Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/515

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Address Delivered by Governor Z. B. Vance. 509

Of this number 107,932 were regular soldiers in the Confederate service, 3,203 were regular troops in the State service, and the re- mainder what may be termed " Land-wehr," doing garrison duty, guarding prisoners, arresting deserters, etc. These were organized as follows:

Sixty regiments of infantry; six regiments of cavalry; three regi- ments of artillery; two regiments of reserves — Total, seventy-one.

Four battalions of artillery; four battalions of cavalry; three bat- talions of infantry ; nine battalions of reserves — Total, twenty, and thirteen unattached companies, and eleven companies borne on our rolls serving in regiments from other States. These figures are official.

I do not know but what my assertion might be amended so as to claim that this is not relatively but positively more troops than any State put into service. At all events, I shall be glad if this brings fortli the records of any sister State, and will submit when fairly beaten.

According to the report of Adjutant-General Cooper, the whole number of troops in the Confederate service was 600,000, of which North Carolina furnished largely more than one-sixth; one fe/i^k would have been about her share. Her total white population was in i860, 629,942 ; of this she sent to the army more than one man to every six souls ! How they demeaned themselves in the field the bloody records of killed and wounded in all the great battles of the war bear melancholy testimony. In many of the severe conflicts on the soil of Virginia— notably in that of Fredericksburg — a large majority of the casualties of the whole army were in the North Caro- lina troops, as appeared by the reports in the Richmond papers at that time. One regiment, the Twenty sixth North CaroHna, at the battle of Gettysburg, which went in nine-hundred rank and file, came out with but little over one hundred men fit for duty. They lost no prisoners. One company, eighty-four strong, made the unprece- dented report that every man and officer in it was hit, and the orderly sergeant who made out the list did it with a bullet through each leg- The regiment commanded by General George B. Anderson (then Colonel) the Fourth North Carolina, at the balde of Seven Pines lost four hundred and sixty-two men, killed and wounded, out of five hundred and twenty, and twenty-four out of twenty-seven officers.

Of the four divisions— D. H. Hill's, A. P. Hill's, Longstreet's and Jackson's— which assailed and put to rout McClellan's right on the