30 Southern Historical Society Papers.
more than 25 per cent, of all her troops engaged, to-wit : eighteen regiments, including seven colonels killed.*
Dignity and magnanimity alike demand, my comrades, that we, the survivors of the Confederate armies, who faithfully did our duty while we had arms in our hands, should refrain from all expression of vindictiveness and hardness of feeling to those who, with equal sincerity as ourselves, espoused the cause of the Union, and at the call of their States fought on the side in which their States had en- rolled them. For myself, I can truly say that I have no feeling of hatred or animosity for the true Federal soldier. I can heartily join my Northern friends in their admiration and respect for McClellan and Meade, and Hancock and Humphreys, and many others. There are few men I would go further, personally, to serve than General Henry J. Hunt, the Federal chief tff artillery in the Army of the Potomac. For the noble and generous promptings of Grant's heart in the first moments of his great triumph, and his magnanimous treatment of Lee, I feel the greatest gratitude, a gratitude which I will not allow to be diminished even by his after conduct as a politician, under the influence of party spirit at Washington; but for the malig- nity and brutality of Sherman, I can have nothing but indignation and resentment.
When our friends at the North, and, my comrades, we have warm and earnest friends there, beg us to forget and forgive the injuries necessarily incident to the war we ourselves dared, I heartily respond. But when I come across such a history of the war as Harper's Pic- torial History of the Rebellion, and see there the pictures of the burning of Columbia and Winnsboro, and read the unpitying and exultant comments upon the misery they depict, I can feel it no part of Christian or patriotic duty to suppress the just indignation which fills my heart alike against the perpetrators and boastful recorders of such inhumanity.
There is there a picture of Winnsboro in flames, and on the next page there is one of Hanging Rock, Sumter's battle ground, and between them are pictures of Sherman's foragers and bummers coming in with their spoils and dividing their booty. With these pictures is the story that when Kilpatrick reached Hanging Rock he reported to Sherman that several dead bodies of Federal soldiers had been found in the road with a labt v l by Hampton's cavalry, that such would be the fate of all " Foragers. " Whereupon Sherman, it is said,
- See Southern Historical Papers, Volume XIII, p. i.
