The visitor to the University to-day will see on the rotunda porch two large bronze tablets on the right and left of the central door, on which are graven the names of the alumni who laid down their lives in the Civil War for the independence of the South. There are just five hundred and three names.

The number itself is significant. If five hundred died, there must have been more than two thousand five hundred, perhaps as many as three thousand, on the rolls of the Confederate armies, who called this University mother. We have no accurate register of the number of alumni who were living in 1861 and fit for military service. But we do know that of the six hundred and twenty-five who were students here when the tocsin of war sounded, five hundred and thirty hailed from the seceding States, and about five hundred and fifteen went to the front. Two of the professors followed their students,—our illustrious professor of Greek, Basil L. Gildersleeve, who was wounded fighting with Gordon in the valley of Virginia—he still lives, thank God! to adorn American scholarship—and Lewis Minor Coleman, our right royal professor of Latin, who fell gloriously while commanding a battalion of artillery at Fredericksburg.

These numbers are significant. They bear eloquent witness, not only to the gallantry of our brother alumni, but to the unanimity of the Southern people in that great struggle, and they afford convincing proof of the falsity of the theory, held by some historians of the Civil War, that the uprising of the Southern people was the result of a conspiracy of a few ambitious leaders. When we see five hundred and fifteen out of six hundred and twenty-five students,1 representing the flower of the intellect and culture of the South— its yeomen as well as its aristocracy—spring to arm at the first sound of the long roll, we realize that the resistance offered to coercion in 1861 was in no sense artificial, but free and spontaneous, and that it was the act of the people, not of the politicians.

This conclusion may be fortified by a comparison with the record of a great New England university. The memorial tablets at Harvard contain the names of one hundred and seventeen of her alumni who gave their lives to the cause of the Union, while the whole number who entered the Union army and navy was nine hundred and thirty-eight. If the same proportion of loss held among the men of our Alma Mater, then there would have been four thousand students and alumni of the University of Virginia in the army and navy of the Confederate States. But the proportion of killed in action was greater on our side, so that this total must be much reduced. We know from the records that not less than two thousand five hundred of the men who followed the battle flag of the Southern Cross were sons of this Virginia University. The actual number was probably considerably larger. Thus though her students and alumni of military age were less numerous than those of Harvard, in something like the proportion of four to seven, yet there were more than three times as many of them serving with the colors in the great conflict; and while one hundred and seventeen men of the Cambridge university laid down

1 This number represents all the students from all the States, North as well as South. Not a few came from localities which were not in sympathy with the South.

SOMETHING may here be appropriately said, before proceeding with my narrative, upon the constitutional question involved in the action taken by Virginia in seceding from the Union, and the action of these young men at the University in obeying her summons and rallying to the standard of the Southern Confederacy.

Virginia loved the Union which her illustrious sons had done so much to establish. She refused to secede from the Union until she was called upon to assist in the work of coercing the already seceded States back into the Union. This she refused to do. She would not raise her arm to strike down her Southern sisters. She would not be a party to the coercion of a sovereign State by the general government. That, she had been taught by the fathers of the Constitution, Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton, was an unconstitutional act. Alexander Hamilton had denounced the proposal to coerce a State as a mad project. Edmund Randolph said it meant “civil war.” So the project was abandoned in the Constitutional Convention. Her people believed that the several States possessed the inalienable right of dissolving the compact with their sister States whenever they became convinced that their sacred rights were no longer safe in the Union.

All acknowledge that the right of Secession does not exist to-day. The fourteenth amendment has changed the character of the Federal Constitution. The surrender at Appomattox, moreover, involved the surrender of the right of Secession. Since the 9th of April, 1865, the Union has been indissoluble. That is universally acknowledged in the South to-day. But it was not so in 1861. Logically and historically the weight of evidence is clearly on the side of those who hold that the right of withdrawing from the Union existed from the foundation of the government.

Mr. Madison, the “father of the Constitution,” held that, in adopting the Constitution, “they were making a government of a Federal nature, consisting of many co-equal sovereignties.” Washington held that the Union then formed was “a compact.” In a letter to Madison, Aug. 3, 1788, he uses this language, “till the States begin to act under the new compact.” John Marshall said in the debate on the adoption of the Constitution: “It is a maxim that those who give may take away. It is the people that give power, and can take it back. Who shall restrain them? They are the masters who give it.” This was said in discussing Virginia's right “to resume her powers if abused.” Whatever he may have held late in life, this was his opinion in 1788 in the great debate on the Constitution. He was then in his thirty-third year. See Elliott's Debates, III, p. 227. It is an historical fact that the Constitution was regarded as a compact between the States by the leaders of opinion in New England for at least forty years after its adoption. In the same quarter the sovereignty of the States was broadly affirmed, and also the right of a State to resume, if need be, the powers granted or delegated under the Constitution. When Samuel Adams objected to the preamble because it expressed the idea of “a National Government instead of a Federal Union of sovereign States,” Governor Hancock brought in the tenth amendment reserving to the States all the powers not expressly delegated to the General Government.

Webster and Story apostatized from the New England interpretation of the Constitution. I may here recall the fact that the first threat of Secession came from the men of New England. Four times before the Secession of South Carolina, Secession was threatened in the North,—in 1802-1803, in 1811-1812, in 1814, and in 1844-1845. The first time it came from Col. Timothy Pickering, of Massachusetts, a friend of Washington and a member of his Cabinet; the second time from Josiah Quincy, another distinguished citizen of Massachusetts; the third time from the Hartford Convention of 1814; and the fourth time from the Legislature of Massachusetts. Josiah Quincy in the debate on the admission of Louisiana, Jan. 14, 1811, declared his “deliberate opinion that, if the bill passes, the bonds of this Union are virtually dissolved, . . . as it will be the right of all [the States], so it will be the duty of some, to prepare definitely for a separation,—amicably if they can, violently if they must.” In 1812 pulpit, press, and rostrum in New England advocated Secession. In 1839 John Quincy Adams declared “the people of each State have a right to secede from the Confederated Union.” In 1844 and again in 1845 the Legislature of Massachusetts avowed the right to secede and threatened to exercise the right if Texas should be admitted to the Union. This was its language:

This expresses exactly the attitude of the seceding States in 1861. Thus the North and the South at these two epochs (only a dozen years apart) held the same view of the right of withdrawal from the Union. And the ground of their apprehension was very similar. New England believed that the admission of Louisiana and Texas would give the South a preponderance of power in the Union, and hence that her rights within the Union would no longer be secure. The cotton States believed that the election of a sectional President by a party pledged to the abolition of slavery gave the North a preponderance of power in the Union and left their rights insecure. And when Virginia beheld the newly elected President preparing to coerce the seceding States by force of arms, she believed that the Constitution was being violated, and that her place was now with her Southern sisters.

It is a fact full of significance that even Alexander Hamilton, strong Federalist as he was, could threaten Jefferson with the Secession of New England, “unless the debts of the States were assumed by the General Government.” And Madison spoke of the thirteen States as “thirteen sovereignties,” and again he said, “Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body.”

Daniel Webster, in 1830 and again in 1833, argued that the Constitution was not a “compact,” not a “confederacy,” and that the acts of ratification were not “acts of accession.” These terms, he said, would imply the right of Secession, but they were terms unknown to the fathers; they formed a “new vocabulary,” invented to uphold the theory of State sovereignty. But in this Mr. Webster was wholly mistaken. Those terms we now know were in familiar use in the great debates on the Constitution. In 1787 Mr. Gerry, of Massachusetts, said, “If nine out of thirteen States can dissolve the compact (i.e., the Articles of Confederation), six out of nine will be just as able to dissolve the new one.” (It had been agreed that the consent of nine out of the thirteen States should be sufficient to establish the new government.) Gouverneur Morris, Alexander Hamilton, Washington all spoke of the Constitution as a “Compact,” and of the new government as a “Confederacy.” Both Massachusetts and New Hampshire, in their acts of ratification, refer to the Constitution as a “solemn Compact.” We have then the authority of Webster himself for the opinion that these terms implied the right of Secession.

Nor is this all. Virginia, New York, and Rhode Island all declared in their acts of ratification that the powers granted by them to the General Government “may be resumed by them.” Thus the right of Secession was solemnly asserted in the very acts by which these States ratified the Constitution. That assertion was part of the ratification. The ratification was conditioned by it. And the acceptance of these States as members of the Union carried with it the acceptance of the Constitution and the recognition of the right of Secession.

This was recognized by Webster in his maturer years. See his speech Capon Springs, W.Va., in 1851.

I have thought it just to my comrades of whom I am to write in these pages to give at the outset this defence of the course they took in 1861. They followed that interpretation of the Constitution, which they received from their fathers—from Jefferson and Madison and Washington—rather than that which can claim no older or greater names than those of Story and Webster.

These arguments appeared to us convincing then. They are no less convincing to-day from the standpoint of things as they were in 1861. And we appeal to the candid judgement of history to decide whether, believing as we did, we were not justified in doing what we did. The most recent, and one of the ablest, of Northern historians acknowledged that “a large majority of the people of the South believed in the constitutional right of Secession,” and as a consequence believed that the war on the part of the National Government was “a war of subjugation.” But surely it is an act of patriotism to resist a war of subjugation, spoliation, and conquest, and by that standard the soldiers of the Confederate Armies must go down to history not as traitors, but as patriots. Our argument for the constitutional right of withdrawing from the Union may, or may not, appear conclusive, but at least the right of revolution, asserted by our sires in 1776, cannot be denied to their descendants of 1861. On that ground I claim the assent even of those who still stoutly deny the right of Secession to the assertion that the armies of the South were composed not of traitors, but of patriots.

There was a time, during those dark days of Reconstruction, when public opinion in the North demanded that we, who had fought under the Southern flag, should prove the sincerity of our acceptance of the results of the war by acknowledging the unrighteousness of our cause and by expressing contrition for the course we pursued.

But could we acknowledge our cause to be unrighteous when we believed it just? Could we repent of an act done in obedience to the dictates of conscience? Our late antagonists— now, thank God, our friends— may claim that our judgement was at fault; that our action was not justified by sound reasoning; that the fears that goaded us to withdraw from the Union were not well-grounded; but, so long as it is acknowledged that we followed duty as we understood it, they cannot ask us to repent. We could not repent of obeying the dictates of conscience in the face of hardship, danger and death!

And now I turn to the consideration of a grievous reproach often directed against the men who fought in the armies of the South in the Civil War. When we claim for them the crown of patriotism, when we aver that they drew their swords in what they believed to be the cause of liberty and self-government, it is answered that the corner-stone of the Southern Confederacy was slavery, and that the soldiers who fought under the banner of the Southern Cross were fighting for the perpetuation of the institution of slavery.

NOW at length I had redeemed my promise to my mother, in leaving Baltimore, that I would not enter the army, at any rate till the end of the session of the University. But I had made another promise. On June 20th I had written her: “You know that of course I will join no company without papa's consent. Though I did do it once, I shall not do it again.” Accordingly, when the session closed, I was minded to return to Baltimore and plead for permission to join the Southern Army. I even contemplated —in the event of being unable to get through the lines—to go up to the home of my aunt, Mrs. Garrett, some eighteen miles from the University, and settle down “quietly,” “trying to make myself useful teaching the children French and arithmetic.”

But in cherishing such an idea I reckoned without the Zeitgeist. Day after day the spirit of the epoch wrought in me more and more mightily till I felt that I could no longer resist the call to follow the example of my kindred, my friends, and my fellow students, and enlist in the Southern Army.

But there were two obstacles in the way: first, my rash promise just mentioned, that I would not enlist without my father's consent, and secondly this: my young cousin, Robert Breckinridge McKim, was, to some extent, under my charge, and he stoutly insisted that if I joined the army he would do the same. In vain I reasoned with him that he was under age not yet eighteen—while I had just passed my nineteenth birthday—consequently my duty was to my country, his was to his mother.

Unable to move him from his purpose, I said: “Very well, Robert, I will go with you to Baltimore and deliver you to your mother, then my responsibility will end.”

But on our way to Winchester, intending to make our way into Maryland, I heard of the declaring of martial law in Baltimore and the planting of artillery in the public squares of our city. This intelligence swept away all further hesitation as to the course I ought to pursue. I saw that, if I did go back I should to a certainty be arrested as having been at Harper's Ferry in arms against the government. And I strongly hoped that my father could no longer stand with Mr. Lincoln's administration when be found that he “meant to establish a despotism and call it by the sacred name of Union.” Many other Union men had been swung over to the Southern side by this,— surely my father would be also. I remembered, too, how he had taught me that, next to God, my allegiance was due to my country before all other obligations. The fact is that by this time the cause of the South had become identified with liberty itself, and, being of military age, I felt myself bound by every high and holy consideration to take up arms to deliver Maryland from the invaders who were polluting her soil.

At Bristoe Station, en route to Winchester, I had visited the troops at the front. There I saw several first cousins who were in the army, Wirt Harrison, and Major Carter Harrison, and Major Julien Harrison. I heard that thirty-six of my Harrison cousins were in the service. I saw many friends and fellow students in the uniform. And I confess I felt humiliated when I saw these men, already bronzed by camp life, while my face was as white as a piece of writing paper, and I was wearing citizen's clothes.

This experience intensified the conviction which had already taken possession of my mind, and I felt that now all hesitation was at an end.

The following letter tells my mind at this period:

When we entered the train which was to take us to Strasburg en route to Winchester, whence we meant to make our way into Maryland, I called Robert to me and told him I could no longer delay responding to the call of my country, and was resolved to join the army as soon as we reached Winchester, but he must continue on his way and do his duty by returning to his mother. I shall never forget the dear boy's joy when be heard of my resolve. He sprang to his feet, clapped his hands, and said, “I shall follow your example,” nor could I dissuade him from his resolve.

Arrived at Winchester, we made our way next morning, eighteen miles, to Darksville on the Martinsburg pike, where the army of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston was encamped. I enlisted July 11th, ten days before the battle of Manassas. We found the troops forming in line of battle to meet the reported advance of General Patterson, which was hourly expected. Naturally we sought the regiment of Maryland infantry, in whose ranks I soon found a place in the company of my dear friend Capt. Win. H. Murray. But Bob McKim, unable to find a musket, went over to the Rockbridge (Va.) Artillery, and decided to enlist in its ranks, as he had several friends in the company. The brave boy met his death at the battle of Winchester, May 25th, 1862, only ten months later, gallantly serving his piece.

General Patterson did not advance, however, so we had no battle that day, but I had two little foretastes of army life which I will mention. Our captain having given instructions to the men as they stood in line of battle that, when any member of the company should be wounded, but one man should leave the field to care or him, my cousin Duncan McKim, who was immediately in front of me, turned to me and said with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his lips, “Randolph, when you fall, I'll carry you off the field.” I thanked him, with rather a sickly smile, and thought that soldiering was getting to be a serious business.

After waiting several hours for General Patterson's call, to no purpose, about four P.M. we stacked arms, broke ranks, and charged upon the camp-fires, eager for dinner, which had been interrupted by the call to arms. Having had nothing to eat since early morning, and having ridden eighteen miles, and stood in the ranks several hours, my appetite was keen, and I gladly accepted Giraud Wright's invitation to “dine” with him. My host provided the “dinner” by dipping a tin cup into a black camp kettle and procuring one iron spoon. He then invited me to a seat on a rock beside him and we took turns at the soup with the spoon, each also having a piece of hard-tack for his separate use. Alas! my dinner, so eagerly expected, was soon ended, for one or two spoonfuls of the greasy stuff that came out of the camp kettle completely turned my stomach, and I told my friend and host I was not hungry and would not take any more. Inwardly, I said, “Well, I may get used to standing up and being shot at, but this kind of food will kill me in a week!”

I had expected a baptism of fire, and looked forward to it with some nervousness, but, instead I had had a baptism of soup which threatened an untimely end to my military career!

The real experience of a soldier's life now began in earnest. Drill and discipline were applied to the new recruit, by dint of which the raw material of young manhood was to be converted into a soldier. The man at the head of this military factory was Col. George H. Steuart, and he thoroughly understood his business. A “West Pointer,” and an officer in the old army, he was imbued with a very strong sense of the value of strict discipline. The First Maryland Infantry was under his command and he very soon “licked it into shape,” and it began to have a reputation for precision of drill and excellence in marching.

These qualities were to be subjected to a practical test very soon, for not many days after the experience narrated in the last chapter, Gen. Joseph E. Johnston quietly broke camp near Winchester and took up his march for Manassas, there, to effect a junction with General Beauregard and help him win the first great, battle of the war. We marched late in the afternoon of July 18th, and by midnight were ten or twelve miles on our way. As we approached the village of Millwood Clarke County, I observed the home of my aunt, Mrs. Wm. Fitzhugh Randolph, brightly illuminated, and when I entered, the dear old lady met me with perplexity on her face and said, “Randolph, what am I to do? The soldiers have been coining in ever since five o'clock and they have eaten up everything I have in the house and still they keep coming.” “No wonder,” I replied “your house is right at the cross-roads, and you have it brightly illuminated, as if you expected them. Put out the lights and shut the doors and you will soon be at peace.”

Well, the door that shut out the rest shut me in and I had a few hours sleep on a bed, after a refreshing “bite” in the dining-room. By four o'clock I was on the road again with one or two of my company approaching the river which the army was obliged to ford. As we trudged along, with knapsack and musket, in a lonely part of the road, we were overtaken by a mounted officer, muffled up in a cloak, who gruffly demanded what we were doing ahead of our regiment to which I hotly replied, “What business is that of yours?” One of my companions pulled me by the sleeve and said, “Man, that is General Elzey; you'd better shut up, or you'll be arrested and put in the guard-house or shot for insubordination.” I suppose I must have known he was an officer, and that my reply was a gross breach of discipline. But obedience and submission to military authority was a lesson I had not yet learned in my seven days of soldiering. The general, however paid no attention to what I said, and my only punishment was the amusement of my fellow soldiers at my greenness. It was a lonely spot and it was still rather dark. Perhaps that accounts for the general's making as if he did not hear my insubordinate reply.

After wading the Shenandoah we took our way up through Ashby gap and were soon descending the eastern slope of the Blue Ridge. Near the great tree whose branches stretch into four counties we went into camp, and our mess was presently delighted by the approach of a well-furnished wagon from the farm of Mr. Robert Bolling, in charge of the old gentleman himself. He was the father of John Bolling, one of the privates in Murray's company. Both John and his father were very popular men that day in Company H, and long lingered the delicious memory of those Virginia hams and well-fed poultry and goodies too numerous to mention.

It was here I received a letter from my mother which showed that she had no idea I had enlisted in the army, or would do so. I immediately sat down and wrote her the following letter, wholly devoted to explaining my course of action and deprecating her displeasure and my father's. It must have been indited just before taking the cars which were to convey us to the battle of Manassas, fought the next day. It contained no allusion to our forced march, or to the approaching battle.

AS we disembarked from the cars on that Sunday morning, July 21st, 1861, the distant booming of cannon fell upon our cars, and we realized that now we were indeed on the fiery edge of battle. We had orders to cast off our knapsacks that we might march unimpeded to the field. Leaving them in a pile by the roadside under a small guard, we were soon marching at the double quick for Manassas. Our pulses beat more quickly than our feet, as we passed on, the sounds of battle waxing nearer and nearer every moment. It was a severe test of endurance, for the field was six miles away, and the heat of that July day was very exhausting. The weather had been very dry, and the dust rose in clouds around us, as we double-quicked on—so thick was it that I distinctly remember I could not see my file-leader.

We were by and by near enough to hear the rattle of the musketry, and soon we began to meet the wounded coming off the field in streams, some limping along, some, on stretchers borne by their comrades. Stern work was evidently right ahead of us, and it did not steady our nerves for our first battle to be told, as the wounded told us, especially those whose wounds were slight, that it was going very badly with our men at the front. At length the dreadful six-mile double-quick march was over, and the firing line was right in front of us. Some few—very few—had dropped out exhausted. All of us were nearly spent with the heat and the dust and the killing pace; and a brief halt was made to get breath, moisten our lips from the canteens, and prepare for the charge. I remember how poor “Sell” Brogden, panting and exhausted, turned to me and asked for a drink of water from my canteen. I had scarcely a swallow left, but he was so much worse off than I, and his appeal was so piteous, that I gave him the last drop.

We had arrived on the field in the nick of time, at the very crisis, when victory or defeat was trembling in the balance. The Federal general, McDowell, had turned General Beauregard's flank, and only Gen. Joe Johnston's timely arrival on that flank of the Confederate position had saved him from disaster. Jackson at the head of his Virginia troops was “standing like a Stonewall”—those were the words of General Bee as he sought to rally his retreating South Carolinians. But the Confederate line was wavering, and the result of the day hung in grave doubt, when Elzey's brigade arrived on the field and deployed for attack. Of this brigade, the leading regiment (the one first on the field) was the First Maryland under Colonel Steuart, and it was the blow struck by this fine body of men, 600 strong, that turned the balance of battle in favor of the Southern Army. Looking back now, I think the moral effect of the great cloud of dust which rose as we double-quicked to the field, and which was easily seen by the Federals, was worth quite as much as our 600 muskets in action. For it gave the enemy the impression that it was at least a brigade instead of a regiment that was being launched against them at the moment of our charge. This was intensified by the shout, “Go in, Baltimore,” which rose above the din of battle as we swept forward. It so happened that the same Massachusetts regiment which was so roughly handled by the people in the streets of Baltimore on the 19th of April was in our front on the 21st of July, and prisoners afterwards told us that when we charged the Massachusetts men said, “Here come those d-d Baltimore men! It's time for us to git up and git!” Then, after the day was won, and General Elzey, our brigade commander, was saluted as the Blücher of the day, we men of the First Maryland were proud to say that our regiment was the head of the spear that Elzey drove into the vitals of the enemy that eventful day.

I remember that after the first rush, when a brief pause came, some of us dashed down to a tiny little brook for a mouthful of water—only to find the water tinged with blood. Nevertheless not a few stooped and lapped it up where it was clearest.

The first man I saw fall in the battle was Gen. Kirby Smith, who was riding by the side of our column before we deployed for the charge. He fell in the most spectacular way—the reins falling from his grasp, he reeled in the saddle, threw out his arms and fell to the ground, seriously but not fatally wounded.

The New York Zouaves, in their red breeches, were deployed as skirmishers in our front, and did us some damage before we formed our line. One of the amusing incidents that occurred (and the Confederate soldier was always eager to see some fun in the serious work of war) was when Geo. Lemmon in his excitement fired his musket too close to Nick Watkins' head and shot a hole in his cap—fortunately not in his head—and Nick turned and said in the coolest way, “George Lemmon, I wish you'd look where you're shooting—I'm not a Yankee.”

How well I remember our eager expectancy that night. We had seen the rout, and had followed the fleeing Federals some distance along the road back towards Washington. It was full of the evidences of the panic into which the Union Army had been thrown. I need not describe a scene so often described before. But with all the evidences of the demoralization of our enemy, we were confident they could be pursued and Washington taken, if the Confederate Army pressed on. This we confidently expected, and were bitterly disappointed when the next day, and the next, came and went without any serious advance.

As I lay down to sleep on the battle field that night, I had much to think of. The weariness of the day and the peril of the battle were lost sight of in the awful scenes of death and suffering to which we had been introduced that day for the first time. I had seen the reality of the battle field, its carnage, its desolation, its awful pictures of the wounded, the dying, and the dead.

Somehow I was especially moved by the sight of the battery horses on the Henry Hill, so frightfully torn by shot and shell. The sufferings of the poor brutes, not in their own battle or by their own fault, but for man's sake, appealed to me in a peculiar way.

Mingled with my devout thankfulness for my own safety was my sorrow as news came in of friend after friend, and some relatives too, who had fallen.

AFTER the battle of Manassas, we settled down to camp life, varied by occasional picket duty at one of the advanced outposts, such as Mason's and Munsen's Hill, whence the Maryland hills could be seen and which for that reason was a favorite post with our boys. Our colonel, George H. Steuart, had no superior as a camp officer in the Army of Northern Virginia. He kept his camp in good order by careful policing. He paid particular attention to the quartermaster and commissary departments, and looked well after the interests of his men, holding every officer, including the surgeon, to the strict performance of his duty. But he drilled us hard—generally six hours a day; company drill two hours before breakfast, regimental drill two hours after breakfast; and, when he rose to be brigadier, brigade drill two hours in the afternoon. Moreover, he was a strict disciplinarian, and it was not easy for any breach of his orders to escape his lynx-eyed observation. He had some tough elements to deal with in some of his companies, and when these became unruly, the colonel was severe in his punishments. It was not uncommon in his camp to see two or three men tied up by the thumbs to a cross-pole—and in those July and August days this punishment was peculiarly painful. One sometimes heard men muttering curses and threatening to “shoot old Steuart” in the first battle they got into. But after Manassas, when the good result of his strict drill and discipline was seen, he became popular with the men. The regiment soon had the reputation of being the best drilled and the best marching regiment in Gen. Joe Johnston's army; and the men, proud of this, well knew that they owed it to Colonel Steuart.

We had a large drum corps, and its quick-step march was unique in that army of 30,000 men around Manassas that summer. It was a fine sight to see the First Maryland marching with that quick Zouave step by which they were distinguished. It was a sturdy body of men, not so tall as the Virginia regiments usually were, but well set up, active and alert, and capable of much endurance. Best of all, they stood to their work and showed the same fine soldierly qualities that characterized the Maryland line in the first Revolutionary War.

Colonel Steuart was in the habit of testing his men when on guard in some lonely spot by suddenly rushing upon them on foot or on horseback, taking them by surprise if possible. One night a sentinel had been posted near the colonel's tent, and part of his duty was to protect a lot of tent-flies piled up close by. In the small hours of the night, Colonel Steuart crept out of the rear of his tent, and stealthily approaching, while the sentinel was leaning on his musket, gazing at the stars and probably thinking of his sweetheart or his mother, took up one of the tent-flies, shouldered it, and was walking off with it when the sentinel, turning, rushed upon him, and pretending not to recognize him, seized him by the shoulders and gave him such a shaking that the colonel could hardly get breath to cry, “I'm your colonel—I'm your colonel!” Then when the sentry let go his hold and apologized, the colonel slapped him on the back and said, “Good soldier! Good soldier! I'll remember this.”

The regiment was divided into messes containing each about fifteen men, and two of these were detailed for the duty of cooking and chopping wood and bringing water. In many of the Southern regiments there were negro cooks, but we, of Maryland, had to do our own cooking, and first we had to learn how—a slow and painful process. Bacon and flour and salt constituted our bill of fare, with some kind of substitute for coffee, which was a mighty poor make-believe. At first we could only make “slap-jacks,”—composed of flour and water mixed, and floated in bacon-grease. When sufficiently fried on one side, it was then “up” to the cook to toss the frying-pan up and cause the half-cooked cake to turn a somersault in the air and come down “slap-jack” on the pan again—if it did not happen to come down in the fire instead. But by degrees we learned to make biscuits baked in the small oven, and to boil our beef (when we had any), and make soup at the same time. Horse beef was issued sometimes, and we found it a difficult dental proposition. On a famous occasion when we had invited Captain Murray to dine with us, I suggested to my co-cook, Sergeant Lyon, that we should create an apple pie. He was doubtful if the thing could be done. The apples we had in hand as the result of a forage, but how on earth were we to make the pastry? I told him I remembered (when a smaller boy) seeing our cook Josephine make pastry, rolling out the dough thin and sticking little dabs of butter all over it—then folding it and rolling it again. So we made some dough as if for biscuit, then rolled it with a bottle on the top of a barrel, and planted it thick with small pats, of butter —doubled it over and rolled it—and repeated the process until the butter was exhausted. The pie that resulted from all this culinary strategy we considered fit to set before a general, to say nothing of a mere captain. In this connection I recall once on a march making a loaf of bread about three feet long and one-eighth of an inch thick by wrapping the dough round my ramrod and setting it up before the fire to bake. With the modern breech-loader this could not have been done.

About once a week it was my duty to cook for the mess of fifteen men, or else to chop the necessary wood and fetch the water. One of our number, Harry Oliver, a gentleman of wealth and position before he became a soldier, was an enthusiast, almost a monomaniac, about washing, spending much of his leisure time washing himself or his clothes, and I recall more than one occasion when it was his turn to cook breakfast, that when we returned from our first two hours drill, eager for breakfast, Harry was nowhere to be seen, nor was there any breakfast prepared—he was “off at the branch washing.” So our mess No. 5, not without maledictions on Harry, were compelled to go out breakfastless to the second drill of two hours more. Well, I daresay it was a good preparation for the bad time coming when we had to march and fight so often on an empty stomach.

On picket duty sometimes we lived for three days on corn plucked in the fields and roasted in the shuck, a process highly conducive to diarrhœa.

THE autumn of 1861 was spent in camp at Centreville. Our tents were pitched on the summit of a bare hill, from which the encampment of the entire army of Gen. Joseph E. Johnston—about 30,000 men—was visible. At night, when the camp-fires glowed all round us for miles, it was a very beautiful sight. My cousin, W. Duncan McKim, and I used to lie there and fancy we were looking down on the city of Baltimore from Belvidere hill. He would say, “Randolph, there are the lights of Barnum's Hotel, and there is the Shot Tower, and there is the jail, and far away there are the lights on Federal Hill.” Our thoughts turned, in every quiet hour, to home and kindred and friends. Duncan had a great aversion to serving as cook for our mess of fifteen men, and when his turn came round for this duty, he would do his best to exchange with some comrade for guard duty.

As winter approached, we suffered with the cold on that bleak hill-top, and some of the men excavated the entire space under their tents to the depth of three or four feet, and so slept snug and warm, while the less energetic of the company were exposed to the keen, cold winds. This, however, had occasionally its disadvantages. I remember, for instance, one night as I was going out to take my guard duty, looking enviously into one of these tents and seeing the men grouped cosily together in their “dug-out,” some reading, some playing cards, all quite secure from the sweep of the wintry winds; and I wished I could return after my four hours “on guard” to such a snug refuge. But before my watch was over there arose a tempest of wind and rain, and when I passed that tent again, it had collapsed, and there were six inches of water in the cosey place,” and blankets and knapsacks, etc., were all afloat!

John Bolling, his cousin Robert, and I had a small “A” tent together in that camp. It was just wide enough to hold the three of us when we lay “spoon fashion,” and by “pooling” our assets of blankets, we managed to sleep warm—at least the fortunate man in the middle was quite comfortable. But after lying an hour or so on the rough stony ground, our bones would begin to ache, and the man who waked up first, aching, would punch the others so that all might turn over together and preserve the “spoon” alignment, for only in that formation would the blankets cover all three. So, often during the night, the order would be given to our little squad by whichever man wanted to turn over, “Company A, right face,” or “Company A, left face.”

Later, I think early in December, we moved from Centreville to the vicinity of Fairfax Station, and there built ourselves huts for winter quarters. The spot selected was a forest of pines, in the midst of which we hewed out an open space large enough to accommodate huts for the entire regiment. This was unaccustomed work for many of us. Indeed, very few men in Murray's company could wield an axe, but, under the pressure of stern necessity, we learned the art just as we had learned the art of cooking. We hacked down the trees “somehow,” and at last—long after our comrades in most of the other companies—we got our huts built, and set to work to make ourselves comfortable.

The composition of our mess was notable. It was certainly a rare group of men to be serving as private soldiers, on the munificent pay of eleven dollars per month, Confederate money. There was Harry Oliver, a country gentleman of large means, and Wilson Carr, a lawyer who left a good practice in Baltimore to shoulder a musket for the Confederacy, and Redmond, a highly educated Irish gentleman, and Wm. Duncan McKim, a graduate of Harvard, the president of the “Hasty Pudding Club” there and an intimate of Rufus Choate. Then there was McHenry Howard, a second-honor man of Princeton, and John Bolling, who had taken M.A. at the University of Virginia, an honor so difficult of achievement; and, most accomplished of all, Geo. Williamson, master of several modern languages, educated in a European university, widely read and widely travelled. He was a man of great personal charm and of the most exalted ideals. So nice was his sense of duty and honor that we dubbed him “Mr. Conscientious Scruples.” We had also a candidate for Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church, and I, too, had devoted myself at the age of sixteen to the ministry of the Gospel. I may say that, in such a circle of accomplished men, the conversation in our log hut, as we lay in our bunks waiting for taps to sound, was of a very high order. In a fragment of a diary kept at this time (Jan. 24th, 1862), I find the following entry: