Notes and Queries. did General L. A. Armistead fight on the Federal side at First Manassas?
General Abner Doubleday, in his Chancellorsville and Gettysburg (page 195), says: “Armistead was shot down by the side of the gun he had taken. It is said he had fought on our side in the first battle of Bull Run, but had been seduced by Southern affiliations to join in the rebellion, and now dying in the effort to extend the area of slavery over the free States, he saw with a clearer vision that he had been engaged in an unholy cause, and said to one of our officers, who leaned over him: ‘Tell General Hancock I have wronged him, and have wronged my country.’ ”Now, we have only quoted this statement in order to pronounce it without the shadow of foundation, and to express our surprise that a soldier of General Doubleday's position should thus recklessly reflect on the honor of a brave foeman upon the flimsy “it is said,” and the camp rumor of “one of our officers.” But the man who could gravely assert that the Confederates were fighting “to extend the area of slavery over the free States,” is probably sufficiently blinded by his prejudices to believe anything to the detriment of “Rebels.”
Is it still the “Confederate Congress?”
The Army and Navy Journal published recently the following:
There is little said about the ‘Rebel Brigadiers’ in the present Congress, but there is a pretty good number of them on hand--eight in the Senate and thirteen in the House. The Senate has also four Confederate Colonels, one Captain and two privates; and the House has nineteen Colonels, two Majors, seven Captains, one Lieutenant, and fourteen who were privates, or whose rank is not given. Among the Congressmen prominent in the Confederate Government who did not serve in the army are Senator Garland of Arkansas, and Ben Hill of Georgia, who were in the Confederate Senate, Alexander H. Stephens, the Confederacy's Vice-President, Joseph E. Brown, who was the ‘War-Governor’ of Georgia, Singleton of Mississippi, and Vest of Missouri, who were in the Rebel Congress, and Reagan of Texas, who was Postmaster-General of the Confederacy during its whole existence.
We have no doubt that the soldiers on the other side of the Potomac really rejoice that the South has so frequently put into places of honor [285] the men who fought for her, as much as they detest the general custom of the North to pass by her soldiers and honor instead “those who were invisible in war and are now invincible in peace.”
The Man who saw the Beginning and the End.
Major Wilmer McLean, who died in Alexandria recently, was the man who literally saw the beginning and end of the late war. It was on his farm that the battle of Bull Run was fought, and General Lee surrendered in his house at Appomattox, to which he had moved with his family, in order to be free from the annoyances of the war.
Did the Confederate Authorities ever Refuse any Proposition to Mitigate the Sufferings of Prisoners?
The Michigan Post and Tribune makes the recent speech of President Davis in New Orleans the occasion of a vile attack upon him, and among other slanders prints the following, which we only reproduce in order to brand it as false in every particular, and to ask our readers to turn again to the abundant proofs we have given that the Confederate authorities never refused a proposition looking to the amelioration of the condition of prisoners. The extract is as follows:
A citizen of Andersonville who was in and around the murder ground there during the awful days of 1864, related to the writer hereof, who visited the place a year and a half ago that the horrors of the stockade had incited the people of Americus, twenty miles south of Andersonville, to pity; that they bought and contributed a few carloads of provisions and sent them to the dying men; that the rebel scoundrels refused these generous people the pleasure of relieving the suffering soldiers, and forced them to take their laden cars back to Americus unopened. Jeff Davis's rebel Surgeon-General reported to Jeff Davis's rabble in session at Richmond that the unutterable woe he found at Andersonville should be ameliorated, and that the fields of corn and potatoes which stretched abroad in that vicinity not only would be the means of giving life and health to the starving thousands, but could and should be devoted to that purpose, and yet, not an ear of succulent corn, nor a healthful vegetable of any sort, passed into those gates of death. The Hon. Jefferson Davis himself was enthroned in Richmond during his brief disgraceful reign, and he must have forgotten that in November, 1863, the United States Government sent Captain Irving up the James with the steamer Convoy laden with clothing and [286] provisions for the Union soldiers at Libby and Bell Isle, and that the steamer Convoy returned still laden as she went, the rebel scoundrels at Richmond refusing to allow the goods to be delivered to the sufferers there. History will be obliged to step carefully when she goes over this ground, or she will step on Jeff Davis and the inhuman workers of iniquity who brought the cruel rebellion upon us.
We respectfully ask citizens of Americus to tell if they ever carried provisions to prisoners at Andersonville which they were not allowed to distribute?
And we ask Judge Ould to tell us what he knows about the effort of “the steamer Convoy?”
