means of vindicating himself thoroughly from the charge of either disobeying, disregarding, or neglecting any order sent him in any way on that occasion, but the unselfishness of his character induced him to trust rather to time for his vindication than to incur the risk of a discussion that might in the slightest degree injure the cause in which he was enlisted.
His subsequent career proved how ready and prompt he was to respond to all calls on his endurance or his courage. His military record for the year 1862 is so intimately identified with that of Stonewall Jackson that one cannot exist without the other.
The flight and pursuit of Banks down the Valley, Cross Keys Port Republic, Cold Harbor, Slaughter's Mountain, and that most wonderful dash to Pope's rear in August, 1862, would all be shorn of half their proportions if Ewell's name was blotted from the record. Jackson never made a demand upon his energy, courage, or skill that was not promptly honored; and he was maimed for life in earnestly seconding his immortal leader in that most brilliant of all his achievements, the bewildering display of grand tactics, between the armies of Pope and McClellan, on the plains of Manassas in the last days of August, 1862.
The green turf now covers all that was mortal of Jackson's chief lieutenant. His voice is silent, and his pen is still. In departing he has left behind him no sentence or word to wither a solitary leaf of the laurels won by any of his comrades, or to cause a feather in the cap of one of them to moult, and I trust I will be pardoned for putting on record my protest against the injustice done the memory of as true a soldier as ever drew his sword in defence of a righteous cause.
I freely exempt the gentlemen named from all intentional injustice, and from all imputation of unkind motives in giving expression to their views. It is this very fact that renders it necessary to vindicate General Ewell against the implications and inferences to be deduced from their utterances.
I now proceed to consider the question in its general aspect. The idea upon which all the criticisms upon the failure to take Cemetery Hill on the afternoon of the 1st are based, is the assumption that the possession of that hill itself would have been of material advantage to us. We had already inflicted upon the enemy a very serious loss, and the probability is that, if we had
