He spoke as follows:
Mr. Chairman—It would be a vain and presumptuous task were I, on this occasion, to essay an eulogy on the "half fed and half clad" infantry of the Army of Northern Virginia. They have written their own eulogy in imperishable lines on every sod of every battlefield of Virginia. That eulogy has been heard in the princely halls of imperial courts, and it has been rehearsed with pride around the camp-fires of every army, great and small, throughout the world. It has been piped to the four quarters of the earth by the winds that contend for mastery in the passes of the Alps and the Apennines, the Himalayas and the Andes, and it has been murmured as a requiem by the gentle breezes that blow at their base. It has thrilled the hearts of the brave wherever self-sacrificing devotion to duty is cherished, and it has heaved with emotion the gentle breast of woman, and dimmed with sympathetic tears the bright glances of her eyes, it has found an echo in the pathless desert around the tents of the wandering Arab, and it has even penetrated as a household tale into the most secret recesses of the zenanas of the east and the harems of the Turk. Indeed, Mr. Chairman, the infantry of the Army of Northern Virginia, in common with their comrades of the other arms of the service, may well adopt the language of the heroic son of Venus—the princely warrior who led the shattered remnants of the Trojan hosts from smitten Troy and their desolated homes to found imperial dominion in distant lands—
| . . . Quis jam locus . . . Quae regio in terris nostri non plena laboris. |
Instead of attempting such an eulogy, therefore, I will, with your permission, Mr. Chairman, narrate an incident which fell under my own observation, one like so many which are familiar to us all, and illustrative, as I think, of the tone and temper of the brave hearts that beat beneath the ragged jackets of gray—gray only for a time, and then stained with every hue from cloud and storm, from rain and sunshine, from the dust of the march and from the patriot blood that flowed through diminished veins from honorable wounds.
In May, 1862, just after the battle of McDowell, the army of the immortal Jackson lay near Harrisonburg in the Valley of Virginia, while the magnificently equipped army of the enemy, commanded by General Banks, was entrenched at Strasburg, meditating a further advance, while harassing and humiliating the noble people of the Valley in their rear. In order to dislodge him, or, if possible, to get in his rear at Middletown, by way of the Page Valley, and destroy him, Jackson ordered his army to cook three days' rations, and to be placed in light marching order. The next morning at dawn the march commenced—no man but Jackson knowing whither. The troops were accustomed to severe marches, but this was a most trying one. All day long they pushed forward under a broiling sun—unusual at that season—and with a dense and stifling dust.
