President Davis in Reply to General Sher-man. 257
enemy attacked with cavalry ; driven off, and inarch continued, reaching Sailor's Run about 12 M., when it fought its last battle, and although broken down with hard marches, &c., the men fought with as much determination as on any previous field, repelling every attack, until surrounded by overwhelming numbers, when it, with the division, cut its way to Farmville as best it could, where as many of the division as were left rallied and continued the retreat to Appomattox Courthouse, and surrendered with the army.
Geo. K. Griggs, Colonel Thirty-eighth Virgijiia Regiment Infantry.
President Davis in Reply to General Sherman.
[In our last issue, we noticed a slander which General W. T. Sher- man was pleased to make against the ex- President of the Confede- racy, and Mr. Davis's emphatic denial, and his challenge of Sherman to produce the proof.
The following letter, published in. the Baltimore Sii7i, is not only an able and unanswerable reply to Sherman, but contains other matter which should have a place in our records, and be handed down for the use of the future historian. No wonder that General Sherman hzs ihrow7i himself back on his dignity {1\), and declined to reply to this terrible but deserved excoriation.]
THE LETTER OF MR. DAVIS.
Beauvoir, Mississippi, September 23, 1886.
Colonel]. Thomas Scharf, Baltimore, Maryland :
My Dear Sir — At various times and from many of my friends, I have been asked to furnish a reply to General W. T. Sherman's so-called report to the War Department, and which the United States Senate ordered to be printed as "Ex. Doc. No. 36, Forty- eighth Congress, second session." I have been compelled by many causes to postpone my reply to these invitations, and have in some instances declined, for the time being, to undertake the labor. A continuing sense of the great injustice done to me, and to the people I represented, by the Senate making the malicious assault of General
