Members of Company G, Orr's Rifles, who died with disease, summer, 1862: W.D. Anderson, R.S. Ashley, T.J. Beacham, S.N. Bowen, W.T. Ellis, Robert M. Ellis, C.N. Graham, J.B. Graham, J. Moon Jones, T.G. Law, J.R. McAdams, J.T. McWhorter, F.M. McKee, S.L. Pratt, W.N. Shirley, Moses Smith, J.R. Swancey.
[From the Richmond, Va., Dispatch, January 14, 1900.]
PRESIDENT LINCOLN.
His Character and Opinions Discussed.
THE CHAPTER AND VERSE CITED.
No Ground Whatever for Supposing that he was a Religious Man.
Lincoln's Connection with the "First Chronicle of Reuben," &c.
To the Editor of the Dispatch:
A late editorial in one of our most honored—and most deservedly honored—Southern newspapers has likened Lincoln to Washington and to Lee, and has held up Lincoln's character and personality for the admiration and imitation of this future generation. To try to re-awaken or to foster ill-will between the North and South would be a useless, a mischievous, and a most censurable task, but it is a duty for one who knows the truth to correct so serious a mistake as is contained in the above statement, and the subscriber offers the following convincing correction of it to the many thousands of readers of the Dispatch for whom the subject has interest.
Such claims for Lincoln are entirely inconsistent with the concessions of very grave defects in him that are made by his most respectable and most eulogistic biographers. Brief mention of each of them will first be made, and it will be seen that it is quite impossible to suppose that they would acknowledge such faults in their hero as they do acknowledge from any motive but the necessity to concede truths known personally to themselves as his intimate associates, or established on testimony they were obliged to accept.
