sent forward to the front. In the early fall of 1861 all three of the regiments, comprising about 3,000 troops, had arrived at Richmond, were organized and armed, and afterwards went into winter quarters along the Potomac in the neighborhood of Dumfries, some thirty miles below Washington. Shall I pause to describe to you this splendid body of men, as they stood for the first time on dress parade on the banks of the Potomac? Wigfall, McLeod and Rainey, of the 1st; Hood, Marshall and Warwick, of the 4th, and Archer, Robertson and Botts, of the 5th, composed the field officers of the regiments, and thirty as gallant captains as ere commissions bore commanded the thirty companies. As far as the eye could reach was a long line of gray. Three thousand bright Texas boys, mostly from eighteen to twenty-five years of age, with Enfield rifles and bayonets glittering in the sun, they presented a spectacle for the admiration of all beholders. The farm, the ranch, the storehouse, the schoolroom, and the cottage, throughout the length and breadth of our Empire State, had all contributed their quota to swell the ranks of this remarkable body of men. Do you doubt for a moment that as they stood there, a solid phalanx, a thousand miles from home, surrounded by the troops from every State of the Confederacy, as the sole representatives of the Lone Star State, they realized Texas had committed to their care and keeping her fair fame, and they were determined to bear aloft the sacred honor of their State upon the points of their bayonets to victory or to death? Their lips were yet warm with mother's, or wife's, or sweetheart's kiss, and with the parting benedictions to come home with their shields on them, they were inspired by the deeds of the illustrious heroes of the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto, and they pledged their faith to carve a name for themselves and for Texas equal to the Tenth Legion of Caesar or the Old Guard of Napoleon.
HOW THE FEARFUL DRAMA BEGAN.
But enough of this. The fearful drama of 1862 is about to begin. In the early spring the Federal Army, some 200,000 men, under McClellan, changed its base from the Potomac to the Peninsula at Yorktown of historic memory. They were
