The vast majority of Confederate soldiers set to paper one aspect or another of The Civil War. While most of their writings were in the form of letters home, many soldiers kept journals and diaries. Still others took copious notes, later transforming them into book form. The following tributes to the Confederate Soldier are by both admirers and fellow soldiers.
THE CONFEDERATE SOLDIER
Michael Horigan used to be retired. Then he wrote a book about the Civil War prison camp that operated in Elmira in 1864 and '65, and became a man in demand.
A letter from Lt. Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner, Jr. USA [Graduate of VMI -1906 and West Point -1908, Killed on Okinawa June 18, 1945] to the Major General Wm. D. Connor, superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point pertaining to the correct and proper preparation of said Southern delicacy.
Although Lt. Harry Buford was living out his dream of being a war hero, modeling his life after such men as Columbus and Capt. James Cook, Lt. Buford also harbored a secret.
This is the account of the Federal attempt to force Confederate Major Henry Wirz, a Swiss-German immigrant, to commit perjury against President Jefferson Davis.
This song, gathered off the SCV Dispatch, is but one of many sung by the fighting men in Gray as they sat around the campfire at night.
Author unknown, this poem stirs thoughts and asks questions ... questions that will only be answered when we cross over.
'How God Created Confederate
Veterans'
'When
Will The Confederate Soldier Be Forgotten?'
The following inscription, carved on the North side of the Confederate
Memorial at Arlington National
Cemetery, was written by Dr. Randolph Harrison McKim, who went from the ranks of the Confederate
Army into the Ministry, and was the rector of Epiphany Church in Washington
D.C. for 32 years. The inscription reads:
"Not for fame or reward -
Not for place or for rank -
Not lured by ambition -
Or goaded by necessity -
But in simple -
Obedience to duty -
As they understood it
These men suffered all -
Sacrificed All -
Dared all - And Died -"
Dr Randolph Harrison McKim
Dr. McKim also gave the following oration to the SCV in 1904 in Nashville.
"We salute yonder flag - the banner of the stars and stripes - as the symbol of our reunited
country, at the same moment that we .... do homage to the Stars and Bars. We still love our
old battle flag, with the southern cross upon its fiery folds!
We have wrapped it around our hearts!
We have enshrined it in the sacred ark of our love, and we will honor it and cherish it
evermore -- not now as a political symbol, but as the consecrated emblem of an heroic epoch;
as the sacred memento of a day that is dead; as embodiment of memories that will be tender
and holy as long as life shall last.
If Daniel Webster could say that the Bunker Hill monument was not created 'to perpetuate
hostility to Great Britain,' MUCH MORE can we say that the monuments we have erected
and will yet erect in our Southland, to the memory of our dead heroes, are not intended (to be
hostile.)
The people that forgets its heroic dead is already dying at the heart; and we believe it will
make for the strength and glory of the United States if the sentiments that animate us today
shall be perpetuated, generation after generation.
The Battle Flag, ironically should be LESS POLITICAL than the First National or other flags
of the Confederacy - for it is not a country's flag, per se, it was the emblem of the SOLDIER!
The quote is originally from a book: A Soldiers Recollections - Leaves from a
Diary of a Young Confederate.
Published in 1910 by Longmans,Green and Co. Reprinted by Time-Life in 1984.
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