And to see the cheek blanch and to hear the fervent
prayer, aye, I might say the agony of mind were very different indeed
from the patriotic times at home.
CAMP CHEATHAM
After being drilled and disciplined at Camp Cheatham, under the
administrative ability of General R. C. Foster, 3rd, for two months, we,
the First, Third and Eleventh Tennessee Regiments--Maney, Brown and Rains--
learned of the advance of McClelland's army into Virginia, toward
Harper's Ferry and Bull Run.
The Federal army was advancing all along the line. They expected to
march right into the heart of the South, set the negroes free, take our
property, and whip the rebels back into the Union. But they soon found
that secession was a bigger mouthful than they could swallow at one
gobble. They found the people of the South in earnest.
Secession may have been wrong in the abstract, and has been tried and
settled by the arbitrament of the sword and bayonet, but I am as firm in
my convictions today of the right of secession as I was in 1861. The
South is our country, the North is the country of those who live there.
We are an agricultural people; they are a manufacturing people. They are
the descendants of the good old Puritan Plymouth Rock stock, and we of
the South from the proud and aristocratic stock of Cavaliers.
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