Much has been said in after years, since misfortune and ruin overtook the South, since the sad reverses of the army and the overthrow of our principles, about leaders plunging the nation into a bloody and uncalled for war.  This, is all the height of folly.  No man or combination of men could have stayed or avoided war.  No human persuasion or earthly power could have stayed the great wave of revolution that had struck the land; and while, like a storm widening and gathering strength and fury as it goes, to have attempted it would have been but to court ruin and destruction.  Few men living in that period of our country’s history would have had the boldness or hardihood to counsel submission or inactivity.  Differences there may have been and were as to methods, but to Secession, none.  The voices of the women of the land were alone enough to have forced the measures upon the men in some shape or other.  Then, as to the leaders being “shirkers” when the actual contest came, the history of the times gives contradictions sufficient without examples.  Where the duties of the service called, they willingly obeyed.  All could not fill departments or sit in the councils of the nation, but none shirked the responsibility the conditions called them to.  Where fathers filled easy places their sons were in the ranks, and many of our leaders of Secession headed troops in the field.  General Bonham, our Brigadier, had just resigned his seat in the United States Congress; so had L.M.  Keitt, who fell at Cold Harbor at the head of our brigade, while Colonel of the Twentieth Regiment.  James L. Orr, one of the original Secessionists and a member of Congress, raised the first regiment of rifles.  The son of Governor Gist, the last Executive of South Carolina just previous to Secession, fell while leading his regiment, the Fifteenth, of our brigade, in the assault at Fort Loudon, at Knoxville.  Scarcely was there a member of the convention that passed the Ordinance of Secession who had not a son or near kinsman in the ranks of the army.  They showed by their deeds the truth and honesty of their convictions.  They had trusted the North until trusting had ceased to be a virtue.  They wished peace, but feared not war.  All this idle talk, so common since the war, of a “rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight” is the merest twaddle and vilely untrue.

The men of the South had risked their all upon the cast, and were willing to abide by the hazard of the die.  All the great men of South Carolina were for Secession, and they nobly entered the field.  The Hamptons, Butlers, Haskells, Draytons, Bonhams, all readily grasped the sword or musket.  The fire-eaters, like Bob Toombs, of Georgia, and Wigfall, of Texas, led brigades, and were as fiery upon the battlefield as they had been upon the floor of the United States Senate.  So with all the leaders of Secession, without exception; they contributed their lives, their services, and their wealth to the cause they had advocated and loved so well.  I make this departure here to correct an opinion or belief, originated and propagated by the envious few who did not rise to distinction in the war, or who were too young to participate in its glories—­those glories that were mutual and will ever surround the Confederate soldier, regardless of rank.