cle was wrought, how could even Jackson stem the tide of blood.

come.

Thus tortured by anxiety, Jackson's army lay encamped in the Virginia starlight. Every one dreaded for dawn to Captain Nat. Harris, who participated in the fight, has described this night of terror. Our boys, said he, stood almost speechless in the cold chill of the early dawn. But suddenly the boom of a cannon was heard in the hazy distance, coming from Thoroughfare Gap, fifteen miles off. Then a mighty shout arose along the whole line, rising higher and higher like a southern tornado, and these words shaped themselves out from the echoes in the hills: "Hurrah, boys, hurrah. That's That's Longstreet's bull-dogs barking. We're all right now."

James Longstreet, at the close of the Civil War, was the most widely known, if not indeed the most truly beloved, of all the palladins of Lee. Both in the numerical order of his corps and in the date of his commission as lieutenantgeneral, he outranked the great high priest of battle, Stonewall Jackson. Not even Lee's right arm, made nerveless in the forest glooms of Chancellorsville, could surpass Lee's old war horse.

It was universally conceded that of all the Confederate marshals, who rode at the head of the gray battalions and plunged into the sulphurous smoke of the bloody arbitrament, not one of them eclipsed Longstreet in the heroic illustration which he gave to the chivalrous traditions of the Southland. His was the bugle-horn of Roderick Dhu and the battle-fire of Marmion. More than once the tide of battle was victoriously turned by his timely arrival upon the scene, when it seemed as if Achilles, at the head of the Myrmidons, had come to the rescue of the Greeks. We have seen him at Second Manassas. See him now at Chickamauga, wheeling around the bend in the bloody lane to the re-enforcement of Bragg, pouring the red hail of the inferno into the ranks of the foe, and driving

the Federal columns, under Cook and Crittenden, to the very base of Lookout Mountain.

In whatever corps of the army, it was the lot of the Confederate soldier to serve, he reveled in the story of Longstreet's prowess; he thrilled at the mention of Longstreet's name. The trusted lieutenant of the great commander-in-chief, it was Longstreet who shared the most intimate councils and executed the most difficult orders of Lee, never once to be censured by the stainless chieftain whom he served. If there was an officer of troop in all the army, who was idolized by the Southern soldier and dreaded by the Northern foeman, from the palms of Mexico to the snows of Canada, it was the intrepid commander of the gallant First Corps of the Army of Northern Virginia.

Such was the man who, at the last council of war, on the, banks of the Rappahannock could look back upon his long career of service on the field of battle, without finding upon his laurels one solitary stain or stigma; and in all that broken-hearted group of grizzly grays not one face told of deeper anguish for the failure of the Southern cause than did the bronzed face of James Longstreet.

But swifter sometimes than the magic presto are the revolutions of fortune's wheel. Two years after Appomattox, the advent of the summer months found James Longstreet in the city of New Orleans. It was not an easy task for an old soldier, who had been trained in the school of arms, to grapple with younger and fresher spirits in the marts of trade; but he was beginning to succeed. As a cotton broker, he earned a handsome income. Besides, he served an insurance company in the capacity of president. He enjoyed the esteem of every one, from the highest to the lowest. Neither was his personal integrity aspersed nor his war record assailed. He towered above criticism. But General Longstreet was called upon at this time to give his opinion in regard to the political crisis.

It was just at the beginning of the Reconstruction. Passion was paramount. Feeling was intense. The air was filled with denunciations of the Federal Government. It was the outcome of the most flagrant of iniquities; for the Saturnalia of Reconstruction in the South has never been surpassed since the days of Nero, the worst of the Caesars.

To have drifted with the current would have been most easy. But Longstreet's ancestors were at the siege of Leyden; and he felt constrained by the stubborn spirit of the Netherlands to stem the popular tide. The answer which he returned was not delayed, either through uncertainty of mind or from dread of consequences. It was clear-cut and unequivocal. He was neither a time-server nor a diplomat, accustomed to the cunning jugglery of words. He knew nothing of finesse and he spoke with blunt frankness. He was fully alive to the outrages put upon the South. But if the South, armed with muskets, was powerless to prevail against the North, how could the South, enfeebled by defeat, expect to bring the North to terms?

In view of the utter helplessness of his section, he felt that the only logic was to accept the situation. Moreover, he felt obligated by the terms of his parole at Appomattox to support the laws of Congress. He reasoned like an old soldier. He had not been trained in the dialectics of the forum. He knew nothing of make-shifts or evasions. Consequently he advised the South to submit. He lined himself with the Reconstructionists; and, facing the hostile elements, he seemed to say in the words of Seneca's pilot: "O, Neptune, you can sink me or you can save me, but whatever my fate, I shall hold the rudder true."

What followed it is vain to describe without the pen. of Dante. The vials of wrath were instantly unloosed upon the devoted head of James Longstreet. In the newspapers, about the home firesides, upon the sidewalk pavements, he was denounced with the most violent invec

tives and characterized by the most opprobrious epithets. No choice bit of language applied either to Benedict Arnold or to Aaron Burr was considered too savory with the associations of treason to be applied to James Longstreet.

It is needless to say that the temperate zone was wholly unrepresented in the treatment accorded to the fallen idol. If it failed to bespeak the equator, it suggested the aurora borealis. Friends of the day before became utter strangers who craved no introduction. Old war comrades passed him upon the streets unrecognized. Fellow church-members forgot the sweet charities of the Christian religion and assumed an air of frigidity which suggested the climatic rigors of the Arctic region.

Nansen in trying to find the North Pole could not have been greeted less cordially or more stiffly by the floating icebergs, which he encountered among the frozen wigwams of the Esquimaux. But yesterday the name of Longstreet might have stood against the world. Today there was none to do him reverence. He was like the prostrate Caesar, bleeding at the base of Pompey's statue. Come I, then, like the plain, blunt Roman, not to stir your gentle hearts to mutiny, but to tell you that you will yet come to crave a keepsake of his tattered mantle and to dip your napkins in his imperial blood.

It was an unpopular course which the old war horse had taken. I know where I would have stood and what I would have done, for my sympathies have ever been with those who hurled the indignant protests of the Anglo-Saxon. But the course was one which honest convictions compelled him to take; one which subsequent developments, in large measure, served to justify; one which Governor Brown took with like results; one which Mr. Stephens took without leaving the Democratic party; and one which General Lee himself is said to have advised.

Never can I forget the speech of vindication which Governor Brown delivered in Atlanta, on the eve of his election to the United States Senate. I was only a lad and Governor Brown was not an orator to stir the youthful imagination. But the echoes of the old governor's speech

could not have been more lingering if they had come from the bugle horns of Elfland. He argued that the wisdom of his course, during the days of Reconstruction, had been established by the logic of events; and then, to cap the climax, he drew from his pocket an old letter, to show what another Confederate soldier thought of his Appomattox parole.

It was written from Lexington, Virginia. In no uncertain words it commended the policy of acquiescence, as the one best in keeping with the terms of surrender and the one most likely to mitigate the evils of Reconstruction. "That letter," said the old governor, as he held it up before the breathless audience, "was penned by the hand and dictated by the heart of that immortal hero, Robert E. Lee."

There followed a storm of enthusiasm. It rocked the old opera house. Georgia's war governor was sent to the United States Senate. But there was no melting of the ice for Longstreet. It seemed like the cruelest irony of fate that the old war horse should have been denied an immortal death-bed on the heights of fame only to be fed on the bitter husks of humiliation. But it put his heroism to the test. Others quailed under the terrific bombardment, but not Longstreet. He belonged to the old heroic order of the Stoics.

He accepted the obloquy which his course involved. Only the God of the human heart knows how tenderly he loved the South, for whose sake he had bared his bosom to the storm of battle, and how keenly he felt the averted gaze of his own people. But, like the Nazarene, in the judgment hall of Pilate, he returned no answer; and planting himself firmly on the ground which he believed to be right, he there stood unshaken, like the old pyramid of Ghizeh, which spurning the effluvia and the driftwood of the Nile, rises serenely, step by step, to the fixed stars of the Egyptian firmament.

Perhaps if General Longstreet, like Governor Brown,