 The Cruise of the Wasp, from Hero Tales from American History. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by David Leeson. Hero Tales from American History, by Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roussevelt. The Cruise of the Wasp, written by Theodore Roussevelt. A crash as when some swollen cloud cracks o'er the tangled trees, with side to side, and spar to spar, whose smoking decks are these? I know St. George's blood-red cross, thou mistress of the seas, but what is she who streaming bars roll out before the breeze? Ah, well her iron ribs are knit, whose thunders strive to quell the bellowing throats, the blazing lips that peeled the armada's knell, the mist was cleared, a wreath of stars, rose o'er the crimson swell, and, wavering from its haughty peak, the cross of England fell. Homes. In the War of 1812 the Little American Navy, including only a dozen frigates and sloops of war, won a series of victories against the English, the hitherto undoubted masters of the sea, that attracted an attention altogether out of proportion to the force of the combatants, or the actual damage done. For one hundred and fifty years the English ships of war had failed to find fit rivals in those of any other European power. Although they had been matched against each in turn, and when the unknown navy of the new nation growing up across the Atlantic did what no European navy had ever been able to do, not only the English and Americans, but the people of Continental Europe as well, regarded the feat as important out of all proportion to the material aspects of the case. The Americans first proved that the English could be beaten at their own game on the sea. They did what the huge fleets of France, Spain and Holland had failed to do, and the great modern writers on naval warfare in Continental Europe, men like Jureen de la Gravier, have paid the same attention to these contests of frigates and sloops that they give to the whole fleet actions of other wars. Among the famous ships of the Americans in this war were two named the Wasp. The first was an eighteen-gun ship sloop, which at the very outset of the war captured a British brig sloop of twenty guns, after an engagement in which the British fought with great gallantry but were knocked to pieces, while the Americans escaped comparatively unscathed. Immediately afterward a British seventy-four captured the victor. In memory of her the Americans gave the same name to one of the new sloops they were building. These sloops were stoutly made, speedy vessels in which strength and swiftness compared favorably with any ships of their class in any other navy of the day, for the American shipwrights were already as famous as the American gunners and seamen. The new Wasp, like her sister ships, carried twenty-two guns and a crew of one hundred and seventy men, and was ship-rigged. Twenty of her guns were thirty-two pound caronades, while for bow chasers she had two long toms. It was in the year eighteen-fourteen that the Wasp sailed from the United States to prey on the navy and commerce of Great Britain. Her commander was a gallant South Carolinian named Captain Johnson Blakely. Her crew were nearly all Native Americans and were an exceptionally fine set of men. Instead of staying near the American coasts or of sailing the high seas, the Wasp at once headed boldly for the English Channel to carry the war to the very doors of the enemy. At that time the English fleets had destroyed the navies of every other power of Europe and had obtained such complete supremacy over the French that the French fleets were kept in port. Off these ports lay the great squadrons of the English ships of the line, never in gale or in calm, relaxing their watch upon the rival warships of the French Emperor. So close was the blockade of the French ports, and so hopeless were the French of making headway in battle with their antagonists, that not only the great French three-deckers and two-deckers, but their frigates and sloops as well, lay harmless in their harbors, and the English ships patrolled the seas unchecked in every direction. A few French privateers still slipped out now and then, and the far bolder and more formidable American privateersmen drove hither and thither across the ocean in their swift schooners and brigantines, and harried the English commerce without mercy. The Wasp proceeded at once to cruise in the English Channel and off the coasts of England, France, and Spain. Here the water was traversed continually by English fleets and squadrons and single ships of war, which were sometimes convoying detachments of troops for Wellington's peninsula army, sometimes guarding fleets of merchant vessels bound homeward, and sometimes merely cruising for foes. It was this spot right in the teeth of the British naval power that the Wasp chose for her cruising-ground. Hither and thither she sailed through the narrow seas, capturing and destroying the merchant men, and by the seamanship of her crew and the skill and vigilance of her commander, escaping the pursuit of frigate and ship of the line. Before she had been long on the ground, one June morning, while in chase of a couple of merchant ships, she spied a sloop of war, the British Brig Reindeer, of eighteen guns and a hundred and twenty men. The Reindeer was a weaker ship than the Wasp, her guns were lighter, and her men fewer. But her commander, Captain Manners, was one of the most gallant men in the splendid British Navy, and he promptly took up the gauge of battle which the Wasp threw down. The day was calm and nearly still, only a light wind stirred across the sea. At one o'clock the Wasp's drum beat to quarters, and the sailors and marines gathered at their appointed posts. The drum of the Reindeer responded to the challenge, and with her sales reduced to fighting trim, her guns run out, and every man ready, she came down upon the Yankee ship. On her foxle she had rigged a light caronade, and coming up from behind, she five times discharged this point blank into the American sloop. Then in the light air the latter left round, firing her guns as they bore, and the two ships engaged yard arm to yard arm. The guns leaped and thundered as the grimy gunners hurled them out to fire and back again to load, working like demons. For a few minutes the cannonade was tremendous, and the men in the tops could hardly see the decks for the wreck of flying splinters. Then the vessels ground together, and through the open ports the rival gunners hewed, hacked, and thrust at one another, while the black smoke curled up from between the halls. The English were suffering terribly, Captain Manners himself was wounded, and realizing that he was doomed to defeat unless by some desperate effort he could avert it, he gave the signal to board. At the call the borders gathered, naked to the waist, black with powder and spattered with blood, cutlass and pistol in hand. But the Americans were ready, their marines were drawn up on deck, the pikemen stood behind the bulwarks, and the officers watched, cool and alert every movement of the foe. Then the British sea dogs tumbled aboard, only to perish by shot or steel. The combatants slashed and stabbed with savage fury, and the assailants were driven back. The sailors sprang to their head to lead them again himself, when a ball fired by one of the sailors in the American tops crashed through his skull, and he fell, sword in hand, with his face to the foe, dying as honorable a death as ever brave man died in fighting against odds for the flag of his country. As he fell the American officers passed the word to board. With wild cheers the fighting sailor men sprang forward, sweeping the wreck of the British force before them, and in a minute the reindeer was in their possession. All of her officers, and nearly two-thirds of the crew, were killed or wounded. But they had proved themselves as skillful as they were brave, and twenty-six of the Americans had been killed or wounded. The wasps set fire to her prize, and after retiring to a French port to refit came out again to cruise. For some time she met no antagonist of her own size with which to wage war, and she had to exercise the sharpest vigilance to escape capture. Late one September afternoon, when she could see ships of war all around her, she selected one which was isolated from the others, and decided to run alongside her and try to sink her after nightfall. Accordingly, she set her sails in pursuit, and drew steadily toward her antagonist, a big 18-gun brig, the Avon, a ship more powerful than the reindeer. The Avon kept signaling to two other British war vessels which were in sight, one an 18-gun brig and the other a 20-gun ship. They were so close that the wasp was afraid they would interfere before the combat could be ended. Nevertheless Blakely persevered, and made his attack with equal skill and daring. It was after dark when he ran alongside his opponent, and they began forthwith to exchange furious broadsides. As the ships plunged and wallowed in the seas, the Americans could see the clusters of top men in the rigging of their opponent, but they knew nothing of the vessel's name or of her force, save only so far as they felt it. The firing was fast and furious, but the British shot with bad aim, while the skilled American gunners hold their opponent at almost every discharge. In a very few minutes the Avon was in a sinking condition, and she struck her flag and cried for quarter, having lost forty or fifty men, while but three of the Americans had fallen. Before the wasp could take possession of her opponent, however, the two war vessels to which the Avon had been signalling came up, one of them fired at the wasp, and as the latter could not fight two new foes, she ran off easily before the wind. Neither of her new antagonists followed her, devoting themselves to picking up the crew of the sinking Avon. It would be hard to find a braver feat more skillfully performed than this, for Captain Blakely, with hostile foes all around him, had closed with and sunk one antagonist not greatly his inferior in force, suffering hardly any loss himself, while two of her friends were coming to her help. Both before and after this the wasp cruised hither and dither making prizes. Once she came across a convoy of ships bearing arms and munitions to Wellington's army, under the care of a great two-decker, hovering about, the swift sloop evaded the two-decker's movements, and actually cut out and captured one of the transports she was guarding, making her escape unharmed. Then she sailed for the high seas, she made several other prizes, and on October 9 spoke a Swedish brig. This was the last that was ever heard of the gallant wasp. She never again appeared, and no trace of any of those aboard her was ever found. Whether she was wrecked on some desert coast, whether she foundered in some furious gale, or what befell her none ever knew. All that is certain is that she perished, and that all on board her met death in some one of the myriad forms in which it must always be faced by those who go down to the sea in ships. And when she sank there sank one of the most gallant ships of the American navy, with as brave a captain and crew as ever sailed from any port of the new world. End of the Cruise of the Wasp by Theodore Roosevelt The General Armstrong Privateer from Hero Tales from American History. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by David Leeson. Hero Tales from American History by Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt. The General Armstrong Privateer, written by Theodore Roosevelt. We have fought such a fight for a day and a night as may never be fought again. We have won great glory, my men, and a day less or more at sea or ashore. We die. Does it matter when? Tennyson. In the Revolution, and again in the War of 1812, the seas were conquered by swift sailing American privateers, which preyed on the British trade. The hardy seamen of the New England coast, and of New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, turned readily from their adventurous careers in the whalers that followed the giants of the ocean in every sea and every climb, and from trading voyages to the uttermost parts of the earth, to go into the business of privateering, which was more remunerative, and not so very much more dangerous than their ordinary pursuits. By the end of the War of 1812, in particular, the American privateers had won for themselves a formidable position on the ocean. The schooners, brigs, and brigantines in which the privateersmen sailed were beautifully modeled, and were among the fastest craft afloat. They were usually armed with one heavy gun, the long tom, as it was called, arranged on a pivot forward or amid ships, and with a few lighter pieces of cannon. They carried strong crews of well-armed men, and their commanders were veteran seamen, used to brave every danger from the elements or from man. So boldly did they prey on the British commerce, that they infested even the Irish Sea and the British Channel, and increased many times the rate of insurance on vessels passing across those waters. They also often did battle with the regular men of war of the British, being favorite objects for attack by cutting out parties from the British frigates and ships of the line, and also frequently encountering in fight the smaller sloops of war. Usually in these contests the privateersmen were worsted, for they had not the training which is obtained only in a regular service, and they were in no way to be compared to the little fleet of regular vessels which in this same war so gloriously upheld the honor of the American flag. Nevertheless here and there a privateer commanded by an exceptionally brave and able captain, and manned by an unusually well-trained crew, performed some feet of arms which deserves to rank with anything ever performed by the regular navy. Such a feat was the defense of the brig General Armstrong in the Portuguese port of Fayol, of the Azores, against an overwhelming British force. The General Armstrong hailed from New York, and her captain was named Reed. She had a crew of ninety men, and was armed with one heavy thirty-two pounder and six lighter guns. In December 1814, she was lying in Fayol, a neutral port, when four British war vessels, a ship of the line, a frigate and two brigs, hoven to sight, and anchored off the mouth of the harbor. The port was neutral, but Portugal was friendly to England, and Reed knew well that the British would pay no respect to the neutrality laws if they thought that at the cost of their violation they could destroy the privateer. He immediately made every preparation to resist an attack. The privateer was anchored close to the shore. The boarding nettings were got ready, and were stretched to booms thrust outward from the brig's side, so as to check the borders as they tried to climb over the bulwarks. The guns were loaded and cast loose, and the men went to the quarters armed with muskets, boarding pikes, and cutlasses. On their side the British made ready to carry the privateer by boarding. The shoals rendered it impossible for the heavy ships to approach, and the lack of wind and the baffling currents also interfered for the moment with the movements of the sloops of war. Accordingly recourse was had to a cutting-out party, always a favorite device with the British semen of that age, who were accustomed to carry French frigates by boarding, and to capture in their boats the heavy privateers and armed merchantmen, as well as the lighter war vessels of France and Spain. The British first attempted to get possession of the brig by surprise, sending out but four boats. These worked down near to the brig, under pretence of sounding, trying to get close enough to make a rush and board her. The privateers men were on their guard, and warned the boats off, and after the warning had been repeated once or twice unheeded they fired into them, killing and wounding several men. Upon this the boats promptly returned to the ships. This first check greatly irritated the British captains, and they decided to repeat the experiment that night with a force which would render resistance vain. Accordingly after it became dark a dozen boats were sent from the liner and the frigate, manned by four hundred stalwart British seamen, and commanded by the captain of one of the brigs of war. Through the night they rode straight toward the little privateer lying dark and motionless in the gloom. As before the privateers men were ready for their foe, and when they came within range opened fire upon them, first with the long gun and then with the lighter cannon. But the British rode on with steady strokes, for they were seamen accustomed to victory over every European foe, and danger had no terrors for them. With fierce hurrahs they dashed through the shot-riven smoke and grappled the brig, and the borders rose, cutlass in hand, ready to spring over the bulwarks. A terrible struggle followed. The British hacked up the boarding nets and strove to force their way through to the decks of the privateer, while the Americans stabbed the assailants with their long pikes and slashed at them with their cutlasses. The darkness was lit by the flashes of flame from the muskets and the cannon, and the air was rent by the odes and shouts of the combatants, the heavy trampling on the decks, the groans of the wounded, the den of weapon-meeting weapon, and all the savage tumult of a hand-to-hand fight. At the bow the British burst through the boarding netting and forced their way to the deck, killing or wounding all three of the lieutenants of the privateer. But when this had happened the boats had elsewhere been beaten back, and Reed, rallying his grim sea dogs, led them forward with a rush, and the boarding party were all killed or tumbled into the sea. This put an end to the fight. In some of the boats none but killed and wounded men were left. The others drew slowly off like crippled wildfowl, and disappeared in the darkness toward the British squadron. Half of the attacking force had been killed or wounded, while of the Americans, but nine had fallen. The British Commodore and all his officers were maddened with anger and shame over the repulse, and were bent upon destroying the privateer at all costs. Next day, after much exertion, one of the war-brigs was warped into position to attack the American, but she first took her station at long range, so that her caronades were not as effective as the pivot gun of the privateer, and so well was the latter handled that the British brig was repeatedly hulled, and finally was actually driven off. A second attempt was made, however, and this time the sloop of war got so close that she could use her heavy caronades which put the privateer completely at her mercy. Then Captain Reed abandoned his brig and sank her, first carrying ashore the guns, and marched inland with his men. They were not further molested, and if they had lost their brig, they had at least made their foes pay dear for her destruction, for the British had lost twice as many men as there were in the whole hard-fighting crew of the American privateer. End of the General Armstrong Privateer by Theodore Roussevelt The Battle of New Orleans from Hero Tales from American History This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Hero Tales from American History by Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roussevelt The Battle of New Orleans, written by Theodore Roussevelt The heavy fog of mourning still hid the plain from sight, when came a thread of scarlet marked faintly in the white. We fired a single cannon, and as its thunders rolled the mist before us lifted in many a heavy fold. The mist before us lifted, and in their bravery fine came rushing to their ruin the fearless British line. Thomas Dunn English When in 1814 Napoleon was overthrown and forced to retire to Elba, the British troops that had followed Wellington into southern France were left free for use against the Americans. A great expedition was organized to attack and capture New Orleans, and at its head was placed General Pachenham, the brilliant commander of the column that delivered the fatal blow at Salamanca. In December a fleet of British warships and transports, carrying thousands of victorious veterans from the peninsula, and manned by soldiers who had grown old in a quarter of a century's triumphant ocean warfare, anchored off the broad lagoons of the Mississippi Delta. The few American gunboats were carried after a desperate and hand-to-hand struggle. The troops were landed, and on December 23 the advance guard of 2,000 men reached the banks of the Mississippi, but ten miles below New Orleans, and there camped for the night. It seemed as if nothing could save the Creole city from foes who had shown, in the storming of many a Spanish walled town, that they were as ruthless in victory as they were terrible in battle. There were no forts to protect the place, and the militia were ill-armed and ill-trained. But the hour found the man. On the afternoon of the very day when the British reached the banks of the river the vanguard of Andrew Jackson's Tennesseans marched into New Orleans, clad in hunting shirts of buck-skin or homespun, wearing wolfskin and coonskin caps, and carrying their long rifles on their shoulders, the wild soldiery of the backwoods tramped into the little French town. They were tall men, with sinewy frames and piercing eyes. Under old Hickory's lead they had won the bloody battle of the horseshoe bend against the creeks. They had driven the Spaniards from Pensacola, and now they were eager to pit themselves against the most renowned troops of all Europe. Jackson acted with his usual fiery, hasty decision. It was absolutely necessary to get time in which to throw up some kind of breast-works or defenses for the city, and he had once resolved on a night attack against the British. As for the British they had no thoughts of being molested. They did not dream of an assault from inferior numbers of undisciplined and ill-armed militia who did not possess so much as bayonets to their guns. They kindled fires along the levees, ate their supper, and then, as the evening fell, noticed a big schooner drop down the river in ghostly silence and bring up opposite to them. The soldiers flocked to the shore, challenging the stranger, and finally fired one or two shots at her. Then suddenly a rough voice was heard, now give it to them for the honor of America! And a shower of shell and grape fell on the British, driving them off the levee. The stranger was an American man of war schooner. The British brought up artillery to drive her off, but before they succeeded Jackson's land troops burst upon them, and a fierce, indecisive struggle followed. In the night all order was speedily lost, and the two sides fought singly or in groups in the utmost confusion. Finally a fog came up, and the combatants separated. Jackson drew off four or five miles and camped. The British had been so roughly handled that they were unable to advance for three or four days until the entire army came up. When they did advance it was only to find that Jackson had made good use of the time he had gained by his daring assault. He had thrown up breastworks of mud and logs from the swamp to the river. At first the British tried to batter down these breastworks with their cannon, for they had many more guns than the Americans. A terrible artillery duel followed. For an hour or two the result seemed in doubt, but the American gunners showed themselves to be far more skillful than their antagonists, and gradually getting the upper hand they finally silenced every piece of British artillery. The Americans had used cotton bales in the embrasures, and the British hogs heads of sugar, but neither worked well, for the cotton caught fire and the sugar hogs heads were ripped and splintered by the round shot so that both were abandoned. By the use of red-hot shot the British succeeded in setting on fire the American schooner which had caused them such annoyance on the evening of the night attack, but she had served her purpose and her destruction caused little anxiety to Jackson. Having failed in his effort to batter down the American breastworks and the British artillery having been fairly worsted by the American, Pakenham decided to try open assault. He had ten thousand regular troops, while Jackson had under him but little over five thousand men, who were trained only as he had himself trained them in his Indian campaigns. Not a fourth of them carried bayonets. Both Pakenham and the troops under him were fresh from victories won over the most renowned marshals of Napoleon, and over soldiers that had proved themselves on a hundred stricken fields to masters of all others in continental Europe. At Toulouse they had driven Marshal Soule from a position infinitely stronger than that held by Jackson, and yet Soule had under him a veteran army. At Badajoz, Choudad Rodrigo, and San Sebastian they had carried by open assault fortified towns whose strength made the entrenchments of the Americans seem like the mud-walls built by children, though these towns were held by the best soldiers of France. With such troops to follow him, and with such victories behind him in the past, it did not seem possible to Pakenham that the assault of the terrible British infantry could be successfully met by rough backwards riflemen fighting under a general as wild and untrained as themselves. He decreed that the assault should take place on the morning of the Eighth. Throughout the previous night the American officers were on the alert, for they could hear the rumbling of artillery in the British camp, the muffled tread of the battalions as they were marched to their points in the line, and all the smothered den of the preparation for assault. Long before dawn the riflemen were awake and drawn up behind the mud-walls, where they lulled at ease or leaning on their long rifles, peered out through the fog toward the camp of their soldiers. At last the sun rose and the fog lifted, showing the scarlet array of the splendid British infantry. As soon as the air was clear Pakenham gave the word, and the heavy columns of red-coated grenadiers and kilted highlenders moved steadily forward. From the American breast-works the great guns opened, but not a rifle cracked, three-fourths of the distance were covered, and the eager soldiers broke into a run. Then sheets of flame burst from the breast-work in their front as the wild riflemen of the back-woods rose and fired, line upon line. Under the sweeping hail the head of the British advance was shattered and the whole column stopped. Then it surged forward again, almost to the foot of the breast-works, but not a man lived to reach them, and in a moment more the troops broke and ran back. Mad with shame and rage Pakenham rode among them to rally and lead them forward, and the officers sprang around him, smiting the fugitives with their swords and cheering on the men who stood. For a moment the troops halted, and again came forward to the charge, but again they were met with a hail of bullets from the back-woods' rifles. One shot struck Pakenham himself. He reeled and fell from the saddle, and was carried off the field. The second and third in command fell also, and then all attempts at further advance were abandoned, and the British troops ran back to their lines. Another assault had meanwhile been made by a column close to the river, the charging soldiers rushing to the top of the breast-works, but they were all killed or driven back. A body of troops had also been sent across the river, where they routed a small detachment of Kentucky militia, but they were, of course, recalled when the main assault failed. At last the men who had conquered the conquerors of Europe had themselves met defeat. Andrew Jackson and his rough riflemen had worsted, in fair fight, a far larger force of the best of Wellington's veterans, and had accomplished what no French Marshal and no French troops had been able to accomplish throughout the long war in the Spanish Peninsula. For a week the sullen British lay in their lines, then, abandoning their heavy artillery, they marched back to the ships and sailed for Europe. End of the Battle of New Orleans by Theodore Roosevelt John Quincy Adams and the Right of Petition From Hero Tales from American History This is a LibriVox recording. Several LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by David Leeson Hero Tales from American History By Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt John Quincy Adams and the Right of Petition Written by Henry Cabot Lodge He rests with the immortals, his journey has been long. For him no wail of sorrow but a pee and full and strong. So well and bravely has he done the work he found to do, to justice, freedom, duty, God, and man forever true. Whittier The lot of ex-presidents of the United States, as a rule, has been a life of extreme retirement. But to this rule there is one marked exception. When John Quincy Adams left the White House in March 1829, it must have seemed as if public life could hold nothing more for him. He had had everything apparently that an American statesman could hope for. He had been minister to Holland and Prussia, to Russia and England. He had been a senator of the United States, secretary of state for eight years, and finally president. Yet, notwithstanding all this, the greatest part of his career and his noblest service to his country were still before him when he gave up the presidency. In the following year, 1830, he was told that he might be elected to the House of Representatives, and the gentleman who made the proposition ventured to say that he thought an ex-president, by taking such a position, instead of degrading the individual, would elevate the representative character. Mr. Adams replied that he had, in that respect, no scruples whatever. No person can be degraded by serving the people as representative in Congress, nor, in my opinion, would an ex-president of the United States be degraded by serving as a selectman of his town if elected there to by the people. A few weeks later he was chosen to the House, and the district continued to send him every two years from that time until his death. He did much excellent work in the House, and was conspicuous in more than one memorable scene. But here it is possible to touch on only a single point, where he came forward as the champion of a great principle, and fought a battle for the right which will always be remembered among the great deeds of American public men. Soon after Mr. Adams took his seat in Congress, the movement for the abolition of slavery was begun by a few obscure agitators. It did not at first attract much attention, but as it went on it gradually exasperated the overbearing temper of the southern slave-holders. One fruit of this agitation was the appearance of petitions for the abolition of slavery in the House of Representatives. A few were presented by Mr. Adams without attracting much notice, but as the petitions multiplied the southern representatives became aroused. They assailed Mr. Adams for presenting them, and finally passed what was known as the gag rule, which prevented the reception of these petitions by the House. Against this rule Mr. Adams protested in the midst of the loud shouts of the Southerners as a violation of his constitutional rights. But the tyranny of slavery at that time was so complete that the rule was adopted and enforced, and the slave-holders undertook in this way to suppress free speech in the House, just as they also undertook to prevent the transmission through the males of any writings adverse to slavery. With the wisdom of a statesman and a man of affairs Mr. Adams addressed himself to the one practical point of the contest. He did not enter upon a discussion of slavery or of its abolition, but turned his whole force toward the vindication of the right of petition. On every petition day he would offer, in constantly increasing numbers, petitions which came to him from all parts of the country for the abolition of slavery, in this way driving the southern representatives almost to madness, despite their rule which prevented the reception of such documents when offered. Their hatred of Mr. Adams is something difficult to conceive, and they were burning to break him down, and, if possible, drive him from the House. On February 6, 1837, after presenting the usual petitions, Mr. Adams offered one upon which he said he should like the judgment of the speaker as to its propriety, in as much as it was a petition from slaves. In a moment the House was in a tumult and loud cries of expel him, expel him! rose in all directions. One resolution after another was offered looking toward his expulsion or censure, and it was not until February 9, three days later, that he was able to take the floor in his own defense. His speech was a masterpiece of argument, invective, and sarcasm. He showed, among other things, that he had not offered the petition, but had only asked the opinion of the speaker upon it, and that the petition itself prayed that slavery should not be abolished. When he closed his speech, which was quite as savage as any made against him and infinitely abler, no one desired to reply, and the idea of censuring him was dropped. The greatest struggle, however, came five years later, when, on January 21, 1842, Mr. Adams presented the petition of certain citizens of Haverhill, Massachusetts, praying for the disillusion of the Union on account of slavery. His enemies felt that now, at last, he had delivered himself into their hands. Again arose the cry for his expulsion, and again by tuperation was poured out upon him, and resolutions to expel him freely introduced. When he got to the floor to speak in his own defense, he faced an excited House, almost unanimously hostile to him, and possessing as he well knew, both the will and the power to drive him from its walls. But there was no wavering in Mr. Adams. If they say they will try me, he said, they must try me. If they say they will punish me, they must punish me. But if they say that in peace and mercy they will spare me expulsion, I disdain and cast away their mercy, and I ask if they will come to such a trial and expel me, I defy them, I have constituents to go to, and they will have something to say if this House expels me, nor will it be long before the gentlemen will see me here again. The fight went on for nearly a fortnight, and on February 7 the whole subject was finally laid on the table. The sturdy, dogged fighter, single-handed and alone, had beaten all the forces of the South and of slavery. No more memorable fight has ever been made by one man in a parliamentary body, and after this decisive struggle the tide began to turn. Every year Mr. Adams renewed his motion to strike out the gag rule, and forced it to evote. Gradually the majority against it dwindled, until at last, on December 3, 1844, his motion prevailed. Freedom of speech had been vindicated in the American House of Representatives, the right of petition had been won, and the first great blow against the slave power had been struck. Four years later Mr. Adams fell, stricken with paralysis, at his place in the House, and a few hours afterward, with the words, This is the last of earth, I am content, upon his lips, he sank into unconsciousness and died. It was a fit in to a great public career. His fight for the right of petition is one to be studied and remembered, and Mr. Adams made it practically alone. The slave holders of the south and the representatives of the north were alike against him. Against him too, as his biographer Mr. Morse says, was the class in Boston to which he naturally belonged by birth and education. He had to encounter the bitter resistance in his own set of the consciousness-respectability of wealth, but the great body of the New England people were with him, as were the voters of his own district. He was an old man, with the physical infirmities of age. His eyes were weak and streaming, his hands were trembling, his voice cracked in moments of excitement, yet in that age of oratory, in the days of Webster and Clay, he was known as the old man eloquent. It was what he said, more than the way he said it, which told. His vigorous mind never worked more surely and clearly than when he stood alone in the midst of an angry house, the target of their hatred and abuse. His arguments were strong, and his large knowledge and wide experience supplied him with every weapon for defense and attack. Beneath the lash of his invective and his sarcasm the hottest of the slave holders cowered away. He set his back against a great principle. He never retreated an inch, he never yielded, he never conciliated. He was always an assailant, and no man and no body of men had the power to turn him. He had his dark hours, he felt bitterly the isolation of his position, but he never swerved. He had good right to sit down in his diary when the gag rule was repealed. Blessed, forever blessed, be the name of God. End of John Quincy Adams and the Right of Petition by Henry Cabot Lodge Francis Parkman from Hero Tales from American History This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by David Leeson. Hero Tales from American History by Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt Francis Parkman, written by Henry Cabot Lodge He told the Red Man's story, far and wide, he searched the unwritten annals of his race. He sat a listener at the satchel's side. He tracked the hunter through his wildwood chase. High or his head the soaring eagle screamed, the wolf's long howl rang nightly. Through the veil, tramp the lone bear, the panther's eyeballs gleamed, the bison's gallop thundered on the gale. Soon or the horizon rose the cloud of strife. Two proud, strong nations battling for the prize, which swarming host should mold a nation's life, which royal banner flout the western skies. Long raged the conflict. On the crimson sod, native and alien joined their hosts in vain. The lilies withered where the lion trod, till peace lay panting on the ravaged plain. A nobler task was theirs who strove to win, the blood-stained heathen to the Christian fold, to free from Satan's clutch the slaves of sin. These labors, too, with loving grace, he told. Halting with feeble step, or bending oar, the sweet-breathed roses which he loved so well, while through long years his burdening cross he bore, from those firm lips no coward accents fell. A brave bright memory, his the stainless shield, no shame defaces and no envy mars. In our far future's record is unsealed, his name will shine among its morning stars. Homes The stories in this volume deal, for the most part, with single actions, generally with deeds of war and feats of arms. In this one I desire to give, if possible, the impression, for it can be no more than an impression, of a life which, in its conflicts and its victories, manifested throughout heroic qualities. Such qualities can be shown in many ways, and the field of battle is only one of the fields of human endeavor where heroism can be displayed. Francis Parkman was born in Boston on September 16, 1822. He came of a well-known family and was of a good puritan stock. He was rather a delicate boy, with an extremely active mind and of a highly sensitive, nervous organization. To everything that attracted him he threw himself with feverish energy. His first passion, when he was only about twelve years old, was for chemistry, and his eager boyish experiments in this direction were undoubtedly injurious to his health. The interest in chemistry was succeeded by a passion for the woods and the wilderness, and out of this came the longing to write the history of the men of the wilderness, and of the great struggle between France and England for the control of the North American continent. All through his college career this desire was with him, and while in secret he was reading widely to prepare himself for his task, he also spent a great deal of time in the forests and on the mountains. To quote his own words, he was fond of hardships and he was vain of enduring them, cherishing a sovereign scorn for every physical weakness or defect, but deceived moreover, by the rapid development of frame and sinew, which flattered him into the belief that discipline sufficiently unsparing would harden him into an athlete, he slighted the precautions of a more reasonable woodcraft, tired old foresters with long marches, stopped neither for heat nor for rain, and slept on the earth without blankets. The result was that his intense energy carried him beyond his strength, and while his muscles strengthened and hardened, his sensitive nervous organization began to give way. It was not merely because he led an active outdoor life. He himself protests against any such conclusion, and says that if any pale student glued to his desk here seek an apology for a way of life whose natural fruit is that pallid and emasculate scholarship, of which New England has had too many examples, it will be far better that this sketch had not been written. For the student there is, in its season, no better place than the saddle, and no better companion than the rifle or the ore. The evil that was done was due to Parkman's highly irritable organism, which spurred him to excess in everything he undertook. The first special sign of the mischief he was doing to himself and his health appeared in a weakness of sight. It was essential to his plan of historical work to study not only books and records, but Indian life from the inside. Therefore, having graduated from college and the law school, he felt that the time had come for this investigation, which would enable him to gather material for his history, and at the same time to rest his eyes. He went to the Rocky Mountains, and after great hardships living in the saddle, as he said, with weakness and pain, he joined a band of Ogallala Indians. With them he remained despite his physical suffering, and from them he learned, as he could not have learned in any other way, what Indian life really was. The immediate result of the journey was his first book, Instinct with the Freshness and Wildness of the Mountains and the Prairies, and called by him the Oregon Trail. Unfortunately the book was not the only outcome. The illness incurred during his journey from fatigue and exposure was followed by other disorders. The light of the sun became insupportable, and his nervous system was entirely deranged. His sight was now so impaired that he was almost blind, and could neither read nor write. It was a terrible prospect for a brilliant and ambitious man, but Parkman faced it unflinchingly. He devised a frame by which he could write with closed eyes, and books and manuscripts were read to him. In this way he began the history of the conspiracy of Pontiac, and for the first half year the rate of composition covered about six lines a day. His courage was rewarded by an improvement in his health, and a little more quiet in nerves and brain. In two and a half years he managed to complete the book. He then entered upon his great subject of France in the New World. The material was mostly in manuscript, and had to be examined, gathered, and selected in Europe and in Canada. He could not read, and he could write only a very little, and that with difficulty, and yet he pressed on. He slowly collected his material and digested and arranged it, using the eyes of others to do that which he could not do himself, and always on the verge of a complete breakdown of mind and body. In 1851 he had an effusion of water on the left knee, which stopped his outdoor exercise, on which he had always largely depended. All the irritability of the system then centered in the head, resulting in intense pain and in a restless and devouring activity of thought. He himself says, the world, the confusion and strange, undefined tortures attending this condition, are only to be conceived by one who has felt them. The resources of surgery and medicine were exhausted in vain. The trouble in the head and eyes constantly recurred. In 1858 there came a period when for four years he was incapable of the slightest mental application, and the attacks varied in duration from four hours to as many months. When the pressure was lightened a little he went back to his work. When work was impossible he turned to horticulture, grew roses, and wrote a book about the cultivation of those flowers which is a standard authority. As he grew older the attacks moderated, although they never departed. Sleeplessness pursued him always, the slightest excitement would deprive him of the power of exertion. His sight was always sensitive, and at times he was bordering on blindness. In this hard-pressed way he fought the battle of life. He says himself that his books took four times as long to prepare and write as if he had been strong and able to use his faculties. That this should have been the case is little wonder, for those books came into being with failing sight and shattered nerves, with sleeplessness and pain, and the menace of insanity ever hanging over the brave man who, nevertheless, carried them through to an end. Yet the result of those fifty years, even in a mount, is a noble one, and would have been great achievement for a man who had never known a sick day. In quality and subject and method of narration they leave little to be desired. There in Parkman's volumes is told vividly, strongly, and truthfully the history of the great struggle between France and England for the mastery of the North American continent, one of the most important events of modern times. This is not the place to give any critical estimate of Mr. Parkman's work. It is enough to say that it stands in the front rank. It is a great contribution to history, and a still greater gift to the literature of this country. All Americans certainly should read the volumes in which Parkman has told that wonderful story of hardship and adventure, of fighting and of statesmanship, which gave this great continent to the English race and the English speech. But better than the literature or the history is the heroic spirit of the man, which triumphed over pain and all other physical obstacles, and brought a work of such value to his country and his time into existence. There is a great lesson as well as a lofty example in such a career, and in the service which such a man rendered by his life and work to literature and to his country. On the tomb of the conqueror of Quebec it is written, Here lies Wolf Victorious. The same epitaph might with entire justice be carved above the grave of Wolf's historian. End of Francis Parkman by Henry Cabot Lodge. Remember the Alamo from Hero Tales from American History. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by David Leeson. Hero Tales from American History by Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt. Remember the Alamo, written by Theodore Roosevelt. The muffled drum's sad roll has beat the soldier's last tattoo. No more on life's parade shall meet that brave and fallen few. On fame's eternal camping-ground their silent tents are spread, and glory guards with solemn round the bivouac of the dead. The neighing troop, the flashing blade, the bugle's stirring blast, the charge, the dreadful cannonade, the din and shout are passed. Nor war's wild note, nor glory's peel, shall thrill with fierce delight those breasts that never more may feel the rapture of the fight. Theodore O'Hara. Thermopylae had its messengers of death, but the Alamo had none. These were the words with which a United States senator referred to one of the most resolute and effective fights ever waged by brave men against overwhelming odds in the face of certain death. Even after the close of the Second War with Great Britain, parties of American settlers began to press forward into the rich, sparsely settled territory of Texas, then a portion of Mexico. At first these emigrants were well received, but the Mexicans speedily grew jealous of them, and oppressed them in various ways. In consequence, when the settlers felt themselves strong enough, they revolted against Mexican rule, and declared Texas to be an independent republic. Immediately Santa Ana, the dictator of Mexico, gathered a large army and invaded Texas. The slender forces of the settlers were unable to meet his hosts. They were pressed back by the Mexicans, and dreadful atrocities were committed by Santa Ana and his lieutenants. In the United States there was great enthusiasm for the struggling Texans, and many bold backwoodsmen and Indian fighters swarmed to their help. Among them the two most famous were Sam Houston and David Crockett. Houston was the younger man, and had already led an extraordinary and varied career. When a mere lad he had run away from home and joined the Cherokees, living among them for some years, then he returned home. He had fought under Andrew Jackson in his campaigns against the creeks, and had been severely wounded at the battle of the horseshoe bend. He had risen to the highest political honors in his state, becoming governor of Tennessee, and then suddenly, in a fit of moody longing for the life of the wilderness, he gave up his governorship, left the state, and crossed the Mississippi, going to join his old comrades, the Cherokees, in their new home along the waters of the Arkansas. Here he dressed, lived, fought, hunted, and drank precisely like any Indian, becoming one of the chiefs. David Crockett was born soon after the Revolutionary War. He too had taken part under Jackson in the campaigns against the creeks, and had afterward become a man of mark in Tennessee, and gone on to Congress as a wig. But he had quarreled with Jackson and been beaten for Congress, and in his disgust he left the state and decided to join the Texans. He was the most famous rifle shot in all the United States, and the most successful hunter, so that his skill was a proverb all along the border. David Crockett journeyed south, by boat and horse, making his way steadily toward the distant plains where the Texans were waging their life-and-death fight. Texas was a wild place in those days, and the old hunter had more than one hair-bred escape from Indians, desperados, and savage beasts ere he got to the neighborhood of San Antonio, and joined another adventurer, a bee hunter, bent on the same errand as himself. The two had been in ignorance of exactly what the situation in Texas was, but they soon found that the Mexican army was marching toward San Antonio, wither they were going. Near the town was an old Spanish fort, the Alamo, in which the hundred-and-fifty American defenders of the place had gathered. Santa Ana had four thousand troops with him. The Alamo was a mere shell, utterly unable to withstand either a bombardment or a regular assault. It was evident, therefore, that those within it would be in the utmost jeopardy if the place were seriously assaulted, but old Crockett and his companion never wavered. They were fearless and resolute, and masters of woodcraft, and they managed to slip through the Mexican lines and join the defenders within the walls. The bravest, the hardiest, and the most reckless men of the border were there, among them were Colonel Travis, the commander of the fort, and Buoy, the inventor of the famous Buoy knife. They were a wild and ill-disciplined band, little used to restraint or control, but they were men of iron courage and great bodily powers, skilled in the use of their weapons, and ready to meet with stern and uncomplaining indifference whatever doom fate might have in store for them. Soon Santa Ana approached with his army, took possession of the town, and besieged the fort. The defenders knew there was scarcely a chance of rescue, and that it was hopeless to expect that one hundred and fifty men, behind defenses so weak, could beat off four thousand trained soldiers, well armed and provided with heavy artillery, but they had no idea of flinching and made a desperate defense. The days went by, and no help came, while Santa Ana got ready his lines and began a furious cannonade. His gunners were unskilled, however, and he had to serve the guns from a distance, for when they were pushed nearer the American riflemen crept forward under cover and picked off the artillery men. Old Crockett thus killed five men at one gun, but by degrees the bombardment told, the walls of the Alamo were battered and riddled, and when they had been breached so as to afford no obstacle to the rush of his soldiers, Santa Ana commanded that they be stormed. The storm took place on March 6, 1836. The Mexican troops came on well and steadily, breaking through the outer defenses at every point, for the lines were too long to be manned by the few Americans. The frontiersmen then retreated to the inner building, and a desperate hand-to-hand conflict followed, the Mexicans thronging in, shooting the Americans with their muskets, and thrusting at them with lance and bayonet, while the Americans, after firing their long rifles, clubbed them and fought desperately, one against many, and they also used their bowie knives and revolvers with deadly effect. The fight reeled to and fro between the shattered walls, each American the center of a group of foes, but for all their strength and their wild fighting courage the defenders were too few, and the struggle could have but one end. One by one the tall riflemen succumbed, after repeated thrusts with bayonet and lance, until but three or four were left. Colonel Travis the commander was among them, and so was Buoy, who was sick and weak from a wasting disease, but who rallied all his strength to die fighting, and who, in the final struggle, slew several Mexicans with his revolver, and with his big knife of the kind to which he had given his name. Then these fell too, and the last man stood at bay. It was old Davy Crockett. Wounded in a dozen places, he faced his foes with his back to the wall, ringed around by the bodies of the men he had slain. So desperate was the fight he waged, that the Mexicans who thronged round about him were beaten back for the moment, and no one dared to run in upon him. Accordingly, while the Lancers held him where he was, bore, weakened by wounds and loss of blood, he could not break through them, the musketeers loaded their carbines and shot him down. Santa Anna declined to give him mercy. Some say that when Crockett fell from his wounds he was taken alive and was then shot by Santa Anna's order, but his fate cannot be told with certainty, for not a single American was left alive. At any rate, after Crockett fell the fight was over, every one of the hardy men who had held the Alamo lay still in death. Yet they died well avenged, for four times their number fell at their hands in the battle. Santa Anna had but a short while in which to exult over his bloody and hard-won victory. Already a rider from the rolling Texas plains, going north through the Indian Territory, had told Houston that the Texans were up and were striving for their liberty. At once in Houston's mind there kindled a longing to return to the men of his race at the time of their need. Mounting his horse, he rode south by night and day, and was hailed by the Texans as a heaven-sent leader. He took command of their forces, eleven hundred Stark riflemen, and at the battle of San Jacinto he and his men charged the Mexican hosts with the cry of, Remember the Alamo! Almost immediately the Mexicans were overthrown with terrible slaughter. Santa Anna himself was captured, and the freedom of Texas was won at a blow. End of Remember the Alamo by Theodore Roosevelt Ampton Roads, from Hero Tales from American History This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by David Leeson Hero Tales from American History by Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt Ampton Roads, written by Theodore Roosevelt Then far away to the south up rose a little feather of snow-white smoke, and we knew that the iron ship of our foes was steadily steering its course to try the force of our ribs of oak. Down upon us heavily runs silent and sullen the floating fort. Then comes a puff of smoke from her guns and leaps the terrible death with fiery breath from her open port. Ho brave hearts that went down in the seas, ye are at peace in the troubled stream. Ho brave land with hearts like these, thy flag that is rent in twain shall be won again and without a seam. Long fellow. The naval battles of the Civil War possess an immense importance, because they mark the line of cleavage between naval warfare under the old and naval warfare under the new conditions. The ships with which Hull and Decatur and McDonough won victory in the War of 1812 were essentially like those with which Drake and Hawkins and Frobisher had harried the Spanish armadas two centuries and a half earlier. They were wooden sailing vessels, carrying many guns mounted in broadside, like those of De Reuter and Tromp, of Blake and Nelson. Throughout this period all the great admirals, all the famous single ship fighters, whose skill reached its highest expression in our own navy during the War of 1812, commanded craft built and armed in a substantially similar manner, and fought with the same weapons and under much the same conditions. But in the Civil War weapons and methods were introduced which caused a revolution greater even than that which divided the sailing ship from the galley. The use of steam, the casing of ships in iron armor, and the employment of the torpedo, the ram, and the gun of high power produced such radically new types that the old ships of the line became at one stroke as antiquated as the galleys of Hamelkar or Alcibiades. Some of these new engines of destruction were invented and all were for the first time tried in actual combat during our own Civil War. The first occasion on which any of the new methods were thoroughly tested was attended by incidents which made it one of the most striking of naval battles. In Chesapeake Bay, near Hampton Roads, the United States had collected a fleet of wooden ships, some of them old-style sailing vessels, others steamers. The Confederates were known to be building a great iron-clad ram, and the wooden vessels were eagerly watching for her appearance when she should come out of Gosport Harbor. Her powers and capacity were utterly unknown. She was made out of the former United States steam frigate Merrimack, cut down so as to make her fore and aft decks nearly flat, and not much above the water, while the guns were mounted in a covered central battery with sloping flanks. Her sides, deck, and battery were coated with iron, and she was armed with formidable rifle guns, and most important of all, with a steel ram thrust out under water forward from her bow. She was commanded by a gallant and efficient officer, Captain Buchanan. It was March 8, 1862, when the ram at last made her appearance within sight of the Union fleet. The day was calm and very clear, so that the throngs of spectators on shore could see every feature of the battle. With the great ram came three light gun-boats, all of which took part in the action, harassing the vessels which she assailed, but they were not factors of importance in the fight. On the Union side the vessels nearest were the sailing ships Cumberland and Congress, and the steam frigate, Minnesota. The Congress and Cumberland were anchored not far from each other, the Minnesota got aground, and was some distance off. Owing to the currents and shoals and the lack of wind, no other vessel was able to get up in time to take apart in the fight. As soon as the ram appeared out of the harbor, she turned and steamed toward the Congress and the Cumberland, the black smoke rising from her funnels, and the great ripples running from each side of her iron prow as she drove steadily through the still waters. On board of the Congress and Cumberland there was eager anticipation, but not a particle of fear. The officers in command, Captain Smith and Lieutenant Morris, were two of the most gallant men in a service where gallantry has always been too common to need special comment. The crews were composed of veterans, well-trained, self-confident and proud beyond measure of the flag whose honor they upheld. The guns were run out, and the men stood at quarters, while the officers eagerly conned the approaching iron clad. The Congress was the first to open fire, and as her volleys flew, the men on the Cumberland were astounded to see the cannon shot bound off the sloping sides of the ram as hailstones bound from a window pane. The ram answered, and her rifle shells tore the sides of the Congress, but for her first victim she aimed at the Cumberland, and firing her bow guns came straight as an arrow at the little sloop of war which lay broadside to her. It was an absolutely hopeless struggle. The Cumberland was a sailing ship, at anchor, with wooden sides, and a battery of light guns. Against the formidable steam iron clad, with her heavy rifles and steel ram, she was as powerless as if she had been a rowboat, and from the moment the men saw the cannon shot bound from the ram's sides they knew they were doomed. But none of them flinched, one and again they fired their guns full against the approaching ram, and in response received a few shells from the great bow rifles of the latter. Then forging ahead, the Merrimack struck her antagonist with her steel prow, and the sloop of war reeled and shuttered, and through the great rent in her side the black water rushed. She foundered in a few minutes, but her crew fought her to the last, cheering as they ran out the guns, and sending shot after shot against the ram as the latter backed off after delivering her blow. The rush of the water soon swamped the lower decks, but the men above continued to serve their guns until the upper deck also was awash, and the vessel had not ten seconds of life left. Then with her flags flying, her men cheering and her guns firing, the Cumberland sank. It was shallow where she settled down, so that her masts remained above the water. The glorious flag for which the brave men aboard her had died flew proudly in the wind all that day, while the fight went on, and throughout the night, and next morning it was still streaming over the beautiful bay to mark the resting place of as gallant a vessel as ever sailed or fought on the high seas. After the Cumberland sank the ram turned her attention to the Congress. Finding it difficult to get to her in the shoal water, she began to knock her to pieces with her great rifle guns. The unequal fight between the iron clad and the wooden ship lasted for perhaps half an hour. By that time the commander of the Congress had been killed, and her decks looked like a slaughter-house. She was utterly unable to make any impression on her foe, and finally she took fire and blew up. The Minnesota was the third victim marked for destruction, and the Merrimack began the attack upon her at once, but it was getting very late, and as the water was shoal and she could not get close, the ram finally drew back to her anchorage to wait until next day before renewing and completing her work of destruction. All that night there was the wildest exultation among the Confederates, while the gloom and panic of the Union men cannot be described. It was evident that the United States ships of war were as helpless as cockleshells against their iron clad foe, and there was no question but that she could destroy the whole fleet with ease and with absolute impunity. This meant not only the breaking of the blockade, but the sweeping away at one blow of the North's naval supremacy, which was indispensable to the success of the war for the Union. It is small wonder that during that night the wisest and bravest should almost have despaired. But in the hour of the nation's greatest need a champion suddenly appeared, in time to play the last scene in this great drama of sea warfare. The North too had been trying its hand at building iron clads. The most successful of them was the little monitor, a flat-decked low-turreted iron clad armed with a couple of heavy guns. She was the first experiment of her kind, and her absolutely flat surface, nearly level with the water, her revolving turret, and her utter unlikeliness to any pre-existing naval type, had made her an object of mirth among most practical sea men, but her inventor Erickson was not disheartened in the least by the Jeers. Under the command of a gallant naval officer, Captain Warden, she was sent south from New York, and though she almost foundered in a gale she managed to weather it, and reached the scene of the battle at Hampton Roads at the moment when her presence was all important. Early the following morning the Merrimack, now under Captain Jones, for Buchanan had been wounded, again steamed forth to take up the work she had so well begun and to destroy the Union Fleet. She steered straight for the Minnesota, but when she was almost there, to her astonishment a strange-looking little craft advanced from the side of the big wooden frigate and boldly barred the Merrimack's path. For a moment the Confederates could hardly believe their eyes. The monitor was tiny compared to their ship, for she was not one fifth the size, and her queer appearance made them look at their new foe with contempt. But the first shock of battle did away with this feeling. The Merrimack turned on her foe her rifle-guns, intending to blow her out of the water, but the shot glanced from the thick iron turret of the monitor. Then the monitor's guns opened fire, and as the great balls struck the sides of the ram her plates started and her timbers gave. Had the monitor been such a vessel as those of her type produced later in the war, the ram would have been sunk then and there, but as it was her shot were not quite heavy enough to pierce the iron walls. Around and around the two strange combatants hovered, their guns bellowing without cessation, while the men on the frigates and on shore watched the result with breathless interest. Neither the Merrimack nor the monitor could dispose of its antagonist. The ram's guns could not damage the turret, and the monitor was able dexterously to avoid the stroke of the formidable prow. On the other hand, the shot of the monitor could not penetrate the Merrimack's tough sides. Accordingly, fierce though the struggle was, and much though there was that hinged on it, it was not bloody in character. The Merrimack could neither destroy nor evade the monitor. She could not sink her when she tried to, and when she abandoned her and turned to attack one of the other wooden vessels, the little turreted ship was thrown across her path, so that the fight had to be renewed. Both sides grew thoroughly exhausted, and finally the battle ceased by mutual consent. Nothing more could be done. The ram was badly damaged, and there was no help for her save to put back to the port whence she had come. Twice afterward she came out, but neither time did she come near enough to the monitor to attack her, and the latter could not move off where she would cease to protect the wooden vessels. The ram was ultimately blown up by the Confederates on the advance of the Union army. Tactically, the fight was a drawn battle, neither ship being able to damage the other, and both ships being fought to a standstill. But the moral and material effects were wholly in favour of the monitor. Her victory was hailed with exultant joy throughout the whole Union, and exercised a correspondingly depressing effect in the Confederacy, while every naval man throughout the world, who possessed eyes to sea, saw that the fight in Hampton Roads had inaugurated a new era in ocean warfare, and that the monitor and Merrimack, which had waged so gallant and so terrible a battle, were the first ships of the new era, and that as such their names would be forever famous. End of Hampton Roads by Theodore Roosevelt The Flag Bearer From Hero Tales from American History This is LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by David Leeson Hero Tales from American History By Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt The Flag Bearer Written by Theodore Roosevelt My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored. He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword. His truth is marching on. I have seen him in the watchfires of a hundred circling camps. They have builded him an altar in the evening doos and damps. I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps. His day is marching on. He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never beat retreat. He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat. O, be swift my soul to answer him. Be jubilant my feet. Our God is marching on. Julia Ward Howe In no war since the close of the great Napoleonic struggles has the fighting been so obstinate and bloody as in the Civil War. Much has been said in song and story of the resolute courage of the guards at Inkerman, of the charge of the Light Brigade, and of the terrible fighting and loss of the German armies at Mars Latour and Gravalot. The praise bestowed upon the British and Germans for their valor, and for the loss that proved their valor, was well deserved. But there were over one hundred and twenty regiments, Union and Confederate, each of which in some one battle of the Civil War suffered a greater loss than any English regiment at Inkerman or at any other battle in the Crimea, a greater loss than was suffered by any German regiment at Gravalot or at any other battle of the Franco-Prussian War. No European regiment in any recent struggle has suffered such losses as at Gettysburg befell the first Minnesota, when eighty-two percent of the officers and men were killed and wounded, or the one hundred forty-first Pennsylvania, which lost seventy-six percent, or the twenty-sixth North Carolina, which lost seventy-two percent, such as at the second battle of Manassas befell the one hundred-first New York, which lost seventy-four percent, and the twenty-first Georgia, which lost seventy-six percent. At Cold Harbor the twenty-fifth Massachusetts lost seventy percent, and the tenth Tennessee at Chickamauga sixty-eight percent, while at Shiloh the ninth Illinois lost sixty-three percent, and the sixth Mississippi seventy percent, and at Antietam the first Texas lost eighty-two percent. The loss of the Light Brigade in killed and wounded in its famous charge at Balaklava was but thirty-seven percent. These figures show the terrible punishment endured by these regiments, chosen at random from the head of the list which shows the slaughter-roll of the Civil War, yet the shattered remnants of each regiment preserved their organization, and many of the severest losses were incurred in the hour of triumph and not of disaster. Thus the first Minnesota at Gettysburg suffered its appalling loss while charging a greatly superior force which it drove before it, and the little huddle of wounded and unwounded men who survived their victorious charge actually kept both the flag they had captured and the ground from which they had driven their foes. A number of the Continental Regiments under Washington, Green and Wayne did valiant fighting and endured heavy punishment. Several of the regiments raised on the Northern Frontier in 1814 showed, under Brown and Scott, that they were able to meet the best troops of Britain on equal terms in the open and even to overmatch them in fair fight with the Bayonet. The regiments which in the Mexican War under the lead of Taylor captured Monterey and beat back Santa Ana at Buena Vista, or which with Scott as commander, stormed Molino del Rey and Chapultepec, proved their ability to bear terrible loss, to rest victory from overwhelming numbers, and to carry by open assault positions of formidable strength held by a veteran army, but in none of these three wars was the fighting so resolute and bloody as in the Civil War. Countless deeds of heroism were performed by Northerner and by Southerner, by officer and by private in every year of the Great Struggle. The immense majority of these deeds went unrecorded and were known to few beyond the immediate participants. Of those that were noticed it would be impossible even to make a dry catalog in ten such volumes as this. All that can be done is to choose out two or three acts of heroism not as exceptions but as examples of hundreds of others. The times of war are iron times, and bring out all that is best as well as all that is basest in the human heart. In a full recital of the Civil War, as of every other great conflict, there would stand out in naked relief feats of wonderful daring and self-devotion, and, mixed among them, deeds of cowardice, of treachery, of barbarous brutality. Sadder still such a recital would show strange contrasts in the careers of individual men. Men who at one time acted well and nobly, and at another time ill and basely. The ugly truths must not be blinked, and the lessons they teach should be set forth by every historian and learned by every statesman and soldier, but, for our good fortune, the lessons best worth learning in the nation's past are lessons of heroism. From immemorial time the armies of every war-like people have set the highest value upon the standards they bore to battle. To guard one's own flag against capture is the pride. To capture the flag of one's enemy the ambition of every valiant soldier. In consequence, in every war between peoples of good military record, feats of daring performed by color-bearers are honorably common. The Civil War was full of such incidents. Out of very many two or three may be mentioned as noteworthy. One occurred at Fredericksburg on the day when half the brigades of Meager and Caldwell lay on the bloody slope leading up to the Confederate entrenchments. Among the assaulting regiments was the Fifth New Hampshire, and it lost 186 out of 300 men who made the charge. The survivors fell sullenly back behind a fence, within easy range of the Confederate rifle pits. Just before reaching it the last of the color guard was shot, and the flag fell in the open. A Captain Perry instantly ran out to rescue it, and as he reached it was shot through the heart. Another Captain Murray made the same attempt and was also killed, and so was a third, more. Several private soldiers met a like fate. They were all killed close to the flag, and their dead bodies fell across one another. Taking advantage of this breastwork, Lieutenant Nettleton crawled from behind the fence to the colors, seized them, and bore back the Blood One Trophy. Another took place at Gaines Mill, where Greg's first South Carolina formed part of the attacking force. The resistance was desperate, and the fury of the assault unsurpassed. At one point it fell to the lot of this regiment to bear the brunt of carrying a certain strong position. Moving forward at a run the South Carolinians were swept by a fierce and searching fire. King James Taylor, a lad of sixteen, was carrying the flag, and was killed after being shot down three times, twice rising and struggling onward with the colors. The third time he fell the flag was seized by George Cotchett, and when he in turn fell, by Shubrick Hain. Hain was also struck down almost immediately, and the fourth lad, for none of them were over twenty years old, grasped the colors and fell mortally wounded across the body of his friend. The fifth, Gadsden Holmes, was pierced with no less than seven balls. The sixth man, Dominic Spellman, more fortunate but not less brave, bore the flag throughout the rest of the battle. Yet another occurred at Antietam. The seventh main, then under the command of Major T. W. Hyde, was one of the hundreds of regiments that on many hard-fought fields established a reputation for dash and unyielding endurance. Inside the early part of the day at Antietam it merely took its share in the charging and long-range firing, together with the New York and Vermont regiments which were its immediate neighbors in the line. The fighting was very heavy. In one of the charges the main men passed over what had been a Confederate regiment. The gray-clad soldiers were lying, both ranks, privates and officers, as they fell, for so many had been killed or disabled that it seemed as if the whole regiment was prone in death. Much of the time the main men lay on the battlefield, hugging the ground under a heavy artillery fire, but beyond the reach of ordinary musketry. One of the privates named Knox was a wonderful shot, and had received permission to use his own special rifle, a weapon accurately sighted for a very long range. While the regiment thus lay under the storm of shot and shell, he asked leave to go to the front, and for an hour afterward his companions heard his rifle crack every few minutes. Major Hyde, finally, from curiosity, crept forward to see what he was doing, and found that he had driven every man away from one section of a Confederate battery, tumbling over gunner after gunner as they came forward to fire. One of his victims was a general officer, whose horse he had killed. At the end of an hour or so a piece of shell took off the breach of his pet rifle, and he returned to disconsolate. But after a few minutes he gathered three rifles that were left by wounded men, and went back again to his work. At five o'clock in the afternoon the regiment was suddenly called upon to undertake a hopeless charge, owing to the blunder of the brigade commander, who was a gallant veteran of the Mexican war, but who was also given to drink. Opposite the Union lines at this point were some haystacks, near a group of farm-buildings. They were right in the center of the Confederate position, and sharpshooters stationed among them were picking off the Union gunners. The Brigadier, thinking that they were held by but a few skirmishers, rode to where the Seventh Main was lying on the ground, and said, Major Hyde, take your regiment and drive the enemy from those trees and buildings. Hyde saluted, and said that he had seen a large force of rebels go in among the buildings, probably two brigades in all. The Brigadier answered, Are you afraid to go, sir, and repeated the order emphatically? Give the order so the regiment can hear it, and we are ready, sir, said Hyde. This was done, and attention brought every man to his feet. With the regiment were two young boys who carried the marking guidance, and Hyde ordered these to the rear. They pretended to go, but as soon as the regiment charged came along with it. One of them lost his arm, and the other was killed on the field. The colors were carried by the color corporal, Harry Campbell. Hyde gave the orders to left face and forward, and the main men marched out in front of a Vermont regiment which lay beside them. Then, facing to the front, they crossed a sunken road which was so filled with dead and wounded Confederates that Hyde's horse had to step on them to get over. Once across they stopped for a moment in the trampled corn to straighten the line, and then charged toward the right of the barns. Hyde went at the double quick, fifteen skirmishers ahead under Lieutenant Butler, Major Hyde on the right on his Virginia thoroughbred, and agitant Haskell to the left on a big white horse. The latter was shot down at once, as was his horse, and Hyde rode round in front of the regiment just in time to see a long line of men in gray rise from behind the stone wall of the Hagerstown Pike, which was to their right, and pour in a volley, but it mostly went too high. He then ordered his men to left oblique. Just as they were abreast a hill to the right of the barns, Hyde, being some twenty feet ahead, looked over its top and saw several regiments of Confederates, jammed close together and waiting at the ready, so he gave the order left flank and still at the double quick, took his column past the barns and buildings toward an orchard on the hither side, hoping that he could get them back before they were cut off, for they were faced by ten times their number. By going through the orchard he expected to be able to take advantage of a hollow, and partially escape the destructive flank-fire on his return. To hope to keep the barns from which they had driven the sharpshooters was vain, for the single main regiment found itself opposed to portions of no less than four Confederate brigades, at least a dozen regiments all told. When the men got to the orchard fence, Sergeant Benson wrenched apart the tall pickets to let through Hyde's horse. While he was doing this a shot struck his haversack, and the men all laughed at the sight of the flying hard-tack. Going into the orchard there was a rise of ground, and the Confederates fired several volleys at the main men, and then charged them. Hyde's horse was twice wounded, but was still able to go on. No sooner were the men in blue beyond the fence than they got into line and met the Confederates as they came crowding behind with a slaughtering fire and then charged, driving them back. The color corporal was still carrying the colors, though one of his arms had been broken, but when halfway through the orchard Hyde heard him call out as he fell, and turned back to save the colors if possible. The apple trees were short and thick, and he could not see much, and the Confederates speedily got between him and his men. Slowly with the cry of rally boys to save the Major, back surged the regiment, and a volley at arm's length again destroyed all the foremost of their pursuers, so they rescued both their commander and the flag which was carried off by Corporal Ring. Hyde then formed the regiment on the colors, sixty-eight men all told, out of two hundred and forty who had begun the charge, and they slowly marched back toward their place in the Union line, while the New Yorkers and Vermonters rose from the ground cheering and waving their hats. Next day, when the Confederates had retired a little from the field, the color corporal, Campbell, was found in the orchard, dead, propped up against a tree, with his half-smoked pipe beside him. End of The Flag Bearer by Theodore Roosevelt The death of Stonewall Jackson, from hero tales from American history. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by David Leeson. Hero Tales from American History by Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt. The Death of Stonewall Jackson, written by Theodore Roosevelt. Like a servant of the Lord with his Bible and his sword, our general rode along us to form us for the fight. Macaulay The civil war has left, as all wars of brother against brother must leave, terrible and heart-rending memories, but there remains as an offset the glory which has accrued to the nation by the countless deeds of heroism, performed by both sides in the struggle. The captains and the armies that, after long years of dreary campaigning and bloody stubborn fighting, brought the war to a close, have left us more than a reunited realm. North and South, all Americans, now have a common fund of glorious memories. We are the richer for each grim campaign, for each hard fought battle. We are the richer for valor displayed alike by those who fought so valiantly for the right, and by those who, no less valiantly, fought for what they deemed the right. We have in us nobler capacities for what is great and good, because of the infinite woe and suffering, and because of the splendid ultimate triumph. We hold that it was vital to the welfare not only of our people on this continent, but of the whole human race, that the union should be preserved and slavery abolished, that one flag should fly from the great lakes to the Rio Grande, that we should all be free, in fact as well as in name, and that the United States should stand as one nation, the greatest nation on the earth. But we recognize gladly that, South as well as North, when the fight was once on, the leaders of the armies and the soldiers whom they led, displayed the same qualities of daring and steadfast courage, of disinterested loyalty and enthusiasm, and of high devotion to an ideal. The greatest general of the South was Lee, and his greatest lieutenant was Jackson. Both were Virginians, and both were strongly opposed to disunion. Lee went so far as to deny the right of secession, while Jackson insisted that the South ought to try to get its rights inside the union and not outside. But when Virginia joined the Southern Confederacy, and the war had actually begun, both men cast their lot with the South. It is often said that the Civil War was in one sense a repetition of the old struggle between the Puritan and the Puritan and Cavalier types were common to the two armies. In Dash and Light-hearted Daring, Custer and Kearney stood as conspicuous as Stuart and Morgan, and on the other hand no Northern general approached the roundhead type, the type of the stern religious warriors who fought under Cromwell, so closely as Stonewall Jackson. He was a man of intense religious conviction, who carried into every thought and deed of his daily life the precepts of the faith he cherished. He was a tender and loving husband and father, kind-hearted and gentle to all with whom he was brought in contact, yet in the times that tried men's souls he proved not only a commander of genius, but a fighter of iron will and temper, who joined in the battle and always showed at his best when the danger was greatest. The vein of fanaticism that ran through his character helped to render him a terrible opponent. He knew no such word as falter, and when he had once put his hand to a piece of work, he did it thoroughly and with all his heart. It was quite in keeping with his character that this gentle, high-minded and religious man should, early in the contest, have proposed to hoist the black flag, neither take nor give quarter, and make the war one of extermination. No such policy was practical in the nineteenth century and in the American Republic, but it would have seemed quite natural and proper to Jackson's ancestors, the Grimm Scotch Irish, who defeated London Dairy against the forces of the Stuart King, or to their forefathers, the Covenanters of Scotland, and the Puritans who in England rejoiced at the beheading of King Charles I. In the first battle in which Jackson took part, the confused struggle at Bull Run, he gained his name of Stonewall from the firmness with which he kept his men to their work and repulsed the attack of the Union troops. From that time until his death, less than two years afterward, his career was one of brilliant and almost uninterrupted success, whether serving with an independent command in the valley, or acting under Lee as his right arm in the pitched battles with McClellan, Pope, and Burnside. Few generals as great as Lee have ever had as great a lieutenant as Jackson. He was a master of strategy and tactics, fearless of responsibility, able to instill into his men his own intense ardor and battle, and so quick in his movements, so ready to march as well as fight, that his troops were known to the rest of the army as the foot cavalry. In the spring of 1863 Hooker had command of the army of the Potomac. Like McClellan, he was able to perfect the discipline of his forces and to organize them, and as a division commander he was better than McClellan, but he failed even more signally when given a great independent command. He had under him 120,000 men when, toward the end of April, he prepared to attack Lee's army, which was but half as strong. The Union army lay opposite Fredericksburg, looking at the fortified heights where they had received so bloody a repulse at the beginning of the winter. Hooker decided to distract the attention of the Confederates by letting a small portion of his force under General Sedgwick attack Fredericksburg, while he himself took the bulk of the army across the river to the right hand, so as to crush Lee by an assault on his flank. All went well at the beginning, and on the first of May Hooker found himself at Chancellorsville, face to face with the bulk of Lee's forces, and Sedgwick, crossing the river and charging with the utmost determination, had driven out of Fredericksburg the Confederate Division of Early. But when Hooker found himself in front of Lee, he hesitated, faltered instead of pushing on, and allowed the consummate general to whom he was opposed to take the initiative. Lee fully realized his danger, and saw that his only chance was first to beat back Hooker, and then to turn and overwhelm Sedgwick, who was in his rear. He consulted with Jackson, and Jackson begged to be allowed to make one of his favorite flank attacks upon the Union army, attacks which could have been successfully delivered only by a skilled and resolute general, and by troops equally able to march and to fight. Lee consented, and Jackson at once made off. The country was thickly covered with a forest of rather small growth, for it was a wild region in which there was still plenty of game. Shielded by the forest, Jackson marched his gray columns rapidly to the left along the narrow country roads, until he was square on the flank of the Union right wing, which was held by the Eleventh Corps under Howard. The Union Scouts got track of the movement and reported it at headquarters, but the Union Generals thought the Confederates were retreating, and when finally the Scouts brought word to Howard that he was menaced by a flank attack, he paid no heed to the information, and actually let his whole corps be surprised in broad daylight. But all the while the battle was going on elsewhere, and Burdand's sharpshooters had surrounded and captured a Georgia regiment, from which information was received showing definitely that Jackson was not retreating and must be preparing to strike a heavy blow. The Eleventh Corps had not the slightest idea that it was about to be assailed. The men were not even in line. Many of them had stacked their muskets and were lounging about, some playing cards, others cooking supper, intermingled with the pack mules and beef cattle. While they were thus utterly unprepared, Jackson's gray-clad veterans pushed straight through the forest and rushed fiercely to the attack. The first notice the troops of the Eleventh Corps received did not come from the pickets, but from the deer, rabbits, and foxes, which, fleeing from their coverts at the approach of the Confederates, suddenly came running over and into the Union lines. In another minute the frightened pickets came tumbling back, and right behind them came the long files of charging yelling Confederates. With one fierce rush Jackson's men swept over the Union lines, and out of blow the Eleventh Corps became a horde of panic-struck fugitives. Some of the regiments resisted for a few moments, and then they too were carried away in the flight. For a while it seemed as if the whole army would be swept off, but Hooker and his subordinates exerted every effort to restore order. It was imperative to gain time so that the untouched portions of the army could form across the line of the Confederate advance. Kenan's regiment of Pennsylvania cavalry, but four hundred sabers strong, was accordingly sent full against the front of the ten thousand victorious Confederates. Kenan himself fell, pierced by bayonets, and the charge was repulsed at once, but a few priceless moments had been saved, and Pleasanton had been given time to post twenty-two guns, loaded with double canister, where they would bear upon the enemy. The Confederates advanced in a dense mass, yelling and cheering, and the discharge of the guns fairly blew them back across the works they had just taken. Again they charged, and again were driven back, and when the battle once more began the Union reinforcements had arrived. It was about this time that Jackson himself was mortally wounded. He had been leading and urging on the advance of his men, cheering them with voice and gesture, his pale face flushed with joy and excitement, while from time to time as he sat on his horse he took off his hat and, looking upward, thanked heaven for the victory it had vouchsafed him. As darkness drew near he was in the front, where friend and foe were mingled in almost inextricable confusion. He and his staff were fired at, at close range by the Union troops, and as they turned were fired at again through a mistake by the Confederates behind them. Jackson fell, struck in several places. He was put in a litter and carried back, but he never lost consciousness, and when one of his generals complained of the terrible effect of the Union cannonade he answered, You must hold your ground. For several days he lingered, hearing how Lee beat Hooker in detail, and forced him back across the river. Then the old Puritan died. At the end his mind wandered, and he thought he was again commanding in battle, and his last words were, Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade. Thus perished Stonewall Jackson, one of the ablest of soldiers and one of the most upright of men, in the last of his many triumphs. End of THE DEATH OF STONEWALL JACKSON by Theodore Roussevelt The Charge at Gettysburg, from Hero Tales from American History. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by David Leeson. Hero Tales from American History by Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roussevelt. The Charge at Gettysburg. Written by Theodore Roussevelt. For the Lord on the whirlwind is abroad. In the earthquake he has spoken. He has smitten with his thunder the iron walls asunder, and the gates of brass are broken. Whittier. With Bray of the trumpet and roll of the drum and keen ring of bugle the cavalry come. Sharp clank the steel scabbards, the bridal chains ring, and foam from red nostrils the wild chargers fling. Tramp, tramp or the green suede that quivers below, scarce held by the curb bit the fierce horses go, and the grim visaged carnal, with ear-rending shout, peels forth to the squadrons the order trot out. Francis A. D'Orvage The Battle of Chancellorsville marked the zenith of the Confederate good fortune. Immediately afterward, in June 1863, Lee led the victorious army of northern Virginia into Pennsylvania. The south was now the invader, not the invaded, and its heart beat proudly with hopes of success, but these hopes went down in a bloody wreck on July 4 when word was sent to the world that the high valour of Virginia had failed at last on the field of Gettysburg, and that in the far west Vicksburg had been taken by the army of the silent soldier. At Gettysburg Lee had under him some seventy thousand men, and his opponent Mead about ninety thousand. Both armies were composed mainly of seasoned veterans, trained to the highest point by campaign after campaign and battle after battle, and there was nothing to choose between them as to the fighting power of the rank and file. The Union army was the larger, yet most of the time it stood on the defensive, for the difference between the generals, Lee and Mead, was greater than could be bridged by twenty thousand men. For three days the battle raged. No other battle of recent time has been so obstinate and so bloody. The victorious Union army lost a greater percentage in killed and wounded than the allied armies of England, Germany, and the Netherlands lost at Waterloo. Four of its seven corps suffered each a greater relative loss than befell the world renowned British infantry on the day that saw the doom of the French Emperor. The defeated Confederates at Gettysburg lost relatively as many men as the defeated French at Waterloo, but whereas the French army became a mere rabble, Lee withdrew his formidable soldiery with their courage unbroken, and their fighting power only diminished by their actual losses in the field. The decisive moment of the battle, and perhaps of the whole war, was in the afternoon of the third day when Lee sent forward his choicest troops in a last effort to break the middle of the Union line. The center of the attacking force was Pickett's division, the flower of the Virginia infantry, but many other brigades took part in the assault, and the column all told numbered over fifteen thousand men. At the same time the Confederates attacked the Union left to create a diversion. The attack was preceded by a terrific cannonade, Lee gathering 115 guns, and opening a fire on the center of the Union line. In response Hunt, the Union chief of artillery, and Tyler of the artillery reserves, gathered eighty guns on the crest of the gently sloping hill where attack was threatened. For two hours, from one till three, the cannonade lasted, and the batteries on both sides suffered severely. In both the Union and Confederate lines casons were blown up by the fire, riderless horses dashed hither and thither, the dead lay in heaps, and throngs of wounded streamed to the rear. Every man laid down and sought what cover he could. It was evident that the Confederate cannonade was but a prelude to the great infantry attack, and at three o'clock Hunt ordered the fire to stop that the guns might cool to be ready for the coming assault. The Confederates thought that they had silenced the hostile artillery, and for a few minutes their firing continued, then suddenly it ceased, and there was a lull. The men on the Union side who were not at the point directly menaced peered anxiously across the space between the lines to watch the next move, while the men in the divisions, which it was certain were about to be assaulted, lay hugging the ground and gripping their muskets, excited, but confident and resolute. They saw the smoke clouds rise slowly from the opposite crest where the Confederate army lay, and the sunlight glinted again on the long line of brass and iron guns which had been hidden from view during the cannonade. In another moment, out of the lifting smoke there appeared beautiful and terrible the picked thousands of the Southern Army coming on to the assault. They advanced in three lines, each over a mile long, and in perfect order. Pickett's Virginians held the center, with on their left the North Carolinians of Pender and Pettigrew, and on their right the Alabama regiments of Wilcox, and there were also Georgian and Tennessee regiments in the attacking force. Pickett's division, however, was the only one able to press its charge home. After leaving the woods where they started, the Confederates had nearly a mile and a half to go in their charge. As the Virginians moved, they bent slightly to the left, so as to leave a gap between them and the Alabamians on the right. The Confederate lines came on magnificently. As they crossed the Emmitsburg Pike, the 80 guns on the Union crest, now cool and in good shape, opened upon them, first with shot and then with shell. Great gaps were made every second in the ranks, but the gray-clad soldiers closed up to the center, and the color-bearers leaped to the front, shaking and waving the flags. The Union infantry reserved their fire until the Confederates were within easy range, when the musketry crashed out with a roar, and the big guns began to fire grape and canister. On came the Confederates, the men falling by hundreds, the colors fluttering in front like a little forest, for as fast as a color-bearer was shot, someone else seized the flag from his hand before it fell. The North Carolinians were more exposed to the fire than any other portion of the attacking force, and they were broken before they reached the line. There was a gap between the Virginians and the Alabama troops, and this was taken advantage of by Stannard's Vermont Brigade and a Demi-Brigade under Gates of the 20th New York, who were thrust forward into it. Stannard charged front with his regiments and fell on Pickett's forces in flank, and Gates continued the attack. When thus struck in the flank, the Virginians could not defend themselves, and they crowded off toward the center to avoid the pressure. Many of them were killed or captured, many were driven back, but two of the brigades, headed by General Armistead, forced their way forward to the stone wall on the crest, where the Pennsylvania regiments were posted under Given and Webb. The Union guns fired to the last moment, until of the two batteries immediately in front of the charging Virginians every officer but one had been struck. One of the mortally wounded officers was Young Cushing, a brother of the hero of the Albemarle fight. He was almost cut in two, but holding his body together with one hand, with the other he fired his last gun and fell dead, just as Armistead pressing forward at the head of his men, leaped to the wall, waving his hat on his sword. Immediately afterward the battle flags of the foremost Confederate regiments crowned the crest, but their strength was spent. The Union troops moved forward with the bayonet, and the remnant of Pickett's division, attacked on all sides, either surrendered or retreated down the hill again. Armistead fell, dying, by the body of the dead Cushing. Both Given and Webb were wounded. Of Pickett's command two-thirds were killed, wounded or captured, and every brigade commander and every field officer, save one, fell. The Virginians tried to rally, but were broken and driven again by gates, while standard repeated, at the expense of the Alabamians, the movement he had made against the Virginians, and reversing his front attacked them in flank. Their lines were torn by the batteries in front, and they fell back before the Vermonters' attack, and standard reaped a rich harvest of prisoners and of battle flags. The charge was over. It was the greatest charge in any battle of modern times, and it had failed. It would be impossible to surpass the gallantry of those that made it, or the gallantry of those that withstood it. Had there been in command of the Union army a general like Grant, it would have been followed by a counter-charge, and in all probability the war would have been shortened by nearly two years, but no counter-charge was made. As the afternoon waned, a fierce cavalry fight took place on the Union right. Stuart, the famous Confederate cavalry commander, had moved forward to turn the Union right, but he was met by Greg's cavalry, and there followed a contest at close quarters with the white arm. It closed with a desperate melee, in which the Confederates, charged under Generals Wade Hampton and Fitz Lee, were met in mid-career by the Union Generals Custer and McIntosh. All four fought, saber in hand, at the head of their troopers, and every man on each side was put into the struggle. Custer, his yellow hair flowing, his face aflame with the eager joy of battle, was in the thick of the fight, rising in his stirrups as he called out to his famous Michigan swordsmen, come on, you wolverines, come on! All that the Union infantry, watching eagerly from their lines could see, was a vast dust cloud where flakes of light shimmered in the sun shown upon the swinging sabers. At last the Confederate horsemen were beaten back, and they did not come forward again or seek to renew the combat, for Pickett's charge had failed, and there was no longer hope of Confederate victory. One night fell the Union flags waved in triumph on the field of Gettysburg, but over thirty thousand men lay dead or wounded, strewn through wood and meadow, on field and hill, where the three days' fight had surged. End of The Charge at Gettysburg by Theodore Roosevelt