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1005 Series I Volume LII-I Serial 109 - Supplements Part I

Page 1005 Chapter LXIII. CORRESPONDENCE, ETC.-CONFEDERATE.

LYNCHBURG, June 11, 1864.

General BRAXTON BRAGG:

General Breckinridge telegraphs me, June 11, at 1.30 p. m., that the enemy were reported at Greenville yesterday afternoon, between Staunton and Lexington. Tthey may intend to move on Lynchburg.

FRANCIS T. NICHOLLS,

Brigadier-General.

[37.]

RICHMOND, June 11, 1864.

Major General STERLING PRICE,

Commanding District of Arkansas:

MY DEAR GENERAL: I came into Richmond this evening from the lines of the army and found that Major Burton had not left, and therefore will add a word or two to what I have already said. The two armies remain very much in the same posture. Grant is impregnably intrenched and has perfectly secured his base at the White House on the Pamunkey. Frrom this position he will be enabled to complete securely all of his arrangements for the future in regard to the south side movement. His arms, under Hunter, are marching victoriously through the Valley, and Breckinridge has had to be withdrawn from our front and thrown in that direction, but his force will be rrelatively small. With one West Point fool as Comissary-General and with another West Point fool and knave as Adjutant-General and senieor general of the army, neither of whom ever commanded a company or saw a musket fired in the field, and the last of whom is a Yankee by birht, by blood, by parentage, and by education, and with yet another West Pointer of known dishonorable origin and malignant heart and incompetent head, who, by his stupendous military blunders, has done more than any and all others combined to place the country beneth the heel of the enemy, foisted by favoritism against the proclaimed wishes of the country and the soldiery into the chief command of the armies; ; and with still another West Point pigmy, only remarkable for having the ability to complete at Vicksburg that which his notorious coadjutor initiated in Kentucky and Tennesse, as commander of all the artillery of the Richmond defenses; and wiith a ccountry to the north and east of Richmond utterly ravished and despoiled, even to the lasst negro slave and the last morsel of food, should Grant now succeed in getting to the south of Richmond, having in the first instance, by the policy pursued by him from the Rapidan to the Chickahominy, compelled the concentration of almost every man from the Atlantic coast, the Carolinas, and the Valley upon the Chiickahominy front, thus clearing his rear on the south side, and from that position enveloping both our army and our people here in starvation, I do not see what can extricate us but God. The West Pointers have indeed counseled and generaled us to the verge of death itself, to use in part an expression attributed to Colonel Davis at Monterey. But in addition now no liberty remains to the citizen. The word citizen has been virtually blotted out from the statute book and that of soldier substituted. The civil code may be regarded as suspended and the military code enacted in its place, sequentially followed by the negation of all remedy against tyrannical wrong through the immolation of habeas corpus. The further result of self-sacrificing servility on the one hand and dynastical Mameluke and janissaryu selfishness on the other is a bid for peace, couched in unmeaning generalities and vain platitudes, under the disguise of a public manifesto against the atrocities of the enemy, totally irrelevant to the act of Congress which it


Page 1005 Chapter LXIII. CORRESPONDENCE, ETC.-CONFEDERATE.