Forty Years Of Active Service PDF Download

Excerpt from Forty Years of Active Service: Being Some History of the War Between the Confederacy and the Union and of the Events Leading Up to It, With Reminiscences of the Struggle and Accounts of the Author's Experiences of Four Years From Private to Lieutenant-Colonel and Acting Colonel in The Since my retirement from official life. January the first, eighteen hundred and ninety-eight, I have been often and persistently requested by my Confederate comrades and friends in social, business, and official circles to write my reminiscences of my four years' service as a cavalryman in the Army of Northern Virginia under the command respectively of Beauregard, Johnston, Smith, and Lee, and my many years of official life, as a boy court clerk, member of the legislature, judge, member of the House of Representatives, and Governor of the State of Virginia. Conscious of the time and labor such an undertaking would involve and my inability to fully cover the ground over which I would have to travel, I have refrained. But being still strongly urged I have finally yielded, and shall now endeavor as best I can, plainly and without attempt at rhetoric, to put in print some of my recollections of the occurrences, events, and incidents of the years of war and peace I have mentioned, the former necessarily stirring and the latter more or less exciting and thrilling. My pen will not be dipped in the ink of gall, nor tipped with malice or injustice. I shall endeavor to give no offense, and if perchance I should do so it will be, as I think, in the interest of truth. I may make mistakes, for it is human to err, but it will give me infinite pleasure to correct them as soon as they are brought to my attention. I shall endeavor to condense and aim at brevity, leaving much still in the store-house of my memory. Interspersed through the volume will be many stories and anecdotes of both war and official life which may elicit mirth or draw a tear. The whole will be written in the spirit of a fraternal Union of the two sections of our once divided but now reunited land. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.