ever he undertook by thorough, intelligent, persistent, hard work.

Assigned to duty on the day of graduation as second lieutenant of the Third Artillery, he served in the Regular Army for twenty years, during which time he rendered honorable and faithful service in the Florida war from 1840 to 1842; in command of various forts and barracks from 1842 to 1845; in the military occupation of Texas in 1845-46; in the Mexican war from 1846 to 1848, participating in the battle of Buena Vista and in nearly all the operations of GENERAL TAYLOR'S army; in the Seminole war in 1849-50; as instructor in artillery and cavalry at West Point from 1851 to 1854; on frontier duty at various posts in the interior of California and Texas, leading several expeditions against the Indians from 1855 to the autumn of 1860. During these twenty years he was repeatedly brevetted for gallant and meritorious services, and rose through all the grades to a captaincy of artillery; and in 1855 was made a major of the Second Cavalry, which regiment he commanded for three years. He was wounded in a skirmish with the Indians, at the head-waters of the Brazos river, in August, 1860; and, in the following November, went East on a leave of absence.

'Here let us pause, on the threshold of the great events then impending, and inquire what manner of man THOMAS had become. He was forty-four years of age; had walked for nearly a quarter of a century, steadily and uncomplainingly, in the rugged paths of a soldier's life; had made himself complete master of all the details of his profession; had honored every station he had occupied; was in turn honored by his Government and his comrades; and was held in peculiar honor by the people of his own State. Virginia had presented him a splendid sword, as a recognition of his high qualities and gallant conduct in the Mexican war; and the proud

aristocracy of Southampton, to which his family belonged, esteemed him a bright ornament of their society. He had scarcely reached home, when the fearful portents of the storm began to appear. Sharing in the traditional sentiment of the army that a soldier should take no part in politics, he had never identified himself with any political party, and probably had never cast a vote. But we have no reason to doubt that he shared in the general sentiments of Virginia, and deprecated any agitation which should disturb her social institutions. During the winter of 1860-61, he watched with painful anxiety the culmination of that conflict of opinion which preceded the war; and he regarded the growing political strife as a measureless outrage, in which both contestants were wrong, but in which Northern agitators were the first aggressors. The teachings of the Constitution and laws, relating to the subject matter of the contest, were sadly obscured by the legal subtleties then employed to defend, or apologize for, a dissolution of the Union. The President had declared in his annual message to Congress, December 4, 1860, that "the Constitution confers upon Congress no power to coerce into submission a State that is attempting to withdraw from the Union," and that "the sword was not placed in the hands of Congress to preserve the Union by force." To the officers of the army, this official declaration of their Commander-in-Chief amounted to a decree that should their States secede, neither he nor they could do any lawful military act to prevent it. They had a right to regard this decree, while it remained unrevoked, as an order for the regulation of their conduct.

Before the middle of February, 1861, seven States had pased ordinances of secession; the Confederate Government was actually set up at Montgomery; Southern leaders declared the Union lawfully and permanently dissolved, and

that there would be no war. Looking back from our present standpoint, we can hardly understand how widespread was the opinion, both North and South, that the Union was gone, and the Government was powerless to restore it. To an officer of the army the situation was painful and perplexing to the last degree. Dissolution of the Union without war, would carry with it the inevitable dissolution of the army; and, besides the shame and humiliation which an officer must feel at the ruin of a nation whose honor he had so long defended in arms, he saw that he must look about him for some new pursuit by which to earn his bread. What will THOMAS do? What path will he mark out for his own feet to follow through this bewildering maze? His State had not yet seceded; but her heart was on fire, and no one knew how far she would go, nor how many would follow her in the work of ruin.

Let us consider more closely his surroundings. He was a major of the Second Cavalry, a regiment organized in 1855 by JEFFERSON DAVIS, Secretary of War, out of the elite of the Army. Either by accident or design, three-fourths of its officers were from the slave States. Its roster [see Appendix A], as printed in the Army Register of 1860, shows a list of names now widely notorious in the history of the ALBERT SIDNEY JOHNSTON was its colonel, ROBERT E. LEE its lieutenant colonel, and W. J. HARDEE its senior major. Among its captains and lieutenants, were VAN DORN, KIRBY SMITH, JENIFER, HOOD, and FITZHUGH LEE. More than onethird of its officers afterward became rebel generals, and others held less conspicuous rank in the same service.

war.

The regiment had served for five years on the India frontier; and its officers, thus remote from the social and poltical centers, had lived on terms of the closest official and ersonal intimacy. It is difficult to overestimate the combned influence of these brilliant and cultivated men upon the enti

ments and conduct of each. We have seen already, how strong were the influences of family, neighborhood, and early life that bound THOMAS to his State. All these were now thrown violently into the Southern scale. Beside the fact that his wife was a patriotic Northern lady, there was scarcely a countervailing force in the whole circle of his domestic and social life. Giver these facts and the impending conflict, what will be the conduct of a man possessing clear perceptions, high character, and real nerve? He would be less than a man who could choose his path without the keenest suffering. Only a man of the highest type could comprehend all, suffer all, and, resolutely striking through the manifold entanglements of the problem, fdlow, with steady eye and unfaltering step, the highest duty. While the contest was confined to the politicians, and found expression only in constitutional theories and legal subtleties, the wisest might well be perplexed. But the flash of the first gun revealed to the clear intellect of THOMAS the whole character and spirit of the controversy; and his choice was made in an instant. Relinquishing the remainder of his leave of absence, he reported for duty at Carlisle Barracks, Pa., on the 14th of April, the day that our flag went down at Sumter, and less than forty-eight hours after the first shot was fired.

His regiment, betrayed in Texas by the treachery of GENERAL TWIGGS, had come North to be reorganized and equipped; and he entered at once upon the work. Three days after his arrival at Carlisle, by fraud and intrigue in her convention, Virginia resolved herself out of the Union; and (pending a ratification of the act by a popular vote to be taken on the 23d of May) formed a treaty offensive and defensive with the rebel government of JEFFERSON DAVIS. The resolutions of 1798 had borne their bitter fruits. The same day, GOVERNOR LETCHER, as the chief of a "sovereign State," issued his procla

mation, calling upon "all efficient and worthy Virginians in the army of the United States, to withdraw therefrom and enter the service of Virginia."

Three days later (April 20), ROBERT E. LEE resigned his commission, after a service of thirty years, and his example was followed by hundreds of Southern officers. With but two exceptions, all the officers from seceded States who belonged to the Second Cavalry joined the rebellion. THOMAS was one of the two. While his brother officers were leaving, and at once taking high command in the rebel army, a comrade asked THOMAS what he would do if Virginia should vote to secede. "I will help to whip her back again," was his answer. On the 23d of May, the people of Virginia enacted the mockery of an election, to ratify her secession from the Union against which she had already taken up a'ms.

Their overwhelming vote in favor of secession, swept away from our army nearly all the Virginians who had not left in April. With the news of this election, there came to THOMAS the passionate appeals of his family and friends, the summons of his State to join her armies, and the threatening anathemas of them all in case he should refuse. He answered by leaving Carlisle Barracks on the 27th of May, and 'eading a brigade from Chambersburg across Maryland to Williamsport, and, on the 16th of June, rode across the Potomac in full uniform, at the head of his brigade, to invade Virginia and fight his old commanders; and, a few days later, he led the right wing of GENERAL PATTERSON's army in the battle of Falling Waters, where the rebels under STONEWALL JACKSON were defeated. Such was the answer that THOMAS made to the demands of rebellion!

Before leaving this period in the life of GENERAL THOMAS, it is due to his memory and to the truth of history that I should notice an attempt which was first made in the South, amidst the passions of war, to throw a shadow on his good name, by