Co. Aytch - Maury Grays, First Tennessee Regiment | Page 4

their feet to the foe, would fairly make our hair stand on end
with intense patriotism, and we wanted to march right off and whip
twenty Yankees. But we soon found out that the glory of war was at
home among the ladies and not upon the field of blood and carnage of
death, where our comrades were mutilated and torn by shot and shell.
And to see the cheek blanch and to hear the fervent prayer, aye, I might
say the agony of mind were very different indeed from the patriotic
times at home.
CAMP CHEATHAM
After being drilled and disciplined at Camp Cheatham, under the
administrative ability of General R. C. Foster, 3rd, for two months, we,
the First, Third and Eleventh Tennessee Regiments--Maney, Brown
and Rains-- learned of the advance of McClelland's army into Virginia,
toward Harper's Ferry and Bull Run.
The Federal army was advancing all along the line. They expected to
march right into the heart of the South, set the negroes free, take our
property, and whip the rebels back into the Union. But they soon found
that secession was a bigger mouthful than they could swallow at one
gobble. They found the people of the South in earnest.
Secession may have been wrong in the abstract, and has been tried and
settled by the arbitrament of the sword and bayonet, but I am as firm in
my convictions today of the right of secession as I was in 1861. The
South is our country, the North is the country of those who live there.
We are an agricultural people; they are a manufacturing people. They
are the descendants of the good old Puritan Plymouth Rock stock, and
we of the South from the proud and aristocratic stock of Cavaliers. We
believe in the doctrine of State rights, they in the doctrine of
centralization.
John C. Calhoun, Patrick Henry, and Randolph, of Roanoke, saw the

venom under their wings, and warned the North of the consequences,
but they laughed at them. We only fought for our State rights, they for
Union and power. The South fell battling under the banner of State
rights, but yet grand and glorious even in death. Now, reader, please
pardon the digression. It is every word that we will say in behalf of the
rights of secession in the following pages. The question has been long
ago settled and is buried forever, never in this age or generation to be
resurrected.
The vote of the regiment was taken, and we all voted to go to Virginia.
The Southern Confederacy had established its capital at Richmond.
A man by the name of Jackson, who kept a hotel in Maryland, had
raised the Stars and Bars, and a Federal officer by the name of
Ellsworth tore it down, and Jackson had riddled his body with buckshot
from a double- barreled shotgun. First blood for the South.
Everywhere the enemy were advancing; the red clouds of war were
booming up everywhere, but at this particular epoch, I refer you to the
history of that period.
A private soldier is but an automaton, a machine that works by the
command of a good, bad, or indifferent engineer, and is presumed to
know nothing of all these great events. His business is to load and shoot,
stand picket, videt, etc., while the officers sleep, or perhaps die on the
field of battle and glory, and his obituary and epitaph but "one"
remembered among the slain, but to what company, regiment, brigade
or corps he belongs, there is no account; he is soon forgotten.
A long line of box cars was drawn up at Camp Cheatham one morning
in July, the bugle sounded to strike tents and to place everything on
board the cars. We old comrades have gotten together and laughed a
hundred times at the plunder and property that we had accumulated,
compared with our subsequent scanty wardrobe. Every soldier had
enough blankets, shirts, pants and old boots to last a year, and the
empty bottles and jugs would have set up a first-class drug store. In
addition, every one of us had his gun, cartridge-box, knapsack and
three days' rations, a pistol on each side and a long Bowie knife, that

had been presented to us by William Wood, of Columbia, Tenn. We
got in and on top of the box cars, the whistle sounded, and amid the
waving of hats, handkerchiefs and flags, we bid a long farewell and
forever to old Camp Cheatham.
Arriving at Nashville, the citizens turned out en masse to receive us,
and here again we were reminded of the good old times and the "gal we
left behind us." Ah, it is worth soldiering to receive such welcomes as
this.
The Rev. Mr. Elliott invited us to his