Evening times-Republican. [volume] (Marshalltown, Iowa) 1890-1923, 1901-08-14

GuTapie udtslldlS tlldH WOou, suetler
judgment will be exercised and more
permanence insured.
AN OLD SOLDIERS STORIES.
The civil war period seems very re-
mote and the status of its history rather
fixed, yet new interest has been created
in it and its leading actors and another
view of it presented by volume of mil
itary "reminiscences just published by j.
Cox, A. NJ, LII. D., and formerly
major general commanding the Twenty
third army corps. A review of it by the
New York Tribune is worth perusal.
Gen. Cox was, if not one of the com
manding figures in the conflict, a valu-
able and trusted assistant of leading
generals.
At the outbreak of the war Gen. Cox
was member of the state senate of
Ohio, and he held commission as
brigadier in the state militia he was at
once called upon to give his services in
organizing the troops enlisted under the
presidents first call. Mcclellan had
been put in command in West Virginia
| and Cox was assigned to serve under
him in the Great Kanawha district, and
later under Rosecrans, Fremont and
Pope. Then he was summoned with his
troops to Washington to cooperate in
n 1afa of YI,c nil al tyh I,a,
brought again and more closely into re-
lations with Mcclellan during the dark
days of the latter's inactivity and of the
disappointment caused by his failures.
Gen. Mcclellan offered a puzzling
problem in hesitation from the first
Gen. Cox notices that in the early West
Virginia days the turgid rhetoric and
exaggerated pretence of his dispatches,
proclamations and correspondence We're
in unaccountabie contrast with his kind
ly and modest bearing. Here, too, he
showed the 90 me astonishing tendency
to excessive caution, TO over-estimate
his enemy, to interpret unfavorably the
sights and sounds in front, that worked
such injury with the Army of the Po-
tomac. 1t was no lack Of personal brave
". for he was cool and unconcerned I'M
| der fire. McClellan's fiction as to the
strength of Lees forces in Virginia
Gen. Cox calls 1.-The most remarkable
| in the history of modern wars and he
even goes so far az to say:
Whether Mcclellan was the victim
or the accomplice of the inventions of
his secret service we can not tell 1t
is almost Incredible that he should be
deceived, except willingly. The re-
ports of the Peninsula campaign reveal
at times the difficulty there was in keep
ing up the illusion"
His popularity with his men was part
ly personal one, gained by the eviden-
ces of good fellowship he showed to the
troops and by the fact that he had
| taught the army to believe implicitly
that the confederate army was more
than twice as numerous as it was in
| fact, and hence to admire the general
ship that had saved his own from ami
hilation. Gen. Cox has only words Of
censure for the later facts of his career,
| his sacrifice of Burnside's lifelong
1 friendship, for instance, and then the
revelations made in his autobiogra ply
"a most curious piece of self-expos-
ure" in which he unconsciously showed
that he had forgotten much, but had
learned nothing.
| Gen. Cox's work took him to Freder-
| ck, and on that day when Hampton's
troops were driven out, the occasion be-
| ing that which prompted Whittier to
| write barbara Frietchie;" but the
scrupuIous historian is obliged to con-
\ fess his ignorance of that poetical fig
ure Frederick was loyal town, and
the union troops We're greeted by "ladies
waving their handkerchiefs and nation
| al flags, while the men came to the COL
umn with fruits and rerreshments for
| the marching soldiers as they went by
| in the hot sunshine OF the September
afternoon"-not, then. "the cool Septem-
Der morn" Gen. Cox adds:
"Altho at the head of the column. the
| truth of history compels me to say that
saw nothing Of Barbara Frietchie and
heard nothing Of her till ] read Whitti-
er,s poem In later years. When, howev-
ar. Twisted Frederick with Gen. Grant
lin 1863 we were both presented with
| walking sticks made from the timbers
! OF Barbara's house, which had been
torn down, and. Of; course. can not dis
pute the story Of which have the stick
as evidence; for Gen. Grant thought the
stick shut me up from any denial and
lestablished the legend.
J Gen. Cox participated in the battle u