ould the
wound be mortal, I will die at the head of the column." The enemy's
loss in killed and captured amounted to six hundred and seven men. This
affair, the most brilliant of the war, covered the commanding general
with laurels.

[Footnote 28: An officer of the revolutionary army, and a conspicuous
actor in the War of 1812; has written chiefly on military affairs.]

* * * * *

=_Charles Caldwell,[29] 1772-1853._=

From his "Autobiography."

=_104._= A LECTURE OF DR. RUSH.

At length, however, though the class of the winter, all told, amounted
to less than a hundred, a sufficient number had arrived to induce the
professors to commence their lectures; and the introductory of Dr. Rush
was a performance of deep and touching interest, and never, I think, to
be forgotten (while his memory endures), by any one who listened to it,
and was susceptible of the impression it was calculated to make. It
consisted in a well-written and graphical description of the terrible
sweep of the late pestilence; the wild dismay and temporary desolation
it had produced; the scenes of family and individual suffering and woe
he had witnessed during its ravages; the mental dejection, approaching
despair, which he himself had experienced, on account of the entire
failure of his original mode of practice in it, and the loss of his
earliest patients (some of them personal friends); the joy he felt on
the discovery of a successful mode of treating it; the benefactions
which he had afterwards the happiness to confer; and the gratulations
with which, after the success of his practice had become known, he was
often received in sick and afflicted families. The discourse, though
highly colored, and marked by not a few figures of fancy and bursts of
feeling, was, notwithstanding, sufficiently fraught, with substantial
matter to render it no less instructive than it was fascinating.

[Footnote 29: A native of North Carolina; prominent as a physician and
controversialist.]

* * * * *

=_Thomas H. Benton, 1783-1858._= (Manual, p. 487.)

From the "Thirty Years' View of the United States Senate."

=_105._= THE CHARACTER OF MACON.[30]

He was above the pursuit of wealth, but also above dependence and
idleness, and, like an old Roman of the elder Cato's time, worked in the
fields at the head of his slaves in the intervals of public duty, and
did not cease this labor until advancing