BOY'S VIEW

CHAPTER I.

_From Harper's Ferry to Bull Run._

"O war, thou hast thy fierce delight,
Thy gleams of joy intensely bright;
Such gleams as from thy polished shield
Fly dazzling o'er the battle-field."

Is there a boy in all this wide land, North or South, who would not like
to hear what a boy has to say of his experience as a private soldier in
the Confederate Army from 1861 to 1865, serving for the most part in
Stuart's Cavalry of Lee's army? Men have told their story, and
graphically told it from a man's standpoint. But who has spoken for the
boy? Who has told of the part the boy played in that great drama that
was on the stage for four years without intermission? That bloody drama
in which there were 3,000,000 players--a play that cost the country
eight billions in money and half a million human lives?

I do not know how it was in the Northern armies, but the bulk of Lee's
soldiers in the ranks were boys in their teens. It was these boys who
made Thomas Jonathan Jackson, "Stonewall Jackson;" who put Robert E.
Lee's name in the hall of fame and who lifted J.E.B. Stuart up to the
rank of lieutenant-general of cavalry. One of these boys has written the
story as he remembers it in plain, simple language; not a history, but
simply an account of what he saw and did while this eventful history was
being made. If his experience is different from others, or does not
accord in all respects with what the historian has written, it is
because we do not all see alike. The writer has not consulted the
histories for material for this story; he did not have to do this. If
all the boys who served in the Confederate Army were to write their
experience, they would all be different, yet all approximately correct,
and perhaps, taken together, would be the most perfect history that
could be written of the Confederate side of the Civil War.

In the early spring of 1861 I was seventeen years old and going to
school about half a mile from my home in Loudoun county, Virginia.
Twelve miles distant was Harper's Ferry, where four years previous John
Brown had made an attempt to raise an insurrection among the slaves in
that district. He seized the United States arsenal, located there, for
the purpose of arming the negroes, who were expected to flock to his
standard and have their freedom declared. The negroes did not respond;
John Brown and a few of his followers were captured and hanged. This
atrocious act o