The 26th North Carolina had 820 officers and men at Gettysburg, and their per centage of killed and wounded was exceeded by that of only two Confederate and three Federal regiments during the whole war, and those five were all small, ranging from one hundred and sixty-eight to two hundred and sixty-eight. As Senator Vance’s old regiment unquestionably stands head on the numerical list, so should it, in the opinion of the writer, stand on that of per centages. As, for reasons not necessary to mention here, this list relates almost entirely to the early battles of the war, it is not as satisfactory as it might be. Though North Carolina should head the list in the greatest per centage in any one regiment, it does not in the number of regiments. Early in the war, when it was generally believed that peace would come before glory enough to go round had been obtained, the North Carolina troops were, to a certain extent, held back. For this reason, however flattering to our State pride, Colonel Fox’s table is, as it stands, it would have been vastly more so had it covered the whole war, especially the last year, when the fortunes of the Confederacy, were held up by the bright bayonets of the soldiers from the old North State.
“Carolina, Carolina, Heaven’s blessings attend her!”
[Sidenote: “A POOR THING, BUT MINE OWN.”]
We see in field returns for February and March, 1865, that Pickett’s division was the largest in the army. There is nothing remarkable about this fact, for they were not engaged in the bloody repulse at Bristoe Station, were not present at the Wilderness, were not present at Spottsylvania, and did not serve in those horrible trenches at Petersburg. In the same report we see that their aggregate, present and absent, was 9,487. It may be that since the world was made there has been a body of troops with 9,000 names on their muster rolls, who, serving in a long and bloody war, inflicted so little loss upon their enemy or suffered so little themselves. It may be, but it is not probable. With one exception no division surrendered so few men at Appomattox.
Col. Dodge, of Boston, in his history speaks of the commander of this division as “the Ney of Lee’s army.” If satire is intended it is uncalled for as the Virginian never inflicted any loss upon the enemy worth mentioning; certainly not enough to cause any Yankee to owe him a grudge.