The Civil War News & Views Open Discussion Forum

The Rough Riders...

In the late spring of 1898 Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders were being transported by rail from San Antonio, Texas to Tampa Florida on there way to Cuba. The route took them through the heart of the old Confederacy.

"Everywhere the people came out to greet us and cheer us. They brought us flowers; they brought us watermelons and other fruits, and sometimes jugs and pails of milk—all of which we greatly appreciated. We were travelling through a region where practically all the older men had served in the Confederate Army, and where the younger men had all their lives long drunk in the endless tales told by their elders, at home, and at the cross-roads taverns, and in the court-house squares, about the cavalry of Forrest and Morgan and the infantry of Jackson and Hood. The blood of the old men stirred to the distant breath of battle; the blood of the young men leaped hot with eager desire to accompany us. The older women, who remembered the dreadful misery of war—the misery that presses its iron weight most heavily on the wives and the little ones—looked sadly at us; but the young girls drove down in bevies, arrayed in their finery, to wave flags in farewell to the troopers and to beg cartridges and buttons as mementoes. Everywhere we saw the Stars and Stripes, and everywhere we were told, half-laughing, by grizzled ex-Confederates that they had never dreamed in the by-gone days of bitterness to greet the old flag as they now were greeting it, and to send their sons, as now they were sending them, to fight and die under it."

The Rough Riders by Theodore Roosevelt.

________________________
David Upton

Messages In This Thread

The Rough Riders...
clear *NM*
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...
Re: The Rough Riders...