stability and prosperity of the Union; to cultivate amicable relations with our sister States and establish our agricultural and commercial prosperity upon more durable foundations—trusting that the lessons taught by the rebellion will not be lost either to the North or the South: that free men once enlightened will not submit to wrong or injustice, that sectional aggression will meet with sectional resistance, and that the price of political perfidy is blood and carnage."
The governor who uttered these sentiments was the man who so distinguished himself at Gettysburg on July 2, 1863, that his great corps commander, Longstreet, in referring to the battle afterward (Southern Historical papers, vol. V, p. 65), singled him out from 13,000 of his comrades — Mississippians, Georgians, South Carolinians, Alabamians, and Texans — to illustrate the intrepid daring of all the rest in what he did not "hesitate to pronounce the best three hours' fighting ever done by any troops on any battlefield." That man's name was Benjamin G. Humphreys.
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I have made what I believe to be a faithful account of the military history of the troops Mississippi placed in the field in the war of the Confederacy. If I have omitted any, it is not intentional. The writer has been often tempted to stop and pay just tribute to all his brave comrades from Mississippi; but remembering he was asked to write "history" and not "eulogies," checked his strong impulse to give the meed of praise to his fallen and surviving comrades. It is but just and proper, in these closing lines, that I should say that I have been largely aided by my son, Mr. Allen J. Hooker, in the collection and collation of the data on which this history is based, verified by the reports and correspondence of the Federal and Confederate officers in the field.
