and have wrested from him his own Gate city, where were located his foundries, arsenals, and workshops, deemed secure on account of their distance from our base and the seeming impregnable obstacles intervening. Nothing is impossible to an army like this, determined to vindicate a government wherever our flag has once floated, and resolved to maintain them at any and all cost.
"In our campaign many, yea very many of our noble and gallant comrades have preceded us to our common destination, the grave; but they have left the memory of deeds on which a Nation can build a proud history. McPherson, Harker, McCook, and others dear to us all, are now the binding links in our minds that should attach more closely together the living, who have to complete the task which still lies before us in the dim future.
"I ask all to continue as they have so well begun, the cultivation of the soldierly virtues that have ennobled our own and other countries,—courage, patience, obedience to the laws and constituted authorities of our Government, fidelity to our trusts, and good feeling among each other; each trying to excel the other in the practice of those high qualities, and it will then require no prophet to foretell that our country will, in time, emerge from this war purified by the fires of war and worthy its great founder, Washington.
"W. T. Sherman,
Major-general commanding."
