We know that the Southern Confederacy is dead, and all its mourning lovers ask is permission to bury their dead reverently.
“Hushed is the roll of the Rebel drum, The sabres are sheathed, and the cannon are dumb, And fate with pitiless hand has furled, The flag that once challenged the gaze of the world.”
But the fame of its soldiers deserves to live on the pages of history, and, if I have aided in rescuing from oblivion the story of the gallant deeds performed by the men that followed Col. Elijah V. White through the bloody years of that desolating war, I am satisfied.
In commencing the story of the brave deeds performed during the dark days of the great civil war in America by the gallant band known as "White’s Battalion," it will be proper to give a short sketch of the man who, as chief of the “Comanches,” gave to the Thirty-fifth Battalion, Virginia Cavalry, its existence, and led it through so many campaigns, battles and raids, to occupy a place in the history of the war second to no command of its numbers, and distinguished under the special notice of such men as “Stonewall” Jackson, Richard S. Ewell, J. E. B. Stuart, William E. Jones, Thomas L. Rosser and the gallant Butler of South Carolina; besides receiving the highest encomiums from the greatest cavalry commander since the days when Murat led the squadrons of Napoleon—General Wade Hampton—and of Robert E. Lee, before whose fame the most splendid garlands of glory that wreathe the brows of the noblest men of earth in all time, pale as does the silver moon-beam before the radiant rays of the noon-day sun.
Elijah V. White was born near Poolsville, Montgomery County, Maryland, on the 29th of August, 1832, and continued at his father’s home until he was sixteen years of age, when he was sent to Lima Seminary, Livingston Co., N. Y., to be educated. Here he remained for two years, at the expiration of which he attended Granville College, in Licking Co., Ohio, for two more years, when he returned to his home in Maryland.
During the war in Kansas, in 1855 or ’56, he went to that territory, and joining a company from Missouri, took an active part in the troubles that then threatened to overthrow the pillars of the old Constitution in the terrible maelstrom of abolitionism that afterwards swept away their foundations.