"The ordeal to which they were subjected was a severe one, but the task was undertaken with that spirit and courage which always deserves success and seldom fails achieving it. As often as their ranks were shattered and broken by grape and canister did they rally, reform and renew the attack under the leadership of their gallant officers. They were ordered to take the batteries at all hazards and they obeyed the order, not, however, without heavy losses of officers and men. Not far from where the batteries were playing, and while cheering and encouraging his men forward, Lieut.-Col. James L. Autry, commanding the 27th Mississippi, fell, pierced through the head by a minnie ball."

As a public speaker, Colonel Autry had the physical advantage of a fine presence, an excellent voice and a handsome face. He possessed a keen wit which he never permitted to become a cruel sneer, a wholesome humor, which he did not allow to degenerate into coarse stories, a logical and orderly presentation of his reasons, joined to a keen perception of the sentiment of a situation. Leading a cleanly moral life, having earnest, Christian convictions, and withal that indefinable magnetism making for brotherhood among men, it is small wonder that he won the title of Orator. While not a student in the sense of giving all his time to books, he knew thoroughly the Bible, Shakespeare and the standard works and was well versed in history, ancient and modern. Born a slaveholder, he never sold one or permitted a personal chastisement of those he owned. Gentle in nature and charitable in judgment, he became a soldier from a sense of duty and gave up his life in devoted patriotism.

Colonel Autry was about six feet in height; was of a fair complexion, blue eyes and rather stout build. He had dark hair-not black, and at the time of his death weighed about one hundred and seventy-five pounds.

He was a staunch member of the Episcopal church, as his people for generations before him had been. In this membership he had no intolerance or narrowness, for, as to him, the message of the Nazarene to all mankind was "Love ye one another." In politics he was a democrat without the partisan

ship which denied to others a difference of opinion, but, because of a belief that for the good of the whole country, the measures advocated by his party were best for its improve

ment.

When Colonel Autry's body was brought back from the field of Murfreesborough to Holly Springs for its final rest in the cemetery there, the Masonic fraternity, to which he belonged, conducted funeral services at his grave. Colonel H. W. Walter, his brother lawyer and brother Mason, said on that occasion:

"As a Christian, let us admire and imitate him. At a period in the war when the chaplet of fame had been freshly gathered from the fields of Vicksburg, he visited his home, and before the altar and at the font of Christ church, he bent his head in baptism, and surrendering to the Prince of Peace, vowed to live and die a christian. And ever afterward, in the midst of friends-listening to the plaudits of the crowd on the sanguinary field-everywhere he remembered and kept that holy vow, and the chaplet of the christian faith crowned that christian gentleman."

"He has come back to us. What an awful return. A few moments since he was under his own roof, and a wail of agony went up from the hearthstone. The plaintive call of wife and mother fell on cold and listless ears.

"He is before us here. The eye that sparkled with affection is closed, the hand that grasped hand with friendship is paralyzed, the manly form that moved with vigor once, is still and cold now, and the body is sinking slowly, sadly to its final rest. No, thank God; not to its final rest; for we believe it will rise again, as we believe that his spirit has passed to that heaven where law is love,-where legislation is Jehovah,-where battles are never fought, and where happiness is unmixed and eternal."

As a lawyer, he thought that the constitution of his country gave to his Sovereign state the right to secede from the United States, and, as a citizen, he felt it his duty to repel invasion by armed force. Hence he entered the volunteer army of the South, as his father before him had entered the cause of freedom and Texas. Like his father he gave his life to the cause! One does not know! We can have differences of opinion as

to the right or wrong of any political cause; but this is sure: that he who with malice to no man lays down his life in an honest conviction, and for what he believes was for the good of all men, demands a bowing of the head and reverential bending of the body.

SOME MAIN TRAVELED ROADS, INCLUDING CROSSSECTIONS OF NATCHEZ TRACE.

BY GEORGE J. LEFTWICH.

I.

The north half of the American continent became permanently English, rather, permanently subservient to English influences, when Montcalm surrendered to Wolfe at Quebec, but France did not give over her ambition to have American colonies and renewed the conflict in the Southwest, at the mouth of the Mississippi and along the gulf coast where she had long had valuable possessions. The mouth of the Mississippi and the Mexican gulf coast, if successfully defended by her armies, promised France control of an enormous territory along the Father of Waters and in the Northwest which had been early explored by her bold pioneers. Her colonists, emissaries and soldiers cultivated the friendship of the Indian tribes in the Southwest, and made English colonization and English trade some times impossible, always difficult, in that whole region, but the English nation and those of English blood, the inhabitants of the original thirteen colonies, were not to be baffled in their determination to secure and settle the richest land on the continent by the closing of the main water routes of travel by a foreign nation and the consequent loss of the means of transportation to the Mississippi Territory and Southwest. So it was that our leaders of thought and statesmen determined to open up highways through the vast wilderness separating the Mississippi river from the Northeast. The result was the establishment of the Natchez Trace road and the building, by Jackson, of the military road by Columbus,

later, the ultimate effect of which was to neutralize the Spanish and French influences in Mississippi Territory, and to give English blood and the common law dominion to the gulf, and the command of the Mississippi and her tributaries.

Spain, in 1763, had ceded West Florida to England, Napoleon sold Louisiana to Jefferson in 1803, after which the Father of Waters no longer touched foreign shores, but for many years thereafter discontented colonists from Spain and France and other adventurers in the Southwest, such as the attempt by Aaron Burr to found a new empire, caused uneasiness as to the safety of the American settlements and the permanency of the American rule in all that region. How nearly our civilization came being Latinized, with all that term implies, would be an interesting subject for investigation within itself; how far the stern common law was influenced by the gentle equities of the civil, how far the proud formalities of the Spanish inhabitants softened the blunt aggressions of the English, how far our social, economic and statutory laws grew out of the composite influences of the Anglo-Saxon and Latin civilizations, is only discernible now by the investigations of the deep student. Certainly the Spanish and French settlers, the English officers with their love for the crown, the American colonists with their love for freedom, the hardy frontiersman with his love for the wild life on the border of the great river, the New England Furitan, the Virginia cavalier,-each brought their own peculiar views of life and society to this new seat of empire, and the result of it all was a notable, if not a complex, civilization. The Pennsylvania immigrant floated leisurely down the Ohio and the Mississippi, many miles from his mountain home, the New Englander took sail for Pensacola and Mobile and New Orleans, and thence traced his way through the forests; the Virginian, the Carolinian, the Georgian, mainly crossed the mountains to the Tennessee, and thence over the Mussel Shoals, into the Ohio and down the

'Influence of the Mississippi River upon the Early Settlement of the Valley,-Haughton, Vol. 4, p. 481, Publications, Mississippi Historical

Society,