But there were other evidences of regard more valuable to me than
exhibitions of personal kindness. Regard for the people of
Mississippi, founded on a special attention to their history; the
gallant services of your sons in the field, were publicly claimed as
property which Mississippi could not appropriate to herself; but which
were part of the common wealth of the nation, and belonged equally to
the people of Maine. Could I be insensible to such recognition of the
honorable fame of Mississippi? No, the memory of the gallant dead, who
died at Monterey and Buena Vista, forbade it.

At a subsequent period, when in Massachusetts, one of her
distinguished sons, (Gen. Cushing,) paid a compliment to the feat
performed by the Mississippi Regiment in checking the enemies cavalry
on the field of Buena Vista one Black Republican newspaper denied the
originality of the movement, and claimed it to have been previously
performed by an English regiment at Quatre Bras. This claim was
unfounded; the service performed by the British Regiment having been
of a totally different character and for a different purpose.--A
Southern paper, however, has gone one step beyond that of the
Massachusetts paper, and denies the merit claimed for the service
rendered by saying that it was the result of accident, growing out of
the peculiar conformation of the ground on which the regiment rallied
and that it was necessary for the safety of the regiment, being like
the act of a man who leaps from a burning ship and takes the chance of
drowning.

If this only affected myself, I should leave it, like other
misrepresentations, unnoticed, but it concerns the hard earned
reputation of the regiment I commanded. It affects the fame of