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"There are now in South Carolina, absent without proper leave from the
command, 828 men. There have been captured from the brigade in its long
and arduous service, 1,505 men and officers, all of whom are, or soon will be,
in South Carolina on the usual exchange furlough. In the present interrupted
state of communication, both within South Carolina and from thence
to the army, General Johnston thinks it necessary to adopt some other
than the usual means to secure the prompt return of these men to their
standards. With, too, this large number of men or any considerable proportion
of them back in the ranks, the different regiments of the brigade
will be saved from the action of the consolidation act, and the general
appreciates the natural desire of his men to finish the war in the same
organization in which they have heretofore served.

"Influenced by these considerations, the general commanding has ordered
me to turn over the command of the brigade temporarily to the ranking
officer present, and to proceed to South Carolina to secure, by my personal
exertions, as far as may be, the rapid recruiting of our command. This
has been done without previous intimation of his views, or without suggestion
from me. When I learned his intention I applied to have the
remnant of the brigade now here temporarily returned to the State, there

to gather up the absentees; but I was informed that, small as their number
was, they could not be spared from the army here. Our general possesses
your unbounded confidence. He had been called to the command at this
critical juncture by the universal voice of the army and the country, and
it becomes us implicitly and cheerfully to carry out his views.

"I shall be absent forty days, perhaps a short time longer, but so soon
as the purpose of my absence shall be accomplished you have the guarantee
of my past history that I will be back where I have hitherto found
the post of duty—amid your ranks.

"In my absence you will not be consolidated, and although the North
Carolina troops will be taken from the command, the old brigade will be
kept intact and redeveloped into its old proportions as the returning members
arrive.

"In concluding this frank and full statement of the condition of our command,
let me urge upon both officers and men to give their hearty co-operation
in carrying out the views of our general—views dictated not only by
the interest of the country at large, but by the welfare of our beloved
brigade. When I return, greet me, comrades, with the announcement that
in my absence no man has left his standard—that the word deserter has
been expunged from the vocabulary of Hagood's brigade.

"Remember your glorious record. Recall the spirit that animated you at
Walthal when almost single-handed you held the invader at bay until the
arrival of Beaureguard's avenging army. Think of your triumph at
Drury's; your services at Cold Harbor, at Bermuda Hundreds, the sixty-seven
days in the trenches of Petersburg, the bloody but glorious Sunday on
the Weldon road, the Richmond lines, Fisher, Anderson Town Creek, Kinston,
Bentonville. What men before ever made such a record in eleven
months? Will you let such a history terminate ingloriously, and the verdict
of posterity be that the men who made the record perished in the
making, and that the degenerate survivors were unable to sustain the
weight of glory their more gallant comrades had already won?

"Officers and men of the Eleventh, Twenty-first and Twenty-fifth and
Twenty-seventh, to you especially do I appeal to keep your commands
together. You are the nucleus upon which your regiments must be rebuilt.
Suppress any rising spirit of discontent at unavoidable unpleasantness in
your present condition; lend me your zealous efforts; and again your regiments
will be in the condition they were when the swords of Ledbetter and
Dargan and Glover and Hopkins flashed in your van, and their gallant
spirits proudly departed to heaven from a death won in your ranks.