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ALBEET PALMEE
j\I A \ O li ( ) F B () S T O N
DELIVEUEI) BEFORE THE
SUFFOLK COUNTY ASSOCIATION OF THE
GRAND AR:\IY OF THE REPUBLIC

FANEUIL HALL

DECOEATION DAY, MAY 30, 1883

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PRINTED BY ORDER OF THE CITY COUNCIL
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ORATION

HIS HONOR

ALBEET PALMEE
MAYOR OE BOSTON
DELIVERED BEFORE THB
SUFFOLK COUNTY ASSOCIATION OF THE
GRAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC

FANEUIL HALL

DECOEATIOH" DAY, MAY 30, 1883

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PRINTED BY ORDER OF THE CITY COUNCIL
188 3

ROCKWELL AND CHURCHILL,
City Printers,
39 Arch Street, Boston.

(JITY OF BOSTON.

In Board of Aldermen, June 11, 1883.
Ordered, That His Honor the Maj^or be requested to furnish
a copy of the Address delivered by him in Faneuil Hall, on
Decoration Day, May 30, 1883, before the Suffolk County
Association of the Grand Army of the Republic, and that the
same be printed as a City Document or otherwise, under the
direction of the Committee on Printing ; the expenses to be
charged to the appropriation for Printing.
Passed in Common Council.
Came up for concurrence. Concurred.
Approved by the Mayor, June 16, 1883.
A true copy. Attest : JOHN T. PRIEST,
Assintant City Clerh.

ORATION.

Soldiers of the G-rand Arm,y of the Republic and
Fellow- Citizens : —
Love's annual pilgrimage to the shrines of Liberty
has once more been performed. With reverent hands
and grateful hearts we have strewn the floral wealth
of another spring-time on the graves of the nation's
saviors. Mediaeval Europe sought the inspirations of
its valor and its virtue in the sacred • sepulchre of
Jerusalem. The chivalry of Britain, of France, of
Germany, and of Spain, alike turned its eyes to Pal
estine and named it for all time the Holy Land.
But each recurring May reminds us that every city
in this broad Union of ours has its Holy Lands, —
the sleeping-places of the redeemers of the republic, —
the Palestines of American patriotism, forevermore.
We are not here to-day in the spirit of sadness.
The grief of personal loss has almost spent itself; a
few years morejand the last tear of the last mourner
will have dropped and dried. The gloom of these
graves is'°'gone ; their glory still remains. There is

6 ORATION.
pathos in the receding ranks of that Grrand Army
of the Republic whose survivors are, year by year,
counted by smaller and still smaller figures. The
man of middle age, who answered the summons of
Sumter, is now, if living, an old, gray-haired man;
the youth of twenty-one then is in the forties now ;
and a whole train of tender reflections follows the
thonght that, when another period of time equal to
that which has already passed since the war began
shall have become a part of the past, the orator who
shall then fill the place I occupy to-day will be able
to repeat to the few heroes of the strife who shall
then be left to listen to him, those immortal words
of Webster, when, on Bunker Hill, on the 17th of
June, 1825, he- turned to the , handful of veterans
who had outlived the fifty years since the first battle
of tbe revolution was fought, and exclaimed, " Yener-
able men! you have come down to us from a former
generation." Already we are separated from that
raighty drama, in which the dead whom we honor
this day played their glorious part, by almost a quar
ter of a century. The burden of individual bereave
ment lightens, but the debt of national gratitude
grows weightier, with every passing year. Hitherto
we have given them tears and flowers, mingling the
waters of our hearts with the fragrance of the lily
and the violet. Tears and flowers ! — tears for a time,

MEMORIAL DAY. 7
flowers for all eternity. When Mother Earth shall
have gathered into her bosom the last friend of the
last soldier who " marched with Sherman from Atlanta
to the sea," rallied to Sheridan's immortal ride, or
fought with Grant in the Wilderness, the mounds in
yonder cemetery, though no longer bedewed with the
rain of human sorrow, shall still bloom with the
flowers cast upon them by a grateful posterity. The
largess of a thousand ISTew England springs yet to
come is already under mortgage to the graves of the
men who died that the republic, " one and indivisible,
now and forever," might live. And, as each succeed
ing May robes our 'New England hills with verdure
and decks her vales with flowers, the true grandeur
of their work shall be more accurately apprehended
and more profoundly appreciated.
WHAT MEMORIAL DAY MEANS.
The full meaning of this anniversary, the manner
of men whose deeds it recalls, the vast value of
those deeds, the immeasurably precious results which
tbey secured for us, and for all who shall come after
thera, is even yet but dimly apparent. Seen in its
immediate shadow, even the great pyramid seems
a pigmy. So the pyramidic events that loom up on
the plain of history need distance and perspective

8 ORATION.
before their entire greatness flashes out on the
horizon of the human mind. The war in which you
veterans of the Grand Army participated with your
corarades whom you remember this day was too
great an event, its issues too majestic, its stake too
stupendous, its decisions too heavily freighted with
the fate of the generations yet unborn, to be more
than dimly coraprehended by the men who were the
contemporary witnesses of their and your heroic
sacrifices. This but repeats the common experience
of the race. The men who sailed in the Mayflower
drew up in her cabin a mutual covenant for their
common government, and landed without dreaming
that they had outlined the charter of the New World's
liberties. To the men who charged with Rupert, or
with Cromwell, at IS'aseby, it was a fierce fight
between Cavalier and Roundhead ; but parliamentary
governraent was between their sword-blades, and
raanhood suifrage loomed up as divine right went
down. The Concord farmer who, in April, 1775,
left his plough and seized his flintlock, had no idea
that he was laying the foundations of the mightiest
confederation of free coraraonwealths the world had
ever seen. Waterloo was a great fight, raeaning
only glory to iN'apoleon, and duty to Wellington,
and, to their wisest conteraporaries, little more than
the deciding throw of the dice in a game between

MEMORIAL DAY. 9
two captains. It was not till a generation had passed
that raen looked back to those Belgian fields, and
saw that there dawned the natal day of a new dis
pensation, which transformed the whole face of
raodern Europe. Wellington had slept a quarter of
a century in Saint Paul's, and the captive of St.
Helena was but a raeteoric memory, before Hugo
seized his pen and wrote under Waterloo: "The
hinge of the nineteenth century." The men of the
Mayflower have had their Hildreth and Palfrey ;
Cromwell and his Ironsides have had their Macau
lay and Carlyle ; the raen of Lexington and Con
cord and of Bunker Hill have had their Bancroft,
and Waterloo has found its Hugo ; but it raay be
doubted if the historian is yet born to whose pen
it shall be given to do justice to that long panoraraa
of mightier war, which stretched from Sumter to
Appomattox the sanguinary succession of its ter
rific conflicts. A CENTURY OF GREAT WARS.
We live in an age of great wars. The nineteenth
century will be known in history as the century of
colossal conflicts. I know that there be those who
claim for it preeminence in art and in literature, and
still raore who believe it to outrank all the centuries
that have preceded it, for the nuraber, variety, and

10 ORATION.
value of its scientific discoveries. ^Nevertheless, when
all its triumphs in the domain of art, all its trophies
from the field of literature, and all its amazing con
quests in the realm of science, have been recounted, I
still venture the opinion that the cycle of time in whose
last quarter we now stand will be distinguished, above
all else, for the number, the magnitude, and, still more,
for the momentous results of its wars. The smoke of
battle hangs over it like a never-lifting pall, and its
records are written with bayonets for pens, and blood
for iiik. One of the standing anachronisms that will
challenge the philosopher's analysis and point the
cynic's sneer will be this nineteenth century of ours, in
which the greatest strides of civilization and the most
appalling lapses into the barbarism of war have been
simultaneously witnessed. The age of Elizabeth of
England was great. It has been called, indeed, the
golden age in point of learning. Its litei'ature was
brilliant, its poetry magnificent, its contributions to the
arts and sciences many and important. But the era*
which, borrowing the English designation, we call the
Yictorian age, if we omit Shakespeare, — who belonged
to no age, but was, and is, for all time, — is incompara
bly greater in all these respects. If it rested its claim
to progressive preeminence ainong the centuries alone
upon the introduction of steam as a motor, by land and
by sea, I opine that, judged by results, it would have

MEMORIAL DAY. 11
to be admitted; but when to this is added the
invention of the electric telegraph, the submarine
cable, and the as yet but half-developed telephone;
and to this again all the manifold adaptations of
machinery, alike to agriculture and to manufactures,
there can be no question that the current one hundred
years have done more to elevate the general plane of
human existence than all the eighteen centuries of
the Christian chronology that went before. And yet,
with all these astounding achievements, with a redun
dant and ornate literature, a poetry rich, copious, and
for the most part distinctly humane in its inspiration,
with a free and cheap newspaper press constantly
throwing its weight into the scale of liberal and
philanthropic thought, this has been, and is, first of all
and above all, the age of physical combat, of awful,
majestic, unparalleled war. Mars is its presiding planet,
and the forge of Yulcan lights it up with the lurid
glare of phenomenal fires. For Europe and America
alike it has been a period of violent solutions.
Waterloo, Sebastopol, Magenta, Solferino, Mentana,
Sadowa, Sedan, Plevna, — these are the blazing words
ofthe Old World since this century began. Every one
of them recalls a catastrophe and raarks an epoch.
Out of thera a new Europe partly eraerged, — a united
Germany, a united Italy, a republican Prance, an
eraancipated Ru^.sia, a restored Hungary, a reformed

12 ORATION.
Austria, a renascent Greece, and a dying Turkey. It
is a vivid chapter in the history ofthe Old World which
records these vast changes, and the soldier is the
author of it all, frora the first word to the last. But,
iraposing as it is, the war of the American rebellion in
this century of great wars will forever stand, above all
the struggles that preceded or followed it, raost worthy
of the title which Greeley has given it, " The Great
Conflict." It was indeed great, transcendently and sublimely
great. Waterloo was the last raove in a chess-game
between one great raan and several sraall kings.
Sadowa was a duel between two great kings to ap
portion the plunder of a small one. Sedan, the
noblest of the three, was, after all, but an affair of
two eraperors, and the republic of France was its
accidental outcome, not its avowed stake. There was
no accident in the "great conflict" in which the
graves we have this day garlanded anew were made.
Great conflicts are, to vary an old proverb, born, not
made. This was born with the republic itself. The
seeds of it were planted in the constitution itself,
watered by two generations of controversy, and
strengthened by the procession of events, until it be
came, in the undying phrase of Seward, "an irre
pressible conflict." There was no vagueness or
uncertainty about its nature; no indefiniteness about

MEMORIAL DAY. 13
the issue. It was not the caprice of two jealous
kings quarreUing over a point of diplomatic etiquette;
nor was it the bubbling passion of a boulevard mob,
shouting " A Berlin ! A Berlin ! " that carried thirty
millions of freemen into the conflict, whose proud, yet
tearful, memories hallow this hour.

WHAT THE NORTH AND SOUTII EOUGHT EOR.
We fought, JSTorth aud South alike, neither for em
pire nor for territory ; the impulse was neither glory nor
greed. We fought only as free peoples, who are en
lightened as well as free, can be induced to fight, — for
a cause that embodied a principle, and had for its soul
an imperishable idea. I speak now of the men who
fought on both sides. The time has come when the
men of the victorious IS^orth can concede so much to
the men of the vanquished South. What, . indeed, do
we concede in saying this? Yictor Hugo, sweeping
with his poetic eye the broken barricades of Paris after
the civil conflict of 1848, exclairas, in a burst of gen
erous generalization: "The dead are right and the
living are not wrong." That is poetry, eraotion, senti
ment; but it is not truth. We hold no such lax
philosophy. The right and the wrong in the great
American conflict are forever distinctly distinguishable,
and woe to him who shall utter one syllable to confuse

14 ORATION.
them together, or unsettle the judgment that was finally
rendered by the God of Battles. But, yielding noth
ing, imperilling nothing, we may, nevertheless, admit,
nay, we must claim it for the credit of the coraraon
heritage of free institutions which we both enjoyed
together until 1861, and which, under God, we now
hope to share together until the heavens and the earth
shall pass away, that the insurgent arraies of the South,
equally with the armies of the republic, followed, not
only a flag, but an idea; fought, not merely for their
section, but for a sentiment; contended for what to
them was a sacred principle. The idea was false, the
sentiment was mistaken, the principle was wrong.
We may not now, nor raay we ever, admit that they
were right; but we can admit now that the great mass
of them honestly, sincerely, and with a passionate ear
nestness which seeraed to their blinded vision to be the
truest patriotism, mistook the wrong for the right,
and gave to the deadly heresy of treason the hospita
ble shelter of honest hearts and all that brave men
have to give when the ripest conviction whispers its
raajestic inspiration to the rarest courage. So much
we may admit; nay, so much we are proud to claim.
We were one nation before the war; we are one na
tion since the war; and we were one people, sons of a
common lineage, descendants of the same sturdv
stock, inheritors and custodians of the same institii-

M E M 0 R I A L D A Y . 15
tions, throughout the war. In all the sad records of
those four years of fratricidal strife there is one page,
at least, to which we may always turn with admiration
and peruse with pride. In the maddest hour of rebel
lion, when one Southern State after another entered the
arena of armed insurrection, the founders of the Con
federate government turned, as by an instinct too strong
to be resisted, to the archives of the Union which they
sought to dissolve, and promulgated a constitutiou,
borrowed in raost of its essential features frora, and fol
lowing in large part the literal language of, the con
stitution which they repudiated. There was a tribute
in that act, raore eloquent than words, to the depth to
which the cardinal deraocratic doctrines, the basal
republican principles, on which this government is
founded, had struck root. Passion had silenced rea
son, national sentiment was stricken dumb by sectional
interest. State pride raged supreme over fealty to the
Union, and treason ruled the hour.

A FACT TO BE REMEMBERED.
But let us reraeraber with thankfulness, and glory
in the recollection, that, while there was treason to
the federal fiag, treason to the federal governraent,
treason to the federal constitution, there was never
treason to the fundamental faith of the fathers of the

16 ORATION.
republic in the republican or democratic form ot gov
ernment. In the whole length and breadth of the
revolted States there was one phrase that even the
lips of treason could never unlearn, — " We, the peo
ple." No man in the whole domain of secession ever
suggested a monarchy, an empire, or a dictatorship;
but all, even in the wildest frenzy of that desperate
hour, united in declaring that the new governraent,
which they sought to establish on the ruins of the
old, raust rest on the same foundations on which
Washington, Jefferson, Adaras, and Madison had
reared the original edifice of the Union.
Here, indeed, was an insurrection without a parallel.
It stands unique among all recorded revolts against
constituted authorities in this important point, — and it
is a point of difference which has never, in my belief,
received the emphasis which belongs to it, — that it was
not aimed at a change in the generic character or the
distinctive form of the existing government. It did not
propose to substitute a raonarchy for a republic, to pro
claira an absolute empire in place of constitutional gov
ernment, to exchange the simple chair of the chief
magistrate for the gilded throne of a king. It did not
even propose to materially change the methods of elec
tion. It preserved intact all the names and symbols of
popular government, perpetuated the current forras of
parliamentary procedure, and, in short, copied its

MEMORIAL DAY. 17
organic law, almost line for line and letter for letter,
from the government which it sought to overthrow.
There is no other example in all history, of which I am
aware, of a revolution which, in the event of its success,
would have had for its final result the establishment of
a new government, modelled, with an almost perfect
fidelity to details, upon the government against which
it was directed. When Englishmen commenced the
revolution of 1642 they aimed at a radical change in
the very fabric of their government, and the final tri
umph of the Parliament over King Charles saw the
end of the prerogative of kings and the beginning of
the prerogative of the people. When that struggle was
concluded there was a protector where before there
was a king, a comraonwealth where before was an ab
solute monarchy, and the seat of political power in the
British realm had passed forever from the royal palace
to the House of Comraons, where it still remains.
When the French revolutionists of 1792 took to the
streets, they meant to change, and they did change, the
organic structure of their government. A monarchy
disappeared and an aristocracy was annihilated with
Louis XYI.; a republic rose and a Democracy was
created with Mirabeau and Robespierre. The nuraer
ous revolutionary risings which have taken place in
France, in Germany, and in Russia, from that to the
present day, have all had for their objective points cer-

18 ORATION.
tain radical changes in the character and form of the
existing governments in those countries. They were m
every instance designed, either like the Paris rising of
September, 1870, to end a dynasty, or else, like those
of a raore recent time in Russia, to utterly subvert the
prevailing political and social order.

AN ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE.
The attempted Araerican revolution of 1861 dif
fered in this essential feature from every other
revolutionary movement of which we have any
knowledge. If successful, according to the design
of its authors, it would have left two republics where
but one existed . before ; two confederations of demo
cratic commonwealths where but one had hitherto
been; two constitutions, based on like principles, pro
viding, by like methods and by sirailar processes, for
a form and substance of representative government,
in essence the same. In other lands rebellion has
been often proclaimed by a handful of patriots against
the authority of an autocrat ; and, less frequently, by
one desperate and ambitious adventurer against the
authority of a constitutional government. The rebel
lion of the Southern States bears no analogy to either
of these two classes of ordinary insurrections. It was
not proclaimed by a junta of fierce spirits, acting on

MEMORIAL DAY. 19
the arbitrary motion of their own irapulses ; it was
not organized in the brain of one daring and con
suramate conspirator ; it was ordained by soleran votes
of the peoples of the several revolting States, recorded
through their chosen representatives, and ratified by
all the forras that lend the sanctions of regularity to
popular government. It was not an angry flame of
discontent leaping into the streets and flinging its
challenge in the face of the government frora behind
the shelter of an improvised barricade. It was not
the consummation of a diabolical conspiracy born in
the brain of one raan, eager to
" Wade through slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,"
like that which startled Paris on the night of the 2d
of December, 1851, and strangled a republic in the
dark while its citizens slept. It had more majesty
than the first, and more honor than the last. In
stately procession the States of the South raoved, one
after another, into the circle of armed revolt. The mob
was not there, nor was the dictator. It was done in
the Legislatures of sovereign States, duly elected and
regularly assembled. South Carolina led the fatal
way on the 17th of ]S'ovember, 1860; Georgia fol
lowed on the 19th; Mississippi not till the 9th of Janu
ary following; and then Florida, Louisiana, Alabama,

20 ORATION.
Arkansas, Texas, :^orth Carolina, Tennessee, and,
finally, old Yirginia, in the order named, filed out
and took their places in that sanguinary enterprise,
whose failure was secured by the splendid sacrifices
we recall this day. In each case it was done by vote
of the Legislature; and, in several cases, these votes
were, it is well to recall, confirmed by direct appeal to
the people at the polls. It was, therefore, the only
rebellion in all human history which carried its cre
dentials straight from the ballot-box.

THE BALLOT-BOX ALWAYS SUPREME.
There was the underlying fact which had in it the
seed-germ of our perpetual reunion, and held, even in
that hour of wrench and parting, the potential promise
of our permanent and indissoluble confederation.
Divided by a geographic line, we never for a moment
lost identity of institutions. Separated by clashing
interests, we reraained one people by virtue of our
coraraon adhesion to the republican forms of govern
ment. On both sides of the Potomac we continued to
talk of Presidents and Yice-Presidents, of Congress, of
Senators and of Representatives, of Governors and
Legislatures, of annual elections for State officers, and
of quadrennial elections ' for national officers. In a
word, there was one thing that remained with us on

MEMORIAL DAY. 21
both sides, rode securely on the waters of that mighty
deluge, and rested safely at last on the Ararat of a re-
cemented Union, — the ark of Araerican freedom, the
ballot-box !
The Federal Union was denied and defied, but the
fundaraental verities of republican government re
mained supreme over the whole land and comraanded
the allegiance of loyalist and rebel alike. There was
the tie that bound us, and it was never broken. There
was the bow of promise that spanned the black clouds
of war even when they were raining upon us their
fiercest furies of storm and tempest. The area of the
conflict was broad and wide, but it never spread
beyond the four corners of the American Magna
Charta as drawn up by Jefferson and proraulgated by
the signers of 1776.
Gentleraen of the Grand Army and Fellow-Citizens :
It is not too much to say that by that happy circum
stance the Southern States, even as they went out, left
the gates ajar and prepared the way, even as they •
departed, for their return. Abandoning the old flag
they copied the old constitution, and, in the very act
of dissolving the Union, attempted to build another like
unto it. Denying the jurisdiction of the nation's
ballot-boxes as the court of last appeal, they neverthe
less turned, as with an inbred instinct not to be sup
pressed, to the ballot-boxes of their several States for

22 ORATION.
the sanction of their raad defiance. The ISTorth and
the South each invoked the will of the raajority. The
one appealed to the will of the majority of the nation,
the other to the will ofthe majority of the State. But
on both sides the call that summoned men to arms
bore the indorsement of the vnll of the majority,
national or local. The great, the cardinal raaxim of
freedom, that all government must rest on the consent
of the governed, was pinned to the bayonets of both
armies. The constitution which the fathers raade was
read and construed differently on either side of Mason's
and Dixon's line; but the fundamental declaration on
which- they reared it — that the people are the source of
all power, the fountain of all authority — was conceded
and upheld on both. In that fact lay the real hope of
the re-cementing of the Union through all those four
years of checkered and wavering war. That was the
sheet-anchor that held the ship of free government
fast, even when she lurched and rolled raost heavily in
the sea of secession, and creaked and groaned in every
timber with the agony of that mighty conflict.

WHY THE SOUTH FAILED.
But the raen of the South failed to see that a govern
raent which tolerated human slavery could not be suc
cessfully rested upon the ballot-box, nor safely shel-

MEMORIAL DAY. 23
tered under the aegis of representative institutions.
From the raoraent they embarked on that irapossible
enterprise they were at war, not only with us, but with
theraselves. Logic knows no middle path between
liberty and despotism. A republic, proclaiming on its
front that all raen are created free and equal, but hold
ing in chains four raiUions of bondsmen, was an anom
aly. Our brethren of the South were unable to see
it so. ^ay, they went further, and believed they could
buUd a confederation of free commonwealths, whose
basic principle could be maintained side by side with a
denial of huraan equality and the loerpetuation of chat
tel slavery. We have been in the habit of marvelling
at their fatuity. Let us rather marvel at their faith.
Was there ever blinder or raore unreasoning faith in
the strength, the adaptability, and the capacity of the
republican form of government, of deraocratic princi
ples, of representative institutions? Here were ten
millions of enlightened and chivalrous men, cherishing
as dearly as we did the memories of the American
Revolution, holding among them the sacred dust of
Washington, of Jefferson, of Madison, of Monroe, of
Patrick Henry, of Randolph, of Harry Lee, of Pinck
ney, of the Carrolls of Carrolton, of the Rutledges, of
Laurens, and the rest of that immortal band, venerating
the great principle which they labored in the field and
in the forum to raake dominant on this continent, — that

24 ORATION.
all governraent derives its just authority from the con
sent of the governed, — rising in arms to essay the vast
impossibility of a republic pledged to the protection of
the slave mart, a free governnient holding in servi
tude a nation of bondmen. Strange spectacle of in
fatuation, but, at the same time, raajestic testimony to
a deep-rooted and abiding faith in republican govern
raent! Of course they failed. We say they fought
against force of numbers and odds of resources. True;
but they fought against more than these. They
fought against the foreordained and predestined pro
cession of history. They took issue with God's hand
writing on the wall, and challenged the very destiny
of their race. Slavery "had been denounced in infini
tude " ; its hour had fully struck. At the head of the
Grand Army of the Republic raoved that pillar of cloud
by day and that column of fire by night whose presence
in all the ages has given assurance to the conscience
of raankind that the invisible host drawn up " within
the veil " encompasses those who struggle for the right
with inexhaustible battalions of reserves. Yet we may
pause and admire the splendid evidence their conduct,
fatuous and forefated as it was, affords of their un
alterable attachment to the republican forms of
governraent which they inherited, in common with us,
from the fathers; an attachment so deep and so intense
as to prompt them to attempt the impossible, — to retain

MEMORIAL DAY. 25
republican government and chattel slavery intact at
the same time; to endeavor, as it were, to square the
political circle, and demonstrate to the world that logic
has no place in the philosophy of human government.

THE BASIS OF RECONCILIATION.
European commentators upon our affairs have re
corded their amazenient that a civil strife, which
arrayed such vast armies of men against each other
for four years, numbered its combatants by the million
and its slain by myriads, which placed one section
under the heaviest debt that ever was incurred by a
government and bankrupted the other, should have been
concluded with so much magnanimity on the part of the
conquerors, and been followed within so short a space
of time by such general acquiescence on the part of
the conquered. ]^or has the wonder been confined to
foreign observers. It has been a marvel to raany of
our own leading rainds that the raeraorles of a struggle
so fierce and prolonged should, while the majority of
its participants were yet surviving, have lost their
bitterness, and have become the powerful inspirations
of a common love of country. History here again
affords us no parallel. Civil wars in other tiraes and
lands have not thus speedily lost their baleful influence.
The wars of the Roses gave rise to rancors that sur-

26 ORATION.
vived to curse the two great northern shires of Eng
land for a full century at least after the last king of
the rival houses of York and Lancaster had passed
from the throne to the tomb. The war of Roundhead
and Cavalier was a potent raemory for mischief for cer
tainly fifty years after its last battle was fought-, and
years after Monk trooped into London, with Charles II.
holding on behind, the hatreds engendered at ]f!Naseby
and Worcester were strong enough to pull Cromwell's
raouldering body out of its grave to decorate a gibbet.
James II. fled his kingdora in 1690 ; but half a century
later the embers of the civil war that drove him from
his throne blazed up again on Culloden's fatal field,
and for many years after that the spectre of " Prince
Charley frora over the water" continued to haunt the
Hanoverian dynasty. Naj, more than that, the battle
of the Boyne has been constantly resumed at intervals
in the sister island ever since, and raay be said to be
still going on. The experience of the French nation
in its civil wars is not less strongly in contrast to oui*
own. The white liHes of the Bourbons are still the
emblems of a faction that lives as the residuary legatee
of a revolution almost one hundred years old; the Or
leanist princes are still the rallying points of yet
another faction that holds the reversionary interest of
a later domestic insurrection; Avhile the Napoleonic
legend survives St. Helena, Sedan, and Zululand, to

MEMORIAL DAY. 27
distract and divide our sister republic to this day. Yet
there was not one of these civil commotions at all cora-
parable, either in magnitude, in the earnestness with
which it was waged, in duration of time, in weight
of issues at stake, in the nurabers engaged and killed,
or in the heaviness of the cost incurred and loss sus
tained on both sides, with the war which commenced at
Sumter, culminated at Gettysburg, and closed at Appo
mattox Court House.
!N^otwithstanding this disparity, from whatever side
comparison is attempted the American Civil War
is no longer a disturbing force in our national life.
It throws no shadow of unquiet memories across
our doraestic peace, nor menaces our political prog
ress with a revival of its former fires. The issues
it settled were settled forever ; the passions it
evoked are ¦ spent, never to be rekindled. The
questions it closed no man dreams of reopening;
the grand political results it secured are beyond
the reach of change. The Union as it was ; the
constitution as it is ; " an indissoluble union of inde
structible States"; one flag, one country, with equal
liberty and equal laws for all, — these are eternally
safe; they shine, steadfast and serene, fixed stars
in the heavens of American freedom ; they stand
pillars in the temple of liberty, grand and immov
able as the everlasting hills ; they will endure.

28 ORATION.

we may hope, unchanging and unchangeable " to the
last syllable of recorded time."

REUNION NATURAL AND INEVITABLE.
Why are we able thus to boast and thus to hope
to-day? How comes it that the recollections, so
far as they were malignant, of that grandly awful
struggle, have vanished, and "left not a rack be
hind"? Thankful that it is indeed so; happy in
the good fortune which devotes this day to the
awakening of sentiments common to the whole re
united country ; grateful that the graves we robe
with flowers to-day were not made in vain, but
restored to us a Union in spirit and in truth as
well as in narae, — we raay not care perhaps to
analyze too closely the philosophic reasons which
have led to this blessed consummation. I believe,
however, and the Macaulay of our Civil War yet
to come will not, I think, be slow to discover the fact,
that .the identity of institutions to which both parties
in the struggle clung, their coramon allegiance,
never shaken, to the same fundamental principles,
and their coramon preference, never changed, for
the sarae organic structure of government, to which
I have already directed attention, furnished a nat
ural bridge across the chasm raade by the war ; so

MEMORIAL DAY. 29
that the constitutional cancer of secession, once
excised by the sword, the basis of a real reconcilia
tion and a genuine reunion was provided, ready to
our feet, and a rejoining of hearts as well as hands,
of sentiraent as well as States, was not only nat
ural, but inevitable. That is why, when you gentle
men of the Grand Army of the Republic stacked
your arms and went back to the vocations of civil
hfe, you had not merely vindicated the constitution,
saved the Union, and rescued liberty ; you had es
tablished a peace, which had in it the bright promise,
so rarely vouchsafed to conquerors by arms, of
fraternal reconciliation. Revenge is the shadow of
victorious war. Retaliation, like a phantom, haunts
the battle-field, and whispers in the ear of the
conqueror the prophecy of other battle-fields where
he may not conquer. The balance of brute force
wavers, and the word "to-morrow" is ever on the
lips of vanquished men. It was the crowning mercy
of our Civil War that it left no legacy of revenge
behind. The South drearas neither of retaliation
nor reversal. Appomattos; Court House did not
register an adjournment, but a finality.
A PICTURE FROM HUGO.
The vivid imagination of the French poet-historian
says of the field of Waterloo that " at night a sort of

30 ORATION.
visionary raist rises frora it, and if any traveller walk
about it and listen and dreara, like Virgil on the
raournful plain of Philippi, the hallucination of the
catastrophe seizes upon him. The frightful June 18
lives again; the false monumental hill is levelled; the
wondrous lion is dissipated; the battle-field resumes
its reality; lines of infantry undulate on the plain;
^furious galloping crosses the horizon; the startled
dreamer sees the flash of sabres, the sparkle of
bayonets, the red light of shells, the raonstrous col
lision of thunderbolts; he hears, like a death-groan
from the tomb, the vague clamor of the phantom
battle. These shadows are grenadiers; these flashes
are cuirassiers; this skeleton is INapoleon; this skele
ton is Wellington; all this is non-existent, and yet
still combats, and the ravines are stained purple, and
the trees rustle, and there is fury even in the clouds
and in the darkness, while all the stern heights, Mont
St. Jean, Hougomont, Friescheraont, Papelotte, and
Plancenoit, seem confusedly crowned by hosts of
spectres exterminating one another."
There is more than poetry in that pictm'esque
passage from " Les Miserables " ; it is a poem and
portrait both. The battle-fields of the world have,
indeed, had their spectres; not fancied phantoms,
called up by the poet's weird iinagination, but veritable
spirits of evil, wandering over thera, and muttering

MEMORIAL DAY. 31
those dark incantations by which the wrongs and woes
of the dead past are invested with potency in the
living present, and the scales of slaughter kept forever
tipping in the endless effort to redress wrong with
wrong, and make the balance of butchery hang even.

NO HISTORIC REVENGES.
The fields of Gettysburg, of Shiloh, of the Wilder
ness, of Vicksburg, have no such spectral visitants.
The dream of an historic revenge neither disturbs the
slumbers of their dead, nor troubles the tranquillity of
the hving. The adversaries who met there in mortal
corabat finished the argument of arms and waived all ap
peal. The IN^orth and the South have long since looked
into each other's eyes and said, " We differed, we di
vided, we met face to face, we fought foot to foot, and
we ended a conflict that was irrepressible with a verdict
that was irrevocable." Here and there a wail over the
" lost cause " ; now and then a passionate outburst of
individual regret; at intervals a fitful gust of factious
recklessness, fanning into evanescent life the smoulder
ing embers of an extinct feud; but, above all this, over
all this, the steady tramp of fifty millions of reunited
freemen, cherishing no revenges, seeking no reversals,
desiring no resuscitations of closed controversies, but
marching on with fraternal fidelity to the rausic of the

32 ORATION.
Union, to fulfil the as yet unmeasured and uniraagined
destiny that awaits their coramon country — " that dear
common parent of us all." We do well, indeed, to
keep green the graves of the men who raade this pos
sible. Originating, I believe, in the South, where the
fiowers of spring blossom with an earlier profusion than
under our bleaker skies, this commemorative custom
has become universal throughout the Union, and, with
each returning year, has been marked by a broader
spirit and a more catholic significance. This day, it is
now fully recognized, belongs to the nation; the selfish
ness of faction is silent in its presence ; the genius of a
common and comprehensive patriotisra presides over its
observance, and thrills the broad continent from M-
agara to the Golden Gate with the throbbings of a
grateful and exultant nationality.

THE COMMEMORATION OF THE COMMON SOLDIER.
The praises of patriotisra have been said and sung
by the sages and the bards of every clime and time.
There is not a land where the memorial shaft of brass
or marble does not tower skyward to remind the suc
cessive generations, as they pass, of the heroes who
fought and died for their eountry in sorae foreign field.
France looks up to her column of July, surmounted
by the figure of I^apoleon; Gerraany to the colossal

MEMORIAL DAY. 33
statue of Frederick the Great; Russia to her images
of Peter; Britain to the stern face of her iron duke
and to the bronze counterfeits of ]^elson. In every
case it is a man who stands at the top of the column,
a colossus of conquest raised to the clouds from ped
estals at whose base lie myriads of common soldiers,
who fell " unwept, unhonored, and unsung." It has
been appropriately reserved for the great republic to
initiate a new order of martial coraraemoration, and
nothing in her broad domain affords a truer earnest of
the freer, juster, and more equal civilization of which
she was the cradle, and is still the chief custodian,
than the simpler monuments which dot her comraons
and public squares, surmounted with the figures of
the common soldier and sailor, and inscribed siraply,
but strongly: "In raemory of the soldiers and sailors
of this town, who fell in the war for the Union." The
Old World builds its monuments to individual great
ness ; the ISTew World holds in supremest gratitude the
common sacrifices of the " plain people." We are not
without military glory ; but it is not the glory of one
man, rising far above his fellows and towering like a
demi-god among men ; it is the glory of the masses of
mankind. When France thinks of Marengo and Aus
terlitz, it is I^apoleon, ]S'ey, and Soult whom she deifies.
When Britain boasts of Trafalgar, it is only the form
of ISTelson that she sees through the smoke of the

34 ORATION.
Victory's guns ; if she reverts to Blenheim, it is Marl
borough; or if to Waterloo, then it is Wellington.
The common soldier is forgotten; it is only the one
heroic man who is remembered. The American re
public has her individual heroes, the lustre of whose
achievements will not pale by comparison with any of
the great captains of other lands and times. She has
her Grant and her Sherman, her McClellan and her
Meade, her Thomas and her Sheridan, her Hooker
and her Hancock, her Farragut and her Winslow, and
a score of other deathless names of men whose cour
age and skill as commanders are part of her imperish
able renown. These have their fitting homage and
their just reward. But let us thank God this day
that their deeds, brave and brilliant as they were, daz
zled, but never dazed, the republican sentiment of the
people. When they came to erect statues and monuments,
and to decree a day of remerabrance for the perpetual
consecration of that great conflict, they inscribed and
devoted them all to the memories of the coramon sol
dier and sailor, — the men who went out from the farm,
the factory, the workshop, and the counter, and made
the glory of Grant and the fame of Farragut ahke pos
sible. It is the achievements of the sacrifices of the
great American commonalty, the devotion of the first
democratic nation of the earth to democratic govern-

MEMORIAL DAY. 35
ment, the fidelity unto death of the foremost repubhcan
people of modern times to republican institutions, that
we recall with thankful hearts at this hour. The
graves we have just visited were not filled by men who
raarched unthinking, or fell unjustified of their reason.
They sprang to arms, not at the summons of a ruler
whom they feared, but at the call of a country which
they loved, because itwas theirs. "Patriotism," says
Robert Hall, " is a blind and irrational impulse, unless
it is founded ou a knowledge of the blessings we are
called to secure and the privileges we propose to
defend." The men of the Grand Army of the Repub
lic had that knowledge. The Hessian, fighting for
hire, was but as an infinitesimal drop in the ocean of
valor that rolled across the Potomac, surged through
the valley of the Shenandoah, laved the banks of the
Cumberland and the James with its resistless waves,
and upbore the Union Ship upon its mighty billows.
The rank and file of the Grand Army of the Republic
fulfilled Hall's definition of patriotism, and incarnated
the epigram, "bayonets think."
"TO KEEP FAITH WITH FANEUIL HALL."
Two centuries of town meetings culrainated in
their graves. The bells of the meeting-house and
the school-house of :STew England rang the alarum

36 ~ ORATION.
that placed them in battle array. Bunker Hill echoed
the call, and Concord bridge vibrated in sympathy.
The Old South pulpit, where the thunders of Otis and
Sam Adams stiil lingered, breathed its benediction
upon them, as they filed past by day; and at night the
Old ]S"orth tower gleamed, to the spiritual eye, with
the rekindled flash of Paul Revere's lantern. They
marched to keep faith with Faneuil Hall. They died
to rescue that larger cradle of liberty where the hopes
of the whole human race are laid, — the undivided and
indivisible republic of America. They knew why they
fought; their rifles were sighted by that imperial in
telligence, whose godlike form looks down upon you
frora yonder historic canvas. Many of them had heard
him; most of them had read him; all of them under
stood the sublime logic of his plea for the constitution
and the Union. The reasoning of his reply to Cal
houn — a more superb plea for the American nation
ality, it has always seemed to rae, than his raore quoted
reply to Hayne — inspired them with the enthusiasm
of intelligence and the ardor of conviction. They
knew, we all knew, that the hour had struck which
Webster prophetically foresaw when he said: " If the
friends of nullification should be able to propagate
their opinions and give them practical effect, they
would, in my judgment, prove themselves the raost
skilful architects of ruin, the raost effectual extinguish-

MEMORIAL DAY. 37
ers of high-raised expectation, the greatest blasters
of human hopes, that any age has produced. They
would stand up to proclaim, in tones which would
pierce the ears of half the huraan race, that the last
great experiraent of representative governraent had
failed. They would send forth sounds at the hear
ing of which the doctrine of the divine right of kings
would feel, even in its grave, a returning sensation of
vitality and resuscitation. Millions of eyes of those
who now feed their inherent love of liberty on the
success of the American example would turn away
from beholding our dismemberment and find no place
on earth whereon to rest their gratified sight. Amid
the incantations and orgies of nullification, secession,
disunion, and revolution, would be celebrated the
funeral rites of constitutional and republican liberty."
Such was Webster's estimate of the ultimate conse
quences of successful secession.

THE NEW THERMOPYL^.
Between us and our posterity, between the huraan
race and that infinite catastrophe, the graves we deck
to-day interpose their vicarious sacrifice. The gulf
that Webster saw yawned at their feet, and they closed
it with their bodies. The sacrifices of Leonidas and his
three hundred Spartans in the pass of Thermopylae, in

38 ORATION.
order that the heel of the Persian might not press the
neck of their country, have been immortalized in story
and in song. But these, our precious dead, stood in the
shadow of a grander Thermoplyae, and held the pass
of a supremer occasion. Had they failed to keep that
pass, then, in the words I have just quoted, " the last
great experiraent of representative governraent had
failed." Webster's instinct of prescience had accu
rately defined the stake for which they contended, a
full quarter of a century in advance. It was not only
nor raainly slavery that was at hazard; it was not the
rights of the States ; it was neither a question of private
property nor of sectional ascendency. These things
were involved, and, incidentally, in the good providence.
of God, they were decided. The South said she fought
for local self-government and the absolute sovereignty
ofthe State; the ISTorth said, or some ofher spokesmen
said for her, that she fought for the emancipation of
the slaves and the reassertion of the federal integrity.
My friends, these definitions dwarfed the issue. More
than the integrity of a government, far raore than the
extinguishraent of slavery, was decided in the strife in
which the corarades you recall to-day met and con
quered death. Europe knew better; I^fapoleon III.
knew better; Lord John Russell and Mr. Gladstone
knew better. Verifying Webster's prophetic words,
the doctrine of the divine right of kings did feel, " even

MEMORIAL DAY. 39
in its grave, a returning sensation of vitality and resus
citation." The ghost of George HI. raarched with Lee
into Pennsylvania, and Meade was really fighting York-
town over again at Gettysburg. Monarchy looked
across the Atlantic with envious eyes. It felt, instinc
tively and exultingly, that the work of Washington
and Jefferson was in imminent peril of being undone.
The successors of Lord INorth hungered for an historic
revenge. Lee triumphant at Gettysburg would have
counterbalanced the surrender of Cornwallis. There
was one democratic statesman on that side who inter
preted the situation as Webster had foreseen it.

JOHN BRIGHT'S HOPE.
I love to read the ringing words of John Bright to
his countrymen in 1861, evidence, as they are, that the
pulse of freedom's friends beats in unison the wide
world over. "It has been said," exclaimed Bright,
"that it would be much better that the United States
should be severed, and that the great American conti
nent should be, as the continent of Europe is, in many
states, subject to all the contentions and disasters
which have accorapanied the history of the states of
Europe. I should say that, if a raan had a great heart
within hira, he would rather look forward to the day
when, frora that point of land which is habitable near-

40 ORATION.
est to the pole, to the shores of the great gulf, the
whole of that vast continent might becorae one great
confederation of states, without a great army and with
out a great navy, not mixing itself up with the entan
glement of European politics, without a custom-house
inside throughout the whole length and breadth of its
territory, with freedom everywhere, equality every
where, law everywhere, peace everywhere." " Such a
confederation," said England's later Hampden, "would
afford, at least, hope that man is not forsaken of
Heaven, and that the future of our race can be better
than the past."
THE UNION SOLDIER — HIS WORK AND HIS REWARD.
It was to place such a confederation within the
probabilities, I inight almost say within the certainties,
of the measurably near future that the flower of Ifew
England manhood went down into the valley of the
shadow of death and bequeathed these green mounds
to our loving care. They saved the past and they
secured the future. They reaffirmed the judgraent of
Yorktown, and destroyed the last hope of kings on
this continent. They redeeraed the republic, and
washed from her robe the stain of slavery. They
made the flnal award between Webster and Calhoun,
and affirmed that this is, and forever must remain, " an
indissoluble union of indestructible States."

MEMORIAL D.VY. 41
They secured this continent to Republican govern
ment, and rewrote Canning's epigram': "I called a
IS^ew World into existence to redress the balance ofthe
Old." They preserved the integrity of a nation of
thirty millions of people — already a nation of nearly
double that number pays them the annual homage of
its gratitude — and, when we have grown, as statists
tell us we shall grow, to a nation of one hundred and
fifty millions of people, their resting-places shall still be
the Meccas of patriotic pilgrims, and the pledges of our
jierpetuation under one flag and one governraent, the
dominant and dominating democracy ofthe earth. The
flowers of a hundred springs were all too few to cast
upon their graves. They died that the nation might
live, and these poor offerings which we bring, once a
year, to scatter on their dust — what are they? Mere
tokens and symbols of a boundless reverence, meagre
dividends on a debt of gratitude that may never be paid
in full. Yet 'tis all that we can give. On those clear
heights, where now their happy spirits walk, what are
the beauty and the fragrance of earth's fading flowers?
The deathless blossoras of God's eternal garden are
theirs,
" Where everlasting spring iibides
And never-withering flowers."
It is for us, not for them, that we strew the first-fruits
of our gardens above their clay. They need them not.

42 ORATION.
They have entered into their rest, and nothing we may
do or leave undone can touch thera more. But for us
there is inspiration and impulse in this day. In the
presence of their bright memories, and spurred by their
exalted examples, we may, perhaps, be lifted for one
day in the year's dull round of days on to a mount of
transfiguration, where, corarauning with their spirits,
we may discern, though but for a moment, the sublime
grandeur of the republic for which they died — the
vastness of its destinj^, the height of the hopes that
humanity centres upon its success, and the depth of the
despair that would yawn like a precipice upon its
failure. It is in this spirit, fellow-citizens, that
" I with uncovered head
Salute the sacred dead,
Who went, and who return not. — ¦ Say not so !
'Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay,
But the high faith that failed not by the way ;
Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave ;
No bar of endless night exiles the brave ;
And to the saner mind
We rather seem the dead that stayed behind.
Blow, trumpets, all your exultations blow !
For never shall their aureoled presence lack :
I see them muster in a gleaming row,
With ever-youthful brows that nobler show ;
We find in our dull road their shining track ;
In every nobler mood
We feel the orient of their spirit glow,
Part of our life's unalterable good.
Of all our saintlier aspiration ;
They come transfigured back,
Secure from change in their high-hearted ways,
Beautiful evermore, and with the rays
Of morn on their white Shields of Expectation ! "