IV

That chance gathering of heedless persons, stirred by the bombast of

self-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display—loose mobs of

local nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by the

gallant General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp

followers—should tear their passion to tatters with the thought that

Virginia, exercising an indisputable right and violating no reasonable

sensibility, should elect to send memorials of Washington and Lee for

the Hall of Statues in the nation’s Capitol, came in the accustomed way

of bloody-shirt agitation. It merely proved how easily men are led when

taken in droves and stirred by partyism. Such men either bore no part

in the fighting when fighting was the order of the time, or else they

were too ignorant and therefore too unpatriotic to comprehend the

meaning of the intervening years and the glory these had brought with

the expanse of national progress and prowess. In spite of their lack of

representative character it was not easy to repress impatience at

ebullitions of misguided zeal so ignoble; and of course it was not

possible to dissuade or placate them.

All the while never a people more eager to get together than the people

of the United States after the War of Sections, as never a people so

averse to getting into that war. A very small group of extremists and

doctrinaires had in the beginning made a War of Sections possible.

Enough of these survived in the days of Cleveland and McKinley to keep

sectionalism alive.

It was mainly sectional clamor out for partisan advantage. But it made

the presidential campaigns lurid in certain quarters. There was no end

of objurgation, though it would seem that even the most embittered

Northerner and ultra Republican who could couple the names of Robert E.

Lee and Benedict Arnold, as was often done in campaign lingo, would not

hesitate, if his passions were roused or if he fancied he saw in it

some profit to himself or his party, to liken George Washington to

Judas Iscariot.

The placing of Lee’s statue in the Capitol at Washington made the

occasion for this.

It is true that long before Confederate officers had sat in both Houses

of Congress and in Republican and Democratic cabinets and upon the

bench of the Supreme Court, and had served as ambassadors and envoys

extraordinary in foreign lands. But McKinley’s doing was the crowning

stroke of union and peace.

There had been a weary and varied interim. Sectionalism proved a sturdy

plant. It died hard. We may waive the reconstruction period as ancient

history. There followed it intense party spirit. Yet, in spite of

extremists and malignants on both sides of the line, the South rallied

equally with the North to the nation’s drumbeat after the Maine went

down in the harbor of Havana. It fought as bravely and as loyally at

Santiago and Manila. Finally, by the vote of the North, there came into

the Chief Magistracy one who gloried in the circumstance that on the

maternal side he came of fighting Southern stock; who, amid universal

applause, declared that no Southerner could be prouder than he of

Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, apotheosizing an uncle, his

mother’s brother, who had stood at the head of the Confederate naval

establishment in Europe and had fitted out the Confederate cruisers, as

the noblest and purest man he had ever known, a composite of Colonel

Newcome and Henry Esmond.

Meanwhile the process of oblivion had gone on. The graven effigy of

Jefferson Davis at length appeared upon the silver service of an

American battleship. This told the Mississippi’s guests, wherever and

whenever they might meet round her hospitable board, of national

unification and peace, giving the lie to sectional malignancy. In the

most famous and conspicuous of the national cemeteries now stands the

monument of a Confederate general not only placed there by consent of

the Government, but dedicated with fitting ceremonies supervised by the

Department of War, which sent as its official representative the son of

Grant, himself an army officer of rank and distinction.

The world has looked on, incredulous and amazed, whilst our country has

risen to each successive act in the drama of reconciliation with

increasing enthusiasm.

I have been all my life a Constitutional Nationalist; first the nation

and then the state. The episode of the Confederacy seems already far

away. It was an interlude, even as matters stood in the Sixties and

Seventies, and now he who would thwart the unification of the country

on the lines of oblivion, of mutual and reciprocal forgiveness, throws

himself across the highway of his country’s future, and is a traitor

equally to the essential principles of free government and the spirit

of the age.

If sectionalism be not dead it should have no place in popular

consideration. The country seems happily at last one with itself. The

South, like the East and the West, has come to be the merest geographic

expression. Each of its states is in the Union, precisely like the

states of the East and the West, all in one and one in all.

Interchanges of every sort exist.

These exchanges underlie and interlace our social, domestic and

business fabric. That the arrangement and relation after half a century

of strife thus established should continue through all time is the hope

and prayer of every thoughtful, patriotic American. There is no greater

dissonance to that sentiment in the South than in the North. To what

end, therefore, except ignominious recrimination and ruinous

dissension, could a revival of old sectional and partisan passions—if

it were possible—be expected to reach?

V

Humor has played no small part in our politics. It was Col. Mulberry

Sellers, Mark Twain’s hero, who gave currency to the conceit and

enunciated the principle of “the old flag and an appropriation.” He did

not claim the formula as his own, however. He got it, he said, of

Senator Dillworthy, his patriotic file leader and ideal of Christian

statesmanship.

The original of Senator Dillworthy was recognized the country over as

Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, “Old Pom,” as he had come to be called,

whose oleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, adjusting themselves with

equal facility to the purloining of subsidies and the roasting of

rebels, to prayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the

Satirist of the Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in

Congress. He was a ruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a

bishop, and resembled Cruikshank’s pictures of Pecksniff.

There have not been many “Old Poms” in our public life; or, for that

matter Aaron Burrs either, and but one Benedict Arnold. That the chosen

people of God did not dwell amid the twilight of the ages and in

far-away Judea, but were reserved to a later time, and a region then

undiscovered of men, and that the American republic was ordained of God

to illustrate upon the theater of the New World the possibilities of

free government in contrast with the failures and tyrannies and

corruptions of the Old, I do truly believe. That is the first article

in my confession of faith. And the second is like unto it, that

Washington was raised up by God to create it, and that Lincoln was

raised up by God to save it; else why the militia colonel of Virginia

and the rail splitter of Illinois, for no reason that was obvious at

the time, before all other men? God moves in a mysterious way his

wonders to perform. The star of the sublime destiny that hung over the

manager of our blessed Savior hung over the cradle of our blessed

Union.

Thus far it has weathered each historic danger which has gone before to

mark the decline and fall of nations; the struggle for existence; the

foreign invasion; the internecine strife; the disputed succession;

religious bigotry and racial conflict. One other peril confronts it—the

demoralization of wealth and luxury; too great prosperity; the

concentration and the abuse of power. Shall we survive the lures with

which the spirit of evil, playing upon our self-love, seeks to trip our

wayward footsteps, purse-pride and party spirit, mistaken zeal and

perverted religion, fanaticism seeking to abridge liberty and liberty

running to license, greed masquerading as a patriot and ambition making

a commodity of glory—or under the process of a divine evolution shall

we be able to mount and ride the waves which swallowed the tribes of

Israel, which engulfed the phalanxes of Greece and the legions of Rome,

and which still beat the sides and sweep the decks of Europe?

The one-party power we have escaped; the one-man power we have escaped.

The stars in their courses fight for us; the virtue and intelligence of

the people are still watchful and alert. Truth is mightier than ever,

and justice, mounting guard even in the Hall of Statues, walks

everywhere the battlements of freedom!