The dead in this war--there they lie, strewing the fields and woods and
valleys and battle-fields of the south--Virginia, the Peninsula--Malvern
hill and Fair Oaks--the banks of the Chickahominy--the terraces of
Fredericksburgh--Antietam bridge--the grisly ravines of Manassas--the
bloody promenade of the Wilderness--the varieties of the _strayed_ dead,
(the estimate of the War department is 25,000 national soldiers kill'd
in battle and never buried at all, 5,000 drown'd--15,000 inhumed
by strangers, or on the march in haste, in hitherto unfound
localities--2,000 graves cover'd by sand and mud by Mississippi
freshets, 3,000 carried away by caving-in of banks, &c.,)--Gettysburgh,
the West, Southwest--Vicksburgh--Chattanooga--the trenches of
Petersburgh--the numberless battles, camps, hospitals everywhere--the
crop reap'd by the mighty reapers, typhoid, dysentery,
inflammations--and blackest and loathesomest of all, the dead and living
burial-pits, the prison-pens of Andersonville, Salisbury, Belle-Isle,
&c., (not Dante's pictured hell and all its woes, its degradations,
filthy torments, excell'd those prisons)--the dead, the dead, the
dead--_our_ dead--or South or North, ours all, (all, all, all,
finally dear to me)--or East or West--Atlantic coast or Mississippi
valley--somewhere they crawl'd to die, alone, in bushes, low gullies,
or on the sides of hills--(there, in secluded spots, their skeletons,
bleach'd bones, tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing, are
occasionally found yet)--our young men once so handsome and so joyous,
taken from us--the son from the mother, the husband from the wife,
the dear friend from the dear friend--the clusters of camp graves, in
Georgia, the Carolinas, and in Tennessee--the single graves left in
the woods or by the roadside, (hundreds, thousands, obliterated)--the
corpses floated down the rivers, and caught and lodged, (dozens, scores,
floated down the upper Potomac, after the cavalry engagements, the
pursuit of Lee, following Gettysburgh)--some lie at the bottom of the
sea--the general million, and the special cemeteries in almost all the
States--the infinite dead--(the land entire saturated, perfumed with
their impalpable ashes' exhalation in Nature's chemistry distill'd, and
shall be so forever, in every future grain of wheat and ear of corn, and
every flower that grows, and every breath we draw)--not only Northern
dead leavening Southern soil--thousands, aye tens of thousands, of
Southerners, crumble to-day in Northern earth.
And everywhere among these countless graves--everywhere in the many
soldier Cemeteries of the Nation, (there are now, I believe, over
seventy of them)--as at the time in the vast trenches, the depositories
of slain, Northern and Southern, after the great battles--not only where
the scathing trail passed those years, but radiating since in all
the peaceful quarters of the land--we see, and ages yet may see, on
monuments and gravestones, singly or in masses, to thousands or tens of
thousands, the significant word UNKNOWN.
(In some of the cemeteries nearly all the dead are unknown. At
Salisbury, N. C., for instance, the known are only 85, while the unknown
are 12,027, and 11,700 of these are buried in trenches. A national
monument has been put up here, by order of Congress, to mark the
spot--but what visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate
that spot?)