From camp near Washington to Harrisburg, there a closing of accounts
with the Government that had, with the loss of 400,000 Loyal Lives and
the crippling of 300,000 Union Soldiers, and the agonies of the sorrows
which never could be told off, been made altogether free.
* * * * *
Into the hands of each Comrade was placed a printed copy of the
following paper: "Parting as a Band of Brothers, let us cling to
the memory of those tattered banners, under which we have fought
together, and which, without dishonor, we have just now restored to the
authorities who placed them in our hands. Till we grow gray-headed and
pass away, let us sustain the reputation of this noble Regiment.
"Fortune threw together two organizations, the 84th and 57th, to make
the present command. Both Regiments have been in the service since the
beginning of the strife, and the records of both will command respect
in all coming time. Very many of those who were enrolled with us have
fallen, and their graves are scattered here and there throughout the
South. We shall not forget them, and the people of this Nation must and
will honor their memory. Comrades, Farewell."
Then with certificates of Honorable Muster-Out, all matters of detail
faithfully completed, and the 8th day of July, 1865, at hand, the "Old
Regimental Home" was gone, and forever.
* * * * *
The War is over! But not so with its splendid achievements, its grand
and far reaching results.
Never was conflict waged to a better and surer end. Never a result
attained bearing so completely upon true Governmental Economy.
To the Revolution of '75 we are indebted for the rebellion of '61.
The Revolution stands out the more grandly because of the resulting
text--the rebellion. The rejection of the latter was the upholding of
the principles of the former; posterity's emphatic endorsement of a
valued ancestry.
Victories may be great, but not always just. Conquerors have vanquished
peoples and thereby encompassed countries within their toils, and
then regretted there was not more to do on the same line. But their
doing was only the accomplishment of personal gain, the satisfaction of
selfish purpose. With them war was a thing sought after, not a calamity
to be avoided.
Justice was not their polar star, nor did they seek the moral sphere as
the place of their habitation. With them war was a vocation ordinary,
and life and morals considerations secondary. Public standing and
landed interests were made to depend upon military record. Conquered
territory was divided as would be now the spoils of the theft, among
the participators in the act and in proportion to the extent of the
service done. What a mistake, how grievous a wrong, to review on the
printed page the tenacity of an Alexander, or the vigor of a Napoleon,
for the purpose of comparing the wars of their armies with the deeds
of patriotism and of valor that moved the six fighting years of the
Revolution, or the four years of the rebellion.
No man this side the Atlantic forced the Revolution. It was the
outcome of oppression that ill fitted a people who had crossed from
the other shore, not to bear greater burden, but that they might be
full free from the crush of wrong. In its beginning not aggressive, but
defensive. A year passed by before it was determined that the yoke
should be fully thrown off and absolute independence moved for.
And so it was, when along in the after years came the overt acts of
treason that were to force States into rebellion, against the will of
their people, every effort, reasonable and unreasonable, was made to
conciliate the men whose only desire was not Union, but disintegration.
So far did some of the most prominently active, and, I may add,
patriotic men of our Country, go in their determination to avoid a
resort to arms, that the very amendment to the Constitution of these
United States that forever forbids the institution of slavery, would
have been, in number, the amendment that would have fastened slavery
upon the Country forever, had it not been that just then treason
grasped for too much and thereby lost all. Now, when all is safe, it
moves us to a condition of agony to recall that in the Winter of '60
and '61, so weighty was the power of the then South, that among the men
of our Country, those of best repute, were found so many, who, to avert
war, were ready to surrender everything, save the theory of a Central
Government for all the States, and the bare privilege to _look_ at the
Old Flag.
Our Country is great, our Government is powerful, but no thanks are
owing to compromisers for the greatness of the one or the power of the
other.
Treason's eagerness for the capture of _all_ saved one generation
from the commission of a wrong that the good deeds of all the coming
generations could not have atoned for.
_It is well to be on guard always._
And what of the present?
The once soldiers of the confederacy are entitled, as individuals, to
every manly consideration at our hands; as individuals they are as we
are, men walking the journey of life, reaching out to one common goal.
But their organized bodies have no claim upon us for recognition. The
Government should have taken the life from every "camp" at the birth,
and its strong arm should have swept from its soil the first monument
to rebellion, with the warning that the placing of the second would be
known as treason.
They have been asking that the War be forgotten, and yet they would
keep us daily reminded by the flaunting of the confederate bars.
No monument to treason should have been permitted a place on this or
other Field, and being here should be returned to the donors, not to be
erected elsewhere.
_No Government is strong enough to glorify treason against itself, nor
to encourage it anywhere._
The individual I would take most heartily by the hand, the organization
I discard.
There can be no true call for a union of the blue and the gray. Let all
don the blue. In place of waiting for the chasm to be closed, flank it
and locate upon our side. The chasm itself can do no harm. It will be a
thing well to look upon at times, and take warning from as the divider
of great depth and impassable width.
As in Heaven, so in Earth, to dwell together as brothers, all must be
of one mind, patriots upholding the one Flag, standing fast by the Red,
White and Blue.
When true history of our day comes to be written, all things will
be made plain. With the faithful historian, it is not the question
of the doing, but of the thing done. Just as when we look upon the
completed work of the sculptor, or the finished touch of the painter,
it is not of the marble, or the canvas and the material laid upon it
that we think, but of the figure before us, as we note perfection in
every line, and see life in the seeming light of the eye, and apparent
movement of muscle.
History gives little heed to men, save to designate the moral character
of the age.
And now, Comrades, for the part taken by the 84th Regiment Pennsylvania
Veteran Volunteers in the setting of the page which will commemorate
the work of our time, a grateful Commonwealth has placed upon this
spot this weight of granite.
To the living it is, and to the people yet to come it will be, the
visible proof of the deeds of heroism which located a part of the life
of the men who bore the names that make up the Roll of a Command, whose
record among the Archives of the Nation is without the semblance of a
blur or particle of a stain. Clear, positive, clean cut all the way
through. Do we advance _sentiment_ only, when we say that such a body
did not, could not have died in '65? Is there nothing of substance,
nothing real, to come out of the thought, that as our Country lives,
so we as a Regiment go on, living in the freedom of a land and the
stability of a Government, neither of which would now be, without
sentiment, the spring of human life?
The Memorial which is here placed speaks from all along the line, from
Bath to Appomattox.
For the moment it moves aside, and where it was, and within the
lengthening of its shadow, we see them all, and as we glance from right
to left, from front to rear, one is taken from here, another from
there, one by one, from the highest in rank to the lowest, from the
oldest in years to the youngest, the man and the boy; first the 230 in
the time of the War, then the many who have left us in the days that
have intervened; and then comes the Shaft into the space which was
made for it. We look upon it now, and know that it stands for _them_.
The time is coming when it will stand for _all_ whose names made up a
Regimental Roll.
_Then_, and not till then, shall we know that our work here is _fully_
done.
* * * * *
Two years ago, at the Reunion held at Huntingdon, a Committee was
appointed to secure for our Regiment the benefit of the Act of Assembly
appropriating money for the purchase of Monuments for Pennsylvania
Commands and their erection on the Field of Gettysburg. I will not
enter upon a recital of the details of that Committee's work, but
simply report that it is completed.
In so far as it may be the part of the Committee so to do, I now on
its behalf turn over to you, Captain Johnson, as the Vice-President
of the Regimental Association and its acting President, and as such
the Representative of the Survivors of the 84th, this Memorial of its
Service in the War of the Rebellion.