FELLOW CITIZENS: The day is in Concord doubly our calendar day, as being
the anniversary of the invasion of the town by the British troops in
1775, and of the departure of the company of volunteers for Washington,
in 1861. We are all pretty well aware that the facts which make to us the
interest of this day are in a great degree personal and local here; that
every other town and city has its own heroes and memorial days, and that
we can hardly expect a wide sympathy for the names and anecdotes which
we delight to record. We are glad and proud that we have no monopoly of
merit. We are thankful that other towns and cities are as rich; that the
heroes of old and of recent date, who made and kept America free and
united, were not rare or solitary growths, but sporadic over vast tracts
of the Republic. Yet, as it is a piece of nature and the common sense
that the throbbing chord that holds us to our kindred, our friends and
our town, is not to be denied or resisted,—no matter how frivolous or
unphilosophical its pulses,—we shall cling affectionately to our houses,
our river and pastures, and believe that our visitors will pardon us if
we take the privilege of talking freely about our nearest neighbors as
in a family party;—well assured, meantime, that the virtues we are met
to honor were directed on aims which command the sympathy of every loyal
American citizen, were exerted for the protection of our common country,
and aided its triumph.
The town has thought fit to signify its honor for a few of its sons by
raising an obelisk in the square. It is a simple pile enough,—a few slabs
of granite, dug just below the surface of the soil, and laid upon the
top of it; but as we have learned that the upheaved mountain, from which
these discs or flakes were broken, was once a glowing mass at white heat,
slowly crystallized, then uplifted by the central fires of the globe:
so the roots of the events it appropriately marks are in the heart of
the universe. I shall say of this obelisk, planted here in our quiet
plains, what Richter says of the volcano in the fair landscape of Naples:
“Vesuvius stands in this poem of Nature, and exalts everything, as war
does the age.”
The art of the architect and the sense of the town have made these dumb
stones speak; have, if I may borrow the old language of the church,
converted these elements from a secular to a sacred and spiritual use;
have made them look to the past and the future; have given them a meaning
for the imagination and the heart. The sense of the town, the eloquent
inscriptions the shaft now bears, the memories of these martyrs, the
noble names which yet have gathered only their first fame, whatever good
grows to the country out of the war, the largest results, the future
power and genius of the land, will go on clothing this shaft with daily
beauty and spiritual life. ’Tis certain that a plain stone like this,
standing on such memories, having no reference to utilities, but only to
the grand instincts of the civil and moral man, mixes with surrounding
nature,—by day with the changing seasons, by night the stars roll over
it gladly,—becomes a sentiment, a poet, a prophet, an orator, to every
townsman and passenger, an altar where the noble youth shall in all time
come to make his secret vows.[181]
The old Monument, a short half-mile from this house, stands to signalize
the first Revolution, where the people resisted offensive usurpations,
offensive taxes of the British Parliament, claiming that there should
be no tax without representation. Instructed by events, after the
quarrel began, the Americans took higher ground, and stood for political
independence. But in the necessities of the hour, they overlooked the
moral law, and winked at a practical exception to the Bill of Rights they
had drawn up. They winked at the exception, believing it insignificant.
But the moral law, the nature of things, did not wink at it, but kept
its eye wide open. It turned out that this one violation was a subtle
poison, which in eighty years corrupted the whole overgrown body politic,
and brought the alternative of extirpation of the poison or ruin to the
Republic.[182]
This new Monument is built to mark the arrival of the nation at the new
principle,—say, rather, at its new acknowledgment, for the principle is
as old as Heaven,—that only that state can live, in which injury to the
least member is recognized as damage to the whole.
Reform must begin at home. The aim of the hour was to reconstruct the
South; but first the North had to be reconstructed. Its own theory and
practice of liberty had got sadly out of gear, and must be corrected. It
was done on the instant. A thunderstorm at sea sometimes reverses the
magnets in the ship, and south is north. The storm of war works the like
miracle on men. Every Democrat who went South came back a Republican,
like the governors who, in Buchanan’s time, went to Kansas, and instantly
took the free-state colors. War, says the poet, is
“the arduous strife,
To which the triumph of all good is given.”[183]
Every principle is a war-note. When the rights of man are recited
under any old government, every one of them is a declaration of war.
War civilizes, rearranges the population, distributing by ideas,—the
innovators on one side, the antiquaries on the other. It opens the eyes
wider. Once we were patriots up to the town-bounds, or the state-line.
But when you replace the love of family or clan by a principle, as
freedom, instantly that fire runs over the state-line into New Hampshire,
Vermont, New York and Ohio, into the prairie and beyond, leaps the
mountains, bridges river and lake, burns as hotly in Kansas and
California as in Boston, and no chemist can discriminate between one
soil and the other. It lifts every population to an equal power and merit.
As long as we debate in council, both sides may form their private guess
what the event may be, or which is the strongest. But the moment you cry
“Every man to his tent, O Israel!” the delusions of hope and fear are at
an end;—the strength is now to be tested by the eternal facts. There will
be no doubt more. The world is equal to itself. The secret architecture
of things begins to disclose itself; the fact that all things were made
on a basis of right; that justice is really desired by all intelligent
beings; that opposition to it is against the nature of things; and that,
whatever may happen in this hour or that, the years and the centuries are
always pulling down the wrong and building up the right.
The war made the Divine Providence credible to many who did not
believe the good Heaven quite honest. Every man was an abolitionist by
conviction, but did not believe that his neighbor was. The opinions of
masses of men, which the tactics of primary caucuses and the proverbial
timidity of trade had concealed, the war discovered; and it was
found, contrary to all popular belief, that the country was at heart
abolitionist, and for the Union was ready to die.
As cities of men are the first effects of civilization, and also
instantly causes of more civilization, so armies, which are only
wandering cities, generate a vast heat, and lift the spirit of the
soldiers who compose them to the boiling point. The armies mustered in
the North were as much missionaries to the mind of the country as they
were carriers of material force, and had the vast advantage of carrying
whither they marched a higher civilization. Of course, there are noble
men everywhere, and there are such in the South; and the noble know the
noble, wherever they meet; and we have all heard passages of generous
and exceptional behavior exhibited by individuals there to our officers
and men, during the war. But the common people, rich or poor, were the
narrowest and most conceited of mankind, as arrogant as the negroes
on the Gambia River; and, by the way, it looks as if the editors of
the Southern press were in all times selected from this class. The
invasion of Northern farmers, mechanics, engineers, tradesmen, lawyers
and students did more than forty years of peace had done to educate the
South.[184] “This will be a slow business,” writes our Concord captain
home, “for we have to stop and civilize the people as we go along.”
It is an interesting part of the history, the manner in which this
incongruous militia were made soldiers. That was done again on the Kansas
plan. Our farmers went to Kansas as peaceable, God-fearing men as the
members of our school committee here. But when the Border raids were let
loose on their villages, these people, who turned pale at home if called
to dress a cut finger, on witnessing the butchery done by the Missouri
riders on women and babes, were so beside themselves with rage, that
they became on the instant the bravest soldiers and the most determined
avengers.[185] And the first events of the war of the Rebellion gave the
like training to the new recruits.
All sorts of men went to the war,—the roughs, men who liked harsh play
and violence, men for whom pleasure was not strong enough, but who
wanted pain, and found sphere at last for their superabundant energy;
then the adventurous type of New Englander, with his appetite for
novelty and travel; the village politician, who could now verify his
newspaper knowledge, see the South, and amass what a stock of adventures
to retail hereafter at the fireside, or to the well-known companions
on the Mill-dam; young men, also, of excellent education and polished
manners, delicately brought up; manly farmers, skilful mechanics, young
tradesmen, men hitherto of narrow opportunities of knowing the world, but
well taught in the grammar-schools. But perhaps in every one of these
classes were idealists, men who went from a religious duty. I have a
note of a conversation that occurred in our first company, the morning
before the battle of Bull Run. At a halt in the march, a few of our boys
were sitting on a rail fence talking together whether it was right to
sacrifice themselves. One of them said, ‘he had been thinking a good deal
about it, last night, and he thought one was never too young to die for
a principle.’ One of our later volunteers, on the day when he left home,
in reply to my question, How can you be spared from your farm, now that
your father is so ill? said: “I go because I shall always be sorry if I
did not go when the country called me. I can go as well as another.” One
wrote to his father these words: “You may think it strange that I, who
have always naturally rather shrunk from danger, should wish to enter
the army; but there is a higher Power that tunes the hearts of men,
and enables them to see their duty, and gives them courage to face the
dangers with which those duties are attended.” And the captain writes
home of another of his men, “B⸺ comes from a sense of duty and love of
country, and these are the soldiers you can depend upon.”[186]
None of us can have forgotten how sharp a test to try our peaceful people
with, was the first call for troops. I doubt not many of our soldiers
could repeat the confession of a youth whom I knew in the beginning of
the war, who enlisted in New York, went to the field, and died early.
Before his departure he confided to his sister that he was naturally a
coward, but was determined that no one should ever find it out; that he
had long trained himself by forcing himself, on the suspicion of any near
danger, to go directly up to it, cost him what struggles it might. Yet
it is from this temperament of sensibility that great heroes have been
formed.
Our first company was led by an officer who had grown up in this village
from a boy.[187] The older among us can well remember him at school,
at play and at work, all the way up, the most amiable, sensible,
unpretending of men; fair, blond, the rose lived long in his cheek;
grave, but social, and one of the last men in this town you would have
picked out for the rough dealing of war,—not a trace of fierceness, much
less of recklessness, or of the devouring thirst for excitement; tender
as a woman in his care for a cough or a chilblain in his men; had troches
and arnica in his pocket for them. The army officers were welcome to
their jest on him as too kind for a captain, and, later, as the colonel
who got off his horse when he saw one of his men limp on the march, and
told him to ride. But _he_ knew that his men had found out, first that
he was captain, then that he was colonel, and neither dared nor wished
to disobey him. He was a man without conceit, who never fancied himself
a philosopher or a saint; the most modest and amiable of men, engaged in
common duties, but equal always to the occasion; and the war showed him
still equal, however stern and terrible the occasion grew,—disclosed in
him a strong good sense, great fertility of resource, the helping hand,
and then the moral qualities of a commander,—a patience not to be tired
out, a serious devotion to the cause of the country that never swerved,
a hope that never failed. He was a Puritan in the army, with traits that
remind one of John Brown,—an integrity incorruptible, and an ability
that always rose to the need.
You will remember that these colonels, captains and lieutenants, and the
privates too, are domestic men, just wrenched away from their families
and their business by this rally of all the manhood in the land. They
have notes to pay at home; have farms, shops, factories, affairs of
every kind to think of and write home about. Consider what sacrifice and
havoc in business arrangements this war-blast made. They have to think
carefully of every last resource at home on which their wives or mothers
may fall back; upon the little account in the savings bank, the grass
that can be sold, the old cow, or the heifer. These necessities make the
topics of the ten thousand letters with which the mail-bags came loaded
day by day. These letters play a great part in the war. The writing of
letters made the Sunday in every camp:—meantime they are without the
means of writing. After the first marches there is no letter-paper, there
are no envelopes, no postage-stamps for these were wetted into a solid
mass in the rains and mud. Some of these letters are written on the back
of old bills, some on brown paper, or strips of newspaper; written by
fire-light, making the short night shorter; written on the knee, in the
mud, with pencil, six words at a time; or in the saddle, and have to
stop because the horse will not stand still. But the words are proud and
tender,—“Tell mother I will not disgrace her;” “tell her not to worry
about me, for I know she would not have had me stay at home if she could
as well as not.” The letters of the captain are the dearest treasures
of this town. Always devoted, sometimes anxious, sometimes full of joy
at the deportment of his comrades, they contain the sincere praise of
men whom I now see in this assembly. If Marshal Montluc’s[188] Memoirs
are the Bible of soldiers, as Henry IV. of France said, Colonel Prescott
might furnish the Book of Epistles.
He writes, “You don’t know how one gets attached to a company by living
with them and sleeping with them all the time. I know every man by heart.
I know every man’s weak spot,—who is shaky, and who is true blue.” He
never remits his care of the men, aiming to hold them to their good
habits and to keep them cheerful. For the first point, he keeps up a
constant acquaintance with them; urges their correspondence with their
friends; writes news of them home, urging his own correspondent to
visit their families and keep them informed about the men; encourages
a temperance society which is formed in the camp. “I have not had a
man drunk, or affected by liquor, since we came here.” At one time he
finds his company unfortunate in having fallen between two companies of
quite another class,—“’tis profanity all the time; yet instead of a bad
influence on our men, I think it works the other way,—it disgusts them.”
One day he writes, “I expect to have a time, this forenoon, with the
officer from West Point who drills us. He is very profane, and I will
not stand it. If he does not stop it, I shall march my men right away
when he is drilling them. There is a fine for officers swearing in the
army, and I have too many young men that are not used to such talk. I
told the colonel this morning I should do it, and shall,—don’t care what
the consequence is. This lieutenant seems to think that these men, who
never saw a gun, can drill as well as he, who has been at West Point four
years.” At night he adds: “I told that officer from West Point, this
morning, that he could not swear at my company as he did yesterday; told
him I would not stand it anyway. I told him I had a good many young men
in my company whose mothers asked me to look after them, and I should do
so, and not allow them to hear such language, especially from an officer,
whose duty it was to set them a better example. Told him I did not swear
myself and would not allow him to. He looked at me as much as to say, _Do
you know whom you are talking to?_ and I looked at him as much as to say,
_Yes, I do._ He looked rather ashamed, but went through the drill without
an oath.” So much for the care of their morals. His next point is to keep
them cheerful. ’Tis better than medicine. He has games of baseball, and
pitching quoits, and euchre, whilst part of the military discipline is
sham fights.
The best men heartily second him, and invent excellent means of their
own. When, afterwards, five of these men were prisoners in the Parish
Prison in New Orleans, they set themselves to use the time to the wisest
advantage,—formed a debating-club, wrote a daily or weekly newspaper,
called it “Stars and Stripes.” It advertises, “prayer-meeting at 7
o’clock, in cell No. 8, second floor,” and their own printed record is a
proud and affecting narrative.
Whilst the regiment was encamped at Camp Andrew, near Alexandria, in
June, 1861, marching orders came. Colonel Lawrence sent for eight wagons,
but only three came. On these they loaded all the canvas of the tents,
but took no tent-poles.
“It looked very much like a severe thunderstorm,” writes the captain,
“and I knew the men would all have to sleep out of doors, unless we
carried them. So I took six poles, and went to the colonel, and told him
I had got the poles for two tents, which would cover twenty-four men, and
unless he ordered me not to carry them, I should do so. He said he had no
objection, only thought they would be too much for me. We only had about
twelve men [the rest of the company being, perhaps, on picket or other
duty], and some of them have their heavy knapsacks and guns to carry,
so could not carry any poles. We started and marched two miles without
stopping to rest, not having had anything to eat, and being very hot and
dry.” At this time Captain Prescott was daily threatened with sickness,
and suffered the more from this heat. “I told Lieutenant Bowers, this
morning, that I could afford to be sick from bringing the tent-poles,
for it saved the whole regiment from sleeping outdoors; for they would
not have thought of it, if I had not taken mine. The major had tried to
discourage me;—said, ‘perhaps, if I carried them over, some other company
would get them;’—I told him, perhaps he did not think I was smart.” He
had the satisfaction to see the whole regiment enjoying the protection of
these tents.[189]
In the disastrous battle of Bull Run this company behaved well, and the
regimental officers believed, what is now the general conviction of the
country, that the misfortunes of the day were not so much owing to the
fault of the troops as to the insufficiency of the combinations by the
general officers. It happened, also, that the Fifth Massachusetts was
almost unofficered. The colonel was, early in the day, disabled by a
casualty; the lieutenant-colonel, the major and the adjutant were already
transferred to new regiments, and their places were not yet filled. The
three months of the enlistment expired a few days after the battle.
In the fall of 1861, the old artillery company of this town was
reorganized, and Captain Richard Barrett received a commission in March,
1862, from the state, as its commander. This company, chiefly recruited
here, was later embodied in the Forty-seventh Regiment, Massachusetts
Volunteers, enlisted as nine months’ men, and sent to New Orleans, where
they were employed in guard duty during their term of service. Captain
Humphrey H. Buttrick, lieutenant in this regiment, as he had been already
lieutenant in Captain Prescott’s company in 1861, went out again in
August, 1864, a captain in the Fifty-ninth Massachusetts, and saw hard
service in the Ninth Corps, under General Burnside. The regiment being
formed of veterans, and in fields requiring great activity and exposure,
suffered extraordinary losses; Captain Buttrick and one other officer
being the only officers in it who were neither killed, wounded nor
captured.[190] In August, 1862, on the new requisition for troops, when
it was becoming difficult to meet the draft,—mainly through the personal
example and influence of Mr. Sylvester Lovejoy, twelve men, including
himself, were enlisted for three years, and, being soon after enrolled in
the Fortieth Massachusetts, went to the war; and a very good account has
been heard, not only of the regiment, but of the talents and virtues of
these men.
After the return of the three months’ company to Concord, in 1861,
Captain Prescott raised a new company of volunteers, and Captain Bowers
another. Each of these companies included recruits from this town,
and they formed part of the Thirty-second Regiment of Massachusetts
Volunteers. Enlisting for three years, and remaining to the end of
the war, these troops saw every variety of hard service which the war
offered, and, though suffering at first some disadvantage from change of
commanders, and from severe losses, they grew at last, under the command
of Colonel Prescott, to an excellent reputation, attested by the names of
the thirty battles they were authorized to inscribe on their flag, and by
the important position usually assigned them in the field.
I have found many notes of their rough experience in the march and in
the field. In McClellan’s retreat in the Peninsula, in July, 1862, “it
is all our men can do to draw their feet out of the mud. We marched one
mile through mud, without exaggeration, one foot deep,—a good deal of
the way over my boots, and with short rations; on one day nothing but
liver, blackberries, and pennyroyal tea.”—“At Fredericksburg we lay
eleven hours in one spot without moving, except to rise and fire.” The
next note is, “cracker for a day and a half,—but all right.” Another
day, “had not left the ranks for thirty hours, and the nights were broken
by frequent alarms. How would Concord people,” he asks, “like to pass
the night on the battle-field, and hear the dying cry for help, and not
be able to go to them?” But the regiment did good service at Harrison’s
Landing, and at Antietam, under Colonel Parker; and at Fredericksburg, in
December, Lieutenant-Colonel Prescott loudly expressed his satisfaction
at his comrades, now and then particularizing names: “Bowers, Shepard and
Lauriat are as brave as lions.”[191]
At the battle of Gettysburg, in July, 1863, the brigade of which the
Thirty-second Regiment formed a part, was in line of battle seventy-two
hours, and suffered severely. Colonel Prescott’s regiment went in with
two hundred and ten men, nineteen officers. On the second of July they
had to cross the famous wheat-field, under fire from the rebels in
front and on both flanks. Seventy men were killed or wounded out of
seven companies. Here Francis Buttrick, whose manly beauty all of us
remember,[192] and Sergeant Appleton, an excellent soldier, were fatally
wounded. The Colonel was hit by three bullets. “I feel,” he writes,
“I have much to be thankful for that my life is spared, although I
would willingly die to have the regiment do as well as they have done.
Our colors had several holes made, and were badly torn. One bullet hit
the staff which the bearer had in his hand. The color-bearer is brave
as a lion; he will go anywhere you say, and no questions asked; his
name is Marshall Davis.” The Colonel took evident pleasure in the fact
that he could account for all his men. There were so many killed, so
many wounded,—but no missing. For that word “missing” was apt to mean
skulking. Another incident: “A friend of Lieutenant Barrow complains
that we did not treat his body with respect, inasmuch as we did not send
it home. I think we were very fortunate to save it at all, for in ten
minutes after he was killed the rebels occupied the ground, and we had
to carry him and all our wounded nearly two miles in blankets. There was
no place nearer than Baltimore where we could have got a coffin, and I
suppose it was eighty miles there. We laid him in two double blankets,
and then sent off a long distance and got boards off a barn to make the
best coffin we could, and gave him burial.”
After Gettysburg, Colonel Prescott remarks that our regiment is
highly complimented. When Colonel Gurney, of the Ninth, came to him
the next day to tell him that “folks are just beginning to appreciate
the Thirty-second Regiment: it always was a good regiment, and people
are just beginning to find it out;” Colonel Prescott notes in his
journal,—“Pity they have not found it out before it was all gone. We have
a hundred and seventy-seven guns this morning.”
Let me add an extract from the official report of the brigade commander:
“Word was sent by General Barnes, that, when we retired, we should fall
back under cover of the woods. This order was communicated to Colonel
Prescott, whose regiment was then under the hottest fire. Understanding
it to be a peremptory order to retire then, he replied, ‘I don’t want to
retire; I am not ready to retire; I can hold this place;’ and he made
good his assertion. Being informed that he misunderstood the order,
which was only to inform him how to retire when it became necessary,
he was satisfied, and he and his command held their ground manfully.”
It was said that Colonel Prescott’s reply, when reported, pleased the
Acting-Brigadier-General Sweitzer mightily.
After Gettysburg, the Thirty-second Regiment saw hard service at
Rappahannock Station; and at Baltimore, in Virginia, where they were
drawn up in battle order for ten days successively: crossing the Rapidan,
and suffering from such extreme cold, a few days later, at Mine Run,
that the men were compelled to break rank and run in circles to keep
themselves from being frozen. On the third of December, they went into
winter quarters.
I must not follow the multiplied details that make the hard work of the
next year. But the campaign in the Wilderness surpassed all their worst
experience hitherto of the soldier’s life. On the third of May, they
crossed the Rapidan for the fifth time. On the twelfth, at Laurel Hill,
the regiment had twenty-one killed and seventy-five wounded, including
five officers. “The regiment has been in the front and centre since the
battle begun, eight and a half days ago, and is now building breastworks
on the Fredericksburg road. This has been the hardest fight the world
ever knew. I think the loss of our army will be forty thousand. Every
day, for the last eight days, there has been a terrible battle the whole
length of the line. One day they drove us; but it has been regular
bull-dog fighting.” On the twenty-first, they had been, for seventeen
days and nights, under arms without rest. On the twenty-third, they
crossed the North Anna, and achieved a great success. On the thirtieth,
we learn, “Our regiment has never been in the second line since we
crossed the Rapidan, on the third.” On the night of the thirtieth,—“The
hardest day we ever had. We have been in the first line twenty-six days,
and fighting every day but two; whilst your newspapers talk of the
inactivity of the Army of the Potomac. If those writers could be here
and fight all day, and sleep in the trenches, and be called up several
times in the night by picket-firing, they would not call it inactive.”
June fourth is marked in the diary as “An awful day;—two hundred men lost
to the command;” and not until the fifth of June comes at last a respite
for a short space, during which the men drew shoes and socks, and the
officers were able to send to the wagons and procure a change of clothes,
for the first time in five weeks.
But from these incessant labors there was now to be rest for one
head,—the honored and beloved commander of the regiment. On the sixteenth
of June, they crossed the James River, and marched to within three miles
of Petersburg. Early in the morning of the eighteenth they went to the
front, formed line of battle, and were ordered to take the Norfolk and
Petersburg Railroad from the rebels. In this charge, Colonel George
L. Prescott was mortally wounded. After driving the enemy from the
railroad, crossing it, and climbing the farther bank to continue the
charge, he was struck, in front of his command, by a musket-ball which
entered his breast near the heart. He was carried off the field to the
division hospital, and died on the following morning. On his death-bed,
he received the needless assurances of his general that “he had done more
than all his duty,”—needless to a conscience so faithful and unspotted.
One of his townsmen and comrades, a sergeant in his regiment, writing to
his own family, uses these words: “He was one of the few men who fight
for principle. He did not fight for glory, honor, nor money, but because
he thought it his duty. These are not my feelings only, but of the whole
regiment.”
On the first of January, 1865, the Thirty-second Regiment made itself
comfortable in log huts, a mile south of our rear line of works before
Petersburg. On the fourth of February, sudden orders came to move next
morning at daylight. At Dabney’s Mills, in a sharp fight, they lost
seventy-four in killed, wounded and missing. Here Major Shepard was taken
prisoner. The lines were held until the tenth, with more than usual
suffering from snow and hail and intense cold, added to the annoyance
of the artillery fire. On the first of April, the regiment connected
with Sheridan’s cavalry, near the Five Forks, and took an important part
in that battle which opened Petersburg and Richmond, and forced the
surrender of Lee. On the ninth, they marched in support of the cavalry,
and were advancing in a grand charge, when the white flag of General Lee
appeared. The brigade of which the Thirty-second Regiment formed part was
detailed to receive the formal surrender of the rebel arms. The homeward
march began on the thirteenth, and the regiment was mustered out in the
field, at Washington, on the twenty-eighth of June, and arrived in Boston
on the first of July.
Fellow citizens: The obelisk records only the names of the dead. There is
something partial in this distribution of honor. Those who went through
those dreadful fields and returned not deserve much more than all the
honor we can pay. But those also who went through the same fields, and
returned alive, put just as much at hazard as those who died, and, in
other countries, would wear distinctive badges of honor as long as they
lived. I hope the disuse of such medals or badges in this country only
signifies that everybody knows these men, and carries their deeds in such
lively remembrance that they require no badge or reminder. I am sure I
need not bespeak your gratitude to these fellow citizens and neighbors of
ours. I hope they will be content with the laurels of one war.
But let me, in behalf of this assembly, speak directly to you, our
defenders, and say, that it is easy to see that if danger should ever
threaten the homes which you guard, the knowledge of your presence will
be a wall of fire for their protection. Brave men! you will hardly be
called to see again fields as terrible as those you have already trampled
with your victories.
There are people who can hardly read the names on yonder bronze tablet,
the mist so gathers in their eyes. Three of the names are of sons of
one family.[193] A gloom gathers on this assembly, composed as it is of
kindred men and women, for, in many houses, the dearest and noblest is
gone from their hearth-stone. Yet it is tinged with light from heaven.
A duty so severe has been discharged, and with such immense results of
good, lifting private sacrifice to the sublime, that, though the cannon
volleys have a sound of funeral echoes, they can yet hear through them
the benedictions of their country and mankind.