PREJUDICES OF THE PAST FORGOTTEN

LAWRENCE S. Ross

[From an address at Austin, Texas, in 1887, before the surviving members of Hood's Texas brigade. The Texas soldiers led by General John B. Hood were celebrated in the Confederate army for their fierce courage. The tribute to Admiral Farragut in this address is notable. It comes from a man who fought on the opposite side.]

I LOVE to believe that no heroic sacrifice is ever lost; that the characters of men are moulded and inspired by what their fathers have done; that treasured up in American souls are all the unconscious influences of the great deeds of the AngloSaxon race, from Agincourt to Bunker Hill. . .

Could these men be silent in 1861; these, whose ancestors had felt the inspiration of battle on every field where civilization had fought in the last thousand years? Read their answer in this green turf. Each for himself gathered up the cherished purposes of life-its aims and ambitions, its dearest affections and flung all, with life itself, into the scale of battle. And now consider, this silent assembly of the dead. What does it represent? Nay, rather, what does it not represent? It is an epitome of the war. Here are sheaves reaped in the harvest of death, from every battlefield of Virginia. If each grave had a voice to tell us what its silent tenant last saw and heard on earth, we might stand, with uncovered heads, and hear the whole story of the war.

We see here, to-day, a free and independent mingling of men from every section of our broad domain, all prejudices of the past forgotten; and while our State has been fortunate in acquiring thousands of those who fought against us, and who are an honor both to the States which gave them birth, and ours which they have made their home, it matters not whence they come; they can exult in the reflection that our Country is the same, and they find floating here the same banner that

waved above them there, with its broad folds unrent, and its bright stars unobscured; and in its defence, if needs be, the swords of those old Confederates, so recently sheathed, would leap forth with equal alacrity with those of the North.

No nobler emotion can fill the breast of any man than that which prompts him to utter honest praise of an adversary, whose convictions and opinions are at war with his own; and where is there a Confederate soldier.in our land who has not felt a thrill of generous admiration and applause for the pre-eminent heroism of the gallant Federal admiral,1 who lashed himself to the mainmast, while the tattered sails and frayed cordage of his vessel were being shot away by piecemeal above his head, and slowly but surely picked his way through sunken reefs of torpedoes, whose destructive powers consigned many of his luckless comrades to watery graves? The fame of such men as Farragut, Stanley, Hood, and Lee, and the hundreds of private soldiers who were the true heroes of the war, belongs to no time or section, but is the common property of mankind. They were all cast in the same grand mould of self-sacrificing patriotism, and I intend to teach my children to revere their names as long as the love of country is respected as a noble sentiment in the human breast.

It is a remarkable fact that those who bore the brunt of the battle were the first to forget old animosities and consign to oblivion obsolete issues. They saw that nothing but sorrow and shame, and the loss of the respect of the world, was to be gained by perpetuating the bitterness of past strife; and, impelled by a spirit of patriotism, they were willing, by all possible methods, to create and give utterance to a public sentiment which would best conserve our common institutions and restore that fraternal concord in which the war of the Revolution left us, and the Federal Constitution found us.

1 Farragut, at the battle of Mobile Bay, Alabama, in 1864.

WHY MEMORIAL DAY IS STILL KEPT

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.

[From an address to a post of Union veterans at Keene, New Hampshire, on Memorial Day, 1884. Justice Holmes's addresses have been collected into a volume for private circulation. He modestly calls them "chance utterances." All of the selections by him which appear in this book have been reprinted by the courtesy of the author.]

Nor long ago I heard a young man ask why people still kept up Memorial Day, and it set me to thinking of the answer. Not the answer that you and I should give to each other, but an answer which should command the assent of those who do not share our memories, and in which we of the North and our brethren of the South could join in perfect accord.

So far as this last is concerned, to be sure, there is no trouble. The soldiers who were doing their best to kill one another felt less of personal hostility, I am very certain, than some who were not imperilled by their mutual endeavors. I have heard more than one of those who had been gallant and distinguished officers on the Confederate side say that they had no such feeling. I know that I and those whom I know best had not. We believed that it was most desirable that the North should win; we believed in the principle that the Union is indissoluble; we, or many of us at least, also believed that the conflict was inevitable, and that slavery had lasted long enough. But we equally believed that those who stood against us held just as sacred convictions that were the opposite of ours, and we respected them as every man with a heart must respect those who give all for their belief. . . .

We attribute no special merit to a man for having served when all were serving. We know that, if the armies of our war did anything worth remembering, the credit belongs not mainly to the individuals who did it, but to average human nature. . .

...

But, nevertheless, the generation that carried on the war has been set apart by its experience. Through our good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire. It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing. While we are permitted to scorn nothing but indifference, and do not pretend to undervalue the worldly rewards of ambition, we have seen with our own eyes, beyond and above the gold fields, the snowy heights of honor, and it is for us to bear the report to those who come after us.

But, above all, we have learned that whether a man accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is his to command is to bring to his work a mighty heart.

Every year in the full tide of spring, at the height of the symphony of flowers and love and life there comes a pause, and through the silence we hear the lonely pipe of death. Year after year lovers wandering under the apple boughs and through the clover and deep grass are surprised with sudden tears as they see black-veiled figures stealing through the morning to a soldier's grave. Year after year the comrades of the dead follow, with public honor, procession and commemorative flags and funeral march, — honor and grief from us who stand almost alone, and have seen the best and noblest of our generation pass away.

But grief is not the end of all. I seem to hear the funeral march become a pæan. I see beyond the forest the moving banners of a hidden column. Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death, of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and glory of the spring. As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.

BENEFITS OF THE CIVIL WAR

CHARLES MANLY BUSBEE

[From an address on Memorial Day, 1883, at Raleigh, N.C.] THE war was not without its benefits to us, and even now we can discern them. It was inevitable! Sooner or later it had to come! It could no more have been avoided than you could have stayed the movements of the tides. It ought not to have been unavoidable, to be sure, just as man ought not to become diseased, but it was. So long as society remains irrational, so long as human governments are imperfect, will the sword be the final arbiter. It is a survival of the savage nature that the refining hand of time has never obliterated, a remnant of the ages of long ago.

But the war, with all its dark catalogue of horrors, brought in its train many compensatory blessings. It developed the manly virtues of our people, their inherent fortitude and selfsacrifice. It is something to have illustrated the valor of a people, to have carried a nation's flag without dishonor through a hundred battles, to have set an example to coming ages of what unselfish heroism can accomplish, to have immortalized a State, to have accepted defeat with fortitude; and this we did.

Again, the war built upon more certain and enduring foundations the government of the United States, and it stands upon a broader and stronger basis than before. Were we honest in our convictions? Yes. Were we sincere in our allegiance to the Confederate States? Yes. Does this affect our loyalty to the government of the United States? Not at all. Loyalty, free and honest loyalty to the government as it is, is not repugnant to a past loyalty to that adolescent nation whose star shone with abnormal brilliancy for a few short years, and then vanished into the blackness of eternal night. The men who followed the "Stars and Bars" from Bethel to Appomattox