Between the mourners at his head and feet,
Say, scurril jester, is there room for you?
“Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
To lame my pencil and confute my pen;
To make me own this hind of princes peer,
This rail-splitter, a true-born king of men.”
In 1879, at an unveiling in Boston of Freedman’s Memorial Statue, a duplicate of the original in Lincoln Square, Washington, a poem was read from Whittier, of which the last three stanzas are the most significant in their characterization. It beautifully expresses the faith that in righteousness is personal power, even as it also “exalteth a nation.”
“We rest in peace where these sad eyes
Saw peril, strife and pain;
His was the nation’s sacrifice,