[CHAPTER VIII.]
MEMORIAL DAY.
The patriotic men of the South who had so valorously insisted upon their rights throughout the deadly passage at arms, felt that now the war was over, that the country should settle down on the great common principle of the constitution—the principle that had triumphed in 1780. They had an intuitive abhorrence to confiding extravagant power in the hands of the corrupt and ignorant. They could not understand how the Union could be preserved by the annexation of eleven conquered provinces, and asked themselves the question, "Will not the light of these eleven pale stars be totally obscured by a central sun blighting and destroying every germ of constitutional liberty?" The Union, said they, was safe in the hands of President Lincoln. Rome was safe when Cincinnatus was called from the plow, but she was torn asunder by the wars of Scylla and Marius, and history is more or less a repetition of itself.
Despite the catastrophe that overlaid the South because of the unhappy issue of the war; the gravity of which enemies, both domestic and foreign, have scandalized by calling it "rebellion," despite the fact that disbanded forces were still prosecuting their conquests, not against disciplined armies in the field, but against men, women and children, in the lawful pursuit of peace and happiness, with a vengeance hourly reinforced by new resources and fresh horrors, and with a terror that mastered our fettered souls; our people felt that there was at least one refuge from the blast of the tornado—still a sheltering rock to which they could flee from the cruel cloud-burst.
In passing the eye rapidly over the outline of the circumstances in which persecution originated; in reviewing the cause that unsettled the deep foundations of social life, the southern people felt that there were hallowed spots of ground so strongly buttressed in the hearts of the people that the violence of the storm could not rustle a leaf or shake a twig; that these consecrated precincts they could lawfully appropriate, and as to this claim, the carpet-baggers with all their hosts of misrule had the honor, magnanimity and mercy to forget, forgive and forbear. Here at least there could be no intrusion, because the baser passions were fenced upon the outside; and amid this sad continuity of graves the heart would be uplifted in gratitude to God, who in his great mercy had given to the nineteenth century and to the South, such undying examples of patriotism and valor. Here lie the bones of men who dared to say, when the political system of the South was strangely inverted, that it was such a menace to southern institutions that it could not go unchallenged; a palpaple violation of the public faith. To what other convulsions and changes are we predestined? they asked. Shall we leave our character, our civilization, our very being to the unresisted assault and prepare such an epitaph for our tombs? Shall we declare ourselves outlawed from the community of nations? "Nay, war rather to the cost of the last dollar, and slaughter of the last man." Such was the sentiment of the men who sleep so peacefully in these graves. Such was the sentiment of the men, women and children, who to-day stand over these graves to honor the brave, and to reproduce a fresh page in history, and lay it reverently by in our southern Valhalla.
Col. Seymour was the orator of the day. "Stonewall Jackson," his old commander, the subject, and his friends, Judge Bonham and the ex-governor honored auditors. The old governor, whitelocked and furrowed, in introducing the orator observed with a proper decorum. "For what Stonewall Jackson and his brave men did, we have no apologies to make here or elsewhere. I had rather wear here," said he, striking his aged breast, "a scar from the victorious field of Manassas, than the jewelled star of St George, or the Victorian Cross."
I can reproduce in a fragmentary way parts of the patriotic address which I herein give to the reader, to show that there was "life in the old land yet."
"My Comrades, Ladies and Gentlemen:
"One year ago to-day, with the reverence of a pilgrim, I stood by the grave of Stonewall Jackson; and I remembered that every battle order he ever wrote, every victory he ever won, was a thank offering to the christian's God.