Col. Taylor:—When two years ago you honored the ladies of Canandaigua in accepting for the Thirty-third Regiment this Banner, the work of their hands and the gift of their affection, the Regiment, through you, pledged themselves with their lives, to protect it from dishonor and cherish it as the emblem of Love and Loyalty. The Recording Angel registered that vow in figures of Life, and nobly has the pledge been redeemed in the blood of Malvern Hill, Fair Oaks, Williamsburg, Lee’s Mills, Antietam and Fredericksburg.
This bullet-riven, blood-stained Banner is dearer to us, now that we know it has inspired acts of courage and patriotic ardor, and that it has been as the presence of mother, sister, wife, home, to the dying soldier, than it was when we parted with it in its freshness and new life, impatient for the pomp and circumstance of war.
We were proud of it as a beautiful offering. We receive it now with its honorable scars—as a weary soldier seeking rest and shelter. We will guard it carefully and protect it tenderly.
Many a home in our midst is desolate—many waiting, watching hearts are bereaved; but every true woman will thank God it was not made so by the death of a coward or renegade, and that her dead are “Freedom’s now, and Fame’s.”
Soldiers! on the field of battle you proved yourselves all that was noble, brave and manly—worthy sons of old Ontario.
The women of Ontario will expect you to do battle in their service, by respecting as citizens those laws and domestic institutions for which you have perilled your lives; and to your latest posterity your children and your children’s children can have no prouder heritage—can make no prouder boast, than that you were members of the gallant Thirty-third.
The choir now sang the “Star Spangled Banner,” after which Chaplain Lung delivered the following parting address to the Regiment:
Gentlemen and Fellow Soldiers:—You have reached the evening of a two year’s military life. The cause in which you have been engaged is one in which you may well be proud. It gives me pleasure to know that the military glory which surrounds you this hour, is a thing that you have nobly earned. The honors which you now enjoy have been bought by your toil, and sweat and blood. They have been purchased by long and weary marches, by drill and duty in camp, and by your unflinching bravery amid the thunder and peril of battle.
My fellow soldiers, you are standing here to-day, with the pleasing consideration that you have done your duty, and can receive an honorable discharge. Sooner than have been ingloriously dismissed; sooner than to have been branded with the name of deserter—a stain never to be washed out, a stigma to mark your remembrance and disgrace your children after you are dead—sooner than this should have ever overtaken you, you have showed by your gallant conduct that you would have preferred to have been riddled by the enemy’s bullets and died on the field. There were those in our own ranks who have thus died. As a flower when bruised, mangled and crushed, will give forth all the richness of its odor, so these bruised ones who have gone down in the shock of battle, will leave the sweet recollections of a patriotic spirit; and honor from a nation, and love from mothers and sisters, sweeter than the odor of flowers, will cluster around those names, to be handed down to unborn millions.
It is a pleasing consideration, that you are now about to return to the embrace of friends and loved ones. You are to exchange the noise of the camp for the quietude of home; the rude tent for the neat cottage; the hard blanket for the soft bed; and the blast of the bugle for the prattling of children. As you go, I would bind sacred admonition around your hearts, and pray God’s blessing to go with you. If while you have been absent from the holy influences of home, there have been some evil and wicked habits fastened on you, let this hour shake them off; this hour break the fetters that bind them, and return, leaving forever every bad habit which may have come nigh the camp.