on the 12th of April, 1861, at the city of Charleston, South Carolina, and heard him give the order to "fire" on the flag at Fort Sumter.
Slavery and "State Rights" threw down the gauntlet to Freedom and "National Rights!" A million of men were destroyed in the great American Rebellion, and after four years of the bloodiest civil war in history, the Stars and Stripes arose in all its glory at Appomattox, and fluttered again over the fort in Charleston Harbor, so nobly defended by the illustrious Major Anderson.
Alternate success and defeat came to the Union army and the Confederate forces. Bull Run, Donelson, Shiloh, Antietam, Stone River, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Spottsylvania, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, and Gettysburg, are battle milestones of the Republic that shall never be forgotten so long as valor and manhood find a lodgment in the human heart.
Gettysburg is the mausoleum of the American Marathon and the Thermopylæ of Liberty. The grandest heroes of the world died here.
"They fell, devoted, but undying;
The very gales their names seem sighing;
The waters murmur of their name;
The woods are peopled with their fame;
The silent pillars, lone and gray,
Claim kindred with their silent clay;
Their spirits wrap the dusky mountain,
Their memory sparkles o'er the fountain;
The meanest rill, the mightiest river
Rolls mingling with their fame forever!"
What soldier at Gettysburg will ever forget the terrible battles of the 1st, 2d and 3d of July, 1863, when
GENERAL MEAD AND GENERAL LEE,
with two hundred thousand Americans met in deadly conflict for the salvation or destruction of the Great Republic?
The vales and rills and rocks and hills for twenty miles around trembled with the onslaught of the contending hosts, and from Culp's Hill to Cemetery Heights and Round Top the smoke and blaze of the rifle and the cannon lit up the bloody scene with the concussion of an earthquake and volcano, and the climax charge of Pickett's Division punctured the bravest and most unavailing assault ever made by heroic soldiers; and although these warriors in "gray" were doomed to defeat by the defenders of the Union, they deserve a crown of unfading glory for imperishable American valor.
Standing by the side of