Honor to those gallant heroes!
Honor to those empty sleeves!”
When we think of the untold millions spent, and the myriads of lives sacrificed in crushing out the rebellion—for “from Western plain to ocean-tide are stretched the graves of those who died”—the price seems too costly. But how truthful the following:
“Some things are worthless, and others so good
That nations who buy them pay only in blood.”
And only when we remember the grand result achieved—“that the canker of death, dark slavery’s stain,” is wiped out forever, and our glorious Union maintained—can we feel that the three hundred thousand graves where sleep the “Boys in White” were not made in vain.
“Noble souls! oh, how heroic
Was the sacrifice they made,
When the awful tide of treason
By their own life-blood was stayed,