“A bill to honor Commodore Maury, with an appropriate monument, lies mouldering in the archives of Congress. It will some day see the light. During the last years of Maury’s life the smoke of a great conflict gathered about him and hid his face from the National Government; but the smoke is fast lifting, and the healthy breezes of a great national fraternity will soon blow it far away. Then his nation will look upon his face and see the clear outlines of his character—then will he take his own proper place in America’s galaxy of the great.”
THE LADIES’ MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION.
It was in Fredericksburg, and by the ladies of Fredericksburg, Virginians, that the first memorial association was organized and chartered for looking after the dead soldiers, for providing them a final resting place in some convenient cemetery laid out for the purpose, and strewing their graves with the first flowers of spring as the years pass by. This was their second care after their return to their homes at the close of the Civil war, their first being their own homes, which were almost in ruins; and since the organization of that memorial association no season of flowers has passed that these graves have not been piously remembered.
MARY WASHINGTON MONUMENT.
It was the ladies of Fredericksburg, Virginians, who inaugurated the move, and carried it on to complete success, to raise a monument to a woman, the tallest and most imposing of its kind that is to be found on this continent. It towers over fifty feet high, the shaft is solid granite, and it marks the grave of the greatest of American women—Mary, the mother of Washington. It is true, that after the work was commenced, the plans laid, and some money raised, the ladies were assisted by the National Mary Washington Monument Association, which did good service, but even that association, brought into being through the local association at Fredericksburg, was made more active and efficient by the energy and persistence of the pioneers in the movement. That monument is grand and beautiful, and reaches high into the heavens, and while it marks the last resting place of that sainted woman, it reflects great honor upon all the ladies who assisted in its erection.
Commodore Matthew Fontaine Maury,
the “Path Finder of the Seas.”
(See [page 315])
These are some of the things in which Virginians took the lead and which were accomplished by them. There may be omissions of noble acts and brave deeds that might have been mentioned of whose existence we are in ignorance, but these we have mentioned will suffice to show that they were the leading spirits in throwing off the British yoke of oppression, in uniting the colonies for common defence, in proclaiming to the world our grievances and declaring for freedom, in waging a long and bloody war and securing independence, in forming and conducting the government from its infancy through its experimental period, in extending its territorial limits and in contributing to its national greatness. If for all this—if for what has been achieved by their ancestors in field and forum, on land and sea, an honest pride should well up in the breast of the Virginians of the living present, that should find expression in words, where is the individual that can rise up and charge them with vain boasting?