"Here lies a Confederate soldier.
He died for his country."
The September day which brought the body of this mountain hero to that home among the hills which had smiled upon his infancy, been gladdened by his youth, and strengthened by his manhood, was an ever memorable one with the sorrowing concourse of friends and neighbors who followed his shot-riddled body to the grave. And of that number no man gainsaid the honor of his death, lacked full loyalty to the flag for which he fought, or doubted the justice of the cause for which he gave his life.
Thirty-five years have passed; another war has called its roll of martyrs; again the old bell tolls from the crude latticed tower of the settlement church; another great pouring of sympathetic humanity, and this time the body of a son, wrapped in the stars and stripes, is lowered to its everlasting rest beside that of the father who sleeps in the stars and bars.
There were those there who stood by the grave of the Confederate hero years before, and the children of those were there, and of those present no one gainsaid the honor of the death of this hero of El Caney, and none were there but loved, as patriots alone can love, the glorious flag that enshrines the people of a common country as it enshrouds the form that will sleep forever in its blessed folds. And on this tomb will be written:—
"Here lies the son of a Confederate soldier.
He died for his country."
And so it is that between the making of these two graves human hands and human hearts have reached a solution of the vexed problem that has baffled human will and human thought for three decades. Sturdy sons of the South have said to their brothers of the North that the people of the South had long since accepted the arbitrament of the sword to which they had appealed. And likewise the oft-repeated message has come back from the North that peace and good will reigned, and that the wounds of civil dissension were but as sacred memories. Good fellowship was wafted on the wings of commerce and development from those who had worn the blue to those who had worn the gray. Nor were these messages delivered in vain, for they served to pave the way for the complete and absolute elimination of the line of sectional differences by the only process by which such a result was possible. The sentiment of the great majority of the people of the South was rightly spoken in the message of the immortal Hill, and in the burning eloquence of Henry Grady—both Georgians—the record of whose blessed work for the restoration of peace between the sections becomes a national heritage, and whose names are stamped in enduring impress upon the affection of the people of the Republic.
And yet there were still those among us who believed your course was polite, but insincere, and those among you who assumed that our professed attitude was sentimental and unreal. Bitterness had departed, and sectional hate was no more, but there were those who feared, even if they did not believe, that between the great sections of our greater government there was not the perfect faith and trust and love that both professed; that there was want of the faith that made the American Revolution a successful possibility; that there was want of the trust that crystallized our States into the original Union; that there was lack of the love that bound in unassailable strength the united sisterhood of States that withstood the shock of Civil War. It is true this doubt existed to a greater degree abroad than at home. But to-day the mist of uncertainty has been swept away by the sunlight of events, and there, where doubt obscured before stands in bold relief, commanding the admiration of the whole world, the most glorious type of united strength and sentiment and loyalty known to the history of nations.
Out of the chaos of that civil war had risen a new nation, mighty in the vastness of its limitless resources, the realities within its reach surpassing the dreams of fiction, and eclipsing the fancy of fable—a new nation, yet rosy in the flesh, with the bloom of youth upon its cheeks and the gleam of morning in its eyes. No one questioned that commercial and geographic union had been effected. So had Rome re-united its faltering provinces, maintaining the limit of its imperial jurisdiction by the power of commercial bonds and the majesty of the sword, until in its very vastness it collapsed. The heart of its people did not beat in unison. Nations may be made by the joining of hands, but the measure of their real strength and vitality, like that of the human body, is in the heart. Show me the country whose people are not at heart in sympathy with its institutions, and the fervor of whose patriotism is not bespoken in its flag, and I will show you a ship of state which is sailing in shallow waters, toward unseen eddies of uncertainty, if not to the open rocks of dismemberment.
Whence was the proof to come, to ourselves as well as to the world, that we were being moved once again by a common impulse, and by the same heart that inspired and gave strength to the hands that smote the British in the days of the Revolution, and again at New Orleans; that made our ships the masters of the seas; that placed our flag on Chapultepec, and widened our domain from ocean to ocean? How was the world to know that the burning fires of patriotism, so essential to national glory and achievement, had not been quenched by the blood spilled by the heroes of both sides of the most desperate struggle known in the history of civil wars? How was the doubt that stood, all unwilling, between outstretched hands and sympathetic hearts, to be, in fact, dispelled?
If from out the caldron of conflict there arose this doubt, only from the crucible of war could come the answer. And, thank God, that answer has been made in the record of the war, the peaceful termination of which we celebrate to-night. Read it in every page of its history; read it in the obliteration of party and sectional lines in the congressional action which called the nation to arms in the defence of prostrate liberty, and for the extension of the sphere of human freedom; read it in the conduct of the distinguished Federal soldier who, as the chief executive of this great Republic,[9] honors this occasion by his presence to-night, and whose appointments in the first commissions issued after war had been declared made manifest the sincerity of his often repeated utterances of complete sectional reconciliation and the elimination of sectional lines in the affairs of government. Differing with him, as I do, on party issues, utterly at variance with the views of his party on economic problems, I sanction with all my heart the obligation that rests on every patriotic citizen to make party second to country, and in the measure that he has been actuated by this broad and patriotic policy he will receive the plaudits of the whole people: "Well done, good and faithful servant."