I
In Washington, on the 6th of April last, business was suspended from mid-day onwards, while President McKinley and all the high officers of State attended the public funeral at Arlington Cemetery of several hundred soldiers, brought home from the battlefields of Cuba. The burial ground on the heights of Arlington—the old Virginian home, by the way, of the Lee family—had hitherto been known as the resting-place of numbers of Northern soldiers, killed in the Civil War. But among the bodies committed to earth that afternoon were those of many Southerners, who had stood and fallen side by side with their Northern comrades at El Caney and San Juan. The significance of the event was widely felt and commented upon. "Henceforth," said one paper, "the graves at Arlington will constitute a truly national cemetery;" and the same note was struck in a thousand other quarters. Poets burst into song at the thought of their
"Resting together side by side,
Comrades in blue and grey!
"Healed in the tender peace of time,
The wounds that once were red
With hatred and with hostile rage,
While sanguined brothers bled.
"They leaped together at the call
Of country—one in one,
The soldiers of the Northern hills,
And of the Southern sun!
"'Yankee' and 'Rebel,' side by side,
Beneath one starry fold—
To-day, amid our common tears,
Their funeral bells are tolled."
The artlessness of these verses renders them none the less significant. They express a popular sentiment in popular language. But, as here expressed, it is clearly the sentiment of the North: how far is it shared and acknowledged by the South? Happening to be on the spot, I could not but try to obtain some sort of answer to this question.
Again, as I stood on the terrace of the Capitol that April afternoon, and looked out across the Potomac to the old Lee mansion at Arlington, while all the flags of Washington drooped at half-mast, a very different piece of verse somehow floated into my memory: