Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 14.djvu/447

 The Maryland Confederate Monument at Gettysburg. 441

gauntlet was thrown into the arena — with equal resolution and resolve it was lifted from the dust. There was no paltering upon either side with, the magnitude of the interests at stake, and the preparations were commensurate with the powers that were to be opposed.

" Two years of the stubborn trial of strength passed by, and the end seemed as far. off as at the beginning. Manassas and Seven Pines, Donelson and Pittsburg, the trial of the Seven Days, and the contest at Antietam, Corinth and Perryville, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville ! On these, and on an hundred other battlefields, the insatiate demands of the Moloch of civil war had been met, and still there was no rift to be seen in the cloud that hung as a pall over the homes of the millions of our land. From the sighing forests of Maine to where the tropic tides throb upon our Southern shores, here in the land of Penn, there by the firesides of the home of Washing- ton, where Hudson trod, and where De Soto caught his Eldorado, there in that mighty region whose life-blood pulses in the restless flow of the father of waters, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, in ham- let, town and village, and in quiet country home, there was the sound of wailing and the cry of woe. Yet none the less from North to South, from East to West, the fire of battle still fiercely glowed in every heart.

" But even then the mighty fiat had gone forth, and the day was close at hand when the supreme etlbrt was to be made that was to determine upon which side the meed of the victor should rest. And it was here — here that the men that followed Lee met with that crush- ing repulse that gave to the ensuing contests those features that, culminating on the plains of Appomattox with the fading from our view of the knightly crest of Lee, caused to be furled for aye that banner so long upheld in honor and in pride.

"At no time since the first sound of war had rung throughout the land had the heart of the South beat with more hopeful aspiration than when, in the early summer of 1863, the line of march was taken up and the movement northward was begun. With full ranks and as high resolve the opposing force met one by one the moves of Lee. With march and countermarch, with thrust and feint, and hurrying to and fro of armed battalions, and brilliant strategy, the game of war was played, till here, where no sound of war's alarms had ever come, with a shock that was felt to the utmost bounds of our conti- nental domain, the battle of destiny was joined.

" The character of the campaign, impressed upon it from its incip-