Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 16.djvu/115

 Address of Rev. G. W. BedLe. 109

Address of Rev. G. W. Beale at the Northern Neck Soldiers' Reunion,

November n, 1884.

Comrades and Friends :

The motives which prompt a reunion of surviving Confederates are felt to be laudable and honorable, and the occasion awakens a sacred and melancholy pleasure. There is nothing of political signifi- cance or sectional aim in such an assemblage. It has no purpose or wish to rekindle the embers of discord, or to drag forth from the grave the dead issues of the past. The receding years have happily borne us far away from the era of angry recriminations. The snows of more than twenty winters have fallen with cooling effect upon the heated animosities of the war, and not one of us would seek to inflame them again. As innocent as are the gently fallen leaves of this autumn day to disturb the dreamless slumber of the men who fell in the great conflict, would we be to arouse by word or deed one of its slumber- ing passions.

We meet beneath this grovt consecrated to devotion and to God for no unholy purpose. We come to this soldiers' reunion with no disloyal scheme and no unpatriotic sentiments. Our meeting is in the name of fraternity, of patriotism, and of peace. We are drawn hither by the ties of that manly friendship which was formed in the dark hours of trial, and indissolubly sealed in the red heat of suffer- ing and danger. We come with the interests, the sympathies, and the stirring recollections, born of a mutual experience in the camp, on the march, and in the battle, to touch hearts together again, and with gratitude to God for our preservation, to answer once more to the roll-call before we go to answer to it in the great reunion before the bar of our Maker.

We meet to grasp once more in life and peace the hands we were wont to grasp amidst bloody scenes of strife, and in the clear sun- light of domestic quietude to look into the faces that we used to see bronzed with the exposure of the camp or begrimed with the smoke of battle. We bring together hearts that once rose and fell in mutual sympathy with the hopes and fears of a great common cause and danger, that they may beat responsively to that patriotic interest and manly friendship which bound us one to the other as with hooks of steel. We meet to commemorate our deeds of manhood on the arena of fiery trial, and to recall the names and recount the virtues of our fallen comrades, and, I trust, to pledge here, on this sacred spot, our