Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 17.djvu/167

 lAfe^ Services and Character of Jefferson Davis. 159

The white sails of commerce will thicken on your river and the smoke of increasing factories will blacken the skies. Mountains will pour forth their precious metals, and fields will glow in the garniture of richer harvests. The remnants of lives spared from the battle will be interwoven with the texture of the Union ; new stars will cluster upon the flag, and the sons of the South will bear it as their fathers bore it to make the bounds of freedom wider yet. Our great race will meet and solve every problem, however dark, that it now faces, and a people reconciled and mighty will stretch forth their arms to stay those of the oppressor. But no greater souls will rise than those who find rest under the Southern sod from Sumter's battered wall to the trailing vines and ivy leaves of Hollywood, and none will come forth of truer heart or cleaner hands or higher crest to lead them.

To the dust we give his body now ; the ages receive his memory. They have never failed to do justice, however tardy, to him who stood by his people and made their cause his own.

The world does not to-day think less of Warren because he fell at Bunker Hill, a red-handed colonial rebel, fighting the old flag of his sovereign even before his people became secessionists from the crown, nor because his yeomen were beaten in the battle.

The great character and work of John Hampden wear no stigma, though he rode out of the battle at Chalgrove stricken to death by a loyal bullet and soon filled a rebel's grave.

Oliver Cromwell is a proud name in English history, though the English republic which he founded was almost as short lived as the Confederacy and was soon buried under the re-established throne of the Stuarts.

And we but forecast the judgment of the years to come when we pronounce that Jefferson Davis was gii'eat and pure as statesman, man and patriot.

In the eyes of Him to whom a thousand years are as a watch in the night, the war and the century in which it came are but as a single heart-throb in the breast of time, and when the myriads of this great land shall look back through unclouded skies to the old heroic days, the smoke and stain of battle will have vanished from the hero's name. The tall chieftain of the men who wore the gray will stand before them " with a countenance like the lightning and in raiment as white as snow."