Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 23.djvu/11

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Hail Columbia, Yankee Doodle and Dixie, harmonized into one national air.

A true peace among the people of these United States is now a i.i. t accomplished, not a thing to be sought for, but a blessed reality, of which domestic disturbers, as well as all the outside world, will take due notice and govern themselves accordingly. The peacemakers have fulfilled their mission, and may now enter into their reward, for theirs is this kingdom of heaven. The fury of civil war is gone. The fitful fever of sectional passion is over, and it sleeps its last sleep in dreamless death. The North said let us have peace, and they won it ; the South said let us have it also, and thus we met the enemy and they are ours. There is no more any bloody chasm across which old foes are called to clasp their hands. That gaping horror has been closed by the patriotic spirit of a mutual reconciliation more sublime than the harmony of the white and red roses of England, or the agreement by Ephraim and Judah to vex each other no more, for all such restorations to fra- ternity but pre-figured this far-nobler sacrifice of internecine resent- ments upon the altar of our re-united country.

We may not be of one mind on all questions which admit of fair discussion in this land of free speech, but we will have one heart when we contemplate the fiery ordeals through which we have been safely borne. Our attitude toward the great issues, events and people of that militant, political and social upheaval must be reve- rential, indeed, whenever the scenes, the events and the actors of the Confederate era pass before us in solemn and sublime review. Behold the armies as they pass ! On one side mustered into the Union service 2,778,304 arms-bearing men ; on the Confederate side 600,000 men with arms ; united they make a force three and a half millions strong ! Witness more than a score of great and hard- fought battles, every one a Waterloo, and half a thousand others with fewer battalions but equally brilliant in bravery. Survey the theatre of war broader than all Europe; the casualties nearly half the num- bers engaged ; expenditures of treasure and destruction of wealth more than the taxable values of many States ; a mighty nation in lethal throes that writhed its whole social system with an awful pain ; the most masterly minds of a noted age stretched to an agony of tension in thought of the ways, means and measures of pro- tracted war ; heroic men by tens of thousands braving danger and death on crimsoned fields, and paired by devoted women enduring