Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 36.djvu/193

Rh eloquently pleaded the cause of peace and fellowship, and among the first was the great war Governor of Pennsylvania. Reconstruction with its blotted record, long hindered the restoration of sympathetic relations between the North and South, and kept aflame what should have been the dying embers of sectional hate; but we are here to-day with a restored Union, not merely a union in form, but a Union of hearts, of sympathy and of patriotic fellowship, and the veterans of the Blue will to-day point will pride to the monuments erected to the heroes of the Gray who won the victory in this bloody struggle. "It was not the soldiers of either side on the front of the firing-line who hindered the restoration of our common brotherhood. Politicians played upon the prejudices and passions to serve political ends, but the veterans of both sides were the faithful advocates of generous and lasting peace. The veterans of the Gray will not shudder at the monument we are here to unveil. There are like monuments on every important battlefield of the Civil War, many erected to the heroic soldiers of Lee, and many erected to the heroic soldiers of Grant. They no longer stand as monuments for triumph for either the Blue or the Gray, but are accepted by every veteran of the North and South as monuments to the heroism of our American soldiery.

"The day is not far distant when the statue of Lee, the most beloved of all Southern men, who stands in history to-day abreast with the few great soldiers of the nineteenth century. will grace the streets of our national capital along with that of Grant as a tribute of the nation to the greatness of American commanders, and I hope at an early day to see Virginia and Pennsylvania unite in placing on Seminary Hill, at Gettysburg, an equestrian statue of Lee, with the right conceded to the South to embellish that memorable field with statues of her heroic leaders. "A few years ago I made an earnest appeal to the Pennsylvania Legislature to inaugurate such a movement, and it was delayed rather than refused for the reason, as then given, that