Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 36.djvu/194

178 it was not yet the time for so pronounced a declaration from our State that peace with sectional brotherhood had reached its consummation. We are here to-day unveiling a monument to Pennsylvania's fallen heroes on one of the great Virginia battlefields, and there is welcome on every hand by the veterans who won the victory and the citizens who sympathized with the Gray, and I would give equal welcome to the statues of the Confederate heroes on the Gettysburg battlefield, and thus enable the visitor to that historic ground to read, by the statues and tablets on both sides, the complete history of the decisive conflict of the war.

"The veterans of both sides have long been teaching the country that peace and brotherhood have been restored to it. There is not a grave of a veteran of the Gray in any cemetery in the North, where the graves of Union soldiers are made beautiful and fragrant on Decoration Day, that is not decorated with equal care, and the veterans of the Union thus pay equal respect and honor to the fallen on both sides of the conflict; and the veterans of the Gray never fail to decorate the graves of the fallen Union veterans when that tribute is paid to their fallen brethren. "A Confederate soldier was a Cabinet officer under Grant; a Confederate soldier was a Cabinet officer under Hayes, and a Confederate soldier is a Cabinet officer under Roosevelt. Surely the time has come, after forty-three years of a reunited nation when all the terrible asperities should be only a shadowed memory, and when all the grand attributes of generous and affectionate brotherhood should be visible in every section of our great republic. Here, standing among the graves of the heroic dead of both the great armies that were engaged in deadly struggle, all will unite in the patriotic utterance of the great expounder of the Constitution when he replied to the early advocacy of secession by one of South Carolina's great statesmen: Liberty and Union; now and forever, one and inseparable." Many of the Pennsylvanians will remain here several days visiting the historic points and battlefields at and near