Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 9.djvu/195

 Our National Cemeteries,

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��OUR NATIONAL CEMETERIES.

By Charles Cowley, LL.D.

��There are circumstances generally attending the death of the soldier or the sailor, whether on battle-field or gun-deck, whether in the captives' prison, the cockpit, or the field-hospi- tal, which touch our sensibilities far more deeply than any circumstances which usually attend the death of men of any other class ; moving within us mingled emotions of pathos and pity, of mystery and awe.

"There is a tear for all that die, A mourner o'er the humblest grave;

But nations swell the funeral cry, And freedom weeps above the brave;

"For them is sorrow's purest sigh,

O'er ocean's heaving bosom sent; In vain their bones unburied lie, —

All earth becomes their monument.

"A tomb is their's on every page;

An epitaph on every tongue; The present hours, the future age.

Nor mem bewail, to them belong.

"A theme to crowds that knew them not,

Lamented by admiring foes. Who would not share their glorious lot?

Who would not die the death they chose?"

A similar halo invests our National Cemeteries — which are the most per- manent mementos of our sanguinary Civil War.

Nature labors diligently to cover up her scars. Most of the battle-fields of the Rebellion now show growths of use and beauty. Many of the structures of that great conflict have already ceased to be. Some of them have been swept away by the Avinds or overgrown with weeds ; others, like Fort Wagner, have been washed away by the waves. But neither winds nor waves are likely to disturb the monu- ments or the cemeteries of our soldiers and sailors. Where they were placed,

��there they remain ; " and there they will remain forever."

The seventy-eight National Ceme- teries distributed over the country contain the remains of three hundred and eighteen thousand four hundred and fifty-five men, classed as follows : known, 170,960; unknown, 147,495; total, 318,455. And these are not half of those whose deaths are attributable to their service in the armies and navies of the United States and the Confeder- ate States, who are buried in all sec- tions of the Union and in foreign lands.

In some of these cemeteries, as at Gettysburg, Antietam, City Point, Win- chester, Marietta, Woodlawn, Hampton, and Beaufort, by means of public ap- propriations and private subscriptions, statues and other monuments have at different times been erected ; and many others doubtless will be erected in them hereafter. Some of them are in secluded situations, where for many miles the population is sparse, and the few people that live near them cherish tenderer recollections of the " Lost Cause " than of that which finally won. But such of them as are contiguous to cities are places of interest to more or less of the neighboring population ; and, in some of them, there are commemora- tive services upon Memorial Days.

These cemeteries have many features in common ; and much that may be said of one of them may also be said of the others — merely changing the names.

It happened to the present writer to visit the National Cemetery at Beaufort, South Carolina, to deliver an oration on Memorial Day, 1881, in the

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