Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/421

 exemplified not by knights in armor and chariots, but by Him who was nailed to the cross, Who regenerated the sons of men, wearing not a helmet but a crown of thorns. When the early impressions of the war have in time become less vivid, a calm judgment will show that the valor of the soldiers on the field of Gettysburg was no more potent factor than the endurance best exhibited in the prison pens of Andersonville. The men who perished here have not died in vain. Through their deaths the government has taken on a new life and even Georgia has grown mightier than ever before because of what they did and suffered.

In behalf of the commonwealth, I accept this monument, reflecting credit, as it does, upon the commission in charge of its erection, because of its magnificent proportions and artistic effects, and I present it to you, sir, as the representative of the national government with a full faith that here it will stand, for all time to come, as a testimonial to the suffering and valor of those soldiers who lost their lives that the country might survive.

General E. A. Carman, United States Volunteers, accepted the memorial.

I wandered on foot over the field. An old soldier came to me and said that when he was here he knew and bunked with a man named Pennypacker. He went with me and showed me the place, upon the opposite side of a little stream from the spring which is said to have miraculously begun to flow after the prison was established, where they had dug a sort of cave in the side of a hill in which to sleep.

“And what became of him?” I asked.

“Oh! He died of the scurvy.”

On returning home, I looked up the record in Bates' history of the Pennsylvania volunteers and found him described there as “Missing in action.” Such is fame and such often the rewards of effort.

On the 8th, I accepted the monument erected for the 109th Pennsylvania Regiment at Orchard Knob, near Lookout Mountain, and near Chattanooga in Tennessee.

During this month Judge John H. Weiss, who had long presided over the common pleas of Dauphin County, died. At once there was a scramble and the Bar of the county Rh