Page:The autobiography of a Pennsylvanian.djvu/436

 crowned with a red fez and taking an active part in the solemn flummery.

On the 20th, accompanied by my staff, by Mrs. Pennypacker and my sister-in-law, Mrs. James L. Pennypacker, I started for Vicksburg, Mississippi, to dedicate the monument erected to commemorate the services of the Pennsylvania soldiers who took part in that campaign. It is a fact of which Pennsylvanians ought to be proud, and which has a significance, that this state was represented not only in all of the battles of the East, but likewise in those of the West. No other eastern state of the North had any part in Shiloh. We reached Vicksburg on the morning of the 23d and were received with a salute of seventeen guns. General Stephen D. Lee, who had been a lieutenant general in the rebel army, a sensible, kindly and agreeable gentleman, had charge of the local arrangements and gave us much attention. We rode through the National Park and were taken in steamboats upon the Mississippi River to Grant's “Cut-Off,” where it was attempted to divert the channel of the river as a war measure. The black alluvial soil along the river is seventy or eighty feet in depth and suggests agricultural richness. Nobody appeared to be at work, however, except the negroes and the mules, and it looked to me like a country which would perish were it not for them. In the evening there were a reception and a dance at the Carroll Hotel, where my colonels and the pretty Southern girls had a good time. The ceremonies occurred on the following day. General James A. Beaver, a soldier who lost his leg, later a governor and judge of the Superior Court, delivered the address. Vardaman, a long-haired, black-eyed, noisy swashbuckler, was then the governor of Mississippi. He made a speech which sounded like a repetition of some Fourth of July oration he had at some time committed to memory. Later he was sent to the United States Senate. I accepted the monument and gave it into the custody of the nation. In the evening the veterans of the Union and Rebel armies 418