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- guaranteed by the Constitution were directly menaced, that the people
of the South were cajoled into revolution. Through the arts of the
conspirators and the perversity of fortune, the most sensitive love of
liberty was entrapped into the support of a war whose implied end was
the erecting in our advanced century of an Anglo-American empire based
upon the systematic degradation of man.
Spite this clinging reproach, however, signal military virtues and
achievements have conferred upon the Confederate arms historic fame,
and upon certain of the commanders a renown extending beyond the sea—a
renown which we of the North could not suppress, even if we would. In
personal character, also, not a few of the military leaders of the
South enforce forbearance; the memory of others the North refrains from
disparaging; and some, with more or less of reluctance, she can
respect. Posterity, sympathizing with our convictions, but removed from
our passions, may perhaps go farther here. If George IV could, out of
the graceful instinct of a gentleman, raise an honorable monument in
the great fane of Christendom over the remains of the enemy of his
dynasty, Charles Edward, the invader of England and victor in the rout
of Preston Pans—upon whose head the king’s ancestor but one reign
removed had set a price—is it probable that the granchildren of General
Grant will pursue with rancor, or slur by sour neglect, the memory of
Stonewall Jackson?
But the South herself is not wanting in recent histories and
biographies which record the deeds of her chieftains—writings freely
published at the North by loyal houses, widely read here, and with a
deep though saddened interest. By students of the war such works are
hailed as welcome accessories, and tending to the completeness of the
record.
Supposing a happy issue out of present perplexities, then, in the
generation next to come, Southerners there will be yielding allegiance
to the Union, feeling all their interests bound up in it, and yet
cherishing unrebuked that kind of feeling for the memory of the
soldiers of the fallen Confederacy that Burns, Scott, and the Ettrick
Shepherd felt for the memory of the gallant clansmen ruined through
their fidelity to the Stuarts—a feeling whose passion was tempered by
the poetry imbuing it, and which in no wise affected their loyalty to
the Georges, and which, it may be added, indirectly contributed
excellent things to literature. But, setting this view aside,
dishonorable would it be in the South were she willing to abandon to
shame the memory of brave men who with signal personal
disinterestedness warred in her behalf, though from motives, as we
believe, so deplorably astray.
Patriotism is not baseness, neither is it inhumanity. The mourners who
this summer bear flowers to the mounds of the Virginian and Georgian
dead are, in their domestic bereavement and proud affection, as sacred
in the eye of Heaven as are those who go with similar offerings of
tender grief and love into the cemeteries of our Northern martyrs. And
yet, in one aspect, how needless to point the contrast.
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