J. Howard Pugh

“ And this Nation which our Fathers founded, and which [10] thus expanded into eighty years of such vigorous life; how fares it now? It is racked and rent with civil war. In little more than a year, a hundred new battle-fields have been added to its history. Whole States are given up to desolation. The land is filled with mourners. Hearts are broken to-day, that a year ago beat high with hope, and love, and happiness. Childhood, and womanhood, and tottering age, its props all gone, are mingling their tears and prayers to-day, in the bitterness of a sorrow that will never end on earth. ”

“ The prosecution of this war is not with us a matter of choice; we do not regard it as a matter about which we have any right to hesitate or consult our own wishes or interests; it comes to us in the sphere of our highest duties; it prompts us to ask, not so much what we owe ourselves, as what we owe posterity; and we know we shall deserve the just condemnation of history, and the eternal execration of our children, if we do not sacrifice every selfish aim, every social comfort, every domestic tie, every interest of property or life, rather than have this Union divided. ”

“ I believed then, as I believe now, and as events have proved, if rightly interpreted, that the common sense of the common people—of the American masses—had long ago settled the true value of the American Union. The intuitions of a people are better than their logic. Their profoundest convictions make the least noise. Not by argument—not by the talk of politicians, nor the expositions of statesmen—but by the benefits and blessings that flow in upon them through the passing years, do men learn to measure best the value of their institutions. ”

“ For sunshine is the symbol of prosperity, and summer the symbol of peace; and the wondrous bounty of the season fitly typifies the fruits of that civil and religious liberty, to establish which our fathers pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honour. Not that all these anniversaries have been, or will be days of jubilee. Not that the chill and sombreness of winter have not settled, will not settle, upon some. ”

“ No American general now, were he to manifest within a year more than the genius of the first Napoleon, could undertake to establish a dictatorship over the American people, without immediately falling from the pedestal of power. For we have not forgotten our earliest teachings. We have not forgotten that the name of Washington belongs to our history. We have been educated in the meaning of his great and glorious life, and no man now can command any large influence in American affairs, who is not as ready to lay down power as to take it up. ”

“ All men and all nations have learned to regard with admiration the energy, the courage, the fortitude, the exhaustless patience with which our fathers fought the battles of freedom and inaugurated on this continent the “great experiment” of popular government. No one now dares to question the wisdom of their policy, the lofty purity of their lives and purposes, or the sublime quality of that heroic faith in the final triumph of their cause, which never failed them in the darkest hours of their long and bitter struggle to be free. ”

“ As the influences of home and of Christian example mould and fix the character, so do the influences of good government and beneficent institutions settle the convictions of a people, unconsciously, noiselessly, but most profoundly. And it is often true, that nothing but some great world upheaval can arouse men to a consciousness of their slumbering powers, their sublime beliefs, and duties, and perils. So still, and strong, and deep was the faith of the American people in the perpetuity and inestimable worth of the American Union, that they could not believe it was in danger. ”

“ For, I maintain that a set of men, who, like the leaders of this rebellion, would destroy a government like ours, upon pretexts such as theirs, could not be negotiated with, without war. And until their pride is humbled, their power broken, until they have been made to endure somewhat of the bitterness of that suffering they pour out so overwhelmingly upon others, until their arrogance and haughtiness are utterly abased in exile or on the scaffold, there can be no peace upon this continent. ”

“ There is no doubt but that the South is carrying on the war with great unanimity, for war creates its own arguments; but there is no reason to believe that the masses of the South have ever been convinced that their leaders were right in beginning the war, or that the breaking up of the Union could ever ultimate in anything but disaster to themselves and their posterity. There is great reason to believe that the arch leaders themselves did not contemplate, at the outset, the destruction of this government, with a view of establishing two or more independent ones as a final result. ”

“ For it is fitting, that in the midst of glorious summer days, when the earth lies richest in the sunlight; when the fields are golden with the harvests; when the air is fragrant with the scent of flowers and the new hay; when, in a word, the beauty and the bounty of nature, unite to fill the heart with gladness and with gratitude, we should meet in kindred joy and thankfulness to celebrate our nation’s natal day. ”

“ The majestic duty of the hour is to save this Union, for ourselves, for our children and the children of those who would destroy it, for the unborn millions of the North and South, the East and the West. Let us, then, honour the dead who die in this cause, and the living mothers who bore them; let us honour the heroes who survive the conflict ”

“ It gives more lustre to historic names than almost any other single quality. It intensifies life and makes even death glorious and shadowless. But it implies objects. And a country to excite the loftiest patriotism is not made in a day, scarce in a century. It must have a history. In that history must be found the record of immortal names, immortal deeds and a career illustrating and exalting immortal principles. And such a country is ours, and it must include the whole country or patriotism, as we have learned it, is impossible. ”

“ But when the bombardment came, then all men saw at a glance that a Government that could not feed its own starving garrisons—that could not command its own forts—was no government at all. They saw at once that the struggle was one of life and death. And then the Nation rose, and then the war began. The latent patriotism of the people, that had been growing and intensifying for three-quarters of a century, burst forth, at last, like a flame ”

“ To-day, when sorrow sits brooding in a million homes, when the shadow of civil war still rests like a pall upon the nation, when in the beautiful Virginia that Washington loved, his children are grappling in the struggle of death. Still, it is true, that in the eighty odd years of our Independence that have passed, there have been few of these anniversary days that have not wholly been days of jubilee, and with the blessing of God a little longer on our Union armies, there will be fewer yet in the eighty years that are to come ”

“ I know, too, how common is the autocratic talk that the equal rights, the enlarged liberties, which our institutions secure to the citizen, tend only to license in thought and speech, to fanaticism, to lawlessness, to disrespect of authority, to no-government. And yet I know that it has not been the bestowment of privileges upon the many, but the despotic domination of the irresponsible few that has always cursed humanity. And when I remember how seldom in all the world the fundamental rights of man have been ever recognized ”

“ We want no new experiments in Government. Especially do we want none initiated upon the fragments of our own. We know that to the Union we owe all our progress and our power, all that we have, all that we are, all that we can hope to be. ”

“ But men, who condemn him yet condemn not the rebellion he is trying to crush are not entitled to respect. The President, his advisers and agents may err; they are but human, but their object is to save the Constitution and Union; the object of the South is the destruction of both, and wherever and whenever you find men who denounce the former fiercely and the latter faintly, whose eyes are so microscopic that they can discover, in the records of Congress and the departments, flaws in legislation and frauds in contracts, and yet cannot see the tremendous fraud and crime of this rebellion ”

“ Already the South disdains the rule of the people. In a [16] population of ten millions, they have but three hundred thousand slaveholders. Yet, almost every man in power is a slaveholder. Hence, government with them is already in the hands of a class. And then, the tone of their press, and the speeches of their statesmen have aimed for years to degrade labour, have betrayed a growing dislike for the equality of rights demanded by our institutions, and have been coloured with all the assumption and the arrogance of an aristocracy. ”

“ They tolerate no enemies among them. Men who do not heartily support them they drive out of their country, or into the ranks of their armies. We have not dared to attack them with their own weapons. They never can be conquered till we do; and it may be true that we can only learn wisdom in the severe school of defeat and disaster. But learn it we must and will, and we will teach them, and teach the world, at whatever sacrifice of means and life, that republican liberty in America was not born to die. ”

“ And when these lessons have been learned by a people, and when in the Providence of God the darkest hours of their history have come; when they are compelled themselves to strike for liberty or see it perish; when they have risen to that height of patriotism that they exclaim with old John Adams in ’76, that all that they have, and all that they are, and all that they hope for in this life, they are ready to stake upon the altar of their country ”

“ For the South is not fighting for concessions and compromises, and never has been; it is fighting to establish a new government and to break up the old. It wants no peace but upon this basis. And this basis is one which, by the help of God, the American people will never grant. And why? First, because they have learned to love their country as it is. Patriotism is among the grandest virtues. ”

“ The objects we had set before us as being worthy the struggle of a life, have all sunk to a lower level, and higher objects have arisen, demanding self-abandonment, self-sacrifice, and absorbing the whole soul in love of country, in care for its honour, in sorrow for its misfortunes, in joy for its triumphs, in devotion to its service even unto death. ”

“ We know, and we must teach them, that our life-long enthusiasm for popular government, our life-long hope for its spread throughout the world, that all the memories that cluster around this sacred day, hallowing our past and brightening our future, are all involved in, are impossible without, the perpetuity of this Union. ”

“ We shall succeed in crushing this Rebellion. True, tidings of disaster float upon the air. God pity the dying soldier, and the desolate homes throughout the land. If we have lost a great battle the war is just begun. We may lose one battle, we may lose fifty, but we will gain more than we lose, and will conquer in the end. We have two men to their one; we have ten times their wealth; we hold the sea, we have infinite resources in reserve upon land ”

“ We fight to have that nation live, to keep it one and indivisible, and vain were the struggles of the Revolution, and vain the consecration of days like this to Revolutionary memories, if they failed to bring out into highest prominence such deeds as those of the past and passing year. Our fathers fought to create a nation. And for eighty years there was no sublimer sight beneath the stars than the nation they created. During these eighty years, this people grew from three to thirty millions, from thirteen to thirty-four States. ”

“ It is one of the uses of history to teach us what are the noblest uses of life; what deeds live longest in the memories of men; what motives give greatest strength and nobility to character; what fruition follows godlike sacrifices for truth and duty; what ideas and principles, embodied in life, lift men above the common level and crown them with immortal honours. ”

“ I believe that there never has been a time when the Government could have avoided the conflict without unutterable dishonour, and that it will inherit and deserve the contempt of humanity if it fail to continue the struggle with the utmost vigor, until every atom of this rebellion is crushed into annihilation. ”

“ The two facts that need to be remembered are, that the South aims to destroy the Union, we aim only to preserve it; and it is not a question of opinion, it is not a question of party, it is simply a question [13] of patriotism, upon which side you are. There is no middle ground to stand upon. A man must be in favor of one thing or the other, either the prosecution of the war, on our behalf, to a triumphant end, or the destruction of the government. ”

“ They have sunk to that oblivion, or have earned that unenviable immortality, which belongs to the lot of all who fail their country in its hour of trial, and have neither voice nor sympathy but for its enemies. Only those who aided the Colonies in their struggle with Britain and remembered now with gratitude. And having been, for eighty years and more, a great and prosperous and happy [7] people, we feel increasingly, as the years go by, that we cannot venerate the men too highly, through whose blood and tears, and prayers and blessings, we were made and kept a nation. ”