He came can we ever forget it, while the years of our pilgrimage roll?— He brought us a pride and a pleasure, he left us a pathos of tears: A man in the world of his cradle, a sage in his infantine lore, He was brave in the might of endurance, was patient,-and who can be more? The newness of love at his coming, the freshness of grief when he went, AT THE END OF THE WAR. [A Short History of the War of Secession. 1888.] HE home-coming at the North was almost as sorrowful as at the South, there was hardly a participator whose joy was not saddened by missing some well-known face and form now numbered with the silent three hundred thousand. Grant was there, the commander that had never taken a step backward; and Farragut was there, the sailor without an equal; and the unfailing Sherman, and the patient Thomas, and the intrepid Hancock, and the fiery Sheridan, and the brilliant Custer, and many of lesser rank, who in a smaller theatre of conflict would have won a larger fame. But where was young Ellsworth? Shot dead as soon as he crossed the Potomac. And Winthrop-killed in the first battle, with his best books unwritten. And Lyon -fallen at the head of his little army in Missouri, the first summer of the war. And Baker-sacrificed at Ball's Bluff. And Kearny at Chantilly, and Reno at South Mountain, and Mansfield at Antietam, and Reynolds at Gettysburg, and Wadsworth in the Wilderness, and Sedgwick at Spottsylvania, and McPherson before Atlanta, and Craven in his monitor at the bottom of the sea, and thousands of others, the best and bravest, all gone-all, like Latour, the immortal captain, dead on the field of honor, but none the less dead and a loss to their mourning country. The hackneyed allegory of Curtius had been given a startling illustration and a new significance. The South, too, had lost heavily of her foremost citizens in the great struggle-Bee and Bartow at Bull Run; Albert Sidney Johnson, leading a desperate charge at Shiloh; Zollicoffer, soldier and journalist, at Mill Spring; Stonewall Jackson, Lee's right arm, at Chancellorsville; Polk, priest and warrior, at Lost Mountain; Armistead, wavering between two allegiances and fighting alternately for each, and Barksdale and Garnet-all at Gettysburg; Hill at Petersburg; and the dashing Stuart, and Daniel, and Perrin, and Dearing, and Doles, and numberless others. The sudden hush and sense of awe that impresses a child when he steps upon a single grave may well overcome the strongest man when he looks upon the face of his country scarred with battle-fields like these, and considers what blood of manhood was rudely wasted there. And the slain were mostly young, unmarried men, whose native virtues fill no living veins, and will not shine again on any field. It is poor business measuring the mouldered ramparts and counting the silent guns, marking the deserted battle-fields and decorating the grassy graves, unless we can learn from it all some nobler lesson than to destroy. Men write of this as of other wars as if the only thing necessary to be impressed upon the rising generation were the virtue of physical courage and contempt of death. It seems to me that is the last thing that we need to teach; for since the days of John Smith in Virginia and the men of the Mayflower in Massachusetts, no generation of Americans has shown any lack of it. From Louisburg to Petersburg-a hundred and twenty years, the full span of four generations-they have stood to their guns and been shot down in greater comparative numbers than any other race on earth. In the War of Secession there was not a State, not a county, probably not a town, between the Great Lakes and the Gulf, that was not represented on fields where all that men could do with powder and steel was done, and valor was exhibited at its highest pitch. It was a common saying in the Army of the Potomac that courage was the cheapest thing there; and it might have been said of all the other armies as well. There is not the slightest necessity for lauding American bravery or impressing it upon American youth. But there is the gravest necessity for teaching them respect for law, and reverence for human life, and regard for the rights of their fellow-men, and all that is significant in the history of our country-lest their feet run to evil and they make haste to shed innocent blood. I would be glad to convince my compatriots that it is not enough to think they are right, but they are bound to know they are right, before they rush into any experiments that are to cost the lives of men and the tears of orphans, in their own land or in any other. I would warn them to beware of provincial conceit. I would have them comprehend that one may fight bravely, and still be a perjured felon; that one may die humbly, and still be a patriot whom his country cannot afford to lose; that as might does not make right, so neither do rags and bare feet necessarily argue a noble cause. I would teach them that it is criminal either to hide the truth or to refuse assent to that which they see must follow logically from ascertained truth. I would show them that a political lie is as despicable as a personal lie, whether uttered in an editorial, or a platform, or a president's message, or a colored cartoon, or a disingenu ous ballot; and that political chicanery, when long persisted in, is liable to settle its shameful account in a stoppage of civilization and a spilling of life. These are simple lessons, yet they are not taught in a day, and some whom we call educated go through life without mastering them at all. It may be useful to learn from one war how to conduct another; but it is infinitely better to learn how to avert another. I am doubly anxious to impress this consideration upon my readers, because history seems to show us that armed conflicts have a tendency to come in pairs, with an interval of a few years, and because I think I see, in certain circumstances now existing within our beloved Republic, the elements of a second civil war. No American citizen should lightly repeat that the result is worth all it cost, unless he has considered how heavy was the cost, and is doing his utmost to perpetuate the result. To strive to forget the great war, for the sake of sentimental politics, is to cast away our dearest experience and invite, in some troubled future, the destruction we so hardly escaped in the past. There can be remembrance without animosity, but there cannot be oblivion without peril. Laura Redden Searing. BORN in Somerset Co., Md., 1840. DISARMED. [Sounds from Secret Chambers. By Howard Glyndon. 1873.] LOVE, so sweet at first, So bitter in the end! Thou canst be fiercest foe, As well as fairest friend. Ay, thou art swift to slay, Despite thy kiss and clasp, Thy long, caressing look, Thy subtle, thrilling grasp! Than thou art strong to save, Yes, cruel as the grave, Go, go, and come no more! Just where it was before? Go, leave me with my tears, That shall outlive the years. Shed from some passing wing:- Divine, half-timid kiss. In weeping over this! Wendell Phillips Garrison. BORN in Cambridgeport, Mass., 1840. THE MARTYRDOM OF LOVEJOY. [William Lloyd Garrison: The Story of his Life, told by his Children. 1885-89.] OVEJOY'S fourth press was secretly conveyed into a warehouse, "guarded by volunteer citizens with their guns." On the night following (November 7, 1837) the tragedy occurred. No personal incident of the anti-slavery struggle the fate of John Brown excepted-made so profound an impression on the North as the murder of Lovejoy. We call it a murder, although the primary object of the riot was not his destruction, but that of his press; just as we call him a martyr, though we are accustomed to associate more or less of passivity with martyrdom, and he fell while aggressively repelling with arms an armed mob. In both cases the terms are correctly used, as the circumstances conclusively show. Three presses had already been destroyed on the same spot by the same community; a fourth had been procured, whose destruction meant silence-the opposition, grown more desperate, having already almost compassed the editor's assassination. He might have removed the "Observer" to Quincy or to Springfield, but there was no assurance that the liberty of the press would be vindicated in either place. The violence at Alton was, indeed, actually preceded and begotten by violence at St. Louis, but the mob-spirit was everywhere endemic at the North. With unsurpassable courage, Lovejoy accepted the decision of his friends that the stand should be made then and there, not as for an anti-slavery publication merely or mainly, but for the right under the Constitution and upon American soil to utter and print freely, subject only to the restraints and penalties of the law. To maintain this right against local public sentiment, the impotence of the city authorities compelled the friends of law and order to enroll themselves in a military organization (having the mayor's approval), whose first duty it was to prevent an anti-slavery convention from being broken up, and next to guard the newly-arrived press from being thrown into the Mississippi like its predecessors. Among them, not more in defence of himself or of his property than of the principle at stake, Lovejoy took his place; formed one of the little band of twenty who held the warehouse on the night of the fatal attack; volunteered, with a rash and magnanimous heroism, among the first who left the burning building to face the infuriated and drunken mob; was ambushed and fell, the only victim of the defence. The greatest feeling produced by this atrocity was in the city the most remote from the scene-in Boston, where, by a rich compensation, it overcame the timidity of Channing, revealed the oratory and fixed the destiny of Wendell Phillips, and with him drew Edmund Quincy into the forefront of the ranks of the despised abolitionists. The aldermen, who at first refused the use of Faneuil Hall for an indignation meeting, and Attorney-General Aus tin, who desecrated the hall afresh by declaring that Lovejoy had died as the fool dieth, were surprised by the demonstration of a new Boston upon which they had not counted. The Boston which had come near having its Lovejoy in the person of Mr. Garrison, in October, 1835, had undergone a revolution in two years-a revolution perhaps to be defined as the weakening of Southern ascendency. The response of Faneuil Hall to the Alton riot was Northern resentment against a pro-slavery invasion, as it seemed. With more exactness, however, it may be said that Lovejoy was sacrificed on Southern soil. All the towns along the Mississippi were frequented by Southerners, often largely settled by them. Little more than a dozen years had elapsed since the strenuous exertions of Governor Edward Coles had barely defeated the attempt of the Southern element in Illinois to legalize slavery by amending the constitution. Alton, situated in the southern half of the State, opposite the slave-cursed shore of Missouri and not far from St. Louis, in intimate commercial relations with the cotton-growing districts, was, though owing its prosperity, and even a certain reputation for philanthropy, to Eastern settlers, predominantly Southern in tone. Southern divines helped to harden public sentiment against the further countenance or toleration of Lovejoy; Southern doctors took an active part in the mob, and one of them perhaps fired the murderous shot. So, the year before, Cincinnati, tumbling Birney's press into the Ohio, was truly a Southern city; so, the year after, Philadelphia, burning Pennsylvania Hall to the ground. In fact, the least Southern and most surprising of all the mobs of that epoch was precisely the Boston mob against the editor of the "Liberator." Of this mob every citizen of Boston and its vicinity must have been reminded when the news came-not as now by telegraph-of Lovejoy's fate. "PEACEABLE SEPARATION" MOOTED BY THE ABOLITIONISTS OF 1845. THE [From the Same.] HE levers of disunion ready to the hands of the Massachusetts abolitionists were the recent expulsions of the State's delegates from South Carolina and Louisiana, and the impending annexation of Texas. At the annual meeting, Wendell Phillips reported resolves that the Governor should demand of the Federal Executive an enforcement of the Constitution, and the maintenance of Mr. Hoar's right to reside in Charleston; in default of which the Legislature should authorize the Governor to proclaim the Union at an end, recall the Congressional delegation, and provide for the State's foreign relations. This was the logic of the situation. So far as Massachusetts (or any free State) was concerned, South Carolina had dissolved the Union : Federal rights were disregarded in her borders, the Federal laws were subordinate or inoperative, Federal protection could have been exercised only by force and at the cost of a civil war. There could be no better occasion for weighing the value of the Union, or for taking the initiative in peaceable |