SPIRIT AND SIGNIFICANCE
DECORATION DAY ADDRESS
BY JAMES A. GARFIELD
Extract from an Oration delivered at Arlington, Va.,
May 30, 1868
I am oppressed with a sense of the impropriety of uttering
words on this occasion. If silence is ever golden, it must be here beside the
graves of fifteen thousand men, whose lives were more significant than speech,
and whose death was a poem, the music of which can never be sung. With words we
make promises, plight faith, praise virtue. Promises may not be kept; plighted
faith may be broken; and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice. We do
not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke;
but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest
virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus
resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue. For
the noblest man that lives, there still remains a conflict. He must still
withstand the assaults of time and fortune, must still be assailed with
temptations, before which lofty natures have fallen; but with these the conflict
ended, the victory was won, when death stamped on them the great seal of heroic
character, and closed a record which years can never blot.
I know of nothing more appropriate on this occasion than to
inquire what brought these men here; what high motive led them to condense life
into an hour, and to crown that hour by joyfully welcoming death? Let us
consider.
Eight years ago this was the most unwarlike nation of the
earth. For nearly fifty years no spot in any of these states had been the scene
of battle. Thirty millions of people had an army of less than ten thousand men.
The faith of our people in the stability and permanence of their institutions
was like their faith in the eternal course of nature. Peace, liberty, and
personal security were blessings as common and universal as sunshine and
showers and fruitful seasons ; and all sprang from a single source, the old American
principle that all owe due submission and obedience to the lawfully expressed
will of the majority. This is not one of the doctrines of our political system
it is the system itself. It is our political firmament, in which all other
truths are set, as stars in Heaven. It is the encasing air, the breath of the Nation's
life. Against this principle the whole weight of the rebellion was thrown. Its
overthrow would have brought such ruin as might follow in the physical
universe, if the power of gravitation were destroyed, and
"Nature's concord broke,
Among the constellations war were sprung, Two planets, rushing from aspect malign
Of fiercest opposition, in mid-sky
Should combat, and their jarring spheres confound."
The Nation was summoned to arms by every high motive which
can inspire men. Two centuries of freedom had made its people unfit for
despotism. They must save their Government or miserably perish.
As a flash of lightning in a midnight tempest reveals the
abysmal horrors of the sea, so did the flash of the first gun disclose the
awful abyss into which rebellion was ready to plunge us. In a moment the fire
was lighted in twenty million hearts. In a moment we were the most warlike
Nation on the earth. In a moment we were not merely a people with an army we
were a people in arms. The Nation was in column not all at the front, but all
in the array.
I love to believe that no heroic sacrifice is ever lost; that
the characters of men are molded and inspired by what their fathers have done;
that treasured up in American souls are all the unconscious influences of the
great deeds of the Anglo-Saxon race, from Agincourt to Bunker Hill. It was such
an influence that led a young Greek, two thousand years ago, when musing on the
battle of Marathon, to exclaim, ' the trophies of Miltiades will not let me
sleep!' Could these men be silent in 1861; these, whose ancestors had felt the
inspiration of battle on every field where civilization had fought in the last
thousand years? Read their answer in this green turf. Each for himself gathered
up the cherished purposes of life its aims and ambitions, its dearest
affections and flung all, with life itself, into the scale of battle.
And now consider this silent assembly of the dead. What does
it represent? Nay, rather, what does it not represent? It is an epitome of the
war. Here are sheaves reaped in the harvest of death, from every battlefield of
Virginia. If each grave had a voice to tell us what its silent tenant last saw
and heard on earth, we might stand, with uncovered heads, and hear the whole
story of the war. We should hear that one perished when the first great drops
of the crimson shower began to fall, when the darkness of that first disaster
at Manassas fell like an eclipse on the Nation; that another died of disease
while wearily waiting for winter to end; that this one fell on the field, in
sight of the spires of Richmond, little dreaming that the flag must be carried
through three more years of blood before it should be planted in that citadel
of treason; and that one fell when the tide of war had swept us back till the
roar of rebel guns shook the dome of yonder Capitol, and re-echoed in the
chambers of the Executive Mansion. We should hear mingled voices from the
Rappahannock, the Rapidan, the Chickahominy, and the James ; solemn voices from
the Wilderness, and triumphant shouts from the Shenandoah, from Petersburg, and
the Five Forks, mingled with the wild acclaim of victory and the sweet chorus of
returning peace. The voices of these dead will forever fill the land like holy
benedictions.
What other spot so fitting for their last resting place as
this, under the shadow of the Capitol saved by their valor? Here, where the
grim edge of battle joined; here, where all the hope and fear and agony of
their country centered; here let them rest, asleep on the Nation's heart,
entombed in the Nation's love!
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