diest civil war in history, the Stars and
Stripes arose in all its glory at Appomattox, and fluttered again over the
fort in Charleston Harbor, so nobly defended by the illustrious Major
Anderson.

Alternate success and defeat came to the Union army and the Confederate
forces. Bull Run, Donelson, Shiloh, Antietam, Stone River, Vicksburg,
Chickamauga, Missionary Ridge, Spottsylvania, Fredericksburg, the
Wilderness, and Gettysburg, are battle milestones of the Republic that
shall never be forgotten so long as valor and manhood find a lodgment in
the human heart.

Gettysburg is the mausoleum of the American Marathon and the Thermopylae of
Liberty. The grandest heroes of the world died here.

_"They fell, devoted, but undying;
The very gales their names seem sighing;
The waters murmur of their name;
The woods are peopled with their fame;
The silent pillars, lone and gray,
Claim kindred with their silent clay;
Their spirits wrap the dusky mountain,
Their memory sparkles o'er the fountain;
The meanest rill, the mightiest river
Rolls mingling with their fame forever!"_

What soldier at Gettysburg will ever forget the terrible battles of the
1st, 2d and 3d of July, 1863, when

GENERAL MEAD AND GENERAL LEE,

with two hundred thousand Americans met in deadly conflict for the
salvation or destruction of the Great Republic?

The vales and rills and rocks and hills for twenty miles around trembled
with the onslaught of the contending hosts, and from Culp's Hill to
Cemetery Heights and Round Top the smoke and blaze of the rifle and the
cannon lit up the bloody scene with the concussion of an earthquake and
volcano, and the climax charge of Pickett's Division punctured the bravest
and most unavailing assault ever made by heroic soldiers; and although
these warriors in "gray" were doomed to defeat by the defenders of the
Union, they deserve a crown of unfading glory for imperishable American
valor.

Standing by the side of

PRESIDENT ABRAHAM LINCOLN

on the heights of Gettysburg, on the 19th of November, 1863, I heard him
deliver before a multitude of people the following eloquent and
philosophic address in dedicating the great National Cemetery:

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil