erker
fury," peculiar to the Teutonic and Norse peoples, seems to control
him as he recounts the dreadful features of the war and reminds the
vanquished of the meaning of defeat.

In considering the oratory inspired by the passions which found
their climax in the destructiveness of civil war,--and especially in
considering such magnificent outbursts as Mr. Beecher's oration at
Fort Sumter, intelligence will seek to free itself alike from
sympathy and from prejudice that it may the better judge the effect
of the general mind of the people on the orator, and the extent to
which that general mind as he voiced it, was influenced by the
strength of his individuality. If when we ourselves are moved by no
passion we judge with critical calmness the impassioned utterances
of the orators of any great epoch of disturbance, we can hardly fail
to be repelled by much that the critical faculties will reject as
exaggeration. But taking into account the environment, the
traditions, the public opinion, the various general or individual
impulses which influenced the oratory of one side or the other, we
can the better determine its true relation to the history of the
human intellect and that forward movement of the world which is but
a manifestation of the education of intellect.

Mr. Beecher had the temperament, the habits, the physique of the
orator. His ancestry, his intellectual training, his surroundings,
fitted him to be a prophet of the crusade against slavery. Of those
names which for a time were bruited everywhere as a result of the
struggles of the three decades from 1850 to 1880, a majority are
already becoming obscure, and in another generation most of the rest
will be "names only" to all who are not students of history as a
specialty. But the mind in Henry Ward Beecher was so representative;
he was so fully mastered by the forces which sent Sherman on his
march to the sea and Grant to his triumph at Appomattox, that he
will always be remembered as one of the greatest orators of the
Civil War period. Perhaps when the events of the war are so far
removed in point of time as to make a critical judgment really
possible, he may even rank as the greatest.

RAISING THE FLAG OVER FORT SUMTER (Delivered April 14th, 1865, by
request of President Lincoln)

On this solemn and joyful day we again lift to the breeze our
fathers' flag, now again the banner of the United States, with the
fervent prayer that God will crown it with