it may win parted friends from
their alienation; that it may inspire hope, and inaugurate universal
liberty; that it may say to the sword, "Return to thy sheath"; and
to the plow and sickle, "Go forth"; that it may heal all jealousies,
unite all policies, inspire a new national life, compact our
strength, purify our principles, ennoble our national ambitions, and
make this people great and strong, not for agression and
quarrelsomeness, but for the peace of the world, giving to us the
glorious prerogative of leading all nations to juster laws, to more
humane policies, to sincerer friendship, to rational, instituted
civil liberty, and to universal Christian brotherhood. Reverently,
piously, in hopeful patriotism, we spread this banner on the sky, as
of old the bow was painted on the cloud and, with solemn fervor,
beseech God to look upon it, and make it a memorial of an
everlasting covenant and decree that never again on this fair land
shall a deluge of blood prevail. Why need any eye turn from this
spectacle? Are there not associations which, overleaping the recent
past, carry us back to times when, over North and South, this flag
was honored alike by all? In all our colonial days we were one, in
the long revolutionary struggle, and in the scores of prosperous
years succeeding, we were united. When the passage of the Stamp Act
in 1765 aroused the colonies, it was Gadsden, of South Carolina,
that cried, with prescient enthusiasm, "We stand on the broad common
ground of those natural rights that we all feel and know as men.
There ought to be no New England man, no New Yorker, known on this
continent, but all of us," said he, "Americans." That was the voice
of South Carolina. That shall be the voice of South Carolina.
Faint is the echo; but it is coming. We now hear it sighing sadly
through the pines; but it shall yet break in thunder upon the shore.
No North, no West, no South, but the United States of America.
There is scarcely a man born in the South who has lifted his hand
against this banner but had a father who would have died for it. Is
memory dead? Is there no historic pride? Has a fatal fury struck
blindness or hate into eyes that used to look kindly towards each
other, that read the same Bible, that hung over the historic pages
of our national glory, that studied the same Constitution? Let this
uplifting bring back all of the past that was good, but leave in
darkness all that was bad. It was never bef