We see them all as they march proudly away under the flaunting flags,
keeping time to the grand, wild music of war; marching down the streets
of the great cities, through the towns and across the prairies, down to
the fields of glory, to do and to die for the eternal right. We go with
them, one and all. We are by their side on all the gory fields, in all
the hospitals of pain, on all the weary marches. We stand guard with
them in the wild storm and under the quiet stars. We are with them in
ravines running with blood, in the furrows of old fields. We are with
them between contending hosts, unable to move, wild with thirst, the
life ebbing slowly away among the withered leaves. We see them pierced
by balls and torn with shells, in the trenches, by forts, and in the
whirlwind of the charge, where men become iron, with nerves of steel. We
are with them in the prisons of hatred and famine; but human speech can
never tell what they endured. We are at home when the news comes that
they are dead. We see the maiden in the shadow of her first sorrow. We
see the silvered head of the old man bowed with the last grief.

The past rises before us, and we see four millions of human beings
governed by the lash; we see them bound hand and foot; we hear the
strokes of cruel whips; we see the hounds tracking women through tangled
swamps. We see babes sold from the breasts of mothers. Cruelty
unspeakable! Outrage infinite! Four million bodies in chains--four
million souls in fetters. All the sacred relations of wife, mother,
father and child trampled beneath the brutal feet of might. And all this
was done under our own beautiful banner of the free. The past rises
before us. We hear the roar and shriek of the bursting shell. The broken
fetters fall. These heroes die. We look. Instead of slaves we see men
and women and children. The wand of progress touches the auction-block,
the slave-pen, the whipping-post, and we see homes and firesides and
schoolhouses and books, and where all was want and crime and cruelty and
fear, we see the faces of the free.

These heroes are dead. They died for liberty; they died for us. They are
at rest. They sleep in the land they made free, under the flag they
rendered stainless, under the solemn pines, the sad hemlocks, the
tearful willows, and the embracing vines. They sleep beneath the shadows
of the clouds, careless alike of sunshine or of storm, each in the
windowless palace of rest. Earth may run red wi