in
battering down Fort Sumter, it was the fanatics of slavery themselves
who called upon their idolized institution ruin swift and complete.
What law and reason were unable to accomplish, had now to be done by
that uncertain and dreadful dispenser of God's judgments, War--War,
with its abominably casual, inaccurate methods, destroying good and bad
together, but at last able to hew a way out of intolerable situations,
when through man's delusion of perversity every better way is blocked.

Our great western republic had from its origin been a singular anomaly.
A land of freedom, boastfully so-called, with human slavery enthroned
at the heart of it, and at last dictating terms of unconditional
surrender to every other organ of its life, what was it but a thing of
falsehood and horrible self-contradiction? For three-quarters of a
century it had nevertheless endured, kept together by policy,
compromise, and concession. But at the last that republic was torn in
two; and truth was to be possible under the flag. Truth, thank God,
truth! even though for the moment it must be truth written in hell-fire.

And this, fellow-citizens, is why, after the great generals have had
their monuments, and long after the abstract soldier's-monuments have
been reared on every village green, we have chosen to take Robert Shaw
and his regiment as the subjects of the first soldier's-monument to be
raised to a particular set of comparatively undistinguished men. The
very lack of external complication in the history of these soldiers is
what makes them represent with such typical purity the profounder
meaning of the Union cause.

Our nation had been founded in what we may call our American religion,
baptized and reared in the faith that a man requires no master to take
care of him, and that common people can work out their salvation well
enough together if left free to try. But the founders had not dared to
touch the great intractable exception; and slavery had wrought until at
last the only alternative for the nation was to fight or die. What
Shaw and his comrades stand for and show us is that in such an
emergency Americans of all complexions and conditions can go forth like
brothers, and meet death cheerfully if need be, in order that this
religion of our native land shall not become a failure on earth.

We of this Commonwealth believe in that religion; and it is not at all
because Robert Shaw was an exceptional genius, but simply becaus