The Photographic History of The Civil War: in ten volumes, Thousands of Scenes Photographed 1861-65, with Text by many Special Authorities, Volume 9: Poetry and Eloquence.
Francis Trevelyan Miller, Ed.

That the survivors of the Southern armies were as loyal to the Union as the survivors of the Northern came out very clearly in those same years. In 1887, Adjutant-General Drum suggested the return of the Confederate battle-flags then in the War Department at Washington to the governors of the States from whose troops they had been captured. President Cleveland accordingly ordered their return, but on account of dissatisfaction in some quarters soon revoked the order. When Governor Fitzhugh Lee, of Virginia, heard of the Northern protest he declared: ‘The country should not again be agitated by pieces of bunting that mean nothing now. The South is part and parcel of the Union to-day, and means to do her part toward increasing its prosperity and maintaining the peace of the Republic.’ The leading Southern newspapers treated the subject in a similar spirit. The Atlanta Constitution said the flags would have been received ‘as a solemn pledge that the last spark of resentment between the two best armies the sun ever shone on had died out forever.’ It at the same time recorded its belief that ‘the great American heart can neither be misled nor deterred. It has determined that there shall be peace. . . . The war is over; its results are fixed; its passions are dead, and its heroism and sacrifices have bound this people together as they were never bound before.’ It was, then, no exaggeration for that eminent Mississippian, L. Q. C. Lamar, in his oration at Charleston, the center of secession, at the unveiling of the statue of Calhoun, the apostle of States' rights, to declare that the appeal to arms in 1861 guaranteed and established ‘the indissolubility of the American Union and the universality of American freedom.’

How true this was proving was demonstrated in 1898 by the War with Spain. That ninety days expedition was more influential than any other one event in drawing North and South into relations of exultant brotherhood. Congress re-