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‘Fold up the banners, smelt the guns’
The tangled heap is all that remains of hundreds of captured Confederate artillery carriages, gathered at the Watervliet Arsenal in Troy, New York, and burned for the iron.
A more impressive illustration of the line quoted from the stirring battle-ballad could hardly exist.
But Thompson's words were used in a higher sense.
Never more shall Americans level artillery or musketry upon their fellow-countrymen.
Gettysburg virtually decided that.
Not only so, but the people shall be bound together by active pride in their common blood and common traditions which finds expression in common hopes and aspirations for the future.
America has become a single country, with a central Government wielding sovereign power and holding among the nations of the earth a position of world-wide honor and influence.
One of the foremost New England historians, Professor Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard, declares: The keynote to which intelligent spirits respond most quickly in the United States is Americanism; no nation is more conscious of its own existence and its importance in the universe, more interested in the greatness, the strength, the pride, the influence, and the future of the common country. |
