A glance backward.
Let us glance backward.
Thirty-one years ago, on the soil of this very commonwealth, the man to whom we erect this monument lay manacled in a casement of a strongly-garrisoned fortress, charged with the most atrocious crimes known to man—treason and murder.
He had been the unanimously-chosen leader of a true people, who, actuated by a pure and lofty patriotism, after exhausting every effort at compromise, made an attempt to establish a new nation; and after a bitter struggle of four years, after nearly four million soldiers had met in the shock of battle, and over 2,000 battlefields had blazed with glorious deeds, went down in darkness and blood.
Success is the measure of merit applied alike to every man, to every cause; and even in our moral judgments we sentence the unfortunate.
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Men do not idly erect monuments to lost causes.
Fame has no trumpet for failure.
The world hears not the voice of the vanquished.
Yet history might teach us strange things of men who fail and causes that are lost.
Genius did not keep
Hannibal or
Napoleon from defeat; heroism went with Joan of Arc to the stake, and
Emmett to the scaffold.
The eloquence of
Demosthenes did not save
Greece, or
Cato's virtue
Rome.
The courage of
Kosciusko availed naught for
Poland, and
Hungary went down for all the patriotism of
Kossuth.
Sometimes defeat gives a tragic pathos which lifts the commonplace into the immortal, and tenderly preserves the memory of the vanquished long after the victor has been forgotten.
Since the death of
Napoleon there has been no career which illustrates so dramatically the vicissitudes of fortune as that of
Jefferson Davis.
Born amid the rugged surroundings of a frontier State, he lived to win the triple glory of the soldier, the orator, and the statesman.
He became the ruler of 7,000,000 of people.
His government was overwhelmed, his fortune swept away.
He was bound as a criminal and prosecuted for his life.
He became an exile.
He was denied the rights of citizenship.
He was defamed, denounced, insulted, ridiculed to the hour of his death.
And yet he died by millions more sincerely mourned and deeply beloved than any other man in the history of the nation.
If his enemies had succeeded in putting him to death he would have been the most conspicuous figure in American history.