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[461] twenty-fourth year of his age. It was his lot to be tried in great events, and his fortune to be equal to the trial. In his boyhood he had nourished noble ambitions, in his young manhood he had won a fame greater than his modest nature ever dreamed, and, at last, there was accorded him on the field of battle the death counted sweet and honorable.

And thus I might go on and quote by the page the dying words of these dying heroes which are indeed ‘apples of gold in pictures of silver,’ and show that they were taught by God's Spirit how to live and how to die. But these must now suffice.

But I would cheerfully leave this whole question of the permanent moral and religious influence of our army revivals to the conduct of the ‘men who wore the gray’ since the war; for while thousands slept in soldiers' graves, many came back to resume their old places, or rather to make for themselves new places in business and social circles. These men were exposed to some peculiar temptations at the close of the war, and it would not have been strange if they had entered upon a career of lawlessness which would have made the condition of our unhappy South far worse than it was.

After four years absence from any industrial pursuit, with fondly cherished hopes all blighted, plans all frustrated, fortunes swept away, and avenues of business all closed, they returned to their desolated homes. Alas! in many instances blackened ruins marked the spot of their once happy homes, and there were loved ones to tell tales of outrage and wrong which men of Anglo-Saxon blood have not been wont to hear unmoved.

To make matters worse (under the then avowed purpose of Andrew Johnson to ‘make treason odious’) there were stationed in every county squads of ‘blue coats,’ provost marshals and freedman's bureau agents, who were not always discreet, and not unfrequently did or said things well calculated to provoke serious collisions between these returned soldiers and themselves, or the newly emancipated negroes. Then followed the ‘carpet-bag’ and ‘negro rule’ of the Southern States, which is a blot upon our history, at which every true American should blush, and concerning which Dr. John A. Broadus so well said at an educational banquet in Brooklyn four years after the war: ‘You brethren at the North think that you have a great deal for which to forgive the South for the four years of war. I will not discuss that. But I tell you, brethren, we of the South have ’

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