Southern Historical Society Papers, Volume 21.
Reverend J. William Jones, Ed.

[39] of war. The blood was hardly dry upon the battle-fields, the dead were not yet all buried, the smouldering ruins were still smoking, and the echoes of the closing cannonades had hardly ceased to resound in our ears. All was desolation in the present—doubt and fear for the future. So sudden and so complete had been our fall that we lay stunned beneath the crushing blow, with no strength but to suffer, no energy but to despair!

But time rolled on and brought healing upon his wings. The ruined homesteads have been rebuilt. The ploughshare has turned up the soil enriched by the slaughter of war. The luxuriant grass has covered up the graves of the fallen. Some years more and a few slight ridges in the plain, a few mutilated trunks in the forest, will alone mark the spot where rose the bristling fortifications and the red-mouthed artillery shot out its thunders.

And not in the material world alone has the gentle hand of time closed the gaping wounds of war. It has also poured its balm in our sorrowing hearts. It has soothed the agony of recent bereavement and defeat; it has showed us that we have still a country to live for—a country which, if we cannot, as we once fondly hoped, raise to power and proud independence, we can still love and render prosperous by the arts of peace, as we made her illustrious, even in defeat, by the fortitude of our struggle. And now, though many bitter things are still to be endured and the regrets for what might have been, can never cease to exist, yet the light of hope shines brighter and brighter before our eyes, and speaks to us of better days in the future.

But with time and returning prosperity come also the waters of oblivion, whose rising tide threatens to engulf all the vestiges of the past. Here and there a stricken heart, wounded to its inmost core, and alone knowing its own bitterness, will cherish its sacred grief until time itself shall be no more. But without a proper effort on our part there is danger that the corroding cares of the present and the absorbing exertions for existence may make us or our descendants forget the rightfulness of our cause, and the heroic martyrs who fell in its defence.

And beside all this, upon their fate and history lies there not the blight of failure and defeat?

Those who fall in the arms of victory and success need no monuments to preserve their memories. The continued existence and prosperity of their country are sufficient epitaphs, and their names can never be forgotten. But how shall those be remembered who failed? It is their enemies who write their history—painting it with