4r
[Stenographic Report.]
Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. President and Comrades :
It is altogether meet and proper that at each of our
annual reunions an hour should he devoted to remi
niscences and an address.
As we wax older, as the years come and go, as our
numbers in the course of nature decrease, we can look
back upon stormy days, and though they may appear
afar to those of a later generation, we, as we march
o'er life's circling highway and look across it instead of
around it, view them as though they were even now
close upon us, they having been impressed upon us by
march, by battle, by wounds, by death, by all. that goes
to make bloody war. We are passing away, passing
away. Those of us who were then young have be
come middle-aged; those of us who were middle-aged
are now old and are calmly awaiting our muster-out;
those of us who were old have bivouacked forever. A
score of years hence there will be but few of us left in
the ranks of life to tell the tale of the war.
After we shall have made our last march, shall have
answered our last roll-call, then will some historian
take in hand the story of the war and fashion it into a
goodly tale to tell our offspring what we did from '61
to '65. Will our historian be as erudite as Gibbon, as
pious as Rollin, as philosophical as Hume, as preju
diced as Scott, as industrious as Macaulay, as thorough
as Motley ? Will he be blind but able to gaze farther,
clearer into ages past than that student untiring, ripe
scholar, good man, Prescott, or will he misrepresent
like Abbott ? Will he have a bushel of brains, live
more than five-and-eighty years without a stomach, and

0' u

butcher the King's English outrageously, like the quaint
Scotchman, whose only pleasures were work and suck
ing a long-stemmed clay pipe ? Will he inflict upon his
countrymen thousands of heavy-footed, leaden sen
tences, such as Bancroft mercilessly piled upon us for
two generations ? Perhaps he may be another King-
lake. If so, we will rest content. He is in the womb
of Time, yet to be delivered.
His material will be in splendid condition, and it is to
be hoped that Olio will smile upon and thus enable him
to write, not to show his diction, his erudition, his
rhetoric, his skill, as too many considerable historians
have done, but may he tell naught but simple truth.
We who drew saber and pulled trigger then can need
no higher panegyric, and what will his story be ? Start
ing from the over-peopled continent of Europe and the
British Isles he will tell of the adventurous Genoese,
who sailed westerly with the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa
Maria and he presented to the Court of Castile two
mighty continents, and then came the greed and blood
shed of the Fifteenth Century which emptied upon
these newly-won shores the adventurers of that age.
How they butchered the aborigines, wrung from them
and theirs the new lands, secured a foothold and pressed
upon the then barbaric peoples here such civilization as
was then extant; how the Latins trended toward the
south and the Saxons toward the north, and what is now
a part of the grandest nation upon God's blessed foot
stool became certain colonies of England; how unwise
laws of Parliament forced those colonies to sever the
umbilical cord which bound them to their mother; how
the babe waxed lusty, and grew and grew to man's
estate, and then became a giant among giants, a gov
ernment among the many governments of the world,
and how, why, when, where that giant battled within

3
a vast amphitheater for his very life and emerged tri
umphant^ from the bloody arena.
With all the prescience, the wisdom of our early leg
islators there was left within the physical being of their
offspring an hereditary taint, as some thought, a spark
of health, as others believed, which was to grow into a
loathsome ulcer upon the body-politic or to be extirpated
by the knife of the surgeon, which our Southern friends
mistook for the knife of the assassin. The day of com
promises, or even the consideration thereof, had come
and gone, and war, the Supreme Court of Nations, had
to adjudicate the question. There was a faint glim
mering, away off upon the horizon, in October, 1859,
at Harper's Ferry, which told of a storm that was bound
to come unless the wind changed; but it did not change
and along came 1861, and then was heard the hurrying
of marching feet and the cry to arms throughout the
land. Prior thereto, from metal lips, in Charleston
harbor, the Confederacy sp/ke and its hoarse voice had
echoed and re-echoed from sea to sea from lakes to gulf.
We, whose ages permitted, remembered when blood
was flowing in the Crimea and we fancied then that
war could not come to us, that Neptune would drown
Mars ere he could reach our shores, but Clio should
have taught us better or we should have listened unto
her calm voice and learned truth from her patient rec
ords. Since Cain slew Abel men have fought. Our
little ones can turn to their school-books and learn that,
and when those little ones come to man's estate the
larger tomes will teach them that scarce a nation ever
passed a quarter -century without war.
Is this humanity's doom ? Can nothing but ad
versity, in some form, fashion a manly man ? Must
the adversity of nations, War, be as much of a neces
sity to render them fit to maintain themselves among

the Powers ? Reasoning from the past — and what else
can we reason from as the future is mercifully shrouded
from humanity ? — it would seem that men have fought
since the dark deed in Ettep,- the primeval murder, out
raged the Creator and our race began in blood.
If this be so, if the teachings of the great Teacher,
which have been extant since the Star was seen in the
East, have brought man no nearer Peace than he now
is, when, oh, when will the day come when wars and
the rumors of wars will be no longer heard ? For cen
turies we have listened unto much of the mechanical
improvements of arms and projectiles rendering war
no longer necessary, no longer possible. When gun
powder succeeded the bow, lance, shield, sword; when
the flint-lock came after the match-lock; when the per
cussion cap crumbled flints; when rifling made smooth
bores obsolete; when the conical missile drove the bullet
away and the breech-loader barked the muzzle-loader
into silence; when magazine guns proved that columns
of infantry could be annihilated ere bayonet work could
be brought into play; when the iron-clads, in 1862,
thundered across the waters that oaken-walls were
paper- walls and proud frigates were but hulks, at such
times the carpet-knights said there would be no more
wars. Therein were they mistaken.
It had been well if they were prophets true, as the
soldier is happiest when the bugles sound truce, but his
knowledge of camp, march, battle, bivouac gives him
profound insight into human nature, and unless that is
changed, and radically changed, wars will come and
wars will go until the last syllable of recorded time.
Notwithstanding Balances of Power, Holy Alliances,
Pragmatic Sanctions, and, in these later days, Arbitra
tions, man has continued to compound and burn villain-

ous gunpowder. We know not why famine, pestilence,
war should be, but we must accept the conditions, and
the first must be met and conquered by industry, the
second by the physician's art, the third by the educated
soldier. To fashion and to defend a State requires the
soldier and the soldier's art. Who, then, will denounce
him and his profession ? Who dare assert that a Gov
ernment can be exercised until its brawn, its army, is
developed into a mighty engine of defense and offense,
to defend itself if need were or conquer when such
necessity may arise ? Should we thrust from us into
the Battle of Life, the struggling world, our offspring
until we fashion weapons for them to defend them
selves withal ? Shall we rear our heads as a people of
70,000,000 and have no means of defense and offense,
when all the circumnavigated globe bears steel-clad
monsters of foreign make, manned by foreign crews ? —
when a republic of 12,000,000 people is just beyond our
southern border, and all across our northern frontier
would be nationally bound to obey the orders of the
mother-country across the sea ? — when within our body-
politic are 255,000 ruthless savages, who will not amal
gamate, who have butchered and tortured unnumbered
thousands of our pioneers, who could not now be re
strained upon Reservations had not the buffalo been
exterminated ? A Government without an Army would
be like unto a second Gulliver, overcome by sleep and
bound hand and foot by later Lilliputians.
Statistics are not extant — indeed statistical science is
modern, although many of our later writers imagine lots
of them — but,, from the cities that then were and are
now not, or much reduced in populations, we can well
believe that, considering the then crudity of food-pro
duction and commerce, the Continent and the British
Isles were over-peopled when the idea of the rotundity

6
of our planet was impressed upon the tenacious mind
of the great navigator, the adventurous Genoese, and,
after two months westerly steering, he found vent for
the teeming millions. It were a mere consumption of
time to rehearse our early settlements, the Colonies,
and the shaking loose from our Mother Country, and
how those who were skilled in state-craft, over the
sea, wagged their wise heads in doubt when our fore
fathers fashioned a Republic. A King and a Nobility
here were not to be, but a Government by the people
and for the people they would have, and all the rest of
civilized men looked upon the mighty experiment with
doubt and wonder.
Was man able to govern himself or was he to be
governed ? History tells us of Republics galore, from
Rome to France, that were and then were not, and the
wise heads were wagged again when the lanyard was
drawn in Charleston harbor, and the thunder of guns
thence echoed and re-echoed around this mundane
sphere and they fancied another Republic had gone the
way of its many predecessors. Therein were those
wise heads wofully mistaken. Such a springing to
arms of a peaceful people was never seen before.
Country took the place of Party, and the printing-
presses spun out countless volumes on the Art of War,
by Jomini, Tiernay, Charles, Loyd, Clauswitz, Mar-
mont, Dufour, Schalck which were devoured and as
similated by him who had been busy in the school, the
college, the mine, the field, the factory, the office, the
workshop, the counting-room. A citizen was he as
free as the all-encasing air, to come and go as he
pleased, to range the seas, to delve into Earth's bowels
and drag her precious metals into the sunshine of pros
perity and utility, to tickle her fair form and make her
laugh in plenty, to feed his flocks and herds upon her

bounty, to tear from her very vitals crude materials
and fashion them into his needed structures, to clamp
her with bands of steel and stretch across her veins
and arteries engineering devices so he could riot over
her form, and above her buxom bosom he had strung a
mighty iEolian harp, which was murmuring its happy
hymn of commerce internal — but all this he gave up
right willingly and subordinated himself to the orders
of a Commander-in-Chief, to come and go at his beck
and call, to march, to fight, to die.
Oh, the days of '61 when a mob instead of an army
battled with another mob instead of an army on the
banks of an insignificant stream in Virginia, and the
defeat we met there in a fair fight and a fit field; and
oh, the hideous retreat therefrom which well-nigh de
generated into a general rout; and oh, the tedious de
lays we sweltered through until that crude ore was
fused and beaten into fine steel, and then into a trusty
blade wherewith a way was to be hewn to an honorable
peace. It were idle to rehearse the move to the Peninsula
and our failure there; the second defeat in the front of
Washington; the oncoming of our old commander and
the bloody struggle on the banks of the Antietam; the
delays and delays thereafter; the third advance into
Virginia under another and the terrible repulse at Fred
ericksburg; the chagrining, mortifying defeat at Chan-
cellorsville under another; the sunburst of victory at
Gettysburg under still another; the retreat of our foes
therefrom and the campaign of maneuvers in Virginia
during the winter of '63-'64. And then there came
out of the West a small man, with three stars on each
shoulder, and we were fought for all that fighting was
worth, and precious blood made fat the land in the
Wilderness till veterans of all those campaigns stood

8
aghast, but ability and tenacity were in the saddle, and
we fought to water and bridged it, and then ran against
the lines of Petersburg and sat down to a ten-months
siege. Thence, in pursuit, when spring came, we fol
lowed our then foes to an obscure court-house, sur
rounded them, and he who had brought us through all
this blood, toil, glory, turned to his commissary, waved
his hand toward the paroled and said: "General, feed
those gallant, hungry men over yonder."
For four long years the thunder of guns had echoed
and re-echoed over land and sea to the uttermost ends of
the earth, but this generous act of the victor bad stilled
that clamor, and the Angel of Peace spread his far-
reaching pinions over a continent and all was fraternity
and good-will. What then did this Giant of the West,
America? He first cast a warlike glance toward the
Rio Grande, but he shed no drop of brother's blood in
punishment or revenge, thank God. And then what
did he ? He doffed his uniform, threw down his blood
stained arms, took up the implements of peace, went to
work and paid a thousand-million of his debt in twenty
years, something never heard of before in the wide
world's history; and he molded things with the ballot
in such a fashion that they who fought against Old
Glory would now right loyally give their grit and skill
and valor to defend it, should a foreign foe dare raise
hand to strike a star or strip a stripe from the glorious
colors. There was one across the seas, who came to us at the
century's dawn and who left us, we trust, for higher
rewards in 1859; who had borne himself eminently in
Parliament, who had served his nation well in India,
whose poetry is slush, whose essays are masterly, whose
history is a classic, but who had never placed foot upon
American soil and who, therefore, knew not our land

9
and people, who said: "Your Ship of State is all sail,
and no rudder." Ah! my Lord Macaulay, would that
your precious life had been spared another decade of
years; what would you have seen to disturb your phi
losophy ? That that Ship of State was not all sail and
no rudder, but it was well equipped from keel to royals,
from bowsprit to stern, with a hand at the helm which
steered her into a harbor of safety after the seas of war
had raged about her for four, long, bloody years. All
Europe stood in open-mouthed awe and wonder when
it saw the push, the drive, the vim, the dare of the
American soldier, and the astonishing adaptability a
peaceful people displayed in buckling on its armor and
wielding its mighty weapons, and they thanked God
over there that 3,000 miles of salt waters rolled between
their monarchies and this awakened Giant.
And that war was done, but hearken unto it, oh, my
masters: .There was a short man, duck-legged, with a
waxed mustache, oui, monsieur, who first saw blessed
daylight in 1808; who had from youth a high ambition;
who had made a descent upon Boulogne sur mer; who
had justly suffered imprisonment in Ham; who had
escaped therefrom with a pipe in his mouth and a plank
on his shoulder, and then led an immoral life in Lon
don; who had become the President of a Republic of
generous people; who shattered that Republic and from
a shelf a precious diadem stole and put it in his pocket;
who, from the sumptuous Tuileries, had buzzed into the
ear of a tall young man an empty tale of empire and
glory — that the United States of America were hope
lessly riven and he would support him in Mexico.
Verily that war was done, but then was heard an omi
nous click from an instrument and the banks of the Rio
Grande echoed to the tramp of some who had marched

10
in the ranks of the Army of the Potomac and her sister
armies, and behold! From Vera Cruz soldiers, who had
shown their gallantry in Algeria, the Crimea, at Magenta
and Solferino, took shipping and sailed easterly to
France, and by-and-by the tall young man, whose eager
ear had drunk the seductive tale of empire from an
Emperor's lips, shed his heart's blood at Queretaro.
What an exhibition! without firing a shot, by a mere
demonstration, a Power of the first-class was forced to
withdraw its fleet and army and carry them back to
Brest, Boulogne, Havre, Marseilles, Toulon, and this de
sirable result was brought about by a Republic, which,
but four years before, had a regular army of only 17,000
officers and men, and a militia whose annual musters
were convivial, farcical and ridiculous.
What came to pass thereafter? A million men who
had roughed it in camp, march, battle, bivouac, who
had become inured to war and all that war means,
were to be reabsorbed into the body-politic. Once more
those across the waters recorded their dire forebodings:
"That could not be," said they; "look ye now at what
will follow; read ye of Greece, Rome, Carthage and so
on down to modern France — there is a Man on Horse
back to appear." Again were they mistaken over there,
and they acknowledged their error with noble candor
when they saw that army doff its blue and put on its
fustian, its business-suit, its professional -garb, its dress-
coat, and the discipline of war, as it did with Crom
well's veterans, prove to be the sire of industry, econ
omy, success and good citizenship.
And then another shaft of ill omen, barbed with
envy, plumed with ill wishes, came quivering across
Atlantic's multitudinous seas. The Giant of the West
had throttled rebellion, to be sure, but his possessions,
as vast as Brazil, as vast as Australia, were overgrown;

11
too thinly peopled to prosper? the enormous financial
expenditure of the war was greater than he could bear;
old governments, which had breathed the breath of life
for centuries, had not rolled up such a debt as he had
created in his youth; his moneys, his securities were
worthless and he was in the depths of financial despair.
So said the money-changers at Frankfort, London,
Amsterdam. There had been a Richelieu, a Talleyrand,
aMetternich, a Nesselrode, and there was a Bismarck,
a Cavour, a Disraeli, an Antonelli over there, but here
was an illustrious son of this grand Empire State, a
Seward, and away up in the northwest was an inhos
pitable land which was lorded over by a friend we had
in continental Europe, Russia. We needed not, wanted
not that territory for physical reasons, we had land to
burn, but morally, politically, its possession by the
United States at that juncture were magnificent, and
this Giant of the West plunged his horny, thrifty hand
into his capacious purse, withdrew therefrom millions
in glittering gold, hurled it across the stormy Atlantic
and the boisterous Baltic into the coffers of St. Peters
burg, and thus added vast Alaska to his possessions.
Here was a far-reaching stroke of state, so adroitly
cloaked that many of our own people saw it not, which
started many wholesome thoughts over there. How
could an impoverished people lavish their gold thus?
The money-changers in those marts were thunderstruck,
and the securities of the United States are the security
of all other securities, and rule higher everywhere than
any other government security ever uttered in the his
tory of men.
And still another wrong was to be righted: - When
this Giant of the West was battling for his very life a
Power had assisted his then enemy in sweeping his com
merce from the seas. That Power had heard the mag-

12
netic click which hurled the French from Mexico, had
seen the exercise of his mighty brawn, had just appre
ciated his warlike strength, and a Joint High Commis
sion sat themselves down, begot the Geneva Convention
and, by simple arithmetic, the millions of pounds sterl
ing necessary to cancel that wrong were taken from
the treasures of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street,
and paid to our seamen, who had been plundered by
English arms, English crews, English ships, com
manded by Confederate officers.
Oh ye scholars, oh ye students, oh ye reading men,
oh ye who will march o'er life's highway after we shall
have become dust, turn ye to the annals from Herodotus
to our brilliant, beloved., Princetonian ,Sloane, and tell
us truly, we implore^ was there ever a war so thoroughly
fought out, so completely successful, so overwhelmingly
beneficial to a people? As the Seven Years War made
Prussia, did not the Four Years War make the United
States what they are?
We trust we were and hope we always may be char
itable. We know that nineteen centuries ago, in a
manger in the East, a Babe was brought forth, and that
Babe we fondly, fervently believe was a new recruit
who came to join our poor human ranks, and He
brought with Him, from the General-in-Chief up yonder,
a Countersign to pass us into Higher Camps; and He
confounded the doctors, and He worked as a carpenter,
and He went around and about doing good, and He
taught His disciples charity, sweet charity. Man is a
creature of circumstances; nature cannot choose its
origin. Had we been born Turks, we would be Moham
medans to-day; had our parents been Israelites, we would
be Israelites; had our mothers been reared under India's
broiling sun, during our squalling age, when we were
young, juicy, tender, we would have been tossed into

19
the Ganges and comfortably cradled in the stomach of
a crocodile. A man's birth, education, surroundingg
mold his character and fashion his sentiments and
opinions. When the lanyard was drawn in 1861 and
Mars rang out his dire alarum that startled a continent,
it depended upon surroundings as to the side the musket
was to be shouldered for; the Pennsylvanian, the Ohi$an,
the New Yorker, the Vermonter fought for the Stars
and Stripes; the Georgian, the Texan, the Virginian,
the Carolinian fought for the Stars and Bars, but now,
in these later days, we know that they who fought us
as gallant men will defend Old Glory as gallant men
should necessity therefor arise. ,(LuJ+ .d<\( «"'
What wrought the war? Peace and Unity and all
that peace and unity can mean. It was a harsh, harsh
lesson, but our People learned it well. Did not the
awful experience of a four years' war, the Nation's
adversity, bring out its true greatness and character
and carry it farther toward solidity, strength, confi
dence, thrift and all material well-being than a century
of drowsy peace could have done? And more; did not
the gallant Southern men, who fought us down yonder,
see through all that blood, and toil, and strife the true
value of Unity, and are we not all prospering as coun
try never prospered in all the annals of time? Truly
"He works in a mysterious way His wonders to per
form." But the voice of the croaker is heard in our land.
Our Constitution is a rope of sand which cannot bind
the country after our population shall have numbered
its hundreds of millions as it now does its tens of mil
lions; diversified interests will demand different gov
ernments and pedifcieK. The merchants, the miners, the
grazers, the planters, the capitalists, the manufacturers,
the laborers, the sea-farers cannot then be held together

14
without a great standing army and permanent executives.
There was a tall, sad, honest, humorous man, who split
rails and worked on a flatboat, who studied law and sat
in our legislative halls, whom we loved, honored, obeyed,
and we dropped a soldier's tear on his bloody bier,
whose fame, whose name will echo along the Corridors
of Time as long as men read and ponder, who said :
"We will not cross that bridge till we come to it."
What wrought the war ? A mighty object-lesson was
it which we would fain commend to the statesman, not
to the diplomat, not to the politician over the sea. Al
though he may read of dire failures of many republics,
here is a republic which has come to stay, and where
fore ? Verily it is based upon the general education of
its people. Our public schools, our parochial schools,
our private schools take from their mothers our young
and teach them love of country, loyalty, good citizen
ship. Had other republics been based upon that Rock
of Ages, we believe they would have endured. It is a
fundamental principle of all government that Ignorance
requires the strong hand of a Governor; Intelligence
can — nay, it will — govern itself. The astonishing .gen
eral education of our people cannot be understood by
those across the waters from printed words. They must
come into direct, personal contact therewith to see,
know, appreciate it. When that monster of erudition
denounced our Ship of State as all sail and no rudder,
he knew not that within, yet independent of, our gen
eral government our States and their corporations were
spending more money" upon -the educational institu
tions than any government in Continental Europe was
spending upon its standing army.
Comrades, it were arrogance to claim that the Army
of the Potomac alone wrought peace, but it can be said
that it met, in two-score battles, the largest, ablest,

15
best-commanded army of the insurgents and, after the
graceful surrender of that gallant army at Appomattox
the stricken Confederacy tumbled into mere lumber
which required the touchstone of the statesman to
fashion it into wholesome political life.
It fell to the men of our generation to fight out the
war, and that we did; to bind the nation's wounds, and
that we did; to care for the maimed, the widowed, the
fatherless, and that we did, and that we are doing, and
that we will continue to do; and now, as we are wax
ing old, we would fain turn over this glorious land,
nation, country, government to the goodly keeping of
later generations — and what is that land ? A country
so vast in geographical area that no human mind' can
comprehend its immensity, stretching from lakes to
gulf, from sea to sea, comprising more than 3,000,000
square miles; a country teeming with everything its
people could wish to minister to their happiness, com
fort, wealth; a country where love of home, and honor
for age, and patience with youth is well-nigh universal;
a country springing ahead with such gigantic strides
that all the rest of civilized men are indeed looking
upon it with opened-mouthed awe and wonder; a country
where law and order reign supreme and the ballot de
cides the differences of men; a country where social
equality is mere craziness, but where every man is a
man before the law; a country so tranquil in peace and
so stormy in war that the peoples across the waters
would think a thousand time ere they would ruffle it; a
country where^nstead of millions of men under arms,
as there are over yonder, he«e our brain and brawn
are busy in all the manifold walks of industrial life; a
country where the wholesome sense of its citizens is
such that Anarchists are taught to stretch hemp and
dance on air; a country where the abominable laws of

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16
primogeniture have no place upon the statute-book; a
country where woman is more honored and loved than
anywhere else on God's blessed footstool; a country
where the door of the public school is open to all, with
out money and without price, and the spires are point
ing upward, and the Sabbath-bell is ringing out God's
blessed music — "Peace on earth, goodwill toward men."
Oh, ye young men, may ye love, honor, defend, per
petuate this splendid land, nation, country, government;
the bright, consummate flower of modern civilization,
the bulwark of liberty, the hope and refuge of the
oppressed of all lands, the magnificent fruition of sixty
centuries of bloody effort to fashion an ideal republic.
Clarence F. Cobb,
Late Private, 9th Corps, Army of the Potomac.

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