2IO C. F. Adams quarters of Wisconsin battalions shows the heaviest aggregate loss sustained during the war by any similar command, and is hence known in the history of the struggle as the " Iron Brigade." Thir- teen Wisconsin regiments participated in Grant's brilliant move- ment on Vicksburg ; five were with Thomas at Chickamauga ; seven with Sherman at Mission Ridge ; and, finally, eleven marched with him to the sea, while four remained behind to strike with Thomas at Nashville. Thus it may truly be said that wherever, between the 13th of April, 1861, and the 26th of April, 1865, death was reap- ing its heaviest harvest, — whether in Pennsylvania, in Virginia, in Tennessee, in Mississippi, in Georgia, — at Shiloh, at Corinth, at Antietam, at Gettysburg, in the salient at Spottsylvania, in the death- trap at Petersburg, or in the Peninsula slaughter-pen, — wherever during those awful years the dead lay thickest, there the men from Wisconsin were freely laying down their lives. It is, however, no part of my present purpose to set forth here your sacrifices in the contest of 1861-65. What I have undertaken to do is to assign to Wisconsin its proper and relative place as a factor in one of the great evolutionary movements of man. As the twig was bent, the tree inclined. The sacrifices of Wisconsin life and treasure between 1861 and 1865 were but the fulfilment of the promise given by Wisconsin in 1848. The state, it is true, at no time during that momentous struggle rose to a position of unchal- lenged leadership either in the field or the council chamber. Among its representatives it did not number a Lincoln or a Sherman ; but it did supply in marked degree that greatest and most necessary of all essentials in every evolutionary crisis, a well-developed and thoroughly distributed popular backbone. This racial characteristic, also, I take to be the one great essen- tial to the success of our American experiment. In every emer- gency which arises there is always the cry raised for a strong hand at the helm, — the ship of state is invariably declared to be hope- lessly drifting. But it is in just those times of crisis that a widely diffused individuality proves the greatest possible safeguard, — the only reliable public safeguard. It is then with the state as it is with a strong, seaworthy ship manned by a hardy and experienced crew, in no way dependent on the one pilot who may chance to be at the wheel. In any stress of storm, the ship's company will prove equal to the occasion, and somehow provide for its own salvation. Under similar political conditions a community asserts, in the long run, its superiority to the accidents of fortune, — the aberrations due to the influence of individual genius, those winning numbers in the lottery of fate, — and evinces that staying power, which, no less now and
