266
��The Northern Volunteers.
��front, retreatiug in good order from position to position, and liolding tlie enemy in check until Slieridan arrived, and then went forward with their great leader and his cavalry and utterly routed the enemy.
At the battle of Atlanta, the divi- sions of Smith and Leggett repulsed the attack of Hardee from the rear by leaping over their own breastworks and fighting from the other side, and then Leggett's division, inditfereut as to the direction of the enem}', when Cheatham attacked on the original front, leaped back to the proper side of their works, and beat him back.
The tenacity of our men was dis- played wherever they assaulted earth- works and were repulsed. In almost every instance they seized ground in advance of their starting-point, and held it, instead of retiring in dis- couragement. The mighty struo-gle over the salient at Spottsylvania, which lasted for twenty hours at such close quarters that the opposing flags were planted on the same parapets, and no man conld live beside them, was the most conspicuous example. of tenacity. The length of our battles was due to this quality. The most of our great battles lasted two or three days. European armies have seldom fought the second day.
I have said that many a volunteer realizes that he sacrificed what money could not compensate him for ; but I believe that there is not one of them who would retrieve what he has lost by diminishing what the country has gained. They feel that they were fortunate to have lived in the o-reat •events of '61 to 'Go. They are proud to have borne arms for their country
��in her time of need. But it is not in the triumph of success, or the glory of victory, or the poor guerdon of pensions, that they find their reward. It is the priceless heritage of self- government in a free land, without danger of foreign encroachment or entanglements, which their fathers hauded down, and which shall de- scend to their posterit}^ They have no fear for the stability of our insti- tutions. That the majority is some- times in the wrong, that bad men are elected to office, that men unlawfully band themselves together to interfere with the industries and extort un- earned money from their fellow-citi- zens, are but transient evils in the es- timation of the men who witnessed the arousal of the patient, long-suf- fering, and tolerant spirit of this great free people in 1861. The fore- bodings of danger to the republic from violence within which oppress some men find no lodgment in the imagination of the men who saw the sleeping soldier awakened in 2,000,000 citizens, and stood shoulder to shoul- der among them, and felt the mighty impulse which moved them. They know that the love of law and order, the devotion to the political and per- sonal freedom which insures the en- joyment of life and one's own, are inbred in this people, and are to be born in their children. When the last one of the great host of volun- teers shall look back through the glimmering vista of the past, he will see none of these disturbances, for they will have been forgotten, and he will await the summons from on high in the serene confidence that this Union will be perpetual.
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