Addresses: by John A. Martin. Delivered in Kansas.Martin, John Alexander
History
Addresses: by John A. Martin. Delivered in Kansas.
Martin, John Alexander
Kansas
National election by forging a letter, or blackguarding a good wife and
mother, or defacing the tombstone of a little child. No Republican ever
voted to disfranchise the soldiers of the Union while they were absent
fighting the battles of the country. No Republican ever called Abraham
Lincoln a “baboon and an ape,” or denounced Ulysses S. Grant as a
“drunken tanner” and a “brutal butcher,” or was caught, at midnight,
scrawling “329” on his neighbor’s doorstep. There is a splendid anthem
which, during the war, was sung in every camp, and to whose majestic
music a million soldiers marched—the Song of Old John Brown. There is
another, no less thrilling in its glorious chorus, which warms and stirs
the hearts of patriotic Americans whenever they hear its splendid
music—the song which tells the story of the great March to the Sea. No
Democratic Convention ever sang, no Democratic Convention can sing or
dares to sing, either of these songs.
Twenty-one years ago this fall a regiment of Kansas soldiers was
engaged, for two days, in a desperate conflict with the armed hosts of
treason, in the tangled underbrush at Chicamagua. Two years before, they
had marched away from the State, proud, happy, hopeful, each with the
glad picture of a country saved imprinted upon his heart and lighting up
the future of his imagination. Life was as dear and love as sweet to
those Kansas boys as to any of you assembled here to-day. But when the
sun went down on the second day of that fierce battle, over sixty per
cent. of those Kansas boys—sixty out of every hundred—were lying, dead
or wounded, on the blood-stained field. They had been, for more than two
years, my comrades, my friends, my “boys,” and I loved them, one and
all. Not a shot fired at them, not a bullet that laid one of them low,
was fired by a Republican.
These are things which, for one, I never intend to forget. I don’t want
to forget them. I take pride, as a Republican, in remembering that no
Republican has to apologize for any such wrongs, or crimes, or outrages
as these.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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