Produced by Annie McGuire
[Illustration: HARPER'S ROUND TABLE]
Copyright, 1895, by HARPER & BROTHERS. All Rights Reserved.
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PUBLISHED WEEKLY. NEW YORK, TUESDAY, MAY 21, 1895. FIVE CENTS A COPY.
VOL. XVI.--NO. 812. TWO DOLLARS A YEAR.
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[Illustration]
HEROES OF AMERICA.
THE DEATH OF STONEWALL JACKSON.
BY THE HONORABLE THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
[Illustration: Decorative H]
orrible though the civil war was, heartrending though it was that
brother should fight against brother, there remains as an offset the
glory that has accrued to the nation by the countless deeds of heroism
performed by both sides in the struggle. The captains and the armies who
after long years of dreary campaigning and bloody, stubborn lighting
brought the war to a close have left us more than a reunited realm.
North and South, all Americans now have a common fund of glorious
memories. We are the richer for each grim campaign, for each hard-fought
battle. We are the richer for valor displayed alike by those who fought
so valiantly for the right, and by those who no less valiantly fought
for what they deemed the right. We have in us nobler capacities for what
is great and good because of the infinite woe and suffering, and because
of the splendid ultimate triumph. We hold that it was vital to the
welfare not only of our people on this continent but of the whole human
race that the Union should be preserved and slavery abolished; that one
flag should fly from the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande, that we should
all be free in fact as well as in name, and that the United States
should stand as one nation, the greatest nation on the earth; but we
recognize gladly that South as well as North, when the fight was once
on, the leaders of the armies, and the soldiers whom they led, displayed
the same qualities of daring and steadfast courage, of disinterested
loyalty and enthusiasm, and of high devotion to an ideal.
The greatest general of the South was Lee, and his greatest lieutenant
was Jackson. Both were Virginians, and both were strongly opposed to
disunion. Lee went so far as to deny the right of secession; while
Jackson insisted that the South ought to try to get its rights inside
the Union, and not outside; but when Virginia joined the Southern
Confederacy, and the war had actually begun, both men cast their lot
with the South.
It is often said that the civil war was in one sense a repetition of the
old struggle between the Puritan and the Cavalier; but Puritan and
Cavalier types were common to the two armies. In dash and light-hearted
daring Custer and Kearny stood as conspicuous as Stuart and Morgan; and,
on the other hand, no Northern general approached the Roundhead type,
the type of the stern religious warriors who fought under Cromwell, so
closely as Stonewall Jackson.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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