CHAPTER XIX NOT PEACE BUT THE SWORD On the 19th of May, 1862, Edward Everett came to us and delivered his famous oration on Washington. Very few in our city had ever before seen him. A large audience of the most intelligent and cultured among us gathered to hear him. The style of his great speech was clear and finished; his elocution, while a little stately, was nearly faultless; his voice was agreeable and reaching; his gestures graceful and fitting, but he lacked magnetism. His whole effort seemed somewhat studied and a bit mechanical. When pronouncing a given phrase he stretched out his arm and from the palm of his hand extended one finger; when uttering another, he extended two fingers; when enunciating another, three fingers; and now and then in making a full-arm gesture he opened the whole hand. One could not help thinking that before appearing in public he had carefully drilled himself before a looking-glass. His audience listened intently, but was not much moved. He appealed to the head far more strongly than to the heart. Still to sit at the feet of so distinguished an orator was to us all a rare treat. He was not only gathering funds to complete the Washington monument at the national capital, but was still endeavoring, through the love borne to Washington by the people both of the North and South, to unite a divided and warring nation. Amid the clash of arms he was eloquently pleading for peace. His purpose was noble, but his effort was futile. The ears of contending hosts, seething with the passions of war, were deaf to all appeals for peace. One might as well have undertaken to put out the fires of a conflagration by a speech, as to stay the bloody national conflict then raging by an oration on Washington. Fiercer war soon followed this eloquent pleading for good will and harmony. When, in April, General Halleck departed for Corinth, Mississippi, he left General Schofield in command of the greater part of our State, and on the 1st of June he put him in temporary command of the entire Department of Missouri. General Schofield now sent all the soldiers that could possibly be spared from St. Louis and Missouri to swell the ranks of the army in Mississippi. The ever watchful enemy learned from spies among us that we were largely denuded of national troops, and determined to put forth one more vigorous effort to secure the secession of Missouri.