253. The Decoration of Graves

The Decoration of Graves

(Preached on the Sunday before Decoration Day.)

Solomon’92s Son_4:4 : ’93The tower of David builded for an armory, whereon there hang a thousand bucklers, all shields of mighty men.’94

The Church is here compared to an armory, the walls hung with trophies of dead heroes. Walk all about this tower of David and see the dented shields and the twisted swords and the rusted helmets of terrible battle. So we turn our Church today into an armory adorned with memories of our departed braves. Blossom and bloom, oh, walls, with stories of self-sacrifice; the shadows gathered into this drapery typical of our grief for the dead, and the light clustered into these constellations symbolical of our national deliverance. You see it is not the blackness of darkness, but night with stellar illumination.

By unanimous decree of the people of the United States of America, the graves of all the Northern and Southern dead are every year decorated. The nation comes forth with garlands for the graves of the departed and consolation for the bereft who are living. All acerbity and bitterness have gone out of the national solemnity, and as the men and women of the South one month ago floralized the cemeteries and graveyards, so tomorrow we the men and women of the North shall put upon the tombs of our dead the kiss of patriotic affection. Bravery always appreciates bravery, though it fight on the other side; and if a soldier of the Federal army had been a month ago at Savannah he would not have been ashamed to march in the floral processions to the cemetery. And if tomorrow there be a Confederate soldier walking in Greenwood, he will be glad to put a sprig of heart’92s-ease on the silent heart of our dead.

In a battle during our last war, the Confederates were driving back the Federals, who were in swift retreat, when a Federal officer dropped wounded. One of his men stopped at the risk of his life, and put his arms around the officer to carry him from the field. Fifty Confederate muskets were aimed at the young man who was picking up the officer. But the Confederate captain shouted, ’93Hold! Don’92t fire! That fellow is too brave to shoot.’94 And as the Federal officer, held up by his private soldier, went limping slowly off the field, the Confederates gave three cheers for the brave private; and just before the two disappeared behind a barn, both the wounded officer and the brave private lifted their caps in gratitude to the Confederate captain. Shall the Gospel be less generous than the world? We stack arms, the bayonet of our Northern gun facing this way, the bayonet of the Southern gun facing the other way, and as the gray of the morning melts into the blue of noon, so the typical gray and blue of old war-times have blended at last, and they quote in the language of King James’92s translation without any revision: ’93Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men.’94 That you may act intelligently in this matter, I shall make this an ordination service to the beautiful ceremonies of tomorrow.

What do we mean by this great observance? First, we mean instruction to one whole generation. Subtract 1865, when the war ended, from our 1881 and you will realize what a vast number of people were born since the war, or were so young as to have no vivid appreciation. No one under twenty-six years of age has any adequate memory of that prolonged horror. Young man, do you remember it? ’93Well,’94 you say, ’93I only remember that mother swooned away while she was reading the newspaper, and that they brought my father home wrapped in the flag, and that a good many people came in the house to pray, and that mother faded away after that until again there were many people in the house, and they told me she was dead.’94

There are others who cannot remember the roll of a drum or the tramp of a regiment, or a sigh or a tear of that tornado of woe that swept the nation again and again until there was one dead in each house. Now it is the religious duty of those who do remember it to tell those who do not. My young friends, there were such partings at rail-car windows and steamboat wharves, and at front doors of comfortable homes as I pray God you may never witness. Oh, what a time it was, when fathers and mothers gave up their sons, never expecting to see them again, and never did see them again until they came back mutilated and crushed and dead! Four years of blood. Four years of hostile experiences. Four years of ghastliness. Four years of grave-digging. Four years of funerals, coffins, shrouds, hearses, dirges. Mourning! mourning! mourning! It was hell let loose. What a time of waiting for news! Morning paper and evening paper scrutinized for intelligence from the boys at the front. First, announcement that the battle must occur the next day. Then the news of the battle’92s going on. On the following day still going on. Then news of thirty thousand slain, and of the names of the great generals who had fallen, but no news about the private soldiers. Waiting for news! After many days a load of wounded going through the town or city, but no news from our boy. Then a long list of wounded and a long list of the dead, and a long list of the missing. And among the last list, our boy. When missing? How missing? Who saw him last? Missing! Missing! Was he in the woods or by the stream? How was he hurt? Missing! missing! What burning prayers that he may yet be heard from. In that awful waiting for news many a life perished. The strain of anxiety was too great. That wife’92s brain gave way that first week after the battle, and ever and anon she walks the floor of the asylum or looks out of the window as though she expected some one to come along the path and up the steps, as she soliloquizes, ’93Missing! missing!’94

What made matters worse, all this might have been avoided. There was no more need of that war than that this moment I should plunge a dagger through your heart. There were a few Christian philanthropists in those days, scoffed at both by North and South, who had the right of it. If they had been heard on both sides we should have had no war and no slavery. It was advised by those Christian philanthropists, ’93Let the North pay in money for the slaves as property, and set them free.’94 The North said, ’93We cannot afford to pay.’94 The South said, ’93We will not sell the slaves anyhow.’94 But the North did pay in war expenses enough to purchase the slaves, and the South was compelled to give up slavery anyhow. Might not the North better have paid the money and saved the lives of five hundred thousand brave men, and might not the South better have sold out slavery and saved her five hundred thousand brave men? While there are wars that are necessary, and when such wars are forced on us, we must fight in self-defense, I here declare that out of one hundred wars ninety-nine of them are unnecessary, and I swear you by the graves of your fathers and brothers, and sons to a new hatred for the champion curse of the universe’97war! O Lord God, with the hottest bolt of thine omnipotent indignation, strike that monster down forever and ever. Imprison it in the deepest dungeon of the eternal penitentiary. Bolt it in with all the iron ever forged in cannon or moulded into howitzers. Cleave it with all the sabres that ever glittered in battle, and wring its soul with all the pangs which it ever caused. Let it feel all the conflagration of the homesteads it ever destroyed. Deeper down let it fall, and in fiercer flame let it burn, till it has gathered into its heart all the suffering of eternity as well as time. In the name of the millions of graves of its victims, I curse it! The nations need more the spirit of treaty and less of the spirit of war, less of the Disraelian and more of the Gladstonian.

Again, by this national ceremony we mean to honor courage. Many of these departed soldiers were volunteers, not conscripts, and many of those who were drafted might have provided a substitute or got off on furlough or have deserted. The fact that they lie in their graves is proof of their bravery. Brave at the front, brave at cannon’92s mouth, brave on lonely picket duty, brave in cavalry charge, brave before the surgeon, brave in the dying message to the home circle. We tomorrow put a garland on the brow of courage. The world wants more of it. The Church of God is in woeful need of men who can stand under fire. The lion of worldly derision roars and the sheep tremble. In great reformatory movements at the first shot how many fall back! The great obstacle to the Church’92s advancement is the inanity, the vacuity, the soft prettiness, the namby-pambyism of professed Christians. Great on a parade, cowards in battle. Afraid of getting their plumes ruffled, they carry a parasol over their helmet. They go into battle not with warriors’92 gauntlet, but with kid gloves; not clutching the sword-hilt too tightly, lest the glove split at the back. Deliver us from a womanish man, his hair done up with curling tongs and his feet going with girlish steps. In all our reformatory and Christian work the great want is more backbone, more mettle, more daring, more prowess. We would in all our churches like to trade off a hundred do-nothings for one do-everything. ’93Quit yourselves like men; be strong.’94

Thy saints in all this glorious war

Shall conquer, though they die;

They see the triumph from afar,

And seize it with their eye.

Again, we mean by this national observance to honor self-sacrifice for others. To all these departed men home and kindred were as dear as our home and kindred are to us. Do you know how they felt? Just as you and I would feel starting out tomorrow morning with nine chances out of ten against our returning alive; for the intelligent soldier sees not only battle ahead, but malarial sickness and exhaustion. Had these men chosen, they could have spent last night in their homes, and today have been seated where you are. They chose the camp, not because they liked it better than their own house; and followed the drum and fife, not because they were better music than the voices of the domestic circle. South Mountain and Murfreesboro, and the swamps of Chickahominy were not playgrounds.

These heroes risked and lost all for others. There is no higher sublimity than that. To keep three-quarters for ourselves and give one-quarter to others is honorable. To divide even with others is generous. To keep nothing for ourselves and give all for others is magnanimity Christ-like. Put a girdle around your body and then measure the girdle and see if you are fifty or sixty inches round. And is that the circle of your sympathies’97the size of yourself? Or, to measure you around the heart, would it take a girdle large enough to encircle the land and encircle the world? You want to know what we dry theologians mean when we talk of vicarious suffering. Look at the soldiers’92 graves tomorrow and find out. Vicarious! pangs for others, wounds for others, homesickness for others, blood for others, sepulchre for others.

Those who visit the national cemeteries tomorrow at Arlington Heights and at Richmond and Gettysburg will see one inscription on soldiers’92 tombs oftener repeated than any other’97’94Unknown.’94 When, six or seven years ago, I was called to deliver the oration at Arlington Heights, Washington, I was not as much impressed with the minute guns that shook the earth, or with the attendance of President and Cabinet and foreign ministers and generals of the army and commodores of the navy as with the pathetic and overwhelming suggestiveness of that epitaph on so many graves at my feet. ’93Unknown!’94 ’93Unknown!’94 Oh, is it not almost time to take off that epitaph? It seems to me that the time must come when the Government of the United States shall take off that epitaph. They are no more unknown! We have found them out at last. They are the beloved sons of the Republic.

Would it not be well to take the statue of the heathen goddess off the top of the Capitol at Washington (for I have no faith in the morals of a heathen goddess) and put one great statue in all our national cemeteries’97a statue of liberty in the form of a Christian woman with her hand on an open Bible and her foot on the Rock of Ages, with the other hand pointing down to the graves of the unknown, saying, ’93These are my sons who died that I might live.’94 Take off the misnomer. Everybody knows them. It is of comparatively little importance what was the name given them in baptism of water. In the holier and mightier baptism of blood we know them, and tomorrow the nation puts both arms around them and hugs them to her heart, crying, ’93Mine forever!’94

Again, by this national ceremony we mean the future defense of this nation. By every wreath of flowers on the soldiers’92 graves we say, ’93Those who die for the country shall not be forgotten,’94 and that will give enthusiasm to our young men in case our nation should in the future need to defend itself in battle. We shall never have another war between North and South. The old decayed bone of contention, American slavery, has been cast out; although here and there a depraved politician takes it up to see if he can’92t gnaw something off it. We are floating off farther and farther from the possibility of sectional strife. Rutherford B. Hayes wrought four years toward pacification, and President Garfield has no better man in his Cabinet than Secretary Hunt, of New Orleans, Louisiana. The great sectional contest which raged from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, for many years, has dwindled down and dwindled down till there is so little of it that a bear-garden at Albany today attracts the attention of all the nation.

No possibility of civil war. But about foreign invasion I am not so certain. When I spoke against war I said nothing against self-defense. An inventor told me the other day at Washington that he had invented a style of weapon which could be used in self-defense, but not in aggressive warfare. I said, ’93When you get the nations to adopt that weapon you have introduced the millennium.’94 I have no right to go on my neighbor’92s premises and assault him, but if some ruffian break into my house for the assassination of my family, and I can borrow a gun and load it in time and aim it straight enough, I will shoot him.

There is no room on this continent for any other nation’97except Canada, and a better neighbor no one ever had. If you do not think so, go to Montreal and Toronto, and see how well they will treat you. Other than that there is absolutely no room for any other nation. I have been across the continent again and again, and know that we have not a half inch of ground for the gouty foot of foreign despotism to stand on. But I am not so sure that some of the arrogant nations of Europe may not some day challenge us. I do not know that those forts around New York Bay are to sleep all through the next century. I do not know that Barnegat lighthouse will not yet look off upon a hostile navy. I do not know but that a half dozen nations, envious of our prosperity, may want to give us a wrestle. During our Civil War there were two or three nations that could hardly keep their hands off us. It is very easy to pick national quarrels, and if our nation escapes much longer it will be the exception. If foreign foe should come, we want men like those of 1812 and like those of 1861 to meet them. We want them all up and down the coast, Pulaski and Fort Sumter in the same chorus of thunder as Fort Lafayette and Fort Hamilton. Men who will not only know how to fight, but how to die. When such a time comes, if it ever does come, the generations on the stage of action will say, ’93My country will care for my family as they did in the soldiers’92 asylums for the orphans in the Civil War, and my country will honor my dust as it honored those who preceded me in patriotic sacrifice, and once a year at any rate, on Decoration Day, I shall be resurrected into the remembrance of those for whom I died. Here I go for God and my country!’94

I have sometimes thought it might need a foreign invasion to make us forget all our sectional strife’97I mean, to entirely and forever forget it. If such an invasion should ever come, you would see the North, the South, the East, the West, side by side, as though they had never had any quarrel. I see them in imagination going to the conflict: Fifteenth New York volunteers, Tenth Alabama cavalry, Fourteenth Pennsylvania riflemen, Tenth Massachusetts artillery, Seventh South Carolina sharpshooters. And such a strong conjunction of officers: Blaine and Conkling and Garfield and Grant and Mahone and Cornell and Sherman, and all the stalwarts and half-breeds and full-bloods. I do not know but it may require the attack of some foreign foe to make us forget our absurd sectional wrangling. I have no faith in the cry, ’93No North, no South, no East, no West.’94 Let all four sections keep their peculiarities and their preferences, each doing its own work and not interfering with each other, each of the four carrying its part in the great harmony’97the bass, the alto, the tenor, the soprano’97in the grand march of Union.

Once more, this great national ceremony means the beautification of the tombs, whether of those who fell in battle or accident, or who have expired in their beds or in our arms or on our laps. I suppose you have noticed that many of the families take this season as the time for the adornment of their family plots. This national observance has secured the arboriculture and floriculture of the cemeteries, the straightening up of many a slab planted thirty or forty years ago; and has swung the scythe through the long grass and has brought the stonecutter to call out the half-obliterated epitaph. This day is the benediction of the resting place of father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister It is all that we can do for them now. Make the resting places attractive, not absurd with costly outlay but in quiet remembrance. You know how. If you can afford only one flower, that will do. It shows what you would do if you could. One blossom from you may mean more than the Duke of Wellington’92s catafalque. Oh, we cannot afford to forget them. They were so lovely to us. We miss them so much. We will never get over it. Blessed Lord Jesus, comfort our broken hearts. From every bank of flowers breathes promise of resurrection.

In olden times the Hebrews, returning from their burial-place, used to pluck the grass from the field three or four times, then throw it over their heads, sugestive of the resurrection. We pick not the grass, but the flowers; and instead of throwing them over our heads, we place them before our eyes, right down over the silent heart that once beat with warmest love toward us, or over the still feet that ran to service, or over the lips from which we took the kiss at the anguish of the last parting. O my glorified father! O my sainted mother! O my beloved brothers and sisters! O my son! My son! My son! If you pass tomorrow near the new entrance of Greenwood, you who knew him will find his new-made grave. If you go that way, drop a flower on that mound. Your grief is mine, and my grief is yours. But stop! We are not infidels. Our bodies will soon join the bodies of our departed in the tomb, and our spirits shall join their spirits in the land of the rising sun. We cannot long be separated. Instead of crying with Jacob for Joseph, ’93I will go down into the grave unto my son, mourning,’94 let us cry with David, ’93I shall go to him.’94 On one of the gates of Greenwood is the quaint inscription, ’93A night’92s lodging on the way to the city of the New Jerusalem.’94 Comfort one another with these words. May the hand of him who shall wipe away all tears from all eyes wipe your cheek with softest tenderness. The Christ of Mary and Martha and Lazarus will enfold you in his arms. The white-robed angels who sat at the tomb of Jesus will yet roll the stone from the door of your dead in radiant resurrection. The Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout and the voice of the archangel. So the Dead March in Saul shall become the Hallelujah Chorus.

Autor: T. De Witt Talmage