The Old Soldier, entrenched in his philosophy as in a bastioned citadel, rejoices in a redeemed country strong enough to regard with forbearance the foibles of quondam foes. The men who looked bravely into his eyes across the frowning ramparts of Vicksburg, or who, fed on raw corn and persimmons, fluttered their heroic rags for a year between him and beckoning Richmond, only ten miles distant, have been welcomed, as with "sweet, reluctant, amorous delay" they returned to enjoy the privileges and even to accept the honors of the rich citizenship he fought to restore to them. He sees them squeezing pure olive oil and genuine creamery butter out of honest old cottonseed. He puts his own traditional pride of supremacy in the matter of basswood hams and white oak nutmegs resolutely behind him, and hails them proudly as right worthy fellow-yankees and brethren beloved. Whatever, if anything, the present may withhold of universal consent to the sacredness of his cause or the completeness of his triumph, he exultantly leaves to time, to God and to history.
The Old Soldier claims no undue meed of praise. Standing in the limpid incandescence of a momentous epoch, his pardonable pride has only degenerated into boastfulness on rare and radiant village greens, where self-delusion finds a fertile soil fenced with applauding auditors. It was his fortune to have contributed to the preservation of the Union, the emancipation of the slave and the regeneration of the country. But save and except as aforesaid, he makes no pretense of having done it all. He had mighty and Almighty help.
Sometimes the credit for emancipation is ascribed to the heroic agitators, who, before the appeal to projectiles, had long demanded unconditional abolition. It is error to award the palm of this splendid consummation to any class of men. Slavery perished because its death-doom had been sounded on the celestial chimes; because the nineteenth century had come; because the flying engine and the speaking wire had come; because the steel pen and the postage-stamp had come; because the free school, the newspaper and the open Bible had come; because Wilberforce, and Garrison, and Harriet Stowe had come; because Lincoln, and Seward, and Stanton had come; because Grant, and Sherman, and Sheridan had come; because two million gallant boys in blue had come; because the great and terrible day of the Lord had come, and not all the powers of evil could longer buttress and bulwark the crowning iniquity of the universe. Give to all the potent factors a full measure of the award. But let the rapture of self-eulogy never eclipse vital historic truth. Slavery succumbed, not more to military force than to the eternal verities. And rebellion surrendered not alone to Grant and his legions, but also to the loyal men and women who stood behind them, and to the churches and colleges, the mills and mines and storehouses, the homes and herds and harvests of the mighty North.