Address of welcome, delivered at the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Reunion, Topeka, Kansas, September 29, 1885.

Commander Stewart, Comrades of the Grand Army, and Soldiers of the Union: To me has been assigned the delightful duty of welcoming to the Capital this great multitude of patriot heroes. Yet it seems to me that words of welcome are unnecessary. There is no town or city within the boundaries of Kansas where the soldiers of the Union would not be greeted as friends or comrades, and honored as guests; and I know that the loyal people of the Capital, one and all, will welcome you with a hand-clasp far more eloquent than speech.

They will welcome you as men who brought from the gloom of the past the lights of the present and the hopes of the future. They will welcome you as soldiers who rescued the Republic from anarchy; as heroes who brought Union, Liberty and Peace out of the smoke and flames of civil war. They will welcome you as fellow-citizens whose energy, enterprise and industry are building up, here in the heart of the Continent, the greatest and most prosperous State in the Union. One and all, they will welcome and salute you.

You are survivors of the greatest war the world has ever known. You were prominent actors in the grandest epoch of history. You fought for the noblest cause that ever warmed the hearts and nerved the arms of heroes. You have lived to witness the grandeur of your triumph, and the growth and prosperity it has brought in its train. You are here to meet old comrades; to revive recollections of scenes and events that should never be forgotten; to sing the old songs; to touch elbows again in the steadily dwindling line that once reached from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic. And I am glad and proud to say to you: “All hail! and welcome, thrice welcome, to the Capital!”

I know that dyspeptic, envious and small-souled people regard the fact that soldiers’ reunions are steadily increasing in interest, with ill-concealed distrust. Some years ago, following a meeting similar to this, a gentleman said to me: “The boys have had a pleasant time, no doubt. But of what practical benefit are these great gatherings of soldiers? They keep alive, it seems to me, recollections of a period of strife and bloodshed, and what good does that do?”

I replied: “My friend, did you ever object to the celebration of the Fourth of July? That keeps alive memories of a period of strife and bloodshed. Yet we have been celebrating the ‘Glorious Fourth’ for over a hundred years, and nobody has ever objected that it did no good to celebrate it.”

Similar objections are sometimes made to the “Grand Army of the Republic.” It is said that such an organization not only keeps alive the memories of the war, but perpetuates the feelings and prejudices of a period when the land was aflame with passion; and that there is something of egotism in these associations and assemblages of men to celebrate events in which they were actors.

For one, acknowledging that soldiers’ reunions and the Grand Army organization do all this, and are all this, I make no apologies for them. On the contrary, I rejoice that the Grand Army is growing more popular with the men who wore the blue, and that soldiers’ reunions and camp-fires are held with more and more frequency. When the people cease to remember that there have been times when men cheerfully periled health and life for a good cause, they cease to believe in such a thing as patriotism. There is something in example, and these organizations of old soldiers, these reunions of old soldiers, reviving recollections of the old days, when nearly three million men stepped out of the monotony of commonplace lives, and glorified a glorious cause by patient endurance of hardships and privations, and the heroism of death—this example cannot be without its uses in teaching the younger generations of Americans, enjoying the birthright won at Yorktown and preserved at Appomattox, that love of country, courage, and devotion to duty should endure forever.

And why should not the memories of the late war be kept alive? Was there ever, since the morning stars first sang together, a more patriotic, a holier, a greater war than that waged for the Union? We have been celebrating the Declaration of Independence, as I have said, for over a century. Yet the total free population of the American Colonies, at the outbreak of the Revolutionary war, was, in round numbers, 369,000 less than the number of Union soldiers mustered into service during the late civil war. The Continental army, during the Revolutionary war, never exceeded 76,000 men, present and absent; our army, during the war of 1812, aggregated only 38,186; and the total force of the United States during the war with Mexico was only 116,321. During the war of the Rebellion, 2,772,408 men enlisted in the Union army, and from January 1st, 1863, to May 1st, 1865, our army numbered, at all times, nearly 1,000,000 trained soldiers. Kansas alone furnished nearly half as many men for the Union army as were present for duty during any year of the Revolutionary struggle, under Washington.

There were more Union soldiers killed in battle during the war of the Rebellion, and more died of wounds received in battle, than were present for duty during any previous war in which the United States has been engaged. In the National Cemeteries, 318,870 soldiers of the Union are buried—more than four times as many as were enlisted during the Revolutionary war. The latest and most accurate statements show that 44,238 Union soldiers were killed in battle; 49,205 died of wounds received in battle; 9,058 were drowned or accidentally killed; 184 were executed by the enemy; 224,899 died of disease, and 14,155 of causes not stated—making a total of 341,719.

There were 49 engagements, large and small, during the eight years of the Revolution. There were 2,261 during the four years of the Rebellion. And in each of 149 of these the Union loss exceeded 500 men killed and wounded; in each of eighty-eight it was over 1,000; in fifty-two, over 2,000; in twenty-three, over 5,000; in fourteen, over 10,000; and in each of four, over 20,000.

The engagements of the war of 1812 numbered only 89, and the casualties aggregated 1,877 killed, and 3,737 wounded—a total of 5,614.

In the Mexican war there were only twenty-one engagements, in which the Americans lost 1,049 killed and 3,420 wounded—a total of 4,469. At the famous battle of Palo Alto, the American loss, in killed and wounded, aggregated only 174; at Monterey, 488; at Buena Vista, 723; at Cerro Gordo, 250; and at Molino del Rey, 787.

The aggregate casualties of the American troops in all previous wars were less than those of the Union army at each of the great battles of Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Chicamauga or Spottsylvania, and hardly reached one-half the casualties of Grant’s campaign through the Wilderness, or Sherman’s campaign against Atlanta.

I am not citing these facts to depreciate the importance of previous wars, and certainly I would be the last person to depreciate the patriotism and valor of the soldiers who took part in them. I reverence the memory of the “embattled farmers” who, on the village green at Lexington, “fired the shot heard round the world;” I honor the soldiers who, from behind the cotton-bales at New Orleans, taught the trained soldiers of Great Britain a new lesson of war; and I glory in the fame which our little army won on the red fields of Mexico. But I want to make plain and clear the fact that the war for the Union was immeasurably greater than any struggle of modern times, not only in the vast armies it called into being, but in the heroism and patriotism it inspired, and the momentous results depending on its issue.

Why, too, should not the sentiments and prejudices of the late civil war be perpetuated? The war saved the Union and emancipated a race. And in that single sentence what volumes of precious history, what glorious records of heroism, sacrifices and patriotism are condensed! What a noble lifting of all that is exalting in human nature, what a splendid record of patient devotion to duty, what self-forgetfulness and magnificent courage does it stand for! What centuries of human progress does it typify! It was a war for Freedom and National Unity. It was not waged for conquest, nor glory, nor ambition. It was a war to preserve, for all the generations of men, the priceless heritage of self-government. It was a war to vindicate the majesty of outraged law. It was a war to maintain this Republic as a beacon-light for all the world. It was a war, as the greatest of its martyrs said, waged “that a government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth.”

For the existence of the Grand Army, and for the reunions in which it delights to take part, no apology is, therefore, necessary. They should be kept up because they do preserve the memories of the war; because they do perpetuate the sentiments, the emotions, and even the prejudices of that glorious struggle. They were noble sentiments, pure emotions, honest and patriotic prejudices, those born of the country’s great peril and happy deliverance, and no true soldier, no true American, should be ashamed of them.

Let us, then, keep up the Grand Army, and our camp-fires, our reunions, our social gatherings. They typify a comradeship that should touch and warm every soldier’s heart. In all the years since the final muster-out, there have been no such friendships formed as were those cemented in the early mornings long ago, when the boys fell in and answered “Here” to the orderly’s call; or during the dusty and exhausting marches when the white pikes stretched so wearily long, and the evening camp-fires were so near and yet so far; or amid the sulphurous smoke of battle, when they “closed up on the colors” as the line dwindled away before the hot and furious fire of the enemy. The comradeship that springs from such associations and scenes as these, is worth preserving.

This is the great “Soldier State” of the Union—the State which began the civil war six years before any other State had enlisted a regiment. Kansas sent more men to swell the ranks of the Union army, in proportion to population, than any other State; it had a larger percentage of its soldiers killed or wounded in battle than any other State. One-twelfth of its present total population served in the ranks of the Union army. For Kansas was not only the first cause of the war, but the new home to which the veterans turned their footsteps when their marches and battles were over. Every regiment that served in the army of the Republic has contributed its quota to swell this magnificent population, and there are men sitting around quiet hearthstones in every county of the State who can give personal recollections of every march, every campaign, every battle of the war, from Bull Run to Bentonville. In this audience, I have no doubt, are men who have been participants in every great battle of the Rebellion.

Here in Kansas, too, is a generation of young men and women who have in their veins the blood of heroes and patriots. In this audience are hundreds of young men and women whose baby eyes witnessed sad partings, when their fathers hurried away to join the company mustering in the village square. Here are matrons who were young wives, sweethearts or sisters then, and who, busy with household cares, heard the faint throbbing of the far-away drum, and days and weeks before a word was spoken, read in the troubled but resolute eyes of husbands, lovers, and brothers the thought that was busy in their brains—the thought of a stricken country, sadly needing men. They knew, these patient, loving women, what was coming, and in the silence of their rooms, in loneliness and bitter tears, they prayed that, if possible, the shadow of this great grief might be lifted from their home; and that those nearest and dearest to them might remain, to lighten their cares and brighten their daily life. But when at last the word was spoken, a race of self-sacrificing and heroic women stood side by side in patriotic devotion with a race of heroic men, and the whole world learned, as the long procession of weary months and years went by, that the men and women of ’76 had worthy successors in the men and women of ’61 and ’65.

The “boys” of twenty-three years ago are men of mature age; the men of that day are growing old. The faded and tattered battle-flags they followed are preserved in the State-houses. The old sword or musket hanging over the mantel is rusty with age. Every year the ranks are thinning. Wounds and disease, the legacy of battle-field, march and bivouac, are doing their sure work. The glad picture they saw, looking forward through the lurid smoke and flame of battle, as the reward of all their toils and sacrifices—the picture of a mighty Nation, compact, prosperous, free, and respected by all the Nations of the earth—has been fully realized. There is no limit to the power, no measure to the wealth, of the redeemed and enfranchised Republic. Only the memories of a heroic struggle are left us. But until the last survivors of the Grand Army that marched and fought with Lyon, Blunt, McClellan, Rosecrans, Meade, Sheridan, Thomas, Sherman, and Grant, are finally mustered out, let them preserve their comradeship, and keep forever fresh and fair in their hearts the glorious recollections and still more glorious principles of the far-away days when they were soldiers of the Republic.

Soldiers of the Union! again I bid you welcome. I welcome you, as citizens of this great State, to its Capital. I welcome you as patriot heroes, who, during the darkest days the Republic has ever known, gladly and proudly periled health and life to save it from destruction. I welcome you as the men whose strong arms and brave hearts gave Freedom to the Slave, and made this land, in fact as well as in name, a land of Liberty. And with my whole heart I salute you in Fraternity, Charity, and Loyalty, and welcome you as comrades.