The Great Conspiracy, Volume 4 by John Alexander Logan
page 17 of 106 (16%)
page 17 of 106 (16%)
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fatal field of Ball's Bluff--away, amid the lamentations of a Nation
--away, across land and ocean--to lie beside his brave friend Broderick, on that Lone Mountain whose solemn front looks out upon the calm Pacific. He had not lived in vain. In his great speech at the American Theatre in San Francisco, after his election by Oregon (1860) to represent her in the United States Senate, he had aroused the people to a sense of shame, that, as he said: "Here, in a land of written Constitutional Liberty it is reserved for us to teach the World that, under the American Stars and Stripes, Slavery marches in solemn procession; that, under the American flag, Slavery is protected to the utmost verge of acquired territory; that under the American banner, the name of Freedom is to be faintly heard, the songs of Freedom faintly sung; that, while Garibaldi, Victor Emanuel, every great and good man in the World, strives, struggles, fights, prays, suffers and dies, sometimes on the scaffold, sometimes in the dungeon, often on the field of battle, rendered immortal by his blood and his valor; that, while this triumphal procession marches on through the arches of Freedom--we, in this land, of all the World, shrink back trembling when Freedom is but mentioned!" And never was a shamed people more suddenly lifted up from that shame into a grand frenzy of patriotic devotion than were his auditors, when, with the inspiration of his matchless genius, he continued: "As for me, I dare not, will not, be false to Freedom. Where the feet of my youth were planted, there, by Freedom, my feet shall ever stand. I will walk beneath her banner. I will glory in her strength. I have watched her in history struck down on an hundred chosen fields of battle. I have seen her friends fly from her; her foes gather around |
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