Jefferson Davis at length appeared upon the silver service of an American
battleship. This told the Mississippi's guests, wherever and whenever they
might meet round her hospitable board, of national unification and peace,
giving the lie to sectional malignancy. In the most famous and conspicuous
of the national cemeteries now stands the monument of a Confederate general
not only placed there by consent of the Government, but dedicated with
fitting ceremonies supervised by the Department of War, which sent as its
official representative the son of Grant, himself an army officer of rank
and distinction.

The world has looked on, incredulous and amazed, whilst our country has
risen to each successive act in the drama of reconciliation with increasing
enthusiasm.

I have been all my life a Constitutional Nationalist; first the nation and
then the state. The episode of the Confederacy seems already far away. It
was an interlude, even as matters stood in the Sixties and Seventies, and
now he who would thwart the unification of the country on the lines of
oblivion, of mutual and reciprocal forgiveness, throws himself across the
highway of his country's future, and is a traitor equally to the essential
principles of free government and the spirit of the age.

If sectionalism be not dead it should have no place in popular
consideration. The country seems happily at last one with itself. The
South, like the East and the West, has come to be the merest geographic
expression. Each of its states is in the Union, precisely like the states
of the East and the West, all in one and one in all. Interchanges of every
sort exist.

These exchanges underlie and interlace our social, domestic and business