It required a patriot and a hero
like William McKinley to do this. When he signed the commissions of Joseph
Wheeler and Fitzhugh Lee, Confederate generals and graduates of the West
Point Military Academy, to be generals in the Army of the United States,
he made official announcement that the War of Sections was over and gave
complete amnesty to the people and the soldiers of the South.
Yet the bloody shirt lingered long as a troublemaker, and was invoked by
both parties.
IV
That chance gathering of heedless persons, stirred by the bombast of
self-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display--loose mobs of
local nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by the gallant
General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp followers--should
tear their passion to tatters with the thought that Virginia, exercising an
indisputable right and violating no reasonable sensibility, should elect
to send memorials of Washington and Lee for the Hall of Statues in the
nation's Capitol, came in the accustomed way of bloody-shirt agitation. It
merely proved how easily men are led when taken in droves and stirred by
partyism. Such men either bore no part in the fighting when fighting was
the order of the time, or else they were too ignorant and therefore too
unpatriotic to comprehend the meaning of the intervening years and the
glory these had brought with the expanse of national progress and prowess.
In spite of their lack of representative character it was not easy to
repress impatience at ebullitions of misguided zeal so ignoble; and of
course it was not possible to dissuade or placate them.
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