Yet, in spite of
extremists and malignants on both sides of the line, the South rallied
equally with the North to the nation's drumbeat after the Maine went down
in the harbor of Havana. It fought as bravely and as loyally at Santiago
and Manila. Finally, by the vote of the North, there came into the Chief
Magistracy one who gloried in the circumstance that on the maternal side
he came of fighting Southern stock; who, amid universal applause, declared
that no Southerner could he prouder than he of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall
Jackson, apotheosizing an uncle, his mother's brother, who had stood at the
head of the Confederate naval establishment in Europe and had fitted out
the Confederate cruisers, as the noblest and purest man he had ever known,
a composite of Colonel Newcome and Henry Esmond.
Meanwhile the process of oblivion had gone on. The graven effigy of
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.
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