Memorial Day Thought by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain

Robert Samuelson reminds us today of the Civil War origins of Memorial Day in this lovely piece in the Washington Post, which contains a long excerpt from James McPherson’s terrific Battle Cry of Freedom.  And a friend who serves in the Army writes to me today with another thought appropriate for Memorial Day.  It comes from a speech by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of Maine who, as McPherson notes in Samuelson’s piece, had received the Medal of Honor for his heroism at Gettysburg’s crucial Little Round Top engagement, had been wounded twice following the battle, and was the major general chosen by Grant at war’s end to accept surrender from Lee’s troops at Appomattox.  Chamberlain spoke at Gettysburg on October 3, 1888 to dedicate monuments for fallen soldiers from Maine.  “While much of Chamberlain’s later Gettysburg speech speaks only to the generation of Civil War survivors and thus understandably has been forgotten,” says my friend, “one passage contains enduring wisdom, communicated by a battle-hardened soldier and leader remembering the war dead.” Chamberlain:

When the martyr President, standing on this hallowed ground at the consecration of this cemetery, uttered that noble climax of his immortal speech, “We here highly resolve that the government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth”, he meant such a people as I have described.  Surely he did not mean in this sublime utterance to justify the rule of mob majority, nor to furnish a watchword for revolutionists like those who a century ago in France knew not how to overthrow tyranny without overturning also the foundations of society human and divine, nor a pretext for the anarchists and dynamiters of today who in the name of the people would let loose a riot of discordant and irresponsible individualism—a carnival of savage greed and frenzied passion. He meant government; he meant a people holding their liberty under law; exercising their sovereignty by deliberation and delegation; respecting its minorities; checking its own caprice and facility of change; relegating great questions to its sober second thought; its consciousness alive in every part, but guided ever by great commanding convictions, and pressing forward as one for the goal of a common good.