legions of Gordon Granger to the salvation of Thomas' right, when struck by Longstreet's corps on Sunday afternoon of the Chickamauga battle. When this miraculous battle of Missionary Ridge was fought, that ridge now before us was covered by the Confederate army from base to summit, and from near Rossville Gap to Tunnel Hill, a distance of about four miles. General Sherman's troops lay across the ridge on Bragg's right flank, where he fought hard to turn it but failed. General Hooker had crossed from Lookout and enveloped Bragg's left flank at Rossville Gap, but failed to turn it. We were, in the closing hours of the day, without results. General Grant, standing on this Knob, ordered General Thomas, who stood beside him, to make a demonstration on Bragg's front, and take his rifle pits and works at the base of the ridge.

The troops of General Thomas lay upon these plains fronting the army of Bragg on the Ridge.

General Thomas ordered forward near one hundred regiments, a charging line of nearly three miles front.

With slow and measured step at first, but quickening under the thunder tones of the artillery of both armies, they broke into a quick, then a double quick, then a run-the works at the base were taken, and then on and up with the energy of infuriated manhood!

It is said of General Fullerton, then on staff duty, that seeing a halt would be a defeat, and seizing the supreme moment of a supreme opportunity, he flew swift as a weaver's shuttle, from regiment to regiment, from brigade to brigade, from division to division, shouting the hitherto ungiven and unauthorized command, "Take the Ridge! Take the Ridge! Take the Ridge, boys! Take the Ridge!"

The boys took the ridge, and decided, we hope, for all time, the possession of Chattanooga.

Brave soldier, dear comrade and friend, farewell and farewell; wherever thy immortal spirit rests in the great universe of God, may His light and His love shine upon it. And may we not be allowed to hope and believe that his large, loving, soulful eyes, look down upon us now from the battlements of his home in the world of eternity, and that he knows what we do and what we say.

Pardon me, Mr. President, comrades and friends: when the memories of those days, now long past, come to us, we seem lifted from earthly surroundings into a new environment and we know not when to stop. Would that I had angelic tongue or inspired pen to tell you what my eyes have seen and my ears have heard on these fields; but the tongue of man cannot utter them, and the pen of man cannot write them.

And now, your Excellency, Daniel H. Hastings, Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, on behalf of the Pennsylvania ChickamaugaChattanooga Battlefields Executive Committee and Commission, we tender you these monuments, erected to the Twenty-seventh, Twentyeighth, Twenty-ninth, Forty-sixth, Seventy-fifth, Seventy-seventh, Seventy-eighth, Seventy-ninth, One hundred and eleventh and One hundred and forty-seventh regiments of Pennsylvania Infantry, the Seventh,

Ninth and Fifteenth Regiments of Pennsylvania Cavalry, to Battery B of the Twenty-sixth Pennsylvania Light Artillery and Battery E of the Forty-sixth Pennsylvania Light Artillery, with the hope and the prayer that they may stand here through all coming generations, unhurt by the hand of man, and unmarred by winter's cold or summer's heat.

ACCEPTANCE ON BEHALF OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA.

GOVERNOR DANIEL H. HASTINGS.

ELLOW CITIZENS, Ladies and Gentlemen, Comrades:-The surviving veteran soldiers of Pennsylvania who participated in the battles in and about Chattanooga thirty-four years ago have assembled here to-day to dedicate with appropriate ceremony the monuments erected by the authority of our Commonwealth in honor of the service here rendered to their country.

With warm hearts and uncovered heads we salute the great State of Tennessee. The cordiality of our greeting, your unbounded hospitality and your knightly welcome have touched those chords of sympathy and fraternity which, better than words, are told in the trembling lips and tearful eyes of those who are here from the north. Wherever in this great assemblage a gray uniform is seen we instinctively feel and know that the gray coat is buttoned across a breast that feels a soldierly sympathy; that the hand extended is the hand of welcome; that the words you utter are the words of sincerity and hospitality; that your sympathies are our sympathies; that our monuments are your monuments; and the flag that waves before us is the emblem of our common heritage and the shrine of our common devotion.

Standing here on Orchard Knob, where once stood a host of illustrious men, among them Grant, Thomas, Sherman, Sheridan and Granger, we turn to Lookout Mountain, standing as a silent sentinel of the heroic past, and we almost see the enduring bronze bolted to the rocks to tell the coming generations where brave soldiers scaled the heights, and among them Geary and his men of Pennsylvania. Yonder, through the mists and the scattering foliage of autumn, we catch a glimpse of monuments that mark the field of Chickamauga; and there before us are the lowlands across which marched the armies that fought their way to the summit of Missionary Ridge.

These are the fields once contested by Bragg, Longstreet, Polk, Breckenridge, Hood and Buckner, commanders and armies both of whose gallantry and courage evinced the characteristics that make the American soldier the peer of any since time began.

What a peaceful scene is now spread out befors us! Time has healed all evidence of conflict. The seams and scars that the war once made have been effaced. Field and forest, farm and garden, ploughman and furrow, ripened fruit and autumn's mellowing colors of crimson and gold, and sunshine and shadow now decorate the valleys and mountains in nature's full uniform.

To those of us who came to manhood in a later generation it is difficult to realize the emotions that stir the minds and hearts of those who come to visit these fields after an absence of thirty-four years. How different it must be to all of you. You stood upon these fields thirty-four years ago, and for you life was but a jest and death was king; your lives were placed in the hazard of conflict. You doubtless questioned, as you fought through these fields, whether you would ever again see the homes and loved ones whom you had left behind; you saw your comrades fall by your side and you heard the voice of your commander and pressed forward; you saw the battle's end; you endured the hardships of the camp and march and field until peace on her golden wings hovered over every battlefield.

Since then you have waged the battles of life as best you could. But there is a tinge of sadness to this occasion, and in our hearts, for those upon whom infirmity has laid a heavy hand, and for those who fought the battles of the nation more successfully than they have fought the battle for bread. In the deep regret we feel for their absence we know every one of them is with us in spirit. To-day the State that claims the honor of sending you to the field invites you to survey again the scenes of your devotion and valor. You have followed again the battle line; you have dropped many tears of sympathy for the fallen comrades; you have fought the battles over again; you have met in loving and patriotic communion the brave men against whom you struggled, and you have united to-day with them to drop leaves of healing upon the past and upon the future. You have seen the evolutions of a third of a century; and you doubtless wonder why, in the providence of God, it became necessary long ago that veteran should struggle against veteran, battery against battery, or witness the charge of the war horse "whose neck is clothed in thunder," to perpetuate and strengthen a nation. How useless and reckless and unnecessary it all must now appear to you! But out of the recollection of the thunder of battle, how grateful it must be to-day to the brave men who struggled on both sides to realize that out of it all has come a nobler and grander nation than before had ever been contemplated.

Time is a healer as well as a destroyer. Time has cooled the ardor; has tempered the judgment; has healed the wounds and has mellowed-aye, obliterated all sectional animosities. Time was the hospital, the nurse, the christian commission, the holy evangel that sat by the bedside of war and restored to strength and beauty incomparable a nation almost divided. Time's cruel sentence is not yet executed, nor will it be for you until these heroic fields shall no longer be the witness of reunions such as these. But those who come after you will surely keep alive the story of your valor and devotion; and with them

"No more shall the war cry sever,

Nor the winding river be red;

They banish all anger forever,

When they laurel the graves of your dead.

Under the sod and the dew,

Waiting the judgment day

Love and tears for the blue,

Tears and love for the gray."

47

To-day as you visit the graves of your fallen comrades, you may say to your companions, "Here lies one who fought with me on other fields or climbed with me the heights of Lookout Mountain; who stood by my side on Chickamauga's field; or fell while scaling yonder Missionary Ridge." But the years will roll on and the boys and the girls now awaiting your return home, and other soldiers' orphans, may some day walk on these at Shiloh;" with Grant and other fields of conquest. One will say, "My father fell at Gettysburg;" another, "My father fought another, "My father fell in the Wilderness;" another, "My father rode with Sheridan;" and another, "My father went down in the Cumberland." And for them the Society of the Cincinnati, the Order of the Loyal Legion and the Grand Army of the Republic will disclose a grander significance than ever before.

Your pilgrimage here of love will solace many a widow's and a mother's heart. With them your devotion will be some recompense for those who would fondly kneel by the grass-grown mounds and bedew with tears of love the resting places of the uncoffined and unshrouded dead. But when you and they are gone there will be others still to strew the flowers and cherish their memory. As the two Marys found their way to the sepulchre of the Redeemer of mankind, so will the children of the future find their way to the graves of the men whose sacrifices redeemed a nation from bondage.

Let us before these monuments, as before a shrine, mingle our tears and droop our flags and listen to the solemn dirge in memory of the patriotic dead, both north and south; let us again resolve that the men who fell on these fields shall not have died in vain. Let us, as we contemplate the flag of our reunited country floating in peace above these fields, again resolve that this land shall know no other banner than the stars and stripes, and that it shall forever float in triumph and in glory; that wherever it may lead we will follow, and may we maintain the pledge, as Ruth to Naomi, whither thou goest we will go, and where thou lodgest we will lodge; thy people shall be cur people, and thy God our God.

And now, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the Battlefields Commission, for and on behalf of the State by which you were authorized to perform the work of erecting these memorials to perpetuate the memory of the Pennsylvania organizations who participated in the battles in and about Chattanooga, I accept the monuments, and I return to you all thanks for your labor of love so well and so ably performed. And to you, sir (turning to Mr. Tweedale), as the representative of the National Government, I commit their care and keeping. The state that was the keystone of the federal arch; that holds within her bosom the cradle of American liberty; whose fealty to the Constitution framed in our own Philadelphia has never

wavered; whose hills and valleys have re-echoed to the shock of war at Gettysburg, and whose sod gave sepulchre to heroic dead; whose sons have always rallied to the call of patriotism; and who have ever clung with loving tenderness to the flag of the fathers-that State now calls upon the nation, for whose perpetuity these men marched and fought and bled and died, to preserve these monuments as enduring witnesses of their courage and devotion; see to it that they are preserved to the latest generation; that no vandal hand shall mar their beauty; that they shall be perpetual reminders of American valor; and that those who live in the years to come may know and understand that the victories won and the battles lost were accomplished by heroes who faced the north as well as the south in an unparalled struggle from out whose sacrifices and bereavements there came the great advance in the world's civilization, and untold benefits to the human race.

ACCEPTANCE ON BEHALF OF THE NATIONAL GOVERNMENT.

By Hon. JOHN TWEEDALE, Co. I, 15th PA. VOL. CAV.

G

OVERNOR HASTINGS, The Commissioners of Pennsylvania and Comrades:-The Secretary of War takes the greatest interest in everything pertaining to the late war, and he regrets exceedingly that he cannot be here to-day. Public duty demands his presence elsewhere.

He has selected me to represent him on this occasion, not because I am near him in an official capacity, but because I was a private soldier in a Pennsylvania Regiment which participated in these battles.

Not for anything I did, nor for anything meritorious in my record, but that I might stand here to-day as the representative of the men in the ranks, the men who toiled and suffered and died in obscurity, the men who made success possible.

In order then that they may have recognition in these official ceremonies, the Chief Executive of the Nation, and the Secretary of War, both gallant soldiers, have selected one who was an enlisted man to perform this honorable service.

It therefore becomes my duty to accept for and in behalf of the Nation the monuments erected by the State of Pennsylvania to commemorate the deeds of her heroic sons upon these battlefields, and which you, sir, as the Chief Executive of the State, have just tendered to the United States of America. And in further performance of my duty, and in accordance with the instructions of the Secretary of War, I now transfer them to the custody of the Commissioners of the Chickamauga-Chattanooga National