The Blue and the Gray
The inscription on the Soldiers’ Monument on the Common, in the City of Boston, is as follows:
To the men of Boston who died for their country on land and sea in the War which kept the Union whole, destroyed slavery, and maintained the Constitution, the grateful city has built this monument that their example may speak to coming generations.
It is hinted in the Boston newspapers that the inscription from the pen of President Eliot, of Harvard University, was suggested to him by the following lines sent to him by Professor James Russell Lowell:
To men who die for her on land and sea
That you might have a country great and free,
Boston rears this. Build you their monument
In lives like theirs at duty’s summons spent.
The woman’s Confederate monument in Charleston, S. C., bears an inscription beginning thus:
This monument perpetuates the memory of those who, true to the instincts of their birth, faithful to the teachings of their fathers, constant in their love for the State, died in the performance of their duty; who have glorified a fallen cause by the simple manhood of their lives, the patient endurance of suffering and the heroism of death, and who in the dark hours of imprisonment, in the hopelessness of the hospital, in the short, sharp agony of the field, found support and consolation in the belief that at home they would not be forgotten.