THE MONUMENT TO MARYLAND CONFEDERATES

The seven hundred ladies of the Daughters of the Confederacy who have addressed a petition to the Baltimore City Council are meeting with scant courtesy. The Daughters of the Confederacy and the Maryland Society of the Army and Navy have each subscribed $1,000, and members of these societies are gathering more funds for the erection of a monument to the memory of Maryland Confederate soldiers and sailors who lost their lives in the civil war. They have addressed a respectful petition to the City Council asking permission to place their monument either in Druid Hill Park or at the intersection of Mt. Royal avenue and Cathedral street. To this petition they have received no adequate reply. The fact that the Council is a republican body, it might be supposed, would make that body grant the petition with alacrity. A failure to do so will, of course, be attributed to partisan rancor, and doubtless with justice, for it is hard to conceive of any other objection that can be urged. Even hesitation is ugly and will be bitterly condemned by our Maryland people. Baltimore is and has always been Southern in its sympathies and the political upheaval in 1895 was no indication to the contrary. Maryland contributed a large number of soldiers to the Confederate cause, young men drawn from some of the most distinguished families of the State. After the war was over the State borrowed a hundred thousand dollars and sent it South to relieve the distress of the people. in the city of Baltimore fairs have been held from time to time for the Southern people in distress and the people of this city, regardless of politics, have always dealt generously with the South.

The apparent attitude of the Baltimore City Council is in painful contrast with the recent talk of a reunited country. In his Atlanta speech President McKinley said:

“Every soldier’s grave made during the unfortunate civil war is a tribute to American valor. And while, when these graves were made we differed widely about the future of the government, those differences were long ago settled by the arbitrament of arms – and the time has now come in the evolution of sentiment and feeling under the providence of God, when in the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of the Confederate soldiers.”

And yet we have a republican Council in Baltimore apparently putting obstructions in the way of those who wish to preserve the memory of their dead.

In 1895 a Confederate monument was dedicated in Chicago, an intensely Northern city. Not only was permission granted to place the monument in a park, but the people of Chicago contributed the money to build it. Nor was this all. The present commander-in-chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, at the head of a Grand Army post, acted as n escort to the Confederates when they went to Chicago to dedicate the monument. Col. Henry L. Turner, a Union veteran, at the head of the First Illinois Regiment, also escorted the Confederates and fired a volley over the graves of the Confederate dead. IT was this same Colonel Turner at the head of the same Illinois regiment who faced the Spanish bullets at Santiago. In his oration in Chicago Gen. Wade Hampton spoke of the decoration of the Confederate graves in the North by Federal veterans and of Federal graves in the South by Confederates. “Such narrow and bigoted feeling,” he said, “as would prompt a discordant note on occasions of this sort are rarely found among true men and brave soldiers.” This is a true saying.

It is high time for all such feeling as now seems to animate the City Council of Baltimore to cease. It should be recognized by all true men that those who fell in the civil war were brave men, who had the courage of their convictions, and died for a cause they thought to be right.

The commissioners sent by the English government to Virginia in 1676 to inquire into Bacon’s distrubance recieved a petition that “the present Grand Assembly would make an act of oblivion, so that no person may be injured by the provoking name of Rebels and Traitors.” In accordance with this petition the Assembly did pass an act imposing a fine of four hundred pounds of tobacco upon any person who should “renew the breaches, quarrels and heart-burnings amongst us” by the use of such terms as “traitors and rebels.”

Has not the lapse of more than a generation and the intervention of another war, in which North and South joined, brought the time of an act of oblivion in the city of Baltimore, as well as elsewhere? The republican members of the City Council may not be influenced by the narrow sectional prejudices which their attitude seems to suggest, but, if not, they should make haste to clear themselves of the suspicion which their inaction has created. If they persist in refusing respectful consideration to a subject which enlists the sympathy of the great majority of the citizens of Baltimore, and to which their attention has been repeatedly called, they will be regarded as pleading guilty to the charge of a petty intolerance which has disappeared in almost every other section of the country.