Place Names

On May 30, 1868, a stalwart, bearded man of military bearing stood bareheaded in Arlington cemetery. Around him stretched 15,000 graves, neatly spaced row on row. Facing the small crowd that had gathered to hear him speak, he paid soldierly tribute to the men who had died in the Civil War. The occasion was America's first Memorial Day. The speaker was General James A. Garfield, later to become President of the United States. Said he: "Let us consider. Eight years ago this was the most unwarlike nation of the earth. . . . The faith of our people in the stability and permanence of their institutions was like their faith in the eternal course of nature. . . . [Then] in a moment we were the most warlike nation on earth. . . . We were not merely a people with an army--we were a people in arms. . . . Here are sheaves reaped in the harvest of death from every battlefield. . . . If each grave had a voice to tell us what its silent tenant last saw and heard on earth we might . . . hear the whole story of the war."

When Garfield spoke, the struggle between North and South was but three years over. Many of its men and all of its memories were alive. The names of its battles were like a vast orchestration of the years of war. Manassas and Shiloh, Antietam and Gettysburg, Vicksburg and the Wilderness--the names would be long remembered. Seventy-five years later, on another Memorial Day, the nation was again at war. Again it had become, not merely a people with an army, but a people in arms. The old place names still lingered in the American mind, but now there were new names to raise a challenge to the old, Attu was such a name, and Corregidor, and Guadalcanal, Midway and Buna. There were others and there would be more. They too would be long remembered.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.