y to the people and the
soldiers of the South.

Yet the bloody shirt lingered long as a troublemaker, and was invoked by
both parties.

IV

That chance gathering of heedless persons, stirred by the bombast of
self-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display--loose mobs
of local nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by
the gallant General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp
followers--should tear their passion to tatters with the thought that
Virginia, exercising an indisputable right and violating no reasonable
sensibility, should elect to send memorials of Washington and Lee for
the Hall of Statues in the nation's Capitol, came in the accustomed way
of bloody-shirt agitation. It merely proved how easily men are led when
taken in droves and stirred by partyism. Such men either bore no part in
the fighting when fighting was the order of the time, or else they were
too ignorant and therefore too unpatriotic to comprehend the meaning of
the intervening years and the glory these had brought with the
expanse of national progress and prowess. In spite of their lack of
representative character it was not easy to repress impatience at
ebullitions of misguided zeal so ignoble; and of course it was not
possible to dissuade or placate them.

All the while never a people more eager to get together than the people
of the United States after the War of Sections, as never a people so
averse to getting into that war. A very small group of extremists and
doctrinaires had in the beginning made a War of Sections possible.
Enough of these survived in the days of Cleveland and McKinley to keep
sectionalism alive.

It was mainly sectional clamor out for partisan advantage. But it made
the presidential campaigns lurid in certain quarters. There was no
end of objurgation, though it would seem that even the most embittered
Northerner and ultra Republican who could couple the names of Robert E.
Lee and Benedict Arnold, as was often done in campaign lingo, would not
hesitate, if his passions were roused or if he fancied he saw in it
some profit to himself or his party, to liken George Washington to Judas
Iscariot.

The placing of Lee's statue in the Capitol at Washington made the
occasion for this.

It is true that long before Confederate officers had sat in both Houses
of Congress and in Republican and Democratic cabinets and upon the
bench of the Supreme Court, and had served as ambassadors and