My Dear Old Comrades —

I bid you hail and welcome. It is now a whole generation since we were gathered here- thirty-two years. We fought over these slopes, where we did our best to sustain our country and our flag. We did not then stop to count odds. We “went in” wherever duty called, regardless of personal danger, to help settle forever the question of the division of this great country. You who have lived through the war, who have lived to see this great reunited country and meet here on this desperate battleground, have lived to see a spectacle no other nation and no other men have ever seen or experienced.

Here, where two great armies fought and struggled for the supremacy for two long, bloody days, you behold tens of thousands of those combatants meeting to do honor and justice to all who were engaged in this great struggle. Honor to the living, justice to the dead.

Here you have met in friendly intercourse many men who in that great battle you met in hottest combat; whose volleys you met with desolating fire; whose grand attack you met with rushing charge. How well do I remember your defense of the line of the Chickamauga River on that dusty Friday before the great battle was joined, when both armies were sweeping toward the goal of strife- Chattanooga. Your thin line opposed to two grand army corps, struggling to hold them back until “Thomas could come.” How well you did your work and kept the Lafayette Road open and free for Thomas to throw the grand old Fourteenth Corps across the front of Bragg’s advance! How anxiously we waited that long, starless night at the forks of the road, a half-mile west of Viniard’s repelling the enemy’s attempt to seize that point, and how we felt when at 3 in the morning we heard the rumble of Thomas’s march in our rear, closing in to meet the advance of Bragg the next day.

How well do I remember that bloody, desperate conflict at Viniard’s all Saturday afternoon, when you swept the field with your repeaters; when Lilly treble-shotted his guns with canister! When we repulsed the charges that had made Sheridan, Davis and Wood stagger under their blows; when at night we thanked God that we held the ground we occupied in the morning; and then that long, bitter night, when every moment cries of pain and anguish went up from thousands of wounded whose forms dotted that desperate field; and then next morning, when we were withdrawn and placed “on the right fighting flank of the infantry line,” just in rear and to the right of Glenn’s house, how well you must remember that thirsty Sunday forenoon, when we lay on that dry hill, and when at 11 we saw the grand columns of Longstreet cross the Lafayette Road and sweep through the fields and woods toward our single line, and as heroic Sheridan was broken, we sprang to arms and swept in column down the hill and up the slope to Glenn’s house and met the advance of Longstreet’s left, first checking then breaking their column and driving their flank back through the woods to the Lafayette Road. We now stand on the very ground where the two lines first met. Yonder is the stump of the pine where gallant Colonel Funkhouser fell when leading his splendid charge of the Ninety-eight Illinois up the Glenn Hill. Yonder to the left is where brave Colonel A.O. Miller changed front under a rattling flank fire, and with his glorious Seventy-second Indiana drove back the force that had swept around our left flank and forced them off the hill northwardly from the Glenn house. Right here was the right of the One hundred and twenty-third Illinois which, under that splendid soldier, Colonel James Monroe, held back the fierce attempt to cut through our right center. Just where we stand the Seventeenth Indiana, under heroic Major William D. Jones, broke the left regiments of Longstreet’s attack, capturing a number of prisoners and driving then rapidly eastward to the Lafayette Road. Just up there Captain Eli Lilly’s Eighteenth Indiana Battery, with long-range canister, swept the ground in our front, firing rapidly over our heats. There, on the hill near the guns, was Colonel S.I. Atkins with his brave Ninety-second Illinois, repelling the attempt to swing round our rear and capture our battery and led horses.

Now turn from scenes like these to the present, where a great nation, with its best representatives from the combatants of both sides, freely meet and mingle on their hallowed ground, eager to commemorate the grand homage and unselfish devotion here exhibited by Americans in defense of what they believed to be right. Where else on earth can such a spectacle be seen? The government has established a commission composed of one volunteer ex-Federal officer, one ex-Confederate officer, and one officer of the United States regular army, and a historian- all men of splendid character and integrity, all of whom were engaged in this great battle- who have charge of the ground and improvements, and all deeply impressed with their duty to history and to the living and the dead and to make this a just monument and record and an object-lesson of the bloodiest battle of our great war.

Who of you that has survived that great conflict, who has lived through these desperate battles, does not feel a deeper interest in his country for this just recognition of his daring and his duty to his fellow men? Let us all more deeply resolve that our children shall be taught to forever maintain what we preserved in our day- a great, free and united country.

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