Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 30, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 March 1887 — HEPBURN OF IOWA. [ARTICLE]

HEPBURN OF IOWA.

An Eloquent Tribute to, the 400,000 Union Soldiers Who /Marched to Death. -• i t Ouly 30,000 People Would Have Bhared in the Pension Bill—And Only $4,370,000 Bequired to Pay Them. The Contrast with the Mexican Soldiers— A Withering Analysis of Bragg. [From the lowa State Register.] It seems that the speech with which Colonel Hepburn replied to his neighbors, when he received such a cordial welcome home at Clarinda, lowa, was one of peculiar grace and power, and one which is worthy to be printed in every free-minded and fair-dealing paper in the land. In go other speech or paper has the cruelty of the pension veto, the justice of the provisions of the bill, the debt of honor owed by the nation to its soldiers, nnd * the facts as to the few or the many who would have been benefited by the bill, been so clearly and powerfully set forth as in this impromptu speech of this great defender of the Union soldiers, in talking to his own neighbors. It is safe to say that this speech will be the one which the Democratic party will have to meet in the campaigns in the different States, when it shall attempt to justify the action of Cleveland as demanded of him by the solid South and the coldblooded money kings of the North. The old Union soldiers, wherever they shall be as this speech shall come to them, will thank God for Pete Hepburn. After a beautiful and loving tribute to lowa, his home, and its people, his neighbors for nearly his whole life, the Colonel said: There are matters that I would like to talk about, but fearing that some might regard them improper upon an occasion like this, because of seeming partisanship, I will omit them. I cannot, however, omit one thing that I desire to say, and that is, that the President of these United States, in my humble judgment, in honesty of purpose, perhaps, has mistaken the temper of the people when ho classifies those with you and our Chairman from ’6l to ’65 as paupers and mendicants. It is a mistake no legs marked and certain than those other hitter words uttered by our whilom comrades when they wero classified ns vagabonds, as thieves, ns perjurers, as the scum of tho earth. The battle-scarred old heroes of! the Rebellion, tottering toward the grave, have done nothing to deserve such characterization as that. Sometimes I have thought that there might have been a misleading of the Executive mind that wus in harmony with honest purpose. I remember that all the great journals of this land are to-day declaiming against the claims and the rights to recognition of the old veteran; but I remember, my comrades, that in ’6l that same class of journals printed in the great metropolitan centers, the centers of wealth, were not those that upheld the hands of Abraham Lincoln in tho earlier part ot the war. The capital of this nation, like the capital of every other nation, then was cowardly as it now is mean. (Cheers and applause.] Those men whose sentiments are voiced by the great metropolitan presß forget the Then situation. They wero menaced by a separation of our territory' into two hostile nations—nations if erected that must be in the very nature of things constantly at war. There conld have been no peace between the United States and the Confederate Statos. There were such differences of sentiment, such differences of purpose, there were such wars of ideas, that they would have manifested themselves in wars more disastrous than tho wars of the Roses or the Thirty Years war that devastated Europe. The Confederate States with slavery as an institution, and tho United States with the liberty-lovingjprinciples that we had, could not have been at peace. The result would ha' e been constant carnage, that constant destruction of wealth, that constant interference with accumulation that would then have sent the now rich to the poorhouse. The old veteran saved them from the poorhouses, in their days of distress ; they forget it and are not willing now to save the old veteran from the poorhouse. [Applause. | I am not overdrawing this picture. The man who was a man twenty-five years ago and abreast of the thought of his time, knows the absolute impossibility it would have been to have had two governments, one resting upon the corner-stone of liberty and the other resting upon the cornor-stone of human slavery, existing side by side in a condition of peace and amity. I’have thought sometimes that tho younger men—those growing into the activities of life now—fail to appreciate the situation of twenty-five years ago. Youvoung gentlemen have seen nothing around you during all of your few years of experience save those conditions that result from peace, prosperity, and plenty. You know nothing of the conditions of twenty-five years ago. Since that period we hav.e trebled Our wealth, we have more than doubled our population. Since that period we havo trebled our manufacturing and wealth-creating possibilities; we have more than quadrupled the circulating medium; we have since that time multiplied by five times the railways of the country ; we have more than deubled the commerce of the country; we have more than quadrupled the internal commerce of the country. You know nothing about that, and perhaps you havo but faint recollections of what the war cost. , You may not know that of the men that marched to the front, 67,000 of them were shot to death on the battlefield ; that 43,000 of them died in hospitals of wounds received; that 29,000 of them were starved to death in the prison pens of the South; that 24,001 of them died from--accident, were drowned, died from sunstroke, disappeared ; that 235,000 died in the hospitals while their names were still upon tho army rolls. A great army of 410,000 men that went to the front and never came back. You havo forgotten this if you ever knew it. Think of what a multitude of men! There have never been so many votes cast in any election in the State of Iowa; there are not so many voters in the State of lowa to-day as in this’army of tho dead. Could they he called buck and formed into bat-tle-line,, formed into marching column, divided into three arms of the service—infantry, cavalry, and artillery; mount the cavalry, furnish the artillery with guns, horses, and caissons, give to each that camp and garrison equipages and those army trains needed to move the army and supply" it for thirty days, and start it from Davenport on the march ; when the vanguard reached the city of Council Bluffs the rear guard would otlll be looking from the bluffs into the Mississippi River. That was tho number of men that died—that were our comrades. Can it be possible ? I would say it to the President, if I could, can it be possible that of a corps marching to the front, twenty-five per oent. and more could be destroyed, and the balance escape unscathed? They may have escaped the mark of bullet; but how is it possible, all undergoing the same fatigues, tho same perils, the same vicissitudes, one strong man is stricken down and the others not somewhat affected appreciably in t: at physical construction that unfits them for the possibilities of old age, to say nothing of those taat languished in the prison-pen. Twenty-six of Page County’s boys lay for nine months amid the horrors of Andersonville ; young, stalwart, vigorous men when they went within those fatal, fearful gates; you can select them to-day among the men of "their age, because of the premature decay resulting from the horrors of the situation into which they were thrust; and yet, perhaps, not one of them, under the pension laws as they now exist, could receive a pension. That pension bill that was referred to by the gentlemen who preceded me was not the serious thing that many have ffiaos been asHwljfctawddiy returns . ad e from a little more than hall of the ftantteiTln-.trie United States ‘XhsArit&srly ejMS-iaan in those”' conntles were inmate* of tho houses. those caseCT^uS.*foaßa«d>ly digcharged, who from m**.-®**, able to cam a swvvort. It was perhaps, there Would woe; bo 30,W; in round numbers was .the t<A»\ wwsuber i that the Commissioner 1 of Pensions and’the' Committee of Invalid Pensions ih the House expected would be beneficiaries under that act, so that the bOl would cost the Government all told a little less than four and three fourths million dollars annually, the cost gradually diminishing. 'No fair interpretation of that bill can make any man a beneficiary under it unless he is dependent upon his maunal labor for support and is totally incapable of earning a support. It was that class of men we were trying to provide for. It is ttiat class of men that the metropolitan press has said shall notbe provided for, at the instance of the wealth of the country and the solid vote of the unreconstructed South, There was no question or principle involved in this except It be a,.principle of patriotism. The solid vote that the Mexioan {tension bill received, and the approval it receiv'd at the hands of the Hxecutive. met every constitutional question that ia involved in the other bill.

Under the Mexican pension bill fix and three- | fourths millions are estimated to oe annually necessary in the way of appropriation. Bui there is a wonderful difference in the lpoality in its distribution. Under the first bill it is north of Mason A Dixon's line where the money will be expended; under the other bill more than three-fourths/of it will be expended south of that line. These two bills ran side by side through the House. In their passage one was supjxrsed to be dependent upon the other. The North paid the price of putting three mon south of Mason and Dixon's line on the pension roll under the Mexican pension bill for each one that it secured tho North. Of the men who have been engaged in the Indian wars previous to the war of the rebellion, more than ulnetentha of them came from the slave States. Sixty-niho thousand men wore engogod in these wars, the various Indian wars, prior to tho Mexican war. All of them, save 6,1)00 that participated in the Blaokbawk war, were soldiers In the so-called wars that were carried on in the Southern States: the Florida war, the Creek aud Seminole wars. Sixty-nine thousand of that class of volunteers are covered by the Mexican pension law,. Of 101,0(10 volunteers in the Mexican war a little more than two-thirds came from the Southern States ; it was a Southern war: it was for the propagation of the institution of slavery; it was to add new slave States to the union of Stages; it was in their interest; it was carried on by a Democratic and Southern administration. The men who clamored for regiments where favors were to be distributed wero selected largely from the South; so that more than two-thirds of all the volunteers in that war were selected from those States. Here you see 195,000, supposing them all to bo living, are beneficiaries under the Mexican pension bill, while 35,0J(j men only are possibly beneficiaries, supposing them all to be living, under the same bill in the North. But that bill, altfiough tho two measures rau side by side, secured the necessary approval that mode it a law, and after it was approved the other failed. Some of my friends in my own neighborhood have spoken very kindly of the few words I was able to say With regard to tho veto of that measure. I have here in my hand a letter which I received a few days ago, that gave me no inconsiderable satisfaction. With vour permission I will read it. It is dated “Headquarters E. H. Brown Rost, No. 130, G. A. R„ Fond du Lac, Wis.” Fond du Lac is tho home of Gen. Bragg, the man wno characterized my -old comrades, who might be beneficiaries under the bill, as “vagabonds, thieves, scoundrels, perjurers, and the scum of the earth." The letter reads: Feb. 28, 1887, Hon. Mr. Hepburn, M. C., Washington, D. C. : Sm—Y’our remarks to General E. S. Bragg as to his position in the G. A. R., comparing him to Benedict Arnold, meets with the hearty approval ot this post, of which General E. S. Bragg is a member. We thank you and all others in Congress who took so prominent a part in vindicating the late bill for the relief of our worthy comrades and thoir widAws and orphans. Yours respectfully, George D. Stanton, Adjutant of the Post. Accompanying that was a series of resolutions passed by the post, too long to weary you with at tins time. I would have been glad if that gentleman who spoke so feelingly with regard to his love of the true'soldier, could have received a letter indicating the opinions of his old comrades before he delivered his speech in opposition to their bill? It might have saved him from a mistake. There are men here who know, that that gentleman was a gallant officer. He was commander of that i rigado known in the Army of the Potomac as the “Iron Brigade.” There was none better. Ho succeeded to its command late in tho war; it had won a world-wide reputation then. No mm loading a Roman legion in tho days when Rome was most powerful, or a French division in those days seventy-five or eighty years ago, when France won her highest renown as a warlike nation, ever felt or hod a right to feel more confidence in the men who followed him than the leader of that Iron Brigade. I hoard that gentleman say iu the midst of his scathing denunciation of his old comrades that he was a friend of the soldier; that no man could feel the thrill of delight that came to tho soldier’s heart as he rode along a waving line, who heard tho acclaims of the comrades when they felt that confidence that comes with a trusted leader, no man who had ever led them up the heights of a desperate assault, could ever forget his old comrades. Ah, who is it that makes the rotown of the General ? ••■•:■■.—y-..,-.,, Sujipose that when ho dashed along the lines he had not been met by the huzzas that came from brave hearts ; that when he led the assault ho had not been followed by tho bayonets that were hold by well-nerved; hands? What would have becomo of the leader's renown, and where would have been the stars ot rank? I thought when I heard , him say that, that he ought to have felt that soutimont of mutuality and reciprocity that should exist between the soldier who made his General and the General that was created by the ranks. [Applause. | There was another picture ; there were some of those old men that once the commanding" officer came; there were some of those men whose eyes light up with the fires of courage when tVey knew the deadly assault was to bo made ; there were the men who with firm hand held the bayonet as they rushod onward, exposing their bare breasts to the torrent of shot and shell that camo hurtling like a winter's storm against them. These old men now in the poor-houses, eyes dimmed by want, stalwart hands no longer stalwart because of the ravages of disease and old age, holding out those gaunt hands pleadingly toward the man whoso renown they created, and begging him, in the feeble voice of old ago, for succor now in their great distress. [Enthusiastic applause and cheers. 1 Thero were two pictures that should engage the attention o # f tho artist- one Bhowing how well the hoys performed thoir part, the other showing how easy it was to he recreant when profit and possible honor—preferment, I would say—dictated a change of front.