zgHsaams^Er 
 
 A DISCOURSE, 
 
 BY THE REV. W . W. LORD, D . D 
 
 IN UONOR OF 
 
 CAPT. PAUL HAMILTON, 
 
 ADJUTANT GENERAL, THIRD BRIGADE, ARMY OF MISS., 
 
 KILLED IN THE BATTLE OF CHICKASAW BAYOU, DEC. 29th, 1863. 
 
 BUKIED FROM CHRIST CHURCH, VICKSBl RQ, DECEMBER 31. 
 
 COMMEMORATED IN THIS DISCOURSE 
 Sunday, January 4th, 1863. 
 
 So sleep the bntre who sink (o rest. 
 With all their country's wishes blest. 
 
 VICKSBURG: 
 
 PBINTBD UY M. BHAXMON, PKOI'RIETOR OK THK DAILY WHIG. 
 
 18153. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2011 with funding from 
 Duke University Libraries 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/discoursebyrevwwOOIord 
 
Kii 
 
 DISCOURSE. 
 
 [ remsmbered God, ani was troubled; I complaine 3 and my spirit was 
 overwhelmed.— Psalms, 87: 3. 
 
 Those who heard the announcement of my dis- 
 course are prepared to hear me deplore the untimely 
 death of that gallant and ill-fated young man, whose 
 mortal remains were lately borne from this church 
 to the place where his dust will mingle with that of 
 others amongst the heroic dead. And deeply, by 
 all my human sympathies and all my patriotic feel- 
 ings, do I deplore it. 
 
 It was that fair and open countenance upon which 
 N:\ture had written the words noble, loyal and hue — 
 that free which I recently saw before me in this 
 
 I very place, so bright, and animated with informing 
 mind, and that erect and manly figure, full of life 
 
 ^md vigor, contrasted with the prostrate and mu- 
 tilated form that, so soon afterwards, was borne, in 
 its black coffin, past the very place where he had 
 sat with no presentiment of the dark shadow that 
 
 OtB 
 
was to fell upon the spot — it was the sudden change 
 of life and youth and brilliant promise, to death 
 and grief and bitter disappointment, that made my 
 heart, as it mused upon that strange vicissitude, 
 burn within me, and prompted it to ask of what- 
 ever faculty in my nature had power to answer it, 
 these grave and importunate questions : First — 
 assuming the righteousness of our cause, can Di- 
 vine Providence be justified in view of a consequence 
 like this? And next — if that were done, is Liberty 
 worth so much? 
 
 Like Asaph, in the text, I remembered God, and 
 was troubled. The mysterious language of the 
 Psalmist, suddenly became plain. I was troubled 
 because I remembered God, and his great attribute, 
 justice. 
 
 And, looking upon the harvest which Death is now 
 reaping in the broad harvest-field of this Southern 
 land, contemplating the untold amount of human 
 suffering, public loss and private grief which this 
 war has inflicted upon both the parties engaged in 
 it, there is no thoughtful mind but must, at times, 
 ask itself— Was War ever intended by Providence 
 
 ,y.->m-M*MW »ww:n» awr 
 
to be the means of settling national controversies 
 and adjusting the relations of political communities? 
 And, if it was, then, with what justice? — since every 
 war must be practically waged, its perilous battles 
 fought, and grievous burdens borne by those, on 
 either side, who are, for the most part, innocent of 
 the injustice and irresponsible for the causes that 
 precipitated the conflict. Thus, upon the side of 
 our present enemies, the ruthless Statesmen whose 
 ambition occasioned, and he above all, whose procla- 
 mation created the Avar, sit secure in places of 
 safety and power, while thousands who were drag- 
 ged by their action into the disastrous struggle, lie 
 buried, far from domestic graves, in soil that if it 
 could be made conscious of their abhorred presence, 
 would cast them forth, and refuse them sepulture. 
 
 But stranger still — if war be the divine ordeal 
 for the trial of great national disputes— stranger, 
 and more staggeiing to our faith, and not less won- 
 derful because indisputable, nor less inexplicable 
 because so frequently met with in history, is the fact 
 that the righteous cause is maintained by the weaker 
 party; and ilia t thousands of brave youths and 
 
6 
 
 useful men must be sacrificed to the injustice of the 
 strong, and sleep in bloody graves, for t'le sake of 
 a cause that has been already adjudged, and pre- 
 ordained to success, by Heaven. 
 
 I do not know that I can successfully rise to the 
 call that bids me appear and answer for God in the 
 Court of human conscience; or, if with success, that 
 I can without impiety, 
 
 " Attempt the height of that great argument 
 That justifies the ways of God to man." 
 
 But I cannot, as a believer in Holy Scripture, be- 
 lieving also in a Divine Providence in history, deny 
 that He permits the awful arbitration cf war; and 
 even authorizes it in cases of manifest oppression, 
 and injustice not otherwise to be resisted or remedied. 
 Often and again did the Israelites ask Him, if.they 
 should go up to battle, and the jewels of the Sacred 
 Urim flashed forth the oracle, or the lips of the 
 inspired prophet uttered the response — Go up — for 
 I am with you. He styles Himself the God of 
 battles; and one of his most frequent names amongst 
 the Hebrews was Jehovah Sabaoth — Jehovah of 
 Armies — or, as we have it translated, the Lord of 
 
Hosts. And iu the noblest anthem of the Christian 
 Church, the Te Deum of St. Ambrose, we repeat 
 the everlasting invocation of the angels, Holy, 
 Holy, Holy Lord God of Sabaoth. Here the God 
 of Armies, is affirmed to be holy. It is inferred 
 that He is the Providence of war, and at the same 
 time, blameless for the wars which armies, under His 
 Providential direction wage, and innocent of all the 
 crimes and afflictions of war. 
 
 Moses, in his song of victory, by a figure of sur- 
 passing boldness, makes Him, himself, a Warrior. 
 " The Lord is a Man of war : the Lord is his name." 
 And yet, in the words of the same inspiration, 
 "Thou continuest holy,0 thou Worship of Israel!" 
 
 It is not difficult, however, to explain this appa- 
 rent inconsistency. He, who 
 
 Binding Nature fast in Fate, 
 Left free the human Will, 
 
 could not make a world in which war should not 
 exist, unless, at least, he had left man out of it ; or 
 had deprived him of that voluntary power, implying 
 liberty and opportunity to his evil passions, in a 
 word, of that mysterious Free-agency, that makes 
 him essentially Man. 
 
Thus arose from the very constitution of things 
 that law by which a lesser evil sometimes becomes 
 the alternative or remedy of a greater. And it is 
 by that law that war exists; and that the state of 
 war must often be the alternative of a state even 
 worse and more intolerable than war. The christian 
 Economy, therefore, has not made warfare obsolete ; 
 nor, sad as the reflection is, have we any real ground 
 for the expectation that it will ever accomplish what, 
 in the history of nearly two thousand years, it has 
 not accomplished. The mild principles of its foun- 
 der will never, perhaps, be so cordially and univer- 
 sally accepted, as to obviate the stern necessity of 
 an appeal to arms. War is everywhere in the New 
 Testament, as in the Old, assumed to be the occa- 
 sional condition of society to the end of time. The 
 predicted Millenium itself, during which the nations 
 are no more to learn war, is to be but a compar- 
 atively short interval in the warlike history of our 
 race. After the thousand years of peace, the spirit 
 of war will again be loosed : and wars and rumors of 
 wars, are put by Christ himself amongst the signs 
 of the approaching end of the world. Soldiers 
 are spoken of, and the duties of Christian Soldiers, 
 

 
 as if the order was expected to be permanent. The 
 
 Christian is called a Soldier. His service is military, 
 
 his life a warfare. He is compared to a soldier in 
 
 every point of soldierly equipment and discipline. 
 
 Christ himself is called the Captain of our Salva- 
 tion. 
 
 A book that was meant to be perpetual would not 
 certainly be so full of martial phrases, figures and 
 comparisons, doomed to become obsolete, when in 
 the course of time war should be disused, and sol- 
 diers cease to exist. 
 
 It is true that Christianity might be expected to 
 diminish the frequency and severity of wars : and 
 it has fulfilled that expectation. The influence 
 which the Prince of Peace has diffiised among the 
 nations from that interior kingdom of peace, the 
 Church, in which he invisibly reigns, has mitigated 
 the sufferings and horrors of war to a degree, that 
 as little as we can now realize it, makes civilization 
 the infinite debtor of Christianity. It has actually 
 created what are called the rights of the conquered. 
 For, in ancient times, the conquered had no rights ; 
 and their only immuity from death or slavery, lay 
 in the mere clemency of the conqueror. The very 
 wars of Christianity, those wars of which Christ, 
 foreseeing they would arise, said in the spirit of pre- 
 
10 
 
 diction, and not of determination, " I come not to 
 send peace but a sword," were caused by the ne- 
 cessity that Christianity should be free to exert 
 its pacific influence, and by the efforts made to free 
 it from bondage to the interests, the prejudices and 
 the passions of men. So that they were, in effect? 
 wars for the amelioration of war. What, for in- 
 stance, were the wars of the Protestant Reforma- 
 tion but a mighty conflict waged against that spirit 
 of bigotry and of superstition, which had introduced 
 the cruelties of heathenism into the very heart of 
 Christianity? And here, too, is an illustration of 
 my first position, viz : that the evils of war ought 
 sometimes to be incurred in preference to the greater 
 evils entailed by submission to despotic power. In 
 vain had been the restoration of learning, in vain 
 the liberal tastes of Leo, and the elegant erudition 
 of Erasmus, in vain had the voice of Luther "stir- 
 red the sluggish heart of Germany like the voice of 
 God," had not the spirit of the Lord of Hosts en- 
 tered the hearts of the Confederated Princes of 
 Northern Europe, and sustained them through that 
 dire and devastating war of thirty years, which has 
 left its precious result — precious alike to the pro- 
 testant and the catholic world — civil and religious 
 liberty. A result, I admit, that must still, occa- 
 
11 
 
 sionally be again contended for, and re-asserted and 
 re-established by force of arms : but that, even as 
 it has hitherto existed amongst our ancestors and 
 ourselves, has been the cause of so much happiness 
 and prosperity as much more than compensates for 
 the bloody and arduous struggle by which it was 
 obtained, and justifies our present unparalleled efforts 
 to maintain it. 
 
 How much happier, again, would it have been for 
 Ireland if with one mighty effort, at the cost of 
 whatever temporary suffering, aud loss of life, she 
 had, centuries ago, broken and cast of! the yoke of 
 England from her neck. If as late even as the 
 days of Cromwell, when England could put forth but 
 half her force, Ireland had put forth all of hers, and, 
 instead of becoming cowed and subjugated by the 
 usurper's first cruelties, resisted his invading legions, 
 in the holy names of God and her women, even to 
 the death, do you think that Ireland and her people 
 would have been losers, or gainers, in the sum of 
 human happiness ? Would generation after gener- 
 ation of Irishmen have shown in their very faces, 
 the mark of a subjugated people, the sign man- 
 ual of the oppressing race, in the effects of famine 
 and fever, and poverty, and discontent? Would 
 their naturally high and heroic temper, — the pcrfcr- 
 
12 
 
 vidum ingenium of Tacitus, — have only been the 
 occasion of increasing their own misery, and of 
 service only to foreign nations, which have employed 
 their valor and drained their blood in alien wars? 
 
 God avert such a fate from a people not less no- 
 ble in impulse, warm of temperament, and valiant 
 of heart — the people of these Southern States ! 
 And that He has determined to avert it, I see the 
 proof in the efforts He has inspired us to make and 
 the suffering He has fortified us to bear for that ap- 
 parent purpose. 
 
 The object which can alone justify war, is, on our 
 part, the only object for which the war is waged. 
 And if the war be justifiable, then Providence is 
 justified in every ordinary incident of war, including 
 this which we now deplore. Hard as was the fate 
 of the promising young soldier whose death has 
 created among us more than the customary feeling 
 in regard to such events, that fate was not singular 
 nor inglorious. Long before the youthful hero left 
 his heroic State to die here on heroic ground, and 
 before the loot of the first marching man made its 
 first step towards the earliest battle-field of the war, 
 the soil which he went to defend, held in its bosom 
 the precious dust of many a gallant youth, who, 
 like him, had just come into his inheritance of noble 
 
13 
 
 and virtuous manhood, but to sacrifice it, with all 
 its wealth of golden expectations, upon the altar of 
 his country. Over the mouldering bodies of how 
 many such as he, have the harvests of Virginia 
 waved, the cornfields of Kentucky rustled, and the 
 savannahs of the South grown green, long before 
 he was born. None of them, perhaps, had been 
 like him, in thirty battles. None ol them, it can 
 be safely said, had drawn his virgin sword in a cause 
 so entirely just and holy. Few of them could have 
 earned the distinction, which his chief awarded to 
 him, of being the bravest amongst the brave. But 
 the sacred fire of patriotism that burned in their 
 hearts was the same that burned in his, and that 
 will burn forever in the hearts of those who live 
 upon the sacred soil that covers and sepulchres their 
 dust. 
 
 These memories of the patriotic dead naturally 
 bring me to my second question. Conceding all 
 that has been said, and that when the body politic 
 requires the heroic remedy of war, Divine Provi- 
 dence is not to be blamed for the incidental suiler. 
 ing; admitting, too, that the death of those who die 
 for their country, and dying transmit their pious 
 and heroic example to posterity, is not without its 
 effect in excitiug the same exalted spirit of devo- 
 
14 
 
 tion in others ; — still the question recurs, " Is liberty 
 worth so much?" 
 
 I have partly answered this question in answer- 
 ing the other. And I now affirm that liberty is 
 worth all the dangers and sufferings of the state of 
 war ; otherwise war would not have been made the 
 means of asserting and maintaining it, 
 
 Liberty, it has been said, is priceless. And what 
 price shall we think to put upon it, when we see the 
 estimation in which it is held by the Southern 
 heart; when we see mothers give up their sons, and 
 entire communities send the flower of their youth 
 where Death fills his ranks by conscription from 
 ours; and when a nation " coins its heart and drops 
 its blood for drachmas," nor think that they have 
 purchased liberty at too great a cost. For they 
 have purchased happiness, and long exemption from 
 attempted oppression and deliverance from intolera- 
 ble wrongs, for all who survive. And in the most 
 wasting war this is always by far the greatest num- 
 ber. Yes, liberty is worth the price, -even when we 
 pay so much as the recent event which we to-day 
 lament, makes us sensible that we do. It is worth 
 our life. It was worth even that of the chivalrous 
 and aspiring youth in whom we mourn its extinc- 
 tion. Did we not say as much, when we mingled 
 
15 
 
 Laurel with the cypress, in the wreath, which we laid 
 upon his coffin ? Did we not imply as much, in 
 the solemn thanks which we offered "for his good 
 example," as we stood by the grave where all of 
 him that was earth, was committed to the earth ? 
 Did we not attest it, and even make the life he 
 had sacrificed seem of less value, compared with 
 immortality, when we prayed that we might " with 
 him, have our perfect consummation and bliss " in 
 Heaven's " eternal and everlasting glory?" Did 
 not the volley that was fired over his grave, repeat 
 and re-echo it among the graves that cover the re- 
 mains of so many soldiers of this, and of another 
 war; so many of our own noble and cherished dead, 
 for whom we wept the tears that will be wept for 
 him in his distant home ? I know little, almost 
 nothing, of his history. I know not what vows 
 were upon his head, what ties were around his 
 heart. I know not even if he has a living mother, 
 to weep for him, and when all others shall have for- 
 gotten to weep, still to bedew his memory with the! 
 silent tears of the heart. I know not if there be, 
 one who, when his companions who went forth with 
 him, shall return amid rejoicings to their home, will/ 
 exclaim, Alas, my beautiful, my brave ! 
 
 But I saw strong men who had been his compan- 
 
1G 
 
 ( ions in arms weep manly tears, when they heard of 
 'his death, and I knew that a great soul had dwelt, 
 and a warm heart once beat in his shattered bosom. 
 
 And let not his friends in the far off State of his 
 nativity regret the impossibility of conveying his 
 remains thither. We will make for him, or rather 
 he has made for himself — here on the bank of the 
 Mississippi as illustrious a grave as he could have 
 found upon the Atlantic shore. 
 
 Let his native State know that the hero she gave 
 us we have given to his country, and that the in- 
 evitable conscription of Death has never drawn a 
 braver or more willing conscript than answered to 
 ' the name of Hamilton. 
 
 What the Church could do to honor his remains, 
 
 and dignify their interment, she has done. His 
 
 soul is in the hands of Him who in life filled it 
 
 with high and noble impulses; and who, we trust, 
 
 ! has still higher and nobler uses for it in death. 
 
 A strange land, which is yet a part of the coun- 
 try for which he died, has received him with equal 
 i grief and honor into its bosom. And strangers as 
 1 we are, he will remain in our hearts so long as they 
 
 beat, like his, responsive to the voice of country, and 
 cherish, in our countrymen, the memory of worth.