ADDRESS.

DELIVERED AT THE DEDICATION OF GEN. N. B. BAKER'S MONUMENT AT THE CEMETERY IN DES MOINES, SEPT. 6, 1878, BY HON. S. J. KIRKWOOD.

E HAVE met to-day to complete a good work-to dedicate a monument erected to perpetuate the memory of our fellow-citizen, Nathaniel B. Baker.

The monument has been finished, and stands before us, worthy in its material, in its workmanship, in its beauty, of its purpose. The part that has been assigned to me in the ceremonies of its dedication is to me both grateful and embarrassing-grateful in that it affords me the opportunity to speak in praise of a man whom I knew thoroughly and esteemed highly, and embarrassing in that I can say nothing of him to you, who also knew him well, that will not seem to you as familiar as an oft-told tale.

He came to Iowa in 1856, and settled at Clinton when the site of that now-thriving and beautiful city was an almost unbroken prairie. My personal acquaintance with him began at the eighth session of the General Assembly of our state, he having been elected a member of the House from Clinton county. During that session he became known to me, as to all others with whom he came in contact, as an active, industrious and intelligent legislator, and as a kindly, genial, pleasant gentleman. With the spring of 1861 came the outbreak of the great rebellion. I am but saying what you all know when I say that that event brought to the official position I then held in our state, much of care, labor and responsibility, and that I needed in the office of Adjutant General a man whose earnest devotion to the cause of the Union, whose varied intelligence, whose business capacity, whose unwearied industry and whose untiring energy would tend to lighten that care--lessen that labor, although it could not share that responsibility. Such a man I found in him to whose memory we render honor to-day.

From the time of his appointment as Adjutant General, July 25, 1861, until the close of my official term in January, 1864, my intercourse with him, both official and personal, was close and intimate, and enables me to speak with knowledge of him, both as an officer and a man. In order to give you a fair understanding of his official work I must explain to some extent the difficulties under which the work was done. I think it would be difficult to imagine a people more utterly unprepared for war than were the people of Iowa at the outbreak of the rebellion. We would not, until war was actually begun, believe that our Southern brethren could be guilty of the insane folly of making war upon a government that had never done them anything but good, and so we were almost entirely unprepared to do our part in the conflict. We had men, the material from which soldiers are made, none braver or better, but were without military knowledge and organization. When the requisition from President Lincoln came for the first regiment of Iowa volunteers, the composition and organization of that regiment was a question of anxious and earnest inquiry. Judge Dillon, then of the Supreme Court of Iowa, was consulted and gave his opinion, but with less confidence in its correctness, I think, than he usually had when announcing decisions from the bench. I remember very distinctly the relief felt when it was learned there was living at Marion, in Linn county, a gentleman who had been educated at West Point--General McKean--the hot haste in which a messenger was dispatched to bring him to Davenport, and the hearty satisfaction that followed his arrival. We had no food for our volunteers, no clothing, no arms; our treasury was without money, and if it had been full no part of the money could have been used, for the reason that no appropriation had been made for military purposes. Our state had not then, in the wild excitement and uncertainty of the time, any credit outside its own limits, and we had but little money within the state. But our people had faith in themselves, in each other, and in the good cause. Money, to some extent, was absolutely

men

essential, and the banks of the state, (we had the old State Bank then) came nobly to the front and furnished all the money they could spare with justice to their depositors and the public. Railroad men and steamboat men and stage men furnished transportation and waited for their pay. Individuals gave their services without pay or waited payment. Two especially, Hiram Price, of Davenport, and Ezekiel Clark, of Iowa City, rendered good service. They were both men of wealth and had good credit, and they used their money and their credit to the utmost when such service was sorely needed. It was in the midst of these embarrassments that I secured the services of General Baker, and he entered upon the discharge of his duties with earnestness and vigor. He created the Adjutant General's. Department in Iowa. Before the rebellion it had existed in name only. He made it a reality, gave it form and substance, and made it one of the best, if not the very best, state Adjutant General's office in the United States. His duties were various, arduous and unceasing, and I am speaking to many who know, as well as I, that his attention to them was faithful, intelligent and unremitting. I have already said that during the earlier months of the rebellion the general government was not able to take upon itself its proper duty of subsisting, clothing and arming volunteers as they came forward, and that the state authorities were required to do these things so far as possible without means with which to do them. Volunteers often came forward in much greater numbers than called for, and beyond the power of the state authorities to care for them, and they not knowing the difficulties under which the authorities labored, were sometimes indignant at what they supposed to be culpable remissness in not making proper arrangements for their comfort. I was necessarily absent from Davenport much of the time, and consequently the burden of meeting and allaying this natural but still unjust feeling fell upon General Baker, and doubtless many of this audience can yet remember the kindness, the tact, the skill with which he did it. His

labors for the soldiers were untiring, and his pride in them unbounded. During the war and afterward, and until his death, he always spoke of them as "my boys," "my soldiers," and for years before his death they showed their kindly feeling toward him by giving him the familiar name of "Pap Baker."

It does not become me to say what opinion the good people of Iowa have or should have of the work done by the chief executive of Iowa and his staff during that trying time; whether or not they think or should think that work was reasonably well done. But it would be grossly unjust and ungrateful in me if I did not say that whatever of success was achieved was largely due to the ability, energy and devotion of Nathaniel B. Baker.

It is not necessary, before this audience, to speak at length of the personal characteristics of our departed friend. Many of you had the pleasure of a long personal acquaintance with him. I ever found him to be an unflinching friend; frank, genial, generous to a fault, as tender-hearted as a woman, moved often to tears and always ready to divide his last dollar by a tale of distress, especially if told by a soldier or by a soldier's widow or orphan.

I might perhaps properly close here, but the thing we have met here to do suggests some thoughts which I am not willing to leave unspoken. We do honor to the memory of General Baker not so much on account of his private virtues as of his public services, and his public services are especially worthy of commemoration because they aided in maintaining the honor of the old flag and the preservation of the Union. Our civil war naturally and inevitably left behind it angry and bitter feeling, which every right-minded man desires to have soothed and removed as rapidly as it can be done to be thoroughly done. But this bad feeling, this sore on the body politic must be treated somewhat like an ugly sore on the human body, we must guard alike against such treatment as will make the sore permanent and such treatment as will by too

great haste skin the sore over without curing it, leaving it to break out again. It seems to me the tendency of the day is towards the latter error. Instead of frankly and manfully accepting things as they are and must be and making the best we can of them, instead of making proper allowance for natural distrust on the part of the victors and natural bitterness on the part of the vanquished, some of our people seem to desire to ignore the fact that we have ever had a civil war, or to insist that if it shall be remembered at all it shall be only as an unfortunate and foolish quarrel in which both sides were about equally wrong, and neither side especially to blamethat at least each side believed itself to be right and was fighting according to its convictions, and that no blame should attach to him who has convictions and who has the courage to fight for them.

The tendency of this view of affairs is to call in question the wisdom and propriety of such action as ours here to-day, and is in my judgment radically and dangerously wrong. Our veneration for the memory of those who died that our nation might live, and that we and those who are to follow us might enjoy the great good to flow therefrom if we shall preserve what they died for, the affectionate regard we have for their comrades who suffered and fought with them for the same good cause and yet survive among us, our bounden duty to transmit to those who shall soon stand in our places, strong, stately and unimpaired, the goodly fabric thus placed in our hands, and under our care, all these and a thousand tender recollections therewith connected require us, as true men, to see to it, so far as we may, that the sentiment of loyalty to the nation shall be honored and cherished; that the name of Lincoln, and not the name of Davis, shall on the role of our country's patriots stand next to that of Washington, and that the names of Grant and Sherman and Thomas and Sheridan shall be inserted on the roll of the Soldiers of the Republic as worthy of all honor because they fought and fought well for our country, instead of the names of Lee and Johnston and Beauregard, who also fought well, but fought against it.