Gentlemen:—­The adoption by the Chamber of Commerce of these resolutions which I have the honor to second, is no mere perfunctory proceeding.  We have been called here by a genuine impulse of the heart.  To us General Sherman was not a great man like other great men, honored and revered at a distance.  We had the proud and happy privilege of calling him one of us.  Only a few months ago, at the annual meeting of this Chamber, we saw the familiar face of our honorary member on this platform by the side of our President.  Only a few weeks ago he sat at our banquet table, as he had often before, in the happiest mood of conviviality, and contributed to the enjoyment of the night with his always unassuming and always charming speech.  And as he moved among us without the slightest pomp of self-conscious historic dignity, only with the warm and simple geniality of his nature, it would cost us sometimes an effort of the memory to recollect that he was the renowned captain who had marshaled mighty armies victoriously on many a battlefield, and whose name stood, and will forever stand, in the very foremost rank of the saviors of this Republic, and of the great soldiers of the world’s history.  Indeed, no American could have forgotten this for a moment; but the affection of those who were so happy as to come near to him, would sometimes struggle to outrun their veneration and gratitude.

Death has at last conquered the hero of so many campaigns; our cities and towns and villages are decked with flags at half-mast; the muffled drum and the funeral cannon boom will resound over the land as his dead body passes to the final resting-place; and the American people stand mournfully gazing into the void left by the sudden disappearance of the last of the greatest men brought forth by our war of regeneration—­and this last also finally become, save Abraham Lincoln alone, the most widely beloved.  He is gone; but as we of the present generation remember it, history will tell all coming centuries the romantic story of the famous “March to the Sea”—­how, in the dark days of 1864, Sherman, having worked his bloody way to Atlanta, then cast off all his lines of supply and communication, and, like a bold diver into the dark unknown, seemed to vanish with all his hosts from the eyes of the world, until his triumphant reappearance on the shores of the ocean proclaimed to the anxiously expecting millions, that now the final victory was no longer doubtful, and that the Republic would surely be saved.

Nor will history fail to record that this great general was, as a victorious soldier, a model of republican citizenship.  When he had done his illustrious deeds, he rose step by step to the highest rank in the army, and then, grown old, he retired.  The Republic made provision for him in modest republican style.  He was satisfied.  He asked for no higher reward.  Altho the splendor of his achievements, and the personal affection for him, which every one