 | Later Lays and Lyrics |  |
SONG.
I.
Jeff's Kingdom of Cotton with infamy rottenWas doomed to succumb to our glorious flag;
The brave rallied under the stars while in thunder
Was torn into shreds his piratical rag,
The stream, from its fountain, on Look Out's proud mountain,
Hath drank flowing down a libation of blood;
The doom of transgression has smitten secession
Where dark Chattanooga rolls onward his flood.
83
II.
Shout loud, ho, hosannah! the stripes o'er Savannah,Red symbols of doom to proud tyranny wave,
Stern Justice hath risen, and lo! from his prison
Bursts Freedom announcing redress to the slave.
False South! heed the sermon that practical Sherman,
From mouths of his cannon propounded to you;
His legions are chaunting—“weighed well, and found wanting.”
Are wretches who trod on the “Red, White and Blue.”
III.
Proud Charleston is humbled for Sumter hath crumbled,To ruin her storm-beaten battlements hurled;
That eloquent preacher of liberty, Beecher,
Her funeral oration pronounced to the world.
Our famished and dying in dungeons were lying
Where batteries frowned on the banks of the James;
No longer they languish—forgotten their anguish
In Sheridan's march, and the roaring of flames.
IV.
Death only brings terror to black guilt and error,His skull-bones affright not the just and the true;
What shroud for the martyr who loves Freedom's charter
More prized than the glorious “Red, White and Blue?”
Our eagle his pinion once more, Old Dominion!
Flaps o'er you while Earth hears his conquering cry;
The bright bow of promise, so long absent from us,
Again arches over Columbia's sky.
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