The Sunday following was Tennessee's Decoration Day. From the mountains
for miles around the people came to Pall Mall. During the ceremonies,
while the flowers were being placed upon the graves in the little
cemetery, they wanted Alvin to talk to them. He and Gracie were seated
in the empty bed of an unhitched wagon down at the edge of the grove of
forest trees that surrounds the church. He came to the cemetery, and his
talk was the untrammelled outpouring of his heart for all that had been
done for him. The spirit of the day, with his own people around him, his
experiences and the changes that had come into his life since the last
decoration services he had attended there, seemed to move him deeply,
and here was first displayed a power of oratory which he was so rapidly
to develop.
The people of Tennessee began to gather gifts for him before he left
France, and the Tennessee Society of New York City entertained him when
he left his troop-ship. The people of the South had always remembered
with added reverence that Robert E. Lee had declined to commercialize
his military fame, while some of the other generals of the Confederacy
had sacrificed their reputations upon the altar of expediency. So when
it became known that Sergeant York, with no knowledge of history to
guide him, but acting from principle, had refused to capitalize the
record of the few brief months he had spent in the service of his
country, there was nothing within the gift of the people he could not
have had.
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