I have on my bookshelf “The Chronicles of the Old Guard.”

The Old Guard was an Atlanta volunteer militia created in the 1850s as the Gate City Guard. When the Civil War started, they were the first in the state of Georgia to volunteer to fight on behalf of the Confederacy.

When the fighting ended, the soldiers who were a bit long in the tooth formed the Old Guard, and they remarkably organized peace tours in the 1870s to the North, where they were received in places like Boston, Baltimore and Hartford with great fanfare. They met with city and state leaders and Union soldiers and advocated national healing and understanding.

In 1911, they dedicated the Peace Monument in Piedmont Park. Invited were representatives from the North, the soldiers and leaders they met on their Peace tours. It was a week-long celebration of nation building, healing and camaraderie that calumniated with the monument’s dedication on Oct. 10.

The Atlanta Constitution characterized it thusly:

The Sections Know Each Other

Some years ago Joel Chandler Harris wrote an editorial on “Neighbor Knowledge.” It was a masterful treatment in his quiet but incisive way, of the obligations and advantages that flowed from neighbor to neighbor, and of the manner almost magical, in which fancied or real differences took wings as men who had held them came into closer and more understanding relations.

The philosophy may aptly be applied on the day following the unveiling of the Peace Monument, erected by the Old Guard of the Gate City Guard, and the day also that brings finale to the celebration long in planning and contemplation.

The sections now know each other thoroughly. The process has been possible by such events as those of this week, as it was given perceptible impetus by the faraway invasion of the North by the Gate City Guard in 1879, and the fraternal reception accorded them by the prominent Northerners whom it is the privilege of Atlanta to entertain.

The reconstruction immediately following the war was not a reconstruction at all. Time only can obliterate misunderstandings, kindle generosity, engender toleration and rebuild the conceptions and practices of national citizenship.

And time, aided by such mutual interchanges as we have this week witnessed, has accomplished the task. In the stress of the war’s aftermath, Benjamin Harvey Hill told the United States Senate, “We are back in the house of our fathers, and we are here to stay, thank God.” But the genuine renationalization of the South came only with later years. Imaginary and genuine divergence, political and economic factors, and influences that now seem bogies, for a considerable interval kept the South more or less isolated from the nation, and the nation from the South.

The bonds of common interests, the forces of mutual standards, the marvelous growth of the whole country as a factor in international counsels have broken the barriers, and today the nation rejoices in that destiny which the South faces and which her own people hardly comprehend in its vastness.

Our distinguished visitors of this week have seen everywhere evidences of a new and an electrical South. But it is merely a dim forecast of the South of tomorrow, and of its looming importance to the country at large. Many experts of national and international vision have told us that material empire is to swing southward of Mason and Dixon’s line. America as a whole nation will be sharer in the rich development of that day. And the factor most strongly contributory to its dawning is the welding of the sections by the amalgam of mutual knowledge and fraternity. Posterity will hold in due gratitude the men on both sides who have facilitated the process.

From “The Chronicles of The Old Guard,” Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 11, 1911.