(‡ decoration)EDWARD EVERETT.THE GREAT CLASSIC ORATOR OF NEW ENGLAND.GEORGE S. HILLARD, himself an orator of no slight renown, has spoken with much critical insight and appreciation of the mental characteristic and oratorical style of Edward Everett, the great classic orator of Massachusetts: “The great charm ofMr.Everett’s orations consists not so much in any single and strongly developed intellectual trait as in that symmetry and finish which, on every page, give token to the richly endowed and thorough scholar. The natural movements of his mind are full of grace; and the most indifferent sentence which falls from his pen has that simple elegance which it is as difficult to define as it is easy to perceive. His style, with matchless flexibility, rises and falls with his subject and is alternately easy, vivid, elevated, ornamented, picturesque,♦adapting itself to the dominant mood of the mind, as an instrument responds to the touch of a master’s hand. His knowledge is so extensive and the field of his allusion so wide, that the most familiar views, in passing through his hands, gather such a halo of luminous illustrations that their likeness seems transformed, and we entertain doubts of their identity.”♦‘adpating’ replaced with ‘adapting’He was born in Dorchester,Mass., April 11, 1794, and was graduated from Harvard College with the highest honors in 1811. He entered the ministry, and at the age of nineteen he was installed as pastor of the Unitarian Church in Brattle Square, Boston, and only six years later he preached a sermon in the Hall of Representatives at Washington, which made a marvelous impression on all who heard it, and won him great fame for eloquence.He was chosen at the age of twenty to fill the Chair of Greek Literature at Harvard College, and he spent four years abroad to qualify himself for this position, and Victor Cousin said of him at this period that he was one of the best Grecians he ever knew.In 1820, crowded with honors and distinguished in many fields, he became editor of the “North American Review;” during the four years of his editorship he contributed fifty articles to this magazine.He sat in Congress as Representative from Massachusetts from 1824 to 1834. In 1835, and for three years following, he was Governor of Massachusetts, and in the election following he was defeated by one vote.While traveling abroad he received the appointment as Minister to England, and during this period of sojourn he received from Oxford the degree ofD.C.L., and from Cambridge and Dublin that ofLL.D.For three years, from 1846 to 1849, he was President of Harvard College, and in 1852 he succeeded Daniel Webster as Secretary of State, becoming in the year following a member of the United States Senate, which position he filled with great dignity, and rendered his country honorable service. It was largely through his efforts that the money was raised to purchase Mount Vernon. For this purpose the great orator delivered one hundred and twenty-two times his oration on “Washington,” from which more than $58,000 was realized, and he secured $10,000 from a series of articles in the New York “Ledger.”His lecture on the “Early Days of Franklin,” and other lectures for charitable purposes, brought in no less than $90,000.His orations have been collected and published, and form one of the most remarkable collections of graceful and eloquent addresses ever produced in this country. They are as follows: “Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions” (Boston, 1836); “Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions from 1826 to 1850” (2Vols., Boston, 1850); “Orations and Speeches” (Boston, 1859). He is also the author of two stirring poems, “Alaric the Visigoth” and “Santa Croce.”Despite the fact that he and Daniel Webster were often on opposite sides of great questions and issues, and frequently crossed swords in the debate of the giants, they were life-long friends, andMr.Webster wrote to him three months before the death of the former in the following touching words: “We now and then see stretching across the heavens a clear, blue, cerulean sky, with no cloud or mist or haze. And such appears to me our acquaintance from the time when I heard you for a week recite your lessons in the little schoolhouse in Short Street to the date hereof” [July 21, 1852].In 1860, much against his will,Mr.Everett became the candidate for the Vice-Presidency on the ticket of the Constitutional-Union Party, which polled thirty-nine electoral votes.He died at his home in Boston, January 15, 1865.TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF PEACE.While we act, sir, upon the maxim, “In peace prepare for war,” let us also remember that the best preparation for war is peace. This swells your numbers; this augments your means; this knits the sinews of your strength; this covers you all over with a panoply of might. And, then, if war must come in a just cause, no foreign state—no, sir, not all combined—can send forth an adversary that you need fear to encounter.But, sir, give us these twenty-five years of peace. I do believe, sir, that this coming quarter of a century is to be the most important in our whole history. I do beseech you to let us have these twenty-five years, at least, of peace. Let these fertile wastes be filled up with swarming millions; let this tide of emigration from Europe go on; let the steamer, the canal, the railway, and especially let this great Pacific railway, subdue these mighty distances, and bring this vast extension into a span.Let us pay back the ingots of California gold with bars of Atlantic iron; let agriculture clothe our vast wastes with waving plenty; let the industrial and mechanic arts erect their peaceful fortresses at the waterfalls; and then, sir, in the train of this growing population, let the printing office, the lecture-room, the village schoolhouse, and the village church, be scattered over the country. And in these twenty-five years we shall exhibit a spectacle of national prosperity such as the world has never seen on so large a scale, and yet within the reach of a sober, practical contemplation.THE FATHER OF THE REPUBLIC.TO be cold and breathless, to feel not and speak not—this is not the end of existence to the men who have breathed their spirits into the institutions of their country, who have stamped their characters on the pillars of the age, who have poured their heart’s blood into the channels of the public prosperity.Tell me, ye who tread the sods of yon sacred height, is Warren dead? Can you not still see him—not pale and prostrate, the blood of his gallant heart pouring out of his ghastly wound, but moving resplendent over the field of honor, with the rose of heaven upon his cheek and the fire of liberty in his eye?Tell me, ye who make your pious pilgrimage to the shades of Vernon, is Washington indeed shut up in that cold and narrow house? That which made these men, and men like these, cannot die.The hand that traced the charter of independence is, indeed, motionless; the eloquent lips that sustained it are hushed; but the lofty spirits that conceived, resolved and maintained it, and which alone, to such men, make it life to live—these cannot expire.THE LAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS.FOR myself, I can truly say that, after my native land, I feel a tenderness and a reverence for that of my fathers. The pride I take in my own country makes me respect that from which we are sprung. The sound of my native language beyond the sea is a music to my ears beyond the richest strains of Tuscan softness or Castilian majesty.I am not—I need not say I am not—the panegyrist of England. I am not dazzled by her riches nor awed by her power. The sceptre, the mitre and the coronet, stars, garters and ribbons, seem to me poor things for great men to contend for.But England is the cradle and the refuge of free principles, though often persecuted; the school of religious liberty, the more precious for the struggles through which it has passed; she holds the tombs of those who have reflected honor on all who speak the English tongue; she is the birthplace of our fathers, the home of the Pilgrims; it is these which I love and venerate in England.I should feel ashamed of an enthusiasm for Italy and Greece did I not also feel it for a land like this. In an American it would seem to me degenerate and ungrateful to hang with passion upon the traces of Homer and Virgil, and follow without emotion the nearer and plainer footsteps of Shakespeare and Milton. I should think him cold in love for his native land who felt no melting in his heart for that other native country which holds the ashes of his forefathers.(‡ decoration)
(‡ decoration)
THE GREAT CLASSIC ORATOR OF NEW ENGLAND.
GEORGE S. HILLARD, himself an orator of no slight renown, has spoken with much critical insight and appreciation of the mental characteristic and oratorical style of Edward Everett, the great classic orator of Massachusetts: “The great charm ofMr.Everett’s orations consists not so much in any single and strongly developed intellectual trait as in that symmetry and finish which, on every page, give token to the richly endowed and thorough scholar. The natural movements of his mind are full of grace; and the most indifferent sentence which falls from his pen has that simple elegance which it is as difficult to define as it is easy to perceive. His style, with matchless flexibility, rises and falls with his subject and is alternately easy, vivid, elevated, ornamented, picturesque,♦adapting itself to the dominant mood of the mind, as an instrument responds to the touch of a master’s hand. His knowledge is so extensive and the field of his allusion so wide, that the most familiar views, in passing through his hands, gather such a halo of luminous illustrations that their likeness seems transformed, and we entertain doubts of their identity.”
♦‘adpating’ replaced with ‘adapting’
He was born in Dorchester,Mass., April 11, 1794, and was graduated from Harvard College with the highest honors in 1811. He entered the ministry, and at the age of nineteen he was installed as pastor of the Unitarian Church in Brattle Square, Boston, and only six years later he preached a sermon in the Hall of Representatives at Washington, which made a marvelous impression on all who heard it, and won him great fame for eloquence.
He was chosen at the age of twenty to fill the Chair of Greek Literature at Harvard College, and he spent four years abroad to qualify himself for this position, and Victor Cousin said of him at this period that he was one of the best Grecians he ever knew.
In 1820, crowded with honors and distinguished in many fields, he became editor of the “North American Review;” during the four years of his editorship he contributed fifty articles to this magazine.
He sat in Congress as Representative from Massachusetts from 1824 to 1834. In 1835, and for three years following, he was Governor of Massachusetts, and in the election following he was defeated by one vote.
While traveling abroad he received the appointment as Minister to England, and during this period of sojourn he received from Oxford the degree ofD.C.L., and from Cambridge and Dublin that ofLL.D.
For three years, from 1846 to 1849, he was President of Harvard College, and in 1852 he succeeded Daniel Webster as Secretary of State, becoming in the year following a member of the United States Senate, which position he filled with great dignity, and rendered his country honorable service. It was largely through his efforts that the money was raised to purchase Mount Vernon. For this purpose the great orator delivered one hundred and twenty-two times his oration on “Washington,” from which more than $58,000 was realized, and he secured $10,000 from a series of articles in the New York “Ledger.”
His lecture on the “Early Days of Franklin,” and other lectures for charitable purposes, brought in no less than $90,000.
His orations have been collected and published, and form one of the most remarkable collections of graceful and eloquent addresses ever produced in this country. They are as follows: “Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions” (Boston, 1836); “Orations and Speeches on Various Occasions from 1826 to 1850” (2Vols., Boston, 1850); “Orations and Speeches” (Boston, 1859). He is also the author of two stirring poems, “Alaric the Visigoth” and “Santa Croce.”
Despite the fact that he and Daniel Webster were often on opposite sides of great questions and issues, and frequently crossed swords in the debate of the giants, they were life-long friends, andMr.Webster wrote to him three months before the death of the former in the following touching words: “We now and then see stretching across the heavens a clear, blue, cerulean sky, with no cloud or mist or haze. And such appears to me our acquaintance from the time when I heard you for a week recite your lessons in the little schoolhouse in Short Street to the date hereof” [July 21, 1852].
In 1860, much against his will,Mr.Everett became the candidate for the Vice-Presidency on the ticket of the Constitutional-Union Party, which polled thirty-nine electoral votes.
He died at his home in Boston, January 15, 1865.
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF PEACE.
While we act, sir, upon the maxim, “In peace prepare for war,” let us also remember that the best preparation for war is peace. This swells your numbers; this augments your means; this knits the sinews of your strength; this covers you all over with a panoply of might. And, then, if war must come in a just cause, no foreign state—no, sir, not all combined—can send forth an adversary that you need fear to encounter.But, sir, give us these twenty-five years of peace. I do believe, sir, that this coming quarter of a century is to be the most important in our whole history. I do beseech you to let us have these twenty-five years, at least, of peace. Let these fertile wastes be filled up with swarming millions; let this tide of emigration from Europe go on; let the steamer, the canal, the railway, and especially let this great Pacific railway, subdue these mighty distances, and bring this vast extension into a span.Let us pay back the ingots of California gold with bars of Atlantic iron; let agriculture clothe our vast wastes with waving plenty; let the industrial and mechanic arts erect their peaceful fortresses at the waterfalls; and then, sir, in the train of this growing population, let the printing office, the lecture-room, the village schoolhouse, and the village church, be scattered over the country. And in these twenty-five years we shall exhibit a spectacle of national prosperity such as the world has never seen on so large a scale, and yet within the reach of a sober, practical contemplation.
While we act, sir, upon the maxim, “In peace prepare for war,” let us also remember that the best preparation for war is peace. This swells your numbers; this augments your means; this knits the sinews of your strength; this covers you all over with a panoply of might. And, then, if war must come in a just cause, no foreign state—no, sir, not all combined—can send forth an adversary that you need fear to encounter.
But, sir, give us these twenty-five years of peace. I do believe, sir, that this coming quarter of a century is to be the most important in our whole history. I do beseech you to let us have these twenty-five years, at least, of peace. Let these fertile wastes be filled up with swarming millions; let this tide of emigration from Europe go on; let the steamer, the canal, the railway, and especially let this great Pacific railway, subdue these mighty distances, and bring this vast extension into a span.
Let us pay back the ingots of California gold with bars of Atlantic iron; let agriculture clothe our vast wastes with waving plenty; let the industrial and mechanic arts erect their peaceful fortresses at the waterfalls; and then, sir, in the train of this growing population, let the printing office, the lecture-room, the village schoolhouse, and the village church, be scattered over the country. And in these twenty-five years we shall exhibit a spectacle of national prosperity such as the world has never seen on so large a scale, and yet within the reach of a sober, practical contemplation.
THE FATHER OF THE REPUBLIC.
TO be cold and breathless, to feel not and speak not—this is not the end of existence to the men who have breathed their spirits into the institutions of their country, who have stamped their characters on the pillars of the age, who have poured their heart’s blood into the channels of the public prosperity.Tell me, ye who tread the sods of yon sacred height, is Warren dead? Can you not still see him—not pale and prostrate, the blood of his gallant heart pouring out of his ghastly wound, but moving resplendent over the field of honor, with the rose of heaven upon his cheek and the fire of liberty in his eye?Tell me, ye who make your pious pilgrimage to the shades of Vernon, is Washington indeed shut up in that cold and narrow house? That which made these men, and men like these, cannot die.The hand that traced the charter of independence is, indeed, motionless; the eloquent lips that sustained it are hushed; but the lofty spirits that conceived, resolved and maintained it, and which alone, to such men, make it life to live—these cannot expire.
TO be cold and breathless, to feel not and speak not—this is not the end of existence to the men who have breathed their spirits into the institutions of their country, who have stamped their characters on the pillars of the age, who have poured their heart’s blood into the channels of the public prosperity.
Tell me, ye who tread the sods of yon sacred height, is Warren dead? Can you not still see him—not pale and prostrate, the blood of his gallant heart pouring out of his ghastly wound, but moving resplendent over the field of honor, with the rose of heaven upon his cheek and the fire of liberty in his eye?
Tell me, ye who make your pious pilgrimage to the shades of Vernon, is Washington indeed shut up in that cold and narrow house? That which made these men, and men like these, cannot die.
The hand that traced the charter of independence is, indeed, motionless; the eloquent lips that sustained it are hushed; but the lofty spirits that conceived, resolved and maintained it, and which alone, to such men, make it life to live—these cannot expire.
THE LAND OF OUR FOREFATHERS.
FOR myself, I can truly say that, after my native land, I feel a tenderness and a reverence for that of my fathers. The pride I take in my own country makes me respect that from which we are sprung. The sound of my native language beyond the sea is a music to my ears beyond the richest strains of Tuscan softness or Castilian majesty.I am not—I need not say I am not—the panegyrist of England. I am not dazzled by her riches nor awed by her power. The sceptre, the mitre and the coronet, stars, garters and ribbons, seem to me poor things for great men to contend for.But England is the cradle and the refuge of free principles, though often persecuted; the school of religious liberty, the more precious for the struggles through which it has passed; she holds the tombs of those who have reflected honor on all who speak the English tongue; she is the birthplace of our fathers, the home of the Pilgrims; it is these which I love and venerate in England.I should feel ashamed of an enthusiasm for Italy and Greece did I not also feel it for a land like this. In an American it would seem to me degenerate and ungrateful to hang with passion upon the traces of Homer and Virgil, and follow without emotion the nearer and plainer footsteps of Shakespeare and Milton. I should think him cold in love for his native land who felt no melting in his heart for that other native country which holds the ashes of his forefathers.
FOR myself, I can truly say that, after my native land, I feel a tenderness and a reverence for that of my fathers. The pride I take in my own country makes me respect that from which we are sprung. The sound of my native language beyond the sea is a music to my ears beyond the richest strains of Tuscan softness or Castilian majesty.
I am not—I need not say I am not—the panegyrist of England. I am not dazzled by her riches nor awed by her power. The sceptre, the mitre and the coronet, stars, garters and ribbons, seem to me poor things for great men to contend for.
But England is the cradle and the refuge of free principles, though often persecuted; the school of religious liberty, the more precious for the struggles through which it has passed; she holds the tombs of those who have reflected honor on all who speak the English tongue; she is the birthplace of our fathers, the home of the Pilgrims; it is these which I love and venerate in England.
I should feel ashamed of an enthusiasm for Italy and Greece did I not also feel it for a land like this. In an American it would seem to me degenerate and ungrateful to hang with passion upon the traces of Homer and Virgil, and follow without emotion the nearer and plainer footsteps of Shakespeare and Milton. I should think him cold in love for his native land who felt no melting in his heart for that other native country which holds the ashes of his forefathers.
(‡ decoration)
(‡ decoration)WENDELL PHILLIPS.THE DEMOSTHENES OF AMERICA.NO MORE majestic figure in the anti-slavery struggle for thirty years—1835 to 1865—appeared on the American rostrum than the “silvery tongued orator,” Wendell Phillips.In 1830, William Lloyd Garrison wrote in the “Liberator,”—a journal founded primarily by the abolitionists for the sole purpose of freeing the slaves—“I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. I am in earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.” But the abolitionists remained many years a small and despised faction, and, with all of Garrison’s determination, might never have amounted to anything had he not enlisted in his cause such men and masters as Wendell Phillips on the platform, Henry Ward Beecher in the pulpit, Charles Sumner in the United States Senate, and Harriet Beecher Stowe among novelists. It was a great day of promise when such educated talent caught the spirit of Garrison’s zeal.In 1835, an angry pro-slavery mob dragged William Lloyd Garrison through the streets of Boston. A young man of twenty-four witnessed this cruel treatment and determined to abandon the practice of law and devote his life to the same cause. That man was Wendell Phillips. He first came into prominence by his impassioned address in Faneuil Hall, Boston, in 1837, at an indignation meeting called to condemn the killing of Lovejoy, at Alton, Illinois, while defending his anti-slavery newspaper office against a pro-slavery mob. The direct and impassioned eloquence of the orator on this occasion was the key-note to the forward movement toward the liberation of the black man. It was the bugle-blast which cheered the pioneers in the movement, and awoke the slumbering spirits in sympathy with it, but whose timid hopes had not dared to dream of its possible ultimate success.As Demosthenes aroused and fired the Athenians, so Phillips’ appeals carried like an avalanche everything before them. The only way to prevent his influence was to prevent his speaking, and accordingly when he went to New York in 1847, there was such a prejudice against the abolitionists, and such a predominant pro-slavery sentiment, that he could not procure a hall in either of these cities in which to speak. Finally, Henry Ward Beecher, who had recently become pastor of Plymouth Church, prevailed upon his congregation to allow Phillips to address the people from their pulpit.From this memorable occasion Beecher, himself, it is said, became a flaming torch,second only to Phillips in his efforts in the same cause, while Plymouth Congregation seconded him with all its mighty influence, a further account of which may be found under the treatment of Henry Ward Beecher in this volume.Wendell Phillips was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the29thday of November, 1811, and died there February 2, 1884. His parents were prominent in Boston society, his father at one time being Mayor of the city. Phillips was educated at Harvard College, graduating in 1831, after which he studied law at Cambridge and was admitted to the bar in 1833; but his gift as an orator, in which he is regarded as second only to Daniel Webster, and his overmastering zeal in the abolitionist movement, required so much of his time that he did little practice before the court. He was a most fascinating platform speaker outside of politics, and was in constant demand as a lecturer. His most celebrated addresses were “Toussaint l’Ouverture” and “The Lost Arts,” the former being used as an argument of the native ability, intelligence, and possibility of progress on the part of the negro under proper opportunities.The eloquence of Phillips was impassioned and direct, but his manner was so pleasingly polished as not to give personal offence to his most antagonistic hearers, while his English was singularly pure and simple, and his delivery was characterized by a nervous sympathy that was peculiarly magnetic.Like most other great orators, Wendell Phillips has left behind him in literature only his public speeches and letters. One volume of these was published in Boston in 1862, another (largely a revision of the first, with additions to the same) in 1869.POLITICAL AGITATION.ALL hail, Public Opinion! To be sure, it is a dangerous thing under which to live. It rules to-day in the desire to obey all kinds of laws, and takes your life. It rules again in the love of liberty, and rescues Shadrach from Boston Court House. It rules to-morrow in the manhood of him who loads the musket to shoot down—God be praised!—the man-hunter Gorsuch. It rules in Syracuse, and the slave escapes to Canada. It is our interest to educate this people in humanity, and in deep reverence for the rights of the lowest and humblest individual that makes up our numbers. Each man here, in fact, holds his property and his life dependent on the constant presence of an agitation like this of anti-slavery. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day, or it is rotten. The living sap of to-day outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand intrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity oresprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.All clouds, it is said, have sunshine behind them, and all evils have some good result; so slavery, by the necessity of its abolition, has saved the freedom of the white race from being melted in the luxury or buried beneath the gold of its own success. Never look, therefore, for an age when the people can be quiet and safe. At such times Despotism, like a shrouding mist, steals over the mirror of Freedom. The Dutch, a thousand years ago, built against the ocean their bulwarks of willow and mud. Do they trust to that? No. Each year the patient, industrious peasant gives so much time from the cultivation of his soil and the care of his children to stop the breaks and replace the willow which insects have eaten, that he may keep the land his fathers rescued from the water, and bid defiance to the waves that roar above his head, as if demanding back the broad fields man has stolen from their realm.TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE.[Toussaint L’Ouverture, who has been pronounced one of the greatest statesmen and generals of the nineteenth century, saved his master and family by hurrying them on board a vessel at the insurrection of the negroes of Hayti. He then joined the negro army, and soon found himself at their head. Napoleon sent a fleet with French veterans, with orders to bring him to France at all hazards. But all the skill of the French soldiers could not subdue the negro army; and they finally made a treaty, placing Toussaint L’Ouverture governor of the island. The negroes no sooner disbanded their army, than a squad of soldiers seized Toussaint by night, and taking him on board a vessel, hurried him to France. There he was placed in a dungeon, and finally starved to death.]IF I were to tell you the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of French men, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it from your hearts,—you, who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his country. But I am to tell you the story of a negro, Toussaint L’Ouverture, who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of his enemies, men who despised him because he was a negro and a slave, hated him because he had beaten them in battle.Cromwell manufactured his own army. Napoleon, at the age of twenty-seven, was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. Cromwell never saw an army till he was forty; this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army—out of what? Englishmen,—the best blood in Europe. Out of the middle class of Englishmen,—the best blood of the island. And with it he conquered what? Englishmen,—their equals. This man manufactured his army out of what? Out of what you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred thousand of them imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed, and, as you say, despicable mass he forged a thunderbolt and hurled it at what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now, if Cromwell was a general, at least this man was a soldier.Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go back with me to the commencement of the century, and select what statesman you please. Let him be either American or European; let him have a brain the result of six generations of culture; let him have the ripest training of university routine; let him add to it the better education of practical life; crown his temples with the silver locks of seventy years, and show me the man of Saxon lineage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel, rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro,—rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content to blot out all party distinctions, and trust a state to the blood of its sons,—anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty years, and taking his station by the side of Roger Williams, before any Englishman or American had won the right; and yet this is the record which the history of rival States makes up for this inspired black ofSt.Domingo.Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Hayti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them what they think of the negro’s sword.I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word. I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave-trade in the humblest village of his dominions.You think me a fanatic, for you read history, not with your eyes but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright consummate flower of our earlier civilization, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the stateman, the martyr,Toussaint L’Ouverture.
(‡ decoration)
THE DEMOSTHENES OF AMERICA.
NO MORE majestic figure in the anti-slavery struggle for thirty years—1835 to 1865—appeared on the American rostrum than the “silvery tongued orator,” Wendell Phillips.
In 1830, William Lloyd Garrison wrote in the “Liberator,”—a journal founded primarily by the abolitionists for the sole purpose of freeing the slaves—“I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. I am in earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.” But the abolitionists remained many years a small and despised faction, and, with all of Garrison’s determination, might never have amounted to anything had he not enlisted in his cause such men and masters as Wendell Phillips on the platform, Henry Ward Beecher in the pulpit, Charles Sumner in the United States Senate, and Harriet Beecher Stowe among novelists. It was a great day of promise when such educated talent caught the spirit of Garrison’s zeal.
In 1835, an angry pro-slavery mob dragged William Lloyd Garrison through the streets of Boston. A young man of twenty-four witnessed this cruel treatment and determined to abandon the practice of law and devote his life to the same cause. That man was Wendell Phillips. He first came into prominence by his impassioned address in Faneuil Hall, Boston, in 1837, at an indignation meeting called to condemn the killing of Lovejoy, at Alton, Illinois, while defending his anti-slavery newspaper office against a pro-slavery mob. The direct and impassioned eloquence of the orator on this occasion was the key-note to the forward movement toward the liberation of the black man. It was the bugle-blast which cheered the pioneers in the movement, and awoke the slumbering spirits in sympathy with it, but whose timid hopes had not dared to dream of its possible ultimate success.
As Demosthenes aroused and fired the Athenians, so Phillips’ appeals carried like an avalanche everything before them. The only way to prevent his influence was to prevent his speaking, and accordingly when he went to New York in 1847, there was such a prejudice against the abolitionists, and such a predominant pro-slavery sentiment, that he could not procure a hall in either of these cities in which to speak. Finally, Henry Ward Beecher, who had recently become pastor of Plymouth Church, prevailed upon his congregation to allow Phillips to address the people from their pulpit.
From this memorable occasion Beecher, himself, it is said, became a flaming torch,second only to Phillips in his efforts in the same cause, while Plymouth Congregation seconded him with all its mighty influence, a further account of which may be found under the treatment of Henry Ward Beecher in this volume.
Wendell Phillips was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on the29thday of November, 1811, and died there February 2, 1884. His parents were prominent in Boston society, his father at one time being Mayor of the city. Phillips was educated at Harvard College, graduating in 1831, after which he studied law at Cambridge and was admitted to the bar in 1833; but his gift as an orator, in which he is regarded as second only to Daniel Webster, and his overmastering zeal in the abolitionist movement, required so much of his time that he did little practice before the court. He was a most fascinating platform speaker outside of politics, and was in constant demand as a lecturer. His most celebrated addresses were “Toussaint l’Ouverture” and “The Lost Arts,” the former being used as an argument of the native ability, intelligence, and possibility of progress on the part of the negro under proper opportunities.
The eloquence of Phillips was impassioned and direct, but his manner was so pleasingly polished as not to give personal offence to his most antagonistic hearers, while his English was singularly pure and simple, and his delivery was characterized by a nervous sympathy that was peculiarly magnetic.
Like most other great orators, Wendell Phillips has left behind him in literature only his public speeches and letters. One volume of these was published in Boston in 1862, another (largely a revision of the first, with additions to the same) in 1869.
POLITICAL AGITATION.
ALL hail, Public Opinion! To be sure, it is a dangerous thing under which to live. It rules to-day in the desire to obey all kinds of laws, and takes your life. It rules again in the love of liberty, and rescues Shadrach from Boston Court House. It rules to-morrow in the manhood of him who loads the musket to shoot down—God be praised!—the man-hunter Gorsuch. It rules in Syracuse, and the slave escapes to Canada. It is our interest to educate this people in humanity, and in deep reverence for the rights of the lowest and humblest individual that makes up our numbers. Each man here, in fact, holds his property and his life dependent on the constant presence of an agitation like this of anti-slavery. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day, or it is rotten. The living sap of to-day outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand intrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity oresprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.All clouds, it is said, have sunshine behind them, and all evils have some good result; so slavery, by the necessity of its abolition, has saved the freedom of the white race from being melted in the luxury or buried beneath the gold of its own success. Never look, therefore, for an age when the people can be quiet and safe. At such times Despotism, like a shrouding mist, steals over the mirror of Freedom. The Dutch, a thousand years ago, built against the ocean their bulwarks of willow and mud. Do they trust to that? No. Each year the patient, industrious peasant gives so much time from the cultivation of his soil and the care of his children to stop the breaks and replace the willow which insects have eaten, that he may keep the land his fathers rescued from the water, and bid defiance to the waves that roar above his head, as if demanding back the broad fields man has stolen from their realm.
ALL hail, Public Opinion! To be sure, it is a dangerous thing under which to live. It rules to-day in the desire to obey all kinds of laws, and takes your life. It rules again in the love of liberty, and rescues Shadrach from Boston Court House. It rules to-morrow in the manhood of him who loads the musket to shoot down—God be praised!—the man-hunter Gorsuch. It rules in Syracuse, and the slave escapes to Canada. It is our interest to educate this people in humanity, and in deep reverence for the rights of the lowest and humblest individual that makes up our numbers. Each man here, in fact, holds his property and his life dependent on the constant presence of an agitation like this of anti-slavery. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day, or it is rotten. The living sap of to-day outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand intrusted with power becomes, either from human depravity oresprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continual oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be kept sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.
All clouds, it is said, have sunshine behind them, and all evils have some good result; so slavery, by the necessity of its abolition, has saved the freedom of the white race from being melted in the luxury or buried beneath the gold of its own success. Never look, therefore, for an age when the people can be quiet and safe. At such times Despotism, like a shrouding mist, steals over the mirror of Freedom. The Dutch, a thousand years ago, built against the ocean their bulwarks of willow and mud. Do they trust to that? No. Each year the patient, industrious peasant gives so much time from the cultivation of his soil and the care of his children to stop the breaks and replace the willow which insects have eaten, that he may keep the land his fathers rescued from the water, and bid defiance to the waves that roar above his head, as if demanding back the broad fields man has stolen from their realm.
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE.
[Toussaint L’Ouverture, who has been pronounced one of the greatest statesmen and generals of the nineteenth century, saved his master and family by hurrying them on board a vessel at the insurrection of the negroes of Hayti. He then joined the negro army, and soon found himself at their head. Napoleon sent a fleet with French veterans, with orders to bring him to France at all hazards. But all the skill of the French soldiers could not subdue the negro army; and they finally made a treaty, placing Toussaint L’Ouverture governor of the island. The negroes no sooner disbanded their army, than a squad of soldiers seized Toussaint by night, and taking him on board a vessel, hurried him to France. There he was placed in a dungeon, and finally starved to death.]
IF I were to tell you the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of French men, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it from your hearts,—you, who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his country. But I am to tell you the story of a negro, Toussaint L’Ouverture, who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of his enemies, men who despised him because he was a negro and a slave, hated him because he had beaten them in battle.Cromwell manufactured his own army. Napoleon, at the age of twenty-seven, was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. Cromwell never saw an army till he was forty; this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army—out of what? Englishmen,—the best blood in Europe. Out of the middle class of Englishmen,—the best blood of the island. And with it he conquered what? Englishmen,—their equals. This man manufactured his army out of what? Out of what you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred thousand of them imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed, and, as you say, despicable mass he forged a thunderbolt and hurled it at what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now, if Cromwell was a general, at least this man was a soldier.Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go back with me to the commencement of the century, and select what statesman you please. Let him be either American or European; let him have a brain the result of six generations of culture; let him have the ripest training of university routine; let him add to it the better education of practical life; crown his temples with the silver locks of seventy years, and show me the man of Saxon lineage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel, rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro,—rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content to blot out all party distinctions, and trust a state to the blood of its sons,—anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty years, and taking his station by the side of Roger Williams, before any Englishman or American had won the right; and yet this is the record which the history of rival States makes up for this inspired black ofSt.Domingo.Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Hayti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them what they think of the negro’s sword.I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word. I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave-trade in the humblest village of his dominions.You think me a fanatic, for you read history, not with your eyes but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright consummate flower of our earlier civilization, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the stateman, the martyr,Toussaint L’Ouverture.
IF I were to tell you the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of French men, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it from your hearts,—you, who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his country. But I am to tell you the story of a negro, Toussaint L’Ouverture, who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of his enemies, men who despised him because he was a negro and a slave, hated him because he had beaten them in battle.
Cromwell manufactured his own army. Napoleon, at the age of twenty-seven, was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. Cromwell never saw an army till he was forty; this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army—out of what? Englishmen,—the best blood in Europe. Out of the middle class of Englishmen,—the best blood of the island. And with it he conquered what? Englishmen,—their equals. This man manufactured his army out of what? Out of what you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred thousand of them imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed, and, as you say, despicable mass he forged a thunderbolt and hurled it at what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now, if Cromwell was a general, at least this man was a soldier.
Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go back with me to the commencement of the century, and select what statesman you please. Let him be either American or European; let him have a brain the result of six generations of culture; let him have the ripest training of university routine; let him add to it the better education of practical life; crown his temples with the silver locks of seventy years, and show me the man of Saxon lineage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel, rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro,—rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content to blot out all party distinctions, and trust a state to the blood of its sons,—anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty years, and taking his station by the side of Roger Williams, before any Englishman or American had won the right; and yet this is the record which the history of rival States makes up for this inspired black ofSt.Domingo.
Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Hayti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them what they think of the negro’s sword.
I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word. I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave-trade in the humblest village of his dominions.
You think me a fanatic, for you read history, not with your eyes but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of history will put Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright consummate flower of our earlier civilization, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the stateman, the martyr,Toussaint L’Ouverture.
(‡ decoration)HENRY WARD BEECHER.THE GREATEST PULPIT ORATOR OF AMERICA.IT may be safely said that as a pulpit and platform orator, Beecher has had no superior. Nothing is studied or artificial about his delivery. Naturalness, frankness, cordiality, fearlessness, clearness, and depth of thought, expressed in the simplicity and beauty of diction, and enlivened by a rich vein of pungent humor, were marked characteristics of his speech.Those familiar with the public career of this great orator and reformer can scarcely conceive of him at four years of age sitting in the Widow Kilbourn’s school occupied in saying his A B C’s twice a day, and putting in the intervals between recitations in hemming towels and aprons; yet such is the story told of Henry Ward Beecher’s first school-days.His father,Dr.Lyman Beecher, was a Congregational minister, a profound thinker and scholar, stationed at Litchfield, Connecticut, where, on the then large salary of eight hundred dollars per year, he and his wife and ten children lived. Henry Ward was born on the24thof June, 1813—the eighth child in the family.Beecher tells many interesting stories of his childhood. Among others are his accounts of the Sabbath-day struggles with the Catechism. He declared it was a day of terror. Once on referring to it in his Plymouth pulpit he said: “I think that to force childhood to associate religion with such dry morsels is to violate the spirit not only of the New Testament, but of common sense as well. I know one thing, that if I am lax and latitudinarian, the Sunday Catechism is to blame for part of it. The dinners I have lost because I could not go through ‘sanctification,’ and ‘justification,’ and ‘adoption,’ and all such questions, lie heavily on my memory. One Sunday afternoon with my Aunt Esther did me more good than forty Sunday mornings in church with my father. He thundered over my head. She sweetly instructed me down in my heart. The promise that she would read Joseph’s history to me on Sunday was enough to draw a silver thread through the entire week.”Dr.Beecher received a call to preach in Boston in 1825, and removed his family there. The ships, the sea, and the stories Beecher here saw and read of Lord Nelson and other naval heroes, and of Captain Cook’s marvelous voyages and discoveries in new countries, determined him to make a sailor of himself. He was at this time a shy boy with a thick tongue and very indistinct speech. His father, while secretly opposing his project to go to sea, apparently encouraged it by suggesting that he goto Amherst College, where he would learn mathematics and navigation, preparing himself to be a commander instead of a “common Jack Tar.” Henry Ward readily consented to this.At Amherst he studied elocution, and became not only an easy reader and talker, but showed promise of distinction. This opened a new world to him. The spirit of oratory found lodgment in his soul and he forgot his old longing for the sea. Shortly after this, during a religious revival in the college, Beecher determined to be a Christian, and, as a biographer says of him, “Made a joyful consecration of himself to the Lord. It was no doleful giving up to live a life of gloom and sadness. He believed that a Christian life ought to be of all lives the most joyful, and if he could not be a joyful Christian, he should not be one at all.” These convictions followed him through life.Mrs.Stowe, his sister, wrote of him: “He was never found sitting in solemnized meditations in the depth of pine trees like the owl.”Dr.Beecher was elected President of Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1832, and removed to that city, whither Henry Ward followed him after graduation at Amherst in 1836, and took his theological course under his father andProf.Stowe (who afterwards married his sister, Harriet Beecher, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”). After completing his theological course he entered upon his first pastorate at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, at a salary of three hundred dollars per annum, where, he said: “I did all the work of both sexton and pastor; in fact, everything except come to hear myself preach—that much the congregation had to do.”One of his first steps after securing this position was to go back to Massachusetts and marry Miss —— Bullard, his boyhood’s sweetheart, to whom he had been engaged for many years. The young couple started bravely in two rooms over a stable as their first home, and it is doubtful if any young prince and princess have been more truly happy than were these poor but true lovers in their humble nest in the stable loft.Mrs.Beecher’s “Recollections of Henry Ward Beecher,” written just before her death in 1897, furnishes a most delightful description of these early days of privation and poverty, chills and ague, but withal of such cheerfulness we almost envy them. Space forbids that we dwell upon Beecher’s private life, interesting and inspiring as it was. From Lawrenceburg he went to Indianapolis, where he preached for eight years with great success and growing fame, until August 24, 1847, when he was installed as pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, New York.From this point Beecher becomes a national figure, and until the day of his death—a period of forty years—he was ever prominent in the public eye. There was a time when the escutcheon of his moral character was sullied by scandal,—but it was only scandal—which he met boldly, his church standing by him, and before the most scrutinizing investigation he remained steadfast, and in time the world exonerated him—while his accuser fled to Paris, where he spent his life in exile. Few people in the world now believe Beecher was guilty of the charges Theodore Tilton brought against him.Beecher early espoused the cause of the abolition of slavery and of temperance. He considered both these doctrines a part of the gospel of Christ, and preached them boldly from his pulpit. Thus Plymouth Church rose grandly to the need of the age. Wendell Phillips, who in 1847 could find no audience room in New York or Brooklyn, was cordially invited to Beecher’s church, and “from the day that Phillipsmade his great anti-slavery speech from that pulpit until the Emancipation Proclamation—nearly twenty years later—the Plymouth preacher became a flaming advocate for liberty of speech and action on the question of the national evil. If there was anything on earth to which he was sensitive up to the day of his death, it was any form of denial to liberty either in politics, religion, or literature.” With pen and voice he ceased not to labor until the shackles fell from the black man’s hands.A number of slaves were sold from Plymouth pulpit, purchased by public contributions and given their liberty,Mr.Beecher himself acting as auctioneer. The dramatic scenes on such occasions have been vividly recounted inMrs.Beecher’s “Recollections,” and some ofMr.Beecher’s auction speeches have been preserved.When Fort Sumter’s guns announced the beginning of war, Beecher sent back the echo from Plymouth pulpit in no uncertain sounds. His church organized and equipped a regiment which he was pleased to call “My own boys.”Mr.Beecher was in such constant demand as a public speaker that early in 1862 his voice failed and his health gave way, and he went to Europe and traveled in France and Switzerland. On invitation, after regaining his health, he went to England, where he delivered speeches—though England was in sympathy with the South—at Manchester, Glasgow, London and Edinburgh. The opposition which he met in these efforts would have completely overcome a man of less rugged physique, or discouraged one of less imperious will. But Beecher—confident in his own mind that he was right and his soul afire with patriotism—faced, spoke to, and quieted the most vicious and howling mobs into which he went often at personal peril. He describes his experiences as being “like driving a team of runaway horses and making love to a lady at the same time.”After the war was over, Beecher preached as earnestly for forgiveness and reconciliation toward the South as he had preached to abolish slavery and retain the Southern States in the Union. His actions throughout had been purely patriotic and from no hatred of the people whose institution of slavery he fought. These principles made him unpopular for a time at the North and even in his own church. But he was ever the champion of the right, and did much toward the restoration of harmony between the sections. He delivered the oration at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865, when the flag of the Union was again raised over Fort Sumter, and in 1879 made a tour of the Southern States, delivering lectures on popular topics, one of which was entitled “The Reign of the Common People.”Henry Ward Beecher died March 8, 1887. He retired on the evening of March3dapparently in usual health and fell into a sleep from which he never awoke, but merged into an unconscious condition in which he lingered until the morning of March8th, when it is said as “a ray of sunlight flashed full and strong into the room and fell upon the face of the sufferer, who was surrounded by his family, calmly and without a struggle the regular breathing ceased and the great preacher was gone.” The eloquent tongue was silent forever.The remains of Beecher were viewed by thousands, and many came who could not see the bier for the crowds that thronged the house and streets. It is doubtful if any private citizen’s funeral was ever so largely attended. One of his admirers in writing of the occasion said: “He loved the multitude, and the multitude cameto his funeral; he loved the flowers, and ten thousand buds breathed their fragrance and clad his resting-place in beauty; he loved music, and the voice of the organ rose, and the anthems which had delighted him again rolled their harmonies to the rafters; he loved the sunshine, and it streamed through the windows and was a halo around him.”Within the beauty of this halo we would leave the memory of this great man, hung as a portrait in a frame of gold from which his benign and cheerful face shall continue to look down upon succeeding generations. And as we read his encouraging “Lectures to Young Men;” his broad and profound sermons from “Plymouth Pulpit;” his inspiring “Patriotic Addresses;” his editorials in the “Christian Union;” his “Yale Lectures on Preaching;” his “Star Papers;” his “Evolution and Religion;” his novel “Norwood,” or his “Life of Jesus Christ: Earlier Scenes,” on which he was engaged when he died (which are his chief contributions to literature), we will often look up at the picture and exclaim, “Oh! that those lips might speak again!”PUBLIC DISHONESTY.ACORRUPT public sentiment produces dishonesty. A public sentiment in which dishonesty is not disgraceful; in which bad men are respectable, are trusted, are honored, are exalted, is a curse to the young. The fever of speculation, the universal derangement of business, the growing laxness of morals is, to an alarming extent, introducing such a state of things.If the shocking stupidity of the public mind to atrocious dishonesties is not aroused; if good men do not bestir themselves to drag the young from this foul sorcery; if the relaxed bands of honesty are not tightened, and conscience tutored to a severer morality, our night is at hand—our midnight not far off. Woe to that guilty people who sit down upon broken laws, and wealth saved by injustice! Woe to a generation fed by the bread of fraud, whose children’s inheritance shall be a perpetual memento of their father’s unrighteousness; to whom dishonesty shall be made pleasant by association with the revered memories of father, brother and friend!But when a whole people, united by a common disregard of justice, conspire to defraud public creditors, and States vie with States in an infamous repudiation of just debts, by open or sinister methods; and nations exert their sovereignty to protect and dignify the knavery of the commonwealth, then the confusion of domestic affairs has bred a fiend before whose flight honor fades away, and under whose feet the sanctity of truth and the religion of solemn compacts are stamped down and ground into the dirt. Need we ask the cause of growing dishonesty among the young, the increasing untrustworthiness of all agents, when States are seen clothed with the panoply of dishonesty, and nations put on fraud for their garments?Absconding agents, swindling schemes, and defalcations, occurring in such melancholy abundance, have at length ceased to be wonders, and rank with the common accidents of fire and flood. The budget of each week is incomplete without its mob and runaway cashier—its duel and defaulter, and as waves which roll to the shore are lost in those which follow on, so the villainies of each week obliterate the record of the last.Men of notorious immorality, whose dishonesty is flagrant, whose private habits would disgrace the ditch, are powerful and popular. I have seen a man stained with every sin, except those which required courage; into whose head I do not think a pure thought has entered for forty years; in whose heart an honorable feeling would droop for very loneliness; in evil, he was ripe and rotten; hoary and depraved in deed, in word, in his present life and in all his past; evil when by himself, and viler among men; corrupting to the young; to domestic fidelity, recreant; to common honor, a traitor; to honesty, an outlaw; to religion, a hypocrite—base in all that is worthy ofman and accomplished in whatever is disgraceful, and yet this wretch could go where he would—enter good men’s dwellings and purloin their votes. Men would curse him, yet obey him; hate him, and assist him; warn their sons against him, and lead them to the polls for him. A public sentiment which produces♦ignominious knaves cannot breed honest men.♦‘ignominous’ replaced with ‘ignominious’We have not yet emerged from a period in which debts were insecure; the debtor legally protected against the rights of the creditor; taxes laid, not by the requirements of justice, but for political effect, and lowered to a dishonest inefficiency, and when thus diminished, not collected; the citizens resisting their own officers; officers resigning at the bidding of the electors; the laws of property paralyzed; bankrupt laws built up, and stay-laws unconstitutionally enacted, upon which the courts look with aversion, yet fear to deny them lest the wildness of popular opinion should roll back disdainfully upon the bench to despoil its dignity and prostrate its power. General suffering has made us tolerant of general dishonesty, and the gloom of our commercial disaster threatens to become the pall of our morals.EULOGY ON GENERAL GRANT.Part I.ANOTHER name is added to the roll of those whom the world will not willingly let die. A few years since, storm-clouds filled his heaven, and obloquy, slander and bitter lies rained down upon him. The clouds are all blown away; under a serene sky General Grant laid down his life and the whole nation wept. The path to his tomb is worn by the feet of innumerable pilgrims.The mildewed lips of slander are silent, and even criticism hesitates lest some incautious word should mar the history of the modest, gentle, magnanimous warrior. The whole nation watched his passage through humiliating misfortunes with unfeigned sympathy—the whole world sighed when his life ended. At his burial the unsworded hands of those whom he had fought lifted his bier and bore him to his tomb with love and reverence.The South had laid the foundation of her industry, her commerce, and her very commonwealth upon slavery.It was slavery that inspired her councils, that engorged her philanthropy, that corrupted her political economy and theology, that disturbed all the ways of active politics—broke up sympathy between North and South. The hand that fired upon Sumter exploded the mine under the Flood Rock of slavery and opened the way to civilization. The spark that was there kindled fell upon the North like fire upon autumnal prairies. Men came together in the presence of this universal calamity with sudden fusion; the whole land became a military school. But the Northern armies once organized, an amiable folly of conciliation began to show itself. Some peaceable way out of the war was hoped for. Generals seemed to fight so that no one should be hurt. The South had smelted into a glowing mass; it believed in its course with an infatuation that would have been glorious if the cause had been better; it put its whole soul into it and struck hard. For two years the war lingered, unmarked by great deeds. Lincoln, sad and sorrowful, felt the moderation of his generals and longed for a man of iron mould, who had but two words in his military vocabulary—victory or annihilation. He was coming; he was heard from at Henry and Donelson. Three great names were rising to sight,—Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan, and, larger than any, Grant.At the opening of the war his name was almost unknown. It was with difficulty he could obtain a command. Once set forward, Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Petersburg, Appomattox—these were his footsteps! In four years he had risen, without political favor, from the bottom to the very highest command—not second to any living commander in all the world. His plans were large, his undiscouraged will was patient to obduracy. He was not fighting for reputation, nor for the display of generalship, nor for a future Presidency. He had but one motive, andthat as intense as life itself—the subjugation of the rebellion and the restoration of the broken Union. He embodied the feelings of the common people; he was their perfect representative.Part II.The tidings of his death, long expected, gave a shock to the whole world. Governments, rulers, eminent statesmen, and scholars from all civilized nations gave sincere tokens of sympathy. For the hour sympathy rolled as a wave over all our own land. It closed the last furrow of war, it extinguished the last prejudice, it effaced the last vestige of hatred, and cursed shall be the hand that shall bring them back.Johnson and Buckner on one side, Sherman and Sheridan upon the other, of his bier, he went to the tomb, a silent symbol that liberty had conquered slavery; patriotism, rebellion; and peace, war. He rests in peace. No drum or cannon shall disturb his rest. Sleep, hero, until another trumpet shall shake the heavens and the earth—then come forth to glory and immortality!FROM “THE SPARKS OF NATURE.”PATRIOTISM, in our day, is made to be an argument for all public wrong and all private meanness. For the sake of country a man is told to yield everything that makes the land honorable. For the sake of country a man must submit to every ignominy that will lead to the ruin of the State through disgrace of the citizen. There never was a man so unpatriotic as Christ was. Old Jerusalem ought to have been everything to Him. The laws and institutions of His country ought to have been more to Him than all the men in His country. They were not, and the Jews hated Him; but the common people, like the ocean waters, moved in tides towards His heavenly attraction wherever He went.When men begin their prayers with, “O thou omnipotent, omnipresent, all-seeing, ever-living, blessed Potentate, Lord God Jehovah!” I should think they would take breath. Think of a man in his family, hurried for his breakfast, praying in such a strain. He has a note coming due, and it is going to be paid to-day, and he feels buoyant; and he goes down on his knees like a cricket on the hearth, and piles up these majestically moving phrases about God. Then he goes on to say that he is a sinner; he is proud to say that he is a sinner. Then he asks for his daily bread. He has it; and he can always ask for it when he has it. Then he jumps up, and goes over to the city. He comes back at night, and goes through a similar wordy form of “evening prayers;” and he is called “a praying man!” A♦praying man? I might as well call myself an ornithologist, because I eat chicken once in awhile for my dinner.♦‘prayiny’ replaced with ‘praying’When I see how much has been written of those who have lived; how the Greeks preserved every saying of Plato’s; how Boswell followed Johnson, gathering up every leaf that fell from that rugged old oak, and pasting it away,—I almost regret that one of the disciples had not been a recording angel, to preserve the odor and richness of every word of Christ. When John says, “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written,” it affects me more profoundly than when I think of the destruction of the Alexandrian Library, or the perishing of Grecian art in Athens or Byzantium. The creations of Phidias were cold stone, overlaid by warm thought; but Christ described His own creations when He said, “The words that I speak unto you, they are life.” The leaving out of these things from the New Testament, though divinely wise, seems, to my yearning, not so much the unaccomplishment of noble things as the destruction of great treasures, which had already had oral life, but failed of incarnation in literature.
(‡ decoration)
THE GREATEST PULPIT ORATOR OF AMERICA.
IT may be safely said that as a pulpit and platform orator, Beecher has had no superior. Nothing is studied or artificial about his delivery. Naturalness, frankness, cordiality, fearlessness, clearness, and depth of thought, expressed in the simplicity and beauty of diction, and enlivened by a rich vein of pungent humor, were marked characteristics of his speech.
Those familiar with the public career of this great orator and reformer can scarcely conceive of him at four years of age sitting in the Widow Kilbourn’s school occupied in saying his A B C’s twice a day, and putting in the intervals between recitations in hemming towels and aprons; yet such is the story told of Henry Ward Beecher’s first school-days.
His father,Dr.Lyman Beecher, was a Congregational minister, a profound thinker and scholar, stationed at Litchfield, Connecticut, where, on the then large salary of eight hundred dollars per year, he and his wife and ten children lived. Henry Ward was born on the24thof June, 1813—the eighth child in the family.
Beecher tells many interesting stories of his childhood. Among others are his accounts of the Sabbath-day struggles with the Catechism. He declared it was a day of terror. Once on referring to it in his Plymouth pulpit he said: “I think that to force childhood to associate religion with such dry morsels is to violate the spirit not only of the New Testament, but of common sense as well. I know one thing, that if I am lax and latitudinarian, the Sunday Catechism is to blame for part of it. The dinners I have lost because I could not go through ‘sanctification,’ and ‘justification,’ and ‘adoption,’ and all such questions, lie heavily on my memory. One Sunday afternoon with my Aunt Esther did me more good than forty Sunday mornings in church with my father. He thundered over my head. She sweetly instructed me down in my heart. The promise that she would read Joseph’s history to me on Sunday was enough to draw a silver thread through the entire week.”
Dr.Beecher received a call to preach in Boston in 1825, and removed his family there. The ships, the sea, and the stories Beecher here saw and read of Lord Nelson and other naval heroes, and of Captain Cook’s marvelous voyages and discoveries in new countries, determined him to make a sailor of himself. He was at this time a shy boy with a thick tongue and very indistinct speech. His father, while secretly opposing his project to go to sea, apparently encouraged it by suggesting that he goto Amherst College, where he would learn mathematics and navigation, preparing himself to be a commander instead of a “common Jack Tar.” Henry Ward readily consented to this.
At Amherst he studied elocution, and became not only an easy reader and talker, but showed promise of distinction. This opened a new world to him. The spirit of oratory found lodgment in his soul and he forgot his old longing for the sea. Shortly after this, during a religious revival in the college, Beecher determined to be a Christian, and, as a biographer says of him, “Made a joyful consecration of himself to the Lord. It was no doleful giving up to live a life of gloom and sadness. He believed that a Christian life ought to be of all lives the most joyful, and if he could not be a joyful Christian, he should not be one at all.” These convictions followed him through life.Mrs.Stowe, his sister, wrote of him: “He was never found sitting in solemnized meditations in the depth of pine trees like the owl.”
Dr.Beecher was elected President of Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1832, and removed to that city, whither Henry Ward followed him after graduation at Amherst in 1836, and took his theological course under his father andProf.Stowe (who afterwards married his sister, Harriet Beecher, the author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”). After completing his theological course he entered upon his first pastorate at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, at a salary of three hundred dollars per annum, where, he said: “I did all the work of both sexton and pastor; in fact, everything except come to hear myself preach—that much the congregation had to do.”
One of his first steps after securing this position was to go back to Massachusetts and marry Miss —— Bullard, his boyhood’s sweetheart, to whom he had been engaged for many years. The young couple started bravely in two rooms over a stable as their first home, and it is doubtful if any young prince and princess have been more truly happy than were these poor but true lovers in their humble nest in the stable loft.Mrs.Beecher’s “Recollections of Henry Ward Beecher,” written just before her death in 1897, furnishes a most delightful description of these early days of privation and poverty, chills and ague, but withal of such cheerfulness we almost envy them. Space forbids that we dwell upon Beecher’s private life, interesting and inspiring as it was. From Lawrenceburg he went to Indianapolis, where he preached for eight years with great success and growing fame, until August 24, 1847, when he was installed as pastor of Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, New York.
From this point Beecher becomes a national figure, and until the day of his death—a period of forty years—he was ever prominent in the public eye. There was a time when the escutcheon of his moral character was sullied by scandal,—but it was only scandal—which he met boldly, his church standing by him, and before the most scrutinizing investigation he remained steadfast, and in time the world exonerated him—while his accuser fled to Paris, where he spent his life in exile. Few people in the world now believe Beecher was guilty of the charges Theodore Tilton brought against him.
Beecher early espoused the cause of the abolition of slavery and of temperance. He considered both these doctrines a part of the gospel of Christ, and preached them boldly from his pulpit. Thus Plymouth Church rose grandly to the need of the age. Wendell Phillips, who in 1847 could find no audience room in New York or Brooklyn, was cordially invited to Beecher’s church, and “from the day that Phillipsmade his great anti-slavery speech from that pulpit until the Emancipation Proclamation—nearly twenty years later—the Plymouth preacher became a flaming advocate for liberty of speech and action on the question of the national evil. If there was anything on earth to which he was sensitive up to the day of his death, it was any form of denial to liberty either in politics, religion, or literature.” With pen and voice he ceased not to labor until the shackles fell from the black man’s hands.
A number of slaves were sold from Plymouth pulpit, purchased by public contributions and given their liberty,Mr.Beecher himself acting as auctioneer. The dramatic scenes on such occasions have been vividly recounted inMrs.Beecher’s “Recollections,” and some ofMr.Beecher’s auction speeches have been preserved.
When Fort Sumter’s guns announced the beginning of war, Beecher sent back the echo from Plymouth pulpit in no uncertain sounds. His church organized and equipped a regiment which he was pleased to call “My own boys.”Mr.Beecher was in such constant demand as a public speaker that early in 1862 his voice failed and his health gave way, and he went to Europe and traveled in France and Switzerland. On invitation, after regaining his health, he went to England, where he delivered speeches—though England was in sympathy with the South—at Manchester, Glasgow, London and Edinburgh. The opposition which he met in these efforts would have completely overcome a man of less rugged physique, or discouraged one of less imperious will. But Beecher—confident in his own mind that he was right and his soul afire with patriotism—faced, spoke to, and quieted the most vicious and howling mobs into which he went often at personal peril. He describes his experiences as being “like driving a team of runaway horses and making love to a lady at the same time.”
After the war was over, Beecher preached as earnestly for forgiveness and reconciliation toward the South as he had preached to abolish slavery and retain the Southern States in the Union. His actions throughout had been purely patriotic and from no hatred of the people whose institution of slavery he fought. These principles made him unpopular for a time at the North and even in his own church. But he was ever the champion of the right, and did much toward the restoration of harmony between the sections. He delivered the oration at Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865, when the flag of the Union was again raised over Fort Sumter, and in 1879 made a tour of the Southern States, delivering lectures on popular topics, one of which was entitled “The Reign of the Common People.”
Henry Ward Beecher died March 8, 1887. He retired on the evening of March3dapparently in usual health and fell into a sleep from which he never awoke, but merged into an unconscious condition in which he lingered until the morning of March8th, when it is said as “a ray of sunlight flashed full and strong into the room and fell upon the face of the sufferer, who was surrounded by his family, calmly and without a struggle the regular breathing ceased and the great preacher was gone.” The eloquent tongue was silent forever.
The remains of Beecher were viewed by thousands, and many came who could not see the bier for the crowds that thronged the house and streets. It is doubtful if any private citizen’s funeral was ever so largely attended. One of his admirers in writing of the occasion said: “He loved the multitude, and the multitude cameto his funeral; he loved the flowers, and ten thousand buds breathed their fragrance and clad his resting-place in beauty; he loved music, and the voice of the organ rose, and the anthems which had delighted him again rolled their harmonies to the rafters; he loved the sunshine, and it streamed through the windows and was a halo around him.”
Within the beauty of this halo we would leave the memory of this great man, hung as a portrait in a frame of gold from which his benign and cheerful face shall continue to look down upon succeeding generations. And as we read his encouraging “Lectures to Young Men;” his broad and profound sermons from “Plymouth Pulpit;” his inspiring “Patriotic Addresses;” his editorials in the “Christian Union;” his “Yale Lectures on Preaching;” his “Star Papers;” his “Evolution and Religion;” his novel “Norwood,” or his “Life of Jesus Christ: Earlier Scenes,” on which he was engaged when he died (which are his chief contributions to literature), we will often look up at the picture and exclaim, “Oh! that those lips might speak again!”
PUBLIC DISHONESTY.
ACORRUPT public sentiment produces dishonesty. A public sentiment in which dishonesty is not disgraceful; in which bad men are respectable, are trusted, are honored, are exalted, is a curse to the young. The fever of speculation, the universal derangement of business, the growing laxness of morals is, to an alarming extent, introducing such a state of things.If the shocking stupidity of the public mind to atrocious dishonesties is not aroused; if good men do not bestir themselves to drag the young from this foul sorcery; if the relaxed bands of honesty are not tightened, and conscience tutored to a severer morality, our night is at hand—our midnight not far off. Woe to that guilty people who sit down upon broken laws, and wealth saved by injustice! Woe to a generation fed by the bread of fraud, whose children’s inheritance shall be a perpetual memento of their father’s unrighteousness; to whom dishonesty shall be made pleasant by association with the revered memories of father, brother and friend!But when a whole people, united by a common disregard of justice, conspire to defraud public creditors, and States vie with States in an infamous repudiation of just debts, by open or sinister methods; and nations exert their sovereignty to protect and dignify the knavery of the commonwealth, then the confusion of domestic affairs has bred a fiend before whose flight honor fades away, and under whose feet the sanctity of truth and the religion of solemn compacts are stamped down and ground into the dirt. Need we ask the cause of growing dishonesty among the young, the increasing untrustworthiness of all agents, when States are seen clothed with the panoply of dishonesty, and nations put on fraud for their garments?Absconding agents, swindling schemes, and defalcations, occurring in such melancholy abundance, have at length ceased to be wonders, and rank with the common accidents of fire and flood. The budget of each week is incomplete without its mob and runaway cashier—its duel and defaulter, and as waves which roll to the shore are lost in those which follow on, so the villainies of each week obliterate the record of the last.Men of notorious immorality, whose dishonesty is flagrant, whose private habits would disgrace the ditch, are powerful and popular. I have seen a man stained with every sin, except those which required courage; into whose head I do not think a pure thought has entered for forty years; in whose heart an honorable feeling would droop for very loneliness; in evil, he was ripe and rotten; hoary and depraved in deed, in word, in his present life and in all his past; evil when by himself, and viler among men; corrupting to the young; to domestic fidelity, recreant; to common honor, a traitor; to honesty, an outlaw; to religion, a hypocrite—base in all that is worthy ofman and accomplished in whatever is disgraceful, and yet this wretch could go where he would—enter good men’s dwellings and purloin their votes. Men would curse him, yet obey him; hate him, and assist him; warn their sons against him, and lead them to the polls for him. A public sentiment which produces♦ignominious knaves cannot breed honest men.♦‘ignominous’ replaced with ‘ignominious’We have not yet emerged from a period in which debts were insecure; the debtor legally protected against the rights of the creditor; taxes laid, not by the requirements of justice, but for political effect, and lowered to a dishonest inefficiency, and when thus diminished, not collected; the citizens resisting their own officers; officers resigning at the bidding of the electors; the laws of property paralyzed; bankrupt laws built up, and stay-laws unconstitutionally enacted, upon which the courts look with aversion, yet fear to deny them lest the wildness of popular opinion should roll back disdainfully upon the bench to despoil its dignity and prostrate its power. General suffering has made us tolerant of general dishonesty, and the gloom of our commercial disaster threatens to become the pall of our morals.
ACORRUPT public sentiment produces dishonesty. A public sentiment in which dishonesty is not disgraceful; in which bad men are respectable, are trusted, are honored, are exalted, is a curse to the young. The fever of speculation, the universal derangement of business, the growing laxness of morals is, to an alarming extent, introducing such a state of things.
If the shocking stupidity of the public mind to atrocious dishonesties is not aroused; if good men do not bestir themselves to drag the young from this foul sorcery; if the relaxed bands of honesty are not tightened, and conscience tutored to a severer morality, our night is at hand—our midnight not far off. Woe to that guilty people who sit down upon broken laws, and wealth saved by injustice! Woe to a generation fed by the bread of fraud, whose children’s inheritance shall be a perpetual memento of their father’s unrighteousness; to whom dishonesty shall be made pleasant by association with the revered memories of father, brother and friend!
But when a whole people, united by a common disregard of justice, conspire to defraud public creditors, and States vie with States in an infamous repudiation of just debts, by open or sinister methods; and nations exert their sovereignty to protect and dignify the knavery of the commonwealth, then the confusion of domestic affairs has bred a fiend before whose flight honor fades away, and under whose feet the sanctity of truth and the religion of solemn compacts are stamped down and ground into the dirt. Need we ask the cause of growing dishonesty among the young, the increasing untrustworthiness of all agents, when States are seen clothed with the panoply of dishonesty, and nations put on fraud for their garments?
Absconding agents, swindling schemes, and defalcations, occurring in such melancholy abundance, have at length ceased to be wonders, and rank with the common accidents of fire and flood. The budget of each week is incomplete without its mob and runaway cashier—its duel and defaulter, and as waves which roll to the shore are lost in those which follow on, so the villainies of each week obliterate the record of the last.
Men of notorious immorality, whose dishonesty is flagrant, whose private habits would disgrace the ditch, are powerful and popular. I have seen a man stained with every sin, except those which required courage; into whose head I do not think a pure thought has entered for forty years; in whose heart an honorable feeling would droop for very loneliness; in evil, he was ripe and rotten; hoary and depraved in deed, in word, in his present life and in all his past; evil when by himself, and viler among men; corrupting to the young; to domestic fidelity, recreant; to common honor, a traitor; to honesty, an outlaw; to religion, a hypocrite—base in all that is worthy ofman and accomplished in whatever is disgraceful, and yet this wretch could go where he would—enter good men’s dwellings and purloin their votes. Men would curse him, yet obey him; hate him, and assist him; warn their sons against him, and lead them to the polls for him. A public sentiment which produces♦ignominious knaves cannot breed honest men.
♦‘ignominous’ replaced with ‘ignominious’
We have not yet emerged from a period in which debts were insecure; the debtor legally protected against the rights of the creditor; taxes laid, not by the requirements of justice, but for political effect, and lowered to a dishonest inefficiency, and when thus diminished, not collected; the citizens resisting their own officers; officers resigning at the bidding of the electors; the laws of property paralyzed; bankrupt laws built up, and stay-laws unconstitutionally enacted, upon which the courts look with aversion, yet fear to deny them lest the wildness of popular opinion should roll back disdainfully upon the bench to despoil its dignity and prostrate its power. General suffering has made us tolerant of general dishonesty, and the gloom of our commercial disaster threatens to become the pall of our morals.
EULOGY ON GENERAL GRANT.
Part I.
ANOTHER name is added to the roll of those whom the world will not willingly let die. A few years since, storm-clouds filled his heaven, and obloquy, slander and bitter lies rained down upon him. The clouds are all blown away; under a serene sky General Grant laid down his life and the whole nation wept. The path to his tomb is worn by the feet of innumerable pilgrims.The mildewed lips of slander are silent, and even criticism hesitates lest some incautious word should mar the history of the modest, gentle, magnanimous warrior. The whole nation watched his passage through humiliating misfortunes with unfeigned sympathy—the whole world sighed when his life ended. At his burial the unsworded hands of those whom he had fought lifted his bier and bore him to his tomb with love and reverence.The South had laid the foundation of her industry, her commerce, and her very commonwealth upon slavery.It was slavery that inspired her councils, that engorged her philanthropy, that corrupted her political economy and theology, that disturbed all the ways of active politics—broke up sympathy between North and South. The hand that fired upon Sumter exploded the mine under the Flood Rock of slavery and opened the way to civilization. The spark that was there kindled fell upon the North like fire upon autumnal prairies. Men came together in the presence of this universal calamity with sudden fusion; the whole land became a military school. But the Northern armies once organized, an amiable folly of conciliation began to show itself. Some peaceable way out of the war was hoped for. Generals seemed to fight so that no one should be hurt. The South had smelted into a glowing mass; it believed in its course with an infatuation that would have been glorious if the cause had been better; it put its whole soul into it and struck hard. For two years the war lingered, unmarked by great deeds. Lincoln, sad and sorrowful, felt the moderation of his generals and longed for a man of iron mould, who had but two words in his military vocabulary—victory or annihilation. He was coming; he was heard from at Henry and Donelson. Three great names were rising to sight,—Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan, and, larger than any, Grant.At the opening of the war his name was almost unknown. It was with difficulty he could obtain a command. Once set forward, Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Petersburg, Appomattox—these were his footsteps! In four years he had risen, without political favor, from the bottom to the very highest command—not second to any living commander in all the world. His plans were large, his undiscouraged will was patient to obduracy. He was not fighting for reputation, nor for the display of generalship, nor for a future Presidency. He had but one motive, andthat as intense as life itself—the subjugation of the rebellion and the restoration of the broken Union. He embodied the feelings of the common people; he was their perfect representative.Part II.The tidings of his death, long expected, gave a shock to the whole world. Governments, rulers, eminent statesmen, and scholars from all civilized nations gave sincere tokens of sympathy. For the hour sympathy rolled as a wave over all our own land. It closed the last furrow of war, it extinguished the last prejudice, it effaced the last vestige of hatred, and cursed shall be the hand that shall bring them back.Johnson and Buckner on one side, Sherman and Sheridan upon the other, of his bier, he went to the tomb, a silent symbol that liberty had conquered slavery; patriotism, rebellion; and peace, war. He rests in peace. No drum or cannon shall disturb his rest. Sleep, hero, until another trumpet shall shake the heavens and the earth—then come forth to glory and immortality!
ANOTHER name is added to the roll of those whom the world will not willingly let die. A few years since, storm-clouds filled his heaven, and obloquy, slander and bitter lies rained down upon him. The clouds are all blown away; under a serene sky General Grant laid down his life and the whole nation wept. The path to his tomb is worn by the feet of innumerable pilgrims.
The mildewed lips of slander are silent, and even criticism hesitates lest some incautious word should mar the history of the modest, gentle, magnanimous warrior. The whole nation watched his passage through humiliating misfortunes with unfeigned sympathy—the whole world sighed when his life ended. At his burial the unsworded hands of those whom he had fought lifted his bier and bore him to his tomb with love and reverence.
The South had laid the foundation of her industry, her commerce, and her very commonwealth upon slavery.
It was slavery that inspired her councils, that engorged her philanthropy, that corrupted her political economy and theology, that disturbed all the ways of active politics—broke up sympathy between North and South. The hand that fired upon Sumter exploded the mine under the Flood Rock of slavery and opened the way to civilization. The spark that was there kindled fell upon the North like fire upon autumnal prairies. Men came together in the presence of this universal calamity with sudden fusion; the whole land became a military school. But the Northern armies once organized, an amiable folly of conciliation began to show itself. Some peaceable way out of the war was hoped for. Generals seemed to fight so that no one should be hurt. The South had smelted into a glowing mass; it believed in its course with an infatuation that would have been glorious if the cause had been better; it put its whole soul into it and struck hard. For two years the war lingered, unmarked by great deeds. Lincoln, sad and sorrowful, felt the moderation of his generals and longed for a man of iron mould, who had but two words in his military vocabulary—victory or annihilation. He was coming; he was heard from at Henry and Donelson. Three great names were rising to sight,—Sherman, Thomas, Sheridan, and, larger than any, Grant.
At the opening of the war his name was almost unknown. It was with difficulty he could obtain a command. Once set forward, Donelson, Shiloh, Vicksburg, Chattanooga, the Wilderness, Spottsylvania, Petersburg, Appomattox—these were his footsteps! In four years he had risen, without political favor, from the bottom to the very highest command—not second to any living commander in all the world. His plans were large, his undiscouraged will was patient to obduracy. He was not fighting for reputation, nor for the display of generalship, nor for a future Presidency. He had but one motive, andthat as intense as life itself—the subjugation of the rebellion and the restoration of the broken Union. He embodied the feelings of the common people; he was their perfect representative.
Part II.
The tidings of his death, long expected, gave a shock to the whole world. Governments, rulers, eminent statesmen, and scholars from all civilized nations gave sincere tokens of sympathy. For the hour sympathy rolled as a wave over all our own land. It closed the last furrow of war, it extinguished the last prejudice, it effaced the last vestige of hatred, and cursed shall be the hand that shall bring them back.
Johnson and Buckner on one side, Sherman and Sheridan upon the other, of his bier, he went to the tomb, a silent symbol that liberty had conquered slavery; patriotism, rebellion; and peace, war. He rests in peace. No drum or cannon shall disturb his rest. Sleep, hero, until another trumpet shall shake the heavens and the earth—then come forth to glory and immortality!
FROM “THE SPARKS OF NATURE.”
PATRIOTISM, in our day, is made to be an argument for all public wrong and all private meanness. For the sake of country a man is told to yield everything that makes the land honorable. For the sake of country a man must submit to every ignominy that will lead to the ruin of the State through disgrace of the citizen. There never was a man so unpatriotic as Christ was. Old Jerusalem ought to have been everything to Him. The laws and institutions of His country ought to have been more to Him than all the men in His country. They were not, and the Jews hated Him; but the common people, like the ocean waters, moved in tides towards His heavenly attraction wherever He went.When men begin their prayers with, “O thou omnipotent, omnipresent, all-seeing, ever-living, blessed Potentate, Lord God Jehovah!” I should think they would take breath. Think of a man in his family, hurried for his breakfast, praying in such a strain. He has a note coming due, and it is going to be paid to-day, and he feels buoyant; and he goes down on his knees like a cricket on the hearth, and piles up these majestically moving phrases about God. Then he goes on to say that he is a sinner; he is proud to say that he is a sinner. Then he asks for his daily bread. He has it; and he can always ask for it when he has it. Then he jumps up, and goes over to the city. He comes back at night, and goes through a similar wordy form of “evening prayers;” and he is called “a praying man!” A♦praying man? I might as well call myself an ornithologist, because I eat chicken once in awhile for my dinner.♦‘prayiny’ replaced with ‘praying’When I see how much has been written of those who have lived; how the Greeks preserved every saying of Plato’s; how Boswell followed Johnson, gathering up every leaf that fell from that rugged old oak, and pasting it away,—I almost regret that one of the disciples had not been a recording angel, to preserve the odor and richness of every word of Christ. When John says, “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written,” it affects me more profoundly than when I think of the destruction of the Alexandrian Library, or the perishing of Grecian art in Athens or Byzantium. The creations of Phidias were cold stone, overlaid by warm thought; but Christ described His own creations when He said, “The words that I speak unto you, they are life.” The leaving out of these things from the New Testament, though divinely wise, seems, to my yearning, not so much the unaccomplishment of noble things as the destruction of great treasures, which had already had oral life, but failed of incarnation in literature.
PATRIOTISM, in our day, is made to be an argument for all public wrong and all private meanness. For the sake of country a man is told to yield everything that makes the land honorable. For the sake of country a man must submit to every ignominy that will lead to the ruin of the State through disgrace of the citizen. There never was a man so unpatriotic as Christ was. Old Jerusalem ought to have been everything to Him. The laws and institutions of His country ought to have been more to Him than all the men in His country. They were not, and the Jews hated Him; but the common people, like the ocean waters, moved in tides towards His heavenly attraction wherever He went.
When men begin their prayers with, “O thou omnipotent, omnipresent, all-seeing, ever-living, blessed Potentate, Lord God Jehovah!” I should think they would take breath. Think of a man in his family, hurried for his breakfast, praying in such a strain. He has a note coming due, and it is going to be paid to-day, and he feels buoyant; and he goes down on his knees like a cricket on the hearth, and piles up these majestically moving phrases about God. Then he goes on to say that he is a sinner; he is proud to say that he is a sinner. Then he asks for his daily bread. He has it; and he can always ask for it when he has it. Then he jumps up, and goes over to the city. He comes back at night, and goes through a similar wordy form of “evening prayers;” and he is called “a praying man!” A♦praying man? I might as well call myself an ornithologist, because I eat chicken once in awhile for my dinner.
♦‘prayiny’ replaced with ‘praying’
When I see how much has been written of those who have lived; how the Greeks preserved every saying of Plato’s; how Boswell followed Johnson, gathering up every leaf that fell from that rugged old oak, and pasting it away,—I almost regret that one of the disciples had not been a recording angel, to preserve the odor and richness of every word of Christ. When John says, “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written,” it affects me more profoundly than when I think of the destruction of the Alexandrian Library, or the perishing of Grecian art in Athens or Byzantium. The creations of Phidias were cold stone, overlaid by warm thought; but Christ described His own creations when He said, “The words that I speak unto you, they are life.” The leaving out of these things from the New Testament, though divinely wise, seems, to my yearning, not so much the unaccomplishment of noble things as the destruction of great treasures, which had already had oral life, but failed of incarnation in literature.