"O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more! Freed from wrath's pale eclipse, The rosy edges of their smile lay bare, What words divine of lover or of poet Could tell our love and make thee know it, Among the nations bright beyond compare? What all our lives to save thee? We reck not what we gave thee; We will not dare to doubt thee But ask whatever else, and we will dare!" -James Russell Lowell. A Greylock Pulpit. A PATRIOTIC RETROSPECT. AN ADDRESS Delivered on Memorial Day, 1897. One who has not participated in the scenes of the civil war, must shrink from any attempt to deal with a subject on which only a veteran is best able to speak. It is a great honor to wear the blue and to be alive to-day to rehearse the history of a struggle involving our national existence. Next to a veteran, one can congratulate himself on being the son of a veteran, if the blood of patriotism is thicker than the mere blood of descent. While martial strains stir us, we may well congratulate ourselves in Adams, that we have not put our sentiment into a useless memento of stone perchance without even educating our sense of taste. The new Memorial Hall, with its public library and entabulatures mingling to the honor of the brave, is a practical, genuine and beautiful form of monument which even rebukes the builders of the pyramids. Patriotism, if true, is a form of a religion and true religion broadens to include science and utility. Let no devout Jew be more diligent to bind the law about his neck or put it into the door posts of his house or repeat it to his children, than any of us to insist on those principles which were forever vindicated in 1865. The public library is the college of the people and the most fitting memorial to the Union soldier and sailor. This appears from the fact that our war was waged not between the lovers and haters of goodness, but between men whose education had been favored and a form of civilization less democratic and progressive. It has been well said by President Frost of Berea College, Kentucky; "Nobody is to be blamed for what nobody has told him." It occurred to me that it might be a comfort to you if instead of dealing with the sad recollections of the war, I should discourse on the issues at stake, and the development of the ideas culuminating in the civil conflict and the reconstruction. There be those who have manufactured history instead of reporting the facts. The origin of the great conflict dates back to and even antedates the constitution itself. We may begin with the events with which the last century closes. First. The period of the Revolution. The theory of the constitution as in a sense supreme law, was held in common by the Fathers, but their interpretations of the instrument, after a political campaign or two, became varied. Compromise between North and South was necessary from the start. The southern states insisted on representation of voters on the basis of a non-voting negro population. The slaveholders as a class thus cast a collective vote, based upon their property in slaves. Laws passed by congress were held by certain southern politicians of the time of Jefferson as null and void, if the states, taken separately, should so judge. The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions" of 1798 took this ground as the expression of conventions held in those states, the word "nullification" having origin in the Kentucky convention. The state of Georgia defied the national supremacy in dealing with the Creek Indians. South Carolina in Jackson's administration, proposed to go to war if necessary on the subject of the tariff, but postponed the day of her disgrace till 1861. The issue of slavery and freedom was real, but smouldering. The two ideas were from the first in unconscious battle array. In the North there were great numbers concerned in varied industries and giving much attention to education. In the South there were vast numbers, chiefly concerned in one great cotton industry, bound together in one concentrated property interest in the hands of a social and aristocratic dictation. The emphasis on education was slight in comparison with that of the North. Our fathers saw, to an extent, the evil of slavery, but it was subordinate to the question whether all should be slaves chained to the throne of King George. After our independence had been secured to us as states, some attention was given to the slavery question. Franklin, who died in 1790 at the age of eighty-five, was a pioneer in the anti-slavery movement. One of his last labors was the writing of an elaborate address in favor of negro emancipation. As president of an abolition society he sent a petition to congress urging the suppression of the slave trade. Neither Franklin nor Washington saw the danger to the Union which the institution of slavery proved. The complications, arising from the invention of the cotton gin, were among the many things impossible to foresee. This device enabled men to separate seed from two hundred pounds of cotton in a single day, where before only one or two pounds could be so treated. This multiplied the dangers of slavery by from one to two hundred per cent. There was sudden and great demand for slave labor. The South had to be aggressive by the law of supply and demand, and inasmuch as the whole system of slavery was inherently wrong, her fight had to be unrelenting as well. The system required ever extending territory to handle the slaves. Her hope was in the sleeping conscience of the North and redoubled vigilance of her own. New territory on parallel lines with Southern Atlantic states must of course be slave states. This territory was in the original grant of the South Atlantic states. The French purchase, the Spanish purchase in Florida and west of the Mississippi river, the Mexican annexation, the territories, must all, if possible, be slave soil. Once limit the direction of future slave power aggression, and the South will be overthrown by the North. The wrong will be overcome by the right. These aggressions were resisted, and the loose interpretations of the constitution were not overlooked, although seen first by few. Second. It was at last necessary for the South to make some halting place, and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was the result. This marks the second era in the progress of affairs. By this compromise, it was agreed that all territory north of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes should be forever exempt from slavery, if only Missouri were admitted as a slave state. It carried. There was a shameful reservation about the word "forever,” it appearing years after that forever did not mean forever, but only as long as the district in question continued a territory. "If that territorial status were to last forever," they later said, very well, but becoming a state exempts the district from the law." The eleventh year after the passing of this compromise measure marked the beginning of active and more pronounced anti-slavery agitation. Then followed the argument of force, mob violence. This made friends for freedom, through the press, pulpit, platform and conventions, causing a rising tide of anti-slavery sentiment which steadily rose from 1831 to 1860. 66 Mr. Garrison established the Liberator newspaper in Boston in 1831. On the first page were the memorable words, “I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.” The best people of the South had confessed that slavery was a sin, but it was like all other sin it had no remedy. They would have to make the best of it. On the other hand Garrison's position was simple and true. Property in man is wrong. It ought to be stopped at once. Here was a new turn in affairs. $5000 were offered for Garrison's head by a Southern governor. Lovejoy's printing press was destroyed three times, and defending it the third time he was shot. This was only eighteen miles from my boyhood home. A meeting of congratulation in Boston, turned into one of grief, and Wendell Phillips became a convert to the cause of freedom. Amos Dresser, since known as "Father Dresser," an agent for the American Bible society, received in Kentucky thirty lashes on the bare back because they found in his carriage a picture of a common scene in the South, a slave coffle led by negroes with violins followed by other negroes, carrying the American flag, followed by the slave driver on horse-back whip in hand. “Father Dresser,” when a young man, was a member of the Anti-slavery Society of Lane seminary. This organization was so furiously attacked by the people of Cincinnatti, that the trustees of the seminary ordered its suppression. Prof. John Morgan was dismissed and went with a number of students to Oberlin. Among these students was Amos Dresser. He is lately reported as saying, that at the founding of Oberlin, the trustees were evenly divided over the question whether the colored man should be received on an equal basis with the white man. The casting vote was given by Owen Brown, the father of John Brown. "Father Dresser" is still alive and well, an important part of the backbone of Nebraska. The people who made sympathy with the slave odious were not ruffians but among the very best people of the North, as people go. It will not be forgotten that there was a Negro pew" in the church, high up above the gallery. There was reluctance in the North to hear anti-slavery preaching. There were many 66 |