Part 18

The ancients believed in a serene and beautiful Genius which ruled in the affairs of nations; which, with a slow but stern justice, carried forward the fortunes of certain chosen houses, weeding out single offenders or offending families, and securing at last the firm prosperity of the favorites of Heaven. It was too narrow a view of the Eternal Nemesis. There is a serene Providence which rules the fate of nations, which makes little account of time, little of one generation or race, makes no account of disasters, conquers alike by what is called defeat or by what is called victory, thrusts aside enemy and obstruction, crushes everything immoral as inhuman, and obtains the ultimate triumph of the best race by the sacrifice of everything which resists the moral laws of the world.[177] It makes its own instruments, creates the man for the time, trains him in poverty, inspires his genius, and arms him for his task. It has given every race its own talent, and ordains that only that race which combines perfectly with the virtues of all shall endure.[178]

XVI

HARVARD COMMEMORATION SPEECH

JULY 21, 1865

“‘Old classmate, say Do you remember our Commencement Day? Were we such boys as these at twenty?’ Nay, God called them to a nobler task than ours, And gave them holier thoughts and manlier powers,— This is the day of fruits and not of flowers! These ‘boys’ we talk about like ancient sages Are the same _men_ we read of in old pages— The bronze recast of dead heroic ages! We grudge them not, our dearest, bravest, best,— Let but the quarrel’s issue stand confest: ’Tis Earth’s old slave-God battling for his crown And Freedom fighting with her visor down.”

HOLMES.

* * * * *

“Many loved Truth, and lavished life’s best oil Amid the dust of books to find her, Content at last, for guerdon of their toil, With the cast mantle she hath left behind her. Many in sad faith sought for her, Many with crossed hands sighed for her; But these, our brothers, fought for her, At life’s dear peril wrought for her, So loved her that they died for her, Tasting the raptured fleetness Of her divine completeness: Their higher instinct knew Those love her best who to themselves are true, And what they dare to dream of, dare to do; They followed her and found her Where all may hope to find, Not in the ashes of the burnt-out mind, But beautiful, with danger’s sweetness round her. Where faith made whole with deed Breathes its awakening breath Into the lifeless creed, They saw her plumed and mailed, With sweet, stern face unveiled, And all-repaying eyes, look proud on them in death.”

LOWELL, _Commemoration Ode_.

HARVARD COMMEMORATION SPEECH

MR. CHAIRMAN, AND GENTLEMEN: With whatever opinion we come here, I think it is not in man to see, without a feeling of pride and pleasure, a tried soldier, the armed defender of the right. I think that in these last years all opinions have been affected by the magnificent and stupendous spectacle which Divine Providence has offered us of the energies that slept in the children of this country,—that slept and have awakened. I see thankfully those that are here, but dim eyes in vain explore for some who are not.

The old Greek Heraclitus said, “War is the Father of all things.” He said it, no doubt, as science, but we of this day can repeat it as political and social truth. War passes the power of all chemical solvents, breaking up the old adhesions, and allowing the atoms of society to take a new order. It is not the Government, but the War, that has appointed the good generals, sifted out the pedants, put in the new and vigorous blood. The War has lifted many other people besides Grant and Sherman into their true places. Even Divine Providence, we may say, always seems to work after a certain military necessity. Every nation punishes the General who is not victorious. It is a rule in games of chance that the cards beat all the players, and revolutions disconcert and outwit all the insurgents.

The revolutions carry their own points, sometimes to the ruin of those who set them on foot. The proof that war also is within the highest right, is a marked benefactor in the hands of the Divine Providence, is its _morale_. The war gave back integrity to this erring and immoral nation. It charged with power, peaceful, amiable men, to whose life war and discord were abhorrent. What an infusion of character went out from this and other colleges! What an infusion of character down to the ranks! The experience has been uniform that it is the gentle soul that makes the firm hero after all. It is easy to recall the mood in which our young men, snatched from every peaceful pursuit, went to the war. Many of them had never handled a gun. They said, “It is not in me to resist. I go because I must. It is a duty which I shall never forgive myself if I decline. I do not know that I can make a soldier. I may be very clumsy. Perhaps I shall be timid; but you can rely on me. Only one thing is certain, I can well die, but I cannot afford to misbehave.”

In fact the infusion of culture and tender humanity from these scholars and idealists who went to the war in their own despite—God knows they had no fury for killing their old friends and countrymen—had its signal and lasting effect. It was found that enthusiasm was a more potent ally than science and munitions of war without it. “It is a principle of war,” said Napoleon, “that when you can use the thunderbolt you must prefer it to the cannon.” Enthusiasm was the thunderbolt. Here in this little Massachusetts, in smaller Rhode Island, in this little nest of New England republics it flamed out when the guilty gun was aimed at Sumter.

Mr. Chairman, standing here in Harvard College, the parent of all the colleges; in Massachusetts, the parent of all the North; when I consider her influence on the country as a principal planter of the Western States, and now, by her teachers, preachers, journalists and books, as well as by traffic and production, the diffuser of religious, literary and political opinion;—and when I see how irresistible the convictions of Massachusetts are in these swarming populations,—I think the little state bigger than I knew. When her blood is up, she has a fist big enough to knock down an empire. And her blood was roused. Scholars changed the black coat for the blue. A single company in the Forty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment contained thirty-five sons of Harvard. You all know as well as I the story of these dedicated men, who knew well on what duty they went,—whose fathers and mothers said of each slaughtered son, “We gave him up when he enlisted.” One mother said, when her son was offered the command of the first negro regiment, “If he accepts it, I shall be as proud as if I had heard that he was shot.”[179] These men, thus tender, thus high-bred, thus peaceable, were always in the front and always employed. They might say, with their forefathers the old Norse Vikings, “We sung the mass of lances from morning until evening.” And in how many cases it chanced, when the hero had fallen, they who came by night to his funeral, on the morrow returned to the war-path to show his slayers the way to death!

Ah! young brothers, all honor and gratitude to you,—you, manly defenders, Liberty’s and Humanity’s bodyguard! We shall not again disparage America, now that we have seen what men it will bear. We see—we thank you for it—a new era, worth to mankind all the treasure and all the lives it has cost; yes, worth to the world the lives of all this generation of American men, if they had been demanded.[180]

XVII

ADDRESS

AT THE DEDICATION OF THE SOLDIERS’ MONUMENT IN CONCORD, APRIL 19, 1867

“They have shown what men may do, They have proved how men may die,— Count, who can, the fields they have pressed, Each face to the solemn sky!”

BROWNELL.

* * * * *

“Think you these felt no charms In their gray homesteads and embowered farms? In household faces waiting at the door Their evening step should lighten up no more? In fields their boyish feet had known? In trees their fathers’ hands had set, And which with them had grown, Widening each year their leafy coronet? Felt they no pang of passionate regret For those unsolid goods that seem so much our own? These things are dear to every man that lives, And life prized more for what it lends than gives. Yea, many a tie, through iteration sweet, Strove to detain their fatal feet; And yet the enduring half they chose, Whose choice decides a man life’s slave or king, The invisible things of God before the seen and known: Therefore their memory inspiration blows With echoes gathering on from zone to zone; For manhood is the one immortal thing Beneath Time’s changeful sky, And, where it lightened once, from age to age, Men come to learn, in grateful pilgrimage, That length of days is knowing when to die.”

LOWELL, _Concord Ode_.

ADDRESS

DEDICATION OF SOLDIERS’ MONUMENT IN CONCORD, APRIL 19, 1867

FELLOW CITIZENS: The day is in Concord doubly our calendar day, as being the anniversary of the invasion of the town by the British troops in 1775, and of the departure of the company of volunteers for Washington, in 1861. We are all pretty well aware that the facts which make to us the interest of this day are in a great degree personal and local here; that every other town and city has its own heroes and memorial days, and that we can hardly expect a wide sympathy for the names and anecdotes which we delight to record. We are glad and proud that we have no monopoly of merit. We are thankful that other towns and cities are as rich; that the heroes of old and of recent date, who made and kept America free and united, were not rare or solitary growths, but sporadic over vast tracts of the Republic. Yet, as it is a piece of nature and the common sense that the throbbing chord that holds us to our kindred, our friends and our town, is not to be denied or resisted,—no matter how frivolous or unphilosophical its pulses,—we shall cling affectionately to our houses, our river and pastures, and believe that our visitors will pardon us if we take the privilege of talking freely about our nearest neighbors as in a family party;—well assured, meantime, that the virtues we are met to honor were directed on aims which command the sympathy of every loyal American citizen, were exerted for the protection of our common country, and aided its triumph.

The town has thought fit to signify its honor for a few of its sons by raising an obelisk in the square. It is a simple pile enough,—a few slabs of granite, dug just below the surface of the soil, and laid upon the top of it; but as we have learned that the upheaved mountain, from which these discs or flakes were broken, was once a glowing mass at white heat, slowly crystallized, then uplifted by the central fires of the globe: so the roots of the events it appropriately marks are in the heart of the universe. I shall say of this obelisk, planted here in our quiet plains, what Richter says of the volcano in the fair landscape of Naples: “Vesuvius stands in this poem of Nature, and exalts everything, as war does the age.”

The art of the architect and the sense of the town have made these dumb stones speak; have, if I may borrow the old language of the church, converted these elements from a secular to a sacred and spiritual use; have made them look to the past and the future; have given them a meaning for the imagination and the heart. The sense of the town, the eloquent inscriptions the shaft now bears, the memories of these martyrs, the noble names which yet have gathered only their first fame, whatever good grows to the country out of the war, the largest results, the future power and genius of the land, will go on clothing this shaft with daily beauty and spiritual life. ’Tis certain that a plain stone like this, standing on such memories, having no reference to utilities, but only to the grand instincts of the civil and moral man, mixes with surrounding nature,—by day with the changing seasons, by night the stars roll over it gladly,—becomes a sentiment, a poet, a prophet, an orator, to every townsman and passenger, an altar where the noble youth shall in all time come to make his secret vows.[181]

The old Monument, a short half-mile from this house, stands to signalize the first Revolution, where the people resisted offensive usurpations, offensive taxes of the British Parliament, claiming that there should be no tax without representation. Instructed by events, after the quarrel began, the Americans took higher ground, and stood for political independence. But in the necessities of the hour, they overlooked the moral law, and winked at a practical exception to the Bill of Rights they had drawn up. They winked at the exception, believing it insignificant. But the moral law, the nature of things, did not wink at it, but kept its eye wide open. It turned out that this one violation was a subtle poison, which in eighty years corrupted the whole overgrown body politic, and brought the alternative of extirpation of the poison or ruin to the Republic.[182]

This new Monument is built to mark the arrival of the nation at the new principle,—say, rather, at its new acknowledgment, for the principle is as old as Heaven,—that only that state can live, in which injury to the least member is recognized as damage to the whole.

Reform must begin at home. The aim of the hour was to reconstruct the South; but first the North had to be reconstructed. Its own theory and practice of liberty had got sadly out of gear, and must be corrected. It was done on the instant. A thunderstorm at sea sometimes reverses the magnets in the ship, and south is north. The storm of war works the like miracle on men. Every Democrat who went South came back a Republican, like the governors who, in Buchanan’s time, went to Kansas, and instantly took the free-state colors. War, says the poet, is

“the arduous strife, To which the triumph of all good is given.”[183]

Every principle is a war-note. When the rights of man are recited under any old government, every one of them is a declaration of war. War civilizes, rearranges the population, distributing by ideas,—the innovators on one side, the antiquaries on the other. It opens the eyes wider. Once we were patriots up to the town-bounds, or the state-line. But when you replace the love of family or clan by a principle, as freedom, instantly that fire runs over the state-line into New Hampshire, Vermont, New York and Ohio, into the prairie and beyond, leaps the mountains, bridges river and lake, burns as hotly in Kansas and California as in Boston, and no chemist can discriminate between one soil and the other. It lifts every population to an equal power and merit.

As long as we debate in council, both sides may form their private guess what the event may be, or which is the strongest. But the moment you cry “Every man to his tent, O Israel!” the delusions of hope and fear are at an end;—the strength is now to be tested by the eternal facts. There will be no doubt more. The world is equal to itself. The secret architecture of things begins to disclose itself; the fact that all things were made on a basis of right; that justice is really desired by all intelligent beings; that opposition to it is against the nature of things; and that, whatever may happen in this hour or that, the years and the centuries are always pulling down the wrong and building up the right.

The war made the Divine Providence credible to many who did not believe the good Heaven quite honest. Every man was an abolitionist by conviction, but did not believe that his neighbor was. The opinions of masses of men, which the tactics of primary caucuses and the proverbial timidity of trade had concealed, the war discovered; and it was found, contrary to all popular belief, that the country was at heart abolitionist, and for the Union was ready to die.

As cities of men are the first effects of civilization, and also instantly causes of more civilization, so armies, which are only wandering cities, generate a vast heat, and lift the spirit of the soldiers who compose them to the boiling point. The armies mustered in the North were as much missionaries to the mind of the country as they were carriers of material force, and had the vast advantage of carrying whither they marched a higher civilization. Of course, there are noble men everywhere, and there are such in the South; and the noble know the noble, wherever they meet; and we have all heard passages of generous and exceptional behavior exhibited by individuals there to our officers and men, during the war. But the common people, rich or poor, were the narrowest and most conceited of mankind, as arrogant as the negroes on the Gambia River; and, by the way, it looks as if the editors of the Southern press were in all times selected from this class. The invasion of Northern farmers, mechanics, engineers, tradesmen, lawyers and students did more than forty years of peace had done to educate the South.[184] “This will be a slow business,” writes our Concord captain home, “for we have to stop and civilize the people as we go along.”

It is an interesting part of the history, the manner in which this incongruous militia were made soldiers. That was done again on the Kansas plan. Our farmers went to Kansas as peaceable, God-fearing men as the members of our school committee here. But when the Border raids were let loose on their villages, these people, who turned pale at home if called to dress a cut finger, on witnessing the butchery done by the Missouri riders on women and babes, were so beside themselves with rage, that they became on the instant the bravest soldiers and the most determined avengers.[185] And the first events of the war of the Rebellion gave the like training to the new recruits.

All sorts of men went to the war,—the roughs, men who liked harsh play and violence, men for whom pleasure was not strong enough, but who wanted pain, and found sphere at last for their superabundant energy; then the adventurous type of New Englander, with his appetite for novelty and travel; the village politician, who could now verify his newspaper knowledge, see the South, and amass what a stock of adventures to retail hereafter at the fireside, or to the well-known companions on the Mill-dam; young men, also, of excellent education and polished manners, delicately brought up; manly farmers, skilful mechanics, young tradesmen, men hitherto of narrow opportunities of knowing the world, but well taught in the grammar-schools. But perhaps in every one of these classes were idealists, men who went from a religious duty. I have a note of a conversation that occurred in our first company, the morning before the battle of Bull Run. At a halt in the march, a few of our boys were sitting on a rail fence talking together whether it was right to sacrifice themselves. One of them said, ‘he had been thinking a good deal about it, last night, and he thought one was never too young to die for a principle.’ One of our later volunteers, on the day when he left home, in reply to my question, How can you be spared from your farm, now that your father is so ill? said: “I go because I shall always be sorry if I did not go when the country called me. I can go as well as another.” One wrote to his father these words: “You may think it strange that I, who have always naturally rather shrunk from danger, should wish to enter the army; but there is a higher Power that tunes the hearts of men, and enables them to see their duty, and gives them courage to face the dangers with which those duties are attended.” And the captain writes home of another of his men, “B⸺ comes from a sense of duty and love of country, and these are the soldiers you can depend upon.”[186]

None of us can have forgotten how sharp a test to try our peaceful people with, was the first call for troops. I doubt not many of our soldiers could repeat the confession of a youth whom I knew in the beginning of the war, who enlisted in New York, went to the field, and died early. Before his departure he confided to his sister that he was naturally a coward, but was determined that no one should ever find it out; that he had long trained himself by forcing himself, on the suspicion of any near danger, to go directly up to it, cost him what struggles it might. Yet it is from this temperament of sensibility that great heroes have been formed.

Our first company was led by an officer who had grown up in this village from a boy.[187] The older among us can well remember him at school, at play and at work, all the way up, the most amiable, sensible, unpretending of men; fair, blond, the rose lived long in his cheek; grave, but social, and one of the last men in this town you would have picked out for the rough dealing of war,—not a trace of fierceness, much less of recklessness, or of the devouring thirst for excitement; tender as a woman in his care for a cough or a chilblain in his men; had troches and arnica in his pocket for them. The army officers were welcome to their jest on him as too kind for a captain, and, later, as the colonel who got off his horse when he saw one of his men limp on the march, and told him to ride. But _he_ knew that his men had found out, first that he was captain, then that he was colonel, and neither dared nor wished to disobey him. He was a man without conceit, who never fancied himself a philosopher or a saint; the most modest and amiable of men, engaged in common duties, but equal always to the occasion; and the war showed him still equal, however stern and terrible the occasion grew,—disclosed in him a strong good sense, great fertility of resource, the helping hand, and then the moral qualities of a commander,—a patience not to be tired out, a serious devotion to the cause of the country that never swerved, a hope that never failed. He was a Puritan in the army, with traits that remind one of John Brown,—an integrity incorruptible, and an ability that always rose to the need.