[Speech of Rev. Dr. Richard S. Storrs at a banquet of the Chamber
of Commerce of the State of New York, given November 5, 1881, in
New York City, in honor of the guests of the nation, the French
diplomatic representatives in America, and members of the families
descended from our foreign sympathizers and helpers, General
Lafayette, Count de Rochambeau, Count de Grasse, Baron von Steuben
and others, who had been present at the centennial celebration of
the victory at Yorktown. The chairman, James M. Brown, vice
President of the Chamber of Commerce, proposed the toast to which
Dr. Storrs responded, "The Victory at Yorktown: it has rare
distinction among victories, that the power which seemed humbled by
it looks back to it now without regret, while the peoples who
combined to secure it, after the lapse of a century of years, are
more devoted than ever to the furtherance of the freedom to which
it contributed."]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE:--It is
always pleasant to respond to your invitations and to join with you on
these festival occasions. You remember the reply of the English lady
[Lady Dufferin] perhaps, when the poet Rogers sent her a note saying:
"Will you do me the favor to breakfast with me to-morrow?" To which she
returned the still more laconic autograph, "Won't I?" [Laughter.]
Perhaps one might as well have that lithographed as his reply to your
cordial and not infrequent invitations. [Laughter.] I do not know
whether you are aware of it, on this side of the East River--perhaps you
don't read the newspapers much--but in that better part of the great
metropolis in which it is my privilege to live, we think of showing our
appreciation of this Chamber of Commerce by electing for Mayor next
week, one of your younger members, the son of one of your older and
most distinguished members, my honored friend, Mr. Low. [Applause.]
It is certainly especially pleasant to be here this evening, Mr.
President and gentlemen, when we meet together, men of commerce, men of
finance, lawyers, journalists, physicians, clergymen, of whatever
occupation, all of us, I am sure, patriotic citizens, to congratulate
each other upon what occurred at Yorktown a hundred years ago, on the
19th of October, 1781, and to express our hearty honor and esteem for
these distinguished descendants or representatives of the gallant men
who then stood with our fathers as their associates and helpers.
[Applause.]
It has always seemed to me one of the most significant and memorable
things connected with our Revolutionary struggle, that it attracted the
attention, elicited the sympathy, inspired the enthusiasm, and drew out
the self-sacrificing co-operation of so many noble spirits, loving
freedom, in different parts of Western and Central Europe. [Applause.]
You remember that Lord Camden testified from his own observation in
1775, about the time of the battle of Concord Bridge, that the
merchants, tradesmen, and common people of England were on the side of
the Colonists, and that only the landed interest really sustained the
Government. So the more distant Poland sent to us Count Pulaski of noble
family, who had been a brilliant leader for liberty at home, who fought
gallantly in our battles, and who poured out his life in our behalf in
the assault upon Savannah. [Cheers.] And it sent another, whose name has
been one to conjure with for freedom from that day to this; who planned
the works on Bemis Heights, against which Burgoyne in vain hurled his
assault; who superintended the works at West Point; who, returning to
his own country, fought for Poland as long as there was a Poland to
fight for; whom the very Empire against which he had so long and so
fiercely contended on behalf of his country, honored and eulogized after
his death--Thaddeus Kosciusko. [Cheers.]
Germany sent us Von Steuben; one, but a host, whose services in our war
were of immense and continual aid to our troops; who fought gallantly at
Yorktown; and who, chose afterwards, to finish his life in the country
for which he had fearlessly drawn his sword. [Applause.] France sent us
Lafayette [loud cheers], young, brilliant, with everything to detain him
at home, who had heard of our struggle, at Metz, you remember, in a
conversation with the Duke of Gloucester, in whom the purpose was there
formed, in a flash, to identify himself with the fortunes of the remote,
poor, unfriended, and almost unknown colonists; who came, against every
opposition, in a ship which he had bought and fitted for the purpose,
and whose name, as has well been said in the sentiment in which we have
already united, will be joined imperishably with that of Washington, as
long as the history of our country continues. [Applause.]
With him came John DeKalb, the intrepid Alsatian, who, after fighting
gallantly through the war, up to the point of his death, fell at Camden,
pierced at last by many wounds. [Cheers.] With them, or after them, came
others, Gouvion, Duportail--some of their names are hardly now familiar
to us--Duplessis, Duponceau, afterward distinguished in literature and
in law, in the country in which he made his residence. There came great
supplies of military equipment, important, we may say indispensable,
aids of money, clothing, and of all the apparatus of war; and, finally,
came the organized naval and military force, with great captains at the
head, Rochambeau [loud cheers], Chastellux, De Choisy, De Lauzun, St.
Simon, De Grasse--all this force brilliantly representative, as we know,
of our foreign allies, in the victory at Yorktown. [Applause.]
I suppose there has never been a stranger contrast on any field of
victory, than that which was presented, between the worn clothing of the
American troops, soiled with mud, rusted with storm, wet with blood, and
the fresh white uniforms of the French troops, ornamented with colored
trimmings; the poor, plain battle-flags of the Colonists, stained with
smoke and rent with shot, compared with the shining and lofty standards
of the French army, bearing on a ground of brilliant white silk
emblazoned in gold embroidery the Bourbon lilies. [Applause.] Indeed
such a contrast went into everything. The American troops were made up
of men who had been, six years before, mechanics, farmers, merchants,
fishermen, lawyers, teachers, with no more thought of any exploits to be
accomplished by them on fields of battle than they had of being elected
Czars of all the Russias. They had a few victories to look back to;
Bennington, Stillwater, Cowpens, Kings Mountain, and the one great
triumph of Saratoga. They had many defeats to remember; Brandywine,
where somebody at the time said that the mixture of the two liquors was
too much for the sober Americans [laughter], Camden, Guilford
Court-house, and others, with one tragic and terrible defeat on the
heights of Long Island. There were men who had been the subjects, and
many of them officers of the very power against which they were
fighting; and some of the older among them might have stood for that
power at Louisbourg or Quebec. On the other hand, the French troops were
part of an army, the lustre of whose splendid history could be traced
back for a thousand years, beyond the Crusaders, beyond Charlemagne.
Their officers had been trained in the best military schools of the
time. They were amply provided with the last and choicest equipments of
war. They had gallantly achieved victory, or as gallantly sustained
defeat on almost every principal battle-field in Europe. They were now
confronting an enemy whom that army had faced in previous centuries on
sea and land; and very likely something of special exhilaration and
animation went into their spirit from thought of this, as they assailed
the English breastworks, swarming into the trenches, capturing the
redoubts, storming the lines with that strange battle-shout, in our
republican American air: "Vive le Roi!" [Applause.]
A singular combination! Undoubtedly, to unfold the influences which had
led to it would take months instead of minutes, and occupy volumes
rather than sentences. I think however, that we reckon too much on
national rivalry, or national animosity, when we seek to explain it,
although these no doubt had their part in it. Doubtless the eager
efforts of Silas Dean, our first diplomatic representative in
Europe--efforts too eager for courtesy or wisdom--had a part in it; and
the skilful diplomacy of Franklin had, as we know, a large and important
influence upon it. The spirit of adventure, the desire for distinction
upon fresh fields, had something to do with it. But the principal factor
in that great effort was the spirit of freedom--the spirit that looked
to the advancement and the maintenance of popular liberty among the
peoples of the earth, wherever civilization had gone; that spirit which
was notably expressed by Van der Capellen, the Dutch orator and
statesman, when he vehemently said, in presence of the States-General of
Holland, in reply to an autograph letter of George III soliciting their
aid, that this was a business for hired janissaries rather than for
soldiers of a free State; that it would be, in his judgment,
"superlatively detestable" to aid in any way to overcome the Americans,
whom he regarded as a brave people, righting in a manly, honorable,
religious manner, not for the rights which had come to them, not from
any British legislation but from God Almighty. [Applause.]
That spirit was native to Holland. But that spirit was also widely in
France. The old temper and enthusiasm for liberty, both civil and
religious, had not passed away. Sixty years and more since the accession
of Louis XV had perhaps only intensified this spirit. It had entered the
higher philosophical minds. They were meditating the questions of the
true social order, with daring disregard of all existing institutions,
and their spirit and instructions found an echo even in our Declaration
of Independence. They made it more theoretical than English state papers
have usually been. Palpably, the same spirit which afterward broke into
fierce exhibition, when the Bastille was stormed in 1789, or when the
First Republic was declared in 1792, was already at work in France, at
work there far more vitally and energetically than was yet recognized by
those in authority; while it wrought perhaps in the field offered by
this country, more eagerly and largely because it was repressed at home.
So it was that so many brilliant Frenchmen came as glad volunteers. It
was because of this electric and vital spirit looking toward freedom.
Travelling was slow. Communication between continents was tardy and
difficult. A sailing ship, dependent upon the wind, hugged the breeze or
was driven before the blast across the stormy North Atlantic. The
steamship was unknown. The telegraph wire was no more imagined than it
was imagined that the Rhine might flow a river of flame or that the
Jungfrau or the Weisshorn might go out on a journey.
But there was this distributed spirit of freedom, propagating itself by
means which we cannot wholly trace, and to an extent which was scarcely
recognized, which brought volunteers in such numbers to our shores, that
Washington, you know, at one time, expressed himself as embarrassed to
know what to do with them; and there were fervent and high aspirations
going up from multitudes of households and of hearts in Central and in
Western Europe, which found realization in what we claim as the greatest
and most fruitful of American victories. [Applause.] The impulse given
by that victory to the same spirit is one on which we can never look
back without gratitude and gladness. It was an impulse not confined to
one nation but common to all which had had part in the struggle. We know
what an impulse it gave to everything greatest and best in our own
country. The spirit of popular exhilaration, rising from that victory at
Yorktown, was a force which really established and moulded our national
Government. The nation rose to one of those exalted points, those
supreme levels, in its public experience, where it found a grander
wisdom, where it had nobler forecast than perhaps it otherwise could
have reached. In consequence of it, our Government came, which has stood
the storm and stress of a hundred years. We may have to amend its
Constitution in time to come, as it has been amended in the past; but we
have become a nation by means of it. It commands the attention--to some
extent, the admiration--of other people of the earth; at all events, it
is bound to endure upon this continent as long as there remains a
continent here for it to rest upon. [Cheers.]
Then came the incessant movement westward: the vast foreign immigration,
the occupation of the immense grainfields, which might almost feed the
hungry world; the multiplication of manufacturers, supplying everything,
nearly, that we need; the uncovering of mines, bringing out the wealth
which has actually disturbed the money standards of the world; the
transforming of territories into States by a process as swift and
magical almost as that by which the turbid mixture of the chemist is
crystallized into its delicate and translucent spars; the building of an
empire on the Western coast, looking out toward the older continent of
Asia. [Cheers.]
We know, too, what an impulse was given to popular rights and hopes in
England. We rejoice in all the progress of England. That salute fired at
the British flag the other day at Yorktown [cheers] was a stroke of the
hammer on the horologe of time, which marks the coming of a new era,
when national animosities shall be forgotten, and only national
sympathies and good-will shall remain. It might seem, perhaps, to have
in it a tone of the old "diapason of the cannonade"; but on the
thoughtful ear, falls from the thundering voice of those guns, a note of
that supreme music which fell on the ear of Longfellow, when "like a
bell with solemn sweet vibration" he heard "once more the voice of
Christ say: 'Peace!'" [Loud applause.]
We rejoice in the progress of English manufactures, which extracts every
force from each ounce of coal, and pounds or weaves the English iron
into nearly everything for human use except boots and brown-bread
[laughter]; in the commerce which spreads its sails on all seas; in the
wealth and splendor that are assembled in her cities; but we rejoice
more than all in the constant progress of those liberal ideas to which
such an impulse was given by this victory of Yorktown. [Cheers.] You
remember that Fox is said to have heard of it "with a wild delight"; and
even he may not have anticipated its full future outcome. You remember
the hissing hate with which he was often assailed, as when the tradesman
of Westminster whose vote he had solicited, flung back at him the
answer: "I have nothing for you, sir, but a halter," to which Fox, by
the way, with instant wit and imperturbable good-nature, smilingly
responded: "I could not think, my dear sir, of depriving you of such an
interesting family relic." [Laughter.] Look back to that time and then
see the prodigious advance of liberal ideas in England, the changed
political condition of the workingman. Look at the position of that
great Commoner, who now regulates the English policy, who equals Fox in
his liberal principles and surpasses him in his eloquence--Mr.
Gladstone. [Cheers.] The English troops marched out of Yorktown, after
their surrender, to that singularly appropriate tune, as they thought
it, "The World Turned Upside Down." [Laughter.] But that vast
disturbance of the old equilibrium which had balanced a King against a
Nation, has given to England the treasures of statesmanship, the
treasures of eloquence, a vast part of the splendor and the power which
are now collected under the reign of that one royal woman in the world,
to whom every American heart pays its eager and unforced fealty--Queen
Victoria. [Loud applause.]
We know what an impulse was given to the same spirit in Germany. Mr.
Schurz will tell us of it in eloquent words. But no discourse that he
can utter, however brilliant in rhetoric; no analysis, however lucid; no
clear and comprehensive sweep of his thought, though expressed in words
which ring in our ears and live in our memories, can so fully and
fittingly illustrate it to us as does the man himself, in his character
and career--an Old World citizen of the American Republic whose
marvellous mastery of our tough English tongue is still surpassed by his
more marvellous mastery over the judgments and the hearts of those who
hear him use it. [Cheers.]
What an impulse was given to the same spirit in France we know. At
first, it fell upon a people not altogether prepared to receive it.
There was, therefore, a passionate effervescence, a fierce ebullition
into popular violence and popular outrage which darkened for the time
the world's annals. But we know that the spirit never died; and through
all the winding and bloody paths in which it has marched, it has brought
France the fair consummation of its present power and wealth and renown.
[Cheers.] We rejoice in its multiform manufactures, which weave the
woollen or silken fibre into every form and tissue of fabric; in the
delicate, dainty skill which keeps the time of all creation with its
watchwork and clockwork; which ornaments beauty with its jewelry, and
furnishes science with its finest instruments; we rejoice in the 14,000
miles of railway there constructed, almost all of it within forty years;
we rejoice in the riches there accumulated; we rejoice in the expansion
of the population from the twenty-three millions of the day of Yorktown
to the thirty-eight millions of the present; but we rejoice more than
all in the liberal spirit evermore there advancing, which has built the
fifteen universities, and gathered the 41,000 students into them; which
builds libraries and higher seminaries, and multiplies common schools:
which gives liberty if not license to the press. [Cheers.]
We rejoice in the universal suffrage which puts the 532 deputies into
the Chamber and which combines the Chamber of Deputies with the Senate
into a National Assembly to elect the President of the Republic. We
rejoice in the rapid political education now and always going on in
France, and that she is to be hereafter a noble leader in Europe, in
illustrating the security and commending the benefits of Republican
institutions. [Applause.]
France has been foremost in many things; she was foremost in chivalry,
and the most magnificent spectacles and examples which that institution
ever furnished were on her fields. She was foremost in the Crusades and
the volcanic country around Auvergne was not more full of latent fire
than was the spirit of her people at the Council of Clermont or before
the appeal of Peter the Hermit and St. Bernard. She led the march of
philosophical discussion in the Middle Ages. She has been foremost in
many achievements of science and art. She is foremost to-day in piercing
with tunnels the mountain-chains, that the wheels of trade may roll
unobstructed through rocky barriers, and cutting canals through the
great isthmuses that the keels of commerce may sweep unhindered across
the seas. But she has never yet had an office so illustrious as that
which falls to her now--to show Europe how Republican institutions
stimulate industry, guarantee order, promote all progress in enterprise
and in thought, and are the best and surest security for a nation's
grandest advancement.
That enthusiasm which has led her always to champion ideas, which led
her soldiers to say in the first Revolution: "With bread and iron we
will march to China," entering now into fulfilment of this great office,
will carry her influence to China and beyond it; her peaceful influence
on behalf of the liberty for which she fought with us at Yorktown, and
for which she has bled and struggled with a pathetic and lofty
stubbornness ever since. [Cheers.]
I do not look back merely then from this evening; I see illustrated at
Yorktown the lesson of that hour; that colonies maturing into great
commonwealths, and peoples combining for common liberties are the best
pledges of the world's future, but I look forward as well and see France
in Europe, a Republic, the United States on this continent, a Republic,
standing again in the future as before, shoulder to shoulder, expecting
with tranquil and exultant spirit the grander victory yet to come, the
outcome of which shall be liberty to all the peoples of the world, and
that benign and divine peace which is the sure and sovereign fruit of
such a liberty. [Applause.]