[Speech of Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, of Hartford, Conn., at the
eighty-sixth annual dinner of the New England Society in the city
of New York, December 22, 1891. J. Pierpont Morgan, the President,
occupied the chair. Mr. Twichell responded to the toast,
"Forefathers' Day."]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN OF THE NEW ENGLAND SOCIETY:--The
posture of my mind the last fortnight relative to the duty of the
present hour--which, indeed, I was proud to be assigned to, as I ought
to have been, but which has been a black care to me ever since I
undertook it--has a not inapt illustration in the case of the old New
England parson who, when asked why he was going to do a certain thing
that had been laid upon him, yet the thought of which affected him with
extreme timidity, answered: "I wouldn't if I didn't suppose it had been
foreordained from all eternity--and I'm a good mind to not as it is."
[Laughter.] However, I have the undisguised good-will of my audience to
begin with, and that's half the battle. The forefathers, in whose honor
we meet, were men of good-will, profoundly so; but they were, in their
day, more afraid of showing it, in some forms, than their descendants
happily are.
The first time I ever stood in the pulpit to preach was in the
meeting-house of the ancient Connecticut town where I was brought up.
That was a great day for our folks and all my old neighbors, you may
depend. After benediction, when I passed out into the vestibule, I was
the recipient there of many congratulatory expressions. Among my
friends in the crowd was an aged deacon, a man in whom survived, to a
rather remarkable degree, the original New England Puritan type, who had
known me from the cradle, and to whom the elevation I had reached was as
gratifying as it could possibly be to anybody. But when he saw the smile
of favor focussed on me there, and me, I dare say, appearing to bask
somewhat in it, the dear old man took alarm. He was apprehensive of the
consequences to that youngster. And so, taking me by the hand and
wrestling down his natural feelings--he was ready to cry for joy--he
said: "Well, Joseph, I hope you'll live to preach a great deal better
than that!" [Laughter.] It was an exceedingly appropriate remark, and a
very tender one if you were at the bottom of it.
That severe, undemonstrative New England habit, that emotional reserve
and self-suppression, though it lingers here and there, has mostly
passed away and is not to be regretted. As much as could be has been
made of it to our forefathers' discredit, as has been made of everything
capable of being construed unfavorably to them. They to whom what they
call the cant of the Puritan is an offence, themselves have established
and practise a distinct anti-Puritan cant with which we are all
familiar. The very people who find it abhorrent and intolerable that
they were such censors of the private life of their contemporaries, do
not scruple to bring to bear on their private life a search-light that
leaves no accessible nook of it unexplored, and regarding any unpretty
trait espied by that unsparing inquest the rule of judgment persistently
employed--as one is obliged to perceive--tends to be: "No explanation
wanted or admitted but the worst." [Applause.]
Accordingly, the infestive deportment characteristic of the New England
colonist has been extensively interpreted as the indisputable index of
his sour and morose spirit, begotten of his religion. I often wonder
that, in computing the cause of his rigorous manners, so inadequate
account is wont to be made of his situation, as in a principal and
long-continuing aspect substantially military--which it was. The truth
is, his physiognomy was primarily the soldier stamp on him.
If you had been at Gettysburg on the morning of July 2, 1863, as I was,
and had perused the countenance of the First and Eleventh Corps,
exhausted and bleeding with the previous day's losing battle, and the
countenance of the Second, Third, and Twelfth Corps, getting into
position to meet the next onset, which everybody knew was immediately
impending, you would have said that it was a sombre community--that Army
of the Potomac--with a good deal of grimness in the face of it; with a
notable lack of the playful element, and no fiddling or other fine arts
to speak of.
As sure as you live, gentlemen, that is no unfair representation of how
it was with the founders of the New England commonwealths in their
planting period.
The Puritan of the seventeenth century lived, moved, and had his being
on the field of an undecided struggle for existence--the New England
Puritan most emphatically so. He was under arms in body much of the
time--in mind all the time. Nothing can be truer than to say that. And
yet people everlastingly pick and poke at him for being stern-featured
and deficient in the softer graces of life.
It was his beauty that he was so, for it grew out of and was befitting
his circumstances. And I, for one, love to see that austere demeanor so
far as it is yet hereditary on the old soil--and some of it is
left--thinking of its origin. It is the signature of a fighting far more
than of an ascetic ancestry--memorial of a new Pass of Thermopylæ held
by the latest race of Spartans on the shores of a new world. [Applause.]
It may be doubted if ever in the history of mankind was displayed a
quality of public courage--of pure, indomitable pluck--surpassing that
of the New England plantations in their infant day. No condition of its
extremest proof was lacking. While the Bay Colony, for example, was in
the pinch of its first wrestle with Nature for a living, much as ever
able to furnish its table with a piece of bread--with the hunger-wolf
never far away from the door, and behind that wolf the Narragansett and
the Pequot, at what moment to burst into savagery none could tell--in
the season when mere existence was the purchase of physical toil,
universal and intense, and of watching night and day--there came from
the old country, from the high places of authority, the peremptory
mandate: Send us back that charter! Under the clause of it granting you
the rule of your own affairs, you are claiming more than was intended or
can be allowed. Send it back! And what was the answer? Mind, there were
less than 5,000 souls of them, all told: less than 1,000 grown men. On
the one hand the power of England--on the other that scrap of a new-born
State, sore pressed with difficulties already.
What was the answer? Why, they got out some old cannon they had and
mounted them, and moulded a stock of bullets, and distributed powder,
and took of every male citizen above the age of sixteen an oath of
allegiance to Massachusetts--and then set their teeth and waited to see
what would happen. And that was their answer. It meant distinctly: Our
charter, which we had of the King's majesty (and therefore came we
hither), is our lawful possession--fair title to the territory we occupy
and the rights we here exercise. And whoever wants it has got to come
and take it. Surrender it we never will! [Applause.]
Nor was that the only time. Again and again during the Colony's initial
stage, when it was exceedingly little of stature and had enough to do to
keep the breath of life in it, that demand was renewed with rising anger
and with menaces; yet never could those Puritans of the Bay be scared
into making a solitary move of any kind toward compliance with it. David
with his sling daring Goliath in armor is an insufficient figure of that
nerve, that transcendent grit, that superb gallantry. Where will you
look for its parallel? I certainly do not know. [Applause.]
They used to tell during the war of a colonel who was ordered to assault
a position which his regiment, when they had advanced far enough to get
a good look at it, saw to be so impossible that they fell back and
became immovable. Whereupon (so the story ran) the colonel, who took the
same sense of the situation that his command did, yet must do his duty,
called out in an ostensibly pleading and fervid voice: "Oh, don't give
it up so! Forward again! Forward! Charge! Great heavens, men, do you
want to live forever?" [Laughter.]
How those first New England Puritans we are speaking of were to come off
from their defiance of the crown alive could scarcely be conjectured.
The only ally they had was distance. The thing they ventured on was the
chance that the Royal Government, which had troubles nearer home, would
have its hands too full to execute its orders 3,000 miles away across
the sea by force. But they accepted all hazards whatsoever of refusing
always to obey those orders. They held on to their charter like grim
death, and they kept it in their time. More than once or twice it seemed
as good as gone; but delay helped them; turns of events helped them;
God's providence delivered them, they thought; anyhow, they kept it;
that intrepid handful against immeasurable odds, mainly because it lay
not in the power of mortal man to intimidate them. And I contend that,
all things considered, no more splendid exhibition of the essential
stuff of manhood stands on human record. They were no hot-heads. All
that while, rash as they appeared, their pulse was calm. The justifying
reasons of their course were ever plain before their eyes. They were of
the kind of men who understood their objects.
The representative of an English newspaper, sent some time since to
Ireland to move about and learn by personal observation the real
political mind of the people there, reported on his return that he had
been everywhere and talked with all sorts, and that as nearly as he
could make out, the attitude of the Irish might be stated about thus:
"They don't know what they want--and they are bound to have it."
[Laughter.]
But those unbending Forefathers well knew what they wanted that charter
for. It was their legal guarantee of the privilege of a spacious
freedom, civil and religious, and all that they did and risked for its
sake is witness of the price at which they held that privilege. It was
not that they had any special objection to the interference in the
province of their domestic administration of the king as a king; for you
find them presently crying "Hands Off!" to the Puritan Parliament as
strenuously as ever they said it to the agents of Charles I. It was
simply and positively the value they set on the self-governing
independence that had been pledged them at the beginning of the
enterprise.
And who that has a man's heart in him but must own that their
inspiration to such a degree, with such an idea and sentiment in the
time, place, and circumstances in which they stood, was magnificent? Was
the inexorable unrelaxing determination with which they, being so few
and so poor, maintained their point somewhat wrought into their faces?
Very probably. Strange if it had not been. Of course, it was. But if
they were stern-visaged in their day, it was that we in our day, which
in vision they foresaw, might of all communities beneath the sun have
reason for a cheerful countenance. [Applause.]
They achieved immense great things for us, those Puritan men who were
not smiling enough to suit the critics. The real foundation on which the
structure of American national liberty subsequently rose was laid by
them in those first heroic years.
And what a marvel it was, when you stop to think, that in conditions so
hard, so utterly prosaic, calculated to clip the wings of generous
thought, they maintained themselves in that elevation of sentiment, that
supreme estimate of the unmaterial, the ideal factors of life that
distinguished them--in such largeness of mind and of spirit altogether.
While confronting at deadly close quarters their own necessities and
perils, their sympathies were wide as the world. To their brethren in
old England, contending with tyranny, every ship that crossed the
Atlantic carried their benediction. Look at the days of thanksgiving and
of fast with which they followed the shifting fortunes of the wars of
Protestantism--which were wars for humanity--on the continent! Look at
the vital consequence they attached to the interest of education; at the
taxes that in their penury, and while for the most part they still lived
in huts, they imposed on themselves to found and to sustain the
institution of the school! [Applause.]
"Child," said a matron of primitive New England to her young son, "if
God make thee a good Christian and a good scholar, thou hast all that
ever thy mother asked for thee." And so saying she spoke like a true
daughter of the Puritans.
They were poets--those brave, stanch, aspiring souls, whose will was
adamant and who feared none but God. Only, as Charles Kingsley has said,
they did not sing their poetry like birds, but acted it like men.
[Applause.] It was their high calling to stand by the divine cause of
human progress at a momentous crisis of its evolution, and they were
worthy to be put on duty at that post. Evolution! I hardly dare speak
the word, knowing so little about the thing. It represents a very great
matter, which I am humbly conscious of being about as far from
surrounding as was a simple-minded Irish priest I have been told of,
who, having heard that we were descended from monkeys, yet not quite
grasping the chronology of the business, the next time he visited a
menagerie, gave particular and patient attention to a large cage of our
alleged poor relations on exhibition there. He stood for a long time
intently scrutinizing their human-like motions, gestures, and
expressions. By and by he fancied that the largest of them, an
individual of a singularly grave demeanor, seated at the front of the
cage, gave him a glance of intelligence. The glance was returned. A
palpable wink followed, which also was returned, as were other like
signals; and so it went on until his Reverence, having cast an eye
around to see that nobody was observing him, leaned forward and said, in
a low, confidential tone: "Av ye'll spake one w-u-r-r-d, I'll baptize
ye, begorra!" [Laughter.]
But, deficient as one's knowledge of evolution, scientifically and in
detail, may be, he may have attained to a not unintelligent perception
of the all-embracing creative process called by that name as that in
which, in the whole range of the advancing universal movement of life,
what is ascends from what was, and fulfils it.
And what I wish to say for my last word is, that whoever of us in
tracing back along the line of its potent and fruitful sources that
which is his noblest heritage as an American and a member of the English
race, leaves out that hard-featured forefather of ours on the shore of
Massachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century, and makes not large
account of the tremendous fight he fought which was reflected in the
face he wore, misses a chief explanation of the fortune to which we and
our children are born. [Loud applause.]