[Speech of Hugh C. Wallace at the fifth annual banquet of the New
York Southern Society, February 21, 1891. The President, Hugh R.
Garden, occupied the chair. In introducing Mr. Wallace, he said:
"It was said of old that the Southerner was wanting in that energy
and fixedness of purpose which make a successful American. No
broader field has existed for the exercise of those qualities than
the great region west of the Rocky Mountains. We are fortunate in
the presence of a gentleman whose young life is already a
successful refutation of that opinion, and I turn with confidence
to 'The Southerner of the Pacific Slope,' and invite Mr. Hugh C.
Wallace, of the State of Washington, to respond."]
MR. CHAIRMAN AND GENTLEMEN:--For more than one hundred years
upon this continent a silent army has been marching from the East toward
the West. No silken banners have waved above it, and no blare of trumpet
or beat of drum has heralded its progress. And yet its conquests have
been grander than those of Peru or Mexico, its victories more glorious
than those of Marengo, of Friedland, or of Austerlitz. It has subdued an
empire richer than the Indies without inflicting the cruelties of Clive,
or the exactions of Hastings, and that empire is to-day, Mr. President,
a part of your heritage and mine. [Applause.] For more than thirty years
past the region in which most of those I see around me first saw the
light has lain prostrate, borne down by a Titanic struggle whose
blighting force fell wholly upon her. For more than a generation her
enterprise has seemed exhausted, her strength wasted, and her glory
departed. And yet she has not failed to furnish her full quota to the
grand army of conquest to carry to completion the great work which
Boone, Crockett, and Houston, all her sons--began, and which her genius
alone made possible. [Applause.]
Turn back with me the pages of time to the beginning of this imposing
march and glance for a moment at its resplendent progress. Its beginning
was in Virginia. Virginians led by that first of Southerners whose natal
day we celebrate to-night and whose fame grows brighter in the
lengthening perspective of the years, conquered the savage and his
little less than savage European ally, and saved for the Nation then
unborn the whole Northwest. The Pinckneys, the Rutledges, and the
Gwinetts forced the hand of Spain from the throat of the Mississippi,
and left the current of trade free to flow to the Gulf unvexed by
foreign influence.
Another Virginian, illustrious through all time as the great vindicator
of humanity, doubled the area of the national possession of his time by
the Louisiana purchase, and Lewis and Clarke, both sons of the Old
Dominion, in 1804 first trod the vast uninhabited wilds of the far
Northwest to find a land richer in all the precious products of the East
than mortal eyes had yet beheld. So were our borders extended from the
Gulf and the Rio Grande to the 49th parallel and from the Atlantic to
the Pacific--but for Southern enterprise they might have stopped at
Ohio, the Monongahela, and the Niagara. [Applause.]
The empire thus secured remained to be subdued. From the States in which
you and I, gentlemen, were born has come a noble wing of the grand army
of subjugation, all of whose battles have been victories and all of
whose victories have been victories of civilization. Moving first from
the old States of the South it took possession of territory along the
Gulf and of Tennessee and of Kentucky's "dark and bloody ground." Fame
crowned the heroes of these campaigns with the patriot's name, and
glorified them as pioneers. As their advance guards swept across the
Mississippi and took possession of Missouri, Arkansas, and territory
farther north, envy called it invasion, and when their scouts appeared
in Nebraska and Kansas they were repelled amid the passion of the hour.
Meanwhile, a new element, whose quickening power is scarcely yet
appreciated, had joined the grand movement. Early in the forties a South
Carolinian captain of engineers, the Pathfinder, John C. Fremont, had
marked the way to the far West coast, and added a new realm to the
National domain. [Applause.] It was the domain soon famed for its
delightful climate, its wealth of resources, and its combination of
every natural advantage that human life desires. The gleaming gold soon
after found in the sands of Sutter's Fort spread its fame afar and
attracted to it the superb band of men who came from every State to lay
firm and sure the foundation of the new commonwealth.
There were only fourteen Southerners in the Constitutional Convention at
Monterey, but their genius for government made them a fair working
majority in the body of forty-eight members. Not content with building a
grand State like this, the united army gathered from the North and South
alike turned its face toward the desert and fastnesses of the eternal
hills and "continuous woods where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound
save his own dashings," and pitched their tents, rolled back the awful
silence that through ages had reigned there; and learned the secrets
that desolation guarded, alluring to them from their fastnesses a
renewed stream of treasure which has resulted in making us the envy of
all other nations.
In conspicuous contrast to the attitude and sentiment of the South, the
East has never followed to encourage nor sympathize with the West.
Whether it be in legislation or politics or finance, the Western idea
has ever failed to command the earnest attention to which it is
entitled. There is a sentiment which is growing more general and
vigorous every day in the far West, that the time is near at hand when
it will decline to adhere to the fortunes of any leader or body which
recklessly ignores its claims or persistently refuses to it recognition.
It is a very significant fact, Mr. President, that this great region,
containing one-fourth of the National area, one-seventeenth of the
population, and constituting one-seventh of the whole number of States
has had up to this time, but one member of the Cabinet. In the present
Cabinet, fourteen States (east of the Mississippi and North of the old
Mason and Dixon's Line) have seven members and the remaining thirty
States have but one. Those thirty States will see to it in the future
that the party which succeeds through their support has its
representation their efforts have deserved.
I cannot close, Mr. President, without giving expression to a sentiment
to which Southerners in the West are peculiarly alive--the sentiment of
sympathy and fraternity which exists between the South and the West.
[Applause.] The course of historical development which I have outlined
of the Western man has wrought a bond of friendship between them, and
that bond is not a reminiscence, but a living, vital, and efficient
fact. Only but yesterday, politicians, thank God not the people, sought
for selfish ends to cast back the South into Stygian gloom from which
she had slowly and laboriously but gloriously emerged, to forge upon her
again hope-killing shackles of a barbarous rule. In that hour of trial
which you and I, sir, know to have been a menace and a reality to whom
did she turn for succor? To this man of the West, and quick and glorious
was the response.