[Speech of Henry Watterson at the eighty-ninth anniversary banquet
of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22,
1894. Elihu Root, President of the Society, introduced Mr.
Watterson in the following words: "Gentlemen, we are forced to
recognize the truth of the observation that all the people of New
England are not Puritans; we must admit an occasional exception. It
is equally true, I am told, that all the people of the South are
not cavaliers; but there is one cavalier without fear and without
reproach [applause], the splendid courage of whose convictions
shows how close together the highest examples of different types
can be among godlike men--a cavalier of the South, of southern
blood and southern life, who carries in thought and in deed all the
serious purpose and disinterested action that characterized the
Pilgrim Fathers whom we commemorate. He comes from an impressionist
State where the grass is blue [laughter], where the men are either
all white or all black, and where, we are told, quite often the
settlements are painted red. [Laughter.] He is a soldier, a
statesman, a scholar, and, above all, a lover; and among all the
world which loves a lover the descendants of those who, generation
after generation, with tears and laughter, have sympathized with
John Alden and Priscilla, cannot fail to open their hearts in
sympathy to Henry Watterson and his star-eyed goddess. [Applause.]
I have the honor and great pleasure of introducing him to respond
to the toast of 'The Puritan and the Cavalier.'"]
MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN:--Eight years ago, to-night, there
stood where I am standing now a young Georgian, who, not without reason,
recognized the "significance" of his presence here--"the first
southerner to speak at this board"--a circumstance, let me add, not very
creditable to any of us--and in words whose eloquence I cannot hope to
recall, appealed from the New South to New England for a united country.
He was my disciple, my protege, my friend. He came to me from the
southern schools, where he had perused the arts of oratory and letters,
to get a few hints in journalism, as he said; needing so few, indeed,
that, but a little later, I sent him to one of the foremost journalists
of this foremost city, bearing a letter of introduction, which described
him as "the greatest boy ever born in Dixie, or anywhere else."
He is gone now. But, short as his life was, its heaven-born mission was
fulfilled; the dream of his childhood was realized; for he had been
appointed by God to carry a message of peace on earth, good-will to men,
and, this done, he vanished from the sight of mortal eyes, even as the
dove from the ark.
I mean to take up the word where Grady left it off, but I shall continue
the sentence with a somewhat larger confidence, and, perhaps, with a
somewhat fuller meaning; because, notwithstanding the Puritan trappings,
traditions, and associations which surround me--visible illustrations of
the self-denying fortitude of the Puritan character and the sombre
simplicity of the Puritan taste and habit--I never felt less out of
place in all my life.
To tell you the truth, I am afraid that I have gained access here on
false pretences; for I am no Cavalier at all; just plain Scotch-Irish;
one of those Scotch-Irish southerners who ate no fire in the green leaf
and has eaten no dirt in the brown, and who, accepting, for the moment,
the terms Puritan and Cavalier in the sense an effete sectionalism once
sought to ascribe to them--descriptive labels at once classifying and
separating North and South--verbal redoubts along that mythical line
called Mason and Dixon, over which there were supposed by the extremists
of other days to be no bridges--I am much disposed to say, "A plague o'
both your houses!"
Each was good enough and bad enough in its way, whilst they lasted; each
in its turn filled the English-speaking world with mourning; and each,
if either could have resisted the infection of the soil and climate they
found here, would be to-day striving at the sword's point to square life
by the iron rule of Theocracy, or to round it by the dizzy whirl of a
petticoat! It is very pretty to read about the Maypole in Virginia and
very edifying and inspiring to celebrate the deeds of the Pilgrim
Fathers. But there is not Cavalier blood enough left in the Old Dominion
to produce a single crop of first families, whilst out in Nebraska and
Iowa they claim that they have so stripped New England of her Puritan
stock as to spare her hardly enough for farm hands. This I do know, from
personal experience, that it is impossible for the stranger-guest,
sitting beneath a bower of roses in the Palmetto Club at Charleston, or
by a mimic log-heap in the Algonquin Club at Boston, to tell the
assembled company apart, particularly after ten o'clock in the evening!
Why, in that great, final struggle between the Puritans and the
Cavaliers--which we still hear sometimes casually mentioned--although it
ended nearly thirty years ago, there had been such a mixing up of
Puritan babies and Cavalier babies during the two or three generations
preceding it, that the surviving grandmothers of the combatants could
not, except for their uniforms, have picked out their own on any field
of battle!
Turning to the Cyclopædia of American Biography, I find that Webster had
all the vices that are supposed to have signalized the Cavalier, and
Calhoun all the virtues that are claimed for the Puritan. During twenty
years three statesmen of Puritan origin were the chosen party leaders of
Cavalier Mississippi: Robert J. Walker, born and reared in Pennsylvania;
John A. Quitman, born and reared in New York, and Sargent S. Prentiss,
born and reared in the good old State of Maine. That sturdy Puritan,
John Slidell, never saw Louisiana until he was old enough to vote and
to fight; native here--an alumnus of Columbia College--but sprung from
New England ancestors. Albert Sidney Johnston, the most resplendent of
modern Cavaliers--from tip to toe a type of the species--the very rose
and expectancy of the young Confederacy--did not have a drop of Southern
blood in his veins; Yankee on both sides of the house, though born in
Kentucky a little while after his father and mother arrived there from
Connecticut. The Ambassador who serves our Government near the French
Republic was a gallant Confederate soldier and is a representative
southern statesman; but he owns the estate in Massachusetts where his
father was born, and where his father's fathers lived through many
generations.
And the Cavaliers, who missed their stirrups, somehow, and got into
Yankee saddles? The woods were full of them. If Custer was not a
Cavalier, Rupert was a Puritan. And Sherwood and Wadsworth and Kearny,
and McPherson and their dashing companions and followers! The one
typical Puritan soldier of the war--mark you!--was a Southern, and not a
Northern, soldier; Stonewall Jackson, of the Virginia line. And, if we
should care to pursue the subject farther back, what about Ethan Allen
and John Stark and Mad Anthony Wayne--Cavaliers each and every one?
Indeed, from Israel Putnam to "Buffalo Bill," it seems to me the
Puritans have had rather the best of it in turning out Cavaliers. So the
least said about the Puritan and the Cavalier--except as blessed
memories or horrid examples--the better for historic accuracy.
If you wish to get at the bottom facts, I don't mind telling you--in
confidence--that it was we Scotch-Irish who vanquished both of you--some
of us in peace--others of us in war--supplying the missing link of
adaptability--the needed ingredient of common sense--the conservative
principle of creed and action, to which this generation of Americans
owes its intellectual and moral emancipation from frivolity and
pharisaism--its rescue from the Scarlet Woman and the mailed hand--and
its crystallization into a national character and polity, ruling by
force of brains and not by force of arms.
Gentlemen--Sir--I, too, have been to Boston. Strange as the admission
may seem, it is true; and I live to tell the tale. I have been to
Boston; and when I declare that I found there many things that suggested
the Cavalier and did not suggest the Puritan, I shall not say I was
sorry. But among other things, I found there a civilization perfect in
its union of the art of living with the grace of life; an Americanism
ideal in its simple strength. Grady told us, and told us truly, of that
typical American who, in Dr. Talmage's mind's eye, was coming, but who,
in Abraham Lincoln's actuality, had already come. In some recent studies
into the career of that great man, I have encountered many startling
confirmations of this judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its
sustenance from gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and
Puritan branches deep beneath the soil, shall spring, is springing, a
shapely tree--symmetric in all its parts--under whose sheltering boughs
this nation shall have the new birth of freedom Lincoln promised it, and
mankind the refuge which was sought by the forefathers when they fled
from oppression. Thank God, the axe, the gibbet, and the stake have had
their day. They have gone, let us hope, to keep company with the lost
arts. It has been demonstrated that great wrongs may be redressed and
great reforms be achieved without the shedding of one drop of human
blood; that vengeance does not purify, but brutalizes; and that
tolerance, which in private transactions is reckoned a virtue, becomes
in public affairs a dogma of the most far-seeing statesmanship. Else how
could this noble city have been redeemed from bondage? It was held like
a castle of the Middle Ages by robber barons, who levied tribute right
and left. Yet have the mounds and dykes of corruption been carried--from
buttress to bell-tower the walls of crime have fallen--without a shot
out of a gun, and still no fires of Smithfield to light the pathway of
the victor, no bloody assizes to vindicate the justice of the cause; nor
need of any.
So I appeal from the men in silken hose who danced to music made by
slaves--and called it freedom--from the men in bell-crowned hats, who
led Hester Prynne to her shame--and called it religion--to that
Americanism which reaches forth its arms to smite wrong with reason and
truth, secure in the power of both. I appeal from the patriarchs of New
England to the poets of New England; from Endicott to Lowell; from
Winthrop to Longfellow; from Norton to Holmes; and I appeal in the name
and by the rights of that common citizenship--of that common
origin--back both of the Puritan and the Cavalier--to which all of us
owe our being. Let the dead past, consecrated by the blood of its
martyrs, not by its savage hatreds--darkened alike by kingcraft and
priestcraft--let the dead past bury its dead. Let the present and the
future ring with the song of the singers. Blessed be the lessons they
teach, the laws they make. Blessed be the eye to see, the light to
reveal. Blessed be Tolerance, sitting ever on the right hand of God to
guide the way with loving word, as blessed be all that brings us nearer
the goal of true religion, true Republicanism and true patriotism,
distrust of watchwords and labels, shams and heroes, belief in our
country and ourselves. It was not Cotton Mather, but John Greenleaf
Whittier, who cried:
"Dear God and Father of us all,
Forgive our faith in cruel lies,
Forgive the blindness that denies.
"Cast down our idols--overturn
Our bloody altars--make us see
Thyself in Thy humanity!"
[Applause and cheers.]