The Makers of the Republic—Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster—The
Proposed League of Nations—The Wilsonian Incertitude—The “New Freedom”
I
The makers of the American Republic range themselves in two
groups—Washington, Franklin and Jefferson—Clay, Webster and
Lincoln—each of whom, having a genius peculiarly his own, gave himself
and his best to the cause of national unity and independence.
In a general way it may be said that Washington created and Lincoln
saved the Union. But along with Washington and Lincoln, Clay makes a
good historic third, for it was the masterful Kentuckian who, joining
rare foresight to surpassing eloquence and leading many eminent men,
including Webster, was able to hold the legions of unrest at bay during
the formative period.
There are those who call these great men “back numbers,” who tell us we
have left the past behind us and entered an epoch of more enlightened
progress—who would displace the example of the simple lives they led
and the homely truths they told, to set up a school of philosophy which
had made Athens stare and Rome howl, and, I dare say, is causing the
Old Continentals to turn over in their graves. The self-exploiting
spectacle and bizarre teaching of this school passes the wit of man to
fathom. Professing the ideal and proposing to recreate the Universe,
the New Freedom, as it calls itself, would standardize it. The effect
of that would be to desiccate the human species in human conceit. It
would cheapen the very harps and halos in Heaven and convert the Day of
Judgment into a moving picture show.
I protest that I am not of its kidney. In point of fact, its platitudes
“stick in my gizzard.” I belong the rather to those old-fashioned ones—
“Who love their land because it is their own, And scorn to give aught
other reason why; Who’d shake hands with a king upon his throne, And
think it kindness to his majesty.”
I have many rights—birthrights—to speak of Kentucky as a Kentuckian,
beside that of more than fifty years’ service upon what may be fairly
called the battle-line of the Dark and Bloody Ground.
My grandmother’s father, William Mitchell Morrison, had raised a
company of riflemen in the War of the Revolution, and, after the War,
marched it westward. He commanded the troops in the old fort at
Harrodsburg, where my grandmother was born in 1784. He died a general.
My grandfather, James Black’s father, the Rev. James Black, was
chaplain of the fort. He remembered the birth of the baby girl who was
to become his wife. He was a noble stalwart—a perfect type of the
hunters of Kentucky—who could bring down a squirrel from the highest
bough and hit a bull’s eye at a hundred yards after he was three score
and ten.
It was he who delighted my childhood with bear stories and properly
lurid narrations of the braves in buckskin and the bucks in paint and
feathers, with now and then a red-coat to give pungency and variety to
the tale. He would sing me to sleep with hunting songs. He would take
me with him afield to carry the game bag, and I was the only one of
many grandchildren to be named in his will. In my thoughts and in my
dreams he has been with me all my life, a memory and an example, and an
ever glorious inspiration.
Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton were among my earliest heroes.