Delivered before the New York State Legislature, at Albany,
N. Y, May 9,1888.
ROSCOE CONKLING--a great man, an orator, a statesman, a lawyer, a
distinguished citizen of the Republic, in the zenith of his fame and
power has reached his journey's end; and we are met, here in the city of
his birth, to pay our tribute to his worth and work. He earned and held
a proud position in the public thought. He stood for independence, for
courage, and above all for absolute integrity, and his name was known
and honored by many millions of his fellow-men.
The literature of many lands is rich with the tributes that gratitude,
admiration and love have paid to the great and honored dead. These
tributes disclose the character of nations, the ideals of the human
race. In them we find the estimates of greatness--the deeds and lives
that challenged praise and thrilled the hearts of men.
In the presence of death, the good man judges as he would be judged. He
knows that men are only fragments--that the greatest walk in shadow, and
that faults and failures mingle with the lives of all.
In the grave should be buried the prejudices and passions born of
conflict. Charity should hold the scales in which are weighed the deeds
of men. Peculiarities, traits born of locality and surroundings--these
are but the dust of the race--these are accidents, drapery, clothes,
fashions, that have nothing to do with the man except to hide his
character. They are the clouds that cling to mountains. Time gives us
clearer vision. That which was merely local fades away. The words of
envy are forgotten, and all there is of sterling worth remains. He who
was called a partisan is a patriot. The revolutionist and the outlaw are
the founders of nations, and he who was regarded as a scheming, selfish
politician becomes a statesman, a philosopher, whose words and deeds
shed light.
Fortunate is that nation great enough to know the great.
When a great man dies--one who has nobly fought the battle of a life,
who has been faithful to every trust, and has uttered his highest,
noblest thought--one who has stood proudly by the right in spite of jeer
and taunt, neither stopped by foe nor swerved by friend--in honoring
him, in speaking words of praise and love above his dust, we pay a
tribute to ourselves.
How poor this world would be without its graves, without the memories of
its mighty dead. Only the voiceless speak forever.
Intelligence, integrity and courage are the great pillars that support
the State.
Above all, the citizens of a free nation should honor the brave
and independent man--the man of stainless integrity, of will and
intellectual force. Such men are the Atlases on whose mighty shoulders
rest the great fabric of the Republic. Flatterers, cringers, crawlers,
time-servers are the dangerous citizens of a democracy. They who gain
applause and power by pandering to the mistakes, the prejudices and
passions of the multitude, are the enemies of liberty.
When the intelligent submit to the clamor of the many, anarchy begins
and the Republic reaches the edge of chaos. Mediocrity, touched with
ambition, flatters the base and calumniates the great, while the true
patriot, who will do neither, is often sacrificed.
In a government of the people a leader should be a teacher--he should
carry the torch of truth.
Most people are the slaves of habit--followers of custom--believers in
the wisdom of the past--and were it not for brave and splendid souls,
"the dust of antique time would lie unswept, and mountainous error be
too highly heaped for truth to overpeer." Custom is a prison, locked
and barred by those who long ago were dust, the keys of which are in the
keeping of the dead.
Nothing is grander than when a strong, intrepid man breaks chains,
levels walls and breasts the many-headed mob like some great cliff that
meets and mocks the innumerable billows of the sea.
The politician hastens to agree with the majority--insists that their
prejudice is patriotism, that their ignorance is wisdom;--not that
he loves them, but because he loves himself. The statesman, the
real reformer, points out the mistakes of the multitude, attacks the
prejudices of his countrymen, laughs at their follies, denounces
their cruelties, enlightens and enlarges their minds and educates the
conscience--not because he loves himself, but because he loves and
serves the right and wishes to make his country great and free.
With him defeat is but a spur to further effort. He who refuses to
stoop, who cannot be bribed by the promise of success, or the fear of
failure--who walks the highway of the right, and in disaster stands
erect, is the only victor. Nothing is more despicable than to reach fame
by crawling,--position by cringing.
When real history shall be written by the truthful and the wise, these
men, these kneelers at the shrines of chance and fraud, these brazen
idols worshiped once as gods, will be the very food of scorn, while
those who bore the burden of defeat, who earned and kept their
self-respect, who would not bow to man or men for place or power, will
wear upon their brows the laurel mingled with the oak.
Roscoe Conkling was a man of superb courage.
He not only acted without fear, but he had that fortitude of soul that
bears the consequences of the course pursued without complaint. He was
charged with being proud. The charge was true--he was proud. His knees
were as inflexible as the "unwedgeable and gnarled oak," but he was
not vain. Vanity rests on the opinion of others--pride, on our own. The
source of vanity is from without--of pride, from within. Vanity is a
vane that turns, a willow that bends, with every breeze--pride is
the oak that defies the storm. One is cloud--the other rock. One is
weakness--the other strength.
This imperious man entered public life in the dawn of the
reformation--at a time when the country needed men of pride, of
principle and courage. The institution of slavery had poisoned all
the springs of power. Before this crime ambition fell upon its
knees,--politicians, judges, clergymen, and merchant-princes bowed low
and humbly, with their hats in their hands. The real friend of man was
denounced as the enemy of his country--the real enemy of the human race
was called a statesman and a patriot. Slavery was the bond and pledge of
peace, of union, and national greatness. The temple of American liberty
was finished--the auction-block was the corner-stone.
It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, of the political
blindness and immorality, of the patriotic dishonesty, of the
cruelty and degradation of a people who supplemented the incomparable
Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive Slave Law.
Think of the honored statesmen of that ignoble time who wallowed in this
mire and who, decorated with dripping filth, received the plaudits of
their fellow-men. The noble, the really patriotic, were the victims of
mobs, and the shameless were clad in the robes of office.
But let us speak no word of blame--let us feel that each one acted
according to his light--according to his darkness.
At last the conflict came. The hosts of light and darkness prepared
to meet upon the fields of war. The question was presented: Shall the
Republic be slave or free? The Republican party had triumphed at the
polls. The greatest man in our history was President elect. The victors
were appalled--they shrank from the great responsibility of success. In
the presence of rebellion they hesitated--they offered to return the
fruits of victory. Hoping to avert war they were willing that slavery
should become immortal. An amendment to the Constitution was proposed,
to the effect that no subsequent amendment should ever be made that in
anyway should interfere with the right of man to steal his fellow-men.
This, the most marvelous proposition ever submitted to a Congress of
civilized men, received in the House an overwhelming majority, and the
necessary two-thirds in the Senate. The Republican party, in the moment
of its triumph, deserted every principle for which it had so gallantly
contended, and with the trembling hands of fear laid its convictions on
the altar of compromise.
The Old Guard, numbering but sixty-five in the House, stood as firm
as the three hundred at Thermopylae. Thad-deus Stevens--as maliciously
right as any other man was ever wrong--refused to kneel. Owen Lovejoy,
remembering his brother's noble blood, refused to surrender, and on the
edge of disunion, in the shadow of civil war, with the air filled with
sounds of dreadful preparation, while the Republican party was retracing
its steps, Roscoe Conkling voted No. This puts a wreath of glory on his
tomb. From that vote to the last moment of his life he was a champion of
equal rights, staunch and stalwart.
From that moment he stood in the front rank. He never wavered and he
never swerved. By his devotion to principle--his courage, the splendor
of his diction,--by his varied and profound knowledge, his conscientious
devotion to the great cause, and by his intellectual scope and grasp, he
won and held the admiration of his fellow-men.
Disasters in the field, reverses at the polls, did not and could not
shake his courage or his faith. He knew the ghastly meaning of defeat.
He knew that the great ship that slavery sought to strand and wreck was
freighted with the world's sublimest hope.
He battled for a nation's life--for the rights of slaves--the dignity
of labor, and the liberty of all. He guarded with a father's care the
rights of the hunted, the hated and despised. He attacked the savage
statutes of the reconstructed States with a torrent of invective, scorn
and execration. He was not satisfied until the freedman was an American
Citizen--clothed with every civil right--until the Constitution was his
shield--until the ballot was his sword.
And long after we are dead, the colored man in this and other lands will
speak his name in reverence and love. Others wavered, but he stood
firm; some were false, but he was proudly true--fearlessly faithful unto
death.
He gladly, proudly grasped the hands of colored men who stood with him
as makers of our laws, and treated them as equals and as friends. The
cry of "social equality" coined and uttered by the cruel and the base,
was to him the expression of a great and splendid truth. He knew that no
man can be the equal of the one he robs--that the intelligent and unjust
are not the superiors of the ignorant and honest--and he also felt, and
proudly felt, that if he were not too great to reach the hand of help
and recognition to the slave, no other Senator could rightfully refuse.
We rise by raising others--and he who stoops above the fallen, stands
erect.
Nothing can be grander than to sow the seeds of noble thoughts and
virtuous deeds--to liberate the bodies and the souls of men--to earn
the grateful homage of a race--and then, in life's last shadowy hour,
to know that the historian of Liberty will be compelled to write your
name.
There are no words intense enough,--with heart enough--to express my
admiration for the great and gallant souls who have in every age and
every land upheld the right, and who have lived and died for freedom's
sake.
In our lives have been the grandest years that man has lived, that Time
has measured by the flight of worlds.
The history of that great Party that let the oppressed go free--that
lifted our nation from the depths of savagery to freedom's cloudless
heights, and tore with holy hands from every law the words that
sanctified the cruelty of man, is the most glorious in the annals of our
race. Never before was there such a moral exaltation--never a party with
a purpose so pure and high. It was the embodied conscience of a nation,
the enthusiasm of a people guided by wisdom, the impersonation of
justice; and the sublime victory achieved loaded even the conquered with
all the rights that freedom can bestow.
Roscoe Conkling was an absolutely honest man. Honesty is the oak around
which all other virtues cling. Without that they fall, and groveling
die in weeds and dust. He believed that a nation should discharge its
obligations. He knew that a promise could not be made often enough, or
emphatic enough, to take the place of payment. He felt that the promise
of the Government was the promise of every citizen--that a national
obligation was a personal debt, and that no possible combination of
words and pictures could take the place of coin. He uttered the splendid
truth that "the higher obligations among men are not set down in writing
signed and sealed, but reside in honor." He knew that repudiation was
the sacrifice of honor--the death of the national soul. He knew that
without character, without integrity, there is no wealth, and that
below poverty, below bankruptcy, is the rayless abyss of repudiation.
He upheld the sacredness of contracts, of plighted national faith, and
helped to save and keep the honor of his native land. This adds another
laurel to his brow.
He was the ideal representative, faithful and incorruptible. He believed
that his constituents and his country were entitled to the fruit of
his experience, to his best and highest thought. No man ever held the
standard of responsibility higher than he. He voted according to his
judgment, his conscience. He made no bargains--he neither bought nor
sold.
To correct evils, abolish abuses and inaugurate reforms, he believed was
not only the duty, but the privilege, of a legislator. He neither sold
nor mortgaged himself. He was in Congress during the years of vast
expenditure, of war and waste--when the credit of the nation was loaned
to individuals--when claims were thick as leaves in June, when the
amendment of a statute, the change of a single word, meant millions, and
when empires were given to corporations. He stood at the summit of his
power--peer of the greatest--a leader tried and trusted. He had the
tastes of a prince, the fortune of a peasant, and yet he never swerved.
No corporation was great enough or rich enough to purchase him. His vote
could not be bought "for all the sun sees, or the close earth wombs, or
the profound seas hide." His hand was never touched by any bribe, and
on his soul there never was a sordid stain. Poverty was his priceless
crown.
Above his marvelous intellectual gifts--above all place he ever
reached,--above the ermine he refused,--rises his integrity like some
great mountain peak--and there it stands, firm as the earth beneath,
pure as the stars above.
He was a great lawyer. He understood the frame-work, the anatomy, the
foundations of law; was familiar with the great streams and currents and
tides of authority.
He knew the history of legislation--the principles that have
been settled upon the fields of war. He knew the maxims,--those
crystallizations of common sense, those hand-grenades of argument. He
was not a case-lawyer--a decision index, or an echo; he was original,
thoughtful and profound. He had breadth and scope, resource, learning,
logic, and above all, a sense of justice. He was painstaking and
conscientious--anxious to know the facts--preparing for every attack,
ready for every defence. He rested only when the end was reached. During
the contest, he neither sent nor received a flag of truce. He was
true to his clients--making their case his. Feeling responsibility, he
listened patiently to details, and to his industry there were only the
limits of time and strength. He was a student of the Constitution. He
knew the boundaries of State and Federal jurisdiction, and no man
was more familiar with those great decisions that are the peaks and
promontories, the headlands and the beacons, of the law.
He was an orator,--logical, earnest, intense and picturesque. He laid
the foundation with care, with accuracy and skill, and rose by "cold
gradation and well balanced form" from the corner-stone of statement
to the domed conclusion. He filled the stage. He satisfied the eye--the
audience was his. He had that indefinable thing called presence. Tall,
commanding, erect--ample in speech, graceful in compliment, Titanic
in denunciation, rich in illustration, prodigal of comparison and
metaphor--and his sentences, measured and rhythmical, fell like music on
the enraptured throng.
He abhorred the Pharisee, and loathed all conscientious fraud. He had a
profound aversion for those who insist on putting base motives back
of the good deeds of others. He wore no mask. He knew his friends--his
enemies knew him.
He had no patience with pretence--with patriotic reasons for unmanly
acts. He did his work and bravely spoke his thought.
Sensitive to the last degree, he keenly felt the blows and stabs of the
envious and obscure--of the smallest, of the weakest--but the greatest
could not drive him from conviction's field. He would not stoop to
ask or give an explanation. He left his words and deeds to justify
themselves.
He held in light esteem a friend who heard with half-believing ears the
slander of a foe. He walked a highway of his own, and kept the company
of his self-respect. He would not turn aside to avoid a foe--to greet or
gain a friend.
In his nature there was no compromise. To him there were but two
paths--the right and wrong. He was maligned, misrepresented and
misunderstood--but he would not answer. He knew that character speaks
louder far than any words. He was as silent then as he is now--and his
silence, better than any form of speech, refuted every charge.
He was an American--proud of his country, that was and ever will be
proud of him. He did not find perfection only in other lands. He did
not grow small and shrunken, withered and apologetic, in the presence
of those upon whom greatness had been thrust by chance. He could not
be overawed by dukes or lords, nor flattered into vertebrate-less
subserviency by the patronizing smiles of kings. In the midst of
conventionalities he had the feeling of suffocation. He believed in the
royalty of man, in the sovereignty of the citizen, and in the matchless
greatness of this Republic.
He was of the classic mould--a figure from the antique world. He had
the pose of the great statues--the pride and bearing of the intellectual
Greek, of the conquering Roman, and he stood in the wide free air as
though within his veins there flowed the blood of a hundred kings.
And as he lived he died. Proudly he entered the darkness--or the
dawn--that we call death. Unshrinkingly he passed beyond our horizon,
beyond the twilight's purple hills, beyond the utmost reach of human
harm or help--to that vast realm of silence or of joy where the
innumerable dwell, and he has left with us his wealth of thought and
deed--the memory of a brave, imperious, honest man, who bowed alone to
death.