Address delivered, July 5, 1886, at the celebration of Independence
Day, by the Swedes of Lindsborg, Kansas.
MR. CHAIRMAN: When I received the invitation to attend this meeting I
did not not think of “the day we celebrate,” nor of what might occur
here, nor of what I could say to you if I came. The invitation to
address an assemblage of Scandinavian people broke down the barriers of
time and place, and awakened recollections of a body of men, born on the
Scandinavian Peninsula, who, nearly a quarter of a century ago, were
endeared to me by the strong ties of common hardships, privations and
dangers. For nearly three years the Kansas regiment I had the honor to
command, tented, marched and fought by the side of a regiment of
Scandinavians. And when the brave but unfortunate commander of that
regiment, Col. Hans C. Heg, was mortally wounded at the battle of
Chicamauga, I succeeded him in command of the Brigade. I speak from
personal knowledge, therefore, when I say that the Scandinavian people
who have immigrated to this country, and sworn allegiance to its
Constitution and its laws, are thorough Americans. I have seen their
loyalty and devotion tested in the fiery furnace of battle, and by the
most arduous and trying campaigns. I know, also, something of the work
the Scandinavian people have done in developing the resources of this
fair young State. Our census returns and our agricultural reports, in
telling the story of the wonderful growth and prosperity of those
sections of Kansas in which the Scandinavian settlers are located, tell,
also, the story of their industry, their enterprise, and their thrift.
And so, when I received your kind invitation to attend this meeting, my
inclination to accept it, as I wrote Professor Swensson, was very
strong. I wanted to avail myself of such an opportunity to acknowledge
two important facts concerning Scandinavian Americans—first, the sturdy
courage and splendid patriotism I had seen illustrated, by them, during
our late civil war; and, second, that as citizens of Kansas they had
done their full share in making this a great, prosperous, law-respecting
commonwealth. This duty I gladly discharge. With reverent gratitude I
recall the services of the men from the Scandinavian Peninsula who
mustered under the flag of the Fifteenth Wisconsin, and with admiring
wonder I look around me and see the substantial evidences of your
industry, energy and enterprise.
One hundred and seven years ago, after the Americans had carried the
British works at Stony Point, the Commanding General, Anthony Wayne,
sent to Washington a letter which read: “Dear General: The American flag
waves here.” That was all. But it told all. To-day the American flag
waves here and everywhere, from the Northern lakes to the Gulf, and from
the Atlantic to the Pacific. And wherever it waves it is the symbol of
peace, order, education, progress, and freedom. It is the flag of sixty
million people, and dear to them, one and all, because it is the flag of
a Republic where each man is the equal of every other man, in rights and
privileges as well as in duties and responsibilities. It is your flag as
it is my flag—mine by birth, yours by adoption. You have a right,
therefore, to celebrate the anniversary of our National Independence.
The impulse which led you to leave the land of your birth and establish
homes in the new world, was that love of Freedom and faith in Humanity
which is the soul of the great Declaration. Thousands of men of your
race and blood have fought and suffered and died for the flag of this
Republic. Their services and sacrifices and your own choice have made
you heirs to the common heritage of American citizenship—individual
liberty and security, a fair chance to work and win, the sovereignty of
electors, and the protection of just laws. No government can give more
than this, and no fair-minded and independent man expects or asks more
of any government.
In exchanging the rocks and snows of Sweden for the broad prairies and
rich soil of Kansas, you have not only benefitted yourselves, but you
have benefitted the State. I do not depreciate your native land. I know
something of its history and its resources. Compared with the vast areas
of the United States, the Scandinavian Peninsula is not a large
territory. It includes less than three hundred thousand square miles; it
has a population not exceeding six million; and its sterile soil yields
grudgingly. But amid its rocks and snows a singularly hardy and
energetic people have lived and worked since the dawn of civilization.
From the bleak and barren hills of this Peninsula came the earliest
forms of constitutional government. There, too, is found not only the
oldest aristocracy of Europe, but the sturdiest, most prosperous and
well-educated people. For of the Swedes, not one in a thousand is unable
to read and write, and the common people are the owners of nearly the
whole of the landed property in the Kingdom. This Peninsula, too, is
rich in historic names. Gustavus Adolphus and Charles XII justly rank
among the greatest rulers and soldiers the world has ever known. Among
statesmen, Oxenstiern deserves his world-wide fame; and among artists,
there is no name brighter than that of Thorwaldsen. In literature, the
writings of Tegner, Fredrika Bremer, Carlen and Bjornson are as familiar
to English-speaking people as to the Swedes. The mystic philosophy of
Emanuel Swedenborg has interested and entertained the students of all
countries. And among singers, what land or age has ever produced voices
so rich in melody as those of Jenny Lind or Christine Neillson? At our
Centennial Exhibition, in 1876, I spent many delightful days in the
Swedish department, and I remember with still vivid interest its
unequalled specimens of wood-carving, and the paintings in which the
effect of moonlight on the water was reproduced with such marvelous
fidelity and skill. The fair-haired people of the Scandinavian Peninsula
have indeed stamped their impress upon the history, the literature, the
arts, the industries, and the laws and government of the whole civilized
world, and always the influence exerted by their teaching and example
has been wholesome and beneficent.
We are interested now, however, in the Scandinavian people in America,
and not those remaining on the Peninsula. The census of 1880 shows that
there are 440,262 Scandinavians—Swedes, Norwegians and Danes—in the
United States, and of these 194,337 are Swedes. The census of Kansas
also reveals the fact that 11,207 of our citizens are of Swedish birth.
This county of McPherson has within its limits the largest number, or
2,117; Saline county has 1,636; and Riley, Osage, Republic and Clay have
each over 500 citizens of Swedish birth within their limits. That they
make good citizens is a fact universally acknowledged. Wherever they
have settled, improvement and prosperity abound, and schools and
churches multiply. They are, too, thorough Americans. They do not want
to go back to the bleak, snow-clad hills and the vast forests of their
native land, nor do they bring with them to this country that distrust
of rulers and of law which arrays them against our government as if it
was a natural enemy. They do not figure largely in politics; they prefer
to attend to more material and personal concerns—building homes,
conducting business and manufacturing industries, establishing schools
for their children, erecting churches, and accumulating property. They
do not, however, neglect the duties and responsibilities of the
citizenship they have assumed; they study to discharge these, not as
aliens, but in the true spirit of American individuality and patriotism.
Hence, in exchanging the rocks and snows of Sweden for the soil and
sunshine of Kansas, our Swedish citizens have, as I have said, benefited
not only themselves, but the young State with whose fortunes they have
linked their own.
There are some foreigners whose coming to America is a public disaster.
These are the men who, degraded and embittered by the oppression of
despotic governments, confound liberty with license and lawlessness, and
can see no difference between the President of the United States and the
Czar of Russia. The tolerance of our laws, the liberality of our system
of government, allows such freedom of speech and of action that these
men, abusing and outraging the liberty they are permitted for the first
time in their lives to enjoy, at once array themselves as enemies of all
law and all government. They cannot comprehend the fact that laws are as
necessary to the human race as the air we breathe. They cannot
understand the difference between an arbitrary despotism and a
government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The red flag
they unfurl is the flag of the robber and the murderer. Their cry for
liberty is the cry of the wolf in the forest seeking for his prey. It is
no wonder that public indignation is intensifying against these
miscreants, and that the demand for laws that will deal with them
promptly and sternly, is swelling into a popular clamor. Less than a
quarter of a century ago more than two million men rallied around their
country’s flag, and cheerfully offered their lives that the Republic
might be preserved. It is a glorious banner—the brave old flag of the
stars and stripes. It is the flag of Yorktown, and Gettysburg, and
Chicamauga, and Vicksburg, and Appomattox. Every man who lives where it
floats is a freeman and a sovereign. It is the symbol of the only real
Republic on the face of the earth. It is the flag of the only government
where every man is free to do whatsoever he pleases as long as he does
not invade the rights and freedom of his fellow-man. It is the banner of
the Nation that opened this rich and beautiful land as a free gift to
all—native and foreign-born alike. And any man, no matter where he was
born, who seeks to degrade this glorious old flag, or to substitute in
its stead the red flag of the robber and the anarchist, ought to enjoy,
for an indefinite period, the liberty of the penitentiary.
I am glad to say that the Swedish settlers in the United States have
never been accused or suspected of either sympathy or affiliation with
the wretches who flaunt the red flag, and affect to believe that all
government is tyranny, and property is robbery.
This country is not only a free country, but its government is the
perfection of human wisdom. From the dawn of its existence, the United
States has been heir to the ripest harvests of the world’s learning and
experience. England, France, Germany and Sweden struggled through long
centuries of barbarism, ignorance and oppression, before they wrested
from force and Kingcraft the protection of constitutional government.
Our forefathers brought with them, across the ocean, the fruits of this
experience. They loved liberty, and they braved the isolation and
dangers of an unknown land in order to enjoy it. Transmitted from sire
to son, and broadening and strengthening for a hundred years, the ideas
and the aspirations of the men who landed at Plymouth and at Jamestown
at last found expression in the Declaration of Independence. “This
immortal State paper,” says Bancroft, “was the soul of the country at
that time; the revelation of its mind when, in its youth, its
enthusiasm, its sublime confronting of danger, it rose to the highest
creative powers of which man is capable. The heart of Jefferson in
writing the Declaration, and of Congress in adopting it, beat for all
humanity; the assertion of right was made for the entire world of
mankind, without any exception whatever, for the proposition which
admits of exceptions can never be self-evident.”
It was inevitable that the successful maintenance of the rights asserted
in the Declaration, and the establishment of a government based upon the
self-evident truths it affirmed, should not only exercise a potent
influence upon the civil institutions of the world, but attract to this
country the most energetic, daring and aspiring spirits of all civilized
nations. A wide continent, almost boundless in its area and infinite in
its resources, afforded human industry and activity such opportunities
for the exercise of their powers as were never before known, while the
theories and principles of the Declaration, embodied in the organic law
of the Republic, guaranteed to every citizen the largest individual
liberty consistent with social order, and ample protection in the
enjoyment of the products of his industry and skill.
If it was great to be a Roman citizen centuries ago, it is glorious,
to-day, to be a citizen of the United States. What Nation enjoys such a
splendid fame as ours? What other people is so opulent in the blessings
of liberty, intelligence and peace? What country can boast of a happier
and more prosperous present, or a more hopeful future? We have no
venerable antiquity to look back upon; but what Nation, old or young,
has enriched history with so long a list of immortal names—the names of
jurists such as Jay and Marshall; or statesmen equalling Adams,
Jefferson, Hamilton, Seward, and Blaine; or orators rivaling Patrick
Henry, Webster, Clay, Douglas, Morton, and Sumner; or soldiers equalling
Washington, Jackson, Grant, Sherman, and Thomas; or philosophers such as
Benjamin Franklin; or poets of nobler fame than Longfellow, Bryant,
Lowell, and Whittier; or financiers greater than Morris, Gallatin,
Chase, and Sherman; or historians such as Bancroft, Prescott, and
Motley? And what age or country, marshalling all its proud names, and
blending the splendid qualities of each in a single person, can match
the towering greatness of him who was at once statesman, orator,
philosopher, hero, patriot and wise ruler—Abraham Lincoln?
The citizens of the United States are heirs to the rights of the
Declaration, the guarantees of the Constitution, the protection of the
flag, and the fame and glory of all the splendid names I have mentioned.
It is, therefore, glorious to be a citizen of this Republic, and in
leaving the bleak Scandinavian Peninsula and coming to America, you have
made a wise exchange. The true Fatherland is the land of equal rights.
The best country is that which affords to all its citizens the best
opportunities for acquiring happy homes. The best government is that
which makes all men equal before the throne of its Constitution and its
laws. This country, this government, as I firmly believe, is the United
States. You share in this belief, and so believing, you have taken our
National Festival to your hearts, and made it your Festival, to
celebrate, to be proud of, to honor and to revere. I greet you,
therefore, not as Swedes, but as fellow-citizens. I rejoice in your
prosperity. I acknowledge the brave, energetic part you have taken in
the work of developing the resources of Kansas. I gladly join with you
in celebrating this Festival of Liberty. You and your kindred have
witnessed the full fruition of the predictions which one of our great
poets attributes to a prophetess of your race, who lived centuries ago: