National Day of Mourning.--Draping of Public Buildings and
Private Residences.--Touching Incident.--Tributes to
Garfield.--Senator Hoar's Address.--Whittier's
Letter.--Senator Dawes' Remarks.
Monday, September 26th, the day when the funeral rites were celebrated
at Cleveland, was appointed by President Arthur as a national day of
mourning. The public buildings throughout the country and many private
residences were draped with mourning, while beautiful and appropriate
emblems of the nation's sorrow were seen in almost every window. A
touching incident is told of a poor colored washerwoman at Long Branch
who tore up her one Sunday gown, a cheap black gingham, and hung it
about her door. When remonstrated with, she said, quietly,--
"He was my President, too." It would take volumes to give any adequate
collection of the many beautiful tributes to Garfield delivered in the
pulpit, from the forum, and through the public press, but from them we
select a few.
At Mechanic's Hall in Worcester, Senator George F. Hoar spoke as
follows: "I suppose at this single hour there is deeper grief over the
civilized world than at any other single hour in its history. Heroes,
and statesmen, and monarchs, and orators, and warriors, and great
benefactors of the race, have died and been buried. There have been men
like William the Silent and his kinsmen of England, and men like
Lincoln, whose death generations unborn will lament with a sense as of
personal bereavement. But in the past the knowledge of great events and
great characters made its way slowly to the minds of men. The press and
the telegraph have this summer assembled all Christendom morning and
evening at the door of one sick-chamber. The gentle and wise Lincoln had
to overcome the hatred and bitterness of a great civil war. It was the
fortune of President Garfield, as it was never the fortune of any other
man, that his whole life has been unrolled as a scroll to be read of all
men. The recent election had made us familiar with that story of the
childhood in the log cabin, of the boyhood on the canal boat, of the
precious school time, of the college days at the feet of our saintly
Hopkins, of the school-teacher, of the marriage to the bright and
beautiful schoolmate, of the Christian preacher, of the soldier saving
the army at Chickamauga, of the statesman leading in great debates in
Congress, and of the orator persuading the conscience and judgment of
Ohio, and, through her, saving the nation's honor and credit in the
great strife for public honesty, of the judge determining the great
issue of the title to the presidency, of the loved and trusted popular
leader, to whom was offered the choice of three great offices,
Representative, Senator, and President at once. We know it all by heart,
as we know the achievements of the brief and brilliant administration of
the presidential office and the heroic patience and cheer of that long
dying struggle, when every sigh of agony was uttered in a telephone at
which all mankind were listening. No wonder the heart burst at last.
While it was throbbing and pulsing with fever and pain, it furnished the
courage which held up for seventy-nine days the sinking hopes of a
world. This man touched the common life of humanity, touched its
lowliness, touched its greatness, at so many points. His roots were in
New England puritanism, were in the yeomanry of Worcester and Middlesex.
He grew up to manhood in Ohio. The South had learned to know him. Her
soldiers had met him in battle. When he died she was making ready to
clasp the hand he was holding out to her returning loyalty. The child in
the log cabin knows all about the childhood so like his own. Scholarship
mourns the scholar who was struck down when he was hastening to lay his
untarnished laurel at the feet of his college. Every mother's heart in
America stirred within her when the first act of the new President was
to pay homage to his own mother. The soldiers and sailors of England,
the veterans of Trafalgar and Waterloo, join his own comrades in
mourning for a hero whom they deemed worthy to be ranked with the heroes
who held out the livelong day with Wellington, or who obeyed Nelson's
immortal signal. The laborer misses a brother who has known all the
bitterness of poverty and the sweetness of bread earned by the sweat of
his brow. The Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India, and
sovereign of Cyprus and Malta and Gibraltar and Canada and Jamaica, knew
her peer when she laid her wreath, last Friday, on the coffin of a king.
The last we heard of him in health he was playing like a boy with his
boy. As our friend said in the pulpit yesterday, the saints of mankind,
when they saw him, knew the birthmark of their race, and bowed their
heads. The American people have anointed him as the representative of
their sovereignty. Washington and Lincoln came forward to greet him and
welcome him to a seat beside their own. I say there is deeper grief at
this hour over the civilized world than at any other single hour in
history. It seems to me that the death of President Garfield is the
greatest single calamity this country ever suffered. I have no doubt
there were hundreds and hundreds of thousands of men who would gladly
have bought his life with their own, but we shall dishonor our dead
here if, even while his grave is open, we allow ourselves to utter a cry
of despair. It is true of nations, even more than of man, that "Whom the
Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth."
Our republic was planted in sorrow. One-half of the pilgrims died at
Plymouth the first winter, and yet not one of the original colony went
back to England. Is there any man now who would they had not died, or
wishes they had found summer and plenty and ease on the coast of
Massachusetts? Could we celebrate Yorktown with the same lofty triumph
without the memories of Valley Forge and the death of Hale and Warren? I
think even the widow who goes mourning all her days will hardly wish now
that our regiments had come home from the war with full ranks. God has
taken from us our beloved, but think what has been brought into this
precious life. Fifty millions of people, of many races, of many climes,
the workman, the farmer, the slave just made free, met together to
choose the man whom they could call to the presidency among mankind. God
took him in his first hour of triumph and stretched him for seventy-nine
days upon a rack. He turned in upon that sick-chamber a Drummond light
that all mankind might look in upon that cruel assay, and see what
manner of men and what manner of women Freedom calls to her high
places. He revealed to them courage, constancy, cheerfulness, woman's
love, faith in God, submission to his will. Into what years of Europe,
into what cycles of Cathay were ever crowded so much of hope and cheer
for humanity as into the tragedy of Elberon? Your prayers were not
answered; the bitter cup has not passed from you, but, so long as human
hearts endure, humanity will be strengthened and comforted, because you
have drunk it."
* * * * *
The following letter, from John G. Whittier, was read at the funeral
services of President Garfield, held in Amesbury:--
DANVERS, MASS., 9TH MO., 24, 1881.
W. H. B. CURRIER.
_My Dear Friend_,--I regret that it is not in my power to
join the citizens of Amesbury and Salisbury in the memorial
services on the occasion of the death of our lamented
President. But in heart and sympathy, I am with you. I share
the great sorrow which overshadows the land; I fully
appreciate the irretrievable loss. But it seems to me that
the occasion is one for thankfulness as well as grief.
Through all the stages of the solemn tragedy which has just
closed with the death of our noblest and best, I have felt
that the Divine Providence was overruling the mighty
affliction--that the patient sufferer at Washington was
drawing with cords of sympathy all sections and parties
nearer to each other. And now, when South and North,
Democrat and Republican, Radical and Conservative, lift
their voices in one unbroken accord of lamentation; when I
see how, in spite of the greed of gain, the lust of office,
the strifes and meanness of party politics, the great heart
of the nation proves sound and loyal, I feel a new hope for
the republic. I have a firmer faith in its stability. It is
said that no man liveth and no man dieth to himself; and the
pure and noble life of Garfield, and his slow, long
martyrdom so bravely borne in the view of all are, I
believe, bearing for us, as a people, "the peaceable fruits
of righteousness." We are stronger, wiser, better for them.
With him it is well. His mission fulfilled, he goes to his
grave by the lakeside, honored and lamented as man never was
before. The whole world mourns him. There is no speech nor
language where the voice of his praise is not heard. About
his grave gathers, with heads uncovered, the vast
brotherhood of man.
And with us it is well also. We are nearer a united people
than ever before. We are at peace with all; our future is
full of promise; our industrial and financial condition is
hopeful. God grant that, while our material interests
prosper, the moral and spiritual influence of this occasion
may be permanently felt; that the solemn sacrament of sorrow
whereof we have been partakers may be blest to the promotion
of the "righteousness which exalts a nation." Thy friend,
JOHN G. WHITTIER.
Said Senator Dawes:--
"Garfield was indeed a great man. This will be the judgment of those who
knew him personally and of history. This tragedy prevents the
corroboration of that judgment by results; for he had but just entered
upon the work for which his preparation and development had fitted him
and has finished nothing but a life of great promise and expectation.
His growth has been a wonderful study to those who were by his side
during its progress. It was constant to the last moment. The last year
had turned it into an altogether new and untried channel. It had been
begun and carried on until that time in quite a different direction. He
had never had executive experience, and a modesty and distrust, rare in
minds conscious of great power, led him to hesitate and shrink from what
was before him. His first remark to a long-tried friend on taking his
hand after the Chicago convention was this: 'I fear I am no man for this
place; I have felt that I could reasonably count on six years more of
labor and study and growth in the new and larger opportunity already
secured to me in my accustomed field, but this is an untried sphere to
me, and I dread the experiment.' The short time he has been permitted,
however, to labor in this new field has yet been long enough to bring
out great qualities and high purposes that the nation can ill spare. He
was conscious of great powers carefully trained, but he lacked
confidence to take hold of new things. His mind did not work quickly,
though it did surely. Always feeling the ground under every step he
took, he never ventured his foot where he could not, by some process of
reasoning, however slow, satisfy himself that he knew what was under
him. Hence the man who was a great leader in battle, and of unflinching
personal courage, and better fitted than any contemporary to
demonstrate and defend a political principle, had not yet come to be a
safe political leader in a sudden emergency, where there is no time for
logic or processes of reasoning, but action must follow instinct and
first impression. At such times he distrusted himself and left to
others, with not a tithe of his real power, the guidance of political
movements. As free from political as from personal guile, he was too
confiding and open-hearted to be safe in the hands of men less
scrupulous and less selfish.
"Those who saw him enter public life, and were with him to the end, have
in mind a wonderful growth, and have in admiration, also, a wonderful
character, personal, mental and moral, ever charming, sure to be
instructive and always exemplary. In private intercourse with those he
loved he was as simple and trusting as a child, as tender and
affectionate as a woman, and as true and valiant as a knight. One of the
most touching scenes, illustrative of what manner of man he was, will
never be forgotten. The great cares of state had well-nigh worn him out;
the wife of his love lay lingering between life and death, and he had
been going from official labor and responsibility to her bedside night
after night, and, for the last two, had scarcely closed his eyes. The
report had gone out that Mrs. Garfield was dying; a near friend called
to inquire. Coming out of the sick-room, and grasping his hand, the
President begged him to sit down, and there this greatest of all public
men unbosomed himself like a broken-hearted woman. Dwelling with
surprising tenderness upon the love and beauty of his married life, and
the noble character of her who had made it what it was, he exclaimed,
with great emotion, 'I have had in this trial glimpses of a better and
higher life beyond, which have made this life I am leading here seem
utterly barren and worthless. Whatever may come of this peril, I fear
that I shall never again have ambition or heart to go through with that
to which I have been called.' To human view he has not been permitted to
finish the work for which he was fitted and to which he aspired, but he
has left valuable material for the study and instruction of public men,
covering a greater range of topics, a more thorough investigation, and
sounder conclusions than have been left by any one so constantly active
in the daily and current demands of public life. Let us thank God for
such a life, of such infinite value to the republic. Its example, its
teachings, its ambitions, its lofty aspirations and high resolves, and
its demonstrations of what man can make of himself, have no parallel in
history, and will have no measure in their beneficent effect upon those
who shall hereafter honestly study them. He dies loved, admired and
mourned before all others, but not yet fully appreciated. His loss is
irreparable, his lesson invaluable."