[Speech of Clark Howell at the Peace Jubilee Banquet in Chicago, October
19, 1898, in response to the toast, "Our Reunited Country: North and
South."]
MR. TOASTMASTER, AND MY FELLOW COUNTRYMEN:--In the mountains of
my State, in a county remote from the quickening touch of commerce, and
railroads and telegraphs--so far removed that the sincerity of its
rugged people flows unpolluted from the spring of nature--two
vine-covered mounds, nestling in the solemn silence of a country
churchyard, suggest the text of my response to the sentiment to which I
am to speak to-night. A serious text, Mr. Toastmaster, for an occasion
like this, and yet out of it there is life and peace and hope and
prosperity, for in the solemn sacrifice of the voiceless grave can the
chiefest lesson of the Republic be learned, and the destiny of its real
mission be unfolded. So bear with me while I lead you to the
rust-stained slab, which for a third of a century--since
Chickamauga--has been kissed by the sun as it peeped over the Blue
Ridge, melting the tears with which the mourning night had bedewed the
inscription:--
"Here lies a Confederate soldier.
He died for his country."
The September day which brought the body of this mountain hero to that
home among the hills which had smiled upon his infancy, been gladdened
by his youth, and strengthened by his manhood, was an ever memorable one
with the sorrowing concourse of friends and neighbors who followed his
shot-riddled body to the grave. And of that number no man gainsaid the
honor of his death, lacked full loyalty to the flag for which he fought,
or doubted the justice of the cause for which he gave his life.
Thirty-five years have passed; another war has called its roll of
martyrs; again the old bell tolls from the crude latticed tower of the
settlement church; another great pouring of sympathetic humanity, and
this time the body of a son, wrapped in the stars and stripes, is
lowered to its everlasting rest beside that of the father who sleeps in
the stars and bars.
There were those there who stood by the grave of the Confederate hero
years before, and the children of those were there, and of those present
no one gainsaid the honor of the death of this hero of El Caney, and
none were there but loved, as patriots alone can love, the glorious flag
that enshrines the people of a common country as it enshrouds the form
that will sleep forever in its blessed folds. And on this tomb will be
written:--
"Here lies the son of a Confederate soldier.
He died for his country."
And so it is that between the making of these two graves human hands and
human hearts have reached a solution of the vexed problem that has
baffled human will and human thought for three decades. Sturdy sons of
the South have said to their brothers of the North that the people of
the South had long since accepted the arbitrament of the sword to which
they had appealed. And likewise the oft-repeated message has come back
from the North that peace and good will reigned, and that the wounds of
civil dissension were but as sacred memories. Good fellowship was wafted
on the wings of commerce and development from those who had worn the
blue to those who had worn the gray. Nor were these messages delivered
in vain, for they served to pave the way for the complete and absolute
elimination of the line of sectional differences by the only process by
which such a result was possible. The sentiment of the great majority of
the people of the South was rightly spoken in the message of the
immortal Hill, and in the burning eloquence of Henry Grady--both
Georgians--the record of whose blessed work for the restoration of peace
between the sections becomes a national heritage, and whose names are
stamped in enduring impress upon the affection of the people of the
Republic.
And yet there were still those among us who believed your course was
polite, but insincere, and those among you who assumed that our
professed attitude was sentimental and unreal. Bitterness had departed,
and sectional hate was no more, but there were those who feared, even if
they did not believe, that between the great sections of our greater
government there was not the perfect faith and trust and love that both
professed; that there was want of the faith that made the American
Revolution a successful possibility; that there was want of the trust
that crystallized our States into the original Union; that there was
lack of the love that bound in unassailable strength the united
sisterhood of States that withstood the shock of Civil War. It is true
this doubt existed to a greater degree abroad than at home. But to-day
the mist of uncertainty has been swept away by the sunlight of events,
and there, where doubt obscured before stands in bold relief, commanding
the admiration of the whole world, the most glorious type of united
strength and sentiment and loyalty known to the history of nations.
Out of the chaos of that civil war had risen a new nation, mighty in the
vastness of its limitless resources, the realities within its reach
surpassing the dreams of fiction, and eclipsing the fancy of fable--a
new nation, yet rosy in the flesh, with the bloom of youth upon its
cheeks and the gleam of morning in its eyes. No one questioned that
commercial and geographic union had been effected. So had Rome re-united
its faltering provinces, maintaining the limit of its imperial
jurisdiction by the power of commercial bonds and the majesty of the
sword, until in its very vastness it collapsed. The heart of its people
did not beat in unison. Nations may be made by the joining of hands, but
the measure of their real strength and vitality, like that of the human
body, is in the heart. Show me the country whose people are not at heart
in sympathy with its institutions, and the fervor of whose patriotism is
not bespoken in its flag, and I will show you a ship of state which is
sailing in shallow waters, toward unseen eddies of uncertainty, if not
to the open rocks of dismemberment.
Whence was the proof to come, to ourselves as well as to the world, that
we were being moved once again by a common impulse, and by the same
heart that inspired and gave strength to the hands that smote the
British in the days of the Revolution, and again at New Orleans; that
made our ships the masters of the seas; that placed our flag on
Chapultepec, and widened our domain from ocean to ocean? How was the
world to know that the burning fires of patriotism, so essential to
national glory and achievement, had not been quenched by the blood
spilled by the heroes of both sides of the most desperate struggle known
in the history of civil wars? How was the doubt that stood, all
unwilling, between outstretched hands and sympathetic hearts, to be, in
fact, dispelled?
If from out the caldron of conflict there arose this doubt, only from
the crucible of war could come the answer. And, thank God, that answer
has been made in the record of the war, the peaceful termination of
which we celebrate to-night. Read it in every page of its history; read
it in the obliteration of party and sectional lines in the congressional
action which called the nation to arms in the defence of prostrate
liberty, and for the extension of the sphere of human freedom; read it
in the conduct of the distinguished Federal soldier who, as the chief
executive of this great Republic,[9] honors this occasion by his
presence to-night, and whose appointments in the first commissions
issued after war had been declared made manifest the sincerity of his
often repeated utterances of complete sectional reconciliation and the
elimination of sectional lines in the affairs of government. Differing
with him, as I do, on party issues, utterly at variance with the views
of his party on economic problems, I sanction with all my heart the
obligation that rests on every patriotic citizen to make party second to
country, and in the measure that he has been actuated by this broad and
patriotic policy he will receive the plaudits of the whole people: "Well
done, good and faithful servant."
Portentous indeed have been the developments of the past six months; the
national domain has been extended far into the Caribbean Sea on the
south, and to the west it is so near the mainland of Asia that we can
hear grating of the process which is grinding the ancient celestial
empire into pulp for the machinery of civilization and of progress.
In a very short while the last page of this war will have been written,
except for the effect it will have on the future. Our flag now floats
over Porto Rico, a part of Cuba, and Manila. It must soon bespeak our
sovereignty over the island of Luzon, or possibly over the whole
Philippine group. It will, ere long, from the staff on Havana's Morro,
cast its shadow on the sunken and twisted frame of the Maine--a grim
reminder of the vengeance that awaits any nation that lays unholy hands
on an American citizen or violates any sacred American right. It has
drawn from an admiring world unstinted applause for the invincible army,
that under tropic suns, despite privations and disease, untrained but
undismayed, has swept out of their own trenches and routed from their
own battlements, like chaff before the wind, the trained forces of a
formidable power. It has bodily stripped the past of lustre and
defiantly challenged the possibilities of the future in the
accomplishment of a matchless navy, whose deeds have struck the universe
with consternation and with wonder.
But speaking as a Southerner and an American, I say that this has been
as naught compared to the greatest good this war has accomplished.
Drawing alike from all sections of the Union for her heroes and her
martyrs, depending alike upon north, south, east and west for her
glorious victories, and weeping with sympathy with the widows and the
stricken mothers wherever they may be, America, incarnated spirit of
liberty, stands again to-day the holy emblem of a household in which the
children abide in unity, equality, love and peace. The iron sledge of
war that rent asunder the links of loyalty and love has welded them
together again. Ears that were deaf to loving appeals for the burial of
sectional strife have listened and believed when the muster guns have
spoken. Hearts that were cold to calls for trust and sympathy have
awakened to loving confidence in the baptism of their blood.
Drawing inspiration from the flag of our country, the South has shared
not only the dangers, but the glories of the war. In the death of brave
young Bagley at Cardenas, North Carolina furnished the first blood in
the tragedy. It was Victor Blue of South Carolina, who, like the Swamp
Fox of the Revolution, crossed the fiery path of the enemy at his
pleasure, and brought the first official tidings of the situation as it
existed in Cuba. It was Brumby, a Georgia boy, the flag lieutenant of
Dewey, who first raised the stars and stripes over Manila. It was
Alabama that furnished Hobson--glorious Hobson--who accomplished two
things the Spanish navy never yet has done--sunk an American ship, and
made a Spanish man-of-war securely float.
The South answered the call to arms with its heart, and its heart goes
out with that of the North in rejoicing at the result. The demonstration
lacking to give the touch of life to the picture has been made. The open
sesame that was needed to give insight into the true and loyal hearts
both North and South has been spoken. Divided by war, we are united as
never before by the same agency, and the union is of hearts as well as
hands.
The doubter may scoff, and the pessimist may croak, but even they must
take hope at the picture presented in the simple and touching incident
of eight Grand Army veterans, with their silvery heads bowed in
sympathy, escorting the lifeless body of the Daughter of the Confederacy
from Narragansett to its last, long rest at Richmond.
When that great and generous soldier, U. S. Grant, gave back to Lee,
crushed, but ever glorious, the sword he had surrendered at Appomattox,
that magnanimous deed said to the people of the South: "You are our
brothers." But when the present ruler of our grand republic on awakening
to the condition of war that confronted him, with his first commission
placed the leader's sword in the hands of those gallant confederate
commanders, Joe Wheeler and Fitzhugh Lee, he wrote between the lines in
living letters of everlasting light the words: "There is but one people
of this Union, one flag alone for all."
The South, Mr. Toastmaster, will feel that her sons have been well
given, that her blood has been well spilled, if that sentiment is to be
indeed the true inspiration of our nation's future. God grant it may be
as I believe it will.