MR. CHAIRMAN, AND GENTLEMEN: With whatever opinion we come here, I think
it is not in man to see, without a feeling of pride and pleasure, a tried
soldier, the armed defender of the right. I think that in these last
years all opinions have been affected by the magnificent and stupendous
spectacle which Divine Providence has offered us of the energies that
slept in the children of this country,—that slept and have awakened. I
see thankfully those that are here, but dim eyes in vain explore for some
who are not.
The old Greek Heraclitus said, “War is the Father of all things.” He said
it, no doubt, as science, but we of this day can repeat it as political
and social truth. War passes the power of all chemical solvents, breaking
up the old adhesions, and allowing the atoms of society to take a new
order. It is not the Government, but the War, that has appointed the good
generals, sifted out the pedants, put in the new and vigorous blood. The
War has lifted many other people besides Grant and Sherman into their
true places. Even Divine Providence, we may say, always seems to work
after a certain military necessity. Every nation punishes the General who
is not victorious. It is a rule in games of chance that the cards beat
all the players, and revolutions disconcert and outwit all the insurgents.
The revolutions carry their own points, sometimes to the ruin of those
who set them on foot. The proof that war also is within the highest
right, is a marked benefactor in the hands of the Divine Providence, is
its _morale_. The war gave back integrity to this erring and immoral
nation. It charged with power, peaceful, amiable men, to whose life
war and discord were abhorrent. What an infusion of character went out
from this and other colleges! What an infusion of character down to the
ranks! The experience has been uniform that it is the gentle soul that
makes the firm hero after all. It is easy to recall the mood in which our
young men, snatched from every peaceful pursuit, went to the war. Many of
them had never handled a gun. They said, “It is not in me to resist. I
go because I must. It is a duty which I shall never forgive myself if I
decline. I do not know that I can make a soldier. I may be very clumsy.
Perhaps I shall be timid; but you can rely on me. Only one thing is
certain, I can well die, but I cannot afford to misbehave.”
In fact the infusion of culture and tender humanity from these scholars
and idealists who went to the war in their own despite—God knows they
had no fury for killing their old friends and countrymen—had its signal
and lasting effect. It was found that enthusiasm was a more potent ally
than science and munitions of war without it. “It is a principle of
war,” said Napoleon, “that when you can use the thunderbolt you must
prefer it to the cannon.” Enthusiasm was the thunderbolt. Here in this
little Massachusetts, in smaller Rhode Island, in this little nest of New
England republics it flamed out when the guilty gun was aimed at Sumter.
Mr. Chairman, standing here in Harvard College, the parent of all the
colleges; in Massachusetts, the parent of all the North; when I consider
her influence on the country as a principal planter of the Western
States, and now, by her teachers, preachers, journalists and books, as
well as by traffic and production, the diffuser of religious, literary
and political opinion;—and when I see how irresistible the convictions
of Massachusetts are in these swarming populations,—I think the little
state bigger than I knew. When her blood is up, she has a fist big
enough to knock down an empire. And her blood was roused. Scholars
changed the black coat for the blue. A single company in the Forty-fourth
Massachusetts Regiment contained thirty-five sons of Harvard. You all
know as well as I the story of these dedicated men, who knew well on
what duty they went,—whose fathers and mothers said of each slaughtered
son, “We gave him up when he enlisted.” One mother said, when her son
was offered the command of the first negro regiment, “If he accepts it,
I shall be as proud as if I had heard that he was shot.”[179] These men,
thus tender, thus high-bred, thus peaceable, were always in the front and
always employed. They might say, with their forefathers the old Norse
Vikings, “We sung the mass of lances from morning until evening.” And in
how many cases it chanced, when the hero had fallen, they who came by
night to his funeral, on the morrow returned to the war-path to show his
slayers the way to death!
Ah! young brothers, all honor and gratitude to you,—you, manly defenders,
Liberty’s and Humanity’s bodyguard! We shall not again disparage
America, now that we have seen what men it will bear. We see—we thank you
for it—a new era, worth to mankind all the treasure and all the lives it
has cost; yes, worth to the world the lives of all this generation of
American men, if they had been demanded.[180]