_Mr. Mayor, Governor, and you, my Hosts_:
One among the very many great Virginians at the time when this Nation
was born—Patrick Henry—said: “We are no longer New Yorkers or New
Englanders, Pennsylvanians or Virginians, we are Americans.” And
surely, Mr. Mayor, the man would be but a poor American who was not
touched and stirred to the depths by the reception that I have met
with to-day in this great historic city of America. Coming to-day
by the statue of Stonewall Jackson, in the city of Lee, I felt what
a privilege it is that I, as an American, have in claiming that you
yourselves have no more right of kinship in Lee and Jackson than I
have. I can claim to be a middling good American, because my ancestry
was half Southern and half Northern; I was born in the East and I have
lived a good while in the West—so long in fact that I do not admit that
any man can be a better Westerner than I am. In short, gentlemen, I
claim to be neither Northerner nor Southerner, neither Easterner nor
Westerner, but a good American, pure and simple.
Next only to a man’s having worn the blue comes the fact of the man’s
having worn the gray, as entitling him to honor in my sight. Last year
I told General Fitzhugh Lee that I wanted to add to my collection of
autograph letters of great Americans—Lincoln, Grant, Clay, Jefferson
(turning to the Governor), your namesake, Andrew Jackson—that of
General Lee, with his photograph. I got from General Fitzhugh Lee a
letter of General Lee and a photograph of him, handed to me after
General Fitzhugh Lee’s death. I was not able to thank my old and valued
friend, the father, but I put the son on my staff; and now I have the
grandson of General Grant and the grandnephew of General Lee and the
son of Phil Sheridan on my staff.
I noticed that the statue of Stonewall Jackson had been raised as a
gift by certain Englishmen. The best biography of General Jackson
was by an Englishman, Colonel Henderson. It is a curious and rather
lamentable fact that he died just as he was about to undertake another
biography which I had earnestly asked him to undertake. I had written
him urging that he should finish his very remarkable military study of
Stonewall Jackson by writing a military biography of General Lee, and
he had written me back that he intended to do so. Shortly afterward I
learned of his death.
Gentlemen, I can not sufficiently express to you my deep appreciation
of the way in which you have greeted me here to-day. You can not be
nearly as glad to see me as I am to see you. Let me say once more what
I said in my more formal address. Think of the good fortune that is
ours, think of the good fortune that is ours as a people in having,
each of us, whether we in our own persons or through our ancestors,
wore the blue or the gray, the proud right to challenge as our own all
of the valor, all of the self-devotion, all of the steadfast adherence
to right as God gave to each man to see the right, shown alike by the
man who wore the blue and by the man who wore the gray in the great
contest that was waged from ’61 to ’65.