_Senator Clay; and you, My Friends, whom it is hard for me not to call
My Neighbors, for I feel as if you were_:
You can have no idea of how much it means to me to come back to
Roswell, to the home of my mother and of my mother’s people, and to see
the spot which I already know so well from what my mother and my aunt
told me. It has been exactly as if I were revisiting some old place of
my childhood.
I hardly like to say how deeply my heart is moved by coming back
here among you. Among the earliest recollections I have as a child
is hearing from my mother and my aunt (Miss Annie Bulloch, she then
was) about Roswell; of how the Pratts, and Kings, and Dunwoodys, and
Bullochs came here first to settle; about the old homestead, the
house on the hill; about the Chattahoochee; about all kinds and sorts
of incidents that would not interest you, but interested me a great
deal when I was a child. I wish I could spend hours here to look all
through and see the different places about which I have heard all
kinds of incidents. All those anecdotes, looking back now, I can see
taught me an enormous amount, perhaps all the more because they were
not intended to teach anything. I think we are very apt to learn most
when neither we nor the people talking to us intend to teach anything.
All those stories of the life of those days taught me what a real home
life, a real neighbor life, was and should be. Looking back now at
what I learned through those stories of the childhood of my mother,
my aunts, my uncles, I can understand why the boys and girls of the
Roswell of that time grew up to be men and women who were good servants
of the community, who were good husbands, good fathers, good wives and
mothers; how it was that they learned to do their duty aright in peace
and in war also.
It is my very great good fortune to have the right to claim that my
blood is half Southern and half Northern; and I would deny the right of
any man here to feel a greater pride in the deeds of every Southerner
than I feel. Of the children, the brothers and sisters of my mother who
were born and brought up in that house on the hill over there, my two
uncles afterward entered the Confederate service, and served in the
Confederate Navy. One, the younger man, served on the “Alabama” as the
youngest officer aboard her. He was captain of one of her broadside
32-pounders in her final fight, and when at the very end the “Alabama”
was sinking, and the “Kearsarge” passed under her stern and came up
along the side that had not been engaged hitherto, my uncle, Irving
Bulloch, shifted his gun from one side to the other and fired the
last two shots fired from the “Alabama.” The other, the elder, James
Dunwoody Bulloch, was an admiral in the Confederate service. Of all the
people whom I have ever met he was the one that came nearest to that
beautiful creation of Thackeray—Colonel Newcome.
Men and women, don’t you think that I have the ancestral right to claim
a proud kinship with those who showed their devotion to duty as they
saw the duty, whether they wore the gray or whether they wore the blue?
All Americans who are worthy the name feel an equal pride in the valor
of those who fought on one side or the other, provided only that each
did with all his strength and soul and mind his duty as it was given
him to see his duty.