ORATION 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 CITY COUNCIL AND CITIZENS 
 
 OF BOSTON, ' 
 
 JULY 4, 186 7, 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. GEORGE H. HEPWORTH. 
 
 
 
 
 m 
 
 S& BO'StOKIA $ 
 
 ' X* CONDI T Aft D. % 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 
 ALFRED MUDGE & SON, CITY PRINTERS, 34 SCHOOL STREET. 
 
 186 7. 
 
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ORATION 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 CITY COUNCIL AND CITIZENS 
 
 OF BOSTON, 
 
 JULY 4, 186 7, 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. GEORGE H. HEPWORTH. 
 
 BOSTON COLLEGE LIBRARY 
 
 CHESTNUT HILL, MASa 
 BOSTON: 
 ALFRED MUDGE & SON, CITY PRINTERS, 34 SCHOOL STREET 
 
 186 7. 
 

 113IJ5 
 
CITY OF BOSTON 
 
 In Board of Aldermen, July 8, 1867. 
 
 Ordered : That the thanks of the City Council be presented 
 to the Reverend George H. Hepworth for the eloquent and 
 patriotic oration delivered by him before the City Government 
 and the citizens of Boston on the ninety-first anniversary of the 
 Declaration of American Independence j and that he be request- 
 ed to furnish a copy for publication. 
 
 Passed — sent down for concurrence. 
 
 CHAS. W. SLACK, Chairman. 
 
 Concurred. 
 
 In Common Council, July 11, 1867. 
 
 WESTON LEWIS, President. 
 
 Approved. 
 
 OTIS NORCROSS, Mayor. 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2011 with funding from 
 
 Boston Library Consortium Member Libraries 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/orationdelivered1867hepw 
 
ORATION. 
 
 Mr. Mayor, Gentlemen of the City Council, Friends 
 and Fellow- Citizens : 
 
 The progress towards an ideal society and an 
 ideal government which marks each new page of 
 history gives the largest encouragement to the 
 reformers of every age. We are moving so rapidly 
 that the wildest dreams of the fanatic of to-day 
 will become the commonplace realities of to-morrow, 
 while the conservatism of to-day embodies all the 
 ideas which the most hopeful theorist uttered yes- 
 terday. Each generation, bearing the world in its 
 giant arms, toils bravely up the mountain side 
 until it is worn and weary, then lifts its precious 
 burden to the shoulders of the young and fresh 
 generation that succeeds, and lies down to sleep. 
 With every age the burden grows heavier and more 
 precious, as mankind are freighted with larger 
 responsibilities, with new philanthropies, and with 
 higher duties, and with every age the strength to 
 
6 .! U L Y 4 , 18 7. 
 
 bear it grows greater as men become more wise, 
 more manly and more Christian. So, by slow 
 degrees, we are ascending from successive slaveries 
 to successive freedoms. 
 
 As the geographer, standing on the hither side 
 of the Rocky Mountains, where the stream comes 
 gurgling from the hidden reservoir, can watch that 
 slender thread of limpid light as it finds its way 
 through forest and plain, broadened and deepened 
 ever and anon by kindred streams, until at last 
 made omnipotent by the grand Missouri and the 
 grander Ohio, it pours itself a resistless flood 
 through the centre of a continent, — so, I take it, 
 the historian standing on the hither side of the 
 rocky summits of barbarism, and seeing the crude 
 thought that is to shape itself into law, and control 
 society, can watch that slender thread as it finds its 
 way from age to age, increased here by the vic- 
 tories of war and there by the higher victories of 
 peace, until at last, deepened and broadened into 
 omnipotence by the Missouri of Revolution and the 
 Ohio of Revelation, it pours itself through our cen- 
 tury, bearing on its bosom the world's hopes after 
 the higher law, and the thousand educational move- 
 ments by which that law is to be reached. 
 
 And, gentlemen, it is at once cheering and 
 
ORATION. i 
 
 instructive to note the various stages of this great 
 progressive movement. It increases our faith in 
 man, and adds inspiration to every new reformatory 
 movement, to watch the nations of the earth strug- 
 gling through the darkness of barbarism, feudalism 
 and every kind of oppression, led by the divine 
 instinct which searches for the light of a larger 
 liberty. It gives us a new strength for to-day's 
 drudgery and toil to watch the gradual refinement 
 of society, the constant sloughing off of old and 
 useless customs, and the constant putting on of 
 new usages which better fit the growing people. 
 
 The French were only children playing with the 
 toys of national childhood, until Charlemagne taught 
 them to put off the garments of barbarism, and to 
 put on the robes and manners of civilized man. 
 They did not grow to conscious national maturity 
 until they were baptized in the blood of the Revo- 
 lution of '93, and they will not achieve their 
 manifest destiny until in another revolution they shall 
 cast off the imperial burden that is held up by the 
 points of half a million bayonets and learn to gov- 
 ern themselves. The English were little better 
 than slaves until they won their freedom on the 
 plain of Runnymede, and they did not grow to 
 manhood until they had beheaded Charles I., and 
 
8 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 proclaimed that no Stuart and no tyrant should ever 
 make laws for a free people. That grand impulse 
 which has driven them thus far will not let them 
 rest until they strip the lawn from the Bishops in 
 the House of Lords, and the parti- colored riband 
 from the so-called nobility, and proclaim aloud that 
 he alone is peasant who has a peasant's heart, and 
 he alone is noble who has a princely soul. 
 
 America began its great work of reform in 
 the seventeenth century. The dreams of the seers 
 of ages began to crystallize themselves into realities 
 when the keel of the Mayflower grated on the bar 
 of Plymouth Harbor. The Colonists entered the 
 high school of the new politics when the tocsin 
 of war called them to the support of a govern- 
 ment of men by men, and they graduated into the 
 true manhood of the race when they planted their 
 victorious banner on the top of Lookout Mountain, 
 and proclaimed Liberty throughout all the land. 
 
 We have come to believe that this whole coun- 
 try is consecrated to the republican experiment. 
 The magnificent valley between the Rocky Moun- 
 tains and the Alleghanies is the crucible in which 
 history will test the political possibilities of the 
 race. Untrammelled by any of the traditions or 
 usages of the old world, with no time-honored and 
 
O K A T I O N . 
 
 <J 
 
 time-hardened social prejudices to overcome, with 
 no longing after the pageantry of royalty, we feel 
 ourselves to be a people wholly free, and standing 
 on the very threshold of a work too large to 
 measure, and almost too appalling to contemplate. 
 The blood in the veins of every European nation- 
 ality runs sluggishly and timidly. Thrones have no 
 stability ; tyrants no power. The people have well- 
 nigh outgrown their worm-eaten tradition that kings 
 are ordained of God, and he who wields the sceptre 
 with the arrogance of earlier times does it at the 
 peril of his life. The continent that once held the 
 person of royalty sacred now simply endures a king 
 who knows that he not only governs but is in his 
 turn governed. The blood in the veins of America, 
 on the other hand, leaps through the ruddy channel 
 of life with all the force and promise of youth. We 
 believe that we have a special mission ; that the 
 whole country is ours from the warm gulf to the 
 frigid zone, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific ; 
 and that here, fired with simple faith in educated 
 men, we shall be able, without the aid of royal favor, 
 to make our own laws, watch over our own interests, 
 and write our own history. If the Old World inter- 
 feres, either by that strange neutrality which refuses 
 help to the loyal while it supplies arms to the 
 
10 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 disloyal, or by sending a wretched debauchee to 
 turn our flank in Mexico, we have but one word of 
 warning, — Hands off; America is neither forgetful of 
 her friends nor afraid of her foes. 
 
 By slow degrees our geographical limits are widen- 
 ing. Within a few years we have put our seal upon 
 the golden mountains of California and the rich plains 
 of Texas. Lately the magnificent territory of the 
 extreme northwest has been bought. It cannot be 
 many years before that people who have resisted 
 tyranny with wonderful bravery, who have at last 
 hedged in within a wall of sharp bayonets the usurper 
 and the adventurer, will knock loud for entrance into 
 the Home of the Free. It cannot be long before 
 we shall have that narrow belt of land that lies on 
 the banks of the St. Lawrence and the shore of the 
 lakes. For two generations it has been the asylum 
 of the heroic black man who refused to bear the 
 stripes of the overseer, and the black woman who 
 denied her body to the lust of her master ; and now, 
 by the wonderful progress of events, it offers itself a 
 hospital to the sick at heart, those arrogant heroes 
 whose " dreams have faded all at length," and who 
 find the air of free America too bracing for the slender 
 life that remains after the fruitless struggle. Then, with 
 the whole continent our own, we can march through the 
 
ORATION. 11 
 
 ages, keeping step to the music of Justice, Morality, 
 and Political Righteousness. Gentlemen, few nations 
 have such heavy, glorious responsibilities as we. Re- 
 publicanism is but just begun. It is a temple whose 
 arching roof will sometime in the future offer its shelter 
 and protection to the people of every clime. To-day, 
 the poor of Europe may live content within the thatched 
 cottage in political oblivion, while the favored and the 
 wealthy sit beneath the gilded roof of power and shape 
 laws to suit their tastes or caprices ; but the hour shall 
 yet come, how far off in the distance it may be none 
 can tell, when the great heart and strong arm of the 
 people of every nationality shall decree that there shall 
 be no king to live in a palace, and no citizen so lowly 
 that he can have no voice in making the laws that 
 govern him, but when all the people shall come 
 together beneath the same roof to be ruled each by 
 the whole and the whole by each. 
 
 Standing, then, as we do, at the beginning of a 
 new era, looking forward with large hope to a 
 peaceful and glorious future, it is well for us to 
 come together on this mighty anniversary to measure 
 our strength and confess our weakness. We ac- 
 knowledge with due gratitude the constant and 
 especial presence of that Providence which has led 
 us along the weary road, guiding us in the day- 
 
12 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 time by the pillar of cloud that rose from the 
 battle-field, and in the night season by the pillar 
 of flame that formed the bivouac-fires of the army 
 of the Republic. We should be unworthy citizens 
 if we failed to recognize the hidden Hand that has 
 guarded us, or forgot to speak of it in the midst 
 of our universal festivities. 
 
 The particular elements of our nationality to which 
 I desire to call your special attention are, first, the 
 Southern Element, its nature, and its probable influ- 
 ence on the future. 
 
 The South has never been a help to the cause 
 of Republicanism. The one incendiary element in 
 our government, the element of caste, it has stood 
 in bold contrast to that levelling and democratic 
 influence which has been the boast and pride of 
 the North. With a territory almost unparalleled 
 for richness of soil ; with long mountain ranges 
 containing in large abundance every mineral which 
 adds to the wealth or strength of society ; with a 
 climate favorable to the finest specimens of physical 
 and moral manhood ; with broad rivers that run 
 through every valley of the region ; with noble 
 forests to supply every domestic and commercial 
 need ; with agricultural possibilities that would rouse 
 the ambition of almost any people, — with all this 
 
ORATION. 
 
 13 
 
 in its favor, we are compelled to admit that the 
 whole region is to-day practically unknown and 
 undeveloped. The granite hills and sterile soil of 
 New England, where niggardly nature gives only 
 what she must, developed by the strong arm and 
 active brain of freedom, have done more for the 
 cause of civilization, more for the commercial wel- 
 fare of the world, than all that vast territory that 
 might have shaped the destinies, and controlled the 
 government of the country. When, in the course 
 of a few years, the political storm shall have sub- 
 sided, and we come to explore and count the value 
 of this region, we shall hnd a new argument against 
 slavery, and a new cause for gratitude that we 
 possess so rich a domain. The wealth that lies 
 hidden in the rocky caverns of the Alleghanies and 
 in the fastnesses of the Cumberland range, calling 
 on the thrift and enterprise of the new generation 
 of young men, is beyond all calculation. Carry to 
 the South, and awaken in the South, the same 
 foresight, energy, genius and inventive power that 
 have subdued the soil of the North, and before 
 those who are now in middle life shall have gone 
 to their rest, we shall find that one of the richest 
 and best parts of America lies between the Ohio 
 and the Gulf. 
 
14 JULY 4, 18 G7. 
 
 But to-day we have more interest in the political 
 aspect of that region. Everywhere is chaos, social 
 anarchy, while our ears are every moment greeted 
 with the roar of some brigand mob, or the cry 
 of some half-murdered man or outraged woman. How 
 much of this is the inevitable consequence of a 
 great war I cannot say ; how much might be 
 avoided if the victors had only a fixed and deter- 
 mined policy, and an executive that dared to stand 
 on the true republican idea and speak with the 
 consciousness of having twenty millions of freemen 
 behind him, I am unable to determine. This, how- 
 ever, I know ; that mobs and murders are the rag- 
 ged, blood-bedraggled fringes of the crimson garment 
 of war. It is scarcely to be hoped that the tem- 
 pest-tossed ocean will calm in a moment, or that 
 the frenzy of the crushed and defeated will in a 
 single hour calm itself into the propriety of the 
 good citizen. If the North will only be true, there 
 is nothing to fear. If we will not rush at once 
 with only the greed for gain, into the selfishness 
 of accumulation, forgetful and careless of the high 
 political concerns of the country, the work of re- 
 construction, now so perplexing, will be as easy as 
 the work of the sculptor who shapes the plastic 
 clay. Too long already have we delayed. We 
 
ORATION. 15 
 
 have lost headway by the " backing and filling " 
 of our mere politicians. We have scarcely known 
 what to do, or, if we have caught a glimpse of 
 duty now and then, we have not had the moral 
 courage to perform it. 
 
 If I know anything about the Southern people 
 I know that all that is needed to insure perfect 
 success in the great work before us is that we 
 shall first know what to do and then proceed to 
 do it. We have harmed our cause and stayed 
 our progress more than can be told, by the exceed- 
 ing unsteadiness of our political policy. To lift 
 the flag for a while with loud huzzas, as though we 
 intended to be exceedingly severe, and then to drop 
 it out of regard to the feelings of the foe, is only 
 to exhibit a weakness which costs us our self- 
 respect, while it adds a battalion to the corps of 
 the enemy. Nail the flag of your policy to the 
 mast-head, and reconstruction will be easy. 
 
 There is in the South, to-day, a large party 
 that will gladly co-operate with us. It is com- 
 posed of that middle class that never had any 
 heart in the war, that has reaped from it only 
 financial ruin. These people hate the large land- 
 owners as the small trader always hates the monop- 
 olist. For years they have seen that the cause 
 
16 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 of secession was not their cause ; that they had no 
 other interest in it than that sad interest which 
 the serf has in the victory of his lord ; that the fight 
 could only end in a continuance of servitude for them- 
 selves and their families. These are the men who 
 congregate in the great centres to listen so eagerly to 
 the words of orators from the North. A new life 
 is opening to them. The gyves have dropped from 
 their wrists, and they are for the first time catch- 
 ing a glimpse of republican America. They will 
 form the grand Southern political party of the fu- 
 ture. They are in the vanguard of the great army 
 of reconstruction, and have bivouacked on their lit- 
 tle farms, waiting to receive orders from headquar- 
 ters where to march. 
 
 The politicians and the so-called aristocrats of the 
 South, — those who were foremost in the councils 
 of secession, — who were willing to risk their all 
 for the re-establishment of slavery, deserve no pity 
 from us. They risked and lost ; let them suffer 
 the full consequences of their guilt. With the poor, 
 rebellion was a delusion ; and a magnanimous victor 
 can afford to forgive the deluded, if their delu- 
 sion has been dispelled. With the educated and 
 wealthy, secession was a crime, and we are not 
 magnanimous, but weak and pusillanimous, if we 
 
ORATION. 
 
 17 
 
 disregard it. By connecting no punishment with 
 open disloyalty, we put a premium on political 
 ambition for the future. Fifty years hence, when 
 another dissension shall shake this country to its 
 centre, when the reverberations of another civil war 
 shall rouse the people to arms, bad mejn will look 
 back to this hour when they reckon the probable 
 cost of their venture. If they see that the people 
 have attached the highest penalty to any assault 
 upon the Government, they will hesitate long before 
 they commit themselves to the uncertainties of a 
 rebellion. But if, on looking back, they hear no 
 word of warning from such times as these ; if on 
 reading the annals of America from '60 to '67, 
 they find no record of any punishment whatever 
 that stamps the adventurer with infamy ; if they 
 see that confiscated estates are all returned with a 
 half apology on the part of the Government for 
 having taken them at all ; that a pardon is ob- 
 tained for the asking ; that the heroes of the 
 rebellion are feted by the people ; that the very 
 leader, when brought into Court, is set at liberty 
 on a petty bail, and that even that is supplied by 
 a chief of the party that conducted the war, and 
 that there can be no surer or safer or nearer road 
 to preferment than that which leads through a 
 
18 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 rebellion, think you they will hesitate long before 
 committing themselves to a cause which, if it fails 
 utterly, leads to no disastrous consequences, and 
 which, regarded only as a speculation, offers a 
 thousand inducements to the daring? I tell you 
 nay. 
 
 I cannot help feeling that one of the prominent 
 weaknesses of a Republic is its forgetfulness of 
 great offences and of great offenders. The minis- 
 ters of justice track the criminal who has lifted his 
 hand against a single life until his hiding-place is 
 reached. They chain him to the dungeon floor ; 
 they summon the witnesses of the awful deed ; 
 they pronounce in solemn voice the sentence of 
 death, and do not lose sight of him until the turf 
 falls on his dead body. All this is right, because 
 the welfare of society demands it. But, alas ! 
 when a monster criminal, urged only by personal 
 ambition, aims at the political life of the whole 
 community ; when he seeks to turn the spirit of 
 the age from freedom back to slavery ; when he 
 would raze to the ground the temple of our 
 national prosperity, whose corner-stones were laid 
 in the blood of the earlier Revolution, and every 
 granite block in whose walls is a memento of some 
 desolated home, Justice uses no harsher phrase than 
 
ORATION. 
 
 19 
 
 when she calls him " the most colossal character 
 of the times," and Punishment performs no severer 
 duty than when she bids him retire to the banks 
 of the St. Lawrence to spend the gold which his 
 foresight has supplied. 
 
 Ah ! gentlemen, I am not cruel. I ,do not like 
 to look even upon the merited punishment of a 
 bad man. But this I say: There is one man 
 too many in America. Yonder, in every State 
 south of the Ohio, slumber the brave defenders of 
 the flag. The plough of the husbandman grates in 
 the soil above their beds ; there is no headstone 
 to tell where they sleep ; they are remembered only 
 in the sighs of aching hearts throughout the North ; 
 their only requiem is the perpetual moaning of the 
 wind through the cypress boughs. America, ever 
 busy and eager, filled with the hope of the morrow 
 more than with the memory of any past, holds 
 the great offender, the man who stood at the head 
 of the organized rebellion and cheered his soldiers 
 to their bloody work, within her fortress walls. 
 The people cry out for justice with thunder tones 
 that echo from the Pacific shore to the Atlantic 
 slope. But policy or cowardice, I know not which, 
 finds excuse for delay, and by slow degrees the 
 people's cry grows fainter and fainter, until at last 
 
20 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 when the prisoner is released, scarcely a ripple of 
 surprise or interest ruffles the surface of the 
 nation's daily life. Posterity shall read this terrible 
 sentence, written on the bloody page of our time : 
 A Republic attaches no penalty to a great crime. 
 Only petty guilt is punished ; while colossal crime 
 hnds an apologist, if not an eulogist, and holds its 
 court in Canada. God grant it may not be the 
 seed - corn of another rebellion. 
 
 But, in looking at the population of the Southern 
 States, and trying to fix their place and value in 
 the future of America, we cannot afford to be 
 unmindful of the four millions of men and women 
 whose history is full of romance, moral courage and 
 faith. Claiming our admiration for their unwavering 
 loyalty to the flag during the darkest days of the 
 war, when their very ignorance seemed illumined 
 by the strange light of the dim hope of liberty, as 
 their masters' culture was darkened by the gloomy 
 frenzy of Slavery, and claiming also our respect 
 for the heroic way in which they received the 
 divine right to be free, we may safely prophesy 
 that they will do us no dishonor in any of the 
 trying days to come. The men, whatever their 
 color, who could meet together at midnight, after a 
 hard day's labor, in the middle of the swamp, with 
 
ORATION. 21 
 
 the lash and the bloodhound as the probable 
 penalty, and pray for the victorious oncoming of 
 an army concerning which they knew nothing 
 except through the lying lips of their owners and 
 the revealing instincts of their own hearts, are as 
 worthy of our confidence, and will become as trusty 
 elements of the Republic, as any class or clique in 
 the South that has outlived the rebellion. The 
 natural allies of Liberty are always those who have 
 chafed in their chains. Prejudice aside, I would 
 rather trust with the solemn responsibility of a vote 
 the rank and file of those heroes who charged at 
 Port Hudson, conscious that they were marching 
 into the Valley of Death, but doing it with the 
 courage of Thermopylae, and with the hope to stem 
 the tide of Southern falsehood and Northern preju- 
 dice, than the most cultured politicians of Richmond, 
 who, having the power, have degraded it to personal 
 ambition, even though it involve Gettysburg and 
 Andersonville. Ignorance and principle are weightier 
 than refinement and disloyalty. 
 
 No country presents so sublime a spectacle as ours. 
 A whole race is uplifting its hands, and asking for 
 the knowledge how to live. Catching a glimpse of 
 the glory of the great Republic of which they have 
 suddenly become a part, conscious of all the obstacles 
 
22 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 which impede their progress towards that education 
 which is to mould them into reliable citizens, with a 
 past behind them of romantic devotion and unswerving 
 loyalty, they only ask that we will protect them by our 
 laws in their rights as workmen, as traders, as mer- 
 chants, as fathers and as husbands, promising in return 
 to stand by our side in all the great political and social 
 struggles of the future. It is little enough to ask ; it 
 is a small boon to be granted by a noble people. 
 
 And the contrast between them and others to whom 
 we grant every political privilege is not so striking as 
 we think. The great West is full of loyal men who 
 have no other education save that they have got on the 
 prairies and among their herds. Europe pours her tens 
 of thousands every year into the territories beyond the 
 Mississippi. Many of them are men who are as inno- 
 cent of the use of the pen and the spelling-book as the 
 humblest black man ; but they learn enough from the 
 atmosphere of the country, and from the thousand acres 
 which they till, to join the political army of the 
 Republic, and denounce by their votes the recreant 
 senator and the disloyal president. They know liberty 
 from slavery, not by the distinctions which are made in 
 the dictionary, but by the practical differences evident 
 in society. You may not call it scholarship, but it is 
 wisdom ; it is knowledge acquired by actual experiment ; 
 
ORATION. 23 
 
 and such a man can be trusted more safely than the 
 most elegant wire-puller of the land. So with the black 
 man who knows not how to spell the word slavery, but 
 who has felt its chains and submitted to its lash. He 
 knows the Confederate from the Union army to-day as 
 well as he did in '63. Listen ! in Atlanta the slave 
 owner is speaking. It is a strange sight to see him 
 pleading with the men whom he would have driven like 
 sheep a few years ago. But to-day he is no more man 
 than they ; and, if you measure manhood as you ought, 
 not so much. How insinuating is his eloquence ! He 
 has boasted that only the man who has lived with the 
 blacks can talk to them with any effect ; that they will 
 have more confidence in their former masters than in 
 any gentleman from the North ; that they will inevi- 
 tably, from the force of habit and the real love they bear 
 them, vote for the old overseers. Such a picture of 
 patriarchal life is painted, such tender ties of affection 
 between the whipper and the whipped are said to exist, 
 that we should expect the whole assemblage to vote 
 with unanimous force for the dear old master, who 
 smiles on his former slaves so benignantly, and so 
 politely asks for their influence in the name of the 
 sweet memories of auld lang syne. But poor, ignorant, 
 degraded as they are, they are too cunning to be cheated 
 by promises, and too clever to be eloquently cajoled out 
 
24 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 of their rights. As the chilling snow-flakes fall, so fall 
 his specious words. The audience is unmoved : The 
 speaker sees that he is speaking to a whirlwind, and is 
 not heeded. He puts his smile from off his lips, tills his 
 face with the old look of the master and his mouth with 
 insolence and obscenity, and Richard is himself again. 
 I tell you, gentlemen, the colored people of the South 
 are better citizens of the Republic than the wily orator 
 who addresses them thus. 
 
 Let America do them justice, and a great reward 
 will be hers. Give them, under proper restrictions, 
 the same restrictions which apply to their white 
 neighbors, the right to vote, thus rewarding the 
 black soldier for his loyalty to the flag, and cloth- 
 ing the humblest with a responsibility which will 
 rouse his ambition and stir within him a longing 
 after education, and you will reap the fruit of 
 your justice in a phalanx that will constitute itself 
 the wall of your defence in any coming struggle. 
 Confiscate enough of the disloyal territory to ensure 
 each loyal man his forty acres for a homestead ; 
 give him land of his own under his feet, and 
 the flag of America over his head, and you have 
 nothing to fear. If any voice comes from the 
 great sacrifices of six bloody years, it says, Secure 
 the safety of the Government beyond a peradven- 
 
ORATION. 25 
 
 ture, and reward those who have been true, from 
 the treasury of those who have been false. The 
 sentiment of mankind will defend such a policy of 
 severity, and the next generation of black men 
 will repay our justice by a million votes for 
 Liberty. If we are reckless enough tp be unjust, 
 we deserve to fall ; if we have the courage to be 
 just, we shall live forever. 
 
 I turn now to the brief consideration of the 
 second element of our nationality, — the Western. 
 No Eastern man can appreciate the vastness and 
 the importance of the Great West unless he has 
 travelled over its boundless prairies, and looked 
 upon the rushing, seething torrent of its commer- 
 cial life. One is appalled at the contemplation of 
 its immense territory. Single States cover an area 
 larger than the whole of New England. Huge 
 lines of railroad stretch westward from Chicago 
 for more than a thousand miles ; the mines of 
 Lake Superior, exhaustless, hold in their earthen 
 embrace mineral wealth that startles the world ; 
 coal beds underlie the rich soil everywhere, a great 
 reservoir of power waiting to be applied to the 
 w r ork of civilization ; broad acres, whose agricul- 
 tural possibilities defy our power of reckoning, 
 stretch far beyond your straining vision ; and above 
 
26 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 all a population restless, ambitious, and in the full 
 vigor of early manhood, demand our enthusiastic 
 admiration. These characteristics point to a future 
 whose magnitude will accord with the miracles 
 already achieved. Not always obeying the scrip- 
 tural injunction, not to think more highly of them- 
 selves than they ought to think ; believing with a 
 friendly kind of sincerity, a sincerity that looks 
 pityingly on all the inhabitants of the earth who 
 do not live in the West, that if there is a pivot 
 on which the whole world swings it is somewhere 
 within a few hours' ride of Chicago or St. Louis ; 
 they yet do exhibit a vigor, a commercial hero- 
 ism, a willingness to undertake new and great 
 projects which no other part of this country 
 presents. 
 
 In the war they 'discovered their political policy, 
 to save the whole country, and to make and keep 
 the whole a free country. Their brave boys are 
 under the sod of everv battle-field : their brave 
 women, true Spartans, tilled the soil, drove the 
 herds, reaped the harvests, sold the produce, in- 
 vested the capital, and made us proud to believe 
 that in America, when the great emergency comes, 
 our women claim the right to do our work, some- 
 times with hearts aching towards the field of strife, 
 
ORATION. 27 
 
 while we are dressing into line, or fighting for the 
 grand future. 
 
 The political importance of the West cannot be 
 overstated. It already wields a large part of the 
 republican power of the country, and it will not be 
 many years before we shall look to ,the millions 
 near the Mississippi to crystallize into laws the hopes 
 and aspirations which freighted the Mayflower. 
 The South has as yet shown no political charac- 
 teristics. There is no party there whose principles 
 can be reckoned as forces for the future. The 
 ideas of the people are chaotic. We believe that 
 by the introduction of Northern educational institu- 
 tions they will sometime grow into that radical 
 love of liberty which is to be the bulwark of the 
 nation ; but to-day we are not sure of their future. 
 The States that lie between the James River, the 
 Hudson River and the great Illinois prairies are 
 full of political theories unsound and unsafe. Too 
 timid to confirm by law whatever is right in 
 morals, too much bound by commercial interests to 
 be radical in their thinking and voting, loaded 
 down with the debris of that kind of democracy 
 which thought twice before it struck a blow for 
 the tottering government, it will for a long while 
 stand neutral in the great political contests that are 
 
28 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 coming. But the Far West, with its large farms 
 and its large-hearted men and women, its immense 
 number of Germans and Scandinavians, who bring 
 with them to their homes the fresh, beautiful love 
 of liberty which compelled them to leave the old 
 world, if we can only plant in its midst the school- 
 houses and churches, the lyceums and the presses 
 which have been the moulding influences of the 
 East, can always be relied upon to stand firm for 
 that justice between man and man, and for those 
 rights and privileges which enable the poorest born 
 to reach and hold the highest office within the 
 people's gift. Nothing is more evident than this, 
 that New England and the West will write the 
 next page of American history. 
 
 I believe this, because the West is growing more 
 rapidly than any other part of the country. The 
 tens of thousands who emigrate from the poverty 
 of the old to the hopes of the new world, anxious 
 to build a home at once, naturally gravitate to 
 that vast territory which belongs to any one who 
 can level the forest and till the soil. They are a 
 hardy class of men and women. Full of health 
 and vigor and ambition, they somehow get into the 
 spirit of the age at once, and so, by means of 
 the ploughs, rakes, reaping and threshing machines, 
 
ORATION. 29 
 
 conceived by the genius and made by the skill of 
 Eastern men, they are marching along the high- 
 way of industry to social position, patriotism and 
 wealth. What a transformation from their sur- 
 roundings in Europe ! There they were only serfs, 
 crushed into sloth or indifference by the leaden 
 weight of a public opinion that frowned upon all 
 attempts to rise. They walked along the narrow 
 path which had been trodden by their fathers, and 
 their children had no higher hope than they. The 
 mere drudges of society, they chafed against the 
 chains that held them, and at last found liberty and 
 hope for themselves and their little ones in the 
 midst of the great prairies of the West. 
 
 So in a few years the log huts on the river's 
 bank have disappeared and the thrifty, busy town 
 builds its school-houses and its churches to attest 
 its earnest and its hopeful work. The little village 
 on the edge of the lake through which a quarter 
 of a century ago a loaded team could scarcely find 
 a safe passage, has become a huge and command- 
 ing city, claiming the admiration of the world, and 
 built, not like St. Petersburg, by the command of 
 an imperious and obstinate king, but by the royal 
 will and generosity of a free and ambitious people. 
 
 If with this immense commercial vigor which 
 
30 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 attracts the young men of the whole country there 
 shall be interwoven the true spirit of republican 
 society and government ; if a true radicalism in 
 politics, the radicalism which knows no local issues, 
 which recognizes no geographical lines, but loves 
 the whole country from ocean to ocean and from 
 Gulf to Lakes, shall keep pace with this magnifi- 
 cent and rapid progress ; and if, above all, a spirit 
 of justice, morality and pure religion shall crown 
 the increasing power of the glorious West ; if she 
 will only hew the corner-stones of her temples of 
 religion, art and commerce out of our own Ply- 
 mouth Rock, we will not envy her her greatness, 
 but give her, and the tens of thousands of our 
 New -England boys who are her sinew and her 
 strength, our hearty God-speed, proud to believe 
 that when a dozen generations shall have passed 
 away, and her ten millions have become an hun- 
 dred, the dear old flag, hallowed by the sacred 
 memories of two great struggles, will stand for the 
 same liberty and the same republican justice be- 
 tween all classes of which it is the type to-day. 
 Brethren of the West, we strike palms with you. 
 New England greets you on this anniversary. We 
 see the glory that awaits you. We believe that 
 the tide of humanity, that has already swept five 
 
ORATION. 31 
 
 hundred miles beyond the Father of Waters, will 
 keep its onward course until it grazes its herds on 
 the slopes of the Rocky Mountains. We can al- 
 ready hear the wind vibrating the Eolian wire that 
 flashes our smiles and tears, our hopes and fears, 
 to the Pacific shore ; and we can almost hear the 
 rattling of the train that starts from a Boston de- 
 pot, that winds through eastern farms, and that 
 strings all the great cities of the North upon the 
 same line of light and love, waking the echoes in 
 the city by the Golden Gate. Let us always 
 stand together, and in our greatness let us never 
 forget that that government alone is lasting that 
 knows the right and has the moral courage to 
 brand all traitors with infamy, and defend all man- 
 hood in every class and of every color. 
 
 And now, gentlemen, what shall I say — what 
 can I say — of the New-England element of our 
 American nationality'? It is always with pride that 
 we contemplate the character of that influence which 
 comes from our educational institutions and our 
 political principles, and which is doing so much to 
 temper and give tone to the public opinion of the 
 whole country. Surely, it is not merely in a 
 boastful mood that we look on the long and glorious 
 vista behind us, and feel every nerve tingle in glad 
 
32 JULY 4, 18G7. 
 
 thanksgiving that we are the sons of noble sires. 
 The grandeur of New England lies in the fact, that 
 in every political and military struggle, the end has 
 been the advocacy of some higher political principle, 
 or the demand for a larger charity and a wider 
 freedom. New England, in the history of the 
 nineteenth century, with her common schools in 
 every street, in every village and hamlet — with 
 her thousand presses that scatter the daily news 
 over every hill and valley ; with her white 
 spires rising from every spot where an hundred 
 sturdy farmers build their huts — stands as the 
 type of the foremost thought and hope of 
 human progress. She began her career when the 
 Mayflower cast anchor, freighted with that precious 
 heroism which the Old World could ill spare, but 
 which laid the corner-stone of the New World in 
 ecclesiastical freedom. She was true to her birth- 
 right when she dared to spill a brother's blood on 
 the field of Lexington, crying out with Roman 
 courage : Not that I love England less, but that I 
 love freedom more. She was not unworthy of her 
 ancestry when in the last struggle she lifted up her 
 voice before the smoke of the first battle had 
 rolled away, demanding, in the name of the national 
 sacrifice about to be placed upon the bloody altar 
 
ORATION. 33 
 
 of war, universal liberty and the civil rights of all 
 classes. And to-day, as in no other part of the 
 country, radical thought, that seeks to destroy our 
 prejudices, social and political, that advocates the 
 plain rights of man or woman, finds in our midst 
 a welcome and a hearing. It is our boast and 
 pride that we fear nothing except ignorance and 
 caste. We have built our power out of a knowl- 
 edge how to read and think ; we believe in nothing 
 so much as in the school-book ; we have no hope 
 for the future except that which comes from the 
 school-house ; we place the most implicit trust in an 
 educated public opinion, and we believe that a man's 
 title to nobility should be sought for in his brain and 
 heart, and not in the color of his skin. 
 
 That public opinion is our bulwark and our 
 strength. It is not swayed by passion ; it is not 
 carried too far by a popular favorite. It looked 
 with unmixed admiration upon Sherman as he swept 
 like a tornado from the mountains to the sea, 
 tearing up secession by the roots ; but when the 
 hero, for a moment only, doffed his purple and put 
 on the cap and bells, it stood still in mute aston- 
 ishment and regret, and not a single shout was 
 heard for one who could have the whole of our 
 love while he was just, but who was met by the 
 
34 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 people's frown the very moment he stepped beyond 
 the general into the politician. 
 
 A Parisian crowd follows its leader anywhere. 
 It has no aim, no policy, no goal. Admiring only 
 the brilliancy of heroic deeds, it is often led by 
 this will-o'-the-wisp into anarchy and chaos. The 
 New England people admire and appland only the 
 man who represents them, who is doing brave 
 work for them and for their children, and whose 
 heroism results in larger rights. And so we have 
 idealized the man who was our President, not 
 because he was a president, but because he was 
 an honest man. As the ancient Greeks lifted 
 their mighty heroes into demi-gods, and soon 
 forgot that they had ever been human, with 
 sharp idiosyncrasies and unpleasant peculiarities, 
 so have the American people lifted up their 
 martyr-chief, Abraham Lincoln, so high that 
 we shall never again see his awkwardness, his 
 coarseness, but only his truthfulness, his moral 
 courage, his calm sagacity, and his fidelity to the 
 great purpose of the blood-stained hour. And, in 
 like fashion, we turn away in sadness, if not in 
 indignation, from that man, whether he be Presi- 
 dent, Secretary of State, or Attorney-General, who 
 tampers with the plain rights of the loyal, and 
 
ORATION 
 
 35 
 
 coquets with what is disloyal. We respect no one 
 except the man who is in the right, and who 
 shows it by throwing his political influence into the 
 same scale that holds the memory of half a million 
 dead or maimed soldiers. Your education, your 
 history, culminates at that point. It .is your divine 
 right, it is a duty you owe to the past, to the 
 present and to the great future, to turn aside from 
 him, from them, from all, whatever badge of office 
 they wear, who are recreant to the people's will. 
 
 And so, to-day, looking on the struggle between 
 the Executive on the one hand, honest or dishonest, 
 who has forgiven the arch-traitor, who will hang 
 his meanest subordinate when the disgusting details 
 have all been told, who vetoed the Military Bill 
 because it gave unlimited and despotic power into 
 the hands of subordinate officials, and who now 
 removes those officials on the ground that they have 
 no power whatever except to disperse mobs and 
 quell disturbances, who does not, and who does not 
 intend to accord with the will of the glorious dead, 
 or the will of the living who gave their all for 
 Liberty ; and on the other hand, a simple Major- 
 General who does not know how to pull the wires 
 of political preferment, who knows only his plain 
 and simple duty, to remove all rebels from office. 
 
36 JULY 4, 1867. 
 
 and to put in their places loyal and trustworthy 
 men, and who does that duty with a singleness of 
 purpose and a moral courage that stamps him a 
 true hero in every fibre, I say, in that great strug- 
 gle, the people care absolutely nothing for the 
 prestige of the sceptre which the one man w T ields, 
 and do not regard the weakness of the other ; but, 
 looking only at the righteousness of the cause, cry 
 out with one voice, and that a voice of thunder, 
 Mr. President, you are wrong, and you must yield, 
 and General Sheridan, hero of a hundred fights, 
 you are right, and we will sustain you. 
 
 New England has always held her place in the van of 
 the great array of progress. While rebellion was being 
 organized, and all through its short, convulsive life, it 
 bestowed its heartiest anathemas upon us ; but now 
 that rebellion is dead, the people of the South are 
 beginning to feel that the most permanent reconstruc- 
 tion demands the adoption of the self-same radical 
 thoughts and principles which grew and flourished only 
 on New-England soil. That love of liberty which has 
 been cherished among our hills for two generations, 
 which the South has vainly combated both on the 
 floors of Congress by word and bludgeon, and on the 
 battle-field by sword and starvation, has at last become 
 the corner-stone of the new edifice, and not only the 
 
ORATION. 37 
 
 common people but even the generals of the disbanded 
 army are uniting their efforts to lift it into place. It 
 cannot be many months before the lines of caste, and 
 the prejudice of color will give way to the oncoming 
 civilization, and South Carolina and Massachusetts, 
 united in the beginning in defence ' of a common 
 cause, separated for three generations by the most 
 implacable differences of policy and administration, 
 shall strike palms again to carry on the same cause 
 which gave us the heroism of the last century. And 
 gentlemen, we can to-day remember with becoming 
 pride that from the first hour when the old bell in 
 Independence Hall sent its ominous but glorious 
 echoes along our granite hills to this very moment, 
 the course of New England has been single and 
 consistent. Liberty and justice was the cry which 
 then woke the patriotism of our fathers ; liberty 
 and justice called their sons to arms in 1860, and 
 the love of liberty and justice constitute the grandeur 
 of New-England manhood and womanhood to-day. 
 Our course has been straight on. Other States, 
 moved by a different policy, made a long and sad 
 detour from the highway of true republicanism, 
 trusting to the fallacies of State rights, slavery and 
 caste, and after wandering for ninety years, insisting 
 all the while that their path was the only road to 
 
38 JULY 4, 1 867. 
 
 national strength and glory, growing weaker every 
 day, and every day more insolent and reckless, an- 
 swering all questions with the knife or the pistol, 
 they have at last laid the whole pile of slavery's 
 chains aside, and come back to our path to confess that 
 there can be no permanent greatness and no enduring 
 strength except under the principles which have 
 always been the crown and glory of New England. 
 Ah, gentlemen, it is no common victory which 
 we have won ! It is nothing less than the triumph 
 of free speech, free thought throughout the conti- 
 nent, the adoption everywhere in America of those 
 truths that have always been so dear to us. Here- 
 after the flag shall mean more than ever. The 
 stain has been washed out in tears and blood ; a 
 new era has begun ; the gray streaks of another 
 and a better political day are breaking through 
 the clouds ; slavery is dead, freedom has been 
 crystallized into law ; justice has become a possi- 
 bility, and the ark of our national covenant, held 
 up in the arms of the largest-hearted heroism 
 and patriotism the world has yet seen, has been 
 carried safely through the sea of blood, and placed 
 in security upon the eternal rock of a tri- 
 umphant republicanism. 
 
 Fellow-citizens, I congratulate you upon the 
 
ORATION. 39 
 
 achievements of the past, and the transcendent 
 hopes of the future. Let us look forward to the 
 hour, not distant, when all the people of this 
 country shall be bound more closely than ever 
 before by a common interest and purpose. Our 
 brethren of the South, redeemed from the fatal 
 error of three generations, shall till the rich soil 
 with free hands, and confess that labor urged by 
 the whip can never compete with that earnest and 
 ambitious toil which always marks the freeman. 
 Our brethren of the West, hardy, sturdy, brave and 
 true, shall educate the millions who find a home in 
 the great prairies, and develop the marvellous resour- 
 ces of a region richer than our thought or hope, 
 and New England, God grant it, shall keep her 
 place at the head of every progressive and reforma- 
 tory movement. Then we shall be one people from 
 the shores washed by the Atlantic, to the western 
 slope where the mild Pacific sings its lullaby to the 
 setting sun ; and from the lakes of the North to 
 the warm gulf of the South, while over us shall wave 
 the flag that means Liberty and Justice for all. 
 
BOSTON COLLEGE 
 
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