E 415 .W6 K4 Copy 1 EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON MALDEN, NOV. 28, 1875. %e****4K& t cn-'u From, the " Cottage Hearth/' Boston. EULOGY OX HENRY WILSON VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED S T A. T E S WHO WAS BORN IN FARMINGTON N H FEB I 6 I 8 I 2 DIED IN THE CAPITOL AT WASHINGTON NOV 2 2 AND WAS INTERRED IN NATICK MASS DEC I 1 875 Pronounced in SALEM HALL in MALDEN Mass Sunday Evening Nov '48 1875 $3ij l\cb Silas l^ctrijum PASTOR OF THE FIRST CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH ittaplctoooti MALI) EX GEORGE CROWELL KETCHUM PRINTER 18/5 A 104 <£ EULOGY ON HON. HENRY WILSON. The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places. How are the mighty fallen; and the weapons of Tear perished. II Samuel, I. IV, 27. Every age has its great men. Every period of our own history has had its great men. In every emer- gency of the nation, thus far, men have not been wanting who were equal to the emergency. Men who could grapple with great facts, and great difficul- ties, and out of danger could bring safety to the Republic. When passions have raged, and political whirlwinds have swept the nation ; when faction has risen against faction and party against party, and the fabric of government has rocked in the tumult ; when enemies have assaulted our peace, by wars from with- out or seditions from within ; there have always been found men of courage and capacity to "ride the whirlwind and direct the storm." Such men are the "glory and honor of a nation." Humanly speaking, they are its rock of defence, the bulwark of its security. When men of great ability and great integrity man the ship of state, there is safe- ty to those on board. But when such men fail ; when the material out of which such men are forged in the furnace of great affairs is wanting; whenever in any crisis a hero is not found equal to the need ; then may 4 EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON. that nation count that the day of its strength and glo- ry is gone by. When the crisis of separation or submission came upon these colonies, the colonics abounded in great men. Not nun who were great in their own age and among their own countrymen, but men who in every age will rank among the great ones of the earth. After a century which has been pregnant with great deeds, and whose records are full of the names of heroes and statesmen who were the peers of the highest, we look back upon that group which gathered in old Independence Hall, in the Congress of Seventy-six, and say, " There were giants in those days." A hundred years hence, when our descendants shall gather to celebrate the bi-centennial of our nation's birth, and shall look back upon that group of men who, by their wisdom, their skill, their integrity and their courage, saved the nation in the hour of her deadly peril, they shall say of these as we say of the Fathers, "There were giants in those days." Conspicuous in the front rank of that illustrious company, not large in number, but great in power, stood Henry Wilson. Many men are great among average men ; Henry Wilson was great among great men. He belonged to a type and represented a class of statesmen, which no other period of our history could have produced, and no other con- juncture of affairs would have needed, than such as fell on him and them. He belonged to and was rep- resentative of a group of men who, by their courage, by their earnestness, by their love of the right and abhorrence of the wrong, raised and waged an irre- pressible conflict with the mightiest political power in EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON. ~, the nation, precipitated the crisis, and annihilated the power. Seward, Sumner, Lincoln, Greeley, Gid- dings, Chase, Owen Lovejoy and John P. Hale. With these men, who created public sentiment, roused the conscience and the indignation of a great people, made history, and revolutionized the theory and pol- icy of a nation, will ever be associated the name of Henry Wilson, great in honor, "equal in power and glory." They are names that will stand high and re- main long in history ; not alone for what they accom- plished, but for the heroism and the perseverence displayed in a cause which all men discerned to be right, and which eNperience has shown to be wise and prudent. I shall, therefore, first speak of the moral courage, the heroic persistency, the tireless continuity, of that group of statesmen, among which Henry Wilson held a foremost place, and of which he was the last on earth. There is a grandeur in the heroism of men in oreat emergencies, which excites the admiration of noble minds, and compels the tribute of historic praise. The statesmanship, the sagacity, the individual worth, of the men who form the central group of the Rev- olution — Washington, Jefferson, the two Adamses, Franklin, Henry, Hancock, Morris, Sherman, Liv- ingston — command the respect and challenge the admiration of the world. But when to these are added the sublime courage, the moral heroism which, for the sake of civil liberty and national independence, moved these men to defy the power of England, swollen with the pride ot great victories ; a power which held undisputed empire of the seas; "already d EULOGY OX HENRY WILSON. encircling the world with her morning drum-beat," and among all nations politically omnipotent, they" rise to the dignity of heroes who would, in a simpler or pagan age, have been in danger of apotheosis. As a scholar, as a statesman and a Christian, the world will ever admire John Hampden, the Luther of the English Revolution of 1648. But the grand moral audacity of soul, which confronted the whole power of the House of Stuart, challenging the right of the crown to assess taxes without the consent of Parliament, places him in the front rank of those who, from age to age, , have periled life, property and every personal consideration, to secure to posterity a great public good. Henry Wilson was a statesman of no mean or- der. He was an orator, clear, forcible, comprehen- sive, compact, and sometimes eloquent ; he had vast powers of concentration, organization and man- agement ; his capacity for business was almost equal to that of Roger Sherman ; he was the soul of honor, integrity and manliness. In any phase of politics, and in any stage of history, he would have taken a respectable rank, if given the opportunity. Hut that which made him a great leader in his day; that which made him heard and respected in the councils of the nation; that which raised him to the second place within the gift of the people; that which will give him his distinctive place in history; that which has moved with profound emotions of sorrow this whole people at the tidings of his death; was the cool courage, the unflinching devotion and the con- summate skill with which he fought the aggressions and assumptions of the power of Slavery in this government, and with which he asserted and defend- EULOGY ON HENRY If'ILSON, 7 ed the right of every man to own himself. This was his life-work. He came into notice and emerged into public life imbued with this conviction, not only that slavery was a curse to the nation, but an unmitigated and inde- fensible wrong to the slave. He was imbibing the political convictions which have swayed the motions and shaped the character of his whole life, just at that time when Garrison, and Phillips, and Whittier, and George Thompson, and N. P. Rogers, Arthur Tappan, and Elijah P. Lovejoy, were rousing to a sense of the enormity of the wrong the sluggish and reluctant moral sense of the nation. The active and ambitious energies of his mind were in their most impressionable state, when the power of slavery in the north raised mobs to break up anti-slavery meet- ings, dragged Garrison through the streets of Bos- ton, with a rope around his body, thrust him into jail at Baltimore, imprisoned Thompson at St. Louis, and shot Lovejoy at Alton. In the midst of outrages of this kind, which never remitted, and only went on ag- gregating in number and atrocity, till they culmina- ted in Rebellion, the indignation of the great soul of Henry Wilson, and such as he, was roused and stim- ulated to a chronic and intense antagonism to the in- stitution. The whole public life of Henry Wilson, until the system was abolished, and the largest fruits of the victory secured to the slave, is an exhibition of hostility to what he deemed a great national wrong, that admitted of no compromise or pacification, but extermination. He fought it on the stump, on the platform, in the village debate, in the councils of your own legislature, in the Senate of the nation, and sjave the whole influence and energy of his character and 8 EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON. service to destroy its power and itself in the Rebellion. And this desperation of earnestness, this aggregation and concentration of force upon one grand purpose, was the secret of his influence and success as a polit- ical leader. He fell on a time when political issues were sharply drawn ; when no man was indifferent or neutral ; when the two great parties were marshalling themselves for and against like two mighty armies. He went to the Senate in 1855, because the people of Massachusetts knew they could depend upon him, by conviction, by education, by constitution of mind, by long public committal, by integrity of character, to up- hold the prevailing public sentiment of the people, and to defend the honor of the State and of the nation, in the conflict which was then beine waeed. To his devotion to the interests of the slave, which in itself involved his hostility to slavery, all other things were secondary, and all personal considera- tions of profit, popular approval and safety, were en- tirely disregarded. He fought against the annexa- tion of Texas, against the Fugitive Slave Law. He strove to commit the great Whig Party to anti-slavery, and when the party repudiated anti-slavery by the nomination of General Taylor, he set his face like a flint against the party. It was the dominant party in the State. It was in that contest the dom- inant party in the nation. It was the party with which he had co-operated. It was powerful in the influence of great names and in the prestige of a great nation- al victory. Henry Wilson said it was dead, and had won its last triumph. He joined the faction of Free Soilers and supported John P. Hale for the presidency. He joined that most absurd but most effective political fanaticism, the Know Nothine Par- EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON. ty, in the hope of carrying the incongruous elements which the party comprised against slavery. But when that party at Philadelphia adopted a pro-slavery platform, he denounced the party, repudiated the platform, declared in the convention that he would support no man who stood upon it, and that in language so strong that Southern men there signifi- cantly laid their hands on their revolvers. Out ot the ruins of the old Whig Party, now dead, and the old Free Soil faction, now become a party ; and out of the Northern section of the American Party which had just foundered, with that large class of conscien- tious men which the Kansas-Nebraska measures had driven out of the ranks of the Democracy; Henry Wilson, and others associated with him, set them- selves to construe!: the great Republican Party which, by its first national success in i860, precipitated the crisis between slavery and freedom, and in the conflict which ensued slavery disappeared forever. These facts have entered into history. The old controversy has been moved so far backward into the past that it seems strange to talk about it. Events of great magnitude have succeeded each other with such rapidity in these last fifteen years, and they who were then young have grown old so fast, that it seems as if these things, which made our hearts burn, be- longed to another generation. And when we remem- ber the men who guided the councils of state in that emergency, "who were of old men of renown," and that now the last great man of that most honorable company, while his remains lie unburied, is receiving the tribute of a nation's honor, we are compelled to the exclamation, " How are the mighty fallen." These men were eminently men of God. Not 10 EULOGY OX IIEXK Y MIL SOX. necessarily in the christian sense ; though some of them were that; but in the sovereign sense. They were men for a purpose. God raised them up that he might show forth his power in them. Through them He moved the mind and conscience of this nation, marshalling right against wrong;, truth against error, freedom against slavery, till all things were ready for Him to reveal the eternal verities of His justice. When that was done, and when the spoils of victory were garnered and secured, their distinct- ive work was done. These men, Lincoln, Sumner, Seward, Hale, Chase, Giddings, Lovejoy, Greeley, Wilson, were all men of three splended qualities : Conscience, Courage, Capacity. They were men of breadth, and depth, and compass. They were men of convictions, purpose, power. They differed essentially and ma- terially from another class, who fought with them in a moral but not in a political copartnership, the great battles of freedom : Garrison, Phillips, Foster, Parker Pillsbury and Theodore Parker. These men were agitators and reformers. They were men of deep convictions, of vast energies, of intense hatreds, of small charity, of ceaseless activity. They were full of sarcasm, invective, denunciation, irony. They were thorns in the flesh. They were caustics and blisters on the body of slavery. They were a scourge of small cords. They were men of vast de- structiveness. Professing to be noncombatants, they were the most combative of men. Into every cal- dron they stirred, they threw " a charm of powerful trouble." Their purpose was not to save the patient's life, but to burn out the cancer. Of their honesty and devotion no man had the slightest doubt. Of EULOGY ON 11 i:\HV WILSON. 11 their usefulness to the cause there is just as little question. But when slavery was abolished, not on- ly was their work done, but their trade was gone. Society had no use to which it could put their talents. They were impracticable men. Theodore Parker died. Foster has retarded the cause of Woman's Suffrage by espousing it. Phillips, the most polish- ed orator in America, by scolding like a woman, and reasoning like a boy, has made himself an object of compassion to his friends. Pillsbury keeps his nails worn close with scratching at Christianity. Garrison alone had the good sense to comprehend the situa- tion, withdraw from public life, lay aside his weapons, and wear, in honorable and dignified silence, the lau- rels earned by a life of toil, and conferred by a grate- ful people. Let us remember, in our admiration of the heroes of the Anti-Slavery conflict, to distinguish between the men who possessed only destructive, and those who possessed also constructive, ability. I have said that Henry Wilson was the last of his kind. I am sorry it is true. He had, in the clays of his vehemence and power, many equals. But he has left no peer behind. It is a fact full of signifi- cance that we have no great statesmen. Many men of respectable talents and good ability ; many o^ em- inent rank as orators, scholars, scientists, diplomats ; but no man nor class of men, with commanding gen- ius, undoubted power, with skill and experience in af- fairs ; who stand out before, or tower above, the com- mon average of able men, It was not so in the days of Washington. It was not so in the days of Mon- roe. It was not so in the days of Webster. It was not so in the days of Sumner and Wilson. But, 12 EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON. "take him for all in all," — his honesty, his integrity, his patriotism, his industry, his statesmanship, his well-balanced and capacious mind, — where shall we look upon his like today ? And this leads me in closing- to speak of the moral soundness of Henry Wilson's character ; for great abilities are no evidence of great worth. Men may have " the ability of a devil, and a conscience to match." Henry Wilson has been associated with men of that kind all his life ; particularly all his public life. He has spent the last twenty years at the capital of the nation, where the most terrible corrup- tion abounds, and the most wicked and shameless types of vice prevail. How has he stood this test? Because, if he has come out of this unscathed and un- damaged, he has shown a moral soundness which few men — compared with the many — who have filled the high places of trust, have shown. It is no small thing that, in the lewdest city on the continent, Henry Wilson has, by common consent of all who have known his manner of life, remained a faithful husband, cherishing his love for his wife with a devotion that was chivalrous while she lived, and pathetic when she was dead. It is no small thing that, among a class of men with whom the use oi alcoholic liquors was a prevail- ing habit, and when intemperence was a common vice, even of those who sat with him in the Senate Chamber of the nation, Henry Wilson has used the influence and example of his high place and his great name, to promote temperance and abstinence in Congress. It is no small thing that, in the period of the most tremendous corruption in our history, and when un- E VL OGY OX HEX It Y It IL S OX. 13 numbered conspiracies were planned to rob die treas- ury of the country ; when both branches of Congress were honey-combed with moral rottenness ; when such talents as his would have commanded any price, and such influence as his would have brought a for- tune every month of every session ; when men of long experience and sterling character, who stood as high in the confidence of the nation, and wore as dis- tinguished honors, fell from their high estate into lasting infamy ; Henry Wilson remained in com- parative but honorable poverty. It is no small thing that, when money was so plen- ty and honor so cheap ; when the cupidity of men rushed into the wildest speculations and the most reckless gambling ; when ostentation and pride sought gratification in the most ruinous extravagance, and disregard of financial obligations permeated public men like a leprosy ; Henry Wilson lived within his means in unostentatious simplicity, and was neither a gambler nor a bankrupt. It is no small thing that, in an age of violent polit- ical competition, when nominations were got by manipulation of conventions, and promotions obtain- ed by pledges ; when partizan feeling has run wild, and places high and low were gained and kept only by the most abject submission to party dictates ; Henry Wilson has stood in his integrity above this traffic, has obeyed conscience and upheld the right. It is no small thing that, in the most godless city of the nation, associated with men to whom profanity was a tenth element of speech, in a Congress where men of commanding influence mocked at religion, and ridiculed the authority of " the higher law;" that when, by his high position, he was most intimately 14 EULOGY ON HENRY WILSON. associated at home with wits, scholars and social magnates, to whom the gospel of Jesus Christ was, as it was to the inhabitants of another Athens in an- other age, " foolishness ;" that in the presence of a dissuasion against the claims of a personal Savior which would have deterred many a lesser man ; Hen- ry Wilson had the courage and the conscience to con- fess Christ before the world, and his dependence on Him for his own personal salvation ; and to stand up among Congressmen and Senators, and call upon them to join him in maintaining a prayer-meeting in the capitol. I count it a grand and noble thing, that a great man, with strong passions, towering ambition and magnificent powers, who has been for thirty years in public life, and has stood for the greater part in places so hi eh that all men could look at him ; who has sus- tained the most intimate relations to public honor and private virtue ; who has been a husband, a father, a neighbor, a citizen, a reformer, a statesman and a christian, has died at his post, in the midst of his toil, on the scene of his victories, and has left a name and a fame unsoiled by any private vice or public crime. For the sake of the State of Massachusetts, for the sake of Congress and our national honor, for the sake of the rising generation of public men, may the man- tle of Henry Wilson not fall upon a worser man. I thank God for the testimony of his dying hour. That in the moment of his failing he sought for con- solation the lesson of a sweet submission in one of the tenderest of christian poems, and that the last lines on which his earthly vision rested, declared his need of a Savior's love : " But after all these duties I have done, Must I in point of merit them disown, And trust in heaven through Jesus' blood alone ? Through Jesus' blood alone." :s-v ?•&#» II LIBRARY OF CONGRESS