jrijnLTirijrijrijrxjrijruijr™ E 672 .F24 Copy 2 NON Farrar's EiJlogy ON GENERAL GRANT xiifTJxruxrijrijrijiJruririjriJ^^ i..injnur EULOGY ON GENERAL GRANT. u EULOGY General Grant DELIVERED AT WESTMINSTER ABBEY London, August 4TH, 1885 BY CANON FARRAR NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 31 West Twenty-third St. By Transfer D. C. Public Library OCT 1 b 1834 rO cr DISfRICT or iOLUMBIA P«€BBRT^ '^^m^^^mou m&LlQ LIBRARY ADDRESS. Eight years have not passed since the Dean of Westminster, whom Americans so much loved and hon- ored, was walking round this Abbey with General Grant, and explaining to him its wealth of great memorials. Neither of them had attained the al- lotted span of human life, and for both we might have hoped that many years would elapse before they went down to the grave, full of years 6 FA REAR'S EULOGY and honors. But this is already the fourth summer since the Dean fell asleep, and to-day we are assembled at the obsequies of the great soldier whose sun has gone down while it yet was day, and at whose funeral service in America tens of thousands are as- sembled at this moment to mourn with his widow, family, and friends. Yes ; life at the best is but as a vapor that passeth away. The glories of our birth and state are shadows, not sub- stantial things. But when death comes, what nobler epitaph can any man have than this, that, having served his generation, by the will of ON GENERAL GRANT. 7 God he fell asleep ? Little can the living do for the dead. The pomps and ceremonies of earthly grandeur have lost their significance, but when our soul shall leave its dwelling the story of one fair and virtuous action is above all the escutcheons on our tombs or silken banners over us. I would desire to speak simply and directly, and, if with generous appre- ciation, yet with no idle flattery, of him whose death has made a nation mourn. His private life, the faults and failines of his character, what- ever they may have been, belong in no sense to the world. They are 8 FARRAR'S EULOGY for the judgment of God, whose merciful forgiveness is necessary for the best of what we do and are. We touch only on his pubHc actions and services, the record of his strength, his magnanimity, his self- control, his generous deeds. His life falls into four marked divisions, of which each has its own lessons for us. He touched on them himself in part when he said : " Bury me either at West Point, where I was trained as a youth ; or at Illinois, which gave me my first com- mission ; or at New York, which sym- pathized with me in my misfortunes." ON GENERAL GRANT. 9 His wish has been respected, and on the cliff overhanging the Hudson his monument will stand, to recall to the memory of future generations those dark days of a nation's history which he did so much to close. First came the early years of growth and training, of poverty and obscurity, of strueele and self-denial. Poor and humbly born, he had to make his own way in the world. God's unseen providence, which men nickname chance, directed his boyhood. A cadetship was given him at the Mili- tary Academy of West Point, and after a brief period of service in the 10 FA REAR'S EULOGY Mexican war, in which he was three times mentioned in dispatches, see- ing no opening for a soldier in what seemed likely to be days of unbroken peace, he settled down to a humble trade in a provincial town. Citizens of St. Louis still remember the rough backwoodsman who sold old wood from door to door, and who afterwards became a leather-seller in the obscure town of Galena. Those who knew him in those days have said that if any one had predicted that the si- lent, unprosperous, unambitious man, whose chief aim was to get a plank- road from his shop to the railway de- ON GENERAL GRANT. \\ pot, would become twice President of the United States, and one of the fore- most men of his day, the prophecy would have seemed extravagantly ridiculous. But such careers are the glory of the American continent. They show that the people have a sovereign insight into intrinsic force. If Rome told with pride how her dictators came from the ploughtail, America, too, may record the answer of the President who, on being asked what would be his coat of arms, an- swered, proudly mindful of his early struggles, "A pair of shirt-sleeves." The answer showed a noble sense of 12 FARRAR'S EULOGY the dignity of labor, a noble superi- ority to the vanities of feudalism, a stronof conviction that men are to be honored simply as men and not for the prizes of birth and accident, which are without them. You have of late years had two martyr Presidents, both men sons of the people. One was the homely man, who at the age of seven was a farm lad, at seventeen a rail splitter, at twenty a boatman on the Mississippi, and who in manhood proved to be one of the most honest and God-fearing of modern rulers. The other grew up from a shoeless child in a log-hut on the prairies, ON GENERAL GRANT. 13 round which the wolves prowled in the winter snow, to be a humble teach- er in Hiram Institute. With these Presidents America need not blush to name also the leather-seller of Galena. Every true man derived his patent of nobleness direct from God. Did not God choose David from the sheepfold, from following the ewes great with young ones, to make him the ruler of his people, Israel ? Was not the Lord of Life and all the worlds for thirty years a carpenter at Nazareth ? Do not such things illus- trate the prophecy of Solomon : " Seest thou a man diligent in his 14 FARRAKS EULOGY business ? He shall stand before kings ; he shall not stand before mean men." When Abraham Lincoln sat, book in hand, day after day under the tree, moving round it as the shadow crossed, absorbed in mastering his task ; when James Garfield rang the bell at Hiram Institute on the very stroke of the hour, and swept the schoolroom as faithfully as he mastered his Greek lesson ; when Ulysses Grant, sent with his team to meet some men who came to load his cart with logs, and finding no men, loaded the cart with his own boy's strength, they showed ON GENERAL GRANT. 15 in conscientious duty qualities which were to raise them to become kines of men. When John Adams was told that his son, John Quincy Adams, had been elected President of the United States, he said, " He has al- ways been laborious, child and man, from infancy." But the youth was not destined to die in the deep valley of obscurity and toil, in which it is the lot — and perhaps the happy lot — of most of us to spend our little lives. The hour came; the man was needed. In 1861 there broke out that most terrible war of modern days. Grant received a l6 FARRAR'S EULOGY commission as Colonel of Volunteers, and in four years the struggling toiler had been raised to the chief command of a vaster army than has ever been handled by any mortal man. Who could have imagined that four years would make that enorm^ous differ- ence ? But it is often so. The great men needed for some tremendous crisis have stepped often, as it were, out of a door in the wall which no man has noticed ; and, unannounced, unheralded, without prestige, have made their way silently and single- handed to the front. And there was no luck in it. It was a work of in- ON GENERAL GRANT. 17 flexible faithfulness, of indomitable resolution, of sleepless energy, and iron purpose and tenacity. In the campaigns at Fort Donelson ; in the desperate battle at Shiloh' ; in the siege of Corinth ; in the successful assaults at Pittsburg ; in battle after battle, in siege after siege ; whatever Grant had to do, he did it with his might. Other generals might fail — • he would not fail. He showed what a man could do whose will was strong. He undertook, as General Sherman said of him, what no one else would have ventured, and his very soldiers began to reflect something of his 1 8 FARRAR'S EULOGY indomitable determination. His say- inofs revealed the man. " I have nothing to do with opinions," he said at the outset, "and shall only deal with armed rebellion." " In riding over the field," he said at Shiloh, " I saw that either side was ready to give way if the other showed a bold front. I took the opportunity, and ordered an advance along the whole line." " No terms," he wrote to General Buckner at Fort Donelson — and it is pleasant to know that General Buck- ner stood as a warm friend beside his dying bed — "no terms other than unconditional surrender can be ac- ON GENERAL GRANT. 19 cepted." " My headquarters," he wrote from Vicksburg, " will be on the field." With a military genius which embraced the vastest plans while attending to the smallest de- tails, he defeated, one after another, every great general of the Confed- erates except General Stonewall Jackson. The Southerners felt that he held them as in the grasp of a vise ; that this man could neither be arrested nor avoided. For all this, he has been severely blamed. He ought not to be blamed. He has been called a butcher, which is grossly unjust. He loved peace ; he 20 FARRAR'S EULOGY hated bloodshed ; his heart was gen- erous and kind. His orders were to save Hves, to save treasure, but at all costs to save his country — and he did save his country. His army cheer- fully accepted the sacrifice, wrote its farewells, buckled its belts, and stood ready. The struggle was not for victory ; it was for existence. It was not for glory ; it was for life and death. Grant had not only to defeat armies, but to annihilate their forces ; to leave no choice but destruction or submission. He saw that the brief ravage of the hurricane is infinitely less ruinous than the interminable ON GENERAL GRANT. 2 1 malignity of the pestilence, and in the colossal struggle, victory, swift, de- cisive, overwhelming, was the truest mercy. In silence and with determin- ation, and with clearness of insight, he was like your Washington and our Wellington. He was like them also in this, that the word " cannot " did not exist in his soldier's dictionary, and what he achieved was achieved with- out bluster. In the hottest fury of all his battles his speech was never known to be more than "yea, yea," and " nay, nay." He met General Lee at Appomatox. He received his sur- render with faultless delicacy. He 22 FARRAR'S EULOGY immediately issued an order that the Confederates should be supplied with rations. Immediately his enemies sur- rendered he gave them terms as simple and as gfenerous as a brother could have given them — terms which healed differences; terms of which they freely acknowledged the magnanimity. Not even entering the capital, avoiding all ostentation, undated by triumph as unruffled by adversity, he hurried back to stop recruits and to curtail the vast expenses of the country. After the surrender at Appomatox Court House, the war was over. He had put his hand upon the plough- ON GENERAL GRANT. 23 share and looked not back. He had made blow after blow, each follow- ing where the last had struck; he had wielded like a hammer the gigan- tic forces at his disposal, and had smitten opposition into the dust. It was a mighty work, and he had done it well. Surely history has shown that for the future destinies of a mighty nation it was a necessary and blessed work ! The Church utters her most indignant anathema at an unright- eous war, but she has never refused to honor the faithful soldiers who fight in the cause of their country and God. The gentlest and most 24 FARRAR'S EULOGY Christian of modern poets has used the tremendous thoueht : "God's most dreaded instrument In working out a pure intent Is man arrayed for mutual slaughter. Yea, Carnage is his daughter ! " We shudder even as we quote the words, but yet the cause for which General Grant fought — the honor of a great people, and the freedom of a whole race of mankind — was a great and noble cause. And the South has accepted that desperate and bloody arbitrament. Two of the Southern generals, we rejoice to hear, will bear General Grant's funeral pall. The rancor and ill-feeling of the past are ON GENERAL GRANT. 25 buried forever in oblivion ; true friends have been made out of brave foemen. Americans are no longer Northerners and Southerners, Fed- erals and Confederates, but they are Americans. " Do not teach your children to hate . . . ." said General Lee to an American lady; "teach them that they are Americans. I thought that we were better off as one nation than as two, and I think so now." " The war is over," said Grant, "and the best sign of rejoicing after victory will be to abstain from all demonstrations in the field." " Let us have peace," were the memorable 26 FAR EAR'S EULOGY words with which he ended his brief inauorural address as President. On the rest of the great soldier's Hfe we will only touch in very few words. As Wellington became Prime Min- ister of England, and lived to be hooted in the streets of London, so Grant, more than half against his will, became President, and for a time lost much of his popularity. He foresaw it all, but it is not for a man to choose ; it is for a man to accept his destiny. What verdict history may pronounce on him as a politician I know not; but here, and now, the voice of censure, deserved or unde- ON GENERAL GRANT. 27 served, is silent. Wiien the great Duke of Marlborough died, and one began to speak of his avarice, "He was so great a man," said Boling- broke, " I had forgotten he had that fault." It was a fine and delicate rebuke, and we do not intend to rake up a man's faults and errors. Those errors, whatever they may have been, we leave to the mercy of the Merciful, and the atoning blood of his Saviour. We speak only in gratitude of his great achievements, beside the open grave. Let us record his virtues in brass, for men's example ; but let his 28 FARRAR'S EULOGY faults, whatever they may have been, be writ in water. Some may think that it would have been well for Grant if he had died in 1865, when steeples clanged and cities were illuminated and congregations rose in his honor. Many and dark clouds overshadowed the last of his days — the blow of financial ruin ; the dread that men should suppose that he had a tar- nished reputation ; the terrible agony of an incurable disease. But God's ways are not as our ways. To bear that sudden ruin, and that speechless agony, required a courage nobler and greater than that of the battle-field, ON GENERAL GRANT. 29 and human courage grows magnifi- cently to the height of human need. "I am a man," said Frederick the Great, "and therefore born to suf- fer." On the long agonizing death- bed, Grant showed himself every inch a hero, bearing his agonies and trials without a murmur, with ruo-o-ed stoicism, in unflinching fortitude; yes, and we believe in a Christian's patience and a Christian's prayers. Which of us can tell whether those hours of torture and misery may not have been blessings in disguise; whether God may not have been refining the gold from the brass, and 30 FARRAR'S EULOGY the strong man had been truly puri- fied by the strong agony ? We are gathered here in England to do honor to his memory, and to show our sympathy with the sorrow of a great sister-nation. Could we be gathered in a more fitting place ? We do not lack here memorials to recall the history of your country. There is the grave of Andre ; there is the monument raised by grateful Massachusetts to the gallant Howe ; there is the temporary resting-place of George Peabody ; there is the bust of Longfellow ; over the Dean's grave there is the faint semblance of ON GENERAL GRANT. 31 Boston Harbor. We add another memory to-day. Whatever there may have been between the two nations to forget and forgive, it is forgotten and forgiven. " I will not speak of them as two peoples," said General Grant at Newcastle in 1877, " because, in fact, we are one people, with a common destiny, and that destiny will be brilliant in proportion to the friendship and co-operation of the brethren dwelling on each side of the Atlantic." Oh ! if the two peo- ples, which are one people, be true to their duty, and true to their God, who can doubt that in their 32 FARRAR'S EULOGY hands are the destinies of the world ? Can anything short of utter demen- tation ever thwart a destiny so man- ifest ? Your founders were our sons ; it was for our past that your present grew. The monument of Sir Walter Raleigh is not that name- less grave in St. Margaret's ; it is the State of Virginia. Yours and ours alike are the memories of Captain John Smith and of the Pilgrim Fathers, of General Oglethorpe's strong benevolence of soul, of the apostolic holiness of Berkeley, and the burning zeal of Wesley and Whitfield. Yours and ours alike are ON GENERAL GRANT. 33 the plays of Shakespeare and the poems of Milton ; ours and yours alike are all that you have accom- plished in literature or in history — the songs of Longfellow and Bryant, the genius of Hawthorne and of Irving, the fame of Washington, Lee, and Grant. But great memories im- ply great responsibilities. It was not for nothing that God has made Eng- land what she is ; not for nothing that the free individualism of a busy multitude, the humble traders of a fugitive people, snatching the New World from feudalism and bigotry — from Philip II. and Louis XIV., 34 FARRAR'S EULOGY from Menendez and Montcalm, from the Jesuit in the Inquisition, from Perquenada and from RicheHeu — to make it the land of the Reformation and the Republic of Christianity and of Peace. '' Let us auspicate all our proceedings in America," said Ed- mund Burke, with the old Church cry "Sursum corda!" But it is for America to live up to the spirit of such words, not merely to quote them with proud enthusiasm. We have heard of — New times, new climes, new lands, new men, but still The same old tears, old crimes, and oldest ill. It is for America to falsify the cyni- ON GENERAL GRANT. 35 cal foreboding. Let her take her place side by side with England in the very van of freedom and of pro- gress, united by a common language, by common blood, by common meas- ures, by common interests, by a common history, by common hopes ; united by the common glory of great men, of which this great temple of silence and reconciliation is the rich- est shrine. Be it the steadfast pur- pose of the two peoples who are one people to show all the world not only the magnificent spectacle of human happiness, but the still more magnifi- cent spectacle of two peoples which 36 FARRAR'S EULOGY. are one people, loving righteousness and hating iniquity, inflexibly faithful to the principles of eternal justice which are the unchanging laws of God. END. LiBI?BRY OK CONURESS ETERNAL HOPE. ^ 013 787 993 1 ^ ment, preached in Westminster Abbey. London, witr. Preface, Notes, Appendices, etc. i2mo, cloth. . . .S'.'' LANGUAGE AND LANGUAGES. Being "Chap. tors on Language" and " Families of Speech." ismo, 431 pages. r .-'i MERiDY AND JUDGMENT. A Few Last Words on Cliristi.in Kschaiolo^y, with reference to Dr. Pusey's "What is of Faith?" i2mo, cloth. .../... i..' THE LIFE OF CHRIST, i vol., 8vo, without Notes. I vol.. 8vri, without Notes, half calf. 1 " " " " Turkey moroccn. .... 6.00 a vols., 8vo, with Notes and Appendix. Large print, cloth, reduced to 4.00 a^ybls., 8vo, half calf S.oo 2 " " Turkey morocco 10.00 THE LIFE AND WORK OF ST. PAUL, r vol. Bvo, complete, with Maps and IncJex. cloth. t.50 J vol., 8 vo, complete, half calf. .... 4.00 Tree calf. fi.oo 2 vols., 8vo, large type, Maps and Index, cloth. . . . 5.00 Same, half calf. 10,00 Full tree calf or morocco is.oi THE MESSAGES OF THE BOOKS. Being dis- courses and notes on the books of the New Testament. 8vo, 552 pages, cloth ".