Hubbard, Richard D.
Address delivered at New Haven, on
i
Decoration Day, Eay 30, 1881.

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From the Library of
THOMAS MILLS DAY, Y'37
Gift of his children
1927

Hon. R. D. HUBBARD'S

ADDEESS

AT NEW 'H A VEN^ MA Y 30, 1881.

ADDRESS

DELIVERED AT NEW HAVEN,

DECORATION DAY, MAY 30, 1881,

Admiral Foote Post, and Henry C, Merwin Post, G, A, R.

Hon. RICHARD D. HUBBARD.

HARTFORD, CONN.
Press of The Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company.
1881.

Hartford, June 21st, 1881.
Hon. Richard D. Hubbard:
Dear Sir:
We have read with great pleasure your Address delivered
at New Haven on the 30th of May, as it was reported for the daily press,
and, in common with many other of your fellow-citizens, we wish to have
it in a form more convenient for preservation. Will you favor us with a
copy of it, and permit its publication? Very respectfully, Yours,
J. H. Trumbull,
Jos. R. Hawlet,
H. C Robinson,
Wm. Hamersley,
Wm. B. Franklin,
John Hooker,
N. J. Burton,
Jas. G. Battebson,
Edwin P. Pabker,
A. C. Dunham,
Geo. G. Sumner.

Haetfobd, July 1st, 1881.
Gentlemen :
Absence from town has prevented an earlier acknowledgment of your
favor of the 21st inst.
The manuscript of my address is herewith submitted to your
disposition. With great respect,
Your Obedient Servant,
R. D. Hubbard.

ADDRESS

Veterans :
Connecticut furnished more than fifty thousand of
her sons to the Union armies, or about one-ninth of
her entire population. Of these the greater part are
now numbered on the dead-roll. Those who still sur
vive are gathered together to-day in local re-unions
throughout the State, as their brethren of other States
are gathered throughout the United States, to renew
old comradships in the field, to pay honor and homage
to their dead, and to revive the memories of that
mighty struggle which shook the Republic for a time
as with an earthquake, but settled it in the end on
firmer and better foundation than ever before. We
do not suffer ourselves to forget at what a cost of
treasure, blood, and fratricide the work was accom
plished. But of this terrible cost we take upon our
consciences no part of the responsibility or blame.
For the contest was forced upon us against our will
as a duty we could not avoid and as a cross which in
the providence of God we of this generation were ap
pointed to bear; and if we came to it unwillingly,
most unwillingly, the world will bear us witness, I
think, that we bore it patiently, bravely, and well. It
is of this great work and to these gallant workers in

it, that I am now bidden to speak in this favoring
presence of kinsmen, friends, and neighbors.
I have somewhere read, or heard it said, that every
spoken word, to be effective, must have like a drawn
sword a real man behind it. If this be so, I hardly
need to add that any word uttered here to-night, in
the presence of these surviving veterans of the war,
should have a real soldier behind it. If, then, I, who
have no quality of the soldier and who had no share
in your great triumphs, attempt here, as best I may,
a few words of salutation and homage to the actors
in the work, and if you shall perceive that those
words on my lips lack point and expression, like a
soldier's sword which lacks a soldier's hand at the
hilt, bear in mind, I pray you, that I come to your
service not as a volunteer, but as a conscript — a
most willing one, I admit, but still a conscript, — for a
call from you, and such as you, is to me nothing less
than a drafting ; and when drafted by your order on
an occasion like this, I neither seek to avoid the draft
or desert the service. I have, therefore, come to obey
your summons, and though having no title to share in
the least of your honors, I count it no small compliment
to have been thought worthy to be with you on this
anniversary, and to say a desultory word or two in
your presence.
I doubt if there is any human quality which at
tracts so much admiration in the judgment of man
kind as human courage. 1 suppose the reason to be

that it involves a sense of personal danger incurred ;
or in other words, of self-sacrifice, that greatest of
human virtues. Our admiration for this quality in
the past has depended, however, too little, I think,
on the moral character of its exercise. The cause
might have been one which the conscience condemned ;
but the heroism of the actor seemed to dignify the
cause and to blind with its glamour the moral judg
ment of the world in respect to both the act and the
actor. I think this has been so from the matadore
in the bull fight fighting the bull as a trade, to the
young Napoleon in the African jungles fighting the
Zulus as an apprenticeship, — from the nameless gladi
ator in the Roman circus, saluting the emperor and
throwing himself on the wild beasts for greed of hire,
to that immortal gladiator of Corsica who pulled
down kings and emperors and threw himself, not on
wild beasts, but on his own kind, from greed of
empire. History has taken little pains to inquire whether
Peter I. of Russia, was anything better in grain than
an imperial savage, or anything better in fact than a
grand larcener of neighboring thrones and provinces,
and a petty larcener of the camp-mistress of one of
his generals, making her his empress and heir of his
dominions, and adding to this, perhaps, the murder of
his own son by starvation and poison; — all the same,
men have surnamed him the Great: or whether
John Churchill was a trafficker in the virtue of his

sister in exchange for military rank, and a swindler
of his country's treasury by false and fraudulent
muster-rolls while serving his sovereign in the field; —
all the same, he became the great Marlborough. The
varnish of military valor was on the outside, and it
mattered little that the inside was full of dead men's
bones and all uncleanness.
But the false judgments of history are not confined
to the remote past, nor to other peoples than our own.
A striking, though far less gross illustration may be
found very near at hand. 'Tis an old story, but I
want to give it ajiew life, Jf any_paor_WQrds of mine
can do so, A young British major in our Revolution
ary war penetrated within the American lines on the
Hudson. He was in complicity Math Benedict Ar
nold, the Judas of profane history, and bore on his
person the passport of that infamous traitor. He was
detected, convicted, and hung as a spy. In the same
contest, only a few miles away, and but a short time
before, an American captain, a young graduate of
Yale, entered in disguise the British lines on the
other side of Long Island sound, and explored their
camp. He, too, was arrested, tried, and hung —
hung with the double infamies of a rebel and a spy!
He was not in complicity with treason in the enemy's
command, and bore no traitor passports for his pro
tection ; but entered upon the perils of his enterprise
unbefriended, and faced its penalties unblenched.
His last words were the words of a confessor: "I

regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."
The first was a soldier by trade, engaged in a war
of subjugation beyond seas ; the second, a citizen sol
dier, and a volunteer for his country's defence in the
cause of liberty. Yet the name of the one is bla
zoned on the rolls of history, and the place of his
death commemorated by a memorial built by Ameri
can hands; the name of the other is but little known
even amongst his own countrymen. For three score
years and more the remains of Andre, transported
by the British government to his native shores, have
reposed in the great Abbey of Westminster. The
ashes of Hale rest in an unknown grave, and lack
even the hospitalities of his native soil.
And what — fe#iHe^pajSO&«^0~a8k*fe-=^what has
his native state done to rescue his memory from the
unequal judgments of history ? We have thrown
out in the front niches of our new Capitol, the
statues of Jonathan Trumbull and Roger Sher
man. Shall Nathan Hale, that young and in
trepid martyr of liberty, fail longer to find a fitting
memorial in the Capitol of his native State, while his
less-deserving brother in courage and misfortune
sleeps in the world's foremost temple of glory, amid
its innumerable poetries of art and effigies of heroes ?
I put this question, and to give it more emphasis, I
repeat it here, in this presence, on this anniversary
day of our country's martyrs. And every son of
Connecticut that hath an ear to hear, let him hear.

Though there be something of intentional and
unconcealed reproof of ourselves in what I have just
now said, and something more perhaps implied in
what I am going next to say, I must not fail to add
that history, whatever may have been its misjudg-
ments in the past, is coming at last to be more
discriminating and judicial in its awards. Men are
beginning to think for themselves, and to unloose
their tongues when they think ; for the suppression
of thought and expression, as an art of governing, is
getting in these days to be dangerous to those who
govern; it breaks out in revolutions, or if not in
these, in dynamite and tyrannicide. And so the
world's opinion is coming to be more and more a
work of the brain and an inquisition of human con
science into human affairs. It is laying hold on all
public questions, movements, and men, and revising
old judgments and passing new ones by infinitely bet
ter moral standards. As a result of this, courage in
a bad cause is losing something of its old prestige ;
but displayed in the cause of justice or on the field
where old despotisms are cloven down and human
liberties are lifted up, it takes a nobility and glory
which it never before possessed — -a nobility and glory,
I may add, accorded in the popular mind to no other
human virtue known amongst men. I doubt if there
stands to-day, in the judgment of mankind, a greater
name than Washington's — not that he was the world's
greatest soldier, as a mere soldier — not that, at all, —
but that, considering the cause in which he fought,

the odds and perils encountered, the fortitude, unself
ishness and wisdom of his soldiership — considering
all these things, he was greater than Alexander,
Csesar, or Bonaparte, greater than the greatest.
Let me now add an illustration which brings me
nearer to the heart of my subject. An American
soldier of our own age and time has recently passed
round the globe. Kings, emperors, and peoples rose
up to do him homage. It was a triumph, such as the
world had never before witnessed. It may be said
that this was merely the homage paid to success. I
think not. The king of Prussia but five or six years
before passed the Rhine with his armies, and by prodi
gies of valor and skill subdued a nation of soldiers
which, not many years before, had subdued well nigh
the whole of Europe, and emphasized his triumph in
the world's eyes by crowning himself emperor of
Germany in the palaces of Louis XIV. Yet I
think it safe to say that, if the German emperor,
with the still greater Moltke and Bismarck in his
train, had made the circuit of the globe at the same
time on a different parallel of latitude, the honors of
the world would have easily been to the untitled
American captain. Why is this ? The answer, I
think, is not at all difficult. The emperor of Ger
many represented merely a duel of dynastic ambitions
and aggrandizements. General Grant, on the other
hand, represented not the lust of conquest, but a
people girding themselves to the defense of their gov-
2

10
ernment and liberties against dismemberment, anar
chy, and ultimate annihilation. In other words, he
represented no one man merely — not even himself;
not Sherman on his march to the sea ; not Hancock
on Cemetery Ridge ; not Hooker at Lookout Moun
tain ; not Sheridan in the Shenandoah ; not Terry in
the fiery hailstorm of Fort Fisher; not the gallant
Worden steaming at night into Hampton Roads, and
throwing himself in his little iron turret on the broad
sides of the Merrimac, and driving her back dismayed
and crippled into the defences of the main land ; not
the hero of the Kearsage bearing down upon the Ala
bama in seven circles of fire off Cherbourg, and sink
ing to the bottom like lead that accursed pirate of the
seas in full face of her French and English abettors,
accomplices, and allies ; not even Farragut — Nelson
and Exmouth were not greater than he — dashing to
the front in Mobile Bay, lashed in the shrouds of his
flagship, or moving on New Orleans at midnight past
blazing forts and batteries, in the midst of rebel shot
and shell, and rams, and chain-booms, and fire-rafts,
and sunken torpedoes — not these merely; not these
principally. These were mere individual phenomena
of courage, most illustrious to be sure ; but the world
had witnessed such phenomena before. No nation —
above all, no free one — can depend for its existence
on any one man, or any score of men, no matter how
great; but only on the courage and manhood
of the people. It is the men who carry muskets in
war and cast ballots in peace that save or destroy free

11
states. This is the most cardinal of all cardinal
truths. It was not then a great chieftain ; it was more
than this, much more ; it was a great people, I repeat,
struggling greatly in a great cause, the Union armies,
the heroic rank and file who mustered from the four
quarters of the loyal North, from fireside, field, work
shop, office, college, bar, and pulpit, and stood in the
files of war for four long and wasting years, and when
their work was done and the Union saved, unclad
themselves of their arms, shook off the habits of the
camp, and melted back at the word of command, a
million strong, without a ripple, into the arts and in
dustries of peace and the methods and obedience of
law ; it was these things that drew audience from the
world as your leader went round it. Such things as
these the world had not seen, such things its thinkers
and prophets had not foreseen. Viewed in this light,
the triumph was superb, viewed as mere hero-worship
it is simply vulgar.
How different — I come next to remark — ¦ how very
different the result achieved from that predicted by
our trans-Atlantic brethren. The worst enemies of
free government are not its enemies from without ; its
deadliest foes are they of its own household. That we
were invincible against foreign assault we had already
given proof in the Revolutionary war, in that of 1812,
and in the Mexican war. Were we capable of de
fending ourselves against ourselves ? This we hoped
and believed ; but the greater part of the old world
not only doubted but disbelieved it. And when the

12
shock came, and the flag of Sumpter fell, and the
curtain went down on Bull Run, and the national
debt was piled up to thousands of millions, they
thought, — not John Bright, nor Richard Cobden, and
such as they ; God bless them for their clearer faith
and clearer vision, — but the greater part of the states
men and scholars and ruling classes of the old world ;
the Palmerstons, Derbys, Russells, Macaulays, Carlyles,
and even the great Gladstone himself — they thought
to see the Republic rent in twain from top to bottom,
and then, as the natural and inevitable result of this,
subdivided at no distant clay into a score of petty
governments, vexing and wasting each other with
commercial retaliations, frontier quarrels, standing
armies, and internecine wars.
But, thank God ! our strength was equal to our
day. We proved it by more than six thousand
millions of treasure expended; by more than two
millions of men summoned to the field ; by hundreds
of thousands of slain or maimed and crippled martyrs
of the cause ; and by the courage and sacrifice of our
citizen soldiery on one of the largest and most difficult
theaters of war ever traversed by armies, and against
as valiant and resolute a foe as ever stood to arms since
the world began. Then consider, too, — do not by any
means fail to consider the patience, constancy, and for
titude of the people in support of the burdens of the
war, in spite of discouragement upon discouragement ;
defeat upon defeat; levy upon levy; a pressure of taxa
tion never before borne by a people with their own con-

13
sent ; the war expenses of the government increased
to three and one-half millions per day ; hostile diplo
macies, intrigues, and neutralities abroad and some
thing too much of slackness and disaffection at home ;
dangers of foreign intervention ; our commerce swept
from the seas by rebel cruisers bearing neutral flags
and fitted out from and finding welcome and shelter
in neutral ports ; a British island just off our coasts
converted into a depot of hostile supplies and a nest
of blockade-runners and privateers; our Canadian
neighbors not refusing hospitality and refuge to con
federate buccaneers on our Northern lakes, and even
to organized conspirators for the burning of Northern
cities and villages. In face of all these things, and in
spite of all these things, the great body of the Ameri
can people stood stout and stedfast to the Union and
as unvarying and unremoved in their great purpose
as the "Northern Star
Of whose true, fixed, and resting quality
There is no fellow in the firmament."
And now shall we hereafter be told, as we have
been told so many times before, that the Republic is
nothing but a rope of sand, unequal to the strains of
faction^ the development of national prosperity, and
the necessities of law, order, and defense ? Let a
brief comparison of history furnish the argument. Our
government has. been in existence for a century only.
In this brief interval what changes, revolutions, wars,
and devastations has it not seen on the continent of
Europe ? Kings and emperors dethroned, reinstated,

14
driven into exile, recalled, some assassinated, and some
self-imprisoned from fear, and depriving themselves
of their own liberty that they may continue to de
prive others of theirs, — and the regicide's knife still
drawn; kingdoms and empires dismembered, consoli
dated, dissevered, reformed, and nearly every one
either subjugated or else invaded and ravaged ; the
map of Europe unmade, remade, and still remaking ; a
French army, now while I am speaking, waging a war
of subjugation in Northern Africa; a British army
doing the same in Southern Africa and Central Asia ;
and the Ottoman empire reeling to its fall, with a
congress of nations casting lots on its vesture, and
sitting in armed observation on the body to protect it
from pillage by each other, — and the end not yet.
In the meantime and during the same interval,
what a contrasted history of stability and enlargement
has not the Republic witnessed at home ? The states
of the Union almost trebled in number ; its popula
tion multiplied from less than 4,000,000 to 50,000,000 ;
its territory enlarged from 800,000 square miles to more
than 3,500,000; its frontiers of settlement extended
from a narrow belt on the Atlantic to the Rocky Moun
tains, and from these to the Pacific ; a wilderness con
verted into an empire of fertile fields, a granary of na
tions, and a hive of thrifty homes and busy and various
arts and industries ; and during all this time no single
acre of territory lost, the map of the Republic unchanged
except by enlargements ; not a star struck from its
flag, and no serf or bondman under its folds ; no man's

15
liberty at the mercy of an autocrat, and no ruler's life
at the mercy of socialists, nihilists, and organized
assassins ; no landless multitudes clamoring for bread,
and held from rebellion by martial law and standing
armies, or crossing the seas to avoid conscription,
poverty, and famine ; but a mighty republic stretching
from the barriers of one ocean to the other, not mailed
in armor or propped on bayonets, but reposing sim
ply on the consent of the governed, the intelligence of
the people, and the authority of law.
This is not a picture of fancy, but a plain parallel,
or contrast rather, of historical facts. I know that
all governments must have their rise and fall ; but so
much, it seems to me, we may justly say of the com
parative strength and stability of our own.
That these things are so, — that the Republic is not
a thing of yesterday, but still exists, for ourselves, our
children, and our children's children, is owing to your
devotion, courage, and sacrifice in the war for the
Union. By these you have secured us a new and
enduring lease of national existence ; given to the
world new proof of American manhood and courage ;
made your country more glorious in the family of
nations ; added an imperishable lustre to its arms ;
given liberty to 4,000,000 of bondmen ; made all men
equal before the law ; rendered possible in the future
a development of the institutions of free government
and of national prosperity, such as the world. has not
yet seen ; and — better than this, better than all — have

16
added to the victories of war the better victories of
peace, and brought back — so far, at least, as the mis
erable debasements and bigotries of party politics
will allow it, — brought back the enemies whom ^you
conquered in arms into the reconciliations of a com
mon citizenship, a voluntary allegiance to a common
flag, and the common love of a common country.
What civil war before ever ended with itself, or failed
to poison the blood both of the combatants and their
posterities with hereditary hatreds and enmities ? It
seems to me to be your peculiar glory that you fought
for the common advantage both of yourselves and of
your enemies, and that in the end all — both they of the
blue and they of the gray — should share alike in a
common heritage of constitutional law and freedom,
no longer conquerors or conquered, — but brothers again
of a common blood, hope, and destiny. Of this great
work of yours, history has already made record, and
Jefferson Davis will not be able to unwrite, rewrite,
or miswrite one word of it. All these things will
one day become classical in history. I know no
reason why they who fought in our day for the Union,
should not become as famous as they who of old
fought at Platsea, and with infinitely better cause ; nor
why Appomattox should not become as memorable in
the world's future as Agincourt or Waterloo.
And so, as I fling back to my mind the pictures of
the war, its events take in retrospect the grandest
proportions, imports, and dignities. When we were

17
on the eve of the struggle, it was difficult to resolve
the problem, and to forecast the end from the begin-
nin& — still more so when we were in the hurricane of
its shifting forces, tragedies, and events. Little by
little we discerned its approach and heard the hurtle
of its coming, and not without a shudder at its awful
possibilities. We held our breath, praying it might
pass from us, but standing in our lot, if come it must.
And when at last it came, it came dark, thick, and
confused. In the clouds and thunderings and light
nings of the storm we could only see, by gleams, our
own directions and driftings. God's balances, wherein
we were being weighed, seemed at times trembling
to our eyes. We saw at the first our armies hurrying
to the field in confident, perhaps over-confident valor ;
we saw them afterward in rout and dismay at Bull Run ;
victorious at New Orleans ; falling back from the
Peninsula ; rooted in their places at Antietam ; wa
vering at Shiloh ; recoiling at Fredericksburg and
Chancellors ville ; triumphant at Gettysburg ; wading
in slaughter through the Wilderness ; staggering back
in dreadful carnage at Cold Harbor ; then gathering
themselves in a deadly coil on Richmond ; next hang
ing on the flank of Lee's retreating columns and encom
passing him in his flight ; and finally crowned with
victory at Appomattox, the Union saved, and peace
restored. Meantime, the people stood as a grand reserve
behind their defenders at the front, in far humbler
labors than yours, to be sure, but yet bending them-
3

18
selves right loyally to their burdens, pouring out their
treasure like water, taxing to its utmost the nation's
credit, themselves, and everything they possessed,
filling your military chests, recruiting your thinned
ranks with new levies, caring for your widows,
children, and orphans ; even your mothers, wives, and
sisters sharing in the common labors of all, using
their fingers instead of swords, sending food, clothing,
and sanitary supplies to the camp, and furnishing to
the sick and wounded the tender ministrations of
womanhood in the hospitals, till the end came, — and
when the end came, and the clouds stood aside, and
the noise of the battle was still, and we saw the
return of your brave legions grizzled, scarred, and
warworn, bearing the riddled ensigns under which
and for which they had fought on a hundred fields of
blood ; when we saw this great coming up out of the
Red Sea in triumph, we repented us — we who had
been at our homes while you were in the trenches,
we who had abode in the sheepfolds while you were
jeoparding your lives to the death in the high places
of the field, — we repented us that we had not been
with you in your perils and were not of you in your
honors and triumphs.
As for myself, to this day, and more and more as
the years go by, I never meet a scarred or mutilated
soldier of the war that I do not seem to hold my own
manhood cheap. I never come before a band of
gallant veterans like this here assembled to-night, that

19
I do not feel envious of their honors and reproached
by their presence — something of that gentle reproof
of Henry IV. to his absent friend after a great battle
gained : Pends-toi, brave Grillon, nous avons vainqu a
Argues, et tu rty Staispas — Slay yourself, good Crillon,
we have conquered at Arques, and you were not there.
For, I repeat, not till after the war was closed could
we discover its truest and grandest imports ; and now,
after the lapse of many years, better even than then,
are we able to throw into their proper perspective the
events and consequences of the struggle and to meas
ure the exceeding greatness of the work and the merits
of the workers.
In view of these things, then, it is meet and right
that to-day, and at every recurring spring-tide, when
the sky is bluest and the earth greenest above the
graves of your dead comrades, from every town, city,
and hamlet that sent a Union soldier to the war, you
gather together, as you are wont, and strengthen your
old fellowships of peril and recall the stirring memo
ries of the field — a thousand great and tender recol
lections ; common hopes, fears, privations and dangers ;
companionships of the march, the bivouac, the outpost,
the line of battle ; all the checkered fortunes of the
field, the surprise, the alarm, the rally, the repulse, the
defeat, the going away into captivity ; standards lost
and regained, columns reeling, plowed through, closed
up, advancing, and fallen comrades left behind in the
red furrows of war ; the storming of fiery intrench-

20
ments, the capture of besieged places ; and finally in
his own good time God's blessing on your struggling
arms, the enemy vanquished, victory achieved, and
the Union saved.
Gather together, then, from year to year, — you who
remain, already lessened, and still faster lessening as
the hurrying years go by, — recall these great and
heroic memories that they fade not ; review your
solemn dead-rolls, your great and multiplying dead-
rolls ; strew the ashes of your sleeping comrades with
the best blooms and verdures of departing spring, and
mark their graves with waving pennons of red, white,
and blue. Brothers in such perils, companionships,
and glories as these, you are brothers until death, —
the living and the dead in one.
An anniversary which brings together with one
accord the survivors of the grand old Union armies
with bowed heads about the graves of their fallen
comrades, is sacramental, sacrificial, and full of human
pathos.

¦!¦

I I