Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z
History
Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z
Speeches, addresses, etc.
And the Cavaliers, who missed their stirrups, somehow, and got into
Yankee saddles? The woods were full of them. If Custer was not a
Cavalier, Rupert was a Puritan. And Sherwood and Wadsworth and Kearny,
and McPherson and their dashing companions and followers! The one
typical Puritan soldier of the war--mark you!--was a Southern, and not a
Northern, soldier; Stonewall Jackson, of the Virginia line. And, if we
should care to pursue the subject farther back, what about Ethan Allen
and John Stark and Mad Anthony Wayne--Cavaliers each and every one?
Indeed, from Israel Putnam to "Buffalo Bill," it seems to me the
Puritans have had rather the best of it in turning out Cavaliers. So the
least said about the Puritan and the Cavalier--except as blessed
memories or horrid examples--the better for historic accuracy.
If you wish to get at the bottom facts, I don't mind telling you--in
confidence--that it was we Scotch-Irish who vanquished both of you--some
of us in peace--others of us in war--supplying the missing link of
adaptability--the needed ingredient of common sense--the conservative
principle of creed and action, to which this generation of Americans
owes its intellectual and moral emancipation from frivolity and
pharisaism--its rescue from the Scarlet Woman and the mailed hand--and
its crystallization into a national character and polity, ruling by
force of brains and not by force of arms.
Gentlemen--Sir--I, too, have been to Boston. Strange as the admission
may seem, it is true; and I live to tell the tale. I have been to
Boston; and when I declare that I found there many things that suggested
the Cavalier and did not suggest the Puritan, I shall not say I was
sorry. But among other things, I found there a civilization perfect in
its union of the art of living with the grace of life; an Americanism
ideal in its simple strength. Grady told us, and told us truly, of that
typical American who, in Dr. Talmage's mind's eye, was coming, but who,
in Abraham Lincoln's actuality, had already come. In some recent studies
into the career of that great man, I have encountered many startling
confirmations of this judgment; and from that rugged trunk, drawing its
sustenance from gnarled roots, interlocked with Cavalier sprays and
Puritan branches deep beneath the soil, shall spring, is springing, a
shapely tree--symmetric in all its parts--under whose sheltering boughs
this nation shall have the new birth of freedom Lincoln promised it, and
mankind the refuge which was sought by the forefathers when they fled
from oppression. Thank God, the axe, the gibbet, and the stake have had
their day. They have gone, let us hope, to keep company with the lost
arts. It has been demonstrated that great wrongs may be redressed and
great reforms be achieved without the shedding of one drop of human
blood; that vengeance does not purify, but brutalizes; and that
tolerance, which in private transactions is reckoned a virtue, becomes
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