“The story of his great achievement in retiring his entire force in the face of a vastly superior English army, of the masterly retreat covered by his most skilfully selected position at Butts Hill, as I believe it is called—as to its proper name, I shall not attempt to correct a Rhode Island audience—a retreat effected finally so completely that not a man was left behind and not a single article lost, while, in the course of that retreat, signal and marked punishment was inflicted upon the British army, will ever read like a romance of model leadership, and, if General John Sullivan had no other memory, my friends, than of what he did within a radius of sixty miles of this Capitol, his fame could be no less great and no less enduring than it is, and, what is more, would be richly deserved. “Thus briefly, as becomes my scanty time, I have sketched the work of John Sullivan to the close of 1778. I have not made the motive of my story clear if it has not already appeared that this man was greater in the hour of undeserved disappointment than most men in the exaltation of victory. Again and again, the fruits of deserved and brilliant success were held to his lips, only to be dashed away by the folly of the foibles of some weaker spirit necessarily entangled in his plans. Yet never for an instant did he yield to the despair and mortification which would have sunk less noble souls. Each disappointment seemed to but nerve him to stronger and more brilliant efforts. And herein, my friends, to my mind, is illustrated and should be made prominent one grand characteristic which we have taken from the noble Irish race. The patience under disappointment which Major General John Sullivan illustrates, the patience under disappointment which again and again was manifestly the fault of men to whom he never gave a word of rebuke or complaint, the steadfast iron determination with which he set to work instantly to repair the ruin that some, associated in common with him, had wrought, is the brightest leaf in the chaplet which America has put upon his grave.