Thomas B. Reed

[Speech of Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, of Hartford, Conn., at the eighty-second annual dinner of the New England Society in the City of New York, December 22, 1887. The President, Horace Russell, occupied the chair. Mr. Twichell responded to the first toast, "Forefathers' Day."]

Mr. President and Gentlemen:—I have heard of an Irishman who, on being asked by a kind-hearted person if he would have a drink of whiskey, made no reply at first, but struck an attitude and stood gazing up into the sky. "What are you looking at, Mike?" inquired his friend. "Bedad, sir," said Mike, "I thought an angel spoke to me." [Much laughter.]

Somewhat so did I feel, Mr. President, when I got your invitation to be here this evening and speak. I own I was uncommonly pleased by it. I considered it the biggest compliment of the kind I had ever received in my life. For that matter it was too big, as I had to acknowledge. That, however, sir, was your affair; and so, without stopping much to think, and before I could muster the cowardice to decline, I accepted it. [Laughter.] But as soon as I began to reflect, especially when I came to ask myself what in the world I had or could have to say in this august presence, I was scared to think of what I had done. I was like the man who while breaking a yoke of steers that he held by a rope, having occasion to use both his hands in letting down a pair of bars, fetched the rope a turn around one of his legs. That instant something frightened the steers, and that unfortunate farmer was tripped up and snaked off feet first on a wild, erratic excursion, a mile or so, over rough ground, as long as the rope lasted, and left in a very lamentable condition, indeed. His neighbors ran to him and gathered him up and laid him together, and waited around for him to come to; which, when he did, one of them inquired of him how he came to do such a thing as hitch a rope around his leg under such circumstances. "Well," said he, "we hadn't gone five rods 'fore I see my mistake." [Hearty laughter.]

But here I am, and the President has passed the tremendous subject of Forefathers' Day, like a Rugby ball, into my hands—after making elegant play with it himself—and, frightful as the responsibility is, I realize that I've got to do something with it—and do it mighty quick. [Laughter.] This is a festive hour, and even a preacher mustn't be any more edifying in his remarks, I suppose, than he can help. And I promise accordingly to use my conscientious endeavors to-night to leave this worshipful company no better than I found it. [Laughter.]

But, gentlemen, well intending as one may be to that effect, and lightly as he may approach the theme of the Forefathers, the minute he sets foot within its threshold he stops his fooling and gets his hat off at once. [Applause.]

Those unconscious, pathetic heroes, pulling their shallop ashore on the Cape yonder in 1620—what reverence can exceed their just merit! What praise can compass the virtue of that sublime, unconquerable manhood, by which in the calamitous, woful days that followed, not accepting deliverance, letting the Mayflower go back empty, they stayed perishing by the graves of their fallen; rather, stayed fast by the flickering flame of their living truth, and so invoked and got on their side forever the force of that great law of the universe, "except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." How richly and how speedily fruitful that seed was, we know. It did not wait for any large unfolding of events on these shores to prove the might of its quickening. "Westward the star of empire takes its way." Yes, but the first pulse of vital power from the new State moved eastward. For behold it still in its young infancy—if it can be said to have had an infancy—stretching a strong hand of help across the sea to reinforce the cause of that Commonwealth, the rise of which marks the epoch of England's new birth in liberty. [Applause.]

The pen of New England, fertilized by freedom and marvellously prolific ere a single generation passed, was indeed the Commonwealth's true nursing mother. Cromwell, Hampden, Sidney, Milton, Owen, were disciples of teachers mostly from this side the Atlantic. Professor Masson, of Edinburgh University, in his admirable "Life of Milton," enumerates seventeen New England men whom he describes as "potent" in England in that period. Numbers went to England in person, twelve of the first twenty graduates of Harvard College prior to 1646, among them; and others, not a few representing the leading families of the colonies, who going over with their breasts full of New England milk, nourished the heart of the great enterprise; "performed," so Palfrey tells us, "parts of consequence in the Parliamentary service, and afterward in the service of the Protectorate." It is not too much to say that on the fields of Marston Moor and Naseby New England appeared; and that those names may fairly be written on her banners. [Applause.]

That, I would observe—and Mr. Grady would freely concede it—was before there was much mingling anywhere of the Puritan and the Cavalier blood, save as it ran together between Cromwell's Ironsides and Rupert's troopers. I would observe also that the propagation eastward inaugurated in that early day has never ceased. The immigration of populations hither from Europe, great a factor as it has been in shaping the history of this continent, has not been so great a factor as the emigration of ideas the other way has been, and continues to be, in shaping the history of Europe, and of the mother country most of all. But that carries me where I did not intend to go.

An inebriated man who had set out to row a boat across a pond was observed to pursue a very devious course. On being hailed and asked what the matter was, he replied that it was the rotundity of the earth that bothered him; he kept sliding off. So it is the rotundity of my subject that bothers me. But I do mean to stay on one hemisphere of it if possible. [Laughter.]

The Forefathers were a power on earth from the start—and that by the masterful quality of their mind and spirit. They had endless pluck, intellectual and moral. They believed that the kingdom in this world was with ideas. It was, you might say, one of their original Yankee notions that it was the property of a man to have opinions and to stand by them to the death. Judged from the standpoint of their times, as any one who will take the pains to look will discover, they were tolerant men; but they were fell debaters, and they were no compromisers. They split hairs, if you will, but they wouldn't split the difference. [Laughter.]

A German professor of theology is reported to have said in lecturing to his students on the Existence of God, that while the doctrine, no doubt, was an important one, it was so difficult and perplexed that it was not advisable to take too certain a position upon it, as many were disposed to do. There were those, he remarked, who were wont in the most unqualified way to affirm that there was a God. There were others who, with equal immoderation, committed themselves to the opposite proposition—that there was no God. The philosophical mind, he added, will look for the truth somewhere between these extremes. The Forefathers had none of that in theirs. [Laughter and applause.]

They were men who employed the great and responsible gift of speech honestly and straightforwardly. There was a sublime sincerity in their tongues. They spoke their minds.

Their sons, I fear, have declined somewhat from their veracity at that precise point. At times we certainly have, and have had to be brought back to it by severest pains—as, for example, twenty-six years ago by the voice of Beauregard's and Sumter's cannon, which was a terrible voice indeed, but had this vast merit that it told the truth, and set a whole people free to say what they thought once more. [Great applause.]

Our fathers of the early day were not literary; but they were apt, when they spoke, to make themselves understood.

There was in my regiment during the war—I was a chaplain—a certain corporal, a gay-hearted fellow and a good soldier, of whom I was very fond—with whom on occasion of his recovery from a dangerous sickness I felt it my duty to have a serious pastoral talk; and while he convalesced I watched for an opportunity for it. As I sat one day on the side of his bed in the hospital tent chatting with him, he asked me what the campaign, when by and by spring opened, was going to be. I told him that I didn't know. "Well," said he, "I suppose that General McClellan knows all about it." (This was away back in 1861, not long after we went to the field.) I answered: "General McClellan has his plans, of course, but he doesn't know. Things may not turn out as he expects." "But," said the corporal, "President Lincoln knows, doesn't he?" "No," I said, "he doesn't know, either. He has his ideas, but he can't see ahead any more than General McClellan can." "Dear me," said the corporal, "it would be a great comfort if there was somebody that did know about things"—and I saw my chance. "True, corporal," I observed, "that's a very natural feeling; and the blessed fact is there is One who does know everything, both past and future, about you and me, and about this army; who knows when we are going to move, and where to, and what's going to happen; knows the whole thing." "Oh," says the corporal, "you mean old Scott!" [Laughter.]

The Forefathers generally spared people the trouble of guessing what they were driving at. [Applause.]

That for which they valued education was that it gave men power to think and reason and form judgments and communicate and expound the same, and so capacitated them for valid membership of the Church and of the State. And that was still another original Yankee notion.

Not often has the nature and the praise of it been more worthily expressed, that I am aware of, than in these sentences, which I lately happened upon, the name of whose author I will, by your leave, reserve till I have repeated them: "Next to religion they prized education. If their lot had been cast in some pleasant place of the valley of the Mississippi, they would have sown wheat and educated their children; but as it was, they educated their children and planted whatever might grow and ripen on that scanty soil with which capricious nature had tricked off and disguised the granite beds beneath. Other colonies would have brought up some of the people to the school; they, if I may be allowed so to express it, let down the school to all the people, not doubting but by doing so the people and the school would rise of themselves."

I do not know if Cardinal Gibbons is present; I do not recognize him. If he is, I am pleased to have had the honor to recite in his hearing and to commend to his attention these words, so true, so just, so appreciative, of a distinguished ecclesiastic of his communion; for they were spoken by the late Archbishop Hughes in a public lecture in this city in 1852. [Applause.]

I would, however, much rather have recited them in the ears of those Protestant Americans—alas, that there should be born New Englanders among them, that is, such according to the flesh, not according to the spirit—who are wont to betray a strange relish for disparaging both the principles and the conduct of our great sires in that early day when they were sowing in weakness what has ever since been rising with power.

There have always, indeed, been those who were fond of spying the blemishes of New England, of illustrating human depravity by instances her sinners contributed. With the open spectacle of armies of beggars—God's beggars they are; I do not object to them—continually swarming in across her borders, as bees to their meadows, and returning not empty, they keep on calling her close-fisted. They even blaspheme her weather—her warm-hearted summers and her magnificent winters. There is, to be sure, a time along in March—but let that pass. [Laughter.]

I refer to this without the least irritation. I do not complain of it. On the contrary, I glory in it. I love her for the enemies she has made. [Laughter.]

She is the church member among the communities, and must catch it accordingly. It is the saints who are always in the wrong. [Laughter.]

Elijah troubled Israel. Daniel was a nuisance in Babylon. And long may New England be such as to make it an object to find fault with her. [Hearty applause.]

Such she will be so long as she is true to herself—true to her great traditions; true to the principles of which her life was begotten; so long as her public spirit has supreme regard to the higher ranges of the public interest; so long as in her ancient glorious way she leaves the power of the keys in the hands of the people; so long as her patriotism springs, as in the beginning it sprang, from the consciousness of rights wedded to the consciousness of duties; so long as by her manifold institutions of learning, humanity, religion, thickly sown, multitudinous, universal, she keeps the law of the Forefathers' faith, that "Man lives not by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." [Prolonged applause.]

THE SOLDIER STAMP

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the New England Society:—The posture of my mind the last fortnight relative to the duty of the present hour—which, indeed, I was proud to be assigned to, as I ought to have been, but which has been a black care to me ever since I undertook it—has a not inapt illustration in the case of the old New England parson who, when asked why he was going to do a certain thing that had been laid upon him, yet the thought of which affected him with extreme timidity, answered: "I wouldn't if I didn't suppose it had been foreordained from all eternity—and I'm a good mind to not as it is." [Laughter.] However, I have the undisguised good-will of my audience to begin with, and that's half the battle. The forefathers, in whose honor we meet, were men of good-will, profoundly so; but they were, in their day, more afraid of showing it, in some forms, than their descendants happily are.

The first time I ever stood in the pulpit to preach was in the meeting-house of the ancient Connecticut town where I was brought up. That was a great day for our folks and all my old neighbors, you may depend. After benediction, when I passed out into the vestibule, I was the recipient there of many congratulatory expressions. Among my friends in the crowd was an aged deacon, a man in whom survived, to a rather remarkable degree, the original New England Puritan type, who had known me from the cradle, and to whom the elevation I had reached was as gratifying as it could possibly be to anybody. But when he saw the smile of favor focussed on me there, and me, I dare say, appearing to bask somewhat in it, the dear old man took alarm. He was apprehensive of the consequences to that youngster. And so, taking me by the hand and wrestling down his natural feelings—he was ready to cry for joy—he said: "Well, Joseph, I hope you'll live to preach a great deal better than that!" [Laughter.] It was an exceedingly appropriate remark, and a very tender one if you were at the bottom of it.

That severe, undemonstrative New England habit, that emotional reserve and self-suppression, though it lingers here and there, has mostly passed away and is not to be regretted. As much as could be has been made of it to our forefathers' discredit, as has been made of everything capable of being construed unfavorably to them. They to whom what they call the cant of the Puritan is an offence, themselves have established and practise a distinct anti-Puritan cant with which we are all familiar. The very people who find it abhorrent and intolerable that they were such censors of the private life of their contemporaries, do not scruple to bring to bear on their private life a search-light that leaves no accessible nook of it unexplored, and regarding any unpretty trait espied by that unsparing inquest the rule of judgment persistently employed—as one is obliged to perceive—tends to be: "No explanation wanted or admitted but the worst." [Applause.]

Accordingly, the infestive deportment characteristic of the New England colonist has been extensively interpreted as the indisputable index of his sour and morose spirit, begotten of his religion. I often wonder that, in computing the cause of his rigorous manners, so inadequate account is wont to be made of his situation, as in a principal and long-continuing aspect substantially military—which it was. The truth is, his physiognomy was primarily the soldier stamp on him.

If you had been at Gettysburg on the morning of July 2, 1863, as I was, and had perused the countenance of the First and Eleventh Corps, exhausted and bleeding with the previous day's losing battle, and the countenance of the Second, Third, and Twelfth Corps, getting into position to meet the next onset, which everybody knew was immediately impending, you would have said that it was a sombre community—that Army of the Potomac—with a good deal of grimness in the face of it; with a notable lack of the playful element, and no fiddling or other fine arts to speak of.

As sure as you live, gentlemen, that is no unfair representation of how it was with the founders of the New England commonwealths in their planting period.

The Puritan of the seventeenth century lived, moved, and had his being on the field of an undecided struggle for existence—the New England Puritan most emphatically so. He was under arms in body much of the time—in mind all the time. Nothing can be truer than to say that. And yet people everlastingly pick and poke at him for being stern-featured and deficient in the softer graces of life.

It was his beauty that he was so, for it grew out of and was befitting his circumstances. And I, for one, love to see that austere demeanor so far as it is yet hereditary on the old soil—and some of it is left—thinking of its origin. It is the signature of a fighting far more than of an ascetic ancestry—memorial of a new Pass of ThermopylÆ held by the latest race of Spartans on the shores of a new world. [Applause.]

It may be doubted if ever in the history of mankind was displayed a quality of public courage—of pure, indomitable pluck—surpassing that of the New England plantations in their infant day. No condition of its extremest proof was lacking. While the Bay Colony, for example, was in the pinch of its first wrestle with Nature for a living, much as ever able to furnish its table with a piece of bread—with the hunger-wolf never far away from the door, and behind that wolf the Narragansett and the Pequot, at what moment to burst into savagery none could tell—in the season when mere existence was the purchase of physical toil, universal and intense, and of watching night and day—there came from the old country, from the high places of authority, the peremptory mandate: Send us back that charter! Under the clause of it granting you the rule of your own affairs, you are claiming more than was intended or can be allowed. Send it back! And what was the answer? Mind, there were less than 5,000 souls of them, all told: less than 1,000 grown men. On the one hand the power of England—on the other that scrap of a new-born State, sore pressed with difficulties already.

What was the answer? Why, they got out some old cannon they had and mounted them, and moulded a stock of bullets, and distributed powder, and took of every male citizen above the age of sixteen an oath of allegiance to Massachusetts—and then set their teeth and waited to see what would happen. And that was their answer. It meant distinctly: Our charter, which we had of the King's majesty (and therefore came we hither), is our lawful possession—fair title to the territory we occupy and the rights we here exercise. And whoever wants it has got to come and take it. Surrender it we never will! [Applause.]

Nor was that the only time. Again and again during the Colony's initial stage, when it was exceedingly little of stature and had enough to do to keep the breath of life in it, that demand was renewed with rising anger and with menaces; yet never could those Puritans of the Bay be scared into making a solitary move of any kind toward compliance with it. David with his sling daring Goliath in armor is an insufficient figure of that nerve, that transcendent grit, that superb gallantry. Where will you look for its parallel? I certainly do not know. [Applause.]

They used to tell during the war of a colonel who was ordered to assault a position which his regiment, when they had advanced far enough to get a good look at it, saw to be so impossible that they fell back and became immovable. Whereupon (so the story ran) the colonel, who took the same sense of the situation that his command did, yet must do his duty, called out in an ostensibly pleading and fervid voice: "Oh, don't give it up so! Forward again! Forward! Charge! Great heavens, men, do you want to live forever?" [Laughter.]

How those first New England Puritans we are speaking of were to come off from their defiance of the crown alive could scarcely be conjectured. The only ally they had was distance. The thing they ventured on was the chance that the Royal Government, which had troubles nearer home, would have its hands too full to execute its orders 3,000 miles away across the sea by force. But they accepted all hazards whatsoever of refusing always to obey those orders. They held on to their charter like grim death, and they kept it in their time. More than once or twice it seemed as good as gone; but delay helped them; turns of events helped them; God's providence delivered them, they thought; anyhow, they kept it; that intrepid handful against immeasurable odds, mainly because it lay not in the power of mortal man to intimidate them. And I contend that, all things considered, no more splendid exhibition of the essential stuff of manhood stands on human record. They were no hot-heads. All that while, rash as they appeared, their pulse was calm. The justifying reasons of their course were ever plain before their eyes. They were of the kind of men who understood their objects.

The representative of an English newspaper, sent some time since to Ireland to move about and learn by personal observation the real political mind of the people there, reported on his return that he had been everywhere and talked with all sorts, and that as nearly as he could make out, the attitude of the Irish might be stated about thus: "They don't know what they want—and they are bound to have it." [Laughter.]

But those unbending Forefathers well knew what they wanted that charter for. It was their legal guarantee of the privilege of a spacious freedom, civil and religious, and all that they did and risked for its sake is witness of the price at which they held that privilege. It was not that they had any special objection to the interference in the province of their domestic administration of the king as a king; for you find them presently crying "Hands Off!" to the Puritan Parliament as strenuously as ever they said it to the agents of Charles I. It was simply and positively the value they set on the self-governing independence that had been pledged them at the beginning of the enterprise.

And who that has a man's heart in him but must own that their inspiration to such a degree, with such an idea and sentiment in the time, place, and circumstances in which they stood, was magnificent? Was the inexorable unrelaxing determination with which they, being so few and so poor, maintained their point somewhat wrought into their faces? Very probably. Strange if it had not been. Of course, it was. But if they were stern-visaged in their day, it was that we in our day, which in vision they foresaw, might of all communities beneath the sun have reason for a cheerful countenance. [Applause.]

They achieved immense great things for us, those Puritan men who were not smiling enough to suit the critics. The real foundation on which the structure of American national liberty subsequently rose was laid by them in those first heroic years.

And what a marvel it was, when you stop to think, that in conditions so hard, so utterly prosaic, calculated to clip the wings of generous thought, they maintained themselves in that elevation of sentiment, that supreme estimate of the unmaterial, the ideal factors of life that distinguished them—in such largeness of mind and of spirit altogether. While confronting at deadly close quarters their own necessities and perils, their sympathies were wide as the world. To their brethren in old England, contending with tyranny, every ship that crossed the Atlantic carried their benediction. Look at the days of thanksgiving and of fast with which they followed the shifting fortunes of the wars of Protestantism—which were wars for humanity—on the continent! Look at the vital consequence they attached to the interest of education; at the taxes that in their penury, and while for the most part they still lived in huts, they imposed on themselves to found and to sustain the institution of the school! [Applause.]

"Child," said a matron of primitive New England to her young son, "if God make thee a good Christian and a good scholar, thou hast all that ever thy mother asked for thee." And so saying she spoke like a true daughter of the Puritans.

They were poets—those brave, stanch, aspiring souls, whose will was adamant and who feared none but God. Only, as Charles Kingsley has said, they did not sing their poetry like birds, but acted it like men. [Applause.] It was their high calling to stand by the divine cause of human progress at a momentous crisis of its evolution, and they were worthy to be put on duty at that post. Evolution! I hardly dare speak the word, knowing so little about the thing. It represents a very great matter, which I am humbly conscious of being about as far from surrounding as was a simple-minded Irish priest I have been told of, who, having heard that we were descended from monkeys, yet not quite grasping the chronology of the business, the next time he visited a menagerie, gave particular and patient attention to a large cage of our alleged poor relations on exhibition there. He stood for a long time intently scrutinizing their human-like motions, gestures, and expressions. By and by he fancied that the largest of them, an individual of a singularly grave demeanor, seated at the front of the cage, gave him a glance of intelligence. The glance was returned. A palpable wink followed, which also was returned, as were other like signals; and so it went on until his Reverence, having cast an eye around to see that nobody was observing him, leaned forward and said, in a low, confidential tone: "Av ye'll spake one w-u-r-r-d, I'll baptize ye, begorra!" [Laughter.]

But, deficient as one's knowledge of evolution, scientifically and in detail, may be, he may have attained to a not unintelligent perception of the all-embracing creative process called by that name as that in which, in the whole range of the advancing universal movement of life, what is ascends from what was, and fulfils it.

And what I wish to say for my last word is, that whoever of us in tracing back along the line of its potent and fruitful sources that which is his noblest heritage as an American and a member of the English race, leaves out that hard-featured forefather of ours on the shore of Massachusetts Bay in the seventeenth century, and makes not large account of the tremendous fight he fought which was reflected in the face he wore, misses a chief explanation of the fortune to which we and our children are born. [Loud applause.]