340J 
 E8D2 
 
 IRLF 
 
 . 
 
 ITifc atrfc ^crimes 
 
 EDWARD EVERETT. 
 
 AN ADDRESS 
 
 BY RICHARD H. DANA, JR. 
 

AN ADDRESS 
 
 LIFE AND SERVICES 
 
 EDWARD EVERETT; 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE 
 
 MUNICIPAL AUTHORITIES AND CITIZENS 
 
 OF C A M B R I D G E, 
 
 KKBIiUAKY 22, 18(35. 
 
 BY RICHARD H. DANA, JK 
 
 C A M T> RIDGE: 
 S E V E R AN I> F R A N ( J L S . 
 
 1865. 
 
1-0 
 
 Cambridge Jpress. 
 
 I) A K I N A X D M E T C A L K. 
 
CITY OF CAMBRIDGE, 
 
 MAYOR S OFFICE, Feb. 23, 18Gf>. 
 HON. RrcHARD II. DAXA. JR. 
 
 DKAR SIR : Permit me, in behalf of the City Council of Cambridge, 
 and in accordance with the concurrent vote of both branches, a copy of 
 which is herewith enclosed, to tender to you our thanks for the inter 
 esting and eloquent address upon the life and services of Edward Everett, 
 delivered on the 22d inst., and to ask of you a copy of the address for 
 publication. 
 
 Yours, respectfully, 
 
 J. WARREN MERRILL, 
 
 Ma ijor. 
 
 MARCH 7, 1805. 
 
 SIR : I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of your communica 
 tion, with the vote of the City Council, expressing their thanks for the 
 address it was my privilege to deliver before them on the 22d ult., 
 and requesting a copy for the press. 
 
 I have reduced the address to writing, and am happy to submit the 
 manuscript to their disposal. 
 
 Believe me, 
 
 Very respectfully yours, 
 
 RICH? II. DANA, JR. 
 1 1 is Honor, 
 
 J. W. MEIUULT,, Maor. 
 
 M180G15 
 
of Cambribge, 
 
 Ix COMMON COUNCIL, March 22, 1865. 
 
 Ordered, That there bo printed, under the direction of the Joint 
 Standing Committee on Printing, for the use of the City Council, one 
 thousand copies of the Address delivered by Richard H. Dana, Jr., Esq., 
 before the City Government, on the 22d February last, in commemora 
 tion of the Life and Services of EDWARD EVERETT. 
 
 Adopted, and sent up for concurrence. 
 
 ATTEST, JOS. G. HOLT, Clerk. 
 
 IN BOARD OF ALDERMEN, March 22, 1865. 
 Concurred. 
 
 ATTEST, JUSTIN A. JACOBS, City Clerk. 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 MR. MAYOR, AND GENTLEMEN OF THE CITY COUNCIL, 
 
 When we were all seeking for some phrase to 
 express our sense of the worth and dignity of the 
 man who has been taken from us, some one, I know 
 not who, had the felicity to speak of him as the 
 First Citizen of the Republic. I believe the fitness 
 of this appellation has been recognized by the com 
 munity ; and when Mr. Seward, at the seat of gov 
 ernment, by order of the President, announced to 
 the whole country the death of EDWARD EVERETT, 
 and requested that all honor should be paid to his 
 memory wherever, at home or abroad, the national 
 authority was recognized, all the people said Amen ! 
 
 He belonged, indeed, to the whole country. Sci 
 ence had a claim upon him. In his youth, Poetry 
 marked him for her own. The Fine Arts, in all 
 their forms, recognized in him a devoted student. 
 Public Law, international and constitutional, ac 
 knowledged him one of her best interpreters. And, 
 the civilized world over, whatever the differences of 
 
 7 
 
L v L l l t ^ >\ \, 1 ADDRESS. 
 
 language or the laws of naturalization, he was one 
 of the foremost citizens of the Universal Republic 
 of Letters. 
 
 And yet, Mr. Mayor, you advanced no more than 
 a just claim when you recommended to your brethren 
 of the City Council that Cambridge should assert her 
 privilege of expressing, on this day, by civic and 
 military honors and public speech, the sentiment of 
 the community. 
 
 Mr. Everett was born in a neighboring town, passed 
 his boyhood in the adjoining city, and at the age of 
 thirteen came to Cambridge to enter our University. 
 His whole academic life was spent here. In the old 
 meeting-house, now no more, scarce a bow r -shot from 
 where we stand, he made his first public appearance, 
 in his graduating oration, at the head of his class. 
 When pastor of the Church in Brattle Street, he was 
 still within the sound of the college bells ; and, after 
 his sojourn in Europe, it was to Cambridge that he 
 returned, as his home. It was from Cambridge that 
 he sent forth that influence which drew all New 
 England scholars to a more earnest study of classical 
 literature and art. It was upon the platform of 
 that old meeting-house, again, that in 1824, in his 
 Phi Beta Kappa oration, he made an era in our 
 literature, and gained the first great success for 
 purely literary demonstrative oratory. For ten years 
 he represented our district in Congress, always sup 
 ported by the vote of Cambridge. After varied ex 
 periences of public life, he returned to us again, to 
 become the President of our University. Resigning 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 that office, he still remained among us, performing, 
 with his usual fidelity, all the duties, even the least 
 conspicuous, of a private citizen. His published 
 works show no less than four addresses made at ex 
 hibitions of our High School. He gave you the de 
 sign of your city seal and its motto, expressing, as it 
 always seemed to me, as well his own achievement 
 as the history of the town: "LiTERis ANTIQUIS, NOVIS 
 INSTITUTIS, DECORA." He was a landholder among us. 
 The street that bears his name ran through his own 
 acres. On the spot where the old meeting-house 
 stood, dear no doubt to him, he planted a grove 
 of oaks and maples, and afterwards told the alumni 
 that for that, if for nothing else, he hoped to be 
 kindly remembered by posterity. He loved our Uni 
 versity. He took pride in its antiquity, its honors, 
 and its wealth ; but he took more pride in remem 
 bering that our ancestors founded Harvard College, 
 not at their leisure, and out of their abundance, but 
 endowed it with pecks of hard-raised wheat, and 
 founded it while they were yet living in log huts, 
 with the Indian lurking in the swamp, and the wolf 
 prowling about the door. He loved to remember 
 that college-bred men founded the institutions of 
 Massachusetts; that college-bred men Harvard Col 
 lege men argued the cause of liberty in Massachu 
 setts against the lawyers of Westminster Hall and 
 the politicians of St. Stephen s Chapel ; that John 
 Adams and Samuel Adams, John Hancock, James 
 Otis, Josiah Quincy, and Joseph Warren, were Har 
 vard College men. 
 
 B 9 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 And when the hour came to him that must come 
 to all, over the familiar bridge, along the well-known 
 way he came, not, as fifty-seven years before, to 
 enter the portals of the University, in the bloom of 
 youth and hope, to pluck the bright fruits of the 
 tree of knowledge, but borne by a sorrowing mul 
 titude, past the portals of the University, past its 
 honored halls, seeing not, hearing not, the tolling 
 bells, the uncovered heads, to our own Mount Au 
 burn. And we are the guardians of all of him that 
 could die. 
 
 One evening, in the delightful circle that gathered 
 about President Kirkland, upon a friendly challenge, 
 he wrote his Dirge of Alaric, familiar, trite even, 
 by the declamation of school-boys, expressing the 
 defiant wish of the savage, misanthropic Visigoth: 
 
 " When I am dead, no pageant train 
 Shall waste their sorrows at my bier, 
 
 Nor worthless pomp of homage vain 
 Stain it with hypocritic tear ; 
 
 For I will die as I did live, 
 
 Nor take the boon I cannot give. 
 
 "Ye shall not raise a marble bust 
 
 Upon the spot where I repose ; 
 Ye shall not fawn before my dust, 
 
 In hollow circumstance of woes, 
 Nor sculptured clay, nor lying breath 
 Insult the clay that moulds beneath. 
 
 " Ye shall riot pile, with servile toil, 
 
 Your monuments upon my breast ; 
 Nor yet, within the common soil, 
 
 Lay down the wreck of power to rest, 
 10 
 
A 1) D R E S S . 
 
 Where man can boast that he has trod 
 On him that was the scourge of God. 
 
 " But ye the mountain stream shall turn, 
 
 And lay its secret channel bare, 
 And hollow, for your sovereign s urn, 
 
 A resting-place forever there ; 
 Then bid its everlasting springs 
 
 Flow back upon the king of kings ; 
 And never be the secret said, 
 Until the deep give up his dead." 
 
 It was no hypocritic tear that fell upon his coffin ! 
 It was no homage vain that we paid at his bier ! 
 We will raise the marble bust! We will rear, with 
 no servile toil, but with the glad service of the 
 whole community, the monument upon his breast ! 
 We have given him no secret burial beneath the 
 waters of a rushing, oblivious flood ; but we have 
 laid him within the common soil, in consecrated 
 earth ; and there the fixed, patient marble, blessed 
 in its consecration, shall point for ages to the spot 
 where lies, not the wreck of power, not the scourge 
 of God, but the benefactor of his race and age. 
 
 The day is auspicious. If there is a name which 
 may be fitly connected with the birthday of the 
 father of his country, it is the name of Edward 
 Everett ! 
 
 This presence, too, is propitious. Magistrates, citi 
 zens of renown, have come down to us from their 
 high places, have come up, rather, for he called 
 this our intellectual metropolis, the beautiful Mount 
 Zion of the mind. 
 
 11 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 All is propitious, the place, the authority, the 
 day, the presence. I alone need invoke consideration 
 and excuse. 
 
 The history of Mr. Everett s life is too familiar to 
 require or justify anything like biographical detail 
 from me. He loved to remember and to say that, 
 in respect of birth and education, he had nothing 
 that was not common to all; that he owed to our 
 common institutions all he was and all he ever should 
 be. He was not, as some would falsely say, favored 
 by fortune with high birth, great wealth, and 
 shining social position, achieved for him by others. 
 He was favored only how could he possibly have 
 been favored more? in his mental and moral consti 
 tution, and in the blessing of an educated, intelligent, 
 religious parentage. What better picture could be 
 presented of the results of our institutions than a 
 yeoman s son from New Hampshire studying law in 
 an office in Boston, eking out the slender support 
 of himself and his brother, by occasionally teach 
 ing under the low roof of the school-house in Cross 
 Street, and, book in hand, Daniel Webster hearing 
 the recitation of Edward Everett ! Through life, Mr. 
 Everett bore the faithful impress of these beginnings. 
 Scholarly, sensitive, reserved, fastidious, he yet had no 
 tendencies to the aristocratic. A reverent student of 
 antiquity, a devotee of honored names and places, he 
 yet had few answering chords to the imposing claims 
 of high birth, long descent, the traditional 6clat of 
 generations, and the splendid results of primogeni 
 ture and entail. In individuals, as in communities, 
 
 12 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 he seemed to look for, to value, little else than in 
 telligence, virtue, culture, and manners. 
 
 Schoolmates, classmates, the greater intimacy of 
 room-mates, have borne testimony to the purity 
 and high purpose of his youth, and to that radiant, 
 hopeful beauty that gave him an easy power of 
 fascination. But, not content with a success so easily 
 obtained, he gave to everything labor as patient and 
 systematic as the dullest faculties would have re 
 quired, and thus plucked those fruits of knowledge 
 and honor which seemed but to fall at his touch. 
 There is a tradition of the elated, joyous sensation 
 that pervaded the audience at his graduating oration, 
 delivered at the age of seventeen, and at his poem 
 before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, the next year. 
 At an age when most young men now enter college, 
 he was called to the pulpit of Brattle Street, then 
 the most exacting pulpit in Boston, to be the suc 
 cessor of Buckminster ; and surely, it should be 
 enough for me to say that, while yet in his mi 
 nority, the received opinion was that, in point of 
 pulpit eloquence, he had equalled his predecessor. 
 
 It was not only as a pulpit orator that he be 
 came celebrated. Mr. George Bethune English, a man 
 not without parts and acquirements, had published 
 a pamphlet attacking the claims of Christianity as 
 a divine revelation. The work was having too much 
 influence, which some attempts at answering it had 
 not diminished, when Mr. Everett brought to bear 
 upon it the force of his scholarship, logic, eloquence, 
 and wit. He not only refuted the arguments of 
 
A /JDK ESS. 
 
 Mr. English, but so destroyed his credit as a scholar 
 and an honest controversialist, that he sent the 
 pamphlet down to oblivion with such an acceleration 
 of force as to carry along the refutation with it ; 
 and now after just half a century of penal service 
 in the land of forgetfulness, it has been dragged 
 back, to add to the funeral honors of its censor, an 
 unwilling witness to the justness and completeness 
 of its condemnation. 
 
 At this time there was no separate professorship 
 of Greek at Harvard, and it was the earnest desire 
 of President Kirkland that one should be established. 
 At his suggestion, such a professorship was founded 
 by a liberal citizen of Boston, Mr. Eliot. There was 
 no person thought to be fully qualified, and it was 
 understood that whoever was appointed to the post 
 should pass several years of preparatory study in 
 Europe. It was without difficulty that the choice 
 fell upon Mr. Everett, and he sailed in the early 
 spring of 1815, and spent nearly five years there. 
 
 This I regard as the decisive period of his life. 
 Will you, therefore, go back with me, and, shutting 
 your eyes to the present, forgetting all that fifty 
 years have done for our country, consider what it 
 was that he left, and to what he went? 
 
 The entire free white population of the country did 
 not exceed six millions. Our claims to high civiliza 
 tion were put forth uncertainly at home, and hardly 
 regarded abroad. Extreme doctrines of State rights 
 had so prevailed that we hardly knew whether we 
 had a central government. The first spade had not 
 
 14 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 been struck in the Erie Canal. Not a house stood 
 upon the wastes where are now the cities of Lowell 
 and Lawrence; and the Merrimack and the Connecti 
 cut ran their whole course unobstructed to the sea. 
 It was seven years afterward that the first manufac 
 turing corporation on the Merrimack was organized. 
 Antiquity of our race on this continent, there was 
 none. Time had not, as now, gathered about our 
 early history its gray hues and venerable forms. 
 Names now classic were familiar and recent. The 
 sages of the revolutionary period had not shuffled 
 off the mortal coil of party connection and prejudice. 
 Of later men, Webster s name w T as not known across 
 the Atlantic : and Wheaton, Kent, arid Story had not 
 written one of the works which have made them 
 authority in both hemispheres. In history, Prescott 
 had graduated that year, Bancroft and Palfrey were in 
 college, Hildreth was at school, and Motley an infant 
 in his cradle. Universities, except in name, we had 
 none. No college had a scientific school in connec 
 tion with it, nor a law school in successful operation. 
 There were no museums of Zoology or Anatomy, 
 few and poor cabinets of Geology and Mineralogy, 
 and not an observatory nor a sidereal telescope. We 
 had no public library as large or as rich as the 
 private library of Lord Spencer at his country-seat at 
 Althorpe. In the fine arts, West and Copley, always 
 British subjects, were domiciled in London, and All- 
 ston, still young, was studying and travelling in 
 Europe. We had no galleries of pictures or statues. 
 I doubt if there was even a professed original of the 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 great masters in the land, and we had produced no 
 native sculptor. 
 
 In architecture, our Capitol and other public build 
 ings at Washington were smoking ruins ; and, except 
 a few State Houses, we had scarcely a secular building 
 with any pretensions to architectural effect ; while 
 religious architecture had hardly begun its exodus 
 from the clapboarded and shingled barns of our 
 ancestors. In music, we had some marches and 
 popular songs ; but the opera and prima donna from 
 Europe had not visited us ; and, except some modest 
 attempts at the great oratorios in Boston, religious 
 music had hardly dared even to plan its escape from 
 the prison-house of Puritan restraints. Monuments, 
 we had none, neither at Concord, nor at Lexington, 
 nor on Bunker Hill. In poetry, there had been pa 
 triotic effusions, but their merits were rather moral 
 than artistic. The Thanatopsis had not been written, 
 nor one of those poems which have given to their 
 authors the name and fame of American poets. Irv 
 ing had not -written his Sketch-Book, nor Cooper 
 one of his novels; and it was five years after Mr. 
 Everett sailed for Europe that the most liberal of 
 British essayists, in the most liberal of British jour 
 nals, put the famous question, " Who, in the four 
 quarters of the globe, reads an American book?" 
 
 Such was the country which he left, he, the 
 scholar, the poet, the devout student of antiquity, 
 the lover of the fine arts, the appreciator of science, 
 the delighted sojourner in libraries and galleries, the 
 reverent visitor of consecrated spots, and for what ? 
 
 16 
 
A D D R ESS. 
 
 He went to trace a civilization of twenty-five hun 
 dred years, an antiquity counting by tens of centu 
 ries as we count by years ; to muse among the fallen 
 columns, the broken arches, the ruined walls of a 
 civilization of exquisite beauty ; to follow the faint 
 traces of the site of Troy; to wander through the 
 pass of Thermopylae, and over the fields of Marathon 
 and Plataea. He went to visit not only the Home 
 of Cicero and Virgil and the Caesars, but the Rome 
 of to-day, the Eternal City, the seat of the more 
 wonderful ecclesiastical power. He went, not only 
 to explore the traces of the past, but to meet the 
 splendid civilization of actual Europe ; to note the 
 tread of armies and the sweep of navies ; to see 
 Europe bristling with bayonets from Gibraltar to 
 the North Sea; to confront the dazzling military 
 fame of Napoleon ; to see statesmen assembling 
 at Vienna and Paris to lay out the boundaries of 
 empires, to make gifts of crowns and sceptres, and 
 to settle the public law of Europe ; and to meet 
 princes and nobles, heads of families of an antiq 
 uity running back to a mythical origin, whose 
 ancestors for generations had commanded armies 
 and navies, led senates and cabinets, and not only 
 affected the destinies of empires, but changed the 
 face of nature itself. The peculiar child of aca 
 demic education, he went to visit universities where 
 were gathered the teachers and the taught of a 
 continent; and to find, at Oxford, a university so 
 ancient that one of its colleges, called, par excel 
 lence, the New College, was founded a hundred years 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 before Columbus discovered America. The student 
 of books, he went to examine libraries where had 
 been gathered not only all there was of literature 
 in printed volumes, but illuminated manuscripts and 
 parchments older than the revival of letters. The 
 lover of art, he went not only to explore the beau 
 tiful remains of classic art in all its orders, but to 
 view the castles arid towers of the feudal ages, and 
 magnificent Gothic structures on so vast a scale that 
 through the great windows of one of them might 
 have been pushed, one after the other, all the build 
 ings of his Alma Mater, their cellars and chimneys 
 with them. He went to observe historic spots in all 
 parts of the continent, marked by fit monuments, and 
 the great squares of cities embellished by the statues 
 of heroes, vsages, saints, and kings; to visit galleries 
 where were collected the paintings of the schools 
 of every age and nation ; and to find, hidden among 
 the untrodden ways on the roof of the Cathedral 
 at Milan, more marble statuary than he could have 
 found, in his own country, from Maine to the Mis 
 sissippi. The appreciator of science, there lay before 
 him not only the homes and working-places of 
 Galileo, Copernicus, Leibnitz, Kepler, and Newton, 
 but he was to find living and honored Humboldt, 
 Cuvier, and Davy. The orator and student of history 
 and public law, he went not only to stand where 
 Demosthenes and ^Eschines had contended and St. 
 Paul had preached, where Cicero and Hortensius had 
 spoken, but in the land of his mother tongue, to 
 enter halls about whose arches he might fancy yet 
 
 18 
 
A D DRE SS. 
 
 lingered tones of Chatham, Burke, Fox, and the 
 younger Pitt. He went to hear the rising elo 
 quence of Canning; to see Castlereagh return from 
 representing triumphant England at Vienna, assign 
 ing to kings and empires their limits and their laws, 
 and adjusting the balance of power for Europe ; and 
 to meet, in the familiarity of private intercourse, 
 Romilly, Mackintosh, and Hallam. A poet, he was 
 not only to wander among scenes ennobled by the 
 verse of Homer and of the bright company of later 
 Grecian poets, to visit the tomb of Virgil and the 
 villa of Horace ; not only to follow the later traces 
 of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Tasso, and the still 
 greener memory of Schiller, and in the home of his 
 forefathers the footsteps of Shakspeare. Milton, Dry- 
 den, and Pope ; but to sojourn in lands illumined by 
 the living genius of Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, 
 Southey, Campbell, and Moore ; to talk with Byron 
 in his library, and to be the guest of Scott at 
 Abbotsford. 
 
 I pass over his studiousness at Gottingen, where 
 Mr. Ticknor tells us that, on one occasion, Mr. Ev 
 erett, desiring to send to President Kirkland a state 
 ment of the system of the German Universities, and 
 wishing to get it off by a certain mail, gave to it, 
 without sleep or rest, thirty-five consecutive hours. I 
 pass by his instructive travels, his days spent in use 
 ful observation and in the society of the learned 
 and the eminent, and his nights intensely studious, 
 remarking only that he, if any one, had a right to 
 say to the young men of his country that the busiest 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 have time enough for much additional labor, if their 
 passions and indolence would suffer them, and that 
 a man s future depended much upon his choice of 
 pleasures, and the way in which he spent his leisure 
 hours; I pass by all this, to ask with what con 
 victions and purposes did he return to his native 
 land ? 
 
 We will await the answer until he gives it him 
 self. Returning to Cambridge, he delivered his 
 courses of lectures, for nearly six years, upon Greek 
 and incidentally upon Roman literature and art, 
 which gave an impulse to those studies, and threw 
 over them an attraction which, short as was his 
 term of office, must have quite repaid the care of 
 President Kirkland and the liberality of Mr. Eliot. 
 He was still a preacher, and his first sermon, after 
 his return, was preached at Brattle Street. The 
 present pastor of that society will tell you, that, 
 then a boy at school, by dint of going very early 
 to the church, and crowding persistently through the 
 passages, he succeeded in getting a standing-place in 
 a window-seat, where, looking between the shoulders 
 of two men, he caught his first view, in the pulpit, 
 of Edward Everett, and received his first impres 
 sion of what was meant by the word Eloquence. 
 Mr. Everett preached on several occasions, and one 
 sermon, especially remembered, from the text, "The 
 time is short." There are men who can tell you now 
 what words, what tones, sent a thrill through the 
 audience ; and more sensitive women who will con 
 fess to you, perhaps, they might if they would, 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 at what word, what tone it was that, having held 
 bravely out till then, they gave way to tears. 
 
 In 1824, he delivered the Phi Beta Kappa ora 
 tion ; and in that it is that I discover the convic 
 tions and purposes with which he returned to his 
 native land. I find in that the key-note to his sub 
 sequent life. 
 
 I pass over the dramatic character of the scene, 
 the presence of heroes and sages of the Ke volution, 
 and of Lafayette himself, which have made it one 
 of our historic epochs. I cannot attempt to describe 
 to you they only who saw it can probably appre 
 ciate it the thrilling effect of his allusion to Lafay 
 ette. He described the young hero, ready to cast 
 aside rank, wealth, honors, home, all for our distant 
 and desperate struggle, offering to our commission 
 ers at Paris the service of himself and friends, 
 and asking only transportation to America ; and 
 our country so poor in money and in credit that 
 our commissioners were obliged to say that they 
 could not provide him a vessel. "Then," cried the 
 youthful hero, " I will provide my own ! " There 
 was something in the presence of that hero him 
 self, in the magnetism of the orator, that caused a 
 scene which can be described by scarce any other 
 word than tumult. It was many minutes before or 
 der was restored. Old men sprang to their feet, 
 shook one another s hands, and shed tears, as if they 
 had that moment heard that Lafayette was coming 
 to their aid in the most desperate state of their 
 
 fortunes. And Lafayette himself, never perfect in 
 
 21 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 our language, not detecting the application, was 
 
 -7 ^/ 
 
 among the most active in the applause. 
 
 I may, however, pause to say that Mr. Everett on 
 that day founded the school of literary, demonstra 
 tive oratory in America. I limit my meaning by 
 those words : titerary, as distinguished from theologi 
 cal, political, scientific, or jurisprudential ; demonstra 
 tive, as not looking to any action on the part of 
 the persons addressed, to any immediate result of 
 vote, verdict, or judgment, but resting in general 
 impressions; oratory r , as distinguished from reading 
 or simple recitation, and giving scope to all the 
 arts and powers of elocution. This school has had 
 - many disciples and some masters ; but Mr. Ever 
 ett was its founder, and, to the last, acknowledged 
 as its great master. I have spoken of this school 
 in America. In Europe it does not exist. It went 
 out with the decline of liberty in Greece and Rome. 
 They have, on the continent of Europe everywhere, 
 the eloquence of the pulpit; in some parts, propor 
 tionately to popular liberty, the eloquence of the 
 forum ; and in England, but scarcely upon the conti 
 nent, the eloquence of the senate. They have learned 
 lectures on many subjects, read, mostly sitting, from 
 the chairs of universities and societies; but Europe 
 has not, even in England, as a general effective pop 
 ular practice, literary demonstrative oratory, nor has 
 it been known in Europe for two thousand years. 
 
 I pass by all this to answer, at last, the question, 
 with what purposes and convictions did Mr. Everett 
 enter upon his public life ? 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 He had not been dazzled by the splendid spec 
 tacles of military power in Europe. In standing 
 armies, he saw only a modern contrivance, not two 
 hundred years old, for binding despotisms upon dis 
 armed and disfranchised peoples. He looked with 
 less dismay upon the turbulence of ancient democ 
 racies, and upon the rude independence of the 
 feudal ages. Admitting the dangers and horrors of 
 mobs, he yet cried, " But, oh ! the disciplined, the 
 paid, the honored inob, not moving in rags and 
 starvation, to some act of blood or plunder, but 
 marching, in all the pomp and circumstance of 
 war, to lay waste some feebler State, or cantoned 
 at home among an overawed and broken-spirited 
 people ! " 
 
 All his observation and study had brought him to 
 the conviction that the general diffusion of intelli 
 gence, and the greatest moral and intellectual 
 development of human nature were possible only 
 where popular liberty existed, and popular systems 
 of self-government. He not only contended that 
 this must be so, because, under such systems, artifi 
 cial inequalities being removed and an opportunity 
 being given to all, men were working in harmony 
 with the natural law by which intellect itself is 
 distributed, which he called "a sterner leveller than 
 ever marched in the van of a revolution;" but he 
 deduced it from the facts of history. He contended 
 that although the natural and exact sciences and cer 
 tain forms of arts and learning might flourish under 
 imperial patronage, yet, not only was knowledge the 
 
A D I) R ESS. 
 
 most generally diffused among all, but the greatest 
 heights attained by the few, where popular liberty 
 existed, and in proportion as it existed. He re 
 minded his audience of scholars, that Constantine, 
 controlling half the world by his arms, was obliged 
 to tear down an arch of Trajan to find sculpture 
 for his own. fie had not mused as a sentimentalist, 
 nor groped like an antiquarian or a pedant, among 
 the ruins of Greece and Rome; but, as a patriot and 
 a thinker, he had gathered from them wisdom for 
 his own age and people. He saw that the Greek re 
 publics were democracies undertaking to administer 
 government in person, without a system of represen 
 tation or agency, never, in fact, getting beyond the 
 town-meeting in Faneuil Hall, and necessarily con 
 fined within the walls of a single city. Their colonies 
 and dependencies they governed with absolute power, 
 never extending to them community in government. 
 They skirted the shores of the Mediterranean, pene 
 trating but little into the interior ; and so narrow 
 were the limits of their civilization, that he tells us, 
 in one of his picturesque sentences, that the moun 
 tain-tops of Thrace, the proverbial home of barba 
 rism, could be seen from the porch t>f the temple of 
 Minerva at Sunium. These republics, with all their 
 civil splendor and military prowess, went down, one 
 after another, before the imperial power of Philip 
 and afterward of the Romans, because they could 
 not or would not make the sacrifices necessary to 
 form a central State, to do what our ancestors did 
 in 1788, form a more perfect union "to provide for 
 
 24 
 
ADDRESp. 
 
 the common defence and promote the general wel 
 fare." He saw that the Roman republic was an in 
 tensely centralized State, holding all its colonies and 
 provinces under absolute military government, Rome 
 alone being a metropolis, and everything else provin 
 cial, if not barbarous. This centralization of power 
 made the struggle for its possession intense and 
 deadly, and the influx of wealth and luxury to the 
 one centre brought effeminacy and corruption, until 
 Rome herself yielded to barbarian invaders. 
 
 From these pictures, he turned to our own conti 
 nent and our system, at once centralized and dis 
 tributed ; where nothing is provincial and nothing 
 metropolitan ; founded in democracy, but adminis 
 tered by a conservative system of representation and 
 agency ; centralized sufficiently for defence from for 
 eign aggression, for the creation of a national senti 
 ment, and to preserve the peace and rights of the 
 States, yet distributed enough for the general diffusion 
 of political education and dignities. By the feature 
 of a single executive head, we secured some of the 
 advantages of monarchy; by courts, senates, and cab 
 inets of selected men, some of the benefits of aris 
 tocracy ; while, by the distribution of powers among 
 coordinate and competing departments, and by writ- 
 ten constitutions to which were secured the force 
 and sanctions of law, and by frequent elections, we 
 seemed to protect ourselves adequately against usur 
 pation. He looked to the national government not 
 only to preserve our unity and to protect us from 
 abroad, but as the only means of securing the local 
 
 i) 25 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 governments themselves, and of keeping the peace of 
 a continent. But it was upon the local institutions 
 of the State and the town that he depended for that 
 general diffusion of knowledge and character which 
 alone can elevate the whole human race. Each man 
 a citizen, as far as possible owning the land on which 
 he lived, called to sit upon the jury, would feel him 
 self part of the magistracy of the land ; bearing arms, 
 he was part of its military power ; and, intrusted 
 with a vote, he was a portion of the political sov 
 ereignty. His functions, however slight in degree, 
 were, in kind, sovereign. He trusted to these duties 
 and responsibilities, with the education of the church 
 and the school, to sober and elevate the public mind. 
 He answered the argument that letters and art 
 needed princely or metropolitan patronage. He not 
 only exposed the partial and limited operation of 
 such patronage, from well-known instances and from 
 the nature of the case, but declared that the best 
 patronage was opportunity and stimulus ; and w r here 
 could such opportunities and stimulus be found as 
 would be furnished by the needs, the tastes, and the 
 pride of vast educated communities ? Has not this 
 proved true ? I ask you, Mr. Agassiz, whether, in 
 your science, as far removed as possible from the 
 passions and interests of the hour, the demands of an 
 intelligent community are not a better patronage, 
 not only because a hundred thousand dollars from 
 a hundred givers has more of promise and encour 
 agement than a hundred thousand dollars from one 
 giver; but whether, measured by dollars and cents, 
 
ADD R E S S . 
 
 it is not richer than the patronage of kings and 
 princes? And he answered the argument, that pop 
 ular systems, if they created more activity, gave it 
 an undue direction to politics. He showed, that un 
 der monarchies and aristocracies, it was only the 
 service of the state, in peace or war, that was con 
 sidered worthy of the noble ; while, in republics, 
 letters, arts, science, commerce, and teaching were 
 dignified in all. 
 
 He was not satisfied with the prospect of a low 
 level of mediocrity. He knew that, as in visible 
 nature inequalities are essential to beauty and to 
 health, so, in every state and society, there must be 
 kings and nobles ; but he hoped that under our 
 system, artificial inequalities being removed and a 
 chance given to all, we should find not always, for 
 he was no dreamer ; nor perhaps generally, but 
 more often than under any other system that the 
 sceptre would pass to the hand of the natural king, 
 the coronet on the head of the natural noble, as 
 we place the wreath on the brow of the real poet 
 and the gown on the shoulders of the veritable 
 scholar. 
 
 But there was one view of the future of our 
 country which seemed to possess and animate him 
 more than any other. One of the greatest myste 
 ries of our nature is that process by which we make 
 with the tongue vibrations on the air, which, strik 
 ing upon the ear, convey to others our thought, 
 wish, or emotion ; or, by the cunning of the hand, 
 form strange black marks on paper, by which souls 
 
 27 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 interchange ideas. Yet it somehow happens and 
 that is no less a mystery that, by a strange law of 
 their being, men will make different sounds and dif 
 ferent marks, totally unintelligible to each other; and 
 so it is that men, charged to the full with thought 
 and emotion, are totally unable to communicate in 
 telligently. Mr. Everett had not only seen in libra 
 ries and on monuments these laborious attempts at 
 expression unintelligible to the greater part of the 
 human race, and sometimes to all the living ; but in 
 Europe, he had found that a river interposed, or a 
 chain of hills, left millions of men, intelligent and 
 cultivated, without the power of intercommunication : 
 orators, statesmen, poets, preachers, charged with 
 the interests of the world, standing deaf and dumb 
 in the presence of each other! He saw how this 
 not only restricted personal communication, but lim 
 ited the power of the press in permanent as well 
 as current literature, discouraged effort and shut out 
 wisdom. 
 
 He turned toward his own country, and saw a vast 
 empire filling up with a people speaking a common 
 language and possessing a common literature. He 
 presented his statistics to show that the ten millions 
 of that day would become thirty, fifty, an hundred, 
 and why not, like the Chinese Empire, three 
 hundred millions ? He declared then, as, when Sec 
 retary of State, he said to Lord John Russel, in 
 1853, that he saw no necessary limits to our repub 
 lic, but the geographical limits of the continent. 
 His soul swelled at the thought of such a world of 
 
 28 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 human beings, all able to understand one another. 
 What a stimulus to the press in periodical and per 
 manent literature ! What fields for the orator of the 
 pulpit, the forum, the senate, and the platform! 
 What inspiration to the poet, the philosopher, the 
 man of science! What a benefit to each one of 
 these receiving millions, from the higher character 
 of the supply so vast a demand would create! 
 
 Was this a baseless vision? We have risen to 
 thirty millions, covering the continent; and there 
 is less of provincialism or dialect in the whole land 
 than within the sound of Bow Bells, or within any 
 one of the counties of England. May this not con 
 tinue with our increase ? There are certain condi 
 tions. The language must be anchored to a com 
 mon alphabet and a common and substantially 
 unchanging mode of spelling. It is moored to the 
 English Bible, the Book of Common Prayer, Shak- 
 speare, Milton, and John Bunyan, and that company 
 of later writers, in prose and verse, whose language 
 is the vernacular of our race. 
 
 A common national government; a common writ 
 ten constitution, which all must understand; the 
 periodical election of a President, upon principles 
 to be canvassed through the land, with a voter at 
 every hearth-stone ; a common legislature, debating 
 in a common tongue, its members chosen from 
 every district; the rapid and general circulation of 
 a daily press; and, above all, the instant communi 
 cation by telegraph to every part of the land of 
 things which it is the interest of all to hear at 
 
 20 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 once : these all keep the pool so troubled as to give 
 no chance for dialects and provincialisms to form 
 upon the surface. What more affecting proof of this, 
 than when Mr. Seward, the other Sunday afternoon, 
 announced, in a few hours, in words understood by 
 all, to the millions of the land, the merchants and 
 the manufacturers of the seaboard, the farmers of the 
 interior, and the miners among the mountains, the 
 death of Edward Everett! 
 
 A scholar, a Greek professor, so far from lament 
 ing the good old times when a few scholars could 
 alone understand one another over Europe in a 
 dead language, he held up to the admiration of an 
 assembly of scholars the vision of a vernacular for 
 a continent. He boldly attacked the saying of Ba 
 con, that Luther prevailed because he awaked all 
 antiquity, and declared that Luther prevailed be 
 cause he awaked the native tongue of Germany, 
 because he spoke to the land in the speech of the 
 fireside and the street; and that if he had battled 
 only in Latin, he would have been answered in better 
 Latin from the Vatican, and the people would have 
 seen in it only a contest between angry priests. 
 
 We can see now why he thought the discovery of 
 this continent by Columbus in the fulness of time, and 
 held back by Providence until that time, the greatest 
 event, not supernatural, in the history of man. We 
 see how he valued the settlement of this country by 
 such men as did settle it, men trained to hardship, 
 self-command, and serious thought. Puritans, perse 
 cuted by church and state; churchmen and royalists, 
 
 30 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 banished by the Puritan Commonwealth ; Huguenots, 
 persecuted by Catholic France ; Catholics, persecuted 
 by Protestant England ; Germans, exiled by the 
 wars of Louis XIV., and Quakers, persecuted by all, 
 settled the various parts of our country. He looked 
 upon our system as the great experiment, on a vast 
 field prepared for it by the providence of God, for the 
 moral and intellectual development of the human 
 race, by the agency of individual liberty and popu 
 lar, responsible systems of self-government. As he 
 approached his native land, he saw a bright bow of 
 promise spanning the western continent. He felt 
 that his mission was not to preach in the pulpit of 
 Brattle Street, nor in any other pulpit ; but, con 
 scious of powers of speech, assured of them by the 
 public testimony, he determined to enter upon a 
 public career of national life, and to devote all he 
 was and had acquired, to securing the successful issue 
 of this vast experiment. I doubt not that he was 
 ambitious. But he sought opportunities, and not 
 office. He asked but a hearing, and no other re 
 wards than that approbation, which I admit was dear 
 to him, and fame, to which he had too much of 
 genius to be indifferent. 
 
 He knew we held our treasure in earthen ves 
 sels. He was no Utopian or sentimentalist. He had 
 read and seen too much of the passions and weak 
 nesses of men, not to know that our great experi 
 ment might fail. He knew that the organization 
 of millions into a State, permanent and benefi 
 cent, was a result for human nature rarely obtained, 
 
 31 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 dearly bought, precariously held, and, if lost, hardly 
 regained. 
 
 Those who knew him slightly may have thought 
 that he gave undue prominence to the subjects of 
 his classical studies. Since his death, I have read 
 the greater part of his published writings, and can 
 truly say that I doubt if ever so good a scholar 
 wrote and spoke so much, saying so little of the 
 Greeks and Romans. He always declared that their 
 civilization had one fatal defect, the lack of spiritual 
 vitality. He reminded the scholars of the Phi Beta 
 Kappa that the hero of Thermopylae would not 
 have hesitated to tear his only child from the bosom 
 of its mother, if it happened to be a sickly babe, and 
 carry it out to be eaten by the wolves of Tayge- 
 tus; that the heroes of Marathon unchained their 
 slaves from the door-posts of their masters to go 
 out and fight the battles of freedom. Painting the 
 possibility of our failure in this grand trust, and its 
 direful consequences to human nature, he exclaimed, 
 "Greece cries to us by the convulsed lips of her 
 poisoned, dying Demosthenes; Rome pleads with us 
 in the mute persuasion of her mangled Tully." 
 
 He saw the necessity of exciting feelings of pride 
 and respect for our common ancestry, of elevating 
 the whole work of this nation, past, present, and to 
 come, to the highest plane of dignity. True to his 
 mission, our horizon was lighted up by unwonted 
 fires at Concord, Lexington, Charlestown, and Plym 
 outh. The names and places were not then clas 
 sical. The actors in the Revolution were living, 
 
 32 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 with the familiar, sometimes the disagreeable, even 
 the ludicrous, sides of their characters open to view. 
 The road to Lexington was but a dusty highway 
 leading by Whittemore s Tavern, toiled over by coun 
 try wagons, and herds of sheep and oxen driven to 
 the shambles at Brighton ; but to his eye of faith, to 
 his vivid imagination, Lexington and Concord, Plym 
 outh and Bunker Hill, were more truly worthy of 
 consecration than Thermopylae or Platsea, Marathon 
 or the Eurymedon. With rare rhetorical courage, he 
 encountered the plebeian surnames, and those un 
 couth Hebrew first names revived to be misapplied 
 and mispronounced after four thousand years. In the 
 height of a dramatic description of the spread of the 
 alarm of the British march to Lexington, he did not 
 fear to name the borrowing of Deacon Larkin s horse; 
 and captivity among the Indians was no less digni 
 fied to him because it was the captivity of Mrs. Je 
 mima Howe and Mr. Pilkial Grout! He had heard a 
 voice saying to him, What God hath cleansed, that 
 call not thou common ! What to him were the child 
 ish fables that hang over the origin of Greek and 
 Roman cities, compared with the time when Massa 
 chusetts consisted of six huts at Salem, and one hut 
 at Charlestown ? The covered wagon, marked " To 
 Marietta, Ohio," carrying the first westward emigra 
 tion from Massachusetts, with its stock of household 
 utensils, was more classic to him than a pantheon of 
 Greek and Roman Lares, Penates, and Termini. Our 
 civilization was not to present the picturesque ef 
 fects of castles, palaces, and towers, and the imposing 
 
 E 33 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 material results of great inequalities of condition, 
 but a land dotted over with churches, colleges, 
 school-houses, town-halls, lecture-rooms, museums, ob 
 servatories, galleries, hospitals, and asylums. "A ster 
 ile hill-side in New England, with a well-kept village 
 school at its foot," was not only a promise of more 
 true wealth to a people, but of more in dollars and 
 cents, than the " lucrative desolation of the sugar 
 islands." 
 
 His published volumes show addresses delivered at 
 our historical anniversaries, on the 19th of April, at 
 Lexington, two: at Concord, two; on the 22d of Feb 
 ruary, two; on the 17th of June, four; on the 22d of 
 December, four; on the 4th of July, eight; and at the 
 anniversaries of the settlements of Springfield, Barn- 
 stable, Dedham, and Dorchester, and of John Win- 
 throp s landing at Charlestown; and upon the deaths 
 of Adams and Jefferson, Lafayette, John Quincy Ad 
 ams, and Webster; and at the inauguration of monu 
 ments to Franklin, Warren, and John Harvard. 
 
 Doubtless, as he always acknowledged, he owed 
 New England much; but New England owes to him, 
 more than to any other man, the artistic consecra 
 tion of her historic names and epochs. "If," said 
 he, "my voice is hushed on these themes, may it 
 never be listened to on any other." 
 
 Not hushed on these themes, it was heard on 
 many others. Science, art, literature, charities, all 
 shared the benefits of his eloquence. In the au 
 tumn of 1857, when, by reason of commercial dis 
 tress, a hard winter was anticipated for the poor, 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 he delivered an address before the Boston Provident 
 Society, which you will remember by that beautiful 
 description of the scenery from the hill of Four- 
 vieres, behind Lyons, which lies in the memory like 
 a landscape of Claude ; and by the contrast he 
 drew between the partial, unsystematic, individual 
 almsgiving of Southern Europe, which has made 
 mendicancy a profession, and the impartial, system 
 atized, universal operation of popular, charitable 
 societies. This discourse he delivered during the 
 winter in the principal cities of the land, at Rich 
 mond, at Charleston, and St. Louis, in all, at 
 fifteen places, obtaining, by the sale of tickets of 
 admission, nearly $15,000 for the benefit of the 
 poor of the respective cities. 
 
 His most exquisitely finished address upon scien 
 tific subjects is that at the opening of the Dudley 
 Observatory at Albany. I had a personal experi 
 ence in connection with that discourse, which in 
 vests it, for me, with a peculiar interest. In the 
 year 1860, it was my fortune to cross the Pacific 
 Ocean, a passenger in an American merchantman. 
 The unspeakable beauty of the nights, while running 
 down the trade-winds in the Pacific tropics, kept 
 me much on deck. The companion of my walk 
 was often the chief mate. He was a man of 
 very imperfect education, but with considerable 
 natural capacity. His duties as a navigator, and 
 the constant presence of the " brave o erhanging 
 firmament, the majestical roof fretted with golden 
 fires," naturally led us to the topic of astronomy. 
 
ADD RE S . 
 
 He asked me if I had ever read a speech at the 
 opening of an observatory at Albany, by Edward 
 Everett, who he believed lived in my part of the 
 Union. He was not a little impressed when I told 
 him that I had not only read the address, but knew 
 Mr. Everett himself. He said that he happened to 
 find it in the cabin of a ship, and had read it 
 again and again. With an inadequate vocabulary 
 and stammering speech, he tried to explain to me 
 the thoughts and emotions this address had awa 
 kened within him; and he did make me feel, better 
 than eloquence could have done, that upon the hard, 
 low course of his life there had opened a vision 
 of celestial light; that he had been made to feel 
 something of the vastness of the universe, of infinity 
 against space, and of eternity against time ; that he 
 had been elevated by the sense of being able to 
 entertain such thoughts, proving to him the gran 
 deur and immortality of his nature. I regret that I 
 never remembered to mention this to Mr. Everett. 
 I am sure he would have valued it as not the 
 least of his many satisfactions. 
 
 Among other subjects, Mr. Everett delivered dis 
 courses upon the colonization of . Africa, education 
 in the West, the importance of science to working 
 men, prison discipline, spoke frequently before agri 
 cultural societies upon moral and intellectual topics 
 relating to agriculture, one being upon the treat 
 ment of animals, and at the anniversaries of most 
 of our colleges, and of many literary societies; and, 
 as a mere incident, which would have been labor 
 
 36 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 enough for some men, he was, for many years, the 
 editor of the North American Review, and always 
 one of its contributors. 
 
 The subject of the militia engaged his earnest 
 attention. Although he truly said he loved not 
 war nor any of its works, he knew that wars 
 were sometimes inevitable and just. He could un 
 derstand the position of the Quaker, who disallows 
 all use of force, and would disband the militia, 
 abolish West Point and Annapolis, and prohibit 
 the bearing of arms or the manufacture of muni 
 tions of war, and strive to make the duty of a sol 
 dier morally odious; but he could not understand 
 how persons admitting that war might ever be just 
 or inevitable, could hold up to ridicule or to moral 
 aversion the duty of a citizen soldier in a republic. 
 Knowing that war is a science and a progressive sci 
 ence, he advocated a liberal support of the Military 
 Academy, with a small army, to furnish educated 
 officers and the nucleus for volunteer and militia 
 organizations in times of war ; but it was to the 
 militia, the arms-bearing citizens, that he looked for 
 that force which, in times of exigency, should be a 
 defence against our enemies, without being danger 
 ous to our institutions ; and one of the reasons he 
 gave for a general education was that arms were 
 safest in the hands of educated and responsible 
 men. In his discourse upon our French and Indian 
 War, " the school of the Revolution," he said that, 
 without a standing army, the people of Massachu 
 setts had been one of the most martial people on 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 earth ; that every fifth man had been in service ; 
 that a larger proportion of the able-bodied men of 
 Massachusetts had been mustered into military ser 
 vice, during the seven years of that war, than 
 Napoleon led into the field from the French people 
 in the height of his power ; and that the lines on 
 Bunker Hill and Dorchester Heights were drawn 
 and our militia organized and commanded by men 
 who had served with British regulars against French 
 regulars on the frontiers, in Canada, at Louisburg, 
 and in the West Indies. If the militia should not 
 be sustained with credit, he thought we exposed 
 ourselves to violence at home and abroad, or in 
 curred the peril of standing armies. 
 
 Mr. Everett was in Congress, as a member of the 
 House of Representatives, for ten years, from 1825 to 
 1835. It has commonly been thought that he owed 
 his passage to public life to the success of his ora 
 tions on patriotic subjects; but he was elected before 
 they were delivered, and his nomination was deter 
 mined upon about the time of nis Phi Beta Kappa 
 discourse. Attention was drawn to him, as having 
 talents for public life, principally by his appearance 
 before the Board of Overseers of the University, in 
 the spring of 1824. The Board of Overseers was 
 at that time probably the most august assembly in 
 New England. He appeared to represent the cause 
 of the Faculty, or local government, in their claims 
 to the fellowships of the corporation. He was op 
 posed by powerful interests in Boston and Salem, 
 but bore himself with such firmness, dignity, and 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 courtesy, and showed such presence of mind as well 
 as power of speech in debate, as to draw to him 
 the attention of leading public men and prepare the 
 way for his nomination to Congress, which was 
 perhaps secured by the success of his Phi Beta 
 Kappa address. 
 
 In Congress, he sustained his reputation as an ora 
 tor, but did not establish a reputation as a debater. 
 Whether he could have succeeded, in any assembly, 
 in the conflicts of extemporaneous speech, I do not 
 undertake to say; but the House of Representatives, 
 impaired in its character by an influx of a kind of 
 ruffianism which came in from the South and South 
 west, was not as favorable a field for his peculiar 
 qualities, certainly, as the Board of Overseers. He 
 left, however, the reputation of a learned, hard-work 
 ing, faithful publicist and legislator. Always upon 
 the Committee on Foreign Relations, he was the au 
 thor of its celebrated report on the Panama Mission, 
 the leading topic of the day; and distinguished him 
 self as an advocate of Greek independence. He 
 took an active part in the Georgia controversy, al 
 ways and earnestly supporting the unpopular and 
 losing cause of the Cherokee Indians, whom not 
 even the decree of the Supreme Court, which the 
 President did not attempt to execute, could protect 
 against the rapacity of Georgia. He served upon 
 the Committee on the Library and Public Buildings, 
 of which, it may be well supposed, he was a most 
 useful member. 
 
 From Congress, he passed to the chair of the 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 chief magistracy of Massachusetts. He held the of 
 fice of Governor for four years, during which were 
 begun and completed some of the most important 
 acts of our State policy, for which we are largely 
 indebted to his enlightened and earnest support. 
 Among these, I may name the establishment of the 
 Board of Education, of the system of Normal Schools, 
 the agricultural and scientific Surveys of the State, 
 the revision of our Statute Law, and the subscrip 
 tion of the State to the Western Railroad. 
 
 At the close of his last term, in 1840, he sailed 
 for Europe, for the benefit of the health of a member 
 of his family. While in the south of Italy, in 1841, 
 he was appointed Minister at the Court of St. James, 
 and repaired to London to find a larger accumulation 
 of difficult and critical questions than has ever fallen 
 upon one of our ministers, except it be the present. 
 Every foot of the boundary line between us and the 
 British provinces was in dispute, from the Bay of 
 Fundy to the Lake of the Woods. The militia from 
 Maine and New Brunswick were under arms, and the 
 danger was increased and the questions complicated 
 by the burning of the Caroline and the arrest and 
 trial of McLeod. Lord Aberdeen, the Secretary for 
 Foreign Affairs, had put forth a claim of a right to 
 visit vessels of other nations suspected of being en 
 gaged in the slave-trade. Our fisheries in the Bay of 
 Fundy were in dispute, the case of the Creole was 
 pending, and there were delicate questions respect 
 ing Oregon and Texas. Such was the confidence of 
 the administration in Mr. Everett, that he was left 
 
 40 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 to meet these questions without specific instructions. 
 The graceful and friendly act of Sir Robert Peel, 
 then Prime Minister, in sending Lord Ashburton as 
 Minister Extraordinary to Washington, removed the 
 boundary question, and incidentally that of the right 
 of visit, from Mr. Everett s cognizance ; but all the 
 questions that he dealt with he treated as a jurist, 
 a scholar, and a thorough patriot. 
 
 In 1845, Mr. Everett returned from England, and 
 was elected President of our University; and, on the 
 spot where I now have the privilege to stand, he 
 delivered that inaugural address, which should be the 
 pride and study of American scholars. Those who 
 heard it will not fail to recall with me his recitation 
 of that passage- from Cicero respecting Natura sine 
 Doctrina and Doctrina sine Natura, in a style so ad 
 mirable, that there was nothing left for a hearer but 
 to exclaim, Could Cicero have done it better? 
 
 On this occasion, there was an occurrence which 
 put suddenly to the severest test the equanimity and 
 ready resources of Mr. Everett. The day and place 
 were his and his only. The crowded assembly waited 
 for his word. He rose, and advanced to the front of 
 the platform, and was received with gratifying ap 
 plause. As he was about to begin, the applause re 
 ceived a sudden and marked acceleration, and rose 
 higher and higher into a tumult of cheers. Mr. Ever 
 ett felt that something more than his welcome had 
 caused this; and turning, he saw, just at that opening 
 behind your seat, Mr. Mayor, the majestic presence of 
 Daniel Webster! The reception of Mr. Webster had 
 
 F 41 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 additional force given to it from the fact that he 
 had just returned from his conflict in Congress with 
 Charles Jared Ingersoll, who had made an attack up 
 on his character, and that this, his first appearance 
 among us since, was altogether unexpected. I had 
 heard Mr. Everett s readiness of resource called in 
 question. I looked all must have looked to see 
 how he would meet this embarrassment. He turned 
 again to the audience, cast his eyes slowly round 
 the assembly, wdth a look of the utmost grati 
 fication, seemed to gather their applause in his 
 arms, and, turning about, to lay it ministerially at 
 the feet of Mr. Webster, saying to him, as I re 
 member, I wish, sir, that I could at once assert the 
 authority that has just been conferred upon me, and 
 " auctoritate mihi cornmissa," declare to the audi 
 ence, " exspectatur oratio in lingua vernacula, a 
 Webster." But I suppose, sir, your convenience and 
 .the arrangements made by others render it expedi 
 ent that I should speak myself, at least at first. 
 
 You will agree with me that the exigency was as 
 embarrassing as it was sudden. How could self-pos 
 session escape from it more gracefully ! 
 
 As President, his success was equivocal. We have 
 been told that at the time of his appointment he was 
 thought eminently fitted for the post by the entire 
 community, with but one exception, and that an im 
 portant one, for it was himself. Deep as was his in 
 terest in the University and in academic life and 
 learning, he knew the duties of the office, and 
 doubted his fitness for their discharge. His ideal of 
 
4DDRESS. 
 
 a student s purpose and achievement was high. He 
 knew what he himself had felt and done, expected 
 too much, and suffered too much from disappoint 
 ment. I think, too, that he judged rightly in com 
 paring his temperament with the duties which would 
 fall to him. All, however, agree that his general 
 plans for the University were far-seeing, liberal, and 
 well laid, and many fruits have been reaped from 
 them to this time. He was especially careful for the 
 moral condition of the students, and was unwearied 
 in his efforts to protect them against temptation, and 
 to bring them under religious influence. He was 
 the earnest advocate of encouraging the psycho 
 logical studies, which he feared were being over 
 borne by the natural and exact sciences : holding 
 that moral truths were in their nature so superior, 
 that the slightest of them were of more value than 
 all facts or theories that begin and end in material 
 objects and interests. 
 
 In 1852, Mr. Webster, with failing health and bro 
 ken spirits, came home to Marshfield, turned his face 
 to the wall, and died. A telegraphic despatch sum 
 moned Mr. Everett to Washington, to take charge of 
 the Department of State. Mr. Webster s long illness 
 had left an accumulation of business and some dis 
 order in the department. Mr. Everett applied him 
 self to his work with his habitual laboriousness and 
 system, and established rules which have been found 
 useful in the despatch of business. Within a few days 
 after taking the portfolio, he prepared his answer to 
 Lord John Russel, on the subject of a tripartite 
 
 43 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 alliance. Had he done nothing else, that letter 
 would have established his reputation as a publicist, 
 a scholar, and a thorough, uncompromising American. 
 The election of Mr. Pierce to the presidency, who 
 had not Mr. Everett s support, ended his term of 
 office on the 4th of March, 1853; and on that day he 
 stepped from the Department of State to the Senate, 
 to which he had been elected by the Legislature of 
 Massachusetts. Hardly had he taken his seat, when 
 the discussion arose on the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, in 
 which he was obliged to encounter Mr. Douglas, ad 
 mitted by all to be one of the most formidable, and 
 thought by many not the most scrupulous, of debat 
 ers. If one may judge by the reports in the Con 
 gressional Globe, Mr. Everett bore his part manfully 
 and well. It was in this debate that, addressing Mr. 
 Douglas, he made his celebrated plea for twenty-five 
 more years of peace. He there gave the first signs 
 of his apprehension that a spirit of military aggran 
 dizement and conquest might possess the country, to 
 its ruin. From the enlargement of our country by 
 the peaceful operation of natural causes, he enter 
 tained no fears; but he did fear lest our simple, electo 
 ral, representative system might not stand the stress 
 of military aggrandizement and conquest. He drew a 
 picture of what this country might be after twenty- 
 five years of peace, the development of all its ma 
 terial wealth, its multiform industries, the spread of 
 education and the advancement of knowledge, with 
 the necessary military and naval science duly culti 
 vated, a people capable of bearing arms, a treasury 
 
 44 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 without debt or heavy taxation, and the devoted and 
 reasoning attachment of the people to their govern 
 ment, and declared, that if then a just war must 
 be made, such a people would be invincible. 
 
 The next year, evil and in an evil hour, Mr. 
 Douglas introduced his amendment to the Kansas- 
 Nebraska Bill. Mr. Everett joined earnestly and elo 
 quently in the resistance to that measure. He saw 
 in it the political and territorial advance of slavery 
 and the receding of freedom, and was filled with 
 gloomy apprehensions of a conflict to come. On the 
 test vote, upon the adoption of the amendment, Mr. 
 Everett voted against it, with Mr. Seward, Mr. Sum- 
 ner, Mr. Chase, and six others. So desirous was he 
 to stand on the record against it on every occasion, 
 that when the final vote was taken on the passage 
 of the general bill, which was but a formal vote, he 
 remained in the Senate, though in feeble health, suf 
 fering in body, until nearly four o clock in the morn 
 ing, and then retired for a little rest, upon an under 
 standing, as he supposed, that the vote would not be 
 taken that night. The next day he returned to find 
 the bill passed, and asked leave to record his name 
 against it, stating the circumstances of his absence. 
 Mr. Clayton made a like request. It required unan 
 imous consent. Mr. Dodge, of Iowa, made the un 
 gracious objection, and the names were not entered. 
 In May of that year, by advice of his physician, and 
 unwilling to perform imperfectly the duties of such 
 a post, he resigned his seat. With this ended his 
 official public life. 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 But how can I close a notice of his public life 
 without alluding to that test by which posterity will 
 judge American statesmen of the last twenty years, 
 - the question, with what wisdom, sagacity, self- 
 command, and courage have they met the subject 
 of slavery ? Being of the number of those who dis 
 approve, nay, who condemn, the course of concession 
 and compromise to which Mr. Everett inclined, 
 and that, they knew full well who gave me public 
 leave to speak of him, I feel the more bound to 
 render to Mr. Everett, on this point, the justice that 
 I think his due. Believing always, and more firmly 
 now than ever, that every concession made or of 
 fered to slavery, since the adoption of the Constitu 
 tion, has but encouraged its arrogance, beckoned it 
 on in its advance toward imperial powers, and em 
 boldened it for the final conflict; believing that the 
 only pacificator, if any were possible, was a thorough 
 understanding, from the beginning, that no conces 
 sions could be expected ; I can yet understand, I 
 think, the state of mind of Mr. Everett. We ought 
 not only to look at the subject from his point of 
 view, as the phrase is, but from his interior state. 
 
 I have endeavored to impress you with the convic 
 tion which I feel myself, of the immense importance 
 Mr. Everett attached to the preservation of our na 
 tional system ; to show you that he returned deeply 
 impressed with this from Europe; that it was the re 
 sult of all his studies and observations; that it was the 
 theme of his first public discourse, and the inspiration 
 with which he entered public life forty years ago. Tt 
 
 4G 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 was not pride of empire, nor merely patriotism, but 
 a solemn conviction that it was the one great experi 
 ment, in the fulness of time, and under the most 
 favorable circumstances possible, for the widest and 
 highest moral and intellectual development of human 
 nature. To him, it was also the peacemaker and 
 civil izer of the continent. He had no faith that the 
 institutions of the States could be preserved, if the 
 general government failed. He knew that it might 
 fail. He knew it was an institution of men, to be 
 managed by men ; and he knew too much of the 
 passions and weaknesses of human nature to be of the 
 number of those who think that a vast people can 
 make and unmake society and fundamental institu 
 tions, at their pleasure, without loss or peril. He had 
 always had before him a vivid, some may think a 
 morbid, but certainly an honest, impression of the 
 direful consequences of failure. As long ago as 1835, 
 at Amherst, he said, "If this great experiment of ra 
 tional liberty shall here be permitted to fail, I know 
 not when or where, among the sons of Adam, it will 
 ever be resumed." In 1851, in New York, fourteen 
 years ago this day, he declared " Secession is war, 
 must be war;" and of all wars, civil war, and of all 
 places for civil war, in the republic of America! He 
 said then, and it was always his belief, that if se 
 cession was attempted, the American people would 
 have before them but this alternative, disintegration 
 or civil war. Secession, acquiesced in or yielded to, 
 ended the power and authority of the general govern 
 ment; and that gone, he saw no security for the States 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 themselves. He had seen the Supreme Court settling 
 the boundary line between Massachusetts and Rhode 
 Island upon paper titles, as it would have determined 
 the disputed boundaries of farms in a civil action; 
 but, the central authority abolished, passions excited, 
 vast interests at stake, he did not believe that a peo 
 ple who had overthrown or permitted to perish a Con 
 stitution given them by the wisdom of Washington, 
 Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, would respect arbitrary, 
 surveyor s lines run on parchment charters from 
 dead Annes and Elizabeths. His temperament may 
 have led him to see dangers more vividly than pos 
 sible resources; but to him they were real. As the 
 Israelite, wandering in the desert, to the ark of the 
 covenant, as the Jew to Jerusalem, as the Mussulman 
 to Mecca, so did he look to our Constitution and 
 Union. He had always thought the danger immi 
 nent, as well as great. In 1856, he said, privately, 
 he did not think it wise to publish the opinion, 
 that that was probably the last Presidential elec 
 tion which would be acquiesced in. He did not 
 make the mistake of underrating the power or the 
 purpose of Southern society. He believed that if 
 they entered on the course of secession, and the 
 collision occurred, it was war, war in its most vast 
 proportions, and with all its hazards. 
 
 In making up a tribunal to pass judgment on the 
 course of Mr. Everett, there are classes of persons who 
 may well be subject to "challenge for cause." Those 
 who did not value the Union as he did, can hardly 
 judge him in the price he would pay for its ransom. 
 
 48 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 Those who have the pleasing fancy that there is 
 little cost or risk in resolving society into its orig 
 inal elements, to make it over again at our will, are 
 hardly capable of placing themselves at his point of 
 view. They, too, may well be counted out, and with 
 them would go the large majority of the North, who 
 did not believe the danger real, or, if real, great, 
 who underrated the slave-power, in its capabilities 
 and its purposes. 
 
 On the other hand, Mr. Everett is not to be con 
 founded with those who were indifferent to the 
 concessions proposed, with that great number, far 
 too great, who, first palliating slavery, then excus 
 ing it, passed at last to justification and sympathy. 
 Whatever he may have said or thought, in youth, of 
 our political relations with slavery, when slavery 
 was but a local institution, not justified but rather 
 excused where it existed, and not suspected of look 
 ing to imperial power, his opinions as to slavery 
 itself, in its moral aspects, were never equivocal. 
 His position was that of compromise, but not of 
 ambiguity. 
 
 In 1853, at Washington, when he was Secretary 
 of State, at the period of the most extreme sen 
 sitiveness and extravagant demands of the slave- 
 power, he delivered an address before the Colo 
 nization Society, in which he controverted their 
 fundamental principle with all the powers which 
 he possessed. He urged that the negro must and 
 could civilize Africa. He met the argument that 
 the negro was not capable of self-government, of 
 49 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 constructing and maintaining a civilized empire, 
 that he is essentially inferior and must be governed 
 by the white, by saying, " I do not believe it." 
 He not only contended that, as a human being, the 
 negro was substantially equal, but he drew proofs 
 from all history, and discredited the assertion of his 
 incapacity by showing that races had been enslaved 
 and as degraded as the negro, yet had risen to be 
 among the master-races of the globe. He wrote the 
 biography of Abdul Rahaman, an African prince, a 
 scholar, and a prince in manners, who, having been 
 made captive in some disastrous battle and sold into 
 slavery, was met, years afterwards, in the streets 
 of a town in Tennessee, in the garb and duties of 
 a slave, a coincidence that would have seemed 
 unnatural in fiction, by an American citizen, who 
 had been a guest at his father s court when trav 
 elling in the interior of Africa. I scarcely know a 
 clearer proof of what slavery is than the fact that 
 neither by law nor by money, nor by persuasion, 
 though multitudes joined in it, could this prince be 
 rescued from bondage to a man who had paid for 
 him on the auction-block. He was liberated it is 
 true, at last, and returned to his native land, but 
 after many years of effort, and not by any course 
 for which the slave-system made provision. 
 
 I think Mr. Everett knew the nature of slavery, 
 that he felt its injustice, and the deplorable con 
 sequences that must follow in its train. When he 
 proposed to concede anything to it, he knew what 
 he conceded. He knew why he conceded. He 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 weighed out the concessions scrupulously and pain 
 fully. He took no satisfaction in any of the com 
 promises which had been or were to be made with 
 it; still less did he ever treat them with levity, or 
 profess to perform their duties with alacrity. He 
 did not join the Democratic party, whatever the 
 temptation, because he believed, I speak of a fact 
 of history, I would not take advantage of my 
 position to-day to wound the susceptibilities of any 
 man, because it was his belief that that party had 
 become too much the ally of the slave-power. He 
 preferred to be without a party. He looked over 
 the whole field. He balanced vast moral consid 
 erations. For purposes which he understood, he 
 was willing to make concessions which he appre 
 ciated. 
 
 Among men capable of understanding such vast 
 questions, and whose objects are no other than the 
 public good, the dividing line is not one of logic, 
 but of temperament. It is, as Macaulay said of 
 Whig and Tory at one time in England, a good 
 deal a question of Natural History. Without un 
 dertaking to analyze and classify those qualities of 
 Mr. Everett, physical and moral, which go to make 
 up what we call, for convenience, the tempera 
 ment, one cannot but be struck by the contrast 
 between him and another statesman of Massachu 
 setts, his near neighbor in birth and residence, 
 John Quiii cy Adams, of whom Mr. Choate 
 once playfully said, in the privacy of his study, 
 what has passed into public biography, " What an 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 antagonist he was ! An instinct for the jugular and 
 carotid artery equal to that of any of the carnivo 
 rous animals ; " and whom Mr. Everett described 
 as one whose natural place would have been at 
 the weather yard-arm in a tempest, or leading the 
 forlorn hope through the deadly imminent breach. 
 
 Mr. Everett is also fairly entitled to be judged 
 as a peace man. I do not mean, in the formal 
 and technical sense, but in spirit and in truth, a 
 peace man. His weapons were the tongue and 
 the pen. He knew that the tongue was a sharp 
 sword, cutting deeper than the life of the body, 
 and the pen an arrow, hurting past all surgery. 
 He used these his weapons with the self-denial 
 and the consideration of a true philanthropist. He 
 believed that those who make war are as respon 
 sible as those who fight war, whether in private 
 society or in the society of nations. He believed 
 that the Christian benediction upon the peace 
 maker might fall upon many a man who, at the 
 call of society and in a just cause, gasped out his 
 life in the roar of battle, and yet be forfeited 
 by those, who, drawing some formal distinction 
 about the personal use of sword and musket, yet 
 allow themselves to wield the weapons of the tongue 
 and the pen in a spirit which, if not repressed in 
 actual warfare, would carry it back to the days of 
 barbarism. Cast your eyes over all he has written, 
 recall whatever he has spoken, and tell me whether 
 you find one word which affects his right to be 
 judged, in spirit and in truth, as a man of peace. 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 Mr. Everett knew that wars were caused as of 
 ten by estranged feeling as by actual wrongs ; and 
 it seemed to him that there was one chord of 
 common sympathy between North and South which 
 might yet be touched with some hope of success, 
 the common love and respect for the memory of 
 Washington. He prepared a discourse upon the 
 character of Washington, to be delivered throughout 
 the country, in aid of the fund for the purchase of 
 Mount Yernon. As a rhetorical composition, adapted 
 for declamation in public, by a master of elocution, 
 it probably has not its superior in American liter 
 ature. He spoke it in all parts of the country, 
 north, south, east, and west, to the largest and 
 most brilliant audiences, in all, no less than one 
 hundred and twenty-nine times ; obtaining, by the 
 sale of tickets of admission, about $50,000 for the 
 benefit of the fund. What a splendid realization 
 of the bright vision of his youth, of a common 
 language and extended education, when we con 
 sider that this discourse has been heard by more 
 men and women than ever listened to any one 
 discourse by any one man, so far as we know, 
 since the beginning of time ! 
 
 The times were beyond the reach of such sedatives 
 as this. But he had done what he could. He felt 
 that he was standing between earnest and strong 
 parties, and that his course was no longer popular, and 
 was subjecting him to the suspicion of timidity and 
 inadequate instincts and opinions. In an oration on 
 the 4th of July, at Boston, in 1858, he said, "I know 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 that this has ceased to be a popular strain; but I 
 willingly accept the unpopularity. I know that in 
 certain quarters Union-saving is treated with real 
 or affected contempt. I am content to share in the 
 ridicule attached to anxiety for the preservation of 
 the Union." His tone at this period was always 
 solemn, and not hopeful. In I860, he accepted the 
 nomination for Vice-President from a party organized 
 upon a principle of compromise between the Repub 
 licans and the Democrats. He thought that the 
 Democratic party had gone too far in allying itself 
 with the slave-power, and that the Republicans were 
 unreasonable in refusing all concessions. I do not 
 think this nomination could have had much attrac 
 tion for him, or that he had much hope of its 
 success. 
 
 At length, the blow was struck ; and not by us ! 
 The war was begun by the slave-power in rebel 
 lion. He took his position instantly. It was neither 
 equivocal nor compromising. He threw the whole 
 weight of his character, influence, and powers mto 
 the scale for the national life. He discarded all 
 party connections; put at hazard life-long friend 
 ships ; refused all criticisms on details of men and 
 measures, military or civil; and gave to the admin 
 istration a generous and thorough-going support. He 
 urged the war thorough, earnest war, with all the 
 powers of war for the preservation of the Union. 
 As for slavery, while he would not strike a blow 
 at that, under a pretence of military necessity, in 
 violation of what is fundamental in our constitution, 
 
 54 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 yet, when the administration decided, in good faith, 
 that such a military necessity did exist, he sustained 
 both the authority and the policy of the government. 
 It has been said, very commonly, that in all 
 this Mr. Everett had undergone a great change, 
 that he had, in fact, made a revolution in his 
 opinions. I do not so regard it. His course, the 
 last four years, seems to me to have been the log 
 ical result of the convictions and purposes we have 
 found possessing him forty years before, and up to 
 the moment the war began. That same immense im 
 portance which he attached to the preservation of our 
 system, not for pride nor for patriotism only, but for 
 the good of the human race ; that same belief in the 
 reality and magnitude of the danger to the Union ; 
 that conviction that secession must be war, by which 
 he had prepared his mind for the result, and was 
 not taken by surprise ; that same conviction of the 
 military and political power of slavery ; that same 
 conviction that secession, acquiesced in or yielded 
 to, was disintegration, was the end of our national 
 system, and perilled the existence of the States 
 themselves, and opened the flood-gates for all those 
 consequences which he most feared and detested for 
 human nature ; that same conviction that war, dread 
 ful as it is, may sometimes be just and necessary ; 
 all the convictions and purposes which inspired his 
 tongue in youth and early manhood, which per 
 suaded him to concessions while there was a hope 
 of averting the catastrophe, these same convictions, 
 when the war had begun, found him poised, collected, 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 unsurprised, satisfied in understanding and in con 
 science that the duty to preserve the Union was a 
 paramount duty, that compromise with Secession was 
 impossible, that the war must be fought through, 
 to its end. He had no new reasons to give. His 
 attempts to avert and to assuage may have been 
 useless. That is matter of opinion. It is matter of 
 opinion, too, whether they were wise or brave ; but 
 his course, when the catastrophe came, was con 
 sistent with his course from the beginning. The 
 surgeon who sees that a capital operation may be 
 necessary, but fears that it may be fatal to life, 
 may put it off too long, and dally with palliatives 
 worse than unavailing ; but it would be a mistake 
 of terms to call him inconsistent for using the 
 knife resolutely when he sees it unavoidable. 
 
 I think, too, many have thought, that from 
 the moment the point was reached beyond which 
 slavery was no longer to be respected, Mr. Everett 
 seemed to enter upon a new life. Whatever else 
 the war had emancipated, it had emancipated him. 
 He was no longer bound by obligations of compact, 
 or law, or policy, to the slave-power. His tone 
 recovered something of the cheer and elation of 
 his youth. He seemed to cry, in the words of 
 ancient Church for thousands of years, "LAQUEUS 
 
 CONTR1TUS EST, ET NOS LIBERATI SUMUS." 
 
 In this war, he did not wait for conscription or 
 for bounty. He enlisted at once in the only arm of 
 the service for which his years had left him fitted. 
 He felt, as he so touchingly said in his last public 
 
 56 
 
A l> 1> R A -S>. 
 
 words, at the meeting for the Savannah sufferers, in 
 Fane nil Hall, " I am an old man. There is nothing 
 of me left with which I can serve my country, except 
 my lips." He felt that the understanding and con 
 science of the people must be satisfied on the subject 
 of this war. He knew that false doctrines of State 
 rights had been so fostered as to lead some to doubt 
 our right to subdue a rebellion begun in the name 
 of a State. He knew that party spirit, the blame 
 of which lay on both sides, crippled the power of the 
 government. He felt that long association with the 
 slave-power and its leaders, in political party, had 
 produced, in many, a latent sympathy which blinded 
 them to the sin of the rebellion, and made them cold 
 in their country s cause. He determined to devote 
 whatever he had of eloquence, of logic, of learning, 
 to the instruction and persuasion of the public mind 
 and conscience; in his own words, in 1824, to 
 " disdain mean conceptions, and speak a noble word 
 which will touch the heart of a great people." He 
 prepared a speech upon the character of the war. 
 Its object was to show the sin of the rebellion, its 
 unprovoked and causeless character ; to show the ne 
 cessity and rightfulness of the war, and to enforce 
 the duty of a generous, self-sacrificing, earnest sup 
 port of the government. This speech has never been 
 printed. A few days since, I had the pleasure of 
 holding the manuscript in my hand. It is written 
 in his careful handwriting, and on the back he 
 had noted the places and dates of its delivery. It 
 was spoken first in Boston, on the 16th October, 
 
 H 57 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 1861, and then no less than sixty times in about 
 thirty weeks. It is known that he was infirm in 
 health, subject to sudden and painful attacks, pecu 
 liarly depressing when away from home and friends, 
 and aggravated by journey ings. He was bowed 
 also by domestic bereavement. Yet, through the 
 long winter, in weariness and painfulness, in journey- 
 ings oft, and not without peril to life, he traversed 
 the country upon his mission, speaking in nearly 
 every large city not within the enemy s lines, in 
 Baltimore and Washington, in St. Louis, Detroit, 
 Chicago, Milwaukie, Davenport, Dubuque, and at St. 
 Paul, at the head-waters of the Mississippi. We can 
 imagine his sensations when he, the orator of the 
 Phi Beta in 1824, stood at the foot of the falls of 
 St. Anthony, pleading the cause of his country, in 
 the vernacular tongue, before a large and culti 
 vated resident audience, where, twenty years after 
 his Phi Beta Kappa address, nothing was to be 
 seen but limitless prairies of the buffalo, forests of 
 wolves, and an intersection of the war-paths of the 
 Sioux and the Chippewas. 
 
 From the beginning of the war, Mr. Everett had 
 carefully abstained from all party action. He said 
 that if he could exert any influence, it must be in 
 dependently of political party. But in 1864, when 
 candidates had been named and purposes declared, 
 he came to the opinion that the election was not 
 a question of political party. He was convinced 
 that the continuance of the administration, by the 
 reelection of Mr. Lincoln, was, to all human view, 
 
 58 
 
.1 />/>UESS. 
 
 the only course for the preservation of the Union. 
 He made one speech in Boston, again addressing 
 himself, calmly and plainly, with an absence of all 
 attempts at mere rhetorical effect, to the under 
 standing and conscience of the people. On this 
 question, no citizen of the republic had a position 
 for influence like his. Not only did his age, dis 
 tinction, experience, public services, and character 
 command respect, but his previous course gave him 
 a peculiar influence with that large class on the 
 middle ground, not intrenched within the party 
 lines, upon whose action the result so largely de 
 pended. This speech was widely circulated, and 
 produced a great effect upon the class of persons 
 to whom it was addressed. On the second Monday 
 in November, he presided over the electoral college 
 of Massachusetts, and certified its vote for Mr. Lin- 
 coin. This was the last official act of his life. 
 
 Whatever difference of opinion may remain as to 
 the Presidential election, I am persuaded that no 
 loyal and patriotic man, looking at what Mr. Everett 
 has done during the last four years, will refuse to 
 join me in saying that, much as Mr. Everett owed 
 to his country, he did not die in its debt. 
 
 His public official life had ended. But he an 
 swered to every call of benevolence and patriot 
 ism. He was selected to utter the national voice 
 at the consecration of the cemetery at Gettysburg. 
 He made an address at the opening of the fair for 
 the seamen of the navy, in Boston. He welcomed 
 the officers and the crew of the Kearsarge, at 
 
.1 L) L) R E $ X . 
 
 Faneuil Hall. The loyal Tennesseans, among their 
 valleys and mountains, will pass down his name with 
 gratitude to children s children. After a day of la 
 bor, pressed with care, and so infirm in health that 
 his absence might not only have been excused but 
 justified, he would not, could not refuse, a blessed 
 instinct led him to speak at Faneuil Hall for the 
 sufferers at Savannah ; and so, the Cradle of Liberty 
 received his last public utterance ; so, he fitly 
 rounded his life, ending, as he began, a preacher 
 of the gospel of charity. It is touching to think 
 that this man, who had stood before kings and 
 people, and held the great arguments of public law 
 and reasons of state, in the high places of the 
 earth, at length and at last comes back to the 
 uttering of those simple, primitive precepts which 
 his mother had taught him at her knee. 
 
 It is time, more than time, that my voice should 
 cease. Yet, may we not delay a moment, for the 
 satisfaction of expressing our belief that the fame 
 of Mr. Everett, as a speaker and writer, has been 
 fairly earned and is firmly fixed? I do not see why 
 it has not been as fairly earned as the painter, 
 sculptor, poet, or composer earns his. The artist 
 produces his statue or picture, the poet his lyric 
 or epic, the composer his oratorio or symphony, sub 
 mits it to the judgment of time, and abides the re 
 sult. For fifty years, year by year, Mr. Everett has 
 submitted orations, speeches, diplomatic letters, es 
 says, and lectures to the judgment of his age, 
 and abided the result. If that judgment has been 
 
 GO 
 
-1 1th HKSS. 
 
 favorable to him, it cannot be attributed to fraud, 
 accident, or surprise. His written and spoken style 
 has been submitted to various tests, the test of 
 novelty and the test of familiarity ; has been ap 
 plied to great varieties of topics, in various places, 
 and before two generations ; and has survived the 
 changes and chances of taste and opinion. That 
 same written style, which at the first charmed 
 this critical community, was found, after forty 
 years, equal to a contest with the trained diplo 
 matists of Europe, on the theatre of the Nations. 
 That elocution, which in the freshness of its 
 youth filled Brattle Street, its aisles, ay to its 
 window-tops, and moved to a kind of ecstasy the 
 select audiences at Cambridge, Concord, and Plym 
 outh, was found, in its gray and bent age, equal 
 more equal than any other to the exigen 
 cies of the most vast and momentous popular can 
 vass the world ever saw. 
 
 We will not pause to recall what is well known 
 of his characteristics, his memory, in quickness and 
 tenacity fairly entitled to be called wonderful ; his 
 systematic habits ; his love of the highest and best 
 topics, men, and books ; the singular purity of his 
 life, the dignity of his manners, his decorous com 
 pliance with all the reasonable and many of the 
 unreasonable demands of society, his reverent partici 
 pation in Christian ordinances. Those who remem 
 ber, in his address on the character of Washington, 
 the loathing with which he describes Frederick the 
 Great displaying at once his disbelief in the Christian 
 
 01 
 
ADDRESS. 
 
 doctrine of the resurrection and his contempt for 
 his species, by ordering his body to be buried with 
 his dogs at Potsdam, can understand the sensibility 
 with which he must have contemplated such a rev 
 erent Christian burial as has been accorded him by 
 this community. At that, we take our leave of 
 him. We cannot follow him further. But we may 
 look into the vacancy, repeating his own words, 
 "After nature, after time, after life, after death, we 
 reach those sweet fields beyond the swelling flood, 
 where the philosophy of the mind awaits, at the 
 foot of the Cross, a wisdom higher than its own." 
 
 62 
 
APPENDIX: 
 
 THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE CITY COUNCIL OP CAMBRIDGE, 
 
 ON THE DECEASE OF 
 
 EDWARD EVERETT. 
 
DEATH OF EDWARD EVERETT. 
 
 AT a meeting of the City Council of Cambridge, January 18, 1865, the 
 Mayor, Hon. J. WARRKX MERRILL, made the following communication: 
 
 O 
 
 CITY OF CAMBRIDGE. 
 
 MAYOR S OFFICE, January 18, 1865. 
 
 GENTLEMEN OF THE CITY COUNCIL: Since we last met, 
 every mind has been startled and every heart saddened by 
 the announcement of the sudden decease of one who was 
 formerly a resident of our city, and whom we, in common 
 with all our countrymen, delighted to honor. 
 
 The Hon. EDWARD EVERETT began his career as a public 
 speaker within the walls of our honored University on the 
 occasion of the visit of the noble Lafayette, and afterwards, 
 as its President, added new lustre to its fair fame. During 
 his residence with us he took a deep interest in our schools, 
 and was ever the friend of popular education. 
 
 But it is not from considerations of local interest that we 
 are called upon to honor his memory. The many eminent 
 positions in the State and in the nation which he occupied 
 and adorned, and the noble example of public and private 
 virtue which he gave us, alike move us to love and respect 
 his memory and to give expression to these feelings. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 For many years he was engaged in political life, yet 
 during all its strifes his opponents never questioned the 
 purity of his motives ; and the nohle manner in which he 
 came forward when traitors fired on the flag of the Re 
 public, in support of " the Constitution and the enforce 
 ment of the laws," filled up the measure of his fame, and 
 secured for him the homage and gratitude of every loyal 
 and patriotic American. 
 
 I do not doubt that you will esteem it a privilege to take 
 such action as will give expression to your feelings on 
 this sad occasion, and I content myself with the sugges 
 tion, that, as his memory is, and will be in all the ages to 
 come, associated with that of Washington, as his most 
 eloquent eulogist, you provide for suitable public ser 
 vices before the citizens of Cambridge, on the 22d of Feb 
 ruary proximo, in honor of his memory. 
 Respectfully submitted, 
 
 J. WARREN MERRILL, MAYOR. 
 
 The foregoing communication having been read by the Mayor, the fol 
 lowing order was adopted in the Board of Aldermen : 
 
 Ix BOARD OF ALDERMEN, January 18, 1865. 
 
 Ordered, That the communication of His Honor be sent 
 to the other Board, and that Messrs. Choate and Carter, 
 with such as the Council may join, be a committee to con 
 sider and report what action shall be taken by the City 
 Government to testify their respect for the memory of the 
 late Mr. Everett. 
 
 The order was adopted by the Common Council, in concurrence, and 
 Messrs. Fuller, Sawyer, and Blanchard were joined on said Committee, 
 on the part of that Board. 
 
 66 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 The Committee retired, and, after a short time, submitted the follow 
 ing report and resolutions : 
 
 IN BOAUD OF ALDERMEN, January 18, 1865. 
 The Committee appointed to consider and report what 
 action shall be taken by the City Government to testify 
 their respect for the memory of the late Hon. Edward 
 Everett, submit a partial report. They recommend that 
 the accompanying resolutions be adopted by the two 
 branches of the City Government, and ask for further time 
 to consider what further action should be taken by the 
 City in accordance with the suggestion of His Honor the 
 
 Mayor. 
 
 C. F. CHOATE, 
 
 For the Committee. 
 
 RESOLUTIONS. 
 
 Whereas, Since the last meeting of the City Council, the 
 Hon. Edward Everett, for many years an honored citizen 
 of Cambridge, has departed this life, deeming it due to the 
 City and to themselves to enter upon the records of the 
 City their deep sense of gratitude for his example and his 
 life, and their grief for the loss which they, in common 
 with the Commonwealth and the nation, have sustained in 
 his decease in the maturity of his great powers and the 
 fulness of his usefulness: 
 
 Resolved, That the City Council of the City of Cam 
 bridge, gratefully recognizing the services of the deceased 
 in all the high stations he was called to fill, his spot 
 less liCe, his varied learning, his matchless eloquence, his 
 comprehensive patriotism, his philanthropic labors for suf 
 fering humanity, which have made his name and memory 
 a precious heirloom of the nation, share in the universal 
 sorrow for a loss so irreparable. 
 
 67 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 Resolved, That the City Council count it a peculiar 
 honor to the City of Cambridge that, for so large a portion 
 of Mr. Everett s life, his home was within its borders, and 
 remember and appreciate his ready services in the cause 
 of public education in the City and his deep interest in its 
 welfare. 
 
 Resolved, That His Honor the Mayor be requested to 
 cause the flags on all the public buildings to be raised at 
 half-mast, and the bells in the churches of the City to be 
 tolled, on the day of the funeral of the deceased. 
 
 Resolved, That a copy of these resolutions and of the 
 communication of His Honor the Mayor be sent to the 
 family of the deceased, to manifest to them the heartfelt 
 sympathy of the people of Cambridge in their bereavement. 
 
 The foregoing resolutions were unanimously adopted by both branches 
 of the City Council. 
 
 A copy of the same was sent to the family of the deceased, and the 
 following communication was received from Mr. William Everett : 
 
 BOSTON, January 23, 1865. 
 
 The family of Mr. Everett have received the certified copy of the 
 resolutions passed by the City Council of Cambridge, and desire 
 me to express how much they have been touched and gratified 
 by the words of sympathy and affection from a city so long the 
 home of their father, and so constantly the object of his interest 
 and care. 
 
 With great respect, 
 
 WILLIAM EVERETT. 
 
 At the regular meeting of the City Council, Feb. 1, 1865, Alderman 
 Choate submitted the following report : 
 68 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 Ix BOARD OF ALDEKMEX, February 1, 1865. 
 
 The Committee to whom was referred the communication 
 of His Honor the Mayor, recommending public services on 
 the 22d day of February by the City Government, in com 
 memoration of the life and services of the late Hon. Ed 
 ward Everett, have considered the subject and respectfully 
 report : 
 
 That in their opinion it is expedient and proper, in view 
 of the relation subsisting for so many years between the 
 City of Cambridge and the deceased, and the high estima 
 tion in which he was held by the people of Cambridge, 
 that such public services should be held by the City Gov 
 ernment as suggested, and that Richard H. Dana, Jr., Esq., 
 be requested to deliver an address on that occasion, and 
 recommend the passage of the following order. 
 For the Committee, 
 
 C. F. CHOATE, CHAIRMAN. 
 
 The order which accompanied the foregoing report was as follows : 
 
 Ix BOARD OF ALDERMEX, February 1, 1865. 
 Ordered, That His Honor the Mayor, and Messrs. 
 Choate and Carter, with such as the Common Council 
 may join, be a committee to make all necessary arrange 
 ments for the celebration of the 22d of February by the 
 City Government, by public services and an address com 
 memorative of the late Edward Everett. 
 
 The order was adopted by the Common Council, in concurrence, and 
 the President of the Council, and Messrs. Merrill, Towne, and Blanchard 
 were joined on the Committee, on the part of that Board. 
 
 On the 22d of February a procession was formed at the City Hall, 
 and moved to the First Church, under the escort of the three Cambridge 
 companies of unattached militia, where the address of Mr. Dana was 
 delivered in presence of the City Council and a large number of invited 
 
 guests and citizens of Cambridge. 
 
 69 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 At the regular meeting of the City Council, February 22, 1865, the 
 following order wa*s unanimously adopted : 
 
 Is BOARD OF ALDERMEX, February 22, 1865. 
 
 Ordered, That the thanks of the City Council be, and 
 hereby are, tendered to Richard H. Dana, Jr., Esq., for his 
 interesting and eloquent address upon the life and services 
 of the late Edward Everett, delivered this day before the 
 City Government, and that the Mayor be requested to ask 
 of Mr. Dana a copy of the address for publication. 
 
 70 
 
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