642 B5 OF THE UNIVERSITY OF 1. A/ t/t2 IT-L. THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. -5HA MEMORIAL ADDRESS^- BY REV. JOHN H. BARROWS. D. D., Pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, Chicago. DELIVERED CENTRAL MUSIC HALL, SUNDAY, MAY 27th. 1883. PRICE TEN CENTS. CHICAGO: THE COMRADE PUBLISHING OFFICE, 193 Washington Street, 1883. I Copyrighted.] DEDICATED to THE FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF CHICAGO, Whose Generous Contributions furnished forth the Services of the Memorial occasion here recorded. The Veteran Soldiers of Chicago take this method of expressing their appreciation of the kindness of the members of this Church, and of its pastor, who, on that evening thrilled them with a patriotic fire which never burned nnore brightly within them than on this eventful occasion. IE INTRODUCTION. ERE is a church in Chicago that was orguniz-jd from the Army X and which has not forgotten its nurturing mother. Fifty years imo, in 18!J:>, wlun Chicago numbered 300 people, including the irarrison who kept tlie fort, this church was formed. Its minister was a homo missionary ; its first Elder was the Commandant of the Fort ; its members were soldiers of the army. Its congregation were summoned to their services by the fife and drum. The fife accompanied its hymns. Soldiers in uniform, twenty-three in number, partook of its communion, and there gathered a little body of the people. Peace sat upon Lake Michigan, the garrison was withdrawn, but the church remained. Great offshoots have divided from the parent stem on each of the three sides, but the old body remains aggressive and militant. Its church edifice cost 16,000. Its membership numbers nearly 1,000. But its pastor feeling that some one should hold the fort near the old mission ground, the people responded. From the first of October to the last of May, they hired the great Central Music Hall, which will seat 4,000; pro vided for a magnificent choir, an organist unsurpassed, and solo singers of great merit, and each Sunday night the pastor held his meetings. The expense for hall, music and printing averaging $130 for each service. As a fitting close of the present season, a memorial service in honor of the nation s dead and of their cause was here called by the descendants of the soldier church on Sunday evening, May 27, 1883. The veterans were invited, and 3,000 seats reserved for the soldiers of the Grand Army were filled by them. Then the hall was crowded to the roof, and thousands who sought admission had to go away. The Union Veteran 4 THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. Club, under command of Captain Sexton, and Posts 5, 7, 9, 28, 40, 50 and 91, commanded by Colonel Swain, attended in a body. The great organ and the hall were draped with the national flag, while the colors in the hands of the color-bearers of the Posts gathered on either end of the stage fringed the scene of peace with martiai pomp. Upon the stage behind the speaker, sat a choir of 150 men. The Appollo Club, led by Professor Tomlins, one of the great musicians of the time. The services were opened by the choir singing the hymn, "O G-od beneath thy guiding hand." The 33d Psalm was then read, and a memorial hymn sung, when Dr. Barrows said: "In our missionary gatherings we are accustomed to sing The Morning light is breaking. and in all our patriotic gatherings we sing My country, tis of thee, let me introduce the honored author of the hymns, the Reverend Samuel Francis Smith, of Boston, Massachussetts, who will lead us ia invoca tion to the throne of grace." Fifty-one years have passed since the banner-hymn first floated from his pen, but age sits lightly on the reverend bard, and the voice whose music has led patriot millions in his song, rose sweet and clear and pure, reaching the utmost corner of the vast hall, and leading all in thanks for the life of the men who died in field and camp and prison, and at their homes ; of martyred Lincoln, Illinois great son, and those who bore the burden and yet live, that freedom and our country might be saved. He was at home, among the soldiers of the country, and their hearts went with him before the Almighty throne. Johu McWade (an old soldier with one arm) most beautifully sang the solo: "Tenting on the old camp ground," the choir joining in the chorus. Then was sung the hymn (no longer Dr. Smith s but America s), u My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing." Within two years the grateful ears of its author has heard it sung in far oft Hindostan by native choirs ; by imperial mandate of the Empress of India, naval bands on British ships welcomed him with his own song ; in London and on the Continent it swelled to do him honor, but here 4.000 veteran voices drowned the vast organ s power, as in mighty sympathy each joined the bard in singing, and made the words his own. The Apollo Club sang Keller s Memorial hymn, and then followed the address, Dr. Barrows basing his remarks on the following verse of the Psalms: "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, and the people whom He hath chosen for His own inheritance." Psalms, xxxii: 12. THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. 5 ADDRESS: I AM to speak to you to-night of this Nation which many of you fought to save from injustice, dismemberment and shameful over throw. When I recall the splendid patriotic record of this great city, when I remember that from this goodly State a quarter of million soldiers were enlisted for the Nation s defense, when I read the story of the brave men who, like the gallant Forty-fifth Illinois Regiment, stormed the heights of Vicksburg, and of the equally brave men from this Common wealth, some of them among my most cherished friends, whose loyalty to the old flag was not conquered by the horrors of Libby and Andersonville, and when I learn with what spirit you have observed these annual com memorations, I can not doubt that the theme which I have chosen is very dear to your hearts. I shall endeavor to show you the worth and the strength of the American Republic, whose wide -branching roots now enfold and pierce a half million loyal soldiers graves. I shall utilize this hour in the hope of re-kindling a noble faith in that national life, the links of whose indissoluble unity were forged in the fiery heat of a thousand battlefields. But who can add, by the feebleness of words, to the patriotic cheer of a scene like this ? Shall I, a man of peace and a servant of the Peaceful King, hope even to vocalize the inspiration that already haunts this mar tial air? While some of you were fighting on the Shenandoah, the Tennessee, the Mississippi and the James, I, a lad at school, was writing essays on Julius Caesar, or following Homer s brazen-clad heroes about the walls of Troy. The ink of the doctors may be, in our civilization,as the Koran declares, equally precious with the blood of the martyrs ; but shall the men of books, on an occasion like this, worthily celebrate the immortal dead, in the presence of so many of the living, before whose daily and nightly vision gleam "the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps?" In the presence of the soldier, Lowell, most gifted of American poets, con fessed : " Weak winged is song Nor aims at that clear-elherecl height, Whither the brave deed climbs for light We seem to do them wrong, Bringing our robin s leaf to deck their hearse Who in warm life-b ood wrote their nobler verse. Our trivial song to honor those who come, W T ith ears attuned to strenuous trump and drum, And shaped in squadrcn-s rophes their desire, Live batt e-odes whose lines were steel and fire." Even Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg : "We can not dedicate, we G THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us ; that from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gav 3 the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain ; that the Nation shall under God have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, for the people and by the people shall not perish from the earth. " Accordingly it is better to say that the soldier honors us. than that we honor him. But, if any words can bring us into sympathy with this memorial hour, if any words can hope to share the perpetual renown of the battle-field, they are those which the good President uttered at Gettysburg. They might well be read at all our patriotic services, for no- modern speech is worthier to be compared with the choicest legacies of Greek eloquence, even with the funeral oration of Pericles in which the Athenian statesman said: "Of illustrious men the whole earth is the sepulchre." A few hours hence we shall celebrate the patriots Holy Day. ID how many hundreds of peaceful cemeteries throughout this continental Republic, by the rushing Penobscot, the majestic Hudson, the tranquil Charles, the broad and placid Susquehanna, the historic Potomac, where "all is quiet" now ; by the beautiful Ohio,the turbid Missouri and the far off streams that seek the Pacific Sea, in classic Auburn where mingle the ashes of heroes and sages, in Oakwood and Graceland by the storm-lashed shores of our own Lake Michigan, on the sacred slopes where the mur dered Garfield s tomb is garlanded with the laurels of all mankind, in Oak Ridge by the Sangamon, where Lincoln sleeps, among the Berkshire Hills where Bartlett, "the more than Sidney of our times" rests at last, the toil and turmoil of the battle over, on the heights of Arlington, over looking the Nation s Capital, where the precious sod is billowy with ten thousand graves, and here and there let us hope, still further southward, where our soldiers died, shall patriots gather and loyal hands shall lay the blossoming wreaths, entwined with loving and grateful memories and dewy with tears that tell of pride and sorrow both, on those bannered mounds, how the number of them grows as the years pass away! beneath which rest the mouldered forms of men, the flower and beauty of their time, who plunged into the red fog that stretched two thousand miles along the ridge of battle, that the flag of an unbroken nationality and an inviolable freedom might forever float above the Republic s undivided and imperial domain. I greatly value the martyred soldier s day in our Nation s calendar, mingling, as we may reverently believe, something of the solemnity of THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. 7 Good Friday with something of the joy of Easter, a day which speaks of life born of death, recalling to a younger generation growing up in the midst of bustle and luxury, those heroic years when treasure and blood were counted little, while civilization and human rights were at stake. Decoration day has appropriated the better uses of the Fourth of July. It has not been degraded, like our chief national holiday, by bluster and dissipation. It keeps a soberer and healthfuller tone, worthier a Nation whose life depends on the intelligence and good principle of its citizens. The glory of that day is that it commemorates not our Declaration of Independence, but the preservation of the independent national life which our fathers declared co be theirs. In his message to Congress on the Fourth of July, 1861, at the opening of the War, Mr. Lincoln said; "Our popular government has often been called an experiment. Two points in it our people have settled, the successful establishing and the successful administering of it. One still remains, its successful main tenance against a formidable attempt to overthrow it." It was to vindi cate the unity of the Nation and make it perpetual, that you O men of Illinois rose up and sent forth your sons to defend the imperilled nation ality. It was because you believed that ours is not a confederacy, but a nation and hence a moral personality that can not be wounded in any part without shame and disaster, that the regiments of the great Prairie Commonwealth hastened southward in those April days which gave us new Lexingtons and Concords. A noble Lord in the British Parliament had just declared that the u <rreat American bubble had burst." Even Mr. Gladstone, foremost of living statesmen, had expressed the opinion, since publicly and penitently retracted, that tao Union should and would be divided. The cannon- shot against Fort Sumpter, which has been called the "yell of pirates against the Declaration of Independence, was also and more a blow struck in the augu.st face of American Nationality, and how the hot blood tingled when the blow fell I In spite of acts of secession passed by legislatures, not the deliberate work of the people, but the coups d etaf of desperate leaders, in spite of long indoctrination into the heresy of state-sovereignty, in spite of the eclipse which slavery had brought in many hearts over the consciousness of a supreme national life, we were still a nation. The flag had many stripes and stars, but the flag was one. The Constitution was the work of "the people of, these United States," and the people was one people. The Government under that Constitu tion had in it all the elements of supremacy and universality, and the Government was one. Hence, when the blow was struck, the Nation, slow to believe in danger, proudly conscious of strength, rose like a THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. startled giant, to grapple with its foe, equipped two millions of men, guarded four thousand miles of coast-line with battle-ships, carrying on its military movements at points as far removed as Liverpool from Jerusalem, and Lisbon from St. Petersburg, making every petty prince, every foolish flunkey and every imperial despot of the Old World respect its force, while some of them prayed for its ruin, and to-day, with reverent gratitude, let us say it, to the men who climbed the heights of Lookout Mountain, faced death in that forest of death, the Wilderness, and strangled the confederacy in the cordon of forts that encompassed Peters burg and Richmond, to day, Lord John Russell s bubble that did nnt burst, shines resplendent on the brow of the century, the crown jewel of the world, with a lustre which, God grant, may never grow dim. The noble Frenchman, Count de Gasparin was right in naming the war for the Union, 4 the uprising of a Great People." In 1814, Jefferson who was the chief antagonist of all centralization, and who is wrongly regarded as justifying the dogma of state sovereignty, wrote to LaFayette; "The cement of the Union is in the heart-blood of every American. I do not believe that there is on earth a government established in so immova ble a basis. Let them in any State, even in Massachusetts itself, raise the standard of separation, and its citizens will rise in mass, and do justice themselves on their own incendiaries." We know that a vast departure from this doctrine was unhappily made before the day came when State after State voted itself out of the Union, and foolishly dreamed that its purpose was accomplished after it had scratched off the U. S. from the national property ! At Baton Rouge, Louisiana, there is a military Academy, whose motto, written in marble over the main door is: " By the liberality of the general government of the United States. The Union, esto perpetua," On the 18th of January, 1861, months before the firing on Sumpter, the Superintendent of this Academy wrote to the Governor of the State: "If Louisiana withdraw from the Federal Union, I prefer to maintain my allegiance to the Constitution as long as a frag ment of it survives." Four years later, the writer of these words, the most brilliant military genius of the war, led a great army from Atlanta to the sea, William T. Sherman. There was in this man no irresolution, no sense of divided allegiance, though he knew better than Mr. Seward. tfie determination of the South and saw the pillars of this national temple falling on every side. It was my fortune, three years after the Franco-Prussian war, to be present at the trial of Marshal Bazaine, in that little palace among the woods of Versailles, which Louis XIV had erected for one of his favor ites. Bazaine had, as you remember, shown great irresolution at Metz, THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. and when lie sought to exculpate himself by declaring that he could not tell what was the government of the country or if it still had any govern ment, the President of the military tribunal, the Due d Auniale, burst forth on the Marshal, with the pathetic and passionate cry: "Mais la France, la France!" "But France, France!" The instinct of the nation s indestructible life found expression in that intense and ringing utterance. France still lived, and to her every soldier and citizen owed supreme and instant allegiance. Though her Emperor was a prisoner, his Empire a ruin, though the Prussian cavalry had swept over her vine- clad hills, and the Prussian artillery had destroyed her army at Sedan, though a hostile sovereign held her fortresses in his iron hand and en camped his cuirassiers in the very heart of Paris, in those Elysian Fields between the gorgeous Palace of the Tuileries and the Arch of the First Napoleon s triumph, France the Nation was not dead. She extemporized a government, liberated her soil, paid her indebtedness and rose up purified and strengthened, to moral heights never reached before. And so, when our horizon was lurid with battle-fires, behind which ap peared the shape of a hostile confederacy, when brave men walked with troubled and clouded brows through the streets of our great cities, when long delays made even the patriot heart sick for a moment of the agony of war, while gentle wives and mothers listened for the daily tidings from the front as for the thunder of artillery carrying doom to their own households, in those days when "Lee marched over the mountain wall and poured his armies between the loyal North and the Nation s Capital, there still glowed in the people s deeper consciousness the sense and cer tainty of a national life, indestructible and all-pervasive, reaching like the air we breathe, from the fishing-huts of our northeastern shores to the woodman s camp and the herdsman s ranch by the western sea, and eager to rush like the north wind through the long line of battle-smoke, southward, till it met the warm waters of the Gulf. Such a conscious ness inspired a passionate boldness in holy women, as, bidding their sous go forth, they cried "0 God save my country." It was this faith that rang through the words of our bravest leaders, and uplifted the heavy heart of the good President as he wrestled in prayer with the Ruler of Nations. The dying soldier at Gettysburg and (Jhickamauga felt it like a breath of heavenly consolation, as looking up to the old flag, powder-stained and bullet-riddled, he thought of the American Re public which undivided and made purer by sufferings, should live on forever. And, even among the dusky children of bondage, men without a country, with the faith that the national banner meant freedom, there iawned the glad conviction, that they too, rising from U 10 THE NATION ^ ND THE SOLDIER. chattlehood to citizenship might have a homo and a country this side of the Heavenly Canaan ! And woe be to us if any who take refuge be neath that flag, shall fail of that freedom and that protection which the soldiers, white and black, died to assure. The war which you, honored soldiers, brought to a successful ter mination, settled the question whether our national existence can be maintained against a powerful insurrection. But, besides this, it threw into the forefront and illumined with solar splendor, the supreme fact of our nationality. It is only thirty-six years since a great statesman, John C. Calhoun, the intellectual father of the rebellion, said of his own South Carolina: "There is my family and connections; there I first drew breath; there are all my hopes." Let us believe that such pitiable pro vincialism was either burned up with the heresy and barbarism which gave it birth and power, or will slowly die, as the Nation enters "the rich dawn of an ampler day," sure to illumine our horizon. You are proud of Illinois, as you well may be. But Illinois is not a nation. She does not possess the national attributes, such as suprem acy, independence, the right to declare war and make pead. , the right to coin money aad to treat with other powers. You are proud of Illinois as you are of your own city, your own homestead or your own wife. But these are not the supreme objects of your loyalty and devotion though I acknowledge that a wife may have certain elements of sover eignty that do not inhere in the commonwealth like the right of declaring war and concluding peace ! But every soldier of the Grand Army of the Republic now before me, knows what is meant by the Re public. It was for the unity of the Nation and not for the glory of Illi nois, Massachusetts or New York that our soldiers fought by the swollen stream of the Chickahominy, and our sailor-boys cheered as the heroic Cumberland sank, her flag still flying, into the waters of Hampton Roads. There is a small island, called Attu, the last of the Aleutian group, which is as far from SanFrancisco as San Francisco is from Boston. This island contains a hundred inhabitants. I would have these citizens proudly realize that they are Americans, for I would have a national spirit that shall melt the glaciers of Alaska on the North, and penetrate the everglades of Florida on the South, even as the national sentiment and consciousness of Englishmen go with them to the gates of Delhi and Lucknow in the East, the pasture-lands of New Zealand and Australia in the Southern Seas, and where the hunter follows the stag over the snowy wildernesses of Hudson s Bay. The great fact of this century in Europe has been the resurrection of nationalities under parliamentary forms of government. In 1 SI 5 THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. 11 there were forty distinct sovereignties, with seven different names in Germany alone. Thus divided, the national life of a great people had no development and little power. But the instinct of unity was not dead in these petty dukedoms and principalities, and to-day, thanks to the force of kindred speech and blood, not less than the genius of a Bismark. the German Fatherland, one and indivisible, sits down under a constitutional government beneath the spiked helmet of her paternal Kaiser. So of Italy. Nature has marked out her boundaries. God meant her to be one. And in our own day eight separate sovereignties have yielded their individual lives to the greater life of the Nation. This is the story of Mazzini and Count Cavour, of Garabaldi and Victor Eman- uel. one flag from the Alps to the hoarse Sicilian shore, one national life where Venice dreams over by-gone grandeurs looking out on her peaceful lagoons, and where Palermo nestles beneath the southern crags, one hope beating in the gay Neapolitan boy and the sturdy Lombard shepherd. Florence saluting Home and Rome blessing all, as the long divided nation of Dante, Rienzi and Michael Angelo fulfils the aspirations of her sages and poets and martyrs, beneath the banner of Italy. Thus Hungary, also, has come to the light. The free spirit of the Magyar has snapped the Austrian chain and now clasps the Austrian hand in friendly alliance. The national life would not down, after Kossuth had blown the trumpet of its resurrection. So, too, with the Greeks. Their classic soil has been redeemed from the blight of the Turk, and a vigorous national existence now centers in the city of Athens, once the intellectual treasure-house ut mankind. And what mean those rising states along the Danube, Bulgaria,. Roumelia and the rest, fragments of tho broken Ottoman Empire? They mean that, beneath the brutal camp x>f the Turk, there lived in those Christian peoples an invincible national consciousness which the scimiter could not destr jy in four centuries of cruelty, and which the Toryism of England and the watchful jealousy of Europe were at last compelled to recognize. In one of the cartoons in the Pantheon, in Paris, a French artist has portrayed the beginnings of Christianity, undermining the pagan Empire of Rome. In the upper zone of the vast picture, you behold a scene of light and gorgeous, victorious pomp, a Caesar entering the capital in triumph, with his splendid legions, his captured enemies, his golden and jewelled spoils and his colossal elephants. But in the lower zone of the picture, in a darkness just visible, you behold the early Christians praying in the catacombs, whose long galleries seem to be the sepulcher into which the Roman pageant and the Roman 12 THE NATION 1 ND THE SOLDIER. Empire above must soon fall. And so it was. And thus also with the national spirit in the European States. Often it was forced to hide underground, overtopped and crushed by imperial power, but its resurrection came in the shaking of thrones, the rubbing out of old and artificial boundary lines on the map of the Continent, and the rehabilitation of Europe around the national idea. There is a God in history, fellow-citizens, and His lessons are sometimes written out in letters of fire on the map of the world. The deepest philosophy now recognizes that the nation is not a political accident, it is not the work of man, a voluntary association for economic ends, but has its origin in God, and like God, has continuance, authority and a moral being. He who "made of one blood all nations," hath also " determined the times before appointed and the bounds of their habitation ;" and by the nation as such, he is carrying out His divine will. Babylon, Persia, Oreece and Rome appeared one after another in the prophetic vision, and each had its work to accomplish. By the nation, called Israel, God wrought out redemption for mankind. England, Germany, France, Russia, have parts in the great world-drama which no others can fill, and shall we hood-wink ourselves to our national life arid destiny, we, about whom so many prophetic voices have gone forth from the wise and good of many lands? Remember this, that while Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, have obtained their national unity at a great price, ours was never lost, thanks to you, brave soldiers, and to your comrades fallen on so many bloody fields, and moreover, like Paul of Tarsus, America may say to all the nations, "I was free b.orn." Scientists have found the secret and security of our undivided national life in our physical geography, the courses of rivers, the trend of coast lines, the great central valley touching the eastern and western ranges of mountains, our national store-house and granary, through which the "Father of Waters," draining the snows of a thousand peaks and fed by the crystal currents springing from a thousand lakes, moves majestically toward the Gulf. Other men, as Dr. Storrsin his oration at the opening of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge, see our national unity assured in the vast net work of railroads and telegraphs covering the land. While acknowledging all this, I prefer to look deeper. I remember that California has been true to the Nation from the begin ning, though geographically separated from us so. far, that in 1847, Lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman was one hundred and ninety- eight days in sailing with his company from New York to the harbor of Monterey. And I remember that Louisiana, guarding the mouth of our :great river, and Virginia, with the dust of Washington in her bosom, THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. 13 tore down and trampled the Nation s flag. Hence I prefer to look back into our history to find, in the evolutions of a Providential plan, the secret and the strength of our nationality. We did not first become a nation when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomatox Court House. Go back thirty-five years. Webster has finished his answer to the heresy of South Carolina and the Senate chamber echoes with the words "Liberty and the Union, now and forever, one and inseparable." Was it from the waters of that memorable debate that the American nationality emerged resplendent, -like Venus rising from the sea?" Not at all. For more than forty years the Nation had been developing under a Con stitution which opened with the words : " We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the gene ral welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America." But was the Nation born, when in 1 7SO it hailed George Washington as President under the Constitution? Not at all. That Constitution, which the London Tinirs has pronounced "the most sacred political document in the whole world," was simply the wise expression of the organizing will of the people back of it. The Nation, wearied of sailing the sea of democratic liberty in that leaky and perilous craft called the Articles of Confederation," embarked in a nobler ship named the " Constitution," built strongly with ribs of the British oak. The vessel was the creation of the people and the people made no provision for its destruction, by admitting into it any right of secession. To have done this, k- would have brought on board," as one has said, " a case of dyna mite with a clock-work adjusted to explode it and blow up the ship of State within a given number of days." The preamble to the constitu tion formed at Montgomery in 18G1, confesses to the wisdom of our fathers and reveals the absence of national elements in the slaveholders league by the words not " we the people, but we the deputies of the sovereign and independent states." Nations are not manufactured suddenly and to order like cotton cloths. If this were so, they would be soon torn to rags. Nations are historic growths, rooted in the soil of earth and bathed in the dews and sun beams of heaven. Go back of our present Constitution, and you find the Nation there, impoverished by war, tumultuous and discordant, but capa ble of emerging from chaos into order and power. Without a stronger government than the Articles of Confederation provided, Washington said -I do not sec how we can long exist as a nation," thereby confessing 14 THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. the national existence. Go back to the American Revolution. It was directed by a Continental Congress. It was fought by a Continental army, led by one who never tired of speaking of "my country." It has been described as the act of the whole people in the endeavor to realize the Nation. But you ask if America was not born when the Declaration of Independence was sent out on the Fourth of July, 1776. No. The Declaration announ3ed formally one element of national life, not even then fully assured. I mean independent sovereignty. But mind you, it was a Declaration, not a creation. It set forth or declared what already was. The consciousness of nationality already stirred in the American heart. It made itself felt and feared eleven years before in a Continent al Congress at New York, assuming the functions of a sovereign and separate authority in treating with Great Britain. It had become in- tenser since the farmers of Concord had "fired the shot heard around the world" and the raw militia had fought the English regulars at Bunker Hill. It is significant that after learning that these minute men had quietly taken the fire of the British troops, AVashington said: "The liber ties of the country are safe." Thus the national consciousness had been largely quickened, and it found expression in the pen of Jefferson writ ing: "When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one I > l>le to dissolve the political bands which may have connected them with another." The great Declaration was signed "in the name and by the authority of the good people of these Colonies," which as united and not as separate, assumed a distinct national existence among the govern ments of the earth. Do we not begin to understand what John Adams meant in affirm ing that the American Revolution was completed before the war com menced ? Nations are older and greater than the governments they ordain. In the colonial mind and heart, in the convictions, habits, aspi rations and purposes of the men who occupied this territory from Fal- mouth to Savannah, men whose fathers had fled from the corruptions and tyrannies of the Old World and had battled with the savage and the soil, the winter and the wilderness in the New, men whose psalms and prayers rose heavenward with the smoke of their cabins, men whose axes rang among the pine trees of the north while their adventurous commerce stretched its white arms over every sea ; in the minds and hearts of these yeomen, sons of English Puritans, of Scotch Covenanters, Hollanders and Hu guenots, Germans and Swedes heirs of the great ages of Elizabeth and Cromwell, of Henry of Navarre and William the Silent there existed the sentiment confused but potential of an American nationality. To- develop and crystallize this sentiment, one man, "the father of the THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. 15 American Revolution," Samuel Adams, of Boston, gave the toil, of his ife. He it was, as Governor Hutchinson told George III, who first sserted colonial independence. All his efforts looked toward this final ssue. It was he, who, in 17(34, first proposed the union of the colonies trainst British aggression. It was he who first called for a Continental Congress, and it was he who established, in 1772, those Committees of nter-colonial Correspondence that, as one has said, melted thirteen om mon wealths as into one thunderbolt." But even he was the heir nd servant of forces greater and older than himself. When we hear l\>hn Adams declaring that the idea of independence was familiar to the .rst American settlers, that it was "as well understood by Governor Vinthrop in 1075 as by Governor Adams," we are startled like one re- eiving an angelic announcement that he is twice as old as he believed imself to be. Yet, the great Frenchman, De Tocqueville, told us forty ears ago, that the destiny of America was wrapped up in the first Pu- itan that landed on these shores. The roots of our nationality are fas- ened in that New England commonwealth which coined her own money. plifted her own flag and passed her own laws in her own name. In 1043 jur New England colonies, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connect! 3Ut nd New Haven formed a league for mutual protection, the germ of our National Union. There are few more important lessons to learn than bat the life of New England was the glowing center around which our ebulous national existence formed and crystallized. The idea of a new ation, according to Palfrey the historian, came with the founders of the lassachusetts commonwealth, and their new nation was built on faith in fod and His Word. These were the men who erected free schools and riranized self-governing towns and churches. These were the men who onored man as the child of a Heavenly Father, and the ransomed ser- ant of a Divine Redeemer, and hence too precious to be enslaved by any arthly task-masters. The organizing idea of all their institutions, and icnce of American nationality, was the sacred ness of human nature- jQt no man imagine that this Nation sprang to life from the field of r^ttysburg or the trenches of Yorktown. It was not born in Philadel- ihia nor cradled in Faneuil Hall. Of older lineage and nobler parentage $ the great Republic, "S le that lifts up the manhood of the poor, She of the open soul and open door, With room about her hearth f r all mankind." >hall we with grave historians, like Bancroft, find her germinal form n the Compact made in the May-flower? Shall we, with others, eek her origin in the pulpit of John Kuox at Edinburg? Shall we witli 16 THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. a great German historian, declare that John Calvin was the virtual founder of the United States of America? Were the roots of our na tionality, fastened as many believe, in the soil of Marston Moor where Cromwell s Iron-sides broke in pieces the army of King; Charles ? ( )r shall we not rather look back of all these to the holy fields of Sacred Scriptures, which the Sixteenth Century opened again to mankind? "Free America," it has been truly said, "was born of the Bible. Hence came many of the strongest impulses which colonized these shores. Hence came simpler forms of self-government in town and church that have gone with our civilization in its westward march. Hence came the Christian teaching, reversing the maxims of the Old World, that the state was made for man and not man for the state. Hence came the observance of the Lord s Day, the bulwark of our freedom and hence the teaching of Biblical truth to the young, which Webster declared, has .done more to preserve our liberties than grave statesmen and armed sol diers." Hence came our public schools and the long line of colleges that stretch from the elms of Cambridge to the Pacific shore. Hence came also, the separation of Church and State, perhaps the greatest revolution of the modern ages that soul-liberty, which Roger Williams learned from Him who said "My kingdom is not of this world." From the Bible came, as Edward Everett declared, the better elements of our na tional institutions. It was an echo from the Scriptures which Jefferson sounded in the teaching, that all men were created equal in their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. From the Bible came the moral force that carried through our first Revolution, "the church," a& Wendell Phillips said,, "leading the van." From the Bible has come the salt of righteousness that thus far has withstood the wastings of corrupt ion. From the same source have sprung the moral reformations that have preserved our nationality and freedom, Garrison and Sunnier hurl ing the Sermon on the Mount at the barbarism of slavery, and Abraham Lincoln declaring that a "nation divided against itself, can not stand." Fellow-citizens of the great American Republic, our nationality i& of heavenly birth. It is no "mud-giant." It does not represent to the world, as Carlyle once said, merely dollars and cotton. It has, indeed greatly augmented the material comforts of mankind and, alas ! it has often dragged into its current the filth of unrighteousness. But looking back the stream of our national development we see its fountain-head far up amid the shining hills of God. Ours is a "land to human nature dear," and hence, when our national existence was imperilled, what multitudes of her citizens, not born on her soil, but prizing her blessings, ruse up to defend her The sons of Germany and England contended THE NATION AND THE SOLDIER. 17 side by side with the children of the Mayflower, and on many a deadly field, the storm of battle raged fiercest where fought the gallant Irish soldiers whose fathers proved their valor with Wellington at Waterloo. And when the slave-holders Confederacy appealed to Great Britain to interfere in our struggle, and the appeal was seconded by the ruling classes of England, the heroic working-men of Lancashire said "No, v and they saw their children gathered in rugs about them, crying the piteous cry of famine, rather than lift one finger against the Republic which had become identified with the interests of the poor throughout the world. Therefore it is, that remembering the origin of our American nationality, and recalling what precious interests and celestial truths it enshrines, I cannot doubt its continuance. It has in it the power of self-preservation. It can meet the new perils as it met and con quered the old. Receiving such various and conflicting elements from all lands, it must teach them to subordinate every other in terest and allegiance to that supreme loyalty which the Nation requires. The flowers you are so soon to scatter on the soldiers graves are not merely tokens of personal affection and tributes to heroic courage. They represent your loyalty to the supreme fact of American nationality and all that it signifies of good to humanity. They represent your gratitude to God for the victory of right over wrong. And your memorial services help to quicken that national spirit which inspired the soul of him who wrote "America" and the lips of the thousands who have sung it so grandly to-night in the presence of its author. From this good hour let there be kindled a holier patriotism in all our hearts. Let the high resolve be here made, that the national idea shall continue its supremacy, and that National citizenship shall possess all its rights. "Each honest man shall have his vote, Each child shall have his sci.ool, For what avail the plough or sail, Or land or life, if freedom fail ? And may God save the Republic ! 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