September 15, 1913
Mr. President: We survivors of the Army of the Cumberland with our guests are met here on the semi-centennial of its greatest battle to do honor to the glorious achievements of its members, living and dead, in the most sanguinary and yet the most chivalrous war ever waged in all the tide of time; a war, too, that had more significance at the time it was waged, and has had since, and will continue to have for the betterment of mankind, than any other war of recorded history.
If, indeed, "it needs be that wars must come," it seems we should all be thankful to High Providence that it fell to our lot to participate in this war for the Union rather than any other of which we have knowledge, and, further, from our knowledge of the past history of mankind, we should be thankful that it fell to our lot to live in our generation, race, and country, with all its blood and tears.
In fact, we of our generation who are still alive have witnessed more and greater progress for betterment physically, mentally, and morally, than all that had gone before.
But to revert to our text, "The Army of the Cumberland," and the war itself. My theme is to inspire just but long-belated honors to the Confederate soldiers in arms.
The nucleus from which sprang the new race and nation of thirty millions of unmilitary and unwarlike Americans called suddenly to form the mighty hosts of over three million Confederate and Union warriors, was the Puritans and Cavaliers of Northern Europe, who for conscience's sake exiled themselves from religious, social and political persecution over two hundred years ago to the American wilderness where they hoped, untrammeled by the imperious custom of ages, to raise a new people self-reliant and of universal common interests where all should be schooled in the same ethics politically, socially and morally.
For over a hundred years they kept faith in their purpose in a self-reliant way never known before, being almost wholly self-supporting, having no public factories, each trade making and repairing its own tools and implements, each rural family raising its own flax, wool and cotton and almost universally spinning and weaving its own fabric for clothing. This brought the rearing of children to the mother's fireside, where the moral training of the mother is more pure, effective and lasting than all other methods, including schools and colleges.
They kept this faith until they had increased to a population of three millions of the most earnest, sturdy and conscientious people on the globe, when the principal mother country beginning insidiously to re-establish over them the very evils from which they had fled into exile, they again in 1776 engaged to free themselves, this time in a war for independence and government of their own. In this they succeeded, and by the time of the adoption of the Constitution in 1787 they had established a government more unique in all its leading characteristics than any known to history, its leading feature being that "all just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed."
This Constitution erased from existence all vestige or semblance of a personal and despotic government, such as titles of nobility, established church, primogeniture and entailment of estates, all of which had played so great a part in upholding the cruel and despotic governments of the great nations of civilization, and substituted in their stead a complicated yet symmetrical government with executive, legislative and judicial powers blending—both Federal and State—in one harmonious whole, which amazed the world and set it doubting whether such liberties could long endure.
For 74 years its creators kept the faith of their professions, continuing their Colonial simplicity, universal industry and frugality. In these 74 years the new nation had risen to a population of 30 millions as resourceful, self-reliant, contented and prosperous people as ever lived under one flag. Their labor-saving machinery and devices had led all the rest of the world, so that the genius of the ceaseless and tireless mental workers had by mechanical appliances and organized labor in large factories relieved man's brawn and muscle from perhaps 30 per cent of its arduous toil in the struggle for existence.
But meanwhile political fanatics and moral agitators began to set up strife between the sections North and South concerning an alleged discriminating tariff against the South on cotton goods, with threats of nullification, and later in the recriminating discussion against slavery and its extension and the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law, until in the fifties a small portion of the people, mostly well meant but ill informed, had arrayed the political parties in great bitterness against each other.
So that in 1860 on the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency the Northern agitators claimed it as foretelling forceful abolition and those of the South claimed it foretold the destruction of the rights of the Southern States. Both these classes busied themselves in embittering the sections by raising armed companies of emigrants to the new Territory of Kansas, where they inaugurated a miniature civil war.
The Mayor of New York City called the City Council and proposed an ordinance declaring New York an independent city, which in the temporary frenzy of the time came near passing, giving encouragement to those very few in the South who contemplated secession. In Boston it was declared in public speech "The Union must be dissolved."
Then there was the mob's resistance to the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law, the armed expedition to Harpers Ferry to incite the ignorant slaves to rise in domestic insurrection, and the declaration of a few fanatical orators that our flag represented "A covenant with death and a league with hell."
But in spite of all there were probably not ten per cent of the men North and South who afterward became soldiers for or against the Union who had any sympathy with the fanatical agitators on either side.
Mr. Lincoln had declared his purpose to "Maintain the Union, the Constitution and the laws, regardless of slavery," and in the border slave States—in fact, in all the slave States, public sentiment admitted that slavery was wrong, but as far as they were concerned an inherited wrong which they saw no practical way to remedy, as where slaves were held in large numbers they would be as helpless as children to care for themselves if freed.
In the border mountain States, however, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri, where families held only a few slaves, their close environments enabled the slaves to acquire such individual character in habits of morality, industry and responsibility as would enable them to make a living for themselves and become comparatively good citizens, and in hundreds of such cases their masters manumitted them, and these manumitted men were setting an example to others and making an incentive which they had not had before. So that by this time if there had been no war or senseless fanatical interference, a great majority of the slaves would be free and would have become citizens well qualified for all duties, including the franchise, and those still in bondage, if any, would have been honestly striving to emulate the example set before them by the more progressive and competent.
I have said that we were fortunate in living in our day and generation, but we have many other things to be thankful for.
We should be thankful that we for the Union had for our leader from start to finish one whom we, his contemporaries, believe to have been the greatest of the human kind; one who spent his early life in loneliness, poverty and toil, and whose after lot fell to lead our mighty hosts; yet with these extreme vicissitudes he was always the same great, good and lovable spirit, "with malice toward none and charity for all."
We should be thankful, too, that our adversaries had for their leader perhaps the greatest man and patriot next to Lincoln in this greatest of wars of history. This is no disparagement to Grant, Jackson (Stonewall), Sherman or Johnston (J. E.), for Lee had the most difficult part: it is easier to be great when triumphant than to be great when vanquished. Lee showed his patriotism from the day of his surrender to the day of his death by becoming a humble, useful and law-abiding citizen, setting an example to many of his more turbulent countrymen that was of untold value in the rehabilitation of the Union as it is today; another and greater Cincinnatus because he had the moral force and patriotism to guide his millions of vanquished but unconquered followers back to the flag—to a loyal obedience and support of the laws of those who vanquished them—thus doing perhaps more than any other to bring about Whittier's beautifully expressed hope that
"The North and South together brought
Shall own the same electric thought,
In peace a common flag salute,
And side by side in labor's free
And unresentful rivalry,
Harvest the fields wherein they fought."
We should be thankful, too, that we had such valiant and chivalrous adversaries as the Confederate soldiers proved to be. Had they been craven or of evil purpose, as many political warriors claimed them to be, and we had more lightly overcome them, it would have been natural to try and subjugate and exploit them, and surely the sequel would have then been different. The Unionists in arms respected the Confederates in arms and vice versa, neither practiced the water cure nor any such kindred barbarisms; they were patriots all fighting heroically and chivalrously, each for what they believed the right as it had been given them to see the right.
And last but not least we should be thankful that the nation had those brave soldiers, Union and Confederate, of border States, the true Highlanders of America, of the Appalachian Range and west to Texas, men
"Who feared not to put it to the touch
And win or lose it all."
None fled their country to escape the draft, but boldly took up arms according to conviction, son against father, brother against brother.
In this connection I overheard soon after the war a dispute between two Congressmen from Indiana and Massachusetts as to which of their two States had furnished the greatest proportion of soldiers without draft. General Tom Crittenden, of the Regular Army, late a Major General in the Union Army, whose brother had been a Major General in the Confederate Army, sitting near, interposed, saying: "Gentlemen, you should be ashamed to admit that you submitted to any draft at all. Kentucky furnished her full quota to both sides without drafting."
Companions of the Army of the Cumberland, I have mentioned these incidents attending the beginning of the war for the Union, not for your enlightenment, for they are well known to you, but to lay the foundation for convincing our children and grandchildren who do not know: that the country at large does not yet appreciate the patriotism, chivalry, heroism and fortitude of the Confederate soldier.
It seems that we, while yet alive, should rise and testify to them of what we have seen and known, for we soldiers of the Union have had ample praise and honor to the ends of the earth: but they have been comparatively forsaken even by their selfish and perfidious professed friends in Europe who once encouraged them.
After Appomattox high officials in England who had first urged them to war, and the English press, which had encouraged it by constant agitation and misrepresentation, now turned against them in their adversity.
The London Dispatch of June 10, 1865, used, among much else that was false, the following language:
"It was clear that a people who had not heart enough to destroy their property that they might defend their rights were neither fit to fight, nor worthy of any fate but that of submission to oppression, that they were not soldiers, that they were wholly unworthy of their cause, and that they were only fit subjects to tyranny."
To which the late Confederate General, Robert H. Anderson, of Georgia, replied in the public press, proving by statistics that the whole Confederate army had lost more in killed and wounded in four years' war than the entire British army of the whole British Empire had lost in the wars of the preceding one hundred years.
But here was a terrible war where the combatants on neither side had any purpose of conquest, subjugation or exploitation, and to our successors it is hard to explain how it came about. It may probably be better explained by the fable of the two knights traveling in opposite directions who met opposite a road sign painted black on one side and white on the other. After salutations the knight on the black side remarked the strangeness of painting a sign black, whereupon he on the other, ever ready to correct errors, informed his new acquaintance that the sign was not black, but white. After disputation they decided to settle the question by combat, so after jousting about for a while their positions became so changed that black was white and white was black, when each glancing at the sign, one said to the other: "What are we fighting about?" "Well, you said the sign was black." "Why, so I did, and it did look black to me then, but now I see that you were right and it is white."
And so with the Union and Confederate soldiers.
The die was cast for war by political and fanatical agitators, and millions of the best men in the world rose to arms, nearly one-half of them minors, ready to sacrifice their lives as patriots for what they believed their rights assailed and likely to be lost; but after jousting about for four long and bloody years they found that each was jousting for the same object; that the Confederates had formed their Confederacy, their Constitution and their laws almost identical with those of the Union.
Shortly after the war in a conversation with Mr. Lanham, a member of Congress from Texas and a warm personal friend, he told me in discussing our different parts in the war that his father and mother and neighbors taught him the war was a holy and righteous one; so that at the age of fourteen he enlisted, believing religiously in what he had been taught, until he came to a halt in Pickett's charge at Gettysburg and saw a Union soldier about his own age, a bright-faced boy who asked for water from his canteen. Asking how badly he was hurt, the boy replied:
"I am mortally wounded, but thank God I am dying in a good cause."
From that hour Lanham said he saw there were two sides to the question. He years afterwards told the same story from the floor of the House.
Incidents like this, but more than all Lincoln's address at Gettysburg, led the soldiers of both armies to the conclusion that all were fighting for the same end, which made it easier for the Appomattox surrender and the greatest fraternal reconciliation of which the world has history.
I have said that nine-tenths of the native Americans who afterwards became soldiers in the war had no part or interest in the crimination and recrimination that brought it about and only took part after the die was cast and war was on, and as this is even at this day a broad statement, it may not be immodest in me to relate some of my exceptional opportunities for forming this and other opinions stated in this address.
I was born in the border State of Indiana, partially educated at West Point, a citizen of another border State, Texas, for four years prior to the war. There I studied law under Colonel Waddell, a former member of Congress from Kentucky, then a district judge, and had charge of his plantation with thirty slaves while he was on his circuit court, and as a surveyor and engineer became fairly well acquainted with its people, who I know were satisfied and contented with the Union as it was. But when the die was cast and war was practically on I went to Washington, asked and was given a commission in the regular army, and had a sword made with this sentiment inscribed thereon:
"No abolition, no secession, no compromise, no reconstruction, the Union as it was from Maine to Texas—Anson Mills, 1st Lieutenant, 18th U. S. Infantry, May 14, 1861."
This sword I carried throughout the war and have it still in my possession.
I served in the field with my regiment for the full term of the war without sickness or on leave, and participated in all its battles, serving with the regular brigade, First Division, Fourteenth Army Corps, Army of the Cumberland.
To illustrate how easy it sometimes is for a small number of political agitators and fanatical reformers in any community or nation to compromise the whole to a policy farthest from the thoughts of nine out of ten, I will take my own State, Texas; the methods there used being more familiar to me, but in all other States that claimed to secede similar methods to circumvent the comparatively dormant wishes of the great majority were employed.
These fanatics and demagogues knew that Governor Houston would not call the Legislature in behalf of secession, and even if he did that the Legislature would not pass such an act, so they resorted to that cure-all now so popular with present-day fanatical reformers, the "initiative, referendum and recall."
Circulars were sent to men in each district known to be violent agitators, stating that a crisis had arisen which could not be dealt with by ordinary methods and inviting them to nominate suitable men to assemble in the Capital to consider the question of secession. In a short time they met and passed a resolution which they asked the Governor to approve. When he declined they passed another, declaring the office of Governor vacant and authorized the Lieutenant Governor (Lubbock) to assume the duties of Governor, appointing a committee to accompany Lubbock to demand the keys to the office from the Governor. Houston declared their action unlawful, saying that were he a younger man he would see the State drenched in blood before he would submit, but turning over the keys to Lubbock and beating the dust from his feet on the door sill, said: "Governor Lubbock, I hope you may leave this office as unsullied as I leave it today."
Although two of his sons became Confederate soldiers, one being killed in battle, he took no part in the affairs of the war save on one occasion near the end when one of the last regiments raised was assembled in Austin, Lubbock invited Houston to review the regiment before it marched to battle.
He accepted and when the regiment was presented to him, gave only these two commands:
"Soldiers, eyes right. Do you see Governor Lubbock equipped for war? No, you do not see him.
"Soldiers, eyes left. Do you see Governor Lubbock equipped for war? No, you do not see him. He is a warrior in peace, but no warrior in war."
Houston being the most venerated man in Texas, his sarcasm weakened the faith of its Confederates in arms.
In March, 1861, when I arrived in Washington I met Lieutenant William R. Terrill of the artillery from Virginia, who had been my instructor at West Point, and asked him to recommend me for service in the army, which he did, remarking there would probably be a terrible war forced upon the people unnecessarily and it was the duty of all to fight for their convictions.
He was an earnest, faithful soldier and Christian gentleman and rose rapidly to the rank of Brigadier General of Union Volunteers, and was killed at the battle of Perryville, Ky., Oct. 8, 1862.
Meanwhile his brother, James B. Terrill, had attained the rank of Brigadier General in the Confederate army and was killed at the battle of Bethesda Church, Virginia, May 30, 1864.
After Appomattox, their father had their bodies brought back to their home in Virginia and buried them in the same grave, erecting a monument over it and a brief record of their lives and deaths, placing below in his despair:
"This monument erected by their father. God alone knows which was right."
But now that the passions of war are past, shall we not all and every one exclaim that they were both right and there can not in justice be any distinction as to the patriotism, chivalry and honor of these two brothers, and so with all of the combative force.
"No culprits they, though ire and pride
Had laid their better mood aside."
Now let us try to point a moral to this our experience: Notwithstanding the fact that the tireless and ceaseless thinkers and doers have by devices and combinations reduced the toil of brawn and muscle by perhaps sixty per cent and increased food, shelter and raiment many-fold, both in quantity and quality, so there is abundance for all who are willing to pay the price in mild and easy effort: unrest is again abroad in the land and the fanatical and political agitators are teaching that the do-less, shiftless and thriftless should share equally with the ceaseless and tireless doers in everything that is produced under pain of the stoppage of all progress unless granted, no rewards and no forfeits.
Let us implore our children and grandchildren to study well these questions lest they in turn be led to the misconceived belief that there is pending an irrepressible conflict, a feud that naught but blood can atone; and in conclusion commend to them the admonition of Doctor Lyman Beecher, of three generations past, who evidently had in view our present condition, of which here is an extract:
"We must educate! We must educate! Or we must perish by our own prosperity. If we do not, short will be our race from the cradle to the grave. If in our haste to be rich and mighty, we outrun our literary and religious institutions, they will never overtake us: or only come up after the battle of liberty is fought and lost, as spoils to grace the victory, and as resources of inexorable despotism for the perpetuity of our bondage.
"We did not, in the darkest hour, believe that God had brought our fathers to this goodly land to lay the foundation of religious liberty, and wrought such wonders in their preservation, and raised their descendants to such heights of civil and religious liberty, only to reverse the analogy of His providence, and abandon His work.
"No punishments of Heaven are so severe as those for mercies abused: and no instrumentality employed in their infliction is so dreadful as the wrath of man. No spasms are like the spasms of expiring liberty, and no wailing such as her convulsions extort.
"It took Rome three hundred years to die; and our death, if we perish, will be as much more terrific as our intelligence and free institutions have given us more bone, sinew and vitality. May God hide from me the day when the dying agonies of my country shall begin! O thou beloved land, bound together by the ties of brotherhood, and common interest, and perils, live forever—one and undivided."