THE SOUTHERNER IN THE WEST
[Speech of Hugh C. Wallace at the fifth annual banquet of the New York Southern Society, February 21, 1891. The President, Hugh R. Garden, occupied the chair. In introducing Mr. Wallace, he said: "It was said of old that the Southerner was wanting in that energy and fixedness of purpose which make a successful American. No broader field has existed for the exercise of those qualities than the great region west of the Rocky Mountains. We are fortunate in the presence of a gentleman whose young life is already a successful refutation of that opinion, and I turn with confidence to 'The Southerner of the Pacific Slope,' and invite Mr. Hugh C. Wallace, of the State of Washington, to respond.">[
Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen:—For more than one hundred years upon this continent a silent army has been marching from the East toward the West. No silken banners have waved above it, and no blare of trumpet or beat of drum has heralded its progress. And yet its conquests have been grander than those of Peru or Mexico, its victories more glorious than those of Marengo, of Friedland, or of Austerlitz. It has subdued an empire richer than the Indies without inflicting the cruelties of Clive, or the exactions of Hastings, and that empire is to-day, Mr. President, a part of your heritage and mine. [Applause.] For more than thirty years past the region in which most of those I see around me first saw the light has lain prostrate, borne down by a Titanic struggle whose blighting force fell wholly upon her. For more than a generation her enterprise has seemed exhausted, her strength wasted, and her glory departed. And yet she has not failed to furnish her full quota to the grand army of conquest to carry to completion the great work which Boone, Crockett, and Houston, all her sons—began, and which her genius alone made possible. [Applause.]
Turn back with me the pages of time to the beginning of this imposing march and glance for a moment at its resplendent progress. Its beginning was in Virginia. Virginians led by that first of Southerners whose natal day we celebrate to-night and whose fame grows brighter in the lengthening perspective of the years, conquered the savage and his little less than savage European ally, and saved for the Nation then unborn the whole Northwest. The Pinckneys, the Rutledges, and the Gwinetts forced the hand of Spain from the throat of the Mississippi, and left the current of trade free to flow to the Gulf unvexed by foreign influence.
Another Virginian, illustrious through all time as the great vindicator of humanity, doubled the area of the national possession of his time by the Louisiana purchase, and Lewis and Clarke, both sons of the Old Dominion, in 1804 first trod the vast uninhabited wilds of the far Northwest to find a land richer in all the precious products of the East than mortal eyes had yet beheld. So were our borders extended from the Gulf and the Rio Grande to the 49th parallel and from the Atlantic to the Pacific—but for Southern enterprise they might have stopped at Ohio, the Monongahela, and the Niagara. [Applause.]
The empire thus secured remained to be subdued. From the States in which you and I, gentlemen, were born has come a noble wing of the grand army of subjugation, all of whose battles have been victories and all of whose victories have been victories of civilization. Moving first from the old States of the South it took possession of territory along the Gulf and of Tennessee and of Kentucky's "dark and bloody ground." Fame crowned the heroes of these campaigns with the patriot's name, and glorified them as pioneers. As their advance guards swept across the Mississippi and took possession of Missouri, Arkansas, and territory farther north, envy called it invasion, and when their scouts appeared in Nebraska and Kansas they were repelled amid the passion of the hour. Meanwhile, a new element, whose quickening power is scarcely yet appreciated, had joined the grand movement. Early in the forties a South Carolinian captain of engineers, the Pathfinder, John C. Fremont, had marked the way to the far West coast, and added a new realm to the National domain. [Applause.] It was the domain soon famed for its delightful climate, its wealth of resources, and its combination of every natural advantage that human life desires. The gleaming gold soon after found in the sands of Sutter's Fort spread its fame afar and attracted to it the superb band of men who came from every State to lay firm and sure the foundation of the new commonwealth.
There were only fourteen Southerners in the Constitutional Convention at Monterey, but their genius for government made them a fair working majority in the body of forty-eight members. Not content with building a grand State like this, the united army gathered from the North and South alike turned its face toward the desert and fastnesses of the eternal hills and "continuous woods where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound save his own dashings," and pitched their tents, rolled back the awful silence that through ages had reigned there; and learned the secrets that desolation guarded, alluring to them from their fastnesses a renewed stream of treasure which has resulted in making us the envy of all other nations.
In conspicuous contrast to the attitude and sentiment of the South, the East has never followed to encourage nor sympathize with the West. Whether it be in legislation or politics or finance, the Western idea has ever failed to command the earnest attention to which it is entitled. There is a sentiment which is growing more general and vigorous every day in the far West, that the time is near at hand when it will decline to adhere to the fortunes of any leader or body which recklessly ignores its claims or persistently refuses to it recognition. It is a very significant fact, Mr. President, that this great region, containing one-fourth of the National area, one-seventeenth of the population, and constituting one-seventh of the whole number of States has had up to this time, but one member of the Cabinet. In the present Cabinet, fourteen States (east of the Mississippi and North of the old Mason and Dixon's Line) have seven members and the remaining thirty States have but one. Those thirty States will see to it in the future that the party which succeeds through their support has its representation their efforts have deserved.
I cannot close, Mr. President, without giving expression to a sentiment to which Southerners in the West are peculiarly alive—the sentiment of sympathy and fraternity which exists between the South and the West. [Applause.] The course of historical development which I have outlined of the Western man has wrought a bond of friendship between them, and that bond is not a reminiscence, but a living, vital, and efficient fact. Only but yesterday, politicians, thank God not the people, sought for selfish ends to cast back the South into Stygian gloom from which she had slowly and laboriously but gloriously emerged, to forge upon her again hope-killing shackles of a barbarous rule. In that hour of trial which you and I, sir, know to have been a menace and a reality to whom did she turn for succor? To this man of the West, and quick and glorious was the response.