MR. PRESIDENT,—The Senator to whom we now say farewell was generous in funeral homage to others. More than once he held great companies in rapt attention, while doing honor to the dead. Over the coffin of Broderick[243] he proclaimed the dying utterance of that early victim, and gave to it the fiery wings of his own eloquence: “They have killed me because I was opposed to the extension of Slavery, and a corrupt Administration”; and as the impassioned orator repeated these words, his own soul was knit in sympathy with the departed; and thus at once did he win to himself the friends of Freedom, though distant.
“Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew
Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.”
There are two forms of eminent talent which are kindred in effect, each producing instant impression, each holding crowds in suspense, and each kindling enthusiastic admiration: I mean the talent of the orator and the talent of the soldier. Each of these, when successful, gains immediate honor, and reads his praise in a nation’s eyes. Baker was orator and soldier. To him belongs the rare renown of this double character. Perhaps he carried into war something of the confidence inspired by the conscious sway of great multitudes, as he surely brought into speech something of the ardor of war. Call him, if you will, the Rupert of battle; he was also the Rupert of debate.
His success in life attests not only a remarkable genius, but the benign hospitality of our institutions. Born on a foreign soil, he was to our country only a step-son; but, were he now alive, I doubt not he would gratefully declare that the country was never to him an ungentle step-mother. Child of poverty, he was brought, while yet in tender years, to Philadelphia, where he began life an exile. His earliest days were passed at the loom rather than at school; and yet from this lowliness he achieved the highest posts of trust and honor, being at the same time Senator and General. It was the boast of Pericles, in his funeral oration, in the Ceramicus, over the dead who had fallen in battle, that the Athenians readily communicated to all the advantages which they themselves enjoyed, that they did not exclude the stranger from their walls, and that Athens was a city open to the Human Family.[244] The same boast may be repeated by us with better reason, as we commemorate our dead fallen in battle.
From Philadelphia the poor man’s son was carried to the West, where he grew with the growth of that surpassing region. He became one of its children; and his own manhood was closely associated with its powerful progress. The honors of the bar and of Congress were soon his; but impatient temper led him from these paths into the Mexican War, where he gallantly took the place of Shields—torn with wounds and almost dead—at Cerro Gordo. But the great West, beginning to teem with population, did not satisfy his ambition, and he repaired to California. With infancy rocked on the waves of the Atlantic, and manhood formed in the broad and open expanse of the Prairie, he now sought a home on the shores of the Pacific. There again his genius was promptly recognized. A new State, which had just taken its place in the Union, sent him as Senator; and Oregon first became truly known to us on this floor by his eloquent lips.[245]
In the Senate he took at once the part of orator. His voice was not full and sonorous, but sharp and clear. It was penetrating rather than commanding, and yet, when touched by his ardent nature, became sympathetic and even musical. Countenance, body, and gesture all shared the unconscious inspiration of his voice, and he went on, master of his audience, master also of himself. All his faculties were completely at command. Ideas, illustrations, words, seemed to come unbidden and range in harmonious forms,—as in the walls of ancient Thebes each stone took its proper place of its own accord, moved only by the music of a lyre. His fame as a speaker was so peculiar, even before he appeared among us, that it was sometimes supposed he might lack those solid powers without which the oratorical faculty itself exercises only a transient influence. But his speech on this floor in reply to a slaveholding conspirator, now an open rebel, showed that his matter was as good as his manner, and that, while master of fence, he was also master of ordnance. His oratory was graceful, sharp, and flashing, like a cimeter; but his argument was powerful and sweeping, like a battery.
You have not forgotten that speech. Perhaps the argument against the sophism of Secession was never better arranged and combined, or more simply popularized for general apprehension. A generation had passed since that traitorous absurdity, fit cover of conspiracy, was exposed. For a while it had shrunk into darkness, driven back by the massive logic of Daniel Webster and the honest sense of Andrew Jackson.
“The times have been,