The gigantic scale on which the operations of our late war were conducted, has dwarfed somewhat the achievements of individual actors. If in the history of either of the other wars in which our people have engaged, whether before or after the Declaration of Independence, such a chapter should be found as the narrative of Garfield's Kentucky campaign, it would alone have made the name of its leader immortal. It is said that General Rosecrans received the young schoolmaster with some prejudice. "When he came to my headquarters," he says, "I must confess that I had a prejudice against him, as I understood he was a preacher who had gone into politics, and a man of that cast I was naturally opposed to." In his official report Rosecrans says:—
"I especially mention Brigadier-General Garfield, ever active, prudent and sagacious. I feel much indebted to him for both counsel and assistance in the administration of this army. He possesses the energy and the instinct of a great commander."
We must leave to soldiers and to military historians to assign then relative historic importance to the movements of the war. But we may safely trust the popular judgment which pronounces Garfield's role at Chickamauga one of the most conspicuous instances of personal heroism, and the Kentucky campaign a most brilliant example of fertility of resource, combined audacity and prudence, sound military judgment, and success against great odds. We may safely trust, too, the judgment of the accomplished historian, who pronounces his report in favor of the advance that ended with the battle of Chickamuauga "the ablest military document submitted by a chief of staff to his superior during the war." We may accept, also, the award of Lincoln, who made him major-general for his brilliant service at Chickamauga, and the confidence of Thomas, who offered him the command of an army corps. Great as was his capacity for military service, the judgment of Abraham Lincoln did not err, when it summoned him to the field of labor where his greatest laurels were won. It is the fashion, in some quarters, to lament the decay of statesmanship, and to make comparisons, by no means complimentary, between persons now entrusted with the conduct of public affairs, and their predecessors. We may at least find consolation in the knowledge that when any of our companions die they do not fail to receive full justice from the hearts of the people.
Suppose any of the statesmen who preceded the war, or some intelligent and not unfriendly foreign observer—some De Tocqueville or Macaulay—to look forward with Garfield to the duties which confronted him when he entered Congress in 1863. With what despair, in the light of all past experience, would he have contemplated the future. How insignificant the difficulties which beset the men of the preceding seventy years compared with those which have crowded the seventeen which were to follow. How marvellous the success the American people have achieved in dealing with these difficulties compared with that which attended the statesmanship of the times of Webster and Clay and Calhoun, giants as they were. The greatness of these men is not likely to be under-valued anywhere, least of all in Massachusetts. They contributed each in his own way those masterly discussions of the great principles by which the Constitution must be interpreted, and the economic laws on which material prosperity depends, which will abide as perpetual forces so long as the republic shall endure. Mr Webster, especially, aided in establishing in the jurisprudence of the country the great judgments, which, on the one hand, asserted for the national government its most necessary and beneficent powers, and, on the other hand, have protected property and liberty from invasion. He uttered in the Senate the immortal argument which convinced the American people of the unity of the republic and the supremacy and indestructibility of the national authority. It has been well said that the cannon of the nation were shotted with the reply to Hayne. But the only important and permanent measure with which the name of Webster is connected is the Ashburton treaty—an achievement of diplomacy of little consequence in comparison with those which obtained from the great powers of Europe the relinquishment of the doctrine of perpetual allegiance, or with the Alabama treaty of 1871. Mr. Clay's life was identified with two great policies—the protection of American industry and the compromise between slavery and freedom in their strife for control of the Territories. When he died the free-trade tariff of 1844 was the law of the land, and within two years the Missouri compromise was repealed. Mr Calhoun has left behind him the memory of a stainless life, great intellectual power and a lost cause.
To each generation is committed its peculiar task. To these men it was given to wake the infant republic to a sense of its own great destiny, and to teach it the laws of its being, by which it must live or bear no life. To the men of our time the abstract theories, which were only debated in other days, have come as practical realities, demanding prompt and final decision on questions where error is fatal. From the time of Jay's treaty no such problem has presented itself to American diplomacy as that which the war left as its legacy. The strongest power on earth, accustomed, in dealing with other nations, to take counsel only of her pride and her strength, had inflicted on us vast injury, of which the honor of this country seemed pledged to insist on reparation, which England conceived hers equally pledged to deny. But in domestic affairs, the difficulties were even greater. For six of the sixteen years that followed the death of Lincoln, the President was not in political accord with either house of Congress. For four others the house was of different politics from President and Senate. During the whole time the dominant party had to encounter a zealous and able opposition, and to submit its measures to a people having apparently the strongest inducements to go wrong. The rights of capital were to be determined by the votes of labor, debtors to fix the value of their payments to their creditors, a people under no constraint but their own sense of duty to determine whether they would continue to bear the weight of a vast debt, the policy of dealing with the conquered to be decided at the close of a long war by the votes of the conquerors, among whom every other family was in mourning for its dead, finance and currency with their subtleties, surpassing the subtleties of metaphysics to be made clear to the apprehension of plain men; business to be recalled from the dizzy and dangerous heights of speculation to moderate gains and safe laws; great public ways connecting distant oceans to be built; commerce to be diverted into unaccustomed channels; the mouth of the Mississippi to be opened; a great banking system to be devised and put in operation, such as was never known before, alike comprehensive and safe, through whose veins and arteries credit, the life-blood of trade should ebb and flow in the remotest extremities of the land; four millions of people to be raised from slavery to citizenship; millions more to be welcomed from foreign lands; a disputed presidential succession to be settled, after an election contest in which the country seemed turned into two hostile camps, by a tribunal for which the founders of the government had made no provision; all this to be accomplished under the restraints of a written Constitution.
When this list has been enumerated the eulogy of Garfield the statesman has been spoken. There is scarcely one of these questions, certainly not more than one or two, which he did not anticipate, carefully and thoroughly study for himself before it arose, and to which he did not contribute an original argument, unsurpassed in persuasive force. Undoubtedly there were others who had more to do with marshalling the political forces of the house. But almost from the time he entered it he was the leader of its best thought. He was ever serious, grave, addressing himself only to the reason and conscience of his auditors.
He lived in a State whose people were evenly divided in politics, and on whose decision, as it swayed alternately from side to side, the fate of the country often seemed to depend. You will search his speeches in vain for an appeal to a base motive or an evil passion. Many men who are called great political leaders are really nothing but great political followers. They study the currents of a public sentiment which other men form. They use as instruments opinions which they never espoused till they became popular. General Garfield always consulted with great care the temper of the house in the conduct of measures which were under his charge. But he was remarkably independent in forming his judgments, and inflexible in adhering to them on all great essential questions. His great friend and commander, General Thomas, whose stubborn courage saved the day in the great battle for the possession of Tennessee, was well-called the "rock of Chickamauga." In the greater battle in 1876 for the nation's honor, Garfield well deserved to be called the "rock of Ohio." Everything he did and said manifested the serious, reverent love of excellent. He had occasion often to seek to win to his opinions masses of men composed largely of illiterate persons. No man ever heard from his lips a sneer at scholarship. At the same time, he never made the scholar's mistake of undervaluing the greatness of the history of his own country, or the quality of his own people.
The limits of this discourse do not permit me to enter into the detail of the variety and extent of his service in debate, in legislation, and in discussions before the people. I could detain you until midnight were I to recount from my own memory the great labors of the twelve years that it was my privilege to share with him in the public service, for four of which I sat almost by his side. Everybody who had a new thought brought it to him for hospitable welcome. Did science or scholarship need anything of the government, Garfield was the man to whom they came. While charged with the duty of supervising the details of present legislation he was always foreseeing and preparing for the future. In the closing years of the war, while chairman of the committee of military affairs, he was studying finance. Later he had prepared himself to deal with the defects in the civil service. I do not think the legislation of the next twenty years will more than reach the ground which he had already occupied in his advanced thought.
General Garfield gave evidence of vast powers of oratory on some very memorable occasions. But he made almost no use of them as a means of persuading the people to conclusions where great public interests were at stake. Sincerity, directness, full and perfect understanding of his subject, clear logic, manly dignity, simple and apt illustration, marked all his discourse. But on a few great occasions, such as that in New York, when the people were moved almost to frenzy by the assassination of Lincoln, or in the storm which moved the great human ocean at the convention at Chicago, he showed that he could touch with a master's hands the chords of that mighty instrument—