Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1

by George S. Boutwell

Kossuth's speech at Bunker Hill, more than his other speeches in New England, bears marks of its Oriental origin. Pointing to the monument he said: "My voice shrinks from the task to mingle with the awful pathos of that majestic orator. Silent like the grave, and yet melodious like the song of immortality upon the lips of cherubim, . . . and thus it speaks: 'The day I commemorate is the rod with which the hand of the Lord has opened the well of liberty. Its waters will flow; every new drop of martyr blood will increase the tide; it will overflow or break through. Bow, and adore, and hope.'" In the course of his remarks he mentioned Gridley, Pollard, Knowlton and Warren, but he appears not to have heard of Putnam and Prescott.

At Lexington he said he was inclined to smile at the controversy with Concord, declaring that it was immaterial whether the fire of the British was first returned at Lexington or Concord; that its was immaterial whether those who fell at Lexington were "butchered martyrs, or victims of a battle-field."

Kossuth was presented to Amariah Preston, aged ninety-four years, and to Abijah Harrington, aged ninety-one years, veterans of the Revolutionary war, and to Jonathan Harrington, then ninety-four years of age, and the only survivor in Lexington of the action of April 19, 1775.

At Concord, Emerson said to the exile: "There is nothing accidental in your attitude. We have seen that you are organically in that cause you plead. The man of freedom, you are also the man of fate. You do not elect, but you are elected by God and your genius to your task. We do not, therefore, affect to thank you."

In his reply Kossuth appealed to Emerson to give to him and to his cause the aid of his philosophical analysis, and to impress the conviction upon the public mind that the Revolution, of which Concord was the preface, was full of a higher destiny,—of a destiny as broad as the world, as broad as humanity itself.

In that speech he anticipated Matthew Arnold in the remark, "One thing I may own, that it is, indeed, true, everything good has yet been in the minority; still mankind went on, and in going on to that destiny the Almighty designed, when all good will not be confined to the minority, but will prevail amongst all mankind." His speech at Concord was not of his best, and there are indications that his estimate of Emerson's supremacy as a philosopher and thinker subjected him to a degree of restraint which he could not overcome.

Only once, as far as I know, did Kossuth speak of himself, except as the chosen and legitimate representative of down-trodden Hungary, and that was in his parting speech in Faneuil Hall, May 14, 1852: "Some take me here for a visionary. Curious, indeed, if that man who, a poor son of the people, has abolished an aristocracy of a thousand years old, created a treasury of millions out of nothing, an army out of nothing, and directed a revolution so as to fix the attention of the whole world upon Hungary, and has beaten the old, well-provided power of Austria, and crushed its future by its very fall, and forsaken, abandoned, alone, sustained a struggle against two empires, and made himself in his very exile feared by czars and emperors, and trusted by foreign nations as well as his own,—if that man be a visionary therefor, so much pride I may be excused, that I would like to look face to face into the eyes of a practical man on earth."

In closing so much of my review of Kossuth's sojourn in Massachusetts as relates to the incident of his visit to Boston and the neighboring cities and towns, I may be permitted to devote a few lines to my acquaintance with him. To my position as Governor of the State, to the paragraph in my address to the Legislature, to my letter of invitation, and to my speech of welcome from the steps of the State House, he gave much more consideration than was deserved; and on many occasions I received evidences of his friendship and confidence.

I class Kossuth among the small number of great men, whether he be classed among orators, philosophers, students of history and government, or as an advocate of the largest range of individual freedom that is consistent with the good order of society.

The great orators have appeared and the great orations have been delivered in revolutionary periods; and this has been illustrated most strikingly when states have been menaced by the fear of transition from a constitution of freedom to a government of tyranny. Of the great orations of this class, the most significant are the orations of Demosthenes in behalf of the imperiled liberties of Greece, and the orations of Cicero in defence of his character and of his conduct in the public service, and in denunciation of the crimes by which the Republic of Rome was transformed into the Empire of the Caesars. In modern times attention may be directed to the speech of James Otis on the Writs of Assistance, to Burke's speech on Conciliation with America, to Fisher Ames' speech on the Jay Treaty, and to Webster's speech on Nullification.