Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis

by John A. J. Creswell

"We do not doubt the result, and expect, freed from the trammels which now bind her, to see Maryland, at no distant day, rapidly advancing in a course of unexampled prosperity with her sister free States of the undivided and indivisible Republic."

Mr. Davis was ubiquitous. He was the life and soul of the whole contest. He arranged the order of battle, dictated the correspondence, wrote the important articles for the newspapers, and addressed all the concerted meetings. In short, neither his voice nor his pen rested in all the time of our travail. He would have no compromise; but rejected all overtures of the enemy short of unconditional surrender. On the Eastern Shore he spoke with irresistible power at Elkton, Easton, Salisbury, and Snow Hill, at each of the three last-named towns with a crowd of wondering "American citizens of African descent" listening to him from afar, and looking upon him as if they believed him to be the seraph Abdiel. His last appointment, in extreme southern Maryland, he filled on Friday, after which, bidding me a cordial God-speed, he descended from the stand, sprang into an open wagon awaiting him, travelled eighty miles through a raw night-air, reached Cambridge by daylight, and then crossed the Chesapeake, sixty miles, in time to close the campaign with one of his ringing speeches in Monument square, Baltimore, on Saturday night. In this, our first contest, we were completely victorious.

But we had yet a weary way before us. The legislature had then to pass a law calling a convention. That law had to be approved by a majority of the people. Members of the convention had then to be elected in all parts of the State, and the Constitution which they adopted had to be carried by a majority of the popular vote. He allowed himself no reprieve from labor until all this had been accomplished. And when the rest of us, worn out by incessant toil, gladly sought rest, he went before the court of appeals to maintain everything that had been done against all comers, and did so triumphantly.

Let free Maryland never forget the debt of eternal gratitude she owes to Henry Winter Davis.

If oratory means the power of presenting thoughts by public and sustained speech to an audience in the manner best adapted to win a favorable decision of the question at issue, then Mr. Davis assuredly occupied the highest position as an orator. He always held his hearers in rapt attention until he closed, and then they lingered about to discuss with one another what they had heard. I have seen a promiscuous assembly, made up of friends and opponents, remain exposed to a beating rain for two hours rather than forego hearing him. Those who had heard him most frequently were always ready to make the greatest effort to hear him again. Even his bitterest enemies have been known to stand shivering on the street corners for a whole evening, charmed by his marvelous tongue. His stump efforts never fell below his high standard. He never condescended to a mere attempt to amuse. He always spoke to instruct, to convince, and to persuade through the higher and better avenues to favor. I never heard him deliver a speech that was not worthy of being printed and preserved. As a stump orator he was unapproachable, in my estimation, and I say that with a clear recollection of having heard, when a boy, that wonder of Yankee birth and southern development, S. S. Prentiss.

Mr. Davis's ripe scholarship promptly tendered to his thought the happiest illustrations and the most appropriate forms of expression. His brain had become a teeming cornucopia, whence flowed in exhaustless profusion the most beautiful flowers and the most substantial fruits; and yet he never indulged in excessive ornamentation. His taste was almost austerely chaste. His style was perspicuous, energetic, concise, and withal highly elegant. He never loaded his sentences with meretricious finery, or high-sounding, supernumerary words. When he did use the jewelry of rhetoric, he would quietly set a metaphor in his page or throw a comparison into his speech which would serve to light up with startling distinctness the colossal proportions of his argument. Of humor he had none; but his wit and sarcasm at times would glitter like the brandished cimeter of Saladin, and, descending, would cut as keenly. The pathetic he never attempted; but when angered by a malicious assault his invective was consuming, and his epithets would wound like pellets of lead. Although gallant to the graces of expression, he always compelled his rhetoric to act as handmaid to his dialectics.

Style may sometimes be an exotic; but when it is, it is sure to partake more and more, as years increase, of the peculiarities of the soil wherein it is nurtured. But the style of Mr. Davis was indigenous and strongly marked by his individuality. Although he doubtless admired, and perhaps imitated, the condensation and dignity of Gibbon, yet it is certain that he carefully avoided the monotonous stateliness and the elaborate and ostentatious art of that most erudite historian. I look in vain for his model in the skeptical Gibbon, the cynical Bolingbroke, or the gorgeous Burke. These were all to him intellectual giants; but giants of false belief and practice. Not even from Tacitus, upon whom he looked with the greatest favor, could he have acquired his burning and impressive diction.

Henry Winter Davis was a man of faith, and believed in Christ and his fellow-man. His heart and mind were both nourished into their full dimensions under the fostering influences of our free institutions; so that, being reared a freeman, he thought and spake as became a freeman. No other land could have produced such dauntless courage and such heroic devotion to honest conviction in a public man; and even our land has produced but few men of his stamp and ability. His implicit faith in God's eternal justice, and his grand moral courage, imparted to him his proselyting zeal, and gave him that amazing, kindling power which enabled him to light the fires of enthusiasm wherever he touched the public mind.

To show his power in extemporaneous debate, as well as his determined patriotism, I will introduce a passage from his speech of April 11, 1864, delivered in the House of Representatives. You will remember that the end of the rebellion had not then appeared. Grant, with his invincible legions, had not started to execute that greatest military movement of modern times, by which, after months of bloody persistence, hurling themselves continually against what seemed the frowning front of destiny, they finally drove the enemy from his strongholds, made Fortune herself captive, and, binding her to their standards, held her there until the surrender of every rebel in arms closed the war amid the exultant plaudits of men and angels. Our hopes had not then grown into victory, and we looked forward anxiously to the terrible march from the Rappahannock to Richmond. Thinking that perhaps our army stood appalled before the great duty required of it, and that the people might be diverted from their purpose to crush the rebellion when they saw that it could only be accomplished at the cost of an ocean of human blood, a call was made on the floor of the American Congress for a recognition of the southern confederacy. Speaking for the nation, Mr. Davis said:

"But, Mr. Speaker, if it be said that a time may come when the question of recognizing the southern confederacy will have to be answered, I admit it. * * * * When the people, exhausted by taxation, weary of sacrifices, drained of blood, betrayed by their rulers, deluded by demagogues into believing that peace is the way to union, and submission the path to victory, shall throw down their arms before the advancing foe; when vast chasms across every State shall make it apparent to every eye, when too late to remedy it, that division from the south is anarchy at the north, and that peace without union is the end of the Republic; then the independence of the south will be an accomplished fact, and gentlemen may, without treason to the dead Republic, rise in this migratory house, wherever it may then be in America, and declare themselves for recognizing their masters at the south rather than exterminating them. Until that day, in the name of the American nation; in the name of every house in the land where there is one dead for the holy cause; in the name of those who stand before us in the ranks of battle; in the name of the liberty our ancestors have confided to us, I devote to eternal execration the name of him who shall propose to destroy this blessed land rather than its enemies.