"It would be a somewhat singular subject of speculation to discover how it is that national character so often remarkably expresses itself in single individuals who are born as representatives of a class. It is wonderful, for it has been the remark of ages, how the great are born in clusters; sometimes, indeed, one star shining with solitary splendor in the firmament above, but generally gathered in grand constellations, filling the sky with glory. What is that combination of influences, partly physical, partly intellectual, but somewhat more moral, which should make a particular country productive of men great over all others on earth and to all ages of time? Ancient Greece, with her indented coast, inviting to maritime adventures, from her earliest period was the mother of heroes in war, of poets in song, of sculptors and artists, and stands up after the lapse of centuries the educator of mankind, living in the grandeur of her works and in the immortal productions of minds which modern civilization with all its cultivation and refinement and science never surpassed and scarcely equalled. And why in the three hundred years of American history it should be given to the Old Dominion to be the grand mother, not only of States, but of the men by whom States and empires are formed, it might be curious were it possible for us to inquire. Unquestionably, Mr. President, there is in this problem the element of race; for he is blind to all the truths of history, to all the revelations of the past, who does not recognize a select race as we recognize a select individual of a race, to make all history; but pretermitting all speculation of that sort, when Virginia unfolds the scroll of her immortal sons—not because illustrious men did not precede him gathering in constellations and clusters, but because the name shines out through those constellations and clusters in all its peerless grandeur—we read the name of George Washington. And then, Mr. President, after the interval of three-quarters of a century, when your jealous eye has ranged down the record and traced the names that history will never let die, you come to the name—the only name in all the annals of history that can be named in the perilous connection—of Robert E. Lee, the second Washington. Well may old Virginia be proud of her twin sons! born almost a century apart, but shining like those binary stars which open their glory and shed their splendor on the darkness of the world.
"Sir, it is not an artifice of rhetoric which suggests this parallel between two great names in American history; for the suggestion springs spontaneously to every mind, and men scarcely speak of Lee without thinking of a mysterious connection that binds the two together. They were alike in the presage of their early history—the history of their boyhood. Both earnest, grave, studious; both alike in that peculiar purity which belongs only to a noble boy, and which makes him a brave and noble man, filling the page of a history spotless until closed in death; alike in that commanding presence which seems to be the signature of Heaven sometimes placed on a great soul when to that soul is given a fit dwelling-place; alike in that noble carriage and commanding dignity, exercising a mesmeric influence and a hidden power which could not be repressed, upon all who came within its charm; alike in the remarkable combination and symmetry of their intellectual attributes, all brought up to the same equal level, no faculty of the mind overlapping any other—all so equal, so well developed, the judgment, the reason, the memory, the fancy, that you are almost disposed to deny them greatness, because no single attribute of the mind was projected upon itself, just as objects appear sometimes smaller to the eye from the exact symmetry and beauty of their proportions; alike, above all, in that soul-greatness, that Christian virtue to which so beautiful a tribute has been rendered by my friend whose high privilege it was to be a compeer and comrade with the immortal dead, although in another department and sphere; and yet alike, Mr. President, in their external fortune, so strangely dissimilar—the one the representative and the agent of a stupendous revolution which it pleased Heaven to bless and give birth to one of the mightiest nations on the globe; the other the representative and agent of a similar revolution, upon which it pleased high Heaven to throw the darkness of its frown; so that, bearing upon his generous heart the weight of this crushed cause, he was at length overwhelmed; and the nation whom he led in battle gathers with spontaneity of grief over all this land which is ploughed with graves and reddened with blood, and the tears of a widowed nation in her bereavement are shed over his honored grave.
"But these crude suggestions, which fall almost impromptu from my lips, suggest that which I desire to offer before this audience to-night. I accept Robert E. Lee as the true type of the American man and the Southern gentleman. A brilliant English writer has well remarked, with a touch of sound philosophy, that when a nation has rushed upon its fate, the whole force of the national life will sometimes shoot up in one grand character, like the aloe which blooms at the end of a hundred years, shooting up in one single spike of glory, and then expires. And wherever philosophy, refinement, and culture, have gone upon the globe, it is possible to place the finger upon individual men who are the exemplars of a nation's character, those typical forms under which others less noble, less expanded, have manifested themselves. That gentle, that perfect moderation, that self-command which enabled him to be so self-possessed amid the most trying difficulties of his public career, a refinement almost such as that which marks the character of the purest woman, were blended in him with that massive strength, that mighty endurance, that consistency and power which gave him and the people whom he led such momentum under the disadvantages of the struggle through which he passed. Born from the general level of American society, blood of a noble ancestry flowed in his veins, and he was a type of the race from which he sprang. Such was the grandeur and urbaneness of his manner, the dignity and majesty of his carriage, that his only peer in social life could be found in courts and among those educated amid the refinements of courts and thrones. In that regard there was something beautiful and appropriate that he should become, in the later years of his life, the educator of the young. Sir, it is a cause for mourning before high Heaven to-night that he was not spared thirty years to educate a generation for the time that is to come; for, as in the days when the red banner streamed over the land, the South sent her sons to fight under his flag and beneath the wave of his sword, these sons have been sent again to sit at his feet when he was the disciple of the Muses and the teacher of philosophy. Oh, that he might have brought his more than regal character, his majestic fame, all his intellectual and moral endowments, to the task of fitting those that should come in the crisis of the future to take the mantle that had fallen from his shoulders and bear it to the generations that are unborn!
"General Lee I accept as the representative of his people, and of the temper with which this whole Southland entered into that gigantic, that prolonged, and that disastrous struggle which has closed, but closed as to us in grief. Sir, they wrong us who say that the South was ever impatient to rupture the bonds of the American Union. The war of 1776, which, sir, has no more yet a written history than has the war of 1861 to 1865, tells us that it was this Southland that wrought the Revolution of 1776. We were the heirs of all the glory of that immortal struggle. It was purchased with our blood, with the blood of our fathers which yet flows in these veins, and which we desire to transmit, pure and consecrated, to the sons that are born to our loins. The traditions of the past sixty years were a portion of our heritage, and it never was easy for any great heart and reflective mind even to seem to part with that heritage to enter upon the perilous effort of establishing a new nationality.
"Mr. President, it was my privilege once to be thrilled in a short speech, uttered by one of the noblest names clustering upon the roll of South Carolina; for, sir, South Carolina was Virginia's sister, and South Carolina stood by Virginia in the old struggle, as Virginia stood by South Carolina in the new, and the little State, small as Greece, barren in resources but great only in the grandeur of the men, in their gigantic proportions, whom she, like Virginia, was permitted to produce—I heard, sir, one of South Carolina's noblest sons speak once thus: 'I walked through the Tower of London, that grand repository where are gathered the memorials of England's martial prowess; and when the guide, in the pride of his English heart, pointed to the spoils of war collected through centuries of the past,' said this speaker, lifting himself upon tiptoe that he might reach to his greatest height, 'I said, "You cannot point to one single trophy from my people, or my country, though England engaged in two disastrous wars with her."' Sir, this was the sentiment. We loved every inch of American soil, and loved every part of that canvas [pointing to the Stars and Stripes above him], which, as a symbol of power and authority, floated from the spires and from the mast-head of our vessels; and it was after the anguish of a woman in birth that this land, that now lies in her sorrow and ruin, took upon herself that great peril; but it is all emblematized in the regret experienced by him whose praises are upon our lips, and who, like the English Nelson, recognized duty engraved in letters of light as the only ensign he could follow, and who, tearing away from all the associations of his early life, and, abandoning the reputation gained in the old service, made up his mind to embark in the new, and, with that modesty and that firmness belonging only to the truly great, expressed his willingness to live and die in the position assigned to him.
"And I accept this noble chieftain equally as the representative of this Southland in the spirit of his retirement from struggle. It could not escape any speaker upon this platform to allude to the dignity of that retirement; how, from the moment he surrendered he withdrew from observation, holding aloof from all political complications, and devoting his entire energies to the great work he had undertaken to discharge. In this he represents—an the true attitude of the South since the close of the war attitude of quiet submission to the conquering power and of obedience to all exactions; but without resiling from those great principles which were embalmed in the struggle, and which, as the convictions of a lifetime, no honest mind could release.
"All over this land of ours there are men like Lee—not as great, not as symmetrical in the development of character, not as grand in the proportions which they have reached, but who, like him, are sleeping upon memories that are holy as death, and who, amid all reproach, appeal to the future, and to the tribunal of History, when she shall render her final verdict in reference to the struggle closed, for the vindication of the people embarked in that struggle. We are silent, resigned, obedient, and thoughtful, sleeping upon solemn memories, Mr. President; but, as said by the poet-preacher in the Good Book, 'I sleep, but my heart waketh,' looking upon the future that is to come, and powerless in every thing except to pray to Almighty God, who rules the destinies of nations, that those who have the power may at least have the grace given them to preserve the constitutional principles which we have endeavored to maintain. And, sir, were it my privilege to speak in the hearing of the entire nation, I would utter with the profoundest emphasis this pregnant truth: that no people ever traversed those moral ideas which underlie its character, its constitution, its institutions, and its laws, that did not in the end perish in disaster, in shame, and in dishonor. Whatever be the glory, the material civilization, of which such a nation may boast, it still holds true that the truth is immortal, and that ideas rule the world.
"And now I have but a single word to say, and that is, that the grave of this noble hero is bedewed with the most tender and sacred tears ever shed upon a human tomb. I was thinking in my study this afternoon, striving to strike out something I might utter on this platform, and this parallel between the first Washington and the second occurred to me. I asked my own heart the question, 'Would you not accept the fame and the glory and the career of Robert E. Lee just as soon as accept the glory and career of the immortal man who was his predecessor?' Sir, there is a pathos in fallen fortunes which stirs the sensibilities, and touches the very fountain of human feeling. I am not sure that at this moment Napoleon, the enforced guest of the Prussian king, is not grander than when he ascended the throne of France. There is a grandeur in misfortune when that misfortune is borne by a noble heart, with the strength of will to endure, and endure without complaining or breaking. Perhaps I slip easily into this train of remarks, for it is my peculiar office to speak of that chastening with which a gracious Providence visits men on this earth, and by which He prepares them for heaven hereafter; and what is true of individuals in a state of adversity, is true of nations when clothed in sorrow. Sir, the men in these galleries that once wore the gray are here to-night that they may bend the knee in reverence at the grave of him whose voice and hand they obeyed amid the storms of battle: the young widow, who but as yesterday leaned upon the arm of her soldier-husband, but now clasps wildly to her breast the young child that never beheld its father's face, comes here to shed her tears over this grave to-night; and the aged matron, with the tears streaming from her eyes as she recalls her unforgotten dead, lying on the plains of Gettysburg, or on the heights of Fredericksburg, now, to-night, joins in our dirge over him who was that son's chieftain and counsellor and friend. A whole nation has risen up in the spontaneity of its grief to render the tribute of its love. Sir, there is a unity in the grapes when they grow together in the clusters upon the vine, and holding the bunch in your hand you speak of it as one; but there is another unity when you throw these grapes into the wine-press, and the feet of those that bruise these grapes trample them almost profanely beneath their feet together in the communion of pure wine; and such is the union and communion of hearts that have been fused by tribulation and sorrow, and that meet together in the true feeling of an honest grief to express the homage of their affection, as well as to render a tribute of praise to him upon whose face we shall never look until on that immortal day when we shall behold it transfigured before the throne of God."
The meeting then adopted the following preamble and resolutions:
"Whereas, Like orphans at the grave of a parent untimely snatched away, our hearts have lingered and brooded, with a grief that no cunning of speech could interpret, over the thought that Robert Edward Lee exists no more, in bodily life, in sensible form, in visible presence, for our love and veneration, for our edification and guidance, for our comfort and solace; and—