Transcriber’s Note: The cover image was created from the blank cover and the pamphlet cover by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT AT
THE UNVEILING OF THE MONUMENT
TO GENERAL SHERIDAN
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1908
WASHINGTON
GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
1908
It is eminently fitting that the Nation’s illustrious men, the men who loom as heroes before the eyes of our people, should be fittingly commemorated here at the National Capital, and I am glad indeed to take part in the unveiling of this statue to General Sheridan. His name will always stand high on the list of American worthies. Not only was he a great general, but he showed his greatness with that touch of originality which we call genius. Indeed this quality of brilliance has been in one sense a disadvantage to his reputation, for it has tended to overshadow his solid ability. We tend to think of him only as the dashing cavalry leader, whereas he was in reality not only that, but also a great commander. Of course, the fact in his career most readily recognized was his mastery in the necessarily modern art of handling masses of modern cavalry so as to give them the fullest possible effect, not only in the ordinary operations of cavalry which precede and follow a battle, but in the battle itself. But in addition he showed in the civil war that he was a first-class army commander, both as a subordinate of Grant and when in independent command. His record in the Valley campaign, and again from Five Forks to Appomattox, is one difficult to parallel in military history. After the close of the great war, in a field where there was scant glory to be won by the general in chief, he rendered a signal service which has gone almost unnoticed; for in the tedious weary Indian wars on the Great Plains it was he who developed in thorough-going fashion the system of campaigning in winter, which, at the cost of bitter hardship and peril, finally broke down the banded strength of those formidable warriors, the horse Indians.
His career was typically American, for from plain beginnings he rose to the highest military position in our land. We honor his memory itself; and moreover, as in the case of the other great commanders of his day, his career symbolizes the careers of all those men who in the years of the nation’s direst need sprang to the front to risk everything, including life itself, and to spend the days of their strongest young manhood in valorous conflict for an ideal. Often we Americans are taunted with having only a material ideal. The empty folly of the taunt is sufficiently shown by the presence here to-day of you men of the Grand Army, you the comrades of the dead general, the men who served with and under him. In all history we have no greater instance of subordination of self, of the exalting of a lofty ideal over merely material well-being among the people of a great nation, than was shown by our own people in the civil war.
And you, the men who wore the blue, would be the first to say that this same lofty indifference to the things of the body, when compared to the things of the soul, was shown by your brothers who wore the gray. Dreadful was the suffering, dreadful the loss, of the civil war. Yet it stands alone among wars in this, that, now that the wounds are healed, the memory of the mighty deeds of valor performed on one side no less than on the other has become the common heritage of all our people in every quarter of this country. The completeness with which this is true is shown by what is occurring here to-day. We meet together to raise a monument to a great Union general, in the presence of many of the survivors of the Union Army; and the Secretary of War, the man at the head of the Army, who, by virtue of his office, occupies a special relation to the celebration, is himself a man who fought in the Confederate service. Few indeed have been the countries where such a conjunction would have been possible, and blessed indeed are we that in our own beloved land it is not only possible, but seems so entirely natural as to excite no comment whatever.