It is a good thing that there should be a large body of our fellow-citizens—that there should be a profession—whose members must, year in and year out, display those old, old qualities of courage, daring, resolution, unflinching willingness to meet danger at need. I hope to see all our people develop the softer, gentler virtues to an ever increasing degree, but I hope never to see them lose the sterner virtues that make men men.
A man is not going to be a fireman or an engineer, or serve well in any other capacity on a railroad long if he has a “streak of yellow” in him. You are going to find it out, and he is going to be painfully conscious of it, very soon. It is a fine thing for our people that we should have those qualities in evidence before us in the life-work of a big group of our citizens.
In American citizenship, we can succeed permanently only upon the basis of standing shoulder to shoulder, working in association, by organization, each working for all, and yet remembering that we need each so to shape things that each man can develop to best advantage all the forces and powers at his command. In your organization you accomplish much by means of the Brotherhood, but you accomplish it because of the men who go to make up that brotherhood.
If you had exactly the organization, exactly the laws, exactly the system, and yet were yourselves a poor set of men, the system would not save you. I will guarantee that, from time to time, you have men go in to try to serve for the nine months who prove that they do not have the stuff in them out of which you can make good men. You have to have the stuff in you, and, if you have the stuff, you can make out of it a much finer man by means of the association—but you must have the material out of which to make it. So it is in citizenship.
And now let me say a word, speaking not merely especially to the Brotherhood, but to all our citizens. Governor McMillan, Mr. Mayor: I fail to see how any American can come to Chattanooga and go over the great battle-fields in the neighborhood—the battle-fields here in this State and just across the border in my mother’s State of Georgia—how any American can come here and see evidences of the mighty deeds done by the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray, and not go away a better American, prouder of the country, prouder because of the valor displayed on both sides in the contest—the valor, the self-devotion, the loyalty to the right as each side saw the right. Yesterday I was presented with a cane cut from the Chickamauga battle-field by some young men of Northern Georgia. On the cane were engraved the names of three Union generals and three Confederate generals. One of those Union generals was at that time showing me over the battle-field—General Boynton. Under one of the Confederate generals—General Wheeler—I myself served. In my regiment there served under me in the ranks a son of General Hood, who commanded at one time the Confederate army against General Sherman. The only captain whom I had the opportunity of promoting to field rank, and to whom the promotion was given for gallantry on the field, was Micah Jenkins, of South Carolina, the son of a Confederate general, whose name you will find recorded among those who fought at Chickamauga.
Two of my best captains were killed at Santiago—one was Allyn Capron, the fifth in line who, from father to son, had served in the regular army of the United States, who had served in every war in which our country had been engaged; the other, Bucky O’Neill. His father had fought under Meagher when, on the day at Fredericksburg, his brigade left more men under the stone wall than did any other brigade. I had in my regiment men from the North and the South; men from the East and the West; men whose fathers had fought under Grant, and whose fathers had fought under Lee; college graduates, capitalists’ sons, wage-workers, the man of means and the man who all his life had owed each day’s bread to the day’s toil. I had Catholic, Protestant, Jew, and Gentile under me. Among my captains were men whose forefathers had been among the first white men to settle on Massachusetts Bay and on the banks of the James, and others whose parents had come from Germany, from Ireland, from England, from France. They were all Americans, and nothing else, and each man stood on his worth as a man, to be judged by it, and to succeed or fail accordingly as he did well or ill. Compared to the giant death-wrestles that reeled over the mountains round about this city the fight at Santiago was the merest skirmish; but the spirit in which we handled ourselves there, I hope was the spirit in which we have to face our duties as citizens if we are to make this Republic what it must be made.
Yesterday, in passing over the Chickamauga battle-field, I was immensely struck by the monument raised by Kentucky to the Union and Confederate soldiers from Kentucky who fell on that battle-field. The inscription reads as follows: “As we are united in life, and they united in death, let one monument perpetuate their deeds, and one people, forgetful of all asperities, forever hold in grateful remembrance all the glories of that terrible conflict which made all men free and retained every star on the nation’s flag.” That is a good sentiment. That is a sentiment by which we can all stand. And oh, my friends! what does that sentiment have as its underlying spirit? The spirit of brotherhood!
I firmly believe in my countrymen, and therefore I believe that the chief thing necessary in order that they shall work together is that they shall know one another—that the Northerner shall know the Southerner, and the man of one occupation know the man of another occupation; the man who works in one walk of life know the man who works in another walk of life, so that we may realize that the things which divide us are superficial, are unimportant, and that we are, and must ever be, knit together into one indissoluble mass by our common American brotherhood.
AT DANVILLE, VA., SEPTEMBER 9, 1902
My Fellow-Citizens: