Mr. Justice, a man would be a poor citizen of this country if he could sit in Abraham Lincoln’s pew and not feel the solemn sense of the associations borne in upon him; and I wish to thank the people of this church for that reverence for the historic past, for the sense of historic continuity, which has made them keep this pew unchanged. I hope it will remain unchanged in this church as long as our country endures. We have not too many monuments of the past; let us keep every little bit of association with that which is highest and best of the past as a reminder to us, equally of what we owe to those who have gone before and of how we should show our appreciation. This evening I sit in this pew of Abraham Lincoln’s, together with Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, who, for my good fortune, now serves as Secretary of State in my Cabinet.
If ever there lived a President who during his term of service needed all of the consolation and of the strength that he could draw from the unseen powers above him, it was Abraham Lincoln, who worked and suffered for the people, and when he had lived for them to good end gave his life at the end. If ever there was a man who practically applied what was taught in our churches, it was Abraham Lincoln. The other day I was rereading—on the suggestion of Mr. Hay—a little speech not often quoted of his, yet which seems to me one of the most remarkable that he ever made; delivered right after his re-election, I think, to a body of serenaders who had come, if my memory is correct, from Maryland, and called for an address from him from the White House. It is extraordinary to read that speech, and to realize that the man who made it had just come successfully through a great political contest in which he felt that so much was at stake for the Nation that he had no time to think whether or not anything was at stake for himself. The speech is devoid of the least shade of bitterness. There is not a word of unseemly triumph over those who have been defeated. There is not a word of glorification of himself, or in any improper sense of his party. There is an earnest appeal, now that the election is over, now that the civic strife has been completed, for all decent men who love the country to join together in service to the country; and in the speech he uses a thoroughly Lincoln-like phrase when he says “I have not willingly planted a thorn in the breast of any man,” thus trying to make clear that he has nothing to say against any opponent, no bitterness toward any opponent; that all he wishes is that those who opposed him should join with those who favored him in working toward a common end. In reading his works and addresses, one is struck by the fact that as he went higher and higher all personal bitterness seemed to die out of him. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates one can still catch now and then a note of personal antagonism; the man was in the arena, and as the blows were given and taken you can see that now and then he had a feeling against his antagonist. When he became President and faced the crisis that he had to face, from that time on I do not think that you can find an expression, a speech, a word of Lincoln’s, written or spoken, in which bitterness is shown to any man. His devotion to the cause was so great that he neither could nor would have feeling against any individual.
In closing, Mr. Justice, in thanking you of this church, the church so closely kindred to my own Dutch Reformed Church, in thanking you for asking me here, let me say how peculiarly glad I am that in the chair sits one man, a Justice of the Supreme Court, and that I could be escorted here by another man, who has just severed his connection with one of the highest places in the United States Army, both of whom—you, Justice Harlan, you, General Breckinridge—had enjoyed the wonderful privilege of proving by their deeds the faith that was in them in the days that tried men’s souls; both of whom did their part in holding up the hands of mighty Lincoln, and both of whom were born in the State of Lincoln’s birth.
REMARKS TO THE DELEGATES OF THE GERMAN SOCIETIES RECEIVED AT THE WHITE HOUSE, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1903
Mr. Voelckner, and Gentlemen:
It gives me peculiar pleasure to greet you to-day; and it is a matter of real regret to me that I can not attend formally your celebration.
You are quite right, Mr. Chairman, when you speak of the stand that the German element in our citizenship has always taken in all crises of our national life. In the first place, from the beginning of our colonial history to this day, the German strain has been constantly increasing in importance among the many strains that go to make up our composite national character. I do not have to repeat to you the story of the early German immigration to this country—the German immigration that began in a mass toward the end of the seventeenth century, but before that time had been represented among the very first settlers. Allow me to give you one bit of ancestral experience of mine. The first head of the New York City Government who was of German birth was Leisler, about the year 1680. He was the representative of the popular faction in the New York colony of that day, and among the Leislerian aldermen was a forbear of mine named Roosevelt. You are entirely familiar, of course, with the German immigration that went to the formation of Pennsylvania from the beginning. That element was equally strong in the Mohawk Valley in New York; it was equally strong in Middle and Western Maryland. For instance, in the Revolutionary War, one of the distinguished figures contributed by New York to the cause of independence was that of the German Herkimer, whose fight in the Mohawk Valley represented one of the turning points in the struggle for independence; and one of the New York counties is now named after him. The other day I went out to the battlefield of Antietam, here in Maryland. There the Memorial Church is the German Lutheran Church, which was founded in 1768, the settlement in the neighborhood of Antietam being originally exclusively a German settlement. There is a list of its pastors, and curiously enough a series of memorial windows of men with German names—men who belonged to the Maryland regiment recruited largely from that region for the Civil War, which Maryland regiment was mainly composed of men of German extraction. In the Civil War it would be difficult to paint in too strong colors what I may wellnigh call the all-importance of the attitude of the American citizens of German birth and extraction toward the cause of Union and Liberty, especially in what were then known as the border States. It would have been out of the question to have kept Missouri loyal had it not been for the German element therein. It was the German portion of the city of St. Louis which formed the core of the Union cause in Missouri. And but little less important was the part played by the Germans in Maryland, and also in Louisville and other portions of Kentucky.
Each body of immigrants, each element that has thus been added to our national strain, has contributed something of value to the national character; and to no element do we owe more than we owe to that element represented by those whom I have the honor this day of addressing.
White House, Washington,
October 18, 1902
My dear Mrs. Van Vorst: