Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 3 (of 7)

by Theodore Roosevelt

But the soldiers who won at Gettysburg, the soldiers who fought to a finish the Civil War and thereby made their countrymen forever their debtors, have left us far more even than the memories of the war itself. They fought for four years in order that on this Continent those who came after them, their children and their children’s children, might enjoy a lasting peace. They took arms not to destroy, but to save liberty; not to overthrow, but to establish the supremacy of the law. The crisis which they faced was to determine whether or not this people was fit for self-government and, therefore, fit for liberty. Freedom is not a gift which can be enjoyed save by those who show themselves worthy of it. In this world no privilege can be permanently appropriated by men who have not the power and the will successfully to assume the responsibility of using it aright. In his recent admirable little volume on freedom and responsibility in democratic government, President Hadley of Yale has pointed out that the freedom which is worth anything is the freedom which means self-government and not anarchy. Freedom thus conceived is a constructive force, which enables an intelligent and good man to do better things than he could do without it; which is in its essence the substitution of self-restraint for external restraint—the substitution of a form of restraint which promotes progress for the form which retards it. This is the right view to take of freedom; but it can only be taken if there is a full recognition of the close connection between liberty and responsibility in every domain of human thought and action. It was essentially the view taken by Abraham Lincoln, and by all those who, when the Civil War broke out, realized that in a self-governing democracy those who desire to be considered fit to enjoy liberty must show that they know how to use it with moderation and justice in peace, and how to fight for it when it is jeoparded by malice domestic or foreign levy.

The lessons they taught us are lessons as applicable in our everyday lives now as in the rare times of great stress. The men who made this field forever memorable did so because they combined the power of fealty to a lofty ideal with the power of showing that fealty in hard, practical, common-sense fashion. They stood for the life of effort, not the life of ease. They had that love of country, that love of justice, that love of their fellow-men, without which power and resourceful efficiency but make a man a danger to his fellows. Yet, in addition thereto, they likewise possessed the power and the efficiency; for otherwise their high purpose would have been barren of result. They knew each how to act for himself, and yet each how to act with his fellows. They learned, as all the generation of the Civil War learned, that rare indeed is the chance to do anything worth doing by one sudden and violent effort. The men who believed that the Civil War would be ended in ninety days, the men who cried loudest “On to Richmond,” if they had the right stuff in them speedily learned their error; and the war was actually won by those who settled themselves steadfastly down to fight for three years, or for as much longer as the war might last, and who gradually grew to understand that the triumph would come, not by a single brilliant victory, but by a hundred painful and tedious campaigns. In the East and the West the columns advanced and recoiled, swayed from side to side, and again advanced; along the coasts the black ships stood endlessly off and on before the hostile forts; generals and admirals emerged into the light, each to face his crowded hour of success or failure; the men in front fought; the men behind supplied and pushed forward those in front; and the final victory was due to the deeds of all who played their parts well and manfully, in the scores of battles, in the countless skirmishes, in march, in camp, or in reserve, as commissioned officers, or in the ranks—wherever and whenever duty called them. That is why the title that most appeals to you now is the title of comrade, by which the private in the ranks and the lieutenant-general address one another, because each did his duty and asks no more than recognition of that fact. Just so it must be for us in civil life. We can make and keep this country worthy of the men who gave their lives to save it, only on condition that the average man among us on the whole does his duty bravely, loyally, and with common-sense, in whatever position life allots to him. Exactly as in time of war courage is the cardinal virtue of the soldier, so in time of peace honesty, using the word in its deepest and broadest significance, is the essential basic virtue, without which all else avails nothing. National greatness is of slow growth. It can not be forced and yet be stable and enduring; for it is based fundamentally upon national character, and national character is stamped deep in a people by the lives of many generations. The men who went into the army had to submit to discipline, had to submit to restraint through the government of the leaders they had chosen, as the price of winning. So we, the people, can preserve our liberty and our greatness in time of peace only by ourselves exercising the virtues of honesty, of self-restraint, and of fair dealing between man and man. In all the ages of the past men have seen countries lose their liberty, because their people could not restrain and order themselves, and therefore forfeited the right to what they were unable to use with wisdom.

It was because you men of the Civil War both knew how to use liberty temperately and how to defend it at need that we and our children and our children’s children shall hold you in honor forever. Here, on Memorial Day, on this great battlefield, we commemorate not only the chiefs who actually won this battle; not only Meade, and his lieutenants, Hancock and Reynolds and Howard and Sickles, and the many others whose names flame in our annals; but also the chiefs who had made the Army of the Potomac what it was, and those who afterward led it in the campaigns which were crowned at Appomattox; and furthermore those who made and used its sister armies: McClellan, with his extraordinary genius for organization; Rosecrans; Buell; Thomas, the unyielding, the steadfast; and that great trio, Sherman, Sheridan, and last and greatest of all, Grant himself, the silent soldier whose hammer-like blows finally beat down even the prowess of the men who fought against him. Above all we meet here to pay homage to the officers and enlisted men who served and fought and died, without having, as their chiefs had, the chance to write their names on the tablets of fame; to the men who marched and fought in the ranks, who were buried in long trenches on the field of battle, who died in cots marked only by numbers in the hospitals; who, if they lived, when the war was over, went back each to his task on the farm or in the town, to do his duty in peace as he had done it in war; to take up the threads of his working life where he had dropped them when the trumpets of the Nation pealed to arms. To-day, all over this land our people meet to pay reverent homage to the dead who died that the Nation might live; and we pay homage also to their comrades who are still with us.

All are at one now, the sons of those who wore the blue and the sons of those who wore the gray, and all can unite in paying respect to the memory of those who fell, each of them giving his life for his duty as he saw it; and all should be at one in learning from the deaths of these men how to live usefully while the times call for the performance of the countless necessary duties of everyday life, and how to hold ourselves ready to die nobly should the Nation ever again demand of her sons the splendid ultimate proof of loyalty to her and to the flag.

REMARKS AT THE WASHINGTON MEMORIAL CHAPEL, VALLEY FORGE, PA., JUNE 19, 1904

It is a great pleasure to come here this afternoon and say a word on behalf of the project to erect a memorial chapel on this great historic site. Three weeks ago I was at the field where the bloodiest and most decisive battle of the Civil War was fought, and it is a noteworthy thing that this State of Pennsylvania should have within its borders the places which mark the two turning points in our history—Gettysburg, which saw the high-tide of the Rebellion—Valley Forge, which saw the getting beyond the danger point of the Revolution.

There have been two great crises in our national history—two crises where failure meant the absolute breaking asunder of the Nation—one the Revolutionary War, one the Civil War. If the men who took to arms in ’76 for national independence had failed, then not merely would there never have been a national growth on this Continent, but the whole spirit of nationality for the younger lands of the world would have perished still-born. If the men of ’61 had failed in the great struggle for national unity it would have meant that the work done by Washington and his associates might almost or quite as well have been left undone. There would have been no point in commemorating what was done at Valley Forge if Gettysburg had not given us the national right to commemorate it. If we were now split up into a dozen wrangling little communities, if we lacked the power to keep away here on our own Continent, within our own lines, or to show ourselves a unit as against foreign aggression, then, indeed, the Declaration of Independence would read like empty sound, and the Constitution would not be worth the paper upon which it was written, save as a study for antiquarians.

There have been other crises than those that culminated during the War for Independence and the great Civil War, there have been great deeds and great men at other periods of our national history, but there never has been another deed vital to the welfare of the Nation save the two—the deed of those who founded and the deed of those who saved the Republic. There never has been another man whose life has been vital to the Republic save Washington and Lincoln. I am not here to say anything about Lincoln, but I do not see how any American can think of either of them without thinking of the other too, because they represent the same work. Think how fortunate we are as a Nation. Think what it means to us as a people that our young men should have as their ideals two men, not conquerors, not men who have won glory by wrongdoing; not men whose lives were spent in their own advancement, but men who lived, one of whom died, that the Nation might grow steadily greater and better—the man who founded the Republic and took no glory from it himself save what was freely given him by his fellow-citizens, and that only in the shape of a chance of rendering them service, and the man who afterward saved the Republic, who saved the state, without striking down liberty. Often in history a state has been saved and liberty struck down at the same time. Lincoln saved the Union and lifted the cause of liberty higher than before. Washington created the Republic, rose by statecraft to the highest position, and used that position only for the welfare of his fellows and for so long as his fellows wished him to keep it.

It is a good thing that of these great landmarks of our history—Gettysburg and Valley Forge—one should commemorate a single tremendous effort and the other what we need, on the whole, much more commonly, and what I think is, on the whole, rather more difficult to do—long-sustained effort. Only men with a touch of the heroic in them could have lasted out that three days’ struggle at Gettysburg. Only men fit to rank with the great men of all time could have beaten back the mighty onslaught of that gallant and wonderful army of Northern Virginia, whose final supreme effort faded at the stone wall on Cemetery Ridge on that July day forty-one years ago.

But after all, hard though it is to rise to the supreme height of self-sacrifice and of effort at a time of crisis that is short, to rise to it for a single great effort—it is harder yet to rise to the level of a crisis when that crisis takes the form of needing constant, patient, steady work, month after month, year after year, when, too, it does not end after a terrible struggle in a glorious day—when it means months of gloom and effort steadfastly endured, and triumph wrested only at the very end.