It is certainly especially pleasant to be here this evening, Mr. President and gentlemen, when we meet together, men of commerce, men of finance, lawyers, journalists, physicians, clergymen, of whatever occupation, all of us, I am sure, patriotic citizens, to congratulate each other upon what occurred at Yorktown a hundred years ago, on the 19th of October, 1781, and to express our hearty honor and esteem for these distinguished descendants or representatives of the gallant men who then stood with our fathers as their associates and helpers. [Applause.]
It has always seemed to me one of the most significant and memorable things connected with our Revolutionary struggle, that it attracted the attention, elicited the sympathy, inspired the enthusiasm, and drew out the self-sacrificing co-operation of so many noble spirits, loving freedom, in different parts of Western and Central Europe. [Applause.] You remember that Lord Camden testified from his own observation in 1775, about the time of the battle of Concord Bridge, that the merchants, tradesmen, and common people of England were on the side of the Colonists, and that only the landed interest really sustained the Government. So the more distant Poland sent to us Count Pulaski of noble family, who had been a brilliant leader for liberty at home, who fought gallantly in our battles, and who poured out his life in our behalf in the assault upon Savannah. [Cheers.] And it sent another, whose name has been one to conjure with for freedom from that day to this; who planned the works on Bemis Heights, against which Burgoyne in vain hurled his assault; who superintended the works at West Point; who, returning to his own country, fought for Poland as long as there was a Poland to fight for; whom the very Empire against which he had so long and so fiercely contended on behalf of his country, honored and eulogized after his death—Thaddeus Kosciusko. [Cheers.]
Germany sent us Von Steuben; one, but a host, whose services in our war were of immense and continual aid to our troops; who fought gallantly at Yorktown; and who, chose afterwards, to finish his life in the country for which he had fearlessly drawn his sword. [Applause.] France sent us Lafayette [loud cheers], young, brilliant, with everything to detain him at home, who had heard of our struggle, at Metz, you remember, in a conversation with the Duke of Gloucester, in whom the purpose was there formed, in a flash, to identify himself with the fortunes of the remote, poor, unfriended, and almost unknown colonists; who came, against every opposition, in a ship which he had bought and fitted for the purpose, and whose name, as has well been said in the sentiment in which we have already united, will be joined imperishably with that of Washington, as long as the history of our country continues. [Applause.]
With him came John DeKalb, the intrepid Alsatian, who, after fighting gallantly through the war, up to the point of his death, fell at Camden, pierced at last by many wounds. [Cheers.] With them, or after them, came others, Gouvion, Duportail—some of their names are hardly now familiar to us—Duplessis, Duponceau, afterward distinguished in literature and in law, in the country in which he made his residence. There came great supplies of military equipment, important, we may say indispensable, aids of money, clothing, and of all the apparatus of war; and, finally, came the organized naval and military force, with great captains at the head, Rochambeau [loud cheers], Chastellux, De Choisy, De Lauzun, St. Simon, De Grasse—all this force brilliantly representative, as we know, of our foreign allies, in the victory at Yorktown. [Applause.]
I suppose there has never been a stranger contrast on any field of victory, than that which was presented, between the worn clothing of the American troops, soiled with mud, rusted with storm, wet with blood, and the fresh white uniforms of the French troops, ornamented with colored trimmings; the poor, plain battle-flags of the Colonists, stained with smoke and rent with shot, compared with the shining and lofty standards of the French army, bearing on a ground of brilliant white silk emblazoned in gold embroidery the Bourbon lilies. [Applause.] Indeed such a contrast went into everything. The American troops were made up of men who had been, six years before, mechanics, farmers, merchants, fishermen, lawyers, teachers, with no more thought of any exploits to be accomplished by them on fields of battle than they had of being elected Czars of all the Russias. They had a few victories to look back to; Bennington, Stillwater, Cowpens, Kings Mountain, and the one great triumph of Saratoga. They had many defeats to remember; Brandywine, where somebody at the time said that the mixture of the two liquors was too much for the sober Americans [laughter], Camden, Guilford Court-house, and others, with one tragic and terrible defeat on the heights of Long Island. There were men who had been the subjects, and many of them officers of the very power against which they were fighting; and some of the older among them might have stood for that power at Louisbourg or Quebec. On the other hand, the French troops were part of an army, the lustre of whose splendid history could be traced back for a thousand years, beyond the Crusaders, beyond Charlemagne. Their officers had been trained in the best military schools of the time. They were amply provided with the last and choicest equipments of war. They had gallantly achieved victory, or as gallantly sustained defeat on almost every principal battle-field in Europe. They were now confronting an enemy whom that army had faced in previous centuries on sea and land; and very likely something of special exhilaration and animation went into their spirit from thought of this, as they assailed the English breastworks, swarming into the trenches, capturing the redoubts, storming the lines with that strange battle-shout, in our republican American air: "Vive le Roi!" [Applause.]
A singular combination! Undoubtedly, to unfold the influences which had led to it would take months instead of minutes, and occupy volumes rather than sentences. I think however, that we reckon too much on national rivalry, or national animosity, when we seek to explain it, although these no doubt had their part in it. Doubtless the eager efforts of Silas Dean, our first diplomatic representative in Europe—efforts too eager for courtesy or wisdom—had a part in it; and the skilful diplomacy of Franklin had, as we know, a large and important influence upon it. The spirit of adventure, the desire for distinction upon fresh fields, had something to do with it. But the principal factor in that great effort was the spirit of freedom—the spirit that looked to the advancement and the maintenance of popular liberty among the peoples of the earth, wherever civilization had gone; that spirit which was notably expressed by Van der Capellen, the Dutch orator and statesman, when he vehemently said, in presence of the States-General of Holland, in reply to an autograph letter of George III soliciting their aid, that this was a business for hired janissaries rather than for soldiers of a free State; that it would be, in his judgment, "superlatively detestable" to aid in any way to overcome the Americans, whom he regarded as a brave people, righting in a manly, honorable, religious manner, not for the rights which had come to them, not from any British legislation but from God Almighty. [Applause.]
That spirit was native to Holland. But that spirit was also widely in France. The old temper and enthusiasm for liberty, both civil and religious, had not passed away. Sixty years and more since the accession of Louis XV had perhaps only intensified this spirit. It had entered the higher philosophical minds. They were meditating the questions of the true social order, with daring disregard of all existing institutions, and their spirit and instructions found an echo even in our Declaration of Independence. They made it more theoretical than English state papers have usually been. Palpably, the same spirit which afterward broke into fierce exhibition, when the Bastille was stormed in 1789, or when the First Republic was declared in 1792, was already at work in France, at work there far more vitally and energetically than was yet recognized by those in authority; while it wrought perhaps in the field offered by this country, more eagerly and largely because it was repressed at home. So it was that so many brilliant Frenchmen came as glad volunteers. It was because of this electric and vital spirit looking toward freedom. Travelling was slow. Communication between continents was tardy and difficult. A sailing ship, dependent upon the wind, hugged the breeze or was driven before the blast across the stormy North Atlantic. The steamship was unknown. The telegraph wire was no more imagined than it was imagined that the Rhine might flow a river of flame or that the Jungfrau or the Weisshorn might go out on a journey.
But there was this distributed spirit of freedom, propagating itself by means which we cannot wholly trace, and to an extent which was scarcely recognized, which brought volunteers in such numbers to our shores, that Washington, you know, at one time, expressed himself as embarrassed to know what to do with them; and there were fervent and high aspirations going up from multitudes of households and of hearts in Central and in Western Europe, which found realization in what we claim as the greatest and most fruitful of American victories. [Applause.] The impulse given by that victory to the same spirit is one on which we can never look back without gratitude and gladness. It was an impulse not confined to one nation but common to all which had had part in the struggle. We know what an impulse it gave to everything greatest and best in our own country. The spirit of popular exhilaration, rising from that victory at Yorktown, was a force which really established and moulded our national Government. The nation rose to one of those exalted points, those supreme levels, in its public experience, where it found a grander wisdom, where it had nobler forecast than perhaps it otherwise could have reached. In consequence of it, our Government came, which has stood the storm and stress of a hundred years. We may have to amend its Constitution in time to come, as it has been amended in the past; but we have become a nation by means of it. It commands the attention—to some extent, the admiration—of other people of the earth; at all events, it is bound to endure upon this continent as long as there remains a continent here for it to rest upon. [Cheers.]
Then came the incessant movement westward: the vast foreign immigration, the occupation of the immense grainfields, which might almost feed the hungry world; the multiplication of manufacturers, supplying everything, nearly, that we need; the uncovering of mines, bringing out the wealth which has actually disturbed the money standards of the world; the transforming of territories into States by a process as swift and magical almost as that by which the turbid mixture of the chemist is crystallized into its delicate and translucent spars; the building of an empire on the Western coast, looking out toward the older continent of Asia. [Cheers.]
We know, too, what an impulse was given to popular rights and hopes in England. We rejoice in all the progress of England. That salute fired at the British flag the other day at Yorktown [cheers] was a stroke of the hammer on the horologe of time, which marks the coming of a new era, when national animosities shall be forgotten, and only national sympathies and good-will shall remain. It might seem, perhaps, to have in it a tone of the old "diapason of the cannonade"; but on the thoughtful ear, falls from the thundering voice of those guns, a note of that supreme music which fell on the ear of Longfellow, when "like a bell with solemn sweet vibration" he heard "once more the voice of Christ say: 'Peace!'" [Loud applause.]