We have no reason to hang our heads at the part which our people have played in the history of the United States. No element that enters into the cosmopolitan population of this country has contributed more in every quality that goes to make a great people than the Irish. We have given eloquence to the bar, dignity to the bench, learning and virtue to the pulpit, wisdom to the Senate, and glory to the sword. We were present at the birth of the Nation and sustained its infantile arms during the years of its struggle for liberty, sharing in the hardships of Valley Forge and in the glory of Yorktown. We fought with Jackson at New Orleans and with Perry in Lake Erie; stormed Chapultepec with Shields, rode from Winchester down the valley of Shenandoah with Sheridan; stormed Marye’s Heights with Meagher and his brigade, and later climbed the heights of San Juan with Buckey O’Neill and “Rafferty of ‘F’.” On every field the Irish marched to the battle-front side by side with the Puritan from New England, the Knickerbocker from New York, and the liberty-loving dweller of the rolling prairies of Iowa and Illinois. In the same deep grave they sleep “the silent sleep that knows no waking.” The snows of winter, like a winding sheet, lie coldly above them, and as each returning spring awakens into life and beauty the sleeping forces of nature, the green grass grows and the wild flowers bloom above their common grave.
I will close by quoting the following tributes to the Irish by men who were not of our race: Col. John Parke Custis, the adopted son of Washington, says: “Then honored be the old and good services of the sons of Erin in the war of Independence. Let the shamrock be entwined with the laurels of the Revolution; and truth and justice, guiding the pen of history, inscribe on the tablets of American remembrance: ‘Eternal gratitude to Irishmen.’”
Similar sentiments were expressed by the late Senator Bayard, in the Senate of the United States. “If,” said he, “the names of the men of Irish birth and of Irish blood who have dignified and decorated the annals of American history were to be erased from the record, how much of the glory of our country would be subtracted? In the list of American statesmen and patriots, theologians and poets, soldiers and sailors, priests and orators, what names shine with purer lustre or are mentioned with more respect than those of the men, past and present, we owe to Ireland. On that imperishable roll of honor, the Declaration of Independence, we find their names, and in the prolonged struggle that followed there was no battlefield from the St. Lawrence to the Savannah but was enriched with Irish blood shed in the cause of civil and religious liberty.”
THE REMINISCENCES OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS, ONE OF THE FIRST MEMBERS OF THE SOCIETY, EDITED BY HIS SON, HOMER SAINT-GAUDENS, AND PUBLISHED THROUGH THE COURTESY OF THE CENTURY MAGAZINE.
My father began his reminiscences in the early spring of 1906, while recovering from a surgical operation in the Corey Hill Hospital of Brookline, Massachusetts. As he had spent a most active life, he chafed at that confinement until this scheme was devised to pass his hours; whereupon, to his great amusement, he dictated the first quarter of the work. Later, after his return to Windsor, when, to his bitter disappointment, he found that he could not for any length of time remain on his feet to model, he continued to write at odd moments up to the middle of the summer.
The contents of my father’s text itself I have left intact, save where exceptionally rough; but the order of thought and anecdote, which was badly tangled, owing to the lack of revision, I have shifted back and forth into a semblance of methodical progression.
My father begins:
“Reminiscences are more likely to be tiresome than otherwise to the readers of later generations; but among the consoling pleasures that appear over the horizon as years advance is that of rambling away about one’s past....
“I was born March 1, 1848, in Dublin, Ireland, near 37 Charlemount Street. If that is not the house, no doubt the record in the nearest Catholic church would give the number.”