Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis Part 1

Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis.

by John A. J. Creswell.

PREFACE.

The death of Hon. HENRY WINTER DAVIS, for many years a distinguished Representative of one of the Baltimore congressional districts, created a deep sensation among those who had been a.s.sociated with him in national legislation, and they deemed it fitting to pay to his memory unusual honors. They adopted resolutions expressive of their grief, and invited Hon. JOHN A. J. CRESWELL, a Senator of the United States from the State of Maryland, to deliver an oration on his life and character, in the hall of the House of Representatives, on the 22d of February, a day the recurrence of which ever gives increased warmth to patriotic emotions.

The hall of the House was filled by a distinguished audience to listen to the oration. Before eleven o'clock the galleries were crowded in every part. The flags above the Speaker's desk were draped in black, and other insignia of mourning were exhibited. An excellent portrait of the late Hon. HENRY WINTER DAVIS was visible through the folds of the national banner above the Speaker's chair. As on the occasion of the oration on President LINCOLN by Hon. GEORGE BANCROFT, the Marine band occupied the ante-room of the reporters' gallery, and discoursed appropriate music.

At twelve o'clock the senators entered, and the judges of the Supreme Court, preceded by Chief Justice Chase. Of the Cabinet Secretary Stanton and Secretary McCulloch were present. After prayer by the chaplain, the Declaration of Independence was read by Hon. EDWARD MCPHERSON, Clerk of the House. After the reading of the Declaration, followed by the playing of a dirge by the band, Hon. SCHUYLER COLFAX, Speaker of the House of Representatives, introduced the orator of the day, Hon. J. A. J.

CRESWELL.

REMARKS

OF

HON. SCHUYLER COLFAX,

SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.

Hon. SCHUYLER COLFAX, Speaker of the House of Representatives, said:

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: The duty has been devolved upon me of introducing to you the friend and fellow-member, here, of HENRY WINTER DAVIS, and I shall detain you but a moment from his address, to which you will listen with saddened interest.

The world always appreciates and honors courage: the courage of Christianity, which sustained martyrs in the amphitheatre, at the stake, and on the rack; the courage of Patriotism, which inspired millions in our own land to realize the historic fable of Curtius, and to fill up with their own bodies, if need be, the yawning chasm which imperiled the republic; the courage of Humanity, which is witnessed in the pest-house and the hospital, at the death-bed of the homeless and the prison-cell of the convict. But there is a courage of Statesmen, besides; and n.o.bly was it ill.u.s.trated by the statesman whose national services we commemorate to-day. Inflexibly hostile to oppression, whether of slaves on American soil or of republicans struggling in Mexico against monarchical invasion, faithful always to principle and liberty, championing always the cause of the down-trodden, fearless as he was eloquent in his avowals, he was mourned throughout a continent; and from the Patapsco to the Gulf the blessings of those who had been ready to perish followed him to his tomb. It is fitting, therefore, though dying a private citizen, that the nation should render him such marked and unusual honors in this hall, the scene of so many of his intellectual triumphs; and I have great pleasure in introducing to you, as the orator of the day, Hon. J. A. J. CRESWELL, his colleague in the thirty-eighth Congress, and now Senator from the State of Maryland.

ORATION

OF

HON. JOHN A. J. CRESWELL.

MY COUNTRYMEN: On the 22d day of February, 1732, G.o.d gave to the world the highest type of humanity, in the person of George Washington.

Combining within himself the better qualities of the soldier, sage, statesman, and patriot, alike brave, wise, discreet, and incorruptible, the common consent of mankind has awarded him the incomparable t.i.tle of Father of his Country. Among all nations and in every clime the richest treasures of language have been exhausted in the effort to transmit to posterity a faithful record of his deeds. For him unfading laurels are secure, so long as letters shall survive and history shall continue to be the guide and teacher of civilized men. The whole human race has become the self-appointed guardian of his fame, and the name of Washington will be ever held, over all the earth, to be synonymous with the highest perfection attainable in public or private life, and coeternal with that immortal love to which reason and revelation have together toiled to elevate human aspirations--the love of liberty, restrained and guarded by law.

But in the presence of the Omnipotent how insignificant is the proudest and the n.o.blest of men! Even Washington, who alone of his kind could fill that comprehensive epitome of General Henry Lee, so often on our lips, "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen," was allowed no exemption from the common lot of mortals. In the sixty-eighth year of his age he, too, paid the debt of nature.

The dread announcement of his demise sped over the land like a pestilence, burdening the very air with mourning, and carrying inexpressible sorrow to every household and every heart. The course of legislation was stopped in mid career to give expression to the grief of Congress, and by resolution, approved January 6, 1800, the 22d of February of that year was devoted to national humiliation and lamentation. This is, then, as well a day of sorrow as a day of rejoicing.

More recent calamities also remind us that death is universal king. Just ten days ago our great historian p.r.o.nounced in this hall an impartial judgment upon the earthly career of him who, as savior of his country, will be counted as the compeer of Washington. Scarce have the orator's lingering tones been mellowed into silence, scarce has the glowing page whereon his words were traced lost the impress of his pa.s.sing hand, yet we are again called into the presence of the Inexorable to crown one more ill.u.s.trious victim with sacrificial flowers. Having taken up his lifeless body, as beautiful as the dead Absalom, and laid it in the tomb with becoming solemnity, we have a.s.sembled in the sight of the world to do deserved honor to the name and memory of HENRY WINTER DAVIS, a native of Annapolis, in the State of Maryland, but always proudly claiming to be no less than a citizen of the United States of America.

We have not convened in obedience to any formal custom, requiring us to a.s.sume an empty show of bereavement, in order that we may appear respectful to the departed. We who knew HENRY WINTER DAVIS are not content to clothe ourselves in the outward garb of grief, and call the semblance of mourning a fitting tribute to the gifted orator and statesman, so suddenly s.n.a.t.c.hed from our midst in the full glory of his mental and bodily strength. We would do more than "bear about the mockery of woe." Prompted by a genuine affection, we desire to ignore all idle and merely conventional ceremonies, and permit our stricken hearts to speak their spontaneous sorrow.

Here, then, where he sat for eight years as a Representative of the people; where friends have trooped about him, and admiring crowds have paid homage to his genius; where grave legislators have yielded themselves willing captives to his eloquence, and his wise counsel has moulded, in no small degree, the law of a great nation, let us, in dealing with what he has left us, verify the saying of Bacon, "Death openeth the good fame and extinguished envy." Remembering that he was a man of like pa.s.sions and equally fallible with ourselves, let us review his life in a spirit of generous candor, applaud what is good, and try to profit by it; and if we find aught of ill, let us, so far as justice and truth will permit, cover it with the vail of charity and bury it out of sight forever. So may our survivors do for us.

The subject of this address was born on the 16th of August, 1817.

His father, Rev. Henry Lyon Davis, of the Protestant Episcopal church, was president of St. John's College at Annapolis, Maryland, and rector of St. Ann's parish. He was of imposing person, and great dignity and force of character. He was, moreover, a man of genius, and of varied and profound learning, eminently versed in mathematics and natural sciences, abounding in cla.s.sical lore, endowed with a vast memory, and gifted with a concise, clear, and graceful style; rich and fluent in conversation, but without the least pretension to oratory and wholly incapable of _extempore_ speaking. He was removed from the presidency of St. John's by a board of democratic trustees because of his federal politics; and, years afterward, he gave his son his only lesson in politics at the end of a letter, addressed to him when at Kenyon College, in this laconic sentence: "My son, beware of the follies of Jacksonism."

His mother was Jane Brown Winter, a woman of elegant accomplishments and of great sweetness of disposition and purity of life. It might be truthfully said of her, that she was an exemplar for all who knew her.

She had only two children, Henry Winter, and Jane, who married Rev.

Edward Syle.

The education of Henry Winter began very early, at home, under the care of his aunt, Elizabeth Brown Winter, who entertained the most rigid and exacting opinions in regard to the training of children, but who was withal a n.o.ble woman. He once playfully said, "I could read before I was four years old, though much against my will." When his father was removed from St. John's, he went to Wilmington, Delaware, but some time elapsed before he became settled there. Meanwhile, Henry Winter remained with his aunt in Alexandria, Virginia. He afterward went to Wilmington, and was there instructed under his father's supervision. In 1827 his father returned to Maryland and settled in Anne Arundel county.

After reaching Anne Arundel, Henry Winter became so much devoted to out-door life that he gave small promise of scholarly proficiency. He affected the sportsman, and became a devoted disciple of Nimrod; accompanied always by one of his father's slaves he roamed the country with a huge old fowling-piece on his shoulder, burning powder in abundance, but doing little damage otherwise. While here he saw much of slaves and slavery, and what he saw impressed him profoundly, and laid the foundation for those opinions which he so heroically and constantly defended in all his after-life. Referring to this period, he said long afterward, "My familiar a.s.sociation with the slaves while a boy gave me great insight into their feelings and views. They spoke with freedom before a boy what they would have repressed before a man. They were far from indifferent to their condition; they felt wronged and sighed for freedom. They were attached to my father and loved me, yet they habitually spoke of the day when G.o.d would deliver them."

He subsequently went to Alexandria, and was sent to school at Howard, near the Theological Seminary, and from Howard he went to Kenyon College, in Ohio, in the fall of 1833.

Kenyon was then in the first year of the presidency of Bishop McIlvaine. It was the centre of vast forests, broken only by occasional clearings, excepting along the lines of the National road, and the Ohio river and its navigable tributaries. In this wilderness of nature, but garden of letters, he remained, at first in the grammar school, and then in the college, until the 6th of September, 1837; when at twenty years of age he took his degree and diploma, decorated with one of the honorary orations of his cla.s.s, on the great day of commencement. His subject was "Scholastic Philosophy."

At the end of the Freshman year, a change in the college terms gave him a vacation of three months. Instead of spending it in idleness, as he might have done, and as most boys would have done, he availed himself of this interval to pursue and complete the studies of the Soph.o.m.ore year, to which he had already given some attention in his spare moments. At the opening of the next session he pa.s.sed the examination for the Junior cla.s.s. Fortunately I have his own testimony and opinion as to this exploit, and I give them in his own language:

"It was a pretty sharp trial of resolution and dogged diligence, but it saved me a year of college, and indurated my powers of study and mental culture into a habit, and perhaps enabled me to stay long enough to graduate. I do not recommend the example to those who are independently situated, for learning must fall like the rain in such gentle showers as to sink in if it is to be fruitful; when poured on the richest soil in torrents, it not only runs off without strengthening vegetation, but washes away the soil itself."

His college life was laborious and successful. The regular studies were prosecuted with diligence, and from them he derived great profit, not merely in knowledge, but in what is of vastly more account, the habit and power of mental labor. These studies were wrought into his mind and made part of the intellectual substance by the vigorous collisions of the societies in which he delighted. For these mimic conflicts he prepared a.s.siduously, not in writing, but always with a carefully deduced logical a.n.a.lysis and arrangement of the thoughts to be developed in the order of argument, with a brief note of any quotation, or image, or ill.u.s.tration, on the margin at the appropriate place. From that brief he spoke. And this was his only method of preparation for all the great conflicts in which he took part in after life. He never wrote out his speeches beforehand.

Speaking of his feelings at the end of his college life, he sadly said:

"My father's death had embittered the last days of the year 1836, and left me without a counsellor. I knew something of books, nothing of men, and I went forth like Adam among the wild beasts of the unknown wilderness of the world. My father had dedicated me to the ministry, but the day had gone when such dedications determined the lives of young men. Theology as a grave topic of historic and metaphysical investigation I delighted to pursue, but for the ministry I had no calling. I would have been idle if I could, for I had no ambition, but I had no fortune and I could not beg or starve."

All who were acquainted with his temperament can well imagine what a gloomy prospect the future presented to him, when its contemplation wrung from his stoical taciturnity that touching confession.

The truth is, that from the time he entered college he was continually cramped for want of money. The negroes ate everything that was produced on the farm in Anne Arundel, a gastronomic feat which they could easily accomplish, without ever having cause to complain of a surfeit. His aunt, herself in limited circ.u.mstances, by a careful husbandry of her means, managed to keep him at college. Kenyon was then a manual-labor inst.i.tution, and the boys were required to sweep their own rooms, make their own beds and fires, bring their own water, black their own boots, if they ever were blacked, and take an occasional turn at grubbing in the fields or working on the roads. There was no royal road to learning known at Kenyon in those days. Through all this Henry Winter Davis pa.s.sed, bearing his part manfully; and knowing how heavily he taxed the slender purse of his aunt, he denied himself with such rigor that he succeeded, incredible as it may appear, in bringing his total expenses, including boarding and tuition, within the sum of eighty dollars per annum.

His father left an estate consisting only of some slaves, which were equally apportioned between himself and sister. Frequent applications were made to purchase his slaves, but he never could be induced to sell them, although the proceeds would have enabled him to pursue his studies with ease and comfort. He rather sought and obtained a tutorship, and for two years he devoted to law and letters only the time he could rescue from its drudgery. In a letter, written in April, 1839, replying to the request of a relative who offered to purchase his slave Sallie, subject to the provisions of his father's will, which manumitted her if she would go to Liberia, he said: "But if she is under my control." (he did not know that she had been set to his share,) "I will _not consent to the sale_, though he wishes to purchase her subject to the will." And so Sallie was not sold, and Henry Winter Davis, the tutor, toiled on and waited. He never would hold any of his slaves under his authority, never would accept a cent of their wages, and tendered each and all of them a deed of absolute manumission whenever the law would allow. Tell me, was that man sincere in his opposition to slavery? How many of those who have since charged him with being selfish and reckless in his advocacy of emanc.i.p.ation would have shown equal devotion to principle? Not one; not one. Ah! the man who works and suffers for his opinions' sake places his own flesh and blood in pledge for his integrity.

Notwithstanding his irksome and exacting duties, he kept his eye steadily on the University of Virginia, and read, without a.s.sistance, a large part of its course. He delighted especially in the pungent pages of Tacitus and the glowing and brilliant, dignified and elevated epic of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. These were favorites which never lost their charm for him. When recently on a visit at my house, he stated in conversation that he often exercised himself in translating from the former, and in transferring the thoughts of the latter into his own language, and he contended that the task had dispelled the popular error that Gibbon's style is swollen and declamatory; for he alleged that every effort at condensation had proved a failure, and that at the end of his labors the page he had attempted to compress had always expanded to the eye, when relieved of the weighty and stringent fetters in which the gigantic genius of Gibbon had bound it.

About this time--the only period when doubts beset him--he was tempted by a very advantageous offer to settle in Mississippi. He determined to accept; but some kind spirit interposed to prevent the despatch of the final letter, and he remained in Alexandria. At last his aunt--second mother as she was--sold some land and dedicated the proceeds to his legal studies. He arrived at the University of Virginia in October, 1839.

From that moment he entered actively and unremittingly on his course of intellectual training. While a boy he had become familiar, under the guidance of his father, with the cla.s.sics of Addison, Johnson, Swift, Cowper, and Pope, and he now plunged into the domain of history. He had begun at Kenyon to make flanking forays into the fields of historic investigation which lay so invitingly on each side of the regular march of his college course. As he acquired more information and confidence, these forays became more extensive and profitable. It was then the transition period from the shallow though graceful pages of Gillies, Rollin, Russel, and Tytler, and the rabbinical agglomerations of Shuckford and Prideaux to the modern school of free, profound, and laborious investigation, which has reared immortal monuments to its memory in the works of Hallam, Macaulay, Grote, Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, Niebuhr, Bunsen, Schlosser, Thiers, and their fellows. But of the last-named none except Niebuhr's History of Rome and Hallam's Middle Ages were accessible to him in the backwoods of Ohio. Cousin's Course of the History of Modern Philosophy was just glittering in the horizon, and Gibbon shone alone as the morning star of the day of historic research, which he had heralded so long. The French Revolution he had seen only as presented in Burke's brilliant vituperation and Scott's Tory diatribe. A republican picture of the great republican revolution, the fountain of all that is now tolerable in Europe, had not then been presented on any authentic and comprehensive page.

Not only these, but all historical works of value which the English, French, and German languages can furnish, with an immense amount of other intellectual pabulum, were eagerly gathered, consumed with voracious appet.i.te, and thoroughly digested. Supplied at last with the required means, he braced himself for a systematic curriculum of law, and pursued it with marked constancy and success. While at the university he also took up the German and French languages and mastered them, and he perfected his scholarship in Latin and Greek. Until his death he read all these languages with great facility and accuracy, and he always kept his Greek Testament lying on his table for easy reference.

After a thorough course at the university, Mr. DAVIS entered upon the practice of the law in Alexandria, Virginia. He began his profession without much to cheer him; but he was not the man to abandon a pursuit for lack of courage. His ability and industry attracted attention, and before long he had acquired a respectable practice, which thenceforth protected him from all annoyances of a pecuniary nature. He toiled with unwearied a.s.siduity, never appearing in the trial of a cause without the most elaborate and exhaustive preparation, and soon became known to his professional brethren as a valuable ally and a formidable foe. His natural apt.i.tude for public affairs made itself manifest in due time, and some articles which he prepared on munic.i.p.al and State politics gave him great reputation. He also published a series of newspaper essays, wherein he dared to question the divinity of slavery; and these, though at the time thought to be not beyond the limits of free discussion, were cited against him long after as evidence that he was a heretic in pro-slavery Virginia and Maryland.

On the 30th of October, 1845, he married Miss Constance T. Gardiner, daughter of William C. Gardiner, Esq., a most accomplished and charming young lady, as beautiful and as fragile as a flower. She lived to gladden his heart for but a few years, and then,