Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis Part 2

Mr. DAVIS was ubiquitous. He was the life and soul of the whole contest.

He arranged the order of battle, dictated the correspondence, wrote the important articles for the newspapers, and addressed all the concerted meetings. In short, neither his voice nor his pen rested in all the time of our travail. He would have no compromise; but rejected all overtures of the enemy short of unconditional surrender. On the Eastern Sh.o.r.e he spoke with irresistible power at Elkton, Easton, Salisbury, and Snow Hill, at each of the three last-named towns with a crowd of wondering "American citizens of African descent" listening to him from afar, and looking upon him as if they believed him to be the seraph Abdiel. His last appointment, in extreme southern Maryland, he filled on Friday, after which, bidding me a cordial G.o.d-speed, he descended from the stand, sprang into an open wagon awaiting him, travelled eighty miles through a raw night-air, reached Cambridge by daylight, and then crossed the Chesapeake, sixty miles, in time to close the campaign with one of his ringing speeches in Monument square, Baltimore, on Sat.u.r.day night.

In this, our first contest, we were completely victorious.

But we had yet a weary way before us. The legislature had then to pa.s.s a law calling a convention. That law had to be approved by a majority of the people. Members of the convention had then to be elected in all parts of the State, and the Const.i.tution which they adopted had to be carried by a majority of the popular vote. He allowed himself no reprieve from labor until all this had been accomplished. And when the rest of us, worn out by incessant toil, gladly sought rest, he went before the court of appeals to maintain everything that had been done against all comers, and did so triumphantly.

Let free Maryland never forget the debt of eternal grat.i.tude she owes to HENRY WINTER DAVIS.

If oratory means the power of presenting thoughts by public and sustained speech to an audience in the manner best adapted to win a favorable decision of the question at issue, then Mr. DAVIS a.s.suredly occupied the highest position as an orator. He always held his hearers in rapt attention until he closed, and then they lingered about to discuss with one another what they had heard. I have seen a promiscuous a.s.sembly, made up of friends and opponents, remain exposed to a beating rain for two hours rather than forego hearing him. Those who had heard him most frequently were always ready to make the greatest effort to hear him again. Even his bitterest enemies have been known to stand shivering on the street corners for a whole evening, charmed by his marvelous tongue. His stump efforts never fell below his high standard.

He never condescended to a mere attempt to amuse. He always spoke to instruct, to convince, and to persuade through the higher and better avenues to favor. I never heard him deliver a speech that was not worthy of being printed and preserved. As a stump orator he was unapproachable, in my estimation, and I say that with a clear recollection of having heard, when a boy, that wonder of Yankee birth and southern development, S. S. Prentiss.

Mr. DAVIS'S ripe scholarship promptly tendered to his thought the happiest ill.u.s.trations and the most appropriate forms of expression. His brain had become a teeming cornucopia, whence flowed in exhaustless profusion the most beautiful flowers and the most substantial fruits; and yet he never indulged in excessive ornamentation. His taste was almost austerely chaste. His style was perspicuous, energetic, concise, and withal highly elegant. He never loaded his sentences with meretricious finery, or high-sounding, supernumerary words. When he did use the jewelry of rhetoric, he would quietly set a metaphor in his page or throw a comparison into his speech which would serve to light up with startling distinctness the colossal proportions of his argument. Of humor he had none; but his wit and sarcasm at times would glitter like the brandished cimeter of Saladin, and, descending, would cut as keenly.

The pathetic he never attempted; but when angered by a malicious a.s.sault his invective was consuming, and his epithets would wound like pellets of lead. Although gallant to the graces of expression, he always compelled his rhetoric to act as handmaid to his dialectics.

Style may sometimes be an exotic; but when it is, it is sure to partake more and more, as years increase, of the peculiarities of the soil wherein it is nurtured. But the style of Mr. DAVIS was indigenous and strongly marked by his individuality. Although he doubtless admired, and perhaps imitated, the condensation and dignity of Gibbon, yet it is certain that he carefully avoided the monotonous stateliness and the elaborate and ostentatious art of that most erudite historian. I look in vain for his model in the skeptical Gibbon, the cynical Bolingbroke, or the gorgeous Burke. These were all to him intellectual giants; but giants of false belief and practice. Not even from Tacitus, upon whom he looked with the greatest favor, could he have acquired his burning and impressive diction.

HENRY WINTER DAVIS was a man of faith, and believed in Christ and his fellow-man. His heart and mind were both nourished into their full dimensions under the fostering influences of our free inst.i.tutions; so that, being reared a freeman, he thought and spake as became a freeman.

No other land could have produced such dauntless courage and such heroic devotion to honest conviction in a public man; and even our land has produced but few men of his stamp and ability. His implicit faith in G.o.d's eternal justice, and his grand moral courage, imparted to him his proselyting zeal, and gave him that amazing, kindling power which enabled him to light the fires of enthusiasm wherever he touched the public mind.

To show his power in extemporaneous debate, as well as his determined patriotism, I will introduce a pa.s.sage from his speech of April 11, 1864, delivered in the House of Representatives. You will remember that the end of the rebellion had not then appeared. Grant, with his invincible legions, had not started to execute that greatest military movement of modern times, by which, after months of b.l.o.o.d.y persistence, hurling themselves continually against what seemed the frowning front of destiny, they finally drove the enemy from his strongholds, made Fortune herself captive, and, binding her to their standards, held her there until the surrender of every rebel in arms closed the war amid the exultant plaudits of men and angels. Our hopes had not then grown into victory, and we looked forward anxiously to the terrible march from the Rappahannock to Richmond. Thinking that perhaps our army stood appalled before the great duty required of it, and that the people might be diverted from their purpose to crush the rebellion when they saw that it could only be accomplished at the cost of an ocean of human blood, a call was made on the floor of the American Congress for a recognition of the southern confederacy. Speaking for the nation, Mr. DAVIS said:

"But, Mr. Speaker, if it be said that a time may come when the question of recognizing the southern confederacy will have to be answered, I admit it. * * * * When the people, exhausted by taxation, weary of sacrifices, drained of blood, betrayed by their rulers, deluded by demagogues into believing that peace is the way to union, and submission the path to victory, shall throw down their arms before the advancing foe; when vast chasms across every State shall make it apparent to every eye, when too late to remedy it, that division from the south is anarchy at the north, and that peace without union is the end of the Republic; _then_ the independence of the south will be an accomplished fact, and gentlemen may, without treason to the dead Republic, rise in this migratory house, wherever it may then be in America, and declare themselves for recognizing their masters at the south rather than exterminating them. Until that day, in the name of the American nation; in the name of every house in the land where there is one dead for the holy cause; in the name of those who stand before us in the ranks of battle; in the name of the liberty our ancestors have confided to us, I devote to eternal execration the name of him who shall propose to destroy this blessed land rather than its enemies.

"But until that time arrive it is the judgment of the American people there shall be no compromise; that ruin to ourselves or ruin to the southern rebels are the only alternatives. It is only by resolutions of this kind that nations can rise above great dangers and overcome them in crises like this. It was only by turning France into a camp, resolved that Europe might exterminate but should not subjugate her, that France is the leading empire of Europe to-day. It is by such a resolve that the American people, coercing a reluctant government to draw the sword and stake the national existence on the integrity of the Republic, are now anything but the fragments of a nation before the world, the scorn and hiss of every petty tyrant. It is because the people of the United States, rising to the height of the occasion, dedicated this generation to the sword, and pouring out the blood of their children as of no account, and vowing before high Heaven that there should be no end to this conflict but ruin absolute or absolute triumph, that we now are what we are; that the banner of the Republic, still pointing onward, floats proudly in the face of the enemy; that vast regions are reduced to obedience to the laws, and that a great host in armed array now presses with steady step into the dark regions of the rebellion. It is only by the earnest and abiding resolution of the people that, whatever shall be our fate, it shall be grand as the American nation, worthy of that Republic which first trod the path of empire and made no peace but under the banners of victory, that the American people will survive in history. And that will save us. We shall succeed, and not fail. I have an abiding confidence in the firmness, the patience, the endurance of the American people; and, having vowed to stand in history on the great resolve to accept of nothing but victory or ruin, victory is ours. And if with such heroic resolve we fall, we fall with honor, and transmit the name of liberty, committed to our keeping, untarnished, to go down to future generations. The historian of our decline and fall, contemplating the ruins of the last great Republic, and drawing from its fate lessons of wisdom on the waywardness of men, shall drop a tear as he records with sorrow the vain heroism of that people who dedicated and sacrificed themselves to the cause of freedom, and by their example will keep alive her worship in the hearts of men till happier generations shall learn to walk in her paths. Yes, sir, if we must fall, let our last hours be stained by no weakness. If we must fall, let us stand amid the crash of the falling Republic and be buried in its ruins, so that history may take note that men lived in the middle of the nineteenth century worthy of a better fate, but chastised by G.o.d for the sins of their forefathers. Let the ruins of the Republic remain to testify to the latest generations our greatness and our heroism. And let Liberty, crownless and childless, sit upon these ruins, crying aloud in a sad wail to the nations of the world, 'I nursed and brought up children and they have rebelled against me.'"

Mr. DAVIS'S most striking characteristics were his devotion to principle and his indomitable courage. There never was a moment when he could be truthfully charged with tr.i.m.m.i.n.g or insincerity. His views were always clearly avowed and fearlessly maintained. He hated slavery, and he did not attempt to conceal it. He remembered the lessons of his youth, and his heart rebelled against the injustice of the system. His antipathy was deeply grounded in his convictions, and he could not be dissuaded, nor frightened, nor driven from expressing it.

He was not a great captain, nor a mighty ruler; he was only one of the people, but, nevertheless, a hero. Born under the flag of a nation which claimed for its cardinal principle of government, that all men are created free, yet held in abject slavery four millions of human beings; which erected altars to the living G.o.d, yet denied to creatures, formed in the image of G.o.d and charged with the custody of immortal souls, the common rights of humanity; he declared that the hateful inconsistency should cease to defile the prayers of Christians and stultify the advocates of freedom. No dreamer was he, no mere theorist, but a worker, and a strong one, who did well the work committed to him. He entered upon his self-imposed task when surrounded by slaves and slave-owners.

He stood face to face with the iniquitous superst.i.tion, and to their teeth defied its worshipers. To make proselytes he had to conquer prejudices, correct traditions, elevate duty above interest, and induce men who had been the propagandists of slavery to become its destroyers.

Think you his work was easy? Count the long years of his unequal strife; gather from the winds, which scattered them, the curses of his foes; suffer under all the annoyances and insults which malice and falsehood can invent, and you will then understand how much of heart and hope, of courage and self-relying zeal, were required to make him what he was, and to qualify him to do what he did. And what did he? When the rough hand of war had stripped off the pretexts which enveloped the rebellion, and it became evident that slavery had struck at the life of the Republic, unmindful of consequences to himself, he, among the first, arraigned the real traitor and demanded the penalty of death. The denunciations that fell upon him like a cloud wrapped him in a mantle of honor, and more truthfully than the great Roman orator he could have exclaimed, "_Ego hoc animo semperfui, ut invidiam virtute partam, gloriam non invidiam putarem_."

This man, so stern and inflexible in the execution of a purpose, so rigorous in his demands of other men in behalf of a principle, so indifferent to preferment and all base objects of pursuit, had a monitor to whom he always gave an open ear and a prompt a.s.sent. It was no demon like that which attended Socrates, no witch like that invoked by Saul, no fiend like that to which Faust resigned himself. A vision of light and life and beauty flitted ever palpably before him, and wooed him to the perpetual service of the good and true. The memory of a pious and beloved mother permeated his whole moral being, and kept warm within him the tenderest affection. Hear how he wrote of her:

"My mother was a lady of graceful and simple manners, fair complexion, blue eyes, and auburn hair, with a rich and exquisite voice, that still thrills my memory with the echo of its vanished music. She was highly educated for her day, when Annapolis was the focus of intellect and fashion for Maryland, and its fruits shone through her conversation, and colored and completed her natural eloquence, which my father used to say would have made her an orator, if it had not been thrown away on a woman. She was the incarnation of all that is Christian in life and hope, in charity and thought, ready for every good work, herself the example of all she taught."

It was the force of her precept and example that formed the man, and supplied him with his shield and buckler. His private life was spotless.

His habits were regular and abstemious, and his practice in close conformity with the Episcopal church, of which he was a member. He invariably attended divine service on Sunday, and confined himself for the remainder of the day to a course of religious reading. If from his father he drew a courage and a fierce determination before which his enemies fled in confusion, from his mother he inherited those milder qualities that won for him friends as true and devoted as man ever possessed. Some have said he was hard and dictatorial. They had seen him only when a high resolve had fired his breast, and when the gleam of battle had lighted his countenance. His friends saw deeper, and knew that beneath the exterior he a.s.sumed in his struggles with the world there beat a heart as pure and unsullied, as confiding and as gentle, as ever sanctified the domestic circle, or made loved ones happy. His heart reminded me of a spring among the hills of the Susquehanna, to which I often resorted in my youth; around a part of it we boys had built a stone wall to protect it from outrage, while on the side next home we left open a path, easily traveled by familiar feet, and leading straight to the sweet and perennial waters within.

He lived to hear the salvos that announced, after more than two centuries of bondage, the redemption of his native State. He lived to vote for that grand act of enfranchis.e.m.e.nt that wiped from the escutcheon of the nation the leprous stain of slavery, and to know that the Const.i.tution of the United States no longer recognized and protected property in man. He lived to witness the triumph of his country in its desperate struggle with treason, and to behold all its enemies, either wanderers, like Cain, over the earth, or suppliants for mercy at her feet. He lived to catch the first glimpse of the coming glory of that new era of progress that matchless valor had won through the blood and carnage of a thousand battle-fields. He lived, through all the storm of war, to see, at last, America rejuvenated, rescued from the grasp of despotism, and rise victorious, with her garments purified and her brow radiant with the unsullied light of liberty. He lived to greet the return of "meek-eyed peace," and then he gently laid his head upon her bosom, and breathed out there his n.o.ble spirit.

The sword may rust in its scabbard, and so let it; but free men, with free thought and free speech, will wage unceasing war until truth shall be enthroned and sit empress of the world. Would to G.o.d that he had been spared to complete a life of three score and ten years, for the sake of his country and posterity. When I think of the good he would have accomplished had he survived for twenty years, I can say, in the language of Fisher Ames, "My heart, penetrated with the remembrance of the man, grows liquid as I speak, and I could pour it out like water."

At the portals of his tomb we may bid farewell to the faithful Christian, in the full a.s.surance that a blessed life awaits him beyond the grave. Serenely and trustfully he has pa.s.sed from our sight and gone down into the dark waters.

"So sinks the day-star in the ocean bed, And yet anon repairs his drooping head, And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."

From this hall, where as scholar, statesman, and orator he shone so brightly, he has disappeared forever. Never again will he, answering to the roll-call from this desk, respond for his country and the rights of man. No more shall we hear his fervid eloquence in the day of imminent peril, invoking us, who hold the mighty power of peace and war, to dedicate ourselves, if need be, to the sword, but to accept no end of the conflict save that of absolute triumph for our country. He has gone to answer the great roll-call above, where the "brazen throat of war" is voiceless in the presence of the Prince of Peace. Let us habitually turn to his recorded words, and gather wisdom as from the testament of a departed sage; and since we were witnesses of his tireless devotion to the cause of human freedom, let us direct that on the monument which loving hearts and willing hands will soon erect over his remains, there shall be deeply engraved the figure of a bursting shackle, as the emblem of the faith in which he lived and died.

For the Christian, scholar, statesman, and orator, all good men are mourners; but what shall I say of that grief which none can share--the grief of sincere friendship?

Oh, my friend! comforted by the belief that you, while living, deemed me worthy to be your companion, and loaded me with the proofs of your esteem, I shall fondly treasure, during my remaining years, the recollection of your smile and counsel. Lost to me is the strong arm whereon I have so often leaned; but in that path which in time past we trod most joyfully together, I shall continue, as G.o.d shall give me to see my duty, with unfaltering though perhaps with unskilful steps, right onward to the end.

Admiring his brilliant intellect and varied acquirements, his invincible courage and unswerving fort.i.tude, glorying in his good works and fair renown, but, more than all, _loving the man_, I shall endeavor to a.s.suage the bitterness of grief by applying to him those words of proud, though tearful, satisfaction, from which the faithful Tacitus drew consolation for the loss of that n.o.ble Roman whom he delighted to honor:

"Quidquid ex Agricola amavimus, quidquid mirati sumus, manet mansurumque est, in animis hominum, in aeternitate temporum, fama rerum."