This imperious man entered public life in the dawn of the reformation--at a time when the country needed men of pride, of principle and courage. The institution of slavery had poisoned all the springs of power. Before this crime ambition fell upon its knees,--politicians, judges, clergymen, and merchant-princes bowed low and humbly, with their hats in their hands. The real friend of man was denounced as the enemy of his country--the real enemy of the human race was called a statesman and a patriot. Slavery was the bond and pledge of peace, of union, and national greatness. The temple of American liberty was finished--the auction-block was the corner-stone.
It is hard to conceive of the utter demoralization, of the political blindness and immorality, of the patriotic dishonesty, of the cruelty and degradation of a people who supplemented the incomparable Declaration of Independence with the Fugitive Slave Law.
Think of the honored statesmen of that ignoble time who wallowed in this mire and who, decorated with dripping filth, received the plaudits of their fellow-men. The noble, the really patriotic, were the victims of mobs, and the shameless were clad in the robes of office.
But let us speak no word of blame--let us feel that each one acted according to his light--according to his darkness.
At last the conflict came. The hosts of light and darkness prepared to meet upon the fields of war. The question was presented: Shall the Republic be slave or free? The Republican party had triumphed at the polls. The greatest man in our history was President elect. The victors were appalled--they shrank from the great responsibility of success. In the presence of rebellion they hesitated--they offered to return the fruits of victory. Hoping to avert war they were willing that slavery should become immortal. An amendment to the Constitution was proposed, to the effect that no subsequent amendment should ever be made that in anyway should interfere with the right of man to steal his fellow-men.
This, the most marvelous proposition ever submitted to a Congress of civilized men, received in the House an overwhelming majority, and the necessary two-thirds in the Senate. The Republican party, in the moment of its triumph, deserted every principle for which it had so gallantly contended, and with the trembling hands of fear laid its convictions on the altar of compromise.
The Old Guard, numbering but sixty-five in the House, stood as firm as the three hundred at Thermopylae. Thad-deus Stevens--as maliciously right as any other man was ever wrong--refused to kneel. Owen Lovejoy, remembering his brother's noble blood, refused to surrender, and on the edge of disunion, in the shadow of civil war, with the air filled with sounds of dreadful preparation, while the Republican party was retracing its steps, Roscoe Conkling voted No. This puts a wreath of glory on his tomb. From that vote to the last moment of his life he was a champion of equal rights, staunch and stalwart.
From that moment he stood in the front rank. He never wavered and he never swerved. By his devotion to principle--his courage, the splendor of his diction,--by his varied and profound knowledge, his conscientious devotion to the great cause, and by his intellectual scope and grasp, he won and held the admiration of his fellow-men.
Disasters in the field, reverses at the polls, did not and could not shake his courage or his faith. He knew the ghastly meaning of defeat.
He knew that the great ship that slavery sought to strand and wreck was freighted with the world's sublimest hope.
He battled for a nation's life--for the rights of slaves--the dignity of labor, and the liberty of all. He guarded with a father's care the rights of the hunted, the hated and despised. He attacked the savage statutes of the reconstructed States with a torrent of invective, scorn and execration. He was not satisfied until the freedman was an American Citizen--clothed with every civil right--until the Constitution was his shield--until the ballot was his sword.
And long after we are dead, the colored man in this and other lands will speak his name in reverence and love. Others wavered, but he stood firm; some were false, but he was proudly true--fearlessly faithful unto death.
He gladly, proudly grasped the hands of colored men who stood with him as makers of our laws, and treated them as equals and as friends. The cry of "social equality" coined and uttered by the cruel and the base, was to him the expression of a great and splendid truth. He knew that no man can be the equal of the one he robs--that the intelligent and unjust are not the superiors of the ignorant and honest--and he also felt, and proudly felt, that if he were not too great to reach the hand of help and recognition to the slave, no other Senator could rightfully refuse.
We rise by raising others--and he who stoops above the fallen, stands erect.
Nothing can be grander than to sow the seeds of noble thoughts and virtuous deeds--to liberate the bodies and the souls of men--to earn the grateful homage of a race--and then, in life's last shadowy hour, to know that the historian of Liberty will be compelled to write your name.
There are no words intense enough,--with heart enough--to express my admiration for the great and gallant souls who have in every age and every land upheld the right, and who have lived and died for freedom's sake.
In our lives have been the grandest years that man has lived, that Time has measured by the flight of worlds.
The history of that great Party that let the oppressed go free--that lifted our nation from the depths of savagery to freedom's cloudless heights, and tore with holy hands from every law the words that sanctified the cruelty of man, is the most glorious in the annals of our race. Never before was there such a moral exaltation--never a party with a purpose so pure and high. It was the embodied conscience of a nation, the enthusiasm of a people guided by wisdom, the impersonation of justice; and the sublime victory achieved loaded even the conquered with all the rights that freedom can bestow.
Roscoe Conkling was an absolutely honest man. Honesty is the oak around which all other virtues cling. Without that they fall, and groveling die in weeds and dust. He believed that a nation should discharge its obligations. He knew that a promise could not be made often enough, or emphatic enough, to take the place of payment. He felt that the promise of the Government was the promise of every citizen--that a national obligation was a personal debt, and that no possible combination of words and pictures could take the place of coin. He uttered the splendid truth that "the higher obligations among men are not set down in writing signed and sealed, but reside in honor." He knew that repudiation was the sacrifice of honor--the death of the national soul. He knew that without character, without integrity, there is no wealth, and that below poverty, below bankruptcy, is the rayless abyss of repudiation.
He upheld the sacredness of contracts, of plighted national faith, and helped to save and keep the honor of his native land. This adds another laurel to his brow.
He was the ideal representative, faithful and incorruptible. He believed that his constituents and his country were entitled to the fruit of his experience, to his best and highest thought. No man ever held the standard of responsibility higher than he. He voted according to his judgment, his conscience. He made no bargains--he neither bought nor sold.
To correct evils, abolish abuses and inaugurate reforms, he believed was not only the duty, but the privilege, of a legislator. He neither sold nor mortgaged himself. He was in Congress during the years of vast expenditure, of war and waste--when the credit of the nation was loaned to individuals--when claims were thick as leaves in June, when the amendment of a statute, the change of a single word, meant millions, and when empires were given to corporations. He stood at the summit of his power--peer of the greatest--a leader tried and trusted. He had the tastes of a prince, the fortune of a peasant, and yet he never swerved.
No corporation was great enough or rich enough to purchase him. His vote could not be bought "for all the sun sees, or the close earth wombs, or the profound seas hide." His hand was never touched by any bribe, and on his soul there never was a sordid stain. Poverty was his priceless crown.
Above his marvelous intellectual gifts--above all place he ever reached,--above the ermine he refused,--rises his integrity like some great mountain peak--and there it stands, firm as the earth beneath, pure as the stars above.
He was a great lawyer. He understood the frame-work, the anatomy, the foundations of law; was familiar with the great streams and currents and tides of authority.
He knew the history of legislation--the principles that have been settled upon the fields of war. He knew the maxims,--those crystallizations of common sense, those hand-grenades of argument. He was not a case-lawyer--a decision index, or an echo; he was original, thoughtful and profound. He had breadth and scope, resource, learning, logic, and above all, a sense of justice. He was painstaking and conscientious--anxious to know the facts--preparing for every attack, ready for every defence. He rested only when the end was reached. During the contest, he neither sent nor received a flag of truce. He was true to his clients--making their case his. Feeling responsibility, he listened patiently to details, and to his industry there were only the limits of time and strength. He was a student of the Constitution. He knew the boundaries of State and Federal jurisdiction, and no man was more familiar with those great decisions that are the peaks and promontories, the headlands and the beacons, of the law.
He was an orator,--logical, earnest, intense and picturesque. He laid the foundation with care, with accuracy and skill, and rose by "cold gradation and well balanced form" from the corner-stone of statement to the domed conclusion. He filled the stage. He satisfied the eye--the audience was his. He had that indefinable thing called presence. Tall, commanding, erect--ample in speech, graceful in compliment, Titanic in denunciation, rich in illustration, prodigal of comparison and metaphor--and his sentences, measured and rhythmical, fell like music on the enraptured throng.
He abhorred the Pharisee, and loathed all conscientious fraud. He had a profound aversion for those who insist on putting base motives back of the good deeds of others. He wore no mask. He knew his friends--his enemies knew him.
He had no patience with pretence--with patriotic reasons for unmanly acts. He did his work and bravely spoke his thought.
Sensitive to the last degree, he keenly felt the blows and stabs of the envious and obscure--of the smallest, of the weakest--but the greatest could not drive him from conviction's field. He would not stoop to ask or give an explanation. He left his words and deeds to justify themselves.
He held in light esteem a friend who heard with half-believing ears the slander of a foe. He walked a highway of his own, and kept the company of his self-respect. He would not turn aside to avoid a foe--to greet or gain a friend.
In his nature there was no compromise. To him there were but two paths--the right and wrong. He was maligned, misrepresented and misunderstood--but he would not answer. He knew that character speaks louder far than any words. He was as silent then as he is now--and his silence, better than any form of speech, refuted every charge.
He was an American--proud of his country, that was and ever will be proud of him. He did not find perfection only in other lands. He did not grow small and shrunken, withered and apologetic, in the presence of those upon whom greatness had been thrust by chance. He could not be overawed by dukes or lords, nor flattered into vertebrate-less subserviency by the patronizing smiles of kings. In the midst of conventionalities he had the feeling of suffocation. He believed in the royalty of man, in the sovereignty of the citizen, and in the matchless greatness of this Republic.
He was of the classic mould--a figure from the antique world. He had the pose of the great statues--the pride and bearing of the intellectual Greek, of the conquering Roman, and he stood in the wide free air as though within his veins there flowed the blood of a hundred kings.
And as he lived he died. Proudly he entered the darkness--or the dawn--that we call death. Unshrinkingly he passed beyond our horizon, beyond the twilight's purple hills, beyond the utmost reach of human harm or help--to that vast realm of silence or of joy where the innumerable dwell, and he has left with us his wealth of thought and deed--the memory of a brave, imperious, honest man, who bowed alone to death.
A TRIBUTE TO RICHARD H. WHITING.
New York, May 24., 1888.
MY FRIENDS: The river of another life has reached the sea.
Again we are in the presence of that eternal peace that we call death.
My life has been rich in friends, but I never had a better or a truer one than he who lies in silence here. He was as steadfast, as faithful, as the stars.
Richard H. Whiting was an absolutely honest man. His word was gold--his promise was fulfillment--and there never has been, there never will be, on this poor earth, any thing nobler than an honest, loving soul.
This man was as reliable as the attraction of gravitation--he knew no shadow of turning. He was as generous as autumn, as hospitable as summer, and as tender as a perfect day in June. He forgot only himself, and asked favors only for others. He begged for the opportunity to do good--to stand by a friend, to support a cause, to defend what he believed to be right.
He was a lover of nature--of the woods, the fields and flowers. He was a home-builder. He believed in the family and the fireside--in the sacredness of the hearth.
He was a believer in the religion of deed, and his creed was to do good.
No man has ever slept in death who nearer lived his creed.
I have known him for many years, and have yet to hear a word spoken of him except in praise.
His life was full of honor, of kindness and of helpful deeds. Besides all, his soul was free. He feared nothing, except to do wrong. He was a believer in the gospel of help and hope. He knew how much better, how much more sacred, a kind act is than any theory the brain has wrought.
The good are the noble. His life filled the lives of others with sunshine. He has left a legacy of glory to his children. They can truthfully say that within their veins is right royal blood--the blood of an honest, generous man, of a steadfast friend, of one who was true to the very gates of death.
If there be another world, another life beyond the shore of this,--if the great and good who died upon this orb are there,--then the noblest and the best, with eager hands, have welcomed him--the equal in honor, in generosity, of any one that ever passed beyond the veil.
To me this world is growing poor. New friends can never fill the places of the old.