The Art of Public Speaking
Happy am I that this mission has brought my feet at last to press New
England's historic soil and my eyes to the knowledge of her beauty and
her thrift. Here within touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill--where
Webster thundered and Longfellow sang, Emerson thought and Channing
preached--here, in the cradle of American letters and almost of American
liberty, I hasten to make the obeisance that every American owes New
England when first he stands uncovered in her mighty presence. Strange
apparition! This stern and unique figure--carved from the ocean and the
wilderness--its majesty kindling and growing amid the storms of winter
and of wars--until at last the gloom was broken, its beauty disclosed in
the sunshine, and the heroic workers rested at its base--while startled
kings and emperors gazed and marveled that from the rude touch of this
handful cast on a bleak and unknown shore should have come the embodied
genius of human government and the perfected model of human liberty! God
bless the memory of those immortal workers, and prosper the fortunes of
their living sons--and perpetuate the inspiration of their handiwork.
Two years ago, sir, I spoke some words in New York that caught the
attention of the North. As I stand here to reiterate, as I have done
everywhere, every word I then uttered--to declare that the sentiments I
then avowed were universally approved in the South--I realize that the
confidence begotten by that speech is largely responsible for my
presence here to-night. I should dishonor myself if I betrayed that
confidence by uttering one insincere word, or by withholding one
essential element of the truth. Apropos of this last, let me confess,
Mr. President, before the praise of New England has died on my lips,
that I believe the best product of her present life is the procession of
seventeen thousand Vermont Democrats that for twenty-two years,
undiminished by death, unrecruited by birth or conversion, have marched
over their rugged hills, cast their Democratic ballots and gone back
home to pray for their unregenerate neighbors, and awake to read the
record of twenty-six thousand Republican majority. May the God of the
helpless and the heroic help them, and may their sturdy tribe increase.
Far to the South, Mr. President, separated from this section by a
line--once defined in irrepressible difference, once traced in
fratricidal blood, and now, thank God, but a vanishing shadow--lies the
fairest and richest domain of this earth. It is the home of a brave and
hospitable people. There is centered all that can please or prosper
humankind. A perfect climate above a fertile soil yields to the
husbandman every product of the temperate zone. There, by night the
cotton whitens beneath the stars, and by day the wheat locks the
sunshine in its bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the
fragrance of the wind, and tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains.
There are mountains stored with exhaustless treasures; forests--vast and
primeval; and rivers that, tumbling or loitering, run wanton to the sea.
Of the three essential items of all industries--cotton, iron and
wood--that region has easy control. In cotton, a fixed monopoly--in
iron, proven supremacy--in timber, the reserve supply of the Republic.
From this assured and permanent advantage, against which artificial
conditions cannot much longer prevail, has grown an amazing system of
industries. Not maintained by human contrivance of tariff or capital,
afar off from the fullest and cheapest source of supply, but resting in
divine assurance, within touch of field and mine and forest--not set
amid costly farms from which competition has driven the farmer in
despair, but amid cheap and sunny lands, rich with agriculture, to which
neither season nor soil has set a limit--this system of industries is
mounting to a splendor that shall dazzle and illumine the world. That,
sir, is the picture and the promise of my home--a land better and fairer
than I have told you, and yet but fit setting in its material excellence
for the loyal and gentle quality of its citizenship. Against that, sir,
we have New England, recruiting the Republic from its sturdy loins,
shaking from its overcrowded hives new swarms of workers, and touching
this land all over with its energy and its courage. And yet--while in
the Eldorado of which I have told you but fifteen per cent of its lands
are cultivated, its mines scarcely touched, and its population so scant
that, were it set equidistant, the sound of the human voice could not be
heard from Virginia to Texas--while on the threshold of nearly every
house in New England stands a son, seeking, with troubled eyes, some new
land in which to carry his modest patrimony, the strange fact remains
that in 1880 the South had fewer northern-born citizens than she had in
1870--fewer in '70 than in '60. Why is this? Why is it, sir, though the
section line be now but a mist that the breath may dispel, fewer men of
the North have crossed it over to the South, than when it was crimson
with the best blood of the Republic, or even when the slaveholder stood
guard every inch of its way?
There can be but one answer. It is the very problem we are now to
consider. The key that opens that problem will unlock to the world the
fairest half of this Republic, and free the halted feet of thousands
whose eyes are already kindling with its beauty. Better than this, it
will open the hearts of brothers for thirty years estranged, and clasp
in lasting comradeship a million hands now withheld in doubt. Nothing,
sir, but this problem and the suspicions it breeds, hinders a clear
understanding and a perfect union. Nothing else stands between us and
such love as bound Georgia and Massachusetts at Valley Forge and
Yorktown, chastened by the sacrifices of Manassas and Gettysburg, and
illumined with the coming of better work and a nobler destiny than was
ever wrought with the sword or sought at the cannon's mouth.
If this does not invite your patient hearing to-night--hear one thing
more. My people, your brothers in the South--brothers in blood, in
destiny, in all that is best in our past and future--are so beset with
this problem that their very existence depends on its right solution.
Nor are they wholly to blame for its presence. The slave-ships of the
Republic sailed from your ports, the slaves worked in our fields. You
will not defend the traffic, nor I the institution. But I do here
declare that in its wise and humane administration in lifting the slave
to heights of which he had not dreamed in his savage home, and giving
him a happiness he has not yet found in freedom, our fathers left their
sons a saving and excellent heritage. In the storm of war this
institution was lost. I thank God as heartily as you do that human
slavery is gone forever from American soil. But the freedman remains.
With him, a problem without precedent or parallel. Note its appalling
conditions. Two utterly dissimilar races on the same soil--with equal
political and civil rights--almost equal in numbers, but terribly
unequal in intelligence and responsibility--each pledged against
fusion--one for a century in servitude to the other, and freed at last
by a desolating war, the experiment sought by neither but approached by
both with doubt--these are the conditions. Under these, adverse at every
point, we are required to carry these two races in peace and honor to
the end.
Never, sir, has such a task been given to mortal stewardship. Never
before in this Republic has the white race divided on the rights of an
alien race. The red man was cut down as a weed because he hindered the
way of the American citizen. The yellow man was shut out of this
Republic because he is an alien, and inferior. The red man was owner of
the land--the yellow man was highly civilized and assimilable--but they
hindered both sections and are gone! But the black man, affecting but
one section, is clothed with every privilege of government and pinned to
the soil, and my people commanded to make good at any hazard, and at any
cost, his full and equal heirship of American privilege and prosperity.
It matters not that every other race has been routed or excluded without
rhyme or reason. It matters not that wherever the whites and the blacks
have touched, in any era or in any clime, there has been an
irreconcilable violence. It matters not that no two races, however
similar, have lived anywhere, at any time, on the same soil with equal
rights in peace! In spite of these things we are commanded to make good
this change of American policy which has not perhaps changed American
prejudice--to make certain here what has elsewhere been impossible
between whites and blacks--and to reverse, under the very worst
conditions, the universal verdict of racial history. And driven, sir, to
this superhuman task with an impatience that brooks no delay--a rigor
that accepts no excuse--and a suspicion that discourages frankness and
sincerity. We do not shrink from this trial. It is so interwoven with
our industrial fabric that we cannot disentangle it if we would--so
bound up in our honorable obligation to the world, that we would not if
we could. Can we solve it? The God who gave it into our hands, He alone
can know. But this the weakest and wisest of us do know: we cannot solve
it with less than your tolerant and patient sympathy--with less than the
knowledge that the blood that runs in your veins is our blood--and that,
when we have done our best, whether the issue be lost or won, we shall
feel your strong arms about us and hear the beating of your approving
hearts!
The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South--the men whose
genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of American
history--whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years of the
fiercest war--whose energy has made bricks without straw and spread
splendor amid the ashes of their war-wasted homes--these men wear this
problem in their hearts and brains, by day and by night. They realize,
as you cannot, what this problem means--what they owe to this kindly and
dependent race--the measure of their debt to the world in whose despite
they defended and maintained slavery. And though their feet are hindered
in its undergrowth, and their march cumbered with its burdens, they have
lost neither the patience from which comes clearness, nor the faith from
which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in passionate moments is disclosed
to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid abysses and its
crimson stains, into which I pray God they may never go, are they struck
with more of apprehension than is needed to complete their consecration!
Such is the temper of my people. But what of the problem itself? Mr.
President, we need not go one step further unless you concede right here
that the people I speak for are as honest, as sensible and as just as
your people, seeking as earnestly as you would in their place to rightly
solve the problem that touches them at every vital point. If you insist
that they are ruffians, blindly striving with bludgeon and shotgun to
plunder and oppress a race, then I shall sacrifice my self-respect and
tax your patience in vain. But admit that they are men of common sense
and common honesty, wisely modifying an environment they cannot wholly
disregard--guiding and controlling as best they can the vicious and
irresponsible of either race--compensating error with frankness, and
retrieving in patience what they lost in passion--and conscious all the
time that wrong means ruin--admit this, and we may reach an
understanding to-night.
The President of the United States, in his late message to Congress,
discussing the plea that the South should be left to solve this problem,