Burton Egbert Stevenson

“ Henry Clay and Daniel Webster were leaders in the same great party, and were, for the most part, personal friends as well as political allies. But Webster overshadowed Clay in intellect, however he may have been outdistanced by him in political astuteness. If Clay were the fox, Webster was the lion. As a constitutional lawyer, he has never been excelled; as an orator, no other American has ever equalled him. He had in supreme degree the orator's equipment of a dominant and impressive personality, a moving voice, an eloquent countenance, and a command of words little less than inspired. ”

“ It was there, too, high courage was developed and endurance, for it was there that men did battle hand to hand with nature's mightiest forces. It was the one career of the age which called to the bold and adventurous spirit. What training Columbus received or what voyages he made we know not; but when, at about the age of thirty, he steps into the light of history, it is as a man with a wide and thorough knowledge of both the theory and practice of seamanship; a man, too, of keen mind and indomitable will, and with a mighty purpose brooding in his heart. ”

“ They served, however, to pierce certain gold-laced bubbles which had been strutting about the stage pretending to be great and impressing many people with their greatness; but which were, in reality, great only in self-conceit, and in that colossal! So did the Revolution and the Civil War, at first, and costly work it was until the last of them had vanished, to be replaced by men who knew how to fight; for it seems one of the axioms of history that the fiercer your soldier is in peace, the more useless he is on a battlefield. ”

“ In clearness of thought, breadth of view, and strength of logic they have never been surpassed. His service to his country was of incalculable value, for he built for the national government a firm, foundation which has stood unshaken through the years.
So we come to a new era in American history—an era marked by unexampled bitterness of feeling and culminating in the great struggle for the preservation of the Union. Across this era, three mighty giants cast their shadows—Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun. ”

“ There are some who claim that America has never produced a genius of the first order, or, at most, but two; however that may be, she has produced, as has no other country, men with great hearts and seeing eyes and devoted souls who have spent themselves for their country and their race.
One hears, sometimes, a grumbler complaining of the defects of a republic; yet, certainly, in these United States, the republican form of government, established with no little fear and uncertainty by the Fathers, has, with all its defects, received triumphant vindication. ”

“ Kansas was in a state of civil war; two days after his inauguration the Supreme Court handed down the famous Dred Scott decision, declaring the right of any slave-holder to take his slaves as property into any territory; while the young Republican party was siding openly with the abolitionists, and, a very firebrand in a powder-house, in 1859, John Brown seized Harper's Ferry, Virginia, and attempted to start a slave insurrection. Now a slave insurrection was the one thing which the South feared more than any other—it was the terror which was ever present. ”

“ By the touchstone of imagination, even badly written biography may be colored and vitalized. Try it—try to see the man you are reading about as an actual human being; make him come out of the pages of the book and stand before you; give him a personality. Watch for his humors, his mistakes, his failings—be sure he had them, however exalted he may have been—they will help to page 15make him human. The spectacle of Washington, riding forward in a towering rage at the battle of Monmouth, has done more to make him real for us than any other incident in his life. ”

“ Those years on the frontier developed a race of men accustomed to danger and ready for any chance; and towering head and shoulders above them all stands the mighty figure of Daniel Boone, the most famous of American pioneers. About him cluster legends and tales innumerable, some true, many false; but one thing is certain; for boldness, cunning and knowledge of woodcraft and Indian warfare he had no equal.
Born in Pennsylvania, but moving at an early age to the little frontier settlement of Holman's Ford, in North Carolina, the boy had barely enough schooling to enable him to read and write. ”

“ But even the mist of years cannot dim essential heroism and nobility of achievement. Indeed, it enhances them; the voyage of Columbus seems to us a far greater thing than his contemporaries thought it; Washington is for us a more venerable figure than he was for the new-born Union; and Lincoln is just coming into his own as a leader among men. ”

“ Penn had been allowed a free hand in shaping the policy of his colony, and forthwith proclaimed such a government as existed nowhere else on earth. Absolute freedom of conscience was guaranteed to everyone; it was declared that governments exist for the sake of the governed, that to reform a criminal is more important than to punish him, that the death penalty should be inflicted only for murder or high treason, and that every man had a right to vote and to hold office. ”

“ I am not a Virginian, but an American."
Samuel Adams said afterwards that, but for that speech, which drew the delegates together and made them forget their differences, the Congress would probably have ended in a wrangle. And a year later, again in Virginia, in defense of his resolution to arm the militia, he gave utterance to the most famous speech of all, starting quietly with the sentence, "Mr. President, it is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope," and ending with the tremendous cry: "I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!" ”

“ Because we are all interested in what other people are doing and thinking, and because a good story tells in an entertaining way about life-like people, into whom the story-teller has breathed something of his own personality. Then how does it come that so few of us care to read the biographies of real people, which ought to be all the more interesting because they are true instead of make-believe? Well, in the first place, because most of us have never tried to read biography in the right way, and so think it tiresome and uninteresting. ”

“ Even Great Britain, mighty seafaring nation as she has been, cannot, in the last hundred and fifty years, show any brighter galaxy of stars. Just why it would be difficult to say. Perhaps America inherited from England the traditions of that race of heroes who made the age of Elizabeth, so memorable on the ocean, and who started their country on her career as mistress of the seas—Raleigh, Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher, Gilbert, and Howard of Effingham. ”

“ Washington served as aide-de-camp to the general, whose ideas of warfare had been gained on the battlefields of Europe, and who could not understand that these ideas did not apply to warfare in a wilderness. In consequence, when only a few miles from the fort, he was attacked by a force of French and Indians, his army all but annihilated and he himself wounded so severely that he died a few days later. During that fierce battle, Washington seemed to bear a charmed life. ”

“ Whatever may have been the relative merits of Grant and Sherman as commanders, there can be no question as to the greatest cavalry leader in the Union armies, and one of the greatest in any army, Philip Henry Sheridan. Above any cavalry leader, North or South, except "Stonewall" Jackson, Sheridan possessed the power of rousing his men to the utmost pitch of enthusiastic devotion; young, dashing and intrepid himself, his men were ready to follow him anywhere—and it was usually to victory that he led them. ”

“ For sixteen years, Burr practiced law in New York, growing steadily in influence. For five of those years, Hamilton did the same. They were the foremost lawyers in the city. No man could stand before them, and when they met on opposite sides of a case, it was, indeed, a meeting of giants. But in 1789, Washington appointed Hamilton his secretary of the treasury, and leaving New York, Hamilton applied himself to the great task of establishing the public credit, laying the basis for the financial system of the nation, which endures until this day. ”

“ So if you are permitted to look along the shelves of the public library, you will have no concern with the great majority of the books you see there; but here and there one will catch your eye which interests you, and these are the ones for you to read. You have no idea how the habit of right reading will grow upon you, and what a delightful and valuable habit it will prove to be. Like any other good habit, it takes pains at first to establish, an effort of will and self-control. ”

“ Up to that time, the Alleghany Mountains had marked a boundary beyond which white settlers dared not go, for to the west lay great reaches of forest, uninhabited except for wild beasts and still wilder bands of roving Indians. Into this forest, Boone and his companions plunged, and after some weeks of wandering, emerged into the beautiful and fertile country of Kentucky—a country not owned by any Indian tribe, but visited only by wandering war- and hunting-parties from the nations living north of the Ohio or south of the Tennessee. ”

“ All great biographies are written with insight and imagination, as well as with truth; that is, the biographer tries, in the first place, to find out not only what his subject did, but what he thought; he tries to realize him thoroughly, and then, reconstructing the scenes through which he moved, interprets him for us. He endeavors to give us the rounded impression of a human being—of a man who really walked and talked and loved and hated—so that we may feel that we knew him. ”

“ In other words, a biography is the story of the life of some individual. Now what the novelist does is to write the biographies of the people of his story; not usually from the cradle to the grave, but for that crucial period of their careers which marked some great success or failure; and he tries to make them so life-like and natural that we will half-believe they are real people, and that the things he tells about really happened. ”

“ The men who had conquered the conquerors of Europe had themselves met defeat.
The battle had lasted less than half an hour, but the British left behind them no less than twenty-six hundred men—seven hundred killed, fourteen hundred wounded, five hundred prisoners. The American loss was eight killed and thirteen wounded.
News of this brilliant victory brought sudden joy to a depressed people, for elsewhere on land the war had been waged disgracefully enough, and Jackson's name was on everyone's lips. ”

“ The Confederate fleet, and especially the great ram, was still to be reckoned with, but before proceeding to that portion of the task, Farragut steamed up the harbor and served breakfast to his men. Just as this was finished, the Tennessee attacked, and put up a desperate fight, but finally became unmanageable and was forced to surrender.
So ended the battle of Mobile Bay. It left Farragut's fame secure as one of the greatest sea-captains of all time; great in daring, in skill, in foresight, and with a coolness and presence of mind which no page 360 peril could shake. ”

“ It is difficult to-day to realize that there was a time when the United States paid tribute to anybody, more especially to a power so insignificant as the Barbary States. Yet such was the fact. Lying along the north coast of Africa were the half-civilized states of Morocco, Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers, and most of their income was from piracy. All merchantmen were their prey; they divided the loot and sold the crews into slavery. Many nations, to secure immunity from these outrages, paid a stated sum yearly to these powers, and the United States was one of them. ”

“ He retired from the presidency broken in health and fortune, for however well he took care of the interests of his friends, he was always careless about his own. The last eight years of his life were spent at his Tennessee estate, The Hermitage. The end came in 1845, but his name has remained as a kind of watchword among the common people—a synonym for rugged honesty, and bluff sincerity. His career is, all in all, by far the most remarkable of any man who ever held the high office of President—with one possible exception, that of Abraham Lincoln. ”

“ One more era remains to be recorded, that in which the United States confirmed its hold upon the Pacific coast, and here again the story is that of the lives of three men—Marcus Whitman, John Augustus Sutter, and John Charles Frémont. It was Whitman who brought home to the Nation the value of Oregon by a spectacular ride from ocean to ocean; it was Sutter who led the way for an American invasion of California, and who gave impetus to that invasion by the discovery of gold; and it was Frémont who led the revolution there against the Mexicans, and who secured the country's independence. ”

“ On the ninth day of April, 1865, six days after the fall of Richmond, Lee found himself surrounded at Appomattox Courthouse by a vastly superior force under General Grant. To have fought would have meant a useless waste of human life. Lee chose the braver and harder course, and surrendered. He knew that there could be but one end to the struggle, and he was brave enough to admit defeat. On that occasion, Grant rose to the full stature of a hero. ”

“ Jackson was one of the most perfect political manipulators and machine-builders this country ever saw, and he had so perfected his machine at the close of his second term that he was able to name as his successor and the heir of his policies, Martin Van Buren, of New York, a man who had been one of Jackson's most valued lieutenants from the first, an astute politician, but not remarkable in any way, nor able to impress himself upon the country. ”

“ Within a very few minutes, under Hull's raking fire, she was reduced to a "perfect wreck"—so perfect, in fact, that she had to be blown up and sunk, as there was no chance of getting her back to port. The Constitution was practically uninjured, and Hull sailed back to Boston, with his ship crowded with British prisoners. He was welcomed with the wildest enthusiasm, banquets were given in his honor, swords voted him by state legislatures, New York ordered a portrait painted of him, and Congress gave him a gold medal. ”

“ But it was soon evident that he lacked those qualities of aggressiveness, energy, and initiative essential to a great commander; that he was unduly cautious. He seems to have habitually over-estimated the strength of the enemy and under-estimated his own. With this habit of mind, it was certain that he would never suffer a great defeat; but it was also probable that he would never win a great victory, and a great victory was just what the North hungered for to wipe out the disgrace of Bull Run. ”

“ He said, "The union of these States is perpetual. No State upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the Union. I shall take care that the laws of the Union are faithfully executed in all the States." It was, in effect, a declaration of war, and was so received by the South. Whether or not it was the constitutional attitude need not concern us now.
The story of Lincoln's life for the next five years is the story of the Civil War. How Lincoln grew and broadened in those fateful years, how he won men by his deep humanity, his complete understanding, his ready sympathy ”

“ He made speeches in Ohio, in Kansas, and even in New York and throughout New England, everywhere making a powerful impression. To disunion and secession he referred only once or twice, for he perceived a truth which, even yet, some of us are reluctant to admit: that every nation has a right to maintain by force, if it can, its own integrity, and that a portion of a nation may sometimes be justified in struggling for independent national existence. ”