John A. J. Creswell

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He lived to vote for that grand act of enfranchisement that wiped from the escutcheon of the nation the leprous stain of slavery, and to know that the Constitution 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. ”

“ We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection.
"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living hearth and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely as they will be, by the better angels of our nature." ”

“ You can survive the integrity of the nation; we in Maryland would live on the side of a gulf, perpetually tending to plunge into its depths. It is for us life and liberty; it is for you greatness, strength, and prosperity."
Nothing appalled him; nothing deterred him. He said, at Baltimore, in 1861:
"The War Department has been taught by the misfortune at Bull Run, which has broken no power nor any spirit, which bowed no State nor made any heart falter, which was felt as a humiliation that has brought forth wisdom." ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 institutions; 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. ”

“ 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." ”

“ 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. ”

“ Having taken up his lifeless body, as beautiful as the dead Absalom, and laid it in the tomb with becoming solemnity, we have assembled 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 God that he had been spared to complete a life of three score and ten years, for the sake of his country and posterity. ”

“ More recent calamities also remind us that death is universal king. Just ten days ago our great historian pronounced 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 passing hand, yet we are again called into the presence of the Inexorable to crown one more illustrious victim with sacrificial flowers. ”

“ David Davis, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who is his only cousin-german. To all these afflicted hearts may God be most gracious.
Thus has the country lost one of the most able, eloquent, and fearless of its defenders. Called from this life at an age when most men are just beginning to command the respect and confidence of their fellows, he has left, nevertheless, a fame as wide as our vast country. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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 title 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. ”

“ Grant, with his invincible legions, had not started to execute that greatest military movement of modern times, by which, after months of bloody 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. ”

“ 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 God, yet denied to creatures, formed in the image of God and charged with the custody of immortal souls, the common rights of humanity ”

“ 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. ”

“ Remembering that he was a man of like passions 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. ”

“ Henry May, conservative Union, and in the face of an opposition which few men have dared to encounter, he carried on, unremittingly from that time until the election on the 13th of June, the most brilliant campaign against open traitors, doubters, and dodgers, that unrivalled eloquence, courage, and activity could achieve. ”

“ Davis, with that political prescience for which he was always remarkable, seemed to discern the first sign of the coming storm. The winds had been long sown, and now the whirlwind was to be reaped. The thirty-sixth Congress, which had opened so inauspiciously, and which his vote had saved from becoming a perpetuated bedlam, met for its second session on the 3d of December, 1860, with the clouds of civil war fast settling down upon the nation. ”

“ 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 God shall give me to see my duty, with unfaltering though perhaps with unskilful steps, right onward to the end. ”

“ 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. ”

“ His aunt, herself in limited circumstances, by a careful husbandry of her means, managed to keep him at college. Kenyon was then a manual-labor institution, 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 passed, bearing his part manfully ”

“ The young men of most ability and promise gathered about him, and made him the centre of their chosen circle. He became a prominent member of the whig party, and was everywhere known as the brilliant orator and successful controvertist of the Scott campaign of 1852. The whig party, worn out by its many gallant but unsuccessful battles, was ultimately gathered to its fathers, and Mr. Davis led off in the American movement. He was elected successively to the thirty-fourth, thirty-fifth, and thirty-sixth Congresses by the American party from the fourth district of Maryland. ”

“ 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 assent. ”

“ 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 noble woman. ”

“ He was defeated, but he sanctified the name of unconditional union in the vocabulary of every true Marylander. He gathered but 6,000 votes out of 14,000, yet the result was a triumph which gave him the real fruits of victory; and he exclaimed to a friend, with laudable pride, "With six thousand of the workingmen of Baltimore on my side, won in such a contest, I defy them to take the State out of the Union." Though not elected, he never ceased his efforts. With us it was a struggle for homes, hearths, and lives. He said at Brooklyn:
"You see the conflagration from a distance ”

“ 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 ”