 | Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 |  |
XXXVII
AT ANTIETAM, SEPTEMBER 17, 1903
Governor Murphy, Veterans of New Jersey, men of the
Grand Army:
I thank you of New Jersey for the monument to the
troops of New Jersey who fought at Antietam, and on
behalf of the nation I accept the gift. We meet to-day
upon one of the great battlefields of the Civil War. No
other battle of the Civil War lasting but one day shows
as great a percentage of loss as that which occurred here
upon the day on which Antietam was fought. Moreover,
in its ultimate effects this battle was of momentous and
even decisive importance; for when it had ended and Lee
had retreated south of the Potomac, Lincoln forthwith
published that immortal paper, the preliminary declaration
of emancipation; the paper which decided that the
Civil War, besides being a war for the preservation of the
Union, should be a war for the emancipation of the slave,
so that from that time onward the causes of Union and
of Freedom, of national greatness and individual liberty,
were one and the same.
Men of New Jersey, I congratulate your State because
she has a right to claim her full share in the honor and
glory of that memorable day; and I congratulate you,
Governor Murphy, because on that day you had the high
good fortune to serve as a lad with credit and honor in
one of the five regiments which your State sent to the
battle. Four of those regiments, by the way, served in
W. Slocum, whom we of New York can claim as our
own. The other regiment, that in which Governor Murphy
served, although practically an entirely new regiment,
did work as good as that of any veteran organization
upon the field, and suffered a proportional loss. This
regiment was at one time ordered to the support of a
division commanded by another New York soldier, the
gallant General Greene, whose son himself served as a
major-general in the war with Spain and is now, as Police
Commissioner of New York, rendering as signal service
in civil life as he had already rendered in military life.
If the issue of Antietam had been other than it was,
it is probable that at least two great European powers
would have recognized the independence of the Confederacy;
so that you who fought here forty-one years ago
have the profound satisfaction of feeling that you played
well your part in one of those crises big with the fate of
all mankind. You men of the Grand Army by your victory
not only rendered all Americans your debtors forevermore,
but you rendered all humanity your debtors.
If the Union had been dissolved, if the great edifice built
with blood and sweat and tears by mighty Washington
and his compeers had gone down in wreck and ruin, the
result would have been an incalculable calamity, not only
for our people—and most of all for those who, in such
event would have seemingly triumphed—but for all mankind.
The great American Republic would have become
a memory of derision; and the failure of the experiment
of self-government by a great people on a great scale
would have delighted the heart of every foe of republican
institutions. Our country, now so great and so wonderful,
would have been split into little jangling rival nationalities,
each with a history both bloody and contemptible.
It was because you, the men who wear the button of the
Grand Army, triumphed in those dark years, that every
that he belongs to a nation whose glorious past and
great present will be succeeded by an even mightier future;
whereas had you failed we would all of us, North
and South, East and West, be now treated by other
nations at the best with contemptuous tolerance; at the
worst with overbearing insolence.
Moreover, every friend of liberty, every believer in
self-government, every idealist who wished to see his
ideals take practical shape, wherever he might be in the
world, knew that the success of all in which he most believed
was bound up with the success of the Union armies
in this great struggle. I confidently predict that when
the final judgment of history is recorded it will be said
that in no other war of which we have written record was
it more vitally essential for the welfare of mankind that
victory should rest where it finally rested. There have
been other wars for individual freedom. There have been
other wars for national greatness. But there has never
been another war in which the issues at stake were so
large, looked at from either standpoint. We take just
pride in the great deeds of the men of 1776, but we must
keep in mind that the Revolutionary War would have
been shorn of well-nigh all its results had the side of
union and liberty been defeated in the Civil War. In
such case we should merely have added another to the
lamentably long list of cases in which peoples have shown
that after winning their liberty they are wholly unable to
make good use of it.
It now rests with us in civil life to make good by our
deeds the deeds which you who wore the blue did in the
great years from '61 to '65. The patriotism, the courage,
the unflinching resolution, and steadfast endurance
of the soldiers whose triumph was crowned at Appomattox
must be supplemented on our part by civic courage,
civic honesty, cool sanity, and steadfast adherence to the
country; reunited in fact as well as in name. You left us
the right of brotherhood with your gallant foes who wore
the gray; the right to feel pride in their courage and their
high fealty to an ideal, even though they warred against
the stars in their courses. You left us also the most
splendid example of what brotherhood really means; for
in your careers you showed in practical fashion that the
only safety in our American life lies in spurning the accidental
distinctions which sunder one man from another,
and in paying homage to each man only because of what
he essentially is; in stripping off the husks of occupation,
of position, of accident, until the soul stands forth revealed,
and we know the man only because of his worth
as a man.
There was no patent device for securing victory by
force of arms forty years ago; and there is no patent device
for securing victory for the forces of righteousness in
civil life now. In each case the all-important factor was
and is the character of the individual man. Good laws in
the State, like a good organization in an army, are the
expressions of national character. Leaders will be developed
in military and in civil life alike; and weapons and
tactics change from generation to generation, as methods
of achieving good government change in civic affairs; but
the fundamental qualities which make for good citizenship
do not change any more than the fundamental qualities
which make good soldiers. In the long run in the Civil
War the thing that counted for more than aught else was
the fact that the average American had the fighting edge;
had within him the spirit which spurred him on through
toil and danger, fatigue and hardship, to the goal of the
splendid ultimate triumph. So in achieving good government
the fundamental factor must be the character of
the average citizen; that average citizen's power of hatred
for what is mean and base and unlovely; his fearless scorn
against the dark and sordid forces of evil.
The Continental troops who followed Washington were
clad in blue and buff, and were armed with clumsy, flintlock
muskets. You, who followed Grant, wore the famous
old blue uniform, and your weapons had changed
as had your uniform; and now the men of the American
Army who uphold the honor of the flag in the far tropic
lands are yet differently armed and differently clad and
differently trained; but the spirit that has driven you all
to victory has remained forever unchanged. So it is in
civil life. As you did not win in a month or a year, but
only after long years of hard and dangerous work, so the
fight for governmental honesty and efficiency can be won
only by the display of similar patience and similar resolution
and power of endurance. We need the same type
of character now that was needed by the men who with
Washington first inaugurated the system of free popular
government, the system of combined liberty and order
here on this continent; that was needed by the men
who under Lincoln perpetuated the government which had
thus been inaugurated in the days of Washington. The
qualities essential to good citizenship and to good public
service now are in all their essentials exactly the same as
in the days when the first Congresses met to provide for
the establishment of the Union; as in the days, seventy
years later, when the Congresses met which had to provide
for its salvation.
There are many qualities which we need alike in private
citizen and in public man, but three above all,—three for
the lack of which no brilliancy and no genius can atone,—
and those three are courage, honesty, and common sense.
| Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 | |