RESPONSE BY THE HONORABLE THOMAS WATT GREGORY, FORMER ATTORNEY-GENERAL
OF THE UNITED STATES
Mr. Toastmaster and Ladies and Gentlemen:
The experience of the ages has demonstrated that liars are divided into
three ascending grades—the liar, the damn liar, and the old Alumnus. It
is astonishing how, on an occasion like this, the fossil representative of a
former generation of students magnifies and manufactures the Homeric
deeds of his youth. He likes to think that in the old days he was a distinct
menace to society, that the faculty quailed when he went on the rampage,
and that the police of Charlottesville took to the Ragged Mountains when
his voice was heard in the land. He may have been the mildest sheep in the
entire flock, but he will bow his back and purr like a cat on hearing his son
whisper that "Dad was a devil in his day." Few people believe these
stories of the old timer any more than the story-teller himself believes them.
I claim no monopoly of veracity, but it does no harm to tell the truth
occasionally, and besides it sometimes pays. I recall a citizen of my native
State of Mississippi who was elected to Congress and remained there twenty
years, largely because he openly proclaimed that he had been a private
soldier in the Confederate Army. The great body of privates, who were
masquerading as captains, and majors, and colonels, voted for this man
because they had a sneaking admiration for his honesty and were unwilling
to see his grade become extinct. He developed into a national character
known as "John Allen, the only surviving private soldier of the Confederacy."
With deep humiliation I confess that when I attended the University of
Virginia during seven months of the collegiate years of 1883-4 I was "a
grind." I trust that this candid confession will be remembered in my favor
at the judgment day, if not sooner. I did not belong to the German Club
or the Eli Bananas; I did not take calico even in homeopathic doses; I did
not have more than two pairs of pants at any time, and only one pair during
much of the time. For me it was a period of grinding labor, with few
friendships, interspersed with little of lighter vein. I was a part of the
wreckage of a stricken South. I was born just after the first battle of Manassas.
My father died in the Confederate Army. A widowed mother, with
painful toil, accumulated the small fund which enabled me to enjoy for a
few months the best instruction the South afforded. I came to sit at the
feet of John B. Minor and Stephen O. Southall, to breathe an atmosphere
sanctified by Monticello and the grave of its builder, to gather inspiration
from the best that was left of the old South by contact with its loftiest minds.
Almost forty years have passed and "the old grind" comes back, and will
tell you why he comes back.
Those were the most valuable seven months of my life, and looking
backward I can clearly see what made them so.
Loyalty is the finest word in any language; as long as you have it you
will be young in heart and worth associating with, and when you lose it
your years will be of little value to anyone, least of all to yourself. I have the
most profound sympathy for former students of this Institution who are
absent on this occasion without good excuse. They remind me of the unhappy
Scotchman who said he found no more pleasure in smoking, that
when he was smoking his own tobacco he was thinking of how much it cost
him, and when he was smoking the other fellow's tobacco he packed his pipe
so tight it wouldn't draw. In contemplating the indifference of those who
show no appreciation of past associations and the high ideals which bring
us here I recall the words of Stevenson when he heard of the death
of Matthew Arnold: "I am sorry for poor Arnold, he will not like God."
Like most of you, I have long since forgotten most of what I learned in
the classroom of "The Old Annex," though God knows John B. tried hard
enough to teach me the distinction between an executory devise and a
contingent remainder. I have never been an enthusiastic admirer of the
mere scholar, and recall with malignant pleasure that John Randolph of
Roanoke once said of a very erudite opponent that "the gentleman reminded
him of the soil of Virginia,—poor by nature and worn out by cultivation."
What then is the tie that binds? What is the mark set upon the brow
of the student of that long past day? What did he take away from here
which he has not forgotten? It was the teachings of Thomas Jefferson, and
the personal example of the men who constituted the Faculty of the University
during the years immediately following the Civil War.
In those days the spirit and influence of Jefferson brooded over this
Institution like the wings of a mother bird. If asked to state his doctrine in
few words I would say it was the principle of individual liberty and a corresponding
individual responsibility. He was not so much interested in
protecting the rights of the States against the powers of the National Government,
as he was in protecting the rights of the individual against the
encroachments of all authority. Out of this fundamental belief of Jefferson
grew, among other things, your original faculty organization, your honor
system which has spread over all the land, the right of the student to select
his courses, the freedom of the student from restraint outside of the classroom,
and the trial by an organized student body of all infractions of a high
code of personal integrity. Well might he dictate for an inscription upon his
marble sentinel—not that he was Minister to France, not that he was
Secretary of State, not that he was Governor of Virginia, not that he was
Vice-President of the United States, not that he was President of the United
States—but that he was the "Father of the University of Virginia." And as
long as the old Arcades, planned by the Master's hand, shall stand, as long
as her sons shall bear her honored name to every section of this Republic,
so long shall the University of Virginia be counted no unworthy monument
to her mighty founder.
To the memory of the Faculty of that day I bow in humble reverence.
They were a Spartan band, but old age had crept upon them. They had
toiled for a third of a century in making the University of Virginia the
Mecca of learning for all the South, and had established here a standard of
scholarship probably unequaled on this continent. They had lived through
war and defeat. Finally the tempest of reconstruction had swept over them,
carrying away for the moment every landmark of social status and political
faith, and leaving these men standing, with folded arms and undaunted
courage, amid the flotsam and jetsam of creeds which were knit into every
fiber of their beings and ancestral traditions which had become a part of their
daily lives. Their attitude carried no craven apology for the past and no
unseemly defiance of the future.
Speaking of the typical Southern leader of that day, Daniel H. Chamberlain,
the reconstruction ruler of South Carolina, said:
"I consider him a distinct and really noble growth of our American soil.
For, if fortitude under good and under evil fortune, if endurance without
complaint of what comes in the tide of human affairs, if a grim clinging to
ideals once charming, if vigor and resiliency of character and spirit under
defeat and poverty and distress, if a steady love of learning and letters when
libraries were lost in flames and the wreckage of war, if self-restraint when
the long-delayed relief at last came; if, I say, all these qualities are parts of
real heroism, if these qualities can vivify and ennoble a man or a people,
then our own South may lay claim to an honored place among the differing
types of our great common race."
Such was the matured judgment of the Massachusetts Governor of
South Carolina during the reconstruction period in regard to men of this
type, and there is nothing I would wish to add to it except this—that when
we of the South forget the precept and example of these men, when we forget
that from them there has come down to us a heritage of loyalty, of manhood
and of courage such as the world has seldom known, when we forget these
things then God, in His infinite justice, should forget us.
The "old grind" has not forgotten. He is here to-night to renew his
allegiance to these men and what they stood for, and to reconsecrate himself
to the faith that was theirs.
