USA > Massachusetts > Middlesex County > Westford > Town of Westford annual report 1908-1913 > Part 18
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MR. METCALF'S ADDRESS.
"How well those of us who have been spared during these years and have been permitted to come to this reunion, can remember the meeting referred to by Captain Fletcher, when President Lincoln's first proclamation calling for volunteers, was read in yonder schoolhouse. You will remember that after · reading the call, the remarks of Hon. J. W. P. Abbott, calling particular attention to the term of service, 'three years unless sooner discharged,' and that after once enlisted it meant faithful devotion to duty in the service of the United States. This had rather a sobering effect on the enthusiasm of some of those present as they had supposed that the war would only last a few
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months at the most. My father then arose and made a patriotic speech and at the close stepped forward and signed the roll and his example was immediately followed by others. He then suggested that there was no time like the present to begin, and formed a squad and put them through several movements that evening.
"None of us then could foresee, the desperate fighting, the long marches and sacrifices that was to be the lot of the Northern soldiers in the next four years. It was better possibly for the history of this nation that they did not know. Nothing said can ever adequately pay tribute to the living and dead for what they gave, in the years 1861 to 1865, to shape the destiny of this nation, that their children might grow up to enjoy the fruits of the greatest country in the world, the United States of America.
"What a magnificent heritage the men who helped to preserve this Union left to their families; what a change has taken place in this country since the church bells called together your citizens on that April evening. We often hear the remark, that there are no such opportunities for young men to succeed now as during our fathers' time, but this is a mistake, as there are many more opportunities and greater possibilities now than ever before. And many of these opportunities are at our door, if we look for them and improve them when they come. I cannot recall all the wonderful developments between then and now that go to make up much that is pleasant in life. Since then the world has made its greatest progress in all directions. In science, art, medicine, education, literature, and electricity. Many of these developments unknown then are no longer luxuries, but necessities to the business world, such as the adding and multiplying machine, typewriter, elevator, electric lights, telephone, bicycle, electric car service and more recently the automobile.
"In the great development of this period, the farmers' interests have not been overlooked. The time of some of our best inventors has been spent in the development of tools and implements to lighten the labor of the farmer and increase the productiveness of his land. When President Lincoln issued his
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first call for volunteers, the farmer tilled his soil with old-fashioned plows. He cut his hay with a scythe, his grain with a sickle and hand reaper. Since then there has been developed the gang plow, both with disc and mold board, the disc and spring harrow, horse cultivator, planter and check rower, seeder, mower, horse rake, tedder, hay loader and carrier, corn planter, husker and sheller, reaper, manure spreader, cream separator, gasoline engine and both grain and corn harvester, those wonderful implements that cut, put into bundles, ties a band around them and after accumulating four or five bundles throws them off into piles convenient for stacking. All these implements have enabled the enterprising farmer to more than triple the producing capacity of each man and make farming lucrative and pleasant, compared with what it was in the days of the men whose memory you have met to commemorate today. In this particular field the United States has led the world and many of our best inventors have been men who took an active part in the events of 1861 to 1865.
"The city where I am now making my home, sends greetings to you, but in view of the prominent part which some of their citizens took during the Civil War, feel that they should have a soldiers' and sailors' monument, and I have been asked several times, why, not being a native of this Town, I was led to present Westford with a soldiers' monument instead of the City of Auburn. When I came here to bury my father, I was met at the railroad station by a delegation of old soldiers. They were strangers to me, they came without any solicitation, they came without any previous knowledge on my part, but I was so much pleased and so much touched at the spirit of devotion and loyalty of those who had stood shoulder to shoulder during the Civil War, that I then and there resolved that I would do some- thing in Westford to the memory of the Veterans, and I hope this monument will stand and serve as an inspiration to the younger generation to take their part in matters of vital interest of their day, and to keep and preserve intact the good name of this great country, as the soldiers of Westford were ready to do 49 years ago.
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"There comes a time in all our lives when we are apt to look back and review the past and judge whether we have made the best possible use of our time and opportunities. Some changes we make in life are not anticipated, but are the result of circumstances. When I left this town to try my fortune in other places, I fully intended to return and pass the closing days of my life here. I have always loved to come back to Westford with its good air, good water, good land, good schools and economical government. Happiness consists of a contented mind and congenial friends, and what can possibly be better for a home than to live in a town abounding in happy, industrious and self-respecting intelligent people, like you have here. I should indeed be ungrateful if I did not acknowledge, that any success in life that I may have had since, was due to those early influences that go so far to form our character in after life, and although not to the 'manor born,' the Town of Westford is associated with so many pleasant recollections and ties, that while I live, I expect to continue to be just as much interested in your prosperity and progress as any of your native born citizens."
DEED OF CONVEYANCE TO THE TOWN.
Know all men by these presents, that I, Edwin D. Metcalf, of the City of Auburn, County of Cayuga, State of New York, in consideration of the natural love and affection which I have for my old friends and schoolmates in the Town of Westford, Middlesex County, State of Massachusetts, by these presents do give, grant and convey unto the said Town of Westford, to be its absolutely and forever, a monument in bronze and granite.
This monument is given in commemoration of those soldiers, of which my father was one, and sailors "Who knew no glory but their country's good," that voluntarily left their homes and families and went forth from the Town of Westford to participate in the great struggle which solved the momentous question
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whether this nation should united, stand, or divided, fall; and of their devotion and distinguished services to the said Town of Westford, to the State and to the Nation.
In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and seal this 30th day of May, 1910.
EDWIN D. METCALF. (Seal) (Witness) Edwin F. Metcalf.
GOVERNOR LONG THE ORATOR.
Hon. John D. Long, who holds a unique place in the hearts of Westford people, in whose academy he once taught in the days of his youth, was the orator of the day. He was given an enthusiastic reception, and responded with the following eloquent address:
"I greatly appreciate the honor you do me, a civilian, in asking me to address you who fought the battle, and to join you in the tender memorial service you pay, this sweetest day of the year, to our patriots dead, your comrades in arms with whom you stood shoulder to shoulder under the flag and bivouacked on the tented field. Some of them who were with you but a few years ago are with you no more. But this memorial statue which we now dedicate will stand for years to come a lifelike and speaking figure of their patriotic youth. And they will all still live in the works that do follow them-in a civilization purified by the fire of war from the dross of human slavery and political inequality. They will live too in history pictured in pages more graphic than those of Plutarch, in the songs of poets singing a nobler than Virgil's man and an epic loftier than the Iliad. They will live too in these monuments of stone and bronze which we erect not more to their memory, than to the incitement of coming generations.
"It may be said that we are in our monumental age. The towering obelisk at Bunker Hill, the homely pillar on Lexington Green are no longer the only columns that write in granite the glory of patriotism. At Plymouth the colossal figure of Faith looking out over the sea, catching from its horizon the first
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tints of the morning and guarding the graves of the Pilgrims, proclaims to the world the story of the Mayflower and its precious freight of civil and religious liberty. Across the bay rises the shaft that marks her first anchorage at Provincetown, and still nearer is the lofty tower that recalls the home of Miles Standish, that type of sturdy independence which has been multiplied in every phase of our thought and culture. In Boston around the State House are Webster, defender of the Constitution; Mann, promoter of public education; Generals Devens and Fighting Joe Hooker, and Governor Banks. Before its City Hall, Franklin, the most prolific and comprehensive brain in American history, and Quincy, a noble name in Massachusetts. In its public squares Winthrop, the Puritan founder, Sam Adams, leader of the people, Abraham Lincoln, emancipator of the grateful race that kneels enfranchised at his feet, and O'Reilly and Collins, types of the eloquence, wit and poetry of the Irish tongue. In its Public Garden the equestrian statue of Father Washington, the figure of Charles Sumner and the uplifted arm of Everett, and in its avenues Hamilton, the youthful founder of our national finance, John Glover, Colonel of the Marblehead Regi- ment, whose lusty arms and oars rescued Washington from Long Island; Garrison, the indomitable, and the Norwegian Lief, who antedated Columbus. At Mount Auburn, James Otis, that flame of fire. At Worcester, the embodied conscience of George F. Hoar. At North Adams and Springfield, the beloved Mckinley. At Concord, the embattled farmer. In Hingham, in marble pure as his heroic instincts, that war governor, John A. Andrew, who in the heart of Massachusetts soldiers can never be disassociated from the sympathies and martyrdom of the service which he shared with them. In Chelsea, the national flag, floating out its bright and rippling cheer from the year's beginning to its end, waves over the Soldiers' Home where, if haply there be one stricken Veteran whom the unparalleled provision of Massachusetts fails, as all general laws in some rare cases must fail, to reach him, he finds a shelter that shall not dishonor him.
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"Time and your patience deny an enumeration of the monuments which within recent years have dotted Massachusetts and which in their massive handwriting have recorded for centuries hence her story of heroism so plain, so legible that though a new Babel should arise and the English tongue be lost, the human heart and eye will read it at a glance. Scarce a town is there from Boston with its commanding Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, at the dedication of which even the victory- less Southron came to pay honor, to the humblest burying ground in rural villages-in which these monuments in whatever form do not rise summer and winter, in snow and sun, day and night, to tell how universal was the response of Massachusetts to the call of the patriot's duty, whether it rang above the city's din or broke the quiet of the farm. On city square and village green stand the graceful figures of mechanic, farmer, student, clerk, in that endeared and never-to-be-forgotten war uniform- reproduced in the statue here before us-of the soldier or the sailor, their stern young faces to the front, still on guard, watching now the work they wrought in the flesh, and teaching in eloquent silence the lesson of the citizen's duty to the State. How our children will study them! How they will search and read their names! How quaint and antique to them will seem the arms and costume! · How they will gather and store up in their minds the fine, insensibly filtering percolation of the sentiments of valor, of fight for right, of resistance against wrong, just as we inherited all these from the Revolutionary Era, so that when some crisis in the future shall come to them as it came to us, they will spring to the rescue, as sprang our youth in the beauty and chivalry of the consciousness of a noble descent.
"Especially fitting it is that in Westford this memorial figure should stand facing her village green. Her history is from first to last an illustration of patriotism. Her old family names are on every shining page of our country's achievement. Her sons have always been of the true blue Lexington-Concord- Bunker Hill stock. Nearly two centuries ago they were in the romantic Lovell's fight. In 1739 they served under the British flag in the unfortunate campaign in Cuba, as only twelve years
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ago they were in the victorious campaign in which under the Stars and Stripes we redeemed that gem of the Antilles from oppression and with a generosity unparalleled in international annals, fought its battles and without money and without price freely gave it independence and set it in the pathway of republics. They were in the memorable siege and capture of Louisburg. They shared the dangers and glories of the French and Indian Wars which culminated in Wolfe's brilliant capture of Quebec, the embodiment of Canada into the British Empire, and thence- forth immunity for New England from the French and Indian raids that had tormented it. In the great argument for colonial rights and parliamentary representation which preceded the Revolution no voices were clearer, no statement of grievances was more emphatic than were heard in the town meetings of the farmers and mechanics of Westford. And when the hoof- beats of Paul Revere's steed broke the stillness of the night before April 19, 1775, they woke the echoes of her hills. Her minutemen, led by the brave Col. Robinson, were on the march at break of dawn and met the fire of the British grenadiers at Concord Bridge and drove them back. Again with Robinson, and under Prescott-also a Westford name-their rifle barrels gleamed over the ramparts of Bunker Hill. More than two hundred men out of her small population they were in the campaigns of the Revolutionary War even to the crowning surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. They served in the War of 1812.
"And in the War for the Union, so recent that it is in the memory and very life of us who are here, again more than two hundred of her brave young men rallied to the call, enlisting in the various regiments of the service, and loyal on every battlefield, thirty-five of them giving their lives, and still more of them scarred with wounds and enfeebled by disease. Nor did Westford rest with her contribution of men. Her treasury was thrown open. Her private citizens gave of their means. Her women, God bless them, their hearts full of tenderness, never forgot the boys in the field and with unbounded generosity, with swift needle and helpful hand, supplied them with every comfort
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of food and clothing and medicine, bound up their wounds, and nursed them in hospitals.
"What an era it was! When I came to Westford in 1857 to teach in the academy, it was a typical New England village of the first half of the 19th century. It was an embodiment of peace. Riding from Cambridge in the previous May through the Middlesex fields beautiful with apple blossoms, I recall that I seemed to breathe not only their fragrance, but a tranquil spirit of the untroubled serenity and charm of rural life into which the storm of the war cloud could never break. The population was then far more homogeneous than now, almost entirely of Anglo- Saxon stock. As I read the history of Westford I find in the list of those who had from its beginning been active and influential in civil and military lines, the same familiar names which I found in 1857. I dare not repeat any of them, though dear to you and to me, lest I omit some. My residence here was just before the great upheaval of 1860 and 1861. But the awakening was already astir. The tranquillity of the previous half century was already rippling with the agitation of the popular conscience.
"Ah! those old anti-slavery days which, so swift is time, many of you here do not recall! Not even the lustre of the Revolutionary period bursting into national independence shone with such beauty of holiness, such moral effulgence, such ardor for the enfranchisement, not of a nation conscious of only mild subjection to laws in the making of which it did not have direct representation, but of a proletariat of poor, despised, enslaved fellow human beings. It is this which makes the anti-slavery crusade the era of our New England chivalry. Then its rue knight couched his lance, and its minstrel sang. It brought not peace, but a sword. It nerved the iron will of Garrison, who would not equivocate and would be heard. It rang from the lips of Phillips, that Puritan Apollo more beautiful than the son of Latona, and higher-bred, whose tongue was his lute and whose swift shaft was winged with the immortal fire of liberty. It pointed the rhyme of Lowell and transformed him, a Boston Brahmin, into a Down East Bird of Freedom. It made Whittier the expression in verse of New England's intense and passionate
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impulse for freedom and for breaking all chains that bind the limb or mind of any brother man-Whittier, an unplumed knight in Quaker garb. It throbbed with magnetic fervor in the soul of Andrew. It inspired the pen of Mrs. Stowe. Electrified by her genius the great popular heart thrilled with veneration and sympathy for the meek and lowly Christian in bondage, Uncle Tom. Its heroism fired the student; and Harvard and her sisters and our dear old academy here were the mothers of heroes. Its passions culminated in the immortal hymn of Mrs. Howe and cried aloud :
" 'Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.'
"But why name these and not also the dwellers in unnum- bered homes of plain living and high thinking all over the land, under the shadows of Plymouth Rock, and among the farms and workshops of Middlesex as well as in the abodes of academic culture and commercial wealth. For the humblest were peers of the exaltation of their leaders, all kindled with equal enthu- siasm for equal rights, all fired with the reformer's zeal, and later giving themselves and sons a sacrifice upon the altar of their faith on the field of battle and of blood. As Christ died to make men holy, so they died to make men free. All honor to them and to you their Veteran surviving comrades here today!
"It was indeed the era of the tumultuous upheaval of the moral sense. It was the burst of the thundercloud, and its lightnings fell and its rains descended and its floods poured, and the house built upon the sand of human slavery fell, and great was the fall thereof.
"For then came the election of Lincoln, the firing on Sumter, the call to arms, the war. The response of Westford was in- stantaneous. It was the 19th of April, 1775 over again. The flag staff was raised on the common and the flag of the Union challenged the breezes of union and liberty. On that day, 1861, the Sixth Regiment from this vicinity was dyeing the streets of Baltimore with its blood. The news of that memorable event came like an electric thrill. A day or two later Mr. John W. P. Abbot presided at a citizens' meeting in response to Lincoln's call for 75,000 men, and twenty-one residents of the town then
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and there signed the enlistment roll. It is said that the first to volunteer was William Metcalf, who made a patriotic speech and then made his patriotic word a still more patriotic deed. Of a spirited and leading nature, it was in keeping that he was chosen second lieutenant in Company C, of the 16th Regiment of the Massachusetts troops, in which he and the others then enlisted were enrolled. Of that rank, and soon promoted to higher, he saw eventful service in the terrible Peninsula campaign and the second battle of Bull Run, a typically gallant and devoted soldier, worthy of the straps that decorated his shoulders and that were riddled by a minie rifle ball at the latter battle.
"And now in filial remembrance of him and in veneration for his comrades from Westford, his son, Edwin D. Metcalf, gives this soldiers' monument. As his father was the one commissioned officer from Westford, the statue might have been of official rank, but the donor has disinterestedly preferred that it should represent the private, and thus do special honor to the two or three hundred soldiers enlisted from the Town. The gift is only one feature in a career of a worthy son of a worthy father. I remember the boy's honest face and bright eyes and sturdy bearing when he sat a pupil under me at the academy. I have since followed with gratification, as you have also done, his onward and upward course, plucking the flower of honor and success out of the nettle of adversity, industrious, efficient, honest, brave, with a genius for large enterprise, helping his mother to maintain the home while the father was at the battle- front, engaging in business, winning fortune by his own unaided exertions, mayor and legislative representative from the city of Springfield, senator from Hampden county, colonel on the staff of Governor Robinson, vice-president of a national bank, and now at the head of a very large manufacturing establishment in New York state, which have brought him prosperity and enabled him to make this gift and effect this happy occasion.
"Ah! how full his heart must be today. The father's memory! The memory of him who, remembering his own boy- hood, determined that ours should lack no help that he could give it ; who stood to our youth, the soul of honor and manliness;
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who led us by the hand; who taught us our first lessons; whose heart, as now so well we know, yearned towards us with so much hope and pride and longing; the greeting welcome of whose face and the brooding of whose watchful care come back to us in dreams; and whom death even takes not from us but only the more clearly reveals to us his devotion and anxiety for our repute and welfare! We each of us erect to our father's memory our monument, though not like this. With most of us it is a modest headstone or the green turf over which we bend with moistened eyes and grateful hearts. But we can all share in the feelings that have given birth to this impressive memorial, and join in a tribute of honor alike to him whom it commemorates and to him who has set it here. Henceforth the names of William and Edwin D. Metcalf, father and son, will be joined as household words in Westford, where the father had his home and where the son spent his boyhood, to the scene of which his heart turns again in his later years with lively and grateful affection.
"But he would not forgive me if I here and now forgot that this occasion is a memorial not to one of its Westford soldiers of the Union War, but to them all. Veterans, into the struggle for the nation's integrity and life you put your youth, your fortunes, your sacred honor and your lives. At that cost victory was won, union preserved, slavery abolished and our country put upon a new and marvelous growth and expansion in territory, in industrial development, in wealth more fabulous than that of the grottoes of oriental magic, in more widely diffused education and knowledge, and in the whole range of the world's civilization and humanity. Your service and sacrifice are a glorious memory now; they were a hard, sharp, exacting though inspiring reality then. As I think of the brilliant growth of the Republic it is yet a pathetic reflection that with you, survivors of the Grand Army of the Republic who saved it and gave it this wondrous develop- ment, the reverse of the picture is true. The ardor and vigor of youth have gone, the almond tree flourishes, and the grasshopper is beginning to be a burden; the silver cord is lax, and the pitcher must needs be very carefully handled lest it be broken at the fountain. But that is true only of the framework. The im-
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mortal spirit, which inspired you and your comrades who sleep under the turf which you so tenderly decorate today, lives in the eternal youth and sunshine of historic heroism and glory.
"Not that the period of our Civil War was without its shadows. At the court there were divided councils and weak and faithless servants. In the camp were blunders and incom- petency and mean jealousies and honey-combing frictions and lack of loyal co-operation in times of urgent need. Battles were lost by officers unequal to command. Unwarranted slaughters followed the mistakes of a campaign. And there were personal faults. Desertion, drunkenness at the top and at the bottom, cowardice, sinister intrigues have been the incident of all wars, and in our own they were the shadows on the brilliantly con- trasted bright record of the great body of our patriots who fought the good fight and were loyal to the high standards of the soldier and the gentleman. Owing to the sudden enormous inflation of all expenditures and employments of every sort and of the temptations that follow these, there probably has never been a time in our history when, side by side with the magnificent contributions of the people, the patriotic enlistment of chivalrous youth, the holy work of Christian and sanitary commissions, the never-to-be-forgotten service of women as nurses in the field or with devoted hearts and fingers at home, there was so much political wire pulling, so much plundering and spoils, so much dishonesty and fraud upon the government in contracts for its supplies, so much rot and stealing, as during our Civil War. But these, too, were the outcroppings of the temptations of the hour and not the expression of the general spirit which animated the heart of the people. There are some chemical tablets which, dissolved in clear water, make a cloudy mass; but a little later they settle out of sight and the water is pellucid as crystal. So at this later date we wisely and well point these our children of a younger generation to those radiant features of the Civil War which alone survive, to the pure gold and not to the dross, and to the heroisms which still live and of which you are the surviving exponents and which found some of their best examples in the rank and file represented here today. Many a private had
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