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in accordance with his convictions. When Daniel Webster, charged with responsibility and confronted with the dangers arising from the growth of the slave power, knew no other device than to compro- mise with the iniquity and entail war on the next generation, he may not have earned the designation of Ichabod given him by Whittier, but he certainly indicated that he did not belong in the front rank of statesmen. The tide of mighty events surged on- ward, seeking a Lincoln and a Meade, and leaving to him such fame as may be due to oratorical utter- ance. Mr. Quay is a plain, simple, modest and kindly man, with a taste for books and literature, with no propensity for the acquisition of riches, and with a genius for the organization and control of men in masses, such as, like the gift of Shakespeare, comes but once in centuries. Without prating about honesty, he has this essential of the highest integrity that he meets every obligation and keeps his every word. He has a courage which never flinches, whether in war or politics. He fails in no duty and he is never beaten. He has permanently influenced the destinies of the American people, since it was due to his individual capacity and effort that Mr.
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Harrison was elected to the presidency and the Republican party restored to control, that the Force Bill was prevented from becoming a law, and in large measure, that the Mckinley Tariff Bill was enacted. During the last twenty years no Repub- lican president could have been elected without his consent, and no national policy successful without his support. Helpful, sagacious and strong, a knightly and picturesque figure, whether riding in the van at Fredericksburg, thwarting the wiles of Tammany, or routing the combination of corporations in Penn- sylvania, his fame is assured as a statesman who deserves well of his country, and in whose achieve- ments even Massachusetts may properly take a pride.
GERMAN IMMIGRATION
[An address at the Bi-Centennial Celebration of. the Settlement of Germantown, Pa., and the Beginning of German Immigration to America, in the Philadelphia Academy of Music, on the evening of October 6th, 1883.]
T HE Teutonic races since the overthrow of the power of ancient Rome, which they brought about, have been in the van of thought and achievement. The only rivals of the German and the Dutchman, in those things which mark broadly the pathway of human advancement, came from the same household. In the sixth cent- ury a tribe of Germans found their way across the North Sea to an island which in time they made their own, and to which they gave the name of Angleland. Like all of their stock, the men of this colony grew in substance and developed in in- telligence, but they have ever since, in times of trial and difficulty, looked back to the fatherland for guidance and support. In 1471 a man named Caxton was in Cologne learning the art of printing.
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He returned to England to impart to his country- men a knowledge of the new discovery, and the literature of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Scott and Dick- ens became a possibility. The impulse which Martin Luther gave to human thought, when he nailed his propositions to the church door at Wit- tenberg, beat along the shores of the Atlantic, and the revolution of 1688, bringing with it the liberty of Englishmen, was one of the results. For the at- tainment of that liberty England drove her own royal line beyond the seas and made the Stadtholder of Holland her king. From his day down to the present time every king of England has been a German.
Early in the seventeenth century an English admiral went to Rotterdam for a wife. According to Pepys, who described her later, she was " a well- looked, fat, short old Dutch woman, but one that hath been heretofore pretty handsome, and, I believe, hath more wit than her husband." The son of this woman was the Quaker, William Penn. He who would know the causes for the settlement of Penn- sylvania, the purest, and in that it gave the best promise of what the future was to unfold, the most fateful of the American colonies, must go to the
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Reformation to seek them. The time has come when men look back through William Penn and George Fox to their masters, Menno Simons, the reformer of the Netherlands; Caspar Schwenckfeld, the nobleman of Silesia, and Jacob Boehm, the in- spired shoemaker of Görlitz. In that great upheaval of the sixteenth century there were leaders who re- fused to stop where Luther, Calvin and Zuinglius took a successful stand. The strong, controlling thought which underlay their teachings was that there should be no exercise of force in religion. The baptism of an infant was a compulsory method of bringing it into the church, and they rejected the doctrine. An oath was a means of compelling the conscience, and they refused to swear. Warfare was a violent interference with the rights of others, and they would take part in no wars even for the purposes of self-protection. More than all, in its political significance and effect, with keen insight and clear view, hoping for themselves what the centuries since have given to us, they for the first time taught that the injunctions of Christ were one thing and the power of man another, that the might of the state should have nothing to do with
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the creed of the church, and that every man in matters of faith should be left to his own convic- tions. Their doctrines, mingled, as must be admitted, with some delusions, spread like wild-fire through- out Europe, and their followers could be found from the mountains of Switzerland to the dikes of Hol- land. They were the forlorn hope of the ages, and, coming into direct conflict with the interests of church and state, they were crushed by the concen- trated power of both.
There is nothing in the history of Christendom like the suffering to which they were subjected, in respect to its extent and severity. The fumes from their burning bodies went up into the air from every city and village along the Rhine. The stories of their lives were told by their enemies, and the pages of history were freighted with the records of their alleged misdeeds. The name of Anabaptist, which was given them, was made a byword and reproach, and we shrink from it with a sense of only half-for- gotten terror even to-day. The English representa- tives of this movement were the Quakers. Picart, after telling that some of the Anabaptists fled to England to spread their doctrines there, says: "The
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Quakers owe their rise to these Anabaptists."* The doctrine of the inner light was an assertion that every man has within himself a test of truth upon which he may rely, and was in itself an attack upon the bind- ing character of authority. The seed from the sowings of Menno, wafted across from the Rhine to the Thames, were planted on English soil by George Fox, and were brought by William Penn to Pennsyl- vania, where no man has ever been molested because of his religious convictions. Three times did William Penn, impelled by a sympathetic nearness of faith and methods, go over to Holland and Germany to hold friendly converse and discussion with these people, and it was very fitting that when he had established his province in the wilds of America he should urge and prevail with them to cross the ocean to him.
On this day, two hundred years ago, thirty- three of them, men, women and children, landed in Philadelphia. The settlement of Germantown has a higher import, then, than that thirteen families founded new homes, and that a new burgh, destined
* Picart was here cited because he makes the statement directly and in few words. Upon this subject consult Barclay's Religious Societies of the Commonwealth, Hortensius' Histoire des Anabaptistes, and Pennsylvania Magazine, Vol. IV., p. 4.
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to fame though it was, was builded on the face of the earth. It has a wider significance, even, than that here was the beginning of that immense immi- gration of Germans who have since flocked to these shores. Those thirteen men, humble as they may have been individually, and unimportant as may have been the personal events of their lives, holding as as they did opinions which were banned in Europe, and which only the fullness of time could justify, standing as they did on what was then the outer picket line of civilization, best represented the mean- ing of the colonization of Pennsylvania and the principles which lie at the foundation of her insti- tutions. Better far than the Pilgrims who landed at Plymouth, better even than the Quakers who established a city of brotherly love, they stood for that spirit of universal toleration which found no abiding place save in America. Their feet were planted directly upon that path which leads from the darkness of the middle ages down to the light of the nineteenth century, from the oppressions of the past to the freedom of the present. Bullinger, the great reviler of the Anabaptists, in detailing in 1560 their many heresies, says they taught that "the
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government shall and may not assume control of questions of religion or faith."* No such attack upon the established order of things had ever been made before, and the potentates were wild in their wrath. Menno went from place to place with a reward upon his head, men were put to death for giving him shelter, and two hundred and twenty-nine of his followers were burned and beheaded in one city alone. But, two centuries after Bullinger wrote, there was put into the constitution of Pennsylvania, in almost identical language: " No human author- ity can, in any case whatever, control or interfere with the right of conscience." The fruitage is here, but the planting and watering were along the Rhine. And to-day the Mennonites and their descendants are to be found from the Delaware river to the Columbia. The Schwenckfelders, hunted out of Europe in 1734, still meet upon the Skippack on the 24th of every September, to give thanks unto the Lord for their deliverance. This is the tale which Lensen, Kunders, Lucken, Tyson, Opdengraeff and the rest, as they sat down to weave their cloth and
* " Die Oberkeit soelle und moege sich der Religion oder Glaubens sachen nijt annemmen." Der Widertoufferen Ursprung, p. 18.
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tend their vines in the woods of Germantown, had to tell to the world. A great poet has sung their story, and you Germans will do well to keep the memory of it green for all time to come.
It cannot be gainsaid that the influence upon American life and institutions of that German immi- gration which began with thirty-three persons in 1683 and had swollen in 1882 to 250,630, has ful- filled the promise given by its auspicious commence- ment. The Quakers maintained control of their pro- vince down to the time of the Revolution, and they were enabled to do it by the support of the Germans. The dread with which the Germans inspired the politicians of the colonial days was excessive. In 1727 James Logan wrote to the proprietary : "You will soon have a German colony here, and, perhaps, such a one as Britain once received from Saxony in ye fifth century." Said Thomas Graeme to Thomas Penn in a letter in 1750, "The Dutch, by their numbers and industry, will soon become masters of the province." Many were the devices to weaken them. It was proposed to establish schools among them where only English should be taught, to invalidate all German deeds, to suppress all German
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printing presses and the importation of German books, and to offer rewards for intermarriages. Samuel Purviance wrote to Colonel James Burd in 1765 that the way to do was "to let it be spread abroad through the country that your party intend to come well-armed to the election, . . . and that you will thrash the sheriff, every inspector, Quaker and mennonist to a jelly." But, as a disappointed manager wrote from Kingsessing the same year, "all in vain was our labour. . Our party at the last election have loosed all."
The speaker of the first federal House of Re- presentatives was a German, and with Simon Snyder, in 1808, began the regime of the eight German gov- ernors of Pennsylvania. To represent her military renown during the Revolutionary War, Pennsylvania has put the statue of Muhlenberg in the capitol at Washington. The terrific and bloody struggle with slavery in this country, which ended at Appomattox in 1865, began at Germantown so long ago as 1688. The Murat of the Rebellion, he who afterwards so sadly lost his life among the savages of the west, had traced his lineage to the Mennonite, Paul Kuster, of Germantown, and if the records were accessible,
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it could, it may be, be carried still further back to that Peter Kuster who was beheaded at Saardam in 1535. Another of the descendants of those earliest immigrants, the youngest general of the war, planted his victorious flag upon the ramparts of Fort Fisher. The Schwenckfelder forefathers of Hartranft, major- general, governor, and once urged by this state for the presidency, lie buried along the Perkiomen. He who reads the annals of the war will find that among those who did the most effective work were Albright, Beaver, Dahlgren, Heintzelman, Hoffman, Rosecrans, Steinwehr, Schurz, Sigel, Weitzel and Wistar.
The liberties of the press in America were established in the trial of John Peter Zenger. Man never knew the distance of the sun and stars until David Rittenhouse, of Germantown, made his observations in 1769 .* The oldest publishing house now existing on this continent was started by Sauer, in Germantown, in 1738. The first paper mill was built by Rittinghuysen upon the Wissahickon creek, in 1690.1 The German Bible antedates the English
* He was born in Roxborough Township near Germantown.
+ It was on a branch of the Wissahickon.
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Bible in America by nearly forty years, and the largest book published in the colonies came from the Ephrata press in 1749. From Pastorius, the en- thusiast, of highest culture and gentlest blood, down to Seidensticker, who made him known to us, the Germans have been conspicuous for learning. To the labors of the Moravian missionaries, Zeisberger and Heckewelder, we largely owe what knowledge we possess of Indian history and philology. Samuel Cunard, a descendant of Thones Kunders in the fifth generation, established the first line of ocean steamers between America and England and was made a British baronet.
If you would see the work of the American Germans of to-day look about you. Is there a scientist of more extended reputation than Leidy? Is there a more eminent surgeon than Gross? Who de- signed your Centennial buildings, and in whose hands did you trust the moneys to pay for them? The president of your university, the most enterprising of American merchants, and the chief justice of your state are alike of German descent. The great bridge just completed after years of labor and im- mense expenditures, which ties Brooklyn to New
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York, was built by a German. The financier of the nation during the Rebellion undertook to con- struct a railroad from the greatest of the inland seas to the widest of the oceans. He fell beneath the weight of the task. A German completed it.
But the time allotted to me does not permit me to more than suggest a few points in the broad out- lines of German achievement. The hammer of Thor, which, at the dawn of history, smote upon the Himalayas, now resounds from the Alleghenies to the Cascades. The Germanic tide, which then be- gan to pour into Europe, has now reached the Pacific. In its great march, covering twenty centuries of time, it has met with no obstacle which it has not overcome, it has been opposed by no force which it has not overthrown, and it has entered no field which it has not made more fruitful. America will have no different story to tell. The future cannot belie the past. Manners and institutions change, the rock crumbles into dust, the shore disappears into the sea, but there is nothing more permanent than the characteristics of a race. Already the rigidity and angularity which Puritanism has im- pressed upon this country have begun to disappear ;
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already we feel the results of a broader scope, a sterner purpose and of more persistent labor. And in the years yet to be, America will have greater gifts to offer unto the generations of men, will be better able to attain! that destiny which, in the providence of God, she is to fulfill, because she has taken unto herself the outpourings of that people which neither the legions of Cæsar, nor papal power, nor the genius of a Bonaparte were able to subdue.
THE CAPTURE OF STONY POINT"
[Oration delivered upon the request of the State of New York at the Dedication of the State Park at Stony Point, July 16, 1902.]
E ACH year of the war of the Revolution, the struggle of the colonies for independence and for the establishment of a nationality that should present to the world a new and permanent system of government, was marked by some event which may be regarded as distinctive and represent- ative of the campaign and the time. In 1775 the contest was begun by the farmers with their shot- guns and rifles behind the stone walls running along the road from Concord to Lexington. In 1776 the tide of disaster and depression was turned, and the hope of final success dawned at Trenton. In 1777 there was victory over the army of Burgoyne in
* In the preparation of this paper I have been much indebted to Daw- son's "Assault upon Stony Point," and to Johnston's " Storming of Stony Point," but I have differed from both of these authors in assigning the credit for the plan which was adopted.
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your own beautiful valley of the Hudson, and there were valor and tenacity shown in the attack upon the main army of the British at Germantown. In 1778 were displayed the sufferings and the persistence at Valley Forge. In 1780 were begun the success- ful campaigns of Greene in the south. In 1781 the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown led to the practical cessation of hostilities.
The important event of 1779, the central year of the war, was of a character to catch and forever hold the attention of mankind, one which the state of New York has even now recognized by the opening of this attractive park. We are here to commemorate that event and to tell it over again, though with meagre and inadequate words.
The main purpose of the campaign of 1779, upon the part of Clinton, who was in command of the British forces, was to break, and upon the part of Washington to maintain, the lines of communi- cation between the eastern states and those to the southward by means of the occupation of the valley of the Hudson. The most important position upon the strongest of these lines was West Point, fortified in such a way as to render it almost impregnable,
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and held by the centre of the American army under General McDougall. The American right, under command of Putnam, lay near Dean Furnace, and the left, under command of Heath, was on the op- posite side of the Hudson, extending eastward from the Sugar Loaf hill. Into this position it had been drawn by Clinton's seizure in May of King's Ferry and its termini, Stony Point and Verplanck's Point. West Point was regarded as the key to the Ameri- can continent. To gain possession of it by force the British had sent the army of Burgoyne in the year preceding, and in an attempt to accomplish the same end by the persuasive influence of money and rank, offered to the unfaithful Arnold, were to send André to his death in the year to follow. It was held fast in the clutch of Washington with an army of about nine thousand men.
Fearing that his grasp could not be loosened by any direct effort that might be made, and hoping to tempt him to come down and deliver battle in the open plain, Clinton sent a force, under Tryon, into Connecticut to devastate and lay waste the towns and farmsteads, and there they burned two hundred and forty dwellings, seven churches, and
THE CAPTURE OF STONY POINT
21I
caused a general destruction of farms, mills, stores, and vessels. Fairfield and Norwalk suffered the most severely.
These depredations and this diversion of a por- tion of the army of Clinton failed utterly to persuade Washington to leave the security of the hills, but he made response in a way which was as unexpected to the foeman as it was unsatisfactory. Thirteen miles below West Point, upon opposite sides of the river, are the promontories of Stony Point and Verplanck's Point, and between them ran the ferry which constituted a link in what was the shortest and most effective line of communication between the eastern and southern colonies. Since the beginning of June they had been in the occu- pation of the British, and now Washington deter- mined to make an effort for the capture of both of these important positions. As to one of them, his plans resulted in an entire and remarkable success which has seldom been equalled in the annals of warfare, and gave to American arms a reputation such as earlier achievements had never been able to win for them.
Stony Point was a rugged promontory, covered
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with rock and wood, extending into the river for half a mile from the western shore line, and rising to a height of one hundred and fifty feet. It stood like a solitary sentinel, ever keeping watch and ward over the gateway of the Highlands. Bending around its western base and separating it from the mainland, a marsh sometimes to the depth of two feet crept from an entrance in the river to the north to an outlet in the river to the south. An island fortress, likened often in its strength and conforma- tion to Gibraltar, it seemed to present insurmount- able obstacles to any attacking force, and with quiet and sardonic frown to threaten its destruction. Upon the summit the British had erected a series of redoubts and had placed seven or eight discon- nected batteries, while immediately below them an abatis extended the entire length of the crest. Within this fortification were four companies of the Seventeenth regiment of infantry, one company of American tories, and a detachment of the royal artillery. About one-third of the way down the hill from the summit ran a second line of abatis supported by three redoubts, on which were brass twelve-pound cannon, defended by two companies
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of the Seventeenth regiment and two companies of grenadiers. At the foot of the hill near the morass were five pickets, and the British vessels of war which rode in the river were able to sweep with their guns the low ground of the approaches. Four brass and four iron cannon, one howitzer and five mortars, amply supplied with ammunition, were at the service of the garrison, which consisted of over six hundred of the best disciplined and most trust- worthy troops in the British army, under the com- mand of Colonel Henry Johnson, of the Seven- teenth regiment, a young and gallant officer.
This formidable fortification so manned and protected it was proposed to capture, not by slow approaches or the modern convenient method of turning, but by storm. Could the Continental troops which had been driven from Bunker Hill, Long Island, Brandywine, and Germantown, be relied upon for such an unprecedented and heroic effort?
The hope of success depended upon the secrecy of the preparations, upon the courage and morale of the troops, and above all upon the character of their commander and his capacity to take advantage
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of every opportunity which might be presented. For this purpose the wise chieftain at the head of the American army selected Anthony Wayne, a Pennsylvania brigadier, thirty-four years of age, whose soldierly qualities indicated a rare blending of keen intelligence and impetuous courage, and who had won a distinction at Brandywine, German- town, and Monmouth which his defeat at Paoli, due to the wide separation by his superior of the wings of the army, had failed to tarnish. He was destined later to add to that high reputation by numerous campaigns in the south, and to gain un- perishable renown when, as general in command of the armies of the United States, he broke the power of the savages of the west where others had failed, and secured that seat of future empire for civiliza- tion. His sword was always drawn from the scabbard, its edge was always turned towards the foe, and in the councils of war it had come to be known that the voice of Wayne was ever in favor of taking the risks of battle. His force was se- lected from the light infantry, the brawniest and pluckiest material in the Continental army, welded into shape and tempered by the experience of four
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