He was like the best of those who stood at Concord Bridge
once, on Lexington Common, and on Bunker Hill, only he was firmer
and higher principled than any that I have chanced to hear of as
there. It was no abolition lecturer that converted him. Ethan
Allen and Stark, with whom he may in some respects be compared, were
rangers in a lower and less important field. They could bravely
face their country's foes, but he had the courage to face his country
herself, when she was in the wrong. A Western writer says, to
account for his escape from so many perils, that he was concealed
under a "rural exterior"; as if, in that prairie land, a hero
should, by good rights, wear a citizen's dress only.
He did not go to the college called Harvard, good old Alma Mater
as she is. He was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. As
he phrased it, "I know no more of grammar than one of your calves."
But he went to the great university of the West, where he sedulously
pursued the study of Liberty, for which he had early betrayed a
fondness, and having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the
public practice of Humanity in Kansas, as you all know. Such were
his humanities and not any study of grammar. He would have left a
Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.
He was one of that class of whom we hear a great deal, but, for
the most part, see nothing at all,--the Puritans. It would be in
vain to kill him. He died lately in the time of Cromwell, but he
reappeared here. Why should he not? Some of the Puritan stock
are said to have come over and settled in New England. They were
a class that did something else than celebrate their forefathers'
day, and eat parched corn in remembrance of that time. They
were neither Democrats nor Republicans, but men of simple habits,
straightforward, prayerful; not thinking much of rulers who did not
fear God, not making many compromises, nor seeking after available
candidates.
"In his camp," as one has recently written, and as I have myself
heard him state, "he permitted no profanity; no man of loose morals
was suffered to remain there, unless, indeed, as a prisoner of war.
'I would rather,' said he, 'have the small-pox, yellow-fever, and
cholera, all together in my camp, than a man without principle....
It is a mistake, sir, that our people make, when they think that
bullies are the best fighters, or that they are the fit men to oppose
these Southerners. Give me men of good principles,--God-fearing
men,--men who respect themselves, and with a dozen of them I will
oppose any hundred such men as these Buford ruffians.'" He said
that if one offered himself to be a soldier under him, who was
forward to tell what he could or would do, if he could only get
sight of the enemy, he had but little confidence in him.
He was never able to find more than a score or so of recruits whom
he would accept, and only about a dozen, among them his sons, in
whom he had perfect faith.
