distinguished
himself and carried from the field an ounce of British lead, which
remained in his body thirty-five years. Captain Solomon Van Rensselaer
fought most courageously by the side of Mad Anthony Wayne in the Miami
campaign. Being seriously wounded in a brilliant charge, he refused to
be carried off the field on a litter, but insisted that, as a dragoon,
he should be allowed to ride his horse from the battle and, if he
dropped, to die where he fell. [Applause.]

Worn and bleeding were the feet, scant the clothing of our ragged
Continentals, as, turning upon their foe, they recrossed the icy
Delaware on Christmas night, surprised Rall and his revellers in
Trenton's village, punished the left of Cornwallis's column at
Princeton, and then, on their way to the mountains of Morris County,
fell by the wayside with hunger and wretchedness, perishing with the
intense cold. But, in the darkness of the night, a partisan trooper,
with twenty horsemen, surrounded the baggage-wagons of the British
force, fired into the two hundred soldiers guarding them, and, shouting
like a host of demons, captured the train, and the doughty captain with
my own ancestral name woke up the weary soldiers of Washington's army
with the rumbling of wagons heavily laden with woollen clothing and
supplies, bravely stolen from the enemy. [Applause.]

The poisoned arrows whistled in the Newtown fight as the New York
contingent pressed forward toward Seneca Castle, the great capitol-house
of the Six Nations. The redskins and their Tory allies, under Brant,
tried hard to resist the progress of that awful human wedge that was
driven with relentless fury among the wigwams of those who had burned
the homes in beautiful Wyoming, who had despoiled with the bloody
tomahawk the settlement at German Flats, and had closed the horrid
campaign with the cruel massacre at Cherry Valley. Bold and daring in
this revengeful expedition was Colonel Philip Van Cortlandt, a name
honored in all Dutch civil and military history. [Continued applause.]

As a leader of three thousand cavalrymen the youthful General Bayard
[great cheers], proud of his Dutch descent, fell on the heights of
bloody Fredericksburg. Like the good knight, he was "without fear and
without reproach." Full of zeal for the cause, the bravest of the brave,
his sword flashed always where dangers were the thickest. When a
bursting shell left him dead on the field of honor, his brave men
mourned him and