e
inspiration of a man recently deceased, who will stand in history as a
monument to the clemency and magnanimity of a great and free people) to
break up the Union in order to insure the perpetuity of slavery, then a
man, plain of speech, rude of garb[12] descended from the Lincolns of
Hingham, in Plymouth County, sounded a rally for Union and freedom
[tremendous applause]; and, hark! there is the tramp, tramp of the
fishermen from Marblehead; there are the Connecticut boys from old
Litchfield; and there is the First Rhode Island; and there are the
sailors from Casco Bay; and the farmers' sons from old Coos, and from
along the Onion River, their hearts beating with the enthusiasm of
liberty, while their steps keep pace with the drum-beat that salutes the
national flag. [Applause.] And, see! is that a thunder-cloud in the
North? No, it is the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, made up of American
citizens of African descent, officered by the best blood of Suffolk, and
at their head Robert G. Shaw, going down to die in the trenches before
Fort Wagner. And there is the man whom a kindly Providence yet spares to
us, descended from the Shermans of Connecticut, preparing for the march
that is to cleave the Confederacy in twain. [Cheers for General
Sherman.] And there is the silent man, eight generations removed from
Matthew Grant (who landed at Dorchester in 1630), destined to make the
continent secure for liberty and to inaugurate the New South, dating
from Appomattox, with traditions of freedom, teeming with a prosperity
rivalling that of New England, a prosperity begotten of the marriage of
labor and intelligence. [Continued applause.]

In times somewhat more recent, when a political campaign was under full
headway, and when politicians were husbanding truth with their wonted
frugality and dispensing fiction with their habitual lavishness, there
sprung up a man removed by only two generations from the Lows of Salem,
who, in the resources of a mind capable of such things, devised what he
was pleased to call "Sunday-school politics"; who has had the further
hardihood to be made president of the college which is the glory of your
metropolis, designing, no doubt, to infuse into the mind of the tender
youth of the New Amsterdam his baleful idea, which, so far as I can make
out, has as its essence the conduct of political affairs on the basis of
the Decalogue.

The campaign over, when the victors are rolling up their sleeves and are