CHAPTER XXXIII.

TO THE PEOPLE OF CONNECTICUT.

A Reminder of What They Have Been-What Made Them What They are-The Character They Have to Maintain.

An organist hardly feels that his musical service is complete, without a suitable postlude to his performance, as well as a prelude. And as the author of this memoir has had as much regard for you in this work, as for your Governor, he takes the liberty of calling attention to certain of your characteristics as a people, which stood you in good stead in all the crises of the war; to certain influences and events in your earlier history to which you owe such characteristics, and to what should be the benefits of some of your recent history to your State and to posterity.

To the Southerner, all New Englanders were Yankees in the most objectionable meaning of the term. But the Connecticut Yankee was a peculiar species of the class, bright, sharp for business, loving money and never spending it except to make more. There was something nasal about his voice, and awkward about his manners, and he had no fine qualities of blood and breeding. In older times when men in public life were not so sectional or partisan, and personal friendships were formed stronger than afterwards, we used to hear of the pleasantries that passed between Southerners and Northerners; like that of the one who saw a drove of mules going by the Capitol at Washington, and called his brother Senator to the window to see a company of his constituents, and the reply was, "Yes, they are going South to teach school." Down to the very opening of the war, when a Southern mother, standing with her boy

before Washington's noble statue at Richmond, was heard teaching him: "There, my son, you see Washington is turning his back upon the North, and only looks with satisfaction and blessing upon the South;" the South had this low opinion of you, and instilled it into their children.

But how unjust this opinion was your history had shown, and your coming action was to do away with it forever. Your country was a rough one, and your climate vigorous for half the year, so that industry and economy had to be considered prime virtues. You had to do your own work, or pay for it when done by others. But you knew how to accumulate your gains, and use them as capital for larger enterprises; you made your water power drive your machinery, and by invention improved your machinery and methods of business until you could not only bring cotton from the South and return it in clothing to advantage, but export it also to the ends of the earth; you utilized the very ice of your ponds as well as the timber of your forests and the clay of your valleys, together with the granite from your hills, to furnish yourselves and others with the comforts and benefits of a higher civilization.

You knew the value of education and Christianity also. You would not incorporate towns even on the outposts of civilization, unless they would provide schools and churches with an educated ministry. You must have your colleges almost from the first, and sent your contributions to Harvard until you could support one of your own. And when those twelve ministers (with little more than their piety, and a few books) founded the one which has since grown into your noble University, with its various departments of literature, theology, philosophy, natural science, sociology, law and medicine, where so many of the statesmen and professional men and scientists of the land have been trained for the last two centuries, it is proof that you have always valued other things than money, and have labored

as hard to secure the former as the latter. Your common schools, free to all, have been cheerfully sustained by those who have had anything to be taxed, whether they had any children or not. Your State, Your State, if we mistake not, was the first to set apart a school fund of $2,000,000 for this purposc. And the result has been, that it is rare to find one of your native population who cannot read and write,-read the newspapers and books, and write an intelligible letter, and affix his signature to his own will.

You have been learning, too, the best use of property. When so many are giving liberally out of their competency or their wealth, and many more out of straitened means or even poverty, to whatever will promote the public good, the relief of distress, the elevation of the oppressed, the promotion of better morals, the most thorough Christianization of this country, and the evangelization of the whole world, who can say that this is not the greatest and best attainment that can be made in this age of progress? When we think of the possibilities that are open to us in this direction; in the intellectuality and education of the people, which would put the wealth of science more fully into our possession, the skill of trained artisanship, the resources of invention, the treasures of history and the refinements of art; when moral and religious culture shall have saved us from the exhaustless waste of vice and fraud, to say nothing of needless incompetency and reckless mismanagement in business, and especially when there shall be enough of the spirit of Christianity in the community to make us "fear God and keep his commandments," "love our neighbor as we love ourselves," seek "another's wealth," as well as our own, be "kind one to another, tender hearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven us; "what mines of wealth, priceless in value and limitless in extent, are found all around us, if they were only developed! There could hardly be a better illustration of this subject,

or one more honorable to you, than the two gifts from your State of a million each, for the education and religious improvement of the colored people of the South, the Slater fund and the Hand fund, the only gifts for the same purpose and of equal amount that have come from any quarter. The Peabody fund is a noble charity, but that is for the white population especially, while these are for the Freedmen, the most needy and depressed, and are absolutely necessary to qualify them for the citizenship which has been conferred upon them, and which they are not yet capable of exercising. This is the supreme wisdom of such a charity, and as full of benevolence to the whole country as it is to the South.

Your generous use of money also for carrying on the war, the way in which individuals pledged their fortunes, the banks offered loans, the towns taxed themselves to raise volunteers and support their families, the Legislature appropriated $1,000,000 to raise and equip troops, and the State loaned its credit to aid the general government, ought to stifle forever the ancient reproach that you were a mercenary and mean-spirited people.*

But more than all, you gave yourselves, as well as your money, to the cause of your country, and herein showed your truest patriotism. Few shrank from enlistment who were fit for military service and could be spared from duties at home, and as the state of things became more critical, instead of sending substitutes, your citizens felt under greater obligation to go into the field themselves, so that the most independent in their circumstances and the

* Nor should it ever be forgotten to your credit that it was a citizen of your State, Hon. C. S. Bushnell of New Haven, who himself and his friends advanced the money which enabled Ericsson to build his Monitor, saved our navy in its greatest peril, and revolutionized the system of naval shipbuilding throughout the world. Our naval department saw nothing promising in such a war vessel and the government had no spare funds to risk upon such an experiment, but this private citizen of yours, virtually at his own risk and expense, saved the nation from disaster, and made this contribution to the defense of every nation.

ablest in every profession and position were to be found in our army. There was a private in one of the Connecticut regiments we know, who, when the government was largely in arrears to them, drew his check for the back pay of the whole regiment. And the assertion of Mr. Lincoln, which was ridiculed abroad, that he could have filled every office in his cabinet from more than one single regiment in the service, was justified. You sent 50,000 men into the field out of a population of less than half a million, or more than one to every ten inhabitants, counting men, women and children. Your State never had to submit to a draft to furnish your quota, but had a surplus of 6,000 to her credit when the war was over. The honor your volunteers did themselves and your State, on land and sea, in campaigns like McClellan's, on the battlefields of the Wilderness, Antietam and Gettysburg; the high rank in the army to which so many of them attained, largely from civil life; the illustrious dead, so many of whom sleep in your village burying grounds, the constant shrine of love and flowers; and so many more who rest in unknown graves, and just outside, perhaps, of some prison pen, where unassuaged grief can never make any expression of affection for them, or of its admiration of the sacrifice they made for others, these are matters of truthful and eternal history, and they tell whether you have any patriotism, or self-sacrifice, or nobility.

What is nobility in its truest sense? Is it to have some royal blood in your veins, like that of Charles the First, or trace your descent to some titled ancestor, like his Attorney General, who prosecuted all the patriots in his Parliament for high treason? Or would you rather find yourself descended from one of those patriots, Hampden or Sir Henry Vane, characters whom all respect, and whose services will be appreciated as long as personal rights are cherished and unjust taxation opposed? Would you rather inherit the faith of the Reformers, who sloughed off