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TITLE: TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE
AUTHOR: CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS
EBOOK: E06266 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

"TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE"

ADDRESS OF

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS

FOUNDERS' DAY, JANUARY 16, 1913

"'TIS SIXTY YEARS SINCE"

In the single hour self-allotted for my part in this occasion there is
much ground to cover,--the time is short, and I have far to go. Did I
now, therefore, submit all I had proposed to say when I accepted your
invitation, there would remain no space for preliminaries. Yet something
of that character is in place. I will try to make it brief.[1]

As the legend or text of what I have in mind to submit, I have given the
words "'Tis Sixty Years Since." As some here doubtless recall, this is
the second or subordinate title of Walter Scott's first novel,
"Waverley," which brought him fame. Given to the world in 1814,--hard on
a century ago,--"Waverley" told of the last Stuart effort to recover the
crown of Great Britain,--that of "The '45." It so chances that Scott's
period of retrospect is also just now most appropriate in my case,
inasmuch as I entered Harvard as a student in the year 1853--"sixty
years since!" It may fairly be asserted that school life ends, and what
may in contradistinction thereto be termed thinking and acting life
begins, the day the young man passes the threshold of the institution of
more advanced education. For him, life's responsibilities then begin.
Prior to that confused, thenceforth things with him become
consecutive,--a sequence. Insensibly he puts away childish things.

[1] Owing to its length, this "Address" was compressed in delivery,
occupying one hour only. It is here printed in the form in which it was
prepared,--the parts omitted in delivery being included.

In those days, as I presume now, the college youth harkened to inspired
voices. Sir Walter Scott belonged to a previous generation. Having held
the close attention of a delighted world as the most successful
story-teller of his own or any preceding period, he had passed off the
stage; but only a short twenty years before. Other voices no less
inspired had followed; and, living, spoke to us. Perhaps my scheme
to-day is best expressed by one of these.

When just beginning to attract the attention of the English-speaking
world, Alfred Tennyson gave forth his poem of "Locksley Hall,"--very
familiar to those of my younger days. Written years before, at the time
of publication he was thirty-three. In 1886, a man of seventy-five, he
composed a sequel to his earlier effort,--the utterance entitled
"Locksley Hall Sixty Years After." He then, you will remember, reviewed
his young man's dreams,--dreams of the period when he

" ... dip't into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be,"

--threescore years later contrasting in sombre verse an old man's stern
realities with the bright anticipations of youth. Such is my purpose
to-day. "Wandering back to living boyhood," to the time when I first
simultaneously passed the Harvard threshold and the threshold of
responsible life, I propose to compare the ideals and actualities of the
present with the ideals, anticipations and dreams of a past now
somewhat remote.

To say that in life and in the order of life's events it is the
unexpected which is apt to occur, is a commonplace. That it has been so
in my own case, I shall presently show. Meanwhile, not least among the
unexpected things is my presence here to-day. If, when I entered Harvard
in 1853, it had been suggested that in 1913, I,--born of the New England
Sanhedrim, a Brahmin Yankee by blood, tradition and environment--had it
been suggested that I, being such, would sixty years later stand by
invitation here in Columbia before the faculty and students of the
University of South Carolina, I should under circumstances then existing
have pronounced the suggestion as beyond reasonable credence. Here,
however, I am; and here, from this as my rostrum, I propose to-day to
deliver a message,--such as it is.

And yet, though such a future outcome, if then foretold, would have
seemed scarcely possible of occurrence, there, after all, were certain
conditions which would have rendered the contingency even at that time
not only possible, but in accordance with the everlasting fitness of
things. For, curiously enough, personal relations of a certain character
held with this institution would have given me, even in 1853, a sense of
acquaintance with it such as individually I had with no other
institution of similar character throughout the entire land. It in this
wise came about. At that period, preceding as it did the deluge about to
ensue, it was the hereditary custom of certain families more especially
of South Carolina and of Louisiana,--but of South Carolina in
particular--to send their youth to Harvard, there to receive a college
education. It thus chanced that among my associates at Harvard were not
a few who bore names long familiarly and honorably known to Carolinian
records,--Barnwell and Preston, Rhett and Alston, Parkman and Eliot; and
among these were some I knew well, and even intimately. Gone now with
the generation and even the civilization to which they belonged, I doubt
if any of them survive. Indeed only recently I chanced on a grimly
suggestive mention of one who had left on me the memory of a character
and personality singularly pure, high-toned and manly,--permeated with a
sense of moral and personal obligation. I have always understood he died
five years later at Sharpsburg, as you call it, or Antietam, as it was
named by us, in face-to-face conflict with a Massachusetts regiment
largely officered by Harvard men of his time and even class,--his own
familiar friends. This is the record, the reference being to a marriage
service held at St. Paul's church in Richmond, in the late autumn of
1862: "An indefinable feeling of gloom was thrown over a most auspicious
event when the bride's youngest sister glided through a side door just
before the processional. Tottering to a chancel pew, she threw herself
upon the cushions, her slight frame racked with sobs. Scarcely a year
before, the wedding march had been played for her, and a joyous throng
saw her wedded to gallant Breck Parkman. Before another twelvemonth
rolled around the groom was killed at the front."[2] Samuel Breck
Parkman was in the Harvard class following that to which I belonged.
Graduating in 1857, fifty-five years later I next saw his name in the
connection just given. It recorded an incident of not infrequent
occurrence in those dark and cruel days.

It was, however, in Breck Parkman and his like that I first became
conscious of certain phases of the South Carolina character which
subsequently I learned to bear in high respect.

So far as this University of South Carolina was concerned, it also so
chanced that, by the merest accident, I, a very young man, was thrown
into close personal relations with one of the most eminent of your
professors,--Francis Lieber. Few here, I suppose, now personally
remember Francis Lieber. To most it gives indeed a certain sense of
remoteness to meet one who, as in my case, once held close and even
intimate relations with a German emigrant, distinguished as a publicist,
who as a youth had lain, wounded and helpless, a Prussian recruit, on
the field above Namur. Occurring in June, 1815, two days after Waterloo,
the affair at Namur will soon be a century gone. Of those engaged in
it, the last obeyed the fell sergeant's summons a half score years ago.
It seems remote; but at the time of which I speak Waterloo was
appreciably nearer those in active life than are Shiloh and Gettysburg
now. The Waterloo campaign was then but thirty-eight years removed,
whereas those last are fifty now; and, while Lieber was at Waterloo, I
was myself at Gettysburg.

[2] DeLeon, "Belles, Beaux and Brains of the Sixties," p. 158.

Subsequently, later in life, it was again my privilege to hold close
relations with another Columbian,--an alumnus of this University as it
then was--in whom I had opportunity to study some of the strongest and
most respect-commanding traits of the Southern character. I refer to one
here freshly remembered,--Alexander Cheves Haskell,--soldier, jurist,
banker and scholar, one of a septet of brothers sent into the field by a
South Carolina mother calm and tender of heart, but in silent suffering
unsurpassed by any recorded in the annals whether of Judea or of Rome.
It was the fourth of the seven Haskells I knew, one typical throughout,
in my belief, of what was best in your Carolinian development. With him,
as I have said, I was closely and even intimately associated through
years, and in him I had occasion to note that almost austere type
represented in its highest development in the person and attributes of
Calhoun. Of strongly marked descent, Haskell was, as I have always
supposed, of a family and race in which could be observed those virile
Scotch-Irish and Presbyterian qualities which found their
representative types in the two Jacksons,--Andrew, and him known in
history as "Stonewall." To Alec Haskell I shall in this discourse again
have occasion to refer.

Thus, though in 1853, and for long years subsequent thereto, it would
not have entered my mind as among the probabilities that I should ever
stand here, reviewing the past after the manner of Tennyson in his
"Locksley Hall Sixty Years After," yet if there was any place in the
South, or, I may say, in the entire country, where, as a matter of
association, I might naturally have looked so to stand, it would have
been where now I find myself.

But I must hasten on; for, as I have said, if I am to accomplish even a
part of my purpose, I have no time wherein to linger.

Not long ago I chanced, in a country ramble, to be conversing with an
eminent foreigner, known, and favorably known, to all Americans. In the
course of leisurely exchange of ideas between us, he suddenly asked if I
could suggest any explanation of the fact that not only were the
publicists who had the greatest vogue in our college days now to a large
extent discredited, but that almost every view and theory advanced by
them, and which we had accepted as fixed and settled, was, where not
actually challenged, silently ignored. Nor did the assertion admit of
denial; for, looking back through the vista of threescore years, of the
principles of what may be called "public polity" then advanced as
indisputable, few to-day meet with general acceptance. To review the
record from this point of view is curious.

When in 1853 I entered Harvard, so far as this country and its polity
were concerned certain things were matters of contention, while others
were accepted as axiomatic,--the basic truths of our system. Among the
former--the subjects of active contention--were the question of Slavery,
then grimly assuming shape, and that of Nationality intertwined
therewith. Subordinate to this was the issue of Free Trade and
Protection, with the school of so-called American political economy
arrayed against that of Adam Smith. Beyond these as political ideals
were the tenets and theories of Jeffersonian Democracy. That the world
had heretofore been governed too much was loudly acclaimed, and the
largest possible individualism was preached, not only as a privilege but
as a right. The area of government action was to be confined within the
narrowest practical limits, and ample scope was to be allowed to each to
develop in the way most natural to himself, provided only he did not
infringe upon the rights of others. Materially, we were then reaching
out to subdue a continent,--a doctrine of Manifest Destiny was in vogue.

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