Title: Address of the President at the unveiling of the monument to General Sheridan, Wednesday, November 25, 1908
Author: Roosevelt, Theodore
Language: English
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THE UNVEILING OF THE MONUMENT TO GENERAL SHERIDAN, WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER
25, 1908 ***



                      ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT AT
                     THE UNVEILING OF THE MONUMENT
                  TO GENERAL SHERIDAN [Illustration]
                     WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 25, 1908


                            [Illustration]


                              WASHINGTON
                      GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
                                 1908



It is eminently fitting that the Nation’s illustrious men, the men
who loom as heroes before the eyes of our people, should be fittingly
commemorated here at the National Capital, and I am glad indeed to take
part in the unveiling of this statue to General Sheridan. His name
will always stand high on the list of American worthies. Not only was
he a great general, but he showed his greatness with that touch of
originality which we call genius. Indeed this quality of brilliance
has been in one sense a disadvantage to his reputation, for it has
tended to overshadow his solid ability. We tend to think of him only
as the dashing cavalry leader, whereas he was in reality not only
that, but also a great commander. Of course, the fact in his career
most readily recognized was his mastery in the necessarily modern art
of handling masses of modern cavalry so as to give them the fullest
possible effect, not only in the ordinary operations of cavalry which
precede and follow a battle, but in the battle itself. But in addition
he showed in the civil war that he was a first-class army commander,
both as a subordinate of Grant and when in independent command. His
record in the Valley campaign, and again from Five Forks to Appomattox,
is one difficult to parallel in military history. After the close
of the great war, in a field where there was scant glory to be won
by the general in chief, he rendered a signal service which has gone
almost unnoticed; for in the tedious weary Indian wars on the Great
Plains it was he who developed in thorough-going fashion the system of
campaigning in winter, which, at the cost of bitter hardship and peril,
finally broke down the banded strength of those formidable warriors,
the horse Indians.

His career was typically American, for from plain beginnings he rose
to the highest military position in our land. We honor his memory
itself; and moreover, as in the case of the other great commanders
of his day, his career symbolizes the careers of all those men who
in the years of the nation’s direst need sprang to the front to risk
everything, including life itself, and to spend the days of their
strongest young manhood in valorous conflict for an ideal. Often we
Americans are taunted with having only a material ideal. The empty
folly of the taunt is sufficiently shown by the presence here to-day of
you men of the Grand Army, you the comrades of the dead general, the
men who served with and under him. In all history we have no greater
instance of subordination of self, of the exalting of a lofty ideal
over merely material well-being among the people of a great nation,
than was shown by our own people in the civil war.

And you, the men who wore the blue, would be the first to say that
this same lofty indifference to the things of the body, when compared
to the things of the soul, was shown by your brothers who wore the
gray. Dreadful was the suffering, dreadful the loss, of the civil war.
Yet it stands alone among wars in this, that, now that the wounds
are healed, the memory of the mighty deeds of valor performed on one
side no less than on the other has become the common heritage of all
our people in every quarter of this country. The completeness with
which this is true is shown by what is occurring here to-day. We meet
together to raise a monument to a great Union general, in the presence
of many of the survivors of the Union Army; and the Secretary of War,
the man at the head of the Army, who, by virtue of his office, occupies
a special relation to the celebration, is himself a man who fought in
the Confederate service. Few indeed have been the countries where such
a conjunction would have been possible, and blessed indeed are we that
in our own beloved land it is not only possible, but seems so entirely
natural as to excite no comment whatever.

There is another point in General Sheridan’s career which it is good
for all of us to remember. Whereas Grant, Sherman, and Thomas were
of the old native American stock, the parents of Sheridan, like the
parents of Farragut, were born on the other side of the water. Any one
of the five was just as much a type of the real American, of what is
best in America, as the other four. We should keep steadily before our
minds the fact that Americanism is a question of principle, of purpose,
of idealism, of character; that it is not a matter of birthplace, or
creed, or line of descent. Here in this country the representatives of
many old-world races are being fused together into a new type, a type
the main features of which are already determined, and were determined
at the time of the Revolutionary war; for the crucible in which all
the new types are melted into one was shaped from 1776 to 1789, and
our nationality was definitely fixed in all its essentials by the men
of Washington’s day. The strains will not continue to exist separately
in this country as in the old world. They will be combined in one; and
of this new type those men will best represent what is loftiest in the
nation’s past, what is finest in her hope for the future, who stand
each solely on his worth as a man; who scorn to do evil to others,
and who refuse to submit to wrongdoing themselves; who have in them no
taint of weakness; who never fear to fight when fighting is demanded by
a sound and high morality, but who hope by their lives to bring ever
nearer the day when justice and peace shall prevail within our own
borders and in our relations with all foreign powers.

Much of the usefulness of any career must lie in the impress that it
makes upon, and the lessons that it teaches to, the generations that
come after. We of this generation have our own problems to solve, and
the condition of our solving them is that we shall all work together as
American citizens without regard to differences of section or creed or
birthplace, copying, not the divisions which so lamentably sundered our
fathers one from another, but the spirit of burning devotion to duty
which drove them forward, each to do the right as it was given him
to see the right, in the great years when Grant, Farragut, Sherman,
Thomas, and Sheridan, when Lee and Jackson, and the Johnstons, the
valiant men of the North and the valiant men of the South, fought to
a finish the great civil war. They did not themselves realize, in the
bitterness of the struggle, that the blood and the grim suffering
marked the death throes of what was worn out, and the birth pangs of
a new and more glorious national life. Mighty is the heritage which
we have received from the men of the mighty days. We, in our turn,
must gird up our loins to meet the new issues with the same stern
courage and resolute adherence to an ideal, which marked our fathers
who belonged to the generation of the man in whose honor we commemorate
this monument to-day.


                            [Illustration]




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