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 Maj. Gen'l HENRY W. UWTON 
 
ITn /llbcmortam 
 
 FUNERAL ORATION 
 
 AT OBSEQUIES OF 
 
 Major General HENRY W. LAWTON, 
 
 U. S. VOLUNTEERS, 
 
 BY 
 
 Professor M. WOOLSEY STRYKER, 
 
 D. D., LL.D. 
 
 CHURCH OF THE COVENANT, 
 
 February 9, 1900, 
 
 WASHINGTON CITY. 
 

 
 57^454 
 
 Gibson Bros., 
 
 Printers and Bookbinders, 
 
 Washington, D. C. 
 
Under the broad seas, and across the land of his love and 
 loyalty, seven weeks gone, the heavy tidings whispered o'er 
 the world's diameter that on the i8th of December, 1899, 
 General Henry W. Lawton, of the United States Army, 
 had " given the last full measure of devotion," and under 
 that peremptory shot which was all but the last bolt of the 
 retiring storm, upon the very wave of victory, had fallen, 
 instantly dead. The tears that gullied the cheeks of his 
 brave men, as they lifted their hero's body to a temporary 
 shelter, have been answered by the passionate sympathy 
 and proud recognition of a Republic that is not ungrate- 
 ful and that remembers, and will remember, those who in 
 its supreme tasks have loved not their own lives. 
 
 Over the width of the earth a soldier's household has 
 brought its warrior home. The dust that the nation 
 gathers to its guarding is that of no common man. We \ 
 are met to celebrate and to mourn him. But while we re- 
 call the record so compact with manliness, and which the 
 white blossom of modesty crowns withal, while we recite 
 the story of one who personified the best American tradi- 
 tions, first this day do we regard her sorrow who treads that 
 " solemn aisle of pain " the sanctity of whose shadows are 
 accessible only to her God. And with her, we remember 
 too, for his true sake who begat them, these four dear chil- 
 dren—daughters of the army, wards of the people, and son 
 whose best possession shall ever be his father's sword. Or- 
 phaned of him indeed his children are, but endowed, too, 
 with the immutable heritage of a gallant name. It is an 
 
estate which with all that appropriately pertains to it this 
 land of pure domestic love will thoughtfully and thank- 
 fully administer. 
 
 " Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 
 the Father of mercies and God of all comfort ; who cora- 
 forteth us in all our affliction, that we may be able to comfort 
 them that are in any affliction, through the comfort where- 
 with we ourselves are comforted of God." 
 
 Hither we have come — the people's chosen head, and all 
 authorities else from their high several sessions — to pay 
 our poor but tender alms of love to an unblemished memory, 
 to thank Him, who is our dwelling place in all generations, 
 that the stout tree of liberty still yields such manner of 
 fruitage, and to pledge ourselves, considering the issue of 
 the lives of our renowned dead, to imitate their unblenching 
 and unblighted faith. 
 
 Station is secondary, humanity is primary. And what- 
 ever else any is, to-day we all are only men and women, 
 brothers and sisters, lifting as children our wet faces toward 
 the consolations of God. The stars of the spangled flag, 
 covering now this shape of its noble warden, shine multi- 
 plied upon the dews of grief. But with a solemn joy, it 
 beseems you, his comrades of the Army, to give thanks for 
 the life whose end must (after this parenthesis of difficult 
 farewells) be viewed not as a calamity but as a conquest. 
 " Men unapt to weep " are smitten by the pathos of that 
 courage we commemorate — courage, most touching of all 
 human graces ; but let them also smile with exalted hope 
 as they lay upon this soldier's sepulchre the chaplets of 
 their homage. 
 
 He was born March 17, 1843. Ohio rocked his cradle, 
 
Missouri and Iowa tutored his western spirit, Indiana yielded 
 him to his whole country. A boy of eighteen, April i6, 1861, 
 while scarcely had the acrid smoke drifted northward from 
 Sumter, he gave all he had — himself — to the cause of an 
 indissoluble Union. At once a sergeant, soon a lieutenant, 
 ere long a colonel, he was in the forefront of it all — that 
 brothers' woeful quarrel — until the happy day broke again 
 upon a sacrifice completed and a flag untorn. At Shiloh, 
 at Corinth, through the crimson strife in Tennessee and 
 Georgia, he led and dared. He was medaled for dis- 
 tinguished gallantry ; but he won what was more than 
 that — the power even better yet to serve his country. The 
 apprentice of great masters in a workshop where anvil 
 answered hammer of like temper, when it ceased Lawton 
 was a boy no more. 
 
 He accepted a lieutenant's commission in the Regular 
 Army in 1867. He was with the Infantry, with the Cavalry, 
 with the Inspector's service. Having fought it out v^^ith the 
 insurrectionary tribes for fifteen years, he was the picked man 
 of men to track the Apaches to their last lair and to wrench 
 the southwest from the terror of Geronimo and his band. 
 As another has vividly said, " He hunted them off their 
 feet." 
 
 Ten years for him, next, of those accurate and delicate 
 administrative tasks which, in the oxidizing times of peace, 
 alone preserve an army's reality and readiness, years filled 
 also with ardent and close study of the literature of his 
 calling (for he was a prepared man and not an accident), 
 and then the judgment drums of 1898 beat to quarters, 
 the free flag blushed forth and signalled a sister star, the 
 steel throats of the guns were charged with human wrath. 
 
 M.. 
 
Never recant that year, ye who believe in America's con- 
 science, nor write aught that is unworthy in the volume 
 then begun ! 
 
 Asking at once for active duty — and what soldierly soul 
 in any way of life does not seek that ! — Lawton was major- 
 general of volunteers at El Caney. Here was a man who 
 " couldn't quit," and the crest was carried. Then it was 
 his task as its provincial governor to purge Santiago of the 
 varied dirt of centuries, and still he was " only a soldier." 
 
 The last year came. It was January, 1899, when the 
 shores of his fatherland hid behind the Atlantic's rim, and 
 he was climbing over the ridge of the world to his final 
 duty and his appointed end. 
 
 " Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights 
 Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home." 
 
 We all were sure that General lyawton could do it and 
 would ; that however Death might throw his heavy dice, 
 this American would stride forward unappalled, purpose 
 shrunken snug upon deed and tight as the steel jackets of 
 the cannon. And he did it. His men were worn barefooted 
 in the persistent rush, but cheerfully they pushed along — 
 the rapid leading making a resistless following — until they 
 were pounding the very back of that insurrection, of which, 
 after all, Aguinaldo was but the local lieutenant. Lawton 
 smote and overcame. The jungles were no obstacles, the 
 mountains were stairs. He had won Santa Cruz, San Ra- 
 fael, San Isidro, San Mateo, and there on the very day that 
 his commission as Brigadier of Regulars had been engrossed 
 his campaigning ended, he received a better promotion. 
 Upon the field he was knighted by the accolade " of that 
 Captain under whose colors he had fought so long," and 
 
his soul was redeemed in peace from the battle. Alas and 
 Amen ! 
 
 " What matters how or on what ground 
 The freed soul its Creator found." 
 
 Long has the way been ; but at last his native land re- 
 ceives to her bosom all of him that could die, and with Ave 
 et Vale takes his fame to her brow and his memory to her 
 heart. Arlington, where armies sleep, opens her gates to 
 the ashes that claim her keeping, which He who cradles 
 the years shall guard well until " the reveille of the break- 
 ing morn." Sound, biigles, your mournful last call ! Carry 
 the echoes, ye million-tongued couriers of the air ! 
 
 "And for his passage 
 The soldier's music and the rites of wars speak loudly for him ! " 
 
 Here the pall, the dead march, the committal and the 
 volley ; but there the squadrons of light, the ranks of the 
 white-clad army of martyrs, the peal of golden bells and 
 the acclaim " Well done ! " Blessed and triumphant doom 
 of the faithful servant ! 
 
 " No soldier on service entangleth himself with the 
 affairs of this life," and — " tide life, tide death " — this vet- 
 eran of three wars was one who served not only " with a 
 soldier's eye," but with an unrelenting will. The muscu- 
 lar hand of his resolution wrought out the plan of his in- 
 telligence and " thought death no hazard in this enterprise." 
 No primrose path of dalliance ever allured his feet. No 
 petty defects quarreled with his unalterable and intrepid 
 fidelity. 
 
 " He could not frame a word unfit, 
 An act unworthy to be done." 
 
 And as to-day we listen to the surf-beats of that eternity, 
 
8 
 
 under whose rote pageantry tarnishes and language is be- 
 numbed, we know again that 
 
 " Wars must make examples out of their best." 
 
 This better Plantagenet, this latest Bayard "without 
 fear and without reproach," this modern Philip Sidney, 
 whose life also was " poetry put into action," has shown 
 once more of what a stuff is incorrigible manhood — in what 
 substance root the memories that last. 
 
 For a true poet (and so proven) is one who has written at 
 least some things of which no poet that ever lived could 
 have been ashamed, would gladly have owned ; and a true 
 man is admitted to the fellowship of heroes by the equality 
 and peerage of his supreme deeds. Here was one whom 
 Raleigh, Gustavus Adolphus, William of Orange, Winkel- 
 ried, Cambronne, Garibaldi, would know at sight. He 
 was of that time-enduring breed which has made Agin- 
 court and Naseby and Quebec and I^ucknow of immortal 
 story. He was comrade to the Marylanders who guarded 
 the retreat at Long Island, to the men who passed the Del- 
 aware, who served the guns of Pleasanton, who soaked the 
 sod of the Peach Orchard, who ran singing through the 
 tide at Manila, who held Guantanamo. The soul was in 
 him of tho.se who did business in great waters with Paul 
 Jones and Lawrence and Truxton and Worden and Bag- 
 ley — of all the line who yet are with us and which shall 
 not be diminished though all the seas run red. He was in 
 the spiritual loins of Joseph Warren and of Herkimer. 
 He knew the secret and has saluted the souls of Mansfield 
 and Sedgwick and Reynolds and McPherson and Phil. 
 Kearney and Custer ! 
 
Let it be said, and let it be said here, that none of us is 
 of those who walk backward into the future and translate 
 the present upside down ! A tumid and carping pessimism 
 lives only in the pluperfect, but good faith lives in the 
 future perfect. The one is subjunctive, the other is indica- 
 tive. Nay, duty is in the imperative and unconditional mood ! 
 Great and embattled evils make resistance indispensable, 
 and such resistance in the extreme event is war. Calamity 
 war ever is ; but there are worse calamities ; for not pain, 
 not cost, is a final criterion against what is best. 
 
 When, in the name of mankind, and that peace might be 
 real, we undertook in 1898 to cleanse the seas, we affirmed 
 a principle and made a precedent that I, for one, hold to 
 have written the most honorable leaf in all our history. 
 But all that has been since was corollary to that. No 
 special pleading of professional malcontents with whom 
 wisdom will not die, no a priori abstraction, can unsay 
 what this dead soldier's zeal said for America. Rather does 
 such a death enjoin upon our purpose and performance such 
 ends as shall vindicate us from cowardly indifferentism and 
 evasion in the face of whatever duty, and however unex- 
 pected or complex, enjoin us to regard and to teach liberty's 
 authority. 
 
 We do not welcome war, we deplore it ; but more de- 
 plorable were a craven vacillation toward a riddle which 
 must have room for its solution. For that room's sake, and 
 for the peace it shall secure at last, we reverently invoke 
 upon our arms the favor of the Lord of Hosts ! and though 
 we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we will 
 fear no evil. " In the name of our God will we set up our 
 banners." 
 
lO 
 
 The Arch-Leader of the migrations of men, the Coun- 
 sellor " whose ways are higher than our ways " summons 
 us to an imperial participation in the affairs of the round 
 world — not for conquest and commerce sake, but for Christ's, 
 who is " the resurrection and the life " for peoples too. 
 He summons us from an isolated even though a continental 
 selfishness, like that in which the palaces of self-contented 
 Babylon became the abode of owls and satyrs — summons 
 us, though we may not yet know the half of it, and though 
 our thoughts are not His thoughts, to minister, as the mis- 
 sionaries of the perfect law of liberty, toward the pacifica- 
 tion of the globe, and unto the coronation of that Blessed 
 and Only Potentate, " having neither beginning of days nor 
 end of years," who in righteousness judges and makes war, 
 and who is the Prince of Life. 
 
 New meridians of relation, new zones of authority, new 
 horizons of duty, — these with all their concomitant respon- 
 sibilities ; but also with the assurance that He who lades 
 the burden will strengthen the back, — that 
 
 " Only the Master shall praise us 
 And only the Master shall blame." 
 
 Our faith, too, must needs be militant, dauntless, ready to 
 die if need were, or else we are unworthy to touch the hem 
 of this pall, which rather let us, in remembrance of one 
 who fought our fight, press to our lips with kisses that are 
 covenants — covenants that we henceforth will stand, as 
 those that are " baptized for the dead," to advance our 
 country's true cause, to purify and to exalt it. 
 
 In some good day — not far away, please God — when 
 those islands, foundlings no longer, shall have been rendered 
 as a majestic deodand to civilization, to regulated freedom, 
 
II 
 
 and to the God of these, there in fair Luzon, right where 
 he fell, front to his duty, let the valiant frame of this true 
 liberator rise in immutable bronze, while, understanding 
 us at last, our brown brothers, gazing upon that statue, 
 stature, statute, all in one, shall say — " He was America's ; 
 but he is ours too — Lawton ! He was slain by us ignorantly 
 in unbelief ; but he has forgiven." 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
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