241 
 G9 S6 
 opy 2 
 
 CLIO 
 
 BY 
 
 DR. C. ALPHONSO SMITH 
 
 An address delivered at the unveiling of a monument 
 
 to the Muse of History at the Guilford Battle 
 
 Ground, Greensboro, N. C, July 
 
 third, nineteen hundred 
 
 and nine 
 
 published by 
 The Guilford Battle Ground Company 
 
 ALSO BY 
 
 The North Carolina Historical Commission 
 
A People Who Have Not the PRroE to Record Their 
 History Will Not Long Have the Virtue to Make History 
 That is Worth Recording. 
 
CLIO. MUSE OF HISTORY 
 
 Monument Unveiled at Guilford Battle Ground, near Greensboro. N. C. 
 
 July 3. 1909 
 
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HISTORY IN 
 A DEMOCRACY 
 
 BY 
 
 C ALPHONSO SMITH 
 
 PROFESSOR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 
 UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA 
 
E2 
 
 THE NORTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL COMMISSION 
 
 J. Bkyan (Jrimes. ClKiii'HKiii. 
 
 W. J. I'EELE, I). II. II ILL, 
 
 TiioJLvs \V. Blount, M. C. S. Noble. 
 
 R. I). \V. Connor, Secretary, Ralei<<h, X. C. 
 
 10 N'09 
 
The Significance of History in 
 A Democracy. 
 
 Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen: 
 
 There is a day famous in the creed and practice of Chris- 
 tendom known as All Saints' Day. On this day honor and 
 reverence are paid Avithout distinction to all the saints and 
 martyrs who have gone before. At other times individual 
 saints and individual martyrs have their individual days; 
 but on this great democratic day all saints and all martyrs, 
 wherever their loyal dust may lie, receive their merited 
 guerdon of praise and gratitude. It is a homage as honor- 
 able to those that render it as to those that receive it, for it 
 is a homage paid not so much to saints themselves as to the 
 universal spirit of saintliness, not so much to martyrs as to 
 the inner meaning of martyrdom. All Saints' Day has its 
 secular counterpart in the day and in the occasion that have 
 brought us together. The Fourth of July is for us and our 
 posterity All Heroes' Day. And the monument which we 
 have met to dedicate is a monument not to this hero or to 
 that hero, but to the spirit of heroism which made them w^hat 
 they were. It symbolizes no detached date or occurrence in 
 history. It is itself the august spirit of history. 
 
 There is to my mind something peculiarly beautiful and 
 suggestive in the thought that this Greek figure is henceforth 
 to keep watch and ward over this historic field. Beneath the 
 shadow of this figure Socrates talked and Plato dreamed and 
 Aristotle reasoned. Into those eyes Sappho looked as she 
 sang herself into the heart-history of the world. Around the 
 base of this figure, in Athenian portico or in Attic grove, 
 Greek boys and girls gathered to hear again the story of Helen 
 and Paris and Ulvsses. From its pedestal outward Pericles 
 
.spread the splciulor of a (Iciiiocrac-y which lias served as bea- 
 con light foi- all (Icinoeracics. The l'ai--()f'r Queen of Sweden 
 cherishes as an mipui'chasahlc hcritauc one of these (Jreek 
 figures which the mutations of histoi'v have transferrnl I'roin 
 Athens to Stoekliohn. 
 
 This historic figure, ladies and genth men. could not have 
 played the part that it lias jilayed in huiium thought ami in 
 national progress uides^s it symbolized some universal truth. 
 The other eight muses have had their day, but this figure 
 lives on. Receding nations catch glimpses of it and are 
 stirred to renewed effort. Youthful nations interpret it in 
 tei-ms of ])i'actical patriotism and of constructive idealism. 
 It beckons to poets and philosoi)hers. to statesmen and his- 
 torians, giving a wider hori/on to their thought and a liner 
 unity to their conce[)ts. Hvery discovery of an liistoi'ical 
 tiaith, every refutation of an liistoi'ical ei-ror. every contribu- 
 tion by word or deed to a nation s stoi'y is a leaf added to the 
 laurel ehaplet around the lirow of the Muse of Ilistoi-y. Jef- 
 ferson .saw this figure when he wrote the l)e;'l:iration of 
 Independence. It was shield and buck'lei' to the great Wash- 
 ington. It was \\ith Cornelius Harnett when he defied the 
 power of Tryon. It stood at Charlotte and at llalifa.x. It 
 was by the side of William R. Davie when he laid the foun- 
 dations of th(^ Cniversity of North Carolina. Aiul 1 i)ray 
 God that when the things of sense grew dim to the fading 
 eyes of the patriots who fell here, this immortal tiuure may 
 have passed befoi-e theii* vision as a hei-ald of th • time wIkmi 
 tlieii- memory sliould be i)edestaled in triumph and their 
 exam|)le become a nation's heritage. 
 
 To the (ii'e( k miiul statuary was not onl\- a thing of beauty 
 and a .)o\' I'orever: it was the outward and visible sign of an 
 inward and abiding truth. A study of this statue will show 
 that there are two uiulerlying conceptions which have served 
 to vital i/.i' aiul pei-petuate it through all the eeutui'ie-;. 
 
 Till' (irst great tiaith that the (ireek artist wrought iiit i the 
 pose ami gi-oupiie^' of this fiuui-e is the vital relationship that 
 should evei' exist be|\\c(ii the pi-iseiil aiul the past. When- 
 ever a Creek looked upon this figure he obsei-ved that the 
 
single scroll in the uplifted hand had been taken from the 
 sheaf of scrolls in the casket behind. The single scroll, the 
 scroll that the J\Iuse of History is reading, represents present 
 time; the scrolls in the casket represent past time. The 
 present, therefore, is included in the past, for it is the 
 product of the past ; and out of the treasures of the past a 
 progressive nation nuist seek the meaning and conduct of the 
 present. 
 
 It was this unbroken continuity of history, this duty of 
 the present to recognize its filial obligation to the past, that 
 drew from Tennyson one of his most characteristic messages: 
 
 "Love thou thy land, with love far-bronght 
 From out tlie storied past, and used 
 Within the present, but transfused 
 Through future time by power of thought." 
 
 In his great essay on The Meaning of History Frederic 
 Harrison defines the past as "that power which to understand 
 is strength, which to repudiate is weakness." The motto of 
 our efficient State Historical Commission will henceforth find 
 an eloquent advocate on this field : 
 
 "The roots of the present lie deep in the past, and nothing 
 in the past is dead to the man who would learn how the 
 present came to be what it is." 
 
 A democracy, fellow-citizens, can not afford to be ungrate- 
 ful. Built as it is on loyal service and patriotic sacrifice, 
 the day of its forgetting will be the day of its undermining. 
 Other nations trace their origin back through a long series of 
 successful and unsuccessful wars. We find our national 
 genesis in a single war; and the measure of our greatness and 
 stability will be the measure of our gratitude to the men who 
 made Yorktown possible. 
 
 I wish also to enter my protest here against the lifeless 
 and mechanical way in which our Revolutionary history is 
 so frequently taught. The purely scientific method of cause 
 and effect has its rightful place in colleges and universities, 
 but whenever the Revolutionary War is interpreted to youth- 
 ful minds in terms merely of great industrial or social or 
 policital movements and not in terms also of personal heroism 
 
 5 
 
and individual initiative, the actors in the st i'uui;lt' seem 
 inci-c puppets. They ai-c hut the |)Iaylliin^x of iiTcsist ihlc 
 e.xti'rnal forces. TIum-c is no chaini oi- personal appeal in 
 the story thus t(thl. 'i'liei-e is infoi-niation, it may l)e. l)ut 
 no inspiration. No great literature of stiuiuhmt s.tnu' and 
 stoiy will ever spring from oui- Kevohitionarx" histoi-y uidess 
 that history is taught in terms of individual heroism on the 
 one side and individual gi-atilude on the other. 
 
 There are those, however, who say — or who used to say — 
 that the lesson of relatedness to the past and of eonsequent in- 
 deiitedness can not ai)i)ropi-iately he taught by the liattle of 
 (iuilfortl (Jourt House. It is not my purpose to go into his- 
 toi-ical details, hut the Xorth Carolinian who accurately in- 
 foiins himseir of what took place here on .Mai-ch lo. 17S1. 
 and who does not thi'ill with i)ri(le aiul gratitude, is unworthy 
 of his citizenship. One hundi-cii and twenty-eight years ago 
 there was a rail fence yonder and in front of it an open Held. 
 On this side of th.e fence lay the Xoi'th Carolina iiiiliti.i 
 inuler i^aton and Butler. Across the open field, advancini; 
 from west to east, charged the tlowei- of the Knglish army. 
 There are elements of pathos ;is well as of ghn-x' in the -ceiie. 
 These foemen spoke the same language-, they knew by lu-art 
 the same prayers: their institutions wei'e the same; Shake- 
 speare and the iMiglish J-Jible were the conniKUi lu'ritage of 
 both: and both were e(pially proud of their .\nglo-S;ixon 
 blood ;ind of what it had accoiuplished. Uut these \oi1h 
 Cai'olina militiamen had never seen an English soldier be- 
 fore, noi- had they been present at a battle. They liiid sh;)t 
 rabbits, s(piiri'els. and an occasional fox. but no largei- game. 
 If they succeed gloriously there will be no |»romolion. for 
 they are not professional soldiers. If tluy fall, the onl.\" note 
 taken of it will be the widowed cry of some desolate woman 
 as she fi'onts the futuie alone. 
 
 If the Xoi'th ('ai'oliiui militia, with thoiinjits like these 
 stirring at their hearts, can hold theii' gi%»unil .-iiid resei've 
 their fire till the English army, disciplined on a hnndi'ed 
 battlelields. lias come within easy shooting I'aULjc. if lliey can 
 stand the oi'deal of uuMH'ly waiting and then i>ull their trig- 
 
gers witli steady aim, — they will have done the bravest deed 
 that either army on that eventful field can boast. Let his- 
 tory answer. Captain Dugald Stewart, of Scotland, who led 
 his men across the open field, says :' 
 
 "In the advance w^e received a very deadly fire from the 
 Irish line [he means the Scotch-Irish North Carolinians] of 
 the American Army. One half of the Highlanders dropped 
 on that spot." Brown, in his History of the Highland Clans. 
 says: "The Americans [the untrained North Carolina mili- 
 tia], covered by the fence in their front, reserved their fire 
 until the British were within thirty or forty paces, at which 
 distance they opened a most destructive fire, which annihi- 
 lated nearly one third of Colonel Webster's Brigade.'" 
 
 The following letter was written by an American soldier 
 shortly after the battle and published in the New Jersey 
 State Gazette of April 11, 1781 : 
 
 "The enemy were so beaten that we should have disputed 
 the victory could we have saved our artillery, but the Gen- 
 eral thought that it was a necessary sacrifice. The spirits of 
 the soldiers would have been affected if the cannon had been 
 sent oif the field, and in this woody country cannon can not 
 always be sent off at a critical moment. 
 
 "The General, by his abilities and good conduct and by his 
 activity and bravery in the field, has gained the confidence 
 and respect of the army and the country to an amazing degree. 
 You would, from the countenances of our men, believe they 
 had been de(iidedly victorious. They are in the highest 
 spirits, and appear most ardently to wish to engage the enemy 
 again. The enemy are much embarrassed by their wounded. 
 When we consider the nakedness of our troops and of course 
 their want of disci|)]ine. their numbers, and the loose, irregu- 
 lar manner in which we came into the field, I think we have 
 done wonders. I rejoice at our success, and were our exer- 
 tions and sacrifices published to the world as some command- 
 
 1 See Caruthers's Lrfe of Caldivell, p. 287. 
 
 2 Both of these citations may be found in A Memorial Volume of the Guilford Battle 
 Ground Company, prepared by Judge David Schenck and published in 1893 by Keece 
 & Elam, Greensboro, N. C. 
 
ing officers \v()uld liavo ])ul)lislic(l tlioiii. wo should have re- 
 ceived more a])j)hinsc than our modesty claims.'" 
 
 These letters t'i'om actual partici])aTits in the battle tell 
 their own story. They dn iiioi'f. They make it plain that 
 for a quarter of a century the most unseltish form of prac- 
 tical pati'iotism exhibited in North Cai'olina has l)een ex- 
 hibitt'd by the (inillni'd IJattlc (irouiid ( Niitii)aii\'. With b\it 
 one mea.ti'er appropriation fi'om the National Government, 
 with an inadecpiate a])pi-o]iriation from the State Govern- 
 iiiciil. Ihcy have exlniiiicd the bodies of <iui' heroic dead, they 
 have redeemed their mcmoi'ies. they have made the name of 
 (iuilford Court House hnown and honored where it was un- 
 known before, and the>' have brought to the historic past of 
 North Carolina a new meaning and an add('(l fcmnvn. Surely 
 there is no place in this State where a monument, whose 
 design is to invest the ])ast with new significance and the 
 present with a larger sense of resi)onsibility, could be so fitly 
 dedicated as on this spot and by this company. 
 
 There is a clause in th(» letter last cited that suggests the 
 second teaching of this monument. The writer says : 
 
 "Were our exertions and sacrifices ]Miblished to the woi-ld 
 as some commanding officers would have ])ublislie(l them, we 
 should have received more ap))lause than our modesty claims." 
 
 Tn other words, there had come to the writer of this letter 
 a dim realization of the fact that the writinu- of history is 
 part of the making of history, that the deed of an individual 
 or of an ai'my or of a iiation is comparatively incomplete and 
 ineffective unless j)erpetna1ed in writing. This gi-e;it truth 
 the Greeks were also the first to apply in a national wa\'. 
 History, as represented by Greek genius in the desii:'ii of this 
 statue, is a recorded histoi'v. a history written down on leg- 
 ible and accessible scrolls, to ])e read of all men. The writ- 
 ten scrolls in the casket and tlie written scroll in the hand 
 are evidence that to the Greek consciousness Clio was the 
 tutelary deity not of history enacted but of history recorded. 
 Other deities presided over the events that went to the mak- 
 
 ■1 I am indebted for this letter to my friend, Mr. P. C. Gregory, Superiiiteiideiit of 
 the Public Schools of Chelsea, Mass. 
 
 8 
 
ing of a nation's history. To the Muse of History was as- 
 signed the honor of garnering in written form the example 
 of the past for the emulation or avoidance of the present. 
 No such conception could have originated among a people who 
 had not themselves attained a rare degree of civilization, 
 who had not themselves realized their grateful indebtedness 
 to the past, or who did not feel at the same time a sense of 
 trusteeship for the future. 
 
 The lines written by the President of the Guilford Battb 
 Ground Company' express with accuracy and beauty the sec- 
 ond teaching of this monument : 
 
 "As sinking silently to night, 
 Noon fades insensibly, 
 So truth -'s fair phase assumes the haze 
 And hush of history. 
 
 But lesser lights relieve the dark. 
 
 Dumb dreariness of night, 
 And 'er the past historians cast 
 
 At least a stellar light. ' ' 
 
 It is this great truth that we dedicate afresh today. The 
 darkness that has rested upon this field shall be dispelled 
 and the starlight of history shall irradiate it with imperish- 
 able splendor. If I were to call the roll of the nations fore- 
 most in history and ask how their historic past escaped the 
 thralldom of the tyrannous years and why it lives on in un- 
 diminished youth and beauty, the jMuse of History would 
 answer that these nations have themselves realized the duty of 
 preserving their past for the guidance and enrichment of 
 their future. By history and biography, by song and story, 
 by epitaph and monument, they have made of their past an 
 ever living present. 
 
 The glory of Greece lives forever in the Iliad and Odyssey 
 and is inscribed on a thousand marble memorials. Rome 
 immortalized her past in the ^Eneid. England's greatest 
 historian was Shakespeare, and Westminster Abbey is today 
 her most eloquent spokesman. United Germany points to 
 
 -t Major Joseph M. Morehead, to whom alone belongs the credit for this monument 
 and who for seventeen years has labored unselfishly and unceasingly to establish the 
 truth of North Carolina history. 
 
 9 
 
h(*r SirLicsMllcc. Seotlaiid tniiiHl lice world-iiitci-iirclci- in 
 the stories ;uul poems of Walter Seott. 
 
 Ainei-iea has made a l)euiniiin<i\ hut only a heoiniiiii<;-. Xo 
 writer has yet realized the possibilities of world-apjieal that 
 lie in our Revolutionary War as Shakespeare realized the 
 possibilities in the far less sio-nifieant Wars of the Roses, or 
 Seott in the border skiiinishes between Lowlander and High- 
 lander, or Sehiller in the tragedy of the Thirty Years War, 
 or Victor Hugo in the single battle of Waterloo. One great 
 Revolutionary novel or di'ania in which the eontri])utions of 
 both the South and the North — of South Carolina, North 
 Carolina, and Virginia as well as ^lassaehusetts. New York, 
 and Pennsylvania — should be pi'oti-ayed with etpial insight 
 and with compelling power, would bind this luition together 
 in the indissolulile bonds of a common sympathy and a com- 
 mon histoi'ic pi'ide. Such a woi'l< will never l)e written, nor 
 would it be acclaimed if written, until each State recognizes 
 the value of its own historic material. No writer can be just 
 to a State until that State is just to itself. 
 
 National unity and stability must be built upon a founda- 
 tion of connnon symi)athies. saei'ifiees. and triumphs. F^very 
 battlefield of the Revolution, wlu-rc .\iiici'ii-an valor was tested 
 and not found wanting, will yet become a link in the golden 
 chain of national ])rotherhood. The men who fought here 
 and the men who have since wrought here are luition builders: 
 Slowly but surely the truth of history is widcMiing its domain, 
 and a heroic past is returning to make a heroic and united 
 present. This Battlefield, already a Mecca of jiatriotism. will 
 yet become in the expanding life of this connnonwealth a 
 stepping-stone to a larger national consciousness aiul a cluipter 
 in the epic of a nation's birth. I dedicate this monument, 
 therefoi-e. to the spirit of a just and impartial liistorv-. In 
 gratitude and love I dedicate it to the splendor of tlie past 
 and to the ever widening service of the future. 
 
 10 
 
No Man is Fit to Be Entrusted With Control op the 
 Present Who is Ignorant of the Past; and No People 
 Who Are Indifferent to Their Past Need Hope to Make 
 Their Future Great. 
 
NOV 9 ,909 
 
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