AT THE LUNCHEON AT RICHMOND, VA., OCTOBER 18, 1905
Mr. Mayor, Governor, and you, my Hosts:
One among the very many great Virginians at the time when this Nation was born—Patrick Henry—said: “We are no longer New Yorkers or New Englanders, Pennsylvanians or Virginians, we are Americans.” And surely, Mr. Mayor, the man would be but a poor American who was not touched and stirred to the depths by the reception that I have met with to-day in this great historic city of America. Coming to-day by the statue of Stonewall Jackson, in the city of Lee, I felt what a privilege it is that I, as an American, have in claiming that you yourselves have no more right of kinship in Lee and Jackson than I have. I can claim to be a middling good American, because my ancestry was half Southern and half Northern; I was born in the East and I have lived a good while in the West—so long in fact that I do not admit that any man can be a better Westerner than I am. In short, gentlemen, I claim to be neither Northerner nor Southerner, neither Easterner nor Westerner, but a good American, pure and simple.
Next only to a man’s having worn the blue comes the fact of the man’s having worn the gray, as entitling him to honor in my sight. Last year I told General Fitzhugh Lee that I wanted to add to my collection of autograph letters of great Americans—Lincoln, Grant, Clay, Jefferson (turning to the Governor), your namesake, Andrew Jackson—that of General Lee, with his photograph. I got from General Fitzhugh Lee a letter of General Lee and a photograph of him, handed to me after General Fitzhugh Lee’s death. I was not able to thank my old and valued friend, the father, but I put the son on my staff; and now I have the grandson of General Grant and the grandnephew of General Lee and the son of Phil Sheridan on my staff.
I noticed that the statue of Stonewall Jackson had been raised as a gift by certain Englishmen. The best biography of General Jackson was by an Englishman, Colonel Henderson. It is a curious and rather lamentable fact that he died just as he was about to undertake another biography which I had earnestly asked him to undertake. I had written him urging that he should finish his very remarkable military study of Stonewall Jackson by writing a military biography of General Lee, and he had written me back that he intended to do so. Shortly afterward I learned of his death.
Gentlemen, I can not sufficiently express to you my deep appreciation of the way in which you have greeted me here to-day. You can not be nearly as glad to see me as I am to see you. Let me say once more what I said in my more formal address. Think of the good fortune that is ours, think of the good fortune that is ours as a people in having, each of us, whether we in our own persons or through our ancestors, wore the blue or the gray, the proud right to challenge as our own all of the valor, all of the self-devotion, all of the steadfast adherence to right as God gave to each man to see the right, shown alike by the man who wore the blue and by the man who wore the gray in the great contest that was waged from ’61 to ’65.