Mr. President, and Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am speaking but the plain
truth when I tell you that I would rather
be here to-night facing an assemblage
of men and women of Irish blood and
Irish breeding than in any other banquet
hall on earth. For I am one who is
Irish and didn’t know it; but now that
I do know it, I am prouder of that fact
than of any other thing on earth except
that I am an American citizen.
I wonder if it ever occurred to you,
what differences are to be found in many
a country and in almost any country,
between the temperaments and the spirits
and the customs of those who live
in the north of it and those who live
in the south of it? To the north, to
Prussia, the German Empire has always
looked for its great scientists and its
great mathematicians and its propounders
and expounders of a certain cool and
analytical philosophy; but it was to the
south, to Bavaria and to Saxony, that
Germany had to turn for its poets and
its story-tellers.
It was the north of France that produced
and yet produces those men who
have harnessed the forces of nature,
who have made the earth tremble to
the pulse-beat of their factories, who
took the ore from the earth and the
coal from the hillsides, and with them
wrought out the great steel industries of
that country; but it was out of the south
of France that there came its marvelous
fiction writers and minstrel-bards, its
greatest poets and its greatest dreamers;
and out of that same south once
upon a time there came, too, a fiery outpouring
of shock-headed men and
women who wore wooden shoes on their
feet and red caps on their heads and
who marched to the words of a song
which has become the fighting song of
every nation, craving liberty and daring
to march and to die for it—the “Marseillaise
Hymn.” (Applause.)
The names of the Poid Milanaise and
the Lombards and the Venetians of
northern Italy are synonymous with
frugality in domestic affairs and energy
in commercial pursuits, but it is down
in the tip of the toe of the Latin boot
that we find the Italian who loves the
hardest and sings the loudest and fights
for the very love of the fighting.
The north of Ireland, as we all know,
has fathered the great business men of
that little island, and the great manufacturers
and the great theologians,
many of them; and, regretful to say, it
has also produced a spawn of human
beings who, in the face of the fact that
in every other land where men have
equal opportunities, the Irishman has
won his way to the front and has held
his own with prince and potentate, yet
cling to the theory that in Ireland, of
all the spots of the world, the Irishman
is not capable of governing himself.
But it was to the south of Ireland,
and it is to the south of Ireland
to-day, that one must turn to find the
dreamer and the writer, the idealist and
the poet. It is to the south of Ireland
also that one must turn to seek for a
people whose literature and whose traditions
are saddened by the memory of
the wrongs they have withstood and the
persecutions they have endured and still
endure, and yet whose spirits and whose
characters are uplifted and sanctified by
that happy optimism which seems everywhere
on this footstool to be the heritage
of the true southerner. (Applause.)
In a measure these same things are
true of our own country. The north
excels in business, but the south leads
in romance. The north opens wide the
door of opportunity to every man who
comes to its borders with willing hands
and eager brain, and commands him to
get busy. The south opens a door, too,
but it is the door of hospitality, and it
bids the stranger enter in, not so much
for what he can give, but for what he
can take in the way of welcome. I think
there is a reason, aside from topography
and geography and climate and environment,
for these differences between the
common divisions of our great country.
And I am going to come to that reason
in a minute.
As a boy, down south, there were two
songs that stirred me as no other songs
could—one was a song that I loved and
one a song that I hated, and one of
these songs was the battle hymn of the
south, “Dixieland,” and the other was
“Marching Through Georgia.” But once
upon a time when I was half-grown, a
wandering piper came to the town where
I lived, a man who spoke with a brogue
and played with one. And he carried
under his arm a weird contraption
which to me seemed to be a compound
of two fishing poles stuck in a hot-water
bottle, and he snuggled it to his breast
and it squawked out its ecstasy, and then
he played on it a tune called “Garryowen.”
And as he played it, I found
that my toes tingled inside my shoes,
and my heart throbbed as I thought it
could only throb to the air of “Dixie.”
And I took counsel with myself and I
said, “Why is it that I who call myself
a pure Anglo-Saxon should be thrilled
by an Irish air?” So I set out to determine
the reason for it. And this is
the kind of Anglo-Saxon I found out
I was:
My mother was of the strain, the
breed of Black Douglas of Scotland,
as Scotch as haggis, and rebels, all of
them, descendants of men who followed
the fortunes of Bonnie Prince Charles,
and her mother lived in a county in
North Carolina, one of five counties
where up to 1820, Gaelic was not only
the language of the people in the street,
but was the official language of the
courts. It was in that selfsame part
of North Carolina that there lived some
of the men who, nearly a year before
our Declaration of Independence was
drawn up, wrote and signed the Mecklenburg
Declaration, which was the first
battle-cry raised for American independence.
On the other side, I found, by
investigation, that my father’s line ran
back straight and unbroken to a thatched
cottage on the green side of a hill in
the Wicklow Mountains, and his people
likewise had some kinsmen in Galway,
and some in Dublin with whom, following
the quaint custom of their land,
they were accustomed to take tea and
fight afterwards. (Applause and laughter.)
I found I had a collateral ancestor
who was out with the pikes in the
’98 and he was taken prisoner and tried
for high crimes and misdemeanors
against the British Government, and was
sentenced to be hanged by the neck until
he was dead and might God have
mercy on his soul! And he was hanged
by the neck until he was dead, and I am
sure God did have mercy on his soul,
for that soul of his went marching on,
transmitting to his people, of whom I
am proud to be one, the desire to rebel
against oppression and tyranny. (Applause.)
I had three great grandfathers,
two of them Irish and one of them
Scotch, who were Revolutionary soldiers,
and I had a father who was a Confederate
soldier. And of these facts, too,
I am quite proud, for I find that my
strain, being Irish, is always intent either
on trying to run the government or
trying to pull it down.
You Irish-descended people of the
Northern States are proud of Shields,
the son of an Irish emigrant, who, if
my memory serves me aright, helped
to direct the destinies of three American
commonwealths and was United
States Senator from all three. But I
like to think of another Irishman, Matthew
Lyon by name, the son of an humble
Wicklow peasant, who was sold as
a slave to the New England plantations
because he, an Episcopalian, dared to
raise his voice and his arm in defense
of the rights of his Catholic neighbors
and kinsmen in the County of Wicklow;
and he bought his freedom with
a black bull, which, according to family
tradition, he first stole, and he became
a United States Senator from Vermont,
and cast the vote, against the wishes of
his constituents, which made Thomas
Jefferson President of this country over
Aaron Burr and by so doing altered the
entire course of our country’s history;
and while he was in jail in a town in
Vermont for his attacks on the odious
alien and sedition laws, he issued a challenge
for a duel to the President of the
United States, and being released, he
moved down to Kentucky and became a
Congressman; and later, having quarreled
with all his neighbors there, he
moved on to Arkansas and was named
as Arkansas’ first territorial delegate to
Washington, and he might have moved
still further west and might have filled
still more offices had he not in the fullness
of his maturity, when he was seventy
years young, been thrown from a
mule and had his neck broken. I like
to think of Matthew Lyon and his career
because he, also, was an ancestor
of mine. (Applause and laughter.)
Well, as I said a bit ago, I set out to
trace my Irish ancestry. In that undertaking
I found a ready helper in a
distant kinsman who was not carried
away by the fetish that the south was
all Anglo-Saxon, whatever that is; and
he worked me early and late on family
records. Indeed, he worked me so hard
that sometimes I think I might have
likened my position to that of a colored
brother in a little town in my state who
was the only member of his race at the
local election who voted the Democratic
ticket. It was felt that such loyalty
should be rewarded, so the incoming
administration created a Department of
Street Cleaning—an institution hitherto
unknown in that community—to consist
of a boss or foreman, and a staff. Quite
naturally the job of foreman went to a
white man, but upon the worthy colored
person was conferred the honor of being
the Staff. Now, he held to the
theory, common even among those of
the more enlightened races, that a political
office meant much honor and much
pay but mighty little work. Nevertheless,
as a matter of form he carried a
shovel with him on the morning when
he reported for service. But the white
man who was to serve over him had
very different ideas regarding the obligation
owing to the municipality. No
sooner had the darkey cleaned up one
pile of debris than the foreman would
find another and yet another for him
to wrestle with. It was four o’clock
in the afternoon before the darkey so
much as straightened his back or wiped
the sweat off his brow or blew on the
new-formed blisters in the palms of his
hands. Finally he said: “Boss, ain’t
you got nuthin’ to do but jes’ to think
up things fur me to do?”
“Yes,” the white man said; “that’s
all my job—just to keep you busy.”
The darky said: “Well, suh, in that
case you will be pleased to know you
ain’t goin’ to be workin’ to-morrow.”
(Laughter.)
But I kept on working and I discovered
a lot of things about the lost tribes
of the Irish in the south. The State of
Kentucky from which I hail has been
called the cradle of the Anglo-Saxon
race in America, and it has been said
that the mountaineers of that state, with
their feuds and their Elizabethan, Chaucerian
methods of speech represent the
purest strains of English blood to be
found to-day on this continent. Now,
then, let us see if that is true. I have
looked into that matter and I tell you
that fifty per cent, at least, of the dwellers
of the mountains of the South and
notably of Kentucky and Virginia are
the lineal descendants of runaway indenture
men, Irish rebels mainly, from the
Virginia plantations. I know a mountain
county in Kentucky of which half
of the population bear one of three
names. They are either Mayos, or Patricks,
or Powers. And I once heard
an orator stand up before an audience
of those Mayos and Powers and Patricks
and congratulate them on their
pure English descent, and they believed
it! (Laughter.)
I wish you would pardon me once
more for referring to my line of ancestry,
for it is testimony to prove my
claim. On my father’s side I am descended
from a group of men who went
from New England to Kentucky and
the names of these men were Lyon and
Cobb, which is a Danish corruption of
O’Connor, and Machen, and Clendenin,
and O’Hara, and Glenn, which is a corruption
of Glynn. What a hot bunch
of Anglo-Saxons! (Laughter.)
The Congressional District in which
I was born and where I used to live
has thirteen counties in it. Listen to
the names of these thirteen counties:
Marshall, Calloway, Graves, McCracken,
Lyon, Livingston, Caldwell, Trigg, Crittenden,
Ballard, Hickman, Fulton, Carlise—thirteen
counties and all but two
of them have Irish names.
What is true of my own section of
Kentucky is true of the rest of the
States. Daniel Boone has been called
the first explorer of Kentucky and it
has been said he was of English descent.
Both of those statements are
wrong. Daniel Boone was not the first
explorer of Kentucky. The first man
to explore Kentucky was an Irishman
by the name of John Finley. But before
him was still another Irishman by
the name of McBride—James McBride.
He lingers in state history as a shadowy
figure, but I like to think of him as a
red-haired chap with a rifle in one hand
and possibly a demijohn in the other,
coming out through the trackless wilderness
alone and landing from his canoe
on what was afterwards to be known
as the Dark and Bloody ground. Aside
from his name, it is proven that he was
an Irishman by the legendary circumstances
that immediately after coming
ashore he carved his name in deep and
enduring letters in the bark of the largest
beech tree of the forest, and claimed
all of the land that lay within his vision
as his own, and shot an Indian or two
and went on his way rejoicing. As for
Daniel Boone, the great pathfinder, he
really was descended from the line of
Buhun, which is Norman-Irish, and his
mother was a Morgan, and his wife
was a Bryan, and his father was an
Irish Catholic.
The records show that nearly three-fourths
of that dauntless little band who
under the leadership of George Rogers
Clark, an Irishman, waded through the
floods to take Vincennes and thereby
won all the great northwest territory
away from the British and gave to the
American colonies what to-day is the
richest part of the United States, where
Irishmen—not Scotch-Irish, nor English-Irish,
but plain Irish-Irish men who
were rebels and patriots by instinct and
born adventurers by reason of the blood
which ran in their veins.
The first settlement of English-speaking
Catholics beyond the Allegheny
Mountains was not located in the north
but in the south, and in my own State
of Kentucky at that. It endures to-day,
after having given to this country one
of its greatest and most scholarly
churchmen, Bishop Spaulding. (Applause.)
The children of the pioneers
of Kentucky, almost without exception,
learned their first lessons in log cabins
under the teachings of that strange but
gifted race of men, the wandering Irish
schoolmasters, who founded the old
field schools of the South and to whom
the South is largely indebted for the
seeds of its culture.
Irishmen from Kentucky, Virginia,
Pennsylvania and Maryland bore the
brunt of the western campaigns in 1812
against the British. Irishmen from
Kentucky fell thick at the disastrous
battles of the Thames, and the Raison,
and their Irish bones to-day rest in that
ground sanctifying it and making of it
an American shrine of patriotism. It
was the hand of a Kentucky Irishman,
Colonel Richard Johnson, afterwards
Vice-President of the United States, that
slew the great Tecumseh. A good share
of the Kentucky and Tennessee riflemen
who at New Orleans stood behind
Andy Jackson’s cotton bale breastworks,
mowing down Packenham’s Peninsular
Veterans and making their red coats
redder still with the life blood of those
invaders, were Irishmen, real Irishmen.
They proved their Irish lineage by the
fact that they fell out and quarreled
with Old Hickory, because he denied
them all the credit for winning the fight,
and he quarreled back, for he was by
way of being an Irishman himself.
(Laughter and applause.)
It was a Kentucky Irishman, Dr.
Ephraim McDowell, who performed the
first operation for ovariotomy—performed
it on a kitchen table with a mad
husband standing over him with a drawn
revolver, threatening to shoot him if his
wife died under the knife. But he went
ahead and it was a successful operation,
and it has brought relief and life and
sanity to millions of women all over
the world. It was a Kentucky Irishman
and a soldier, Theodore O’Hara,
who penned perhaps the most beautiful
lyric poem, and certainly the sweetest
tribute to the brave in our language,
the immortal “Bivouac of the Dead.”
It was another Kentucky Irishman, the
saintly poet-priest, Father Ryan, whose
hand wrote those two fondest poems in
memory of the Lost Cause, “The Conquered
Banner” and “The Sword of
Robert E. Lee.”
In the Civil War it was a Kentuckian
of Scotch and Irish descent who led
the North—Abraham Lincoln—and it
was another Kentuckian of mingled Irish
and Scotch blood—Jefferson Davis—who
was President of the Confederacy.
The historian Collins said the five
greatest lawyers Kentucky ever produced
were Barry, Rowan, Haggin, Breckenridge,
and Bledsoe—four Irish names
and one Indian name—and yet these
five have been called Anglo-Saxons, too.
What is true of Kentucky is to a
greater or less degree true of the rest
of the South. It was an Irish Virginian,
Patrick Henry, who sounded the first
keynote of the American Revolution,
and who at the risk of his life, by his
words paved the way for the Declaration
of Independence. The South Carolina
Irishman, John C. Calhoun, first
raised the slogan of Nullification, and it
was another Irishman, Andrew Jackson
of Tennessee, who swore by the Eternal
to hang him higher than Haman if he
carried out his plan.
To-night you have heard a tribute, and
a deserved one, to little Phil Sheridan
of the North, but I want to couple his
name with that of a Southern Irishman,
the son of an Irish refugee, Pat Cleburne
of Arkansas, one of the most gallant
leaders that the Civil War produced.
(Applause.) Pat Cleburne died on one
of the bloodiest battlefields of Christendom
in his stocking feet because as he
rode into battle that morning he saw
one of his Irish boys from Little Rock
tramping barefooted over the frozen
furrows of a wintry cornfield and
leaving tracks of blood behind him.
So he drew off his boots and bade the
soldier put them on, and fifteen minutes
later he went to his God in his stocking
feet. Raleigh laid down his coat before
Good Queen Bess, and has been immortalized
for his chivalry, but I think a
more courtly deed was that of the gallant
Irishman, Pat Cleburne. For one
was kowtowing before royalty and the
other had in his heart only thoughtfulness
and humanity for the common man
afoot.
Sam Houston, the first President of
the Lone Star State, was a Tennessee
Irishman. Irish through and through,
and the present President of the United
States, a Southerner also, is half Irish.
One of the most distinguished members
of the Supreme Court in recent years
was a Kentucky Irishman, John M. Harlan,
and to-day two of the men who sit
on that tribunal are Irishmen—White of
Louisiana, the distinguished and honored
Chief Justice, and McReynolds of
Tennessee.
(Voice) How about McKenna?
Mr. Cobb: He is not a Southerner,
I regret to say. I suppose I could go
on for hours, if your patience held out—and
my throat—telling of the achievements
of Irishmen, and of the imperishable
records that Irishmen have left on
the history of that part of the Union
from which I came, but to call the roll
of the great men who have done great
things and won achievement and fame
south of Mason’s and Dixon’s line since
there was such a line, would be almost
like running through the parish registers
of the counties of Ireland, both
north and south. Indeed, in my opinion,
it is not altogether topography or geography
or climate that has made the
South what it is, and given it those distinguishing
characteristics which adorn
it. The soft speech of the Southerner;
his warm heart, and his hot head, his
readiness to begin a fight, and to forgive
his opponent afterwards; his veneration
for women’s chastity and his
love for the ideals of his native land—all
these are heritages of his Irish ancestry,
transmitted to him through two
generations. The North has put her
heroes on a pension, but the South has
put hers on a pedestal. There is not a
Southern hamlet of any size to-day that
has not reared a bronze or marble or
granite monument to its own defenders
in the Civil War, and there is scarce a
Southern home where at the knees of
the mother the children are not taught
to revere the memories and remember
the deeds of Lee and Jackson and Forrest,
the Tennessee Irishman, and Morgan,
the Kentucky Irishman, and Washington,
and Light Horse Harry Lee, and
Francis Marion, the Irish Swamp Fox
of the Carolinas. I believe as firmly as
I believe anything on earth that for that
veneration, for that love of heroism and
for that joying in the ideals of its soil,
the South is indebted mainly to the Irish
blood that courses through the veins of
its sons and of its daughters.
No, ladies and gentlemen, the lost
Irish tribes of the South are not lost;
they are not lost any more than the
“wild geese” that flew across the Channel
from Ireland were lost. They are
not lost any more than the McMahons
who went to France, or the O’Donnells
who went to Spain, or the Simon Bolivars
and the O’Higgins who went to
South America, or the O’Farrells and
the O’Briens who went to Cuba. For
their Irish blood is of the strain that
cannot be extinguished and it lives to-day,
thank God, in the attributes and
the habits and the customs and the traditions
of the Southern people. Most of
all it lives in one of their common characteristics,
which, I think, in conclusion,
may possibly be best suggested by the
telling of a story that I heard some time
ago, of an Irishman in Mobile. As the
story goes, this Irishman on Sunday
heard a clergyman preach on the Judgment
Day. The priest told of the hour
when the trumpet shall blow and all peoples
of all climes and all ages shall be
gathered before the Seat of God to be
judged according to their deeds done in
the flesh. After the sermon he sought
out the pastor and he said, “Father, I
want to ask you a few questions touching
on what you preached about to-day.
Do you really think that on the Judgment
Day everybody will be there?”
The priest said: “That is my understanding.”
“Will Cain and Abel be there?”
“Undoubtedly.”
“And David and Goliath—will they
both be there?”
“That is my information and belief.”
“And Brian Boru and Oliver Cromwell
will be there?”
“Assuredly they will be present.”
“And the A. O. H.’s and A. P. A.’s?”
“I am quite positive they will all be
there together.”
“Father,” said the parishioner, “there’ll
be damn little judgin’ done the first
day!”
(Applause and laughter.)
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
The cover image of this eBook was created by the Transcriber and is entered into the public domain.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
