been successful; and to the questions: "Can Nebraska
ever be settled up? Can she ever sustain any considerable
population?" the joyous fields of golden grain nodded an
indisputable affirmative, and gracefully beckoned the weary
emigrant to a home of healthfulness and abundance. The glad
tidings of our success in agriculture were heralded far and
near through the medium of our pioneer press, and a new impetus
was thus given the emigration of that fall and the following
spring. But here came also a spirit of evil among us, a spirit
of reckless speculation, and a seeking for some new method to
acquire wealth, some method which required neither mental not
manual labor.
The legislative assembly in January, 1856,
deeming it necessary to have more money in the country, had,
very unwisely, concluded that the creation of banks of issue,
by special charter, would accomplish that much desired object.
And so six banks were created, or one bank for every 500 men in
the Territory, and each bank had power to issue as many dollars
of indebtedness as the circumstances of its individual
stock-holders demanded for their own pecuniary necessities or
ambitions. And what were the consequences? Rag money was
plenty, everybody had credit, and it was no heavy undertaking
to secure discounts. Town property, though very plenty, as
many, very many thousands of acres of land had been planted
with small oak stakes, were not so amazingly abundant as
Fontenelle, Nemaha Valley & Western Exchange bank bills,
and, as is always the case in commercial matters, the scarcer
article went up in price, and the plentier went down; that is
to say, money was plentier than town lots, and consequently
cheaper. And now indeed did the unsophisticated and
enthusiastic believe that the method of making without either
mental or manual labor had most certainly been invented and
patented in and for the Territory of Nebraska. So far did this
idea diffuse itself throughout the community, that it reached
and took entire possession of the executive head of the
Territory, insomuch, that in a message to the Legislative
Assembly of the Territory, Governor Izard mentioned, as an
evidence of our flush prosperity, the fact that town lots had
advanced in price, in a few months, from $300 to $3,000,
apiece.
Unfortunately for the wise constructors of
those patent mills for money making, there was no reality or
soundness in the prosperity of that day. It did not arise, as
all wealth and true capital must arise, from that great
substratum of prosperity which underlies and supports the whole
civilized world, and is called agricultural development.
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Yet the popular mind was apparently satisfied, and
lulled itself into the belief that the honest art of industry
and economy belonged to a former generation, and that here
indeed they were certainly useless and obsolete. Who would bend
the back, nerve the arm to labor, and sweat the brow in
cultivating the soil, when by the aid of a lithographer and the
flatulent adulation of some ephemeral newspaper, a half section
of land could be made to yield three thousand town lots, at an
average value, prospectively, of one hundred dollars each? Whom
could we expect to desert the elegant and accomplished
avocation of city founder and dealer in real estate, for the
arduous and homely duties of the farmer? We acquired great
velocity and speed, in fact became a surpassingly "fast"
people. We aspired at once to all the luxuries and refinements
of older and better regulated communities in the East. We
emerged suddenly from a few rough hewn squatters, arrayed in
buck-skin and red flannel, to a young nation of exquisite land
sharks and fancy speculators dressed in broad cloths.
The greater portion of the summer of 1856 was
consumed in talking and meditating upon the prospective value
of city property.
Young Chicagos, increscent New Yorks,
precocious Philadelphias, and infant Londons, were duly staked
out, lithographed, divided into shares and puffed with becoming
unction and complaisance. The mere mention of using such
valuable lands for the purpose of agriculture, was considered
an evidence of verdancy wholly unpardonable, and entirely
sufficient to convict a person of old fogyism in the first
degree.
Farms were sadly neglected in the summer of
1856, and there were not as many acres planted that season, in
proportion to the population, as there were the year before,
but the crop of town plats, town shares, town lots, and
Nebraska bank notes, was most astonishingly abundant. We were
then very gay people; we carried a great number of very large
gold watches and ponderous fob chains; sported more fancy
turn-outs, in the way of elegant carriages and buggies; could
point to more lucky and shrewd fellow citizens who had made a
hundred thousand dollars in a very short time; could afford to
drink more champagne, and talk and feel larger, more of
consequence, and by all odds richer than any yearling
settlement that ever flourished in this vast and fast country
of ours. We all felt as they used to print in large letters on
every new town plat, that we were "located adjacent to the very
finest groves of timber, surrounded by a very rich agricultural
country, in prospective, abundantly supplied with
building rock of the finest description, beautifully watered,
and possessing very fine indications of lead, iron, coal, and
salt in great abundance." In my opinion we felt richer, better,
more millionairish than any poor deluded mortals ever did
before, on the same amount of moonshine and pluck.
But the seasons were prompt in their returns,
and the autumn winds came then as they are coming now, and the
ripening sunbeams descended upon the earth as they do today;
but the fields of grain that they wandered and glistened among
were neither as many nor as well tilled as they should have
been.
The fall of 1856 came and passed, and not
enough had been raised to half supply our home wants. Town lots
we could neither eat nor export; they were at once too
expensive for food and too delicate for a foreign market. All
that we had in the world to forward to the Eastern marts was a
general assortment of town shares, ferry charters, and
propositions for receiving money and land warrants to invest or
locate on time. The balance of trade was largely against
us.
We were now, more than ever, a nation of
boarders, eating everything eatable, buying everything
consumable, but producing absolutely nothing.
The winter of 1856 and '57 came, and the
first and second days of December were most admonitory and
fearful harbingers of suffering; they came like messengers of
wrath to rebuke the people for the folly, the thriftlessness,
and extravagance of the summer that had passed unheeded and
unimproved. The storm that lashed those two days through and
ushered in the terrible life-taking winter of that year, will
never be forgotten by those of us who were here and experienced
it.
The legislative assembly commenced in
January, 1857, and again were the wisdom and sagacity of Solon
and Lycurgus called into active service. A grand rally was had
for the purpose of raising more means and more money by
legislative legerdemain. New towns were incorporated and new
shares issued; insurance companies were chartered with nothing
to insure and nothing to insure with; and, finally, another
nest of wild cat banks was set for hatching, it having been
deliberately decided that the easiest way to make money was
through the agency of paper mills, engravers, and the
autographs of fancy financiers. Not less than fifteen new banks
were contemplated and projected. Preparations were thus coolly
and deliberately made for issuing evidence of debt, amounting,
in the aggregate,
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to millions of dollars, and a confiding and generous
public were expected to receive them as money. Fortunately for
you, for the Territory, for your reputation for sanity, the
great infliction was escaped, and out of the entire number, De
Soto, and the never to be forgotten Tekama, were all that ever
saw the light; thus this second attempt to legislate prosperity
into the country by the manufacture of an irresponsible and
worthless currency failed most signally. Its only fruits have
been seen in the thousands of worthless pictures which have the
impress of the Tekama bank, and have finally exploded in the
pockets of the merchants, mechanics, and farmers of this
territory, and thereby defrauded them of some hundred thousands
of dollars worth of capital and labor.
In the mid-summer of 1857, while credulous
men were buying town lots at enormous prices, and sapient
speculators were anxiously looking up enough unoccupied prairie
land to uphold a few more unnamed cities, while the very shrewd
and crafty operators in real estate were counting themselves
worth as many thousand dollars as they owned town lots--while
enthusiastic seers observed with prophetic eye city upon city
arise, and peopled with teeming thousands, while the public
pulse was at fever heat--when the old fogies themselves were
beginning to believe in the new way of making money without
labor, the financial horizon began to. darken. At once hope
whispered that it was only a passing cloud, but judgment
predicted a full grown storm. And one pleasant day, when lots
were high and town shares numerous and marketable, the news
came that one Thompson, John Thompson, had failed, and also
that the hitherto invulnerable Ohio Life & Trust Company
had departed its pecunious and opulent existence.
The streets in cities thereabout were
occupied by knots and groups of wise and anxious men; the
matter was fully and thoroughly discussed and it was generally
conceded that, though it did sprinkle some, it probably would
rain very little, if any. But again and again came the
thunderbolts, and the crash of banks, and the wreck of
merchants, and the fall of insurance companies, the decline of
railroad stocks, the depreciation of even state stocks, and
finally the depletion of the National Treasury. The quaking of
the credit of all the monied institutions, in fact, of the
governments themselves, of both the old and the new world,
demonstrated beyond a doubt, that the storm had indeed begun,
and furthermore, that it was a searching and testing storm.
Just as in your own farm yards, when a sudden
storm of
rain, lightning and tempest has broken out from a sky
almost all sunshine, you have seen the denizens of the pig-sty,
the stables and the poultry coops, run, jump, squeal, cackle,
neigh, and bellow in their stampede for shelter; so vamosed the
city builders, speculators, bank directors and patent cash
makers of Nebraska, while the terrible financial tornado of
1857 swept over the world of commerce.
The last day of the summer of 1857 had died
out and was numbered upon the dial plate of the irrevocable
past. The September sun had come, glittered, warmed and ripened
and the time of harvest had gone by. November, cold, cheerless
and stormy, came on apace and whispered in chilling accents of
the approach of winter.
It became the duty of every man to look to
his pecuniary condition and to prepare well for the season of
cold; and the examinations then made by you and all of us,
proved this: they proved that the season of planting in 1857,
like that of the year previous, had slipped by almost
unnoticed, and unimproved by a great many of the people of
Nebraska. We had not raised enough even to eat; and as for
clothing, it looked as though nakedness itself would stalk
abroad in the land.
If the great states of Illinois and Wisconsin
found themselves, that fall, in an almost hopeless bankruptcy,
what then must have been our condition?
The irrepealable law of commerce which
declares that, "whenever the supply of any article is greater
than the demand, that article must decline in market value,"
was most clearly proven in Nebraska. The supply of town lots,
after the monstrous monetary panic of 1857, was as large as
ever. There was at least one million of town lots, in towns
along the Missouri River, between the Kansas line and the
L'Eau-qui-Court; but where was the demand? It had ceased! It
bad blown away in the great storm, or been crushed out in the
great pressure. We had nothing else to offer for sale, except
real estate, and even that of very doubtful character. We were
yet a colony of consumers; we were worse off than ever; we were
a nation of boarders, and had nothing to pay board with, and
very little valuable baggage to pawn for the same. The greater
number of our banks had exploded, and the individual liability
of stockholders, as marked on each bill, proved to mean that
the bill holders themselves were individually responsible for
whatever amount they might find on hand after the crisis.
I think we were the poorest community the sun
ever looked down upon; that the history of new countries can
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furnish no parallel for udder and abject poverty. I
believe on the first day of January, 1858, there was not, upon
an average, two dollars and fifty cents in cash to each
inhabitant of the Territory. Hard times were the theme of each
and every class of society, and all departments of industry.
Merchants, mechanics, speculators and bankers were continually
lamenting their departed fortunes, and their many failures and
losses.
There was one class of individuals who,
although they may have been sadly pinched by the pressure of
times, noted no failures in their ranks, and who, when winter
set in, were comparatively well off, in fact, relatively
opulent and luxurious in their circumstances. They were the
very few farmers who had passed through the era of speculation
untempted by the allurements thereof, they who had followed the
plow steadily, and planted their crops carefully. They, and
they alone, of all the people of Nebraska could board
themselves. There is no doubt but that poverty induces thought.
It may paralyze the physical energies for a time, but it will
induce reason and reflection in the thought less and judgment
and discretion in the reckless, after all other arguments have
failed. I believe that owing to our extreme poverty, we were
led to more thinking and reasoning during the winter of 1857
and 1858, than up to that time had ever been accomplished in
the Territory. As you have seen your grandfathers, during the
long winter evenings, sit down by the large fire place when the
huge back log and big blaze burned so brightly, away back east,
some where, at your old homesteads, as when the old man, after
reading his newspaper, would wipe his spectacles, put them up
by the clock on the mantle piece, and seating himself there in
the genial fire light, place his head between his hands, and
his elbows on his knees, and have a good "long think"; just so
with us, all in Nebraska that winter. We had a "think," a long,
solemn, gloomy think, and among us all, we thought out these
facts: that the new way of making money by chartering wild cat
banks, had proved a most unprofitable delusion and an
unmitigated humbug. We thought that building large cities
without any inhabitants, therefor, was a singularly
crack-brained specimen of enterprise; and furthermore, that
everybody could not live in town who lived in the Territory
unless the towns were laid off in 80 acre or quarter section
lots. We thought, to sum up all hurriedly, that it was useless
to attempt to legislate prosperity into that country; that it
was impossible to decoy wealth into our laps by legal
enactment; that we had, in fact, been a very fast, very
reckless, very hopeful,
enthusiastic, and self-deceived people; that while we
had assumed to play the part of Dives, we were really better
fitted for the performance of the character of Lazarus. The
scheme for obtaining wealth without labor, prosperity without
industry, and growing into a community of opulence and ease
without effort had been a complete failure.
The spring of 1858 dawned upon us, and the
icy hand of winter relaxed its hold upon the earth, and the
prairies were once more clothed in sunshine and emerald. The
result of our thinking during the long dreary winter, was now
about to be embodied in active efforts to enhance our real
prosperity and substantial wealth. It had been fully and justly
determined that the true grandeur and prosperity of the people
was concealed in their capacity for industry, honesty and
patient endurance. If there were fortunes to be made in
Nebraska, they were to be acquired by frugality and persevering
exertion alone. The soil was to be tilled and taxed for the
support of the dwellers thereon; and out of it and it alone was
all true and substantial independence to be derived. For the
first time during our political existence, we realized our true
condition, and comprehended the proper method of ameliorating
and improving it. The numerous signs marked "banker, broker,
real estate dealer," etc., began one by one to disappear, and
the shrewd and hopeful gentlemen who had adopted them were seen
either departing for their old homes in the east, or buckling
on the panoply of industry, and following quietly the more
honorable and certainly paying pursuit of prairie-breaking and
corn-planting. The gloom of the long night of poverty was about
passing away forever. The clouds were breaking, the effulgence
of a better and brighter day sent its first glad beams to
reanimate and rejoice the dispirited and encourage the strong
and hopeful. Labor at once began and its hundred voices made
the air resonant with its homely music. All about us, on every
side, the prairie plow was at work, turning over, as it were,
the first page in the great volumes of our prosperity.
Everywhere were brawny arms lifted up to strike the earth, that
a stream of plenty and contentment might flow forth and bless
the country, even as the rock itself sent up sweet waters to
quench the thirst of Israel's children when smote by the
strength of Aaron. Everywhere these rich and rolling prairies
which had lain for unnumbered centuries as blank leaves in the
history of the world's progress were being written upon by the
hand of toil, snatched from the obscurity of uselessness, and
forever dedicated to the support of the Anglo-Saxon race. The
sunshine seemed
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brighter, and the rain and the dews more plentiful and
refreshing, because they descended upon the earth and found it
not all a wild and desolate waste. Seed had been sown, farms
opened and every energy had been taxed to make the Territory of
Nebraska self sustaining. It was the first genuine effort in
the right direction. The people were aroused to the fact, that
agriculture, and that alone, was to be for many years the sole
support, the sheet anchor and the salvation of the Territory.
Emulation was excited; each endeavored to outwork the other in
the good cause. In many of the counties, fairs were held last
fall, and agriculture had at last, after three years of
neglect, assumed its true position in Nebraska. As you well
remember the season was favorable, the crops were heavy, we had
enough, aye, more than enough, and the last spring witnessed
the first shipment of our surplus production of grain to the
foreign market. The first steamers that came up the Missouri in
1857, brought us corn to keep us and our stock from perishing
by hunger and starvation. We paid for it at the rate of two
dollars a bushel. But now by the energy of our farmers,
Nebraska in less than two years had been transformed from a
consumer to a producer. And the steamboats of the old Missouri
bore away from our shores in the spring of 1859, hundreds of
thousands of bushels of corn to the southern and eastern
markets, which we did not need for our home use, and for which,
at the rate of 40 cents per bushel, we have taken more money
than for town lots in the last eighteen months, or will in the
next twenty-four. Thus imperfectly and hurriedly I have
narrated the history of agriculture in Nebraska, down to the
planting of last spring's crop; what that was and how much
greater the breadth of land cultivated than ever before, the
new farms that met the eye on every side, and the vast fields
of ripening grain that magically unsurpassed the place of the
rank prairie grass, eloquently proclaimed.
If our brief and only half-improved past has
been thus encouraging and thus indicative of prosperity; if
notwithstanding the mercilessness of the panic and scarcity of
money, the present time, today, finds Nebraska richer in the
true elements of prosperity, stronger in the golden capital of
skillful industry and contented labor than she ever was before,
who shall predict her future? Who shall attempt to portray the
fulness and glory of her destiny?
The Anglo-Saxon race are being driven by the
hand of God across the continent of America, and are to inhabit
and have dominion over it all. These prairies which have been
cleared and made ready for the plow by the hand of God
himself, are intended for the abiding place of the
pioneers in the progress of the world. The American Indian, in
whom there are none of the elements of thrift, held a tenancy
upon these fertile plains for centuries; but there was neither
labor in his arm nor progression in his spirit. He was an
unworthy occupant of so goodly a land and he has been
supplanted. He has gone, and his race is fast becoming extinct;
the world is too old for its aborigines. Their destiny is
completed; they are journeying to their fate; they must die,
and a few years hence only be known through their history, as
it was recorded by the Anglo-Saxon, while he pushed them before
him in his onward tread.
We stand today upon the very verge of
civilization, riding upon the head wave of American enterprise,
but our descendants, living here a century hence, will be in
the center of American commerce--the mid-ocean of our national
greatness and prosperity. Upon this very soil, the depth and
richness of which is unsurpassed in the whole world, in a
country whose mineral resources-as yet wholly undeveloped--are
certainly magnificent and exhaustless; whose coal beds are as
extensive as its prairies; whose rivers and springs are as
healthful as they are numerous, in such a country agriculture
must and will carve out, for an industrious people, a wealth
and happiness, the like of which the world has never dreamed of
before. Manufacture and skill in the various arts may, and will
undoubtedly aid us in our pursuit of a glorious and independent
opulence, but our great trust and strong hope is still hidden
in the fertility of our soil and its adaptation to general
cultivation. The agriculturist may be proud of his calling for
in it he is independent; in it there is no possibility of guile
or fraud, and for his partners in labor God has sent him the
genial sunshine, gentle rains and the softly descending dews.
The very elements are made his assistants and co-workers; the
thunderbolt that purifies the atmosphere and furnishes electric
life to the growing crops, is his friend and his helper. It may
be urged, and often is, that the calling of the farmer is an
arduous and homely one,--that it is arduous no one can deny,
but it is honorable. The idea that a man cannot be a true
gentleman and labor with his hands, is an obsolete, a dead and
dishonored dogma. All labor is honorable. The scholar in his
study, the chemist in his laboratory, the artist in his studio,
the lawyer at his brief, and the preacher at his sermon, are
all of them nothing more, nothing less, than day laborers in
the world's workshop-workers with the
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head. And the smith at his forge, the carpenter at his
bench, mechanics and artisans of every grade and kind, and the
farmer, are the same laborers--workers with the hand.
The two classes represent the two divisions
of labor, and they are mutually dependent upon each other. But
if among them all there is one art more health-giving, one art
more filled with quiet and honest contentment, than another it
is that of agriculture. And yet agriculture, although it is the
art supportive of all arts, although it is the basis and
foundation upon which the superstructure of all the commerce of
the world is reared, is less studied, less thought of, and more
remote from its perfection than all others.
During the last ten years it has, however,
begun to attract a greater degree of attention and has taken a
few steps towards that high place in the world's business which
awaits it. The county, state, and national fairs, which are now
proven so useful, are the protracted meetings of husbandmen,
where agricultural revivals are initiated and thousands
annually converted to the faith of the great church of human
industry. And this is the first revival of the kind ever
instituted in a territory. To Nebraska belongs the honor and
the good name of having placed a bright and worthy example
before the sisterhood of children States which bound her on the
south and west. Let us continue in the good work; let every
heart's aspiration, every thought and effort be to make each
succeeding fair give better and stronger testimony in favor of
the resources and wealth of our vast and beautiful domain.
And while in the east the youth are being
prepared for the so-called learned professions, law, divinity,
and medicine, let us be content to rear up a nation of
enlightened agriculturists. Men sturdy in mind and thought even
as they are robust in body and active in all that pertains to
the lull development and perfection of the physical system of
mankind, let it be our high aim, by our enlightened and
well-directed training of both the body and the mind, to
elevate and improve our race and make the western man the
model, both physical and intellectual, from which all the world
may be happy to make copies.
With such an ambition in the minds of the
people, and an energy to gratify it, the future of this
commonwealth is such a one as thrills the patriot's heart with
grateful pride, and makes one sad to think that death may close
the eye before it shall have rested upon the beauties of the
Garden State that will have been builded up on these shores
within the next fen years. When the valley of L'Eau
qui-Court, the great Platte, the Weeping Water, and
the two Nemahas, shall be shorn of their native wildness and be
resonant with the song of the husbandman, the rumble of mills,
the splash of the paddle wheel and the puff of the steam
engine; when away out upon those undulating plains, whose
primeval stillness is now unbroken, save by the howl of the
wolf, or the wind sighing through the rank prairie grass, the
American citizen shall have builded up homes, hamlets and
villages; when the steam plow, with its lungs of fire and
breath of vapor, shall have sailed over the great land-ocean
that stretches its luxuriant waves of soil from the western
bank of the Missouri to the base of the Rocky Mountains,
leaving in its wake thrifty settlements and thriving villages,
as naturally as a ship riding upon a sea leaves the eddy and
the foam sparkling in the sunlight that gilds its path through
the waste of waters.
When, only fifty miles westward from the
Missouri River, the strong saline waters of Nebraska shall have
arrested the attention of the capitalist, and attracted the
skill of the manufacturer and shall have become, as it must and
will, the salt producer of the whole northwest; when the
rock-ribbed mountains that form our western boundary shall have
been compelled to give up to mankind their long hidden and
golden treasures: when afar off up the winding channel of the
great Platte, the antelope, the buffalo and the Indian shall
have been startled by the scream of the locomotive car, as it
roars and rumbles over the prairies and the mountain; hastening
to unite the states of the Atlantic and Pacific into a unity
and fraternity of interests, a future greater and brighter than
words call picture is to be achieved, and you, the farmers of
Nebraska, are its prime architects and its master workmen.
Be inspired then to hasten the carving out of
that destiny of indisputable superiority which God has assigned
the American people; and so inspired and so laboring in the
great field of the world's advancement, when death, that
harvester whom no seasons control and no laws restrain, gathers
you to his dark and noiseless garner, may you go. like the
grain that has thrived and ripened in the brightest sunshine,
pure and untainted by the mildews of the world, back to Him who
planted mortality on the earth, that immortality might be
reaped and garnered and loved in heaven.
This agricultural address was no sporadic
effort, but the commencement of a devotion to the tillage of the
soil, to the cultivation of flowers, shrubs and trees, a devotion
which culmi-
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nated in the rural decoration of Arbor Lodge, the presentation
of a beautiful park to Nebraska City, and to the association of
his name with Arbor Day triumphs and its beneficent results.
ARBOR DAY.
In the preface to a book entitled "Arbor
Day," which Gov. R. W. Furnas dedicated to the Hon. J. Sterling
Morton, we have the following:
Perhaps no observance ever sprung so
suddenly and almost universally into use in the higher ranks of
life as that of Arbor Day. The name itself attracts, and at
once secures fast hold on refined, intelligent people. The
thought originated with one who worships at the shrine of home
and its endearing relations. A resolution providing that
"Wednesday, the 10th of April, 1872, be and the same is hereby
set apart and consecrated for tree planting in the state of
Nebraska, and the State Board of Agriculture hereby name it
Arbor Day, and to urge upon the people of the State the vital
importance of tree planting, hereby offer a special premium of
one hundred dollars to the agricultural society of that county
of Nebraska which shall, upon that day, plant properly the
largest number of trees; and a farm library of twenty-five
dollars' worth of books to that person who, on that day, shall
plant properly in Nebraska the greatest number of trees," was
unanimously adopted by the State Board of Agriculture on motion
of Hon. J. Sterling Morton, January 4, 1872.
On the day specified in the resolution, the
people responded by planting 1,000,000 trees and repeated the
same in 1873. Supplementing the State Board, Gov. Furnas issued
a proclamation March 31, 1874, and in 1885 the legislature made
the 22nd of April, Mr. Morton's birthday, a holiday, to be
known as Arbor Day. In aid of the object a provision was
incorporated in the state constitution and numerous legal
enactments.
Within two months of the public observance of
the first Arbor Day the Hon. P. W. Hitchcock was instrumental in
passing through the United States senate a bill "To encourage the
growth of timber on the western prairies," the beneficent
operation of which continued for twenty-two years. Within the
space of sixteen years Arbor Day was observed in twenty-
seven of the States and three of the Territories. Editor H. L.
Wood, of the Nebraska City Daily Press, having conceived
the happy idea of issuing an Arbor Day edition of his paper,
received congratulatory responses from many distinguished
citizens. From James Russell Lowell, poet and diplomatist: "I am
glad to join in this tribute of friendly gratitude to the inventor
of Arbor Day." From George H. Broker, of Philadelphia: "I beg to
join with you all in the congratulations that may be offered to
this friend of humanity on his birthday, which was a happy day for
the world into which he was born." From the brilliant author, T.
J. Headly: "All honor to the founder of Arbor Day." From George
William Curtis, editor: "I am very glad to join in grateful
congratulations to the author of the suggestion which has resulted
in so beautiful and serviceable an observance as Arbor Day." From
Gov. Martin of Kansas: "Mr. Morton's thought has brought forth
good fruit, and has been of vast pecuniary value to Kansas and
Nebraska, and to all the states of the West." From ex-Senator T.
F. Bayard: "I count it my good fortune to have long known J.
Sterling Morton, and appreciate his many delightful qualities of
head and heart." From John C. Fremont, the explorer and pathfinder
of empire: "I am glad to have the opportunity to enroll myself
among the friends and well-wishers of Mr. Morton, and to
congratulate him upon the success of his unselfish and broadly
useful work."
In the House, the irrepressible and genial Hon.
Church Howe introduced the following resolution, which was
passed:
Whereas, The President-elect
of the United States has seen fit to select one of the most
distinguished citizens of this State for Secretary of
Agriculture; and
Whereas, J. Sterling Morton, one of
the pioneers of Nebraska and the creator of Arbor Day, is
particularly well equipped for the position, which we firmly
believe he will fill with credit to Nebraska and honor to the
Nation; be it
RESOLVED, That the
house, irrespective of party politics, tender its thanks to the
Hon. Grover Cleveland for the honor conferred upon the State of
Nebraska.
The fact that the measure was introduced by a
republican and
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was passed without a dissenting vote was especially gratifying
to the friends of Mr. Morton.
Within two months Mr. Morton became Secretary of
Agriculture. When the people of New Jersey, in compliance with the
governor's proclamation, met to celebrate Arbor Day, their program
spread before them an elaborate, philosophic, and statistical
essay, by the Secretary, upon the Forestry of Civilized
Nations.
Of the "'relentless, never-ending war between
the animal and vegetable kingdom," he said:
Like great wheels the cycles revolve
and reappear, now in the animal and then in the vegetable
world, as mere mites in the stupendous machinery of the
universe. The glow of beauty on the cheek of youth to-day, may
tomorrow tint a rose growing upon that youth's grave.
We die, we are buried, and down into our very
graves the kingdom of the forest and field sends its fibrous
root-spies, its pioneers, and sappers and miners. The grand
oak, the majestic elm, throw out their arms and foliage to wave
and shimmer in the sunlight, and deploy their roots and
rootlets to invade graves, and bring them food and from the
tired forms that sleep therein.
The almost infinite possibilities of a
tree germ came to my mind, one summer when traveling in a
railway carriage amid beautiful cultivated fields in Belgium. A
cottonwood seed on its wings of down drifted into my
compartment. It came like a materialized whisper from home.
Catching it in my hand I forgot the present and wandered into
the past, to a mote like that which had, years and years
before, been planted by the winds and currents on the banks of
the Missouri. That mote had taken life and root, growing to
splendid proportions, until in 1854 the ax of the pioneer had
vanquished it, and the saw seizing it with relentless, whirling
teeth reduced it to lumber. From its treehood evolved a human
habitation, a home--my home--wherein a mother's love had
blossomed and fruited with a sweetness surpassing the
loveliness of the rose and the honeysuckle. Thus from the
former feathery floater in mid-air grew a home, and all the
endearing contentment and infinite satisfaction which that
blessed Anglo-Saxon word conveys, that one word which means all
that is worth living for, and for which alone all good men and
women are living.
Never did the Secretary of Agriculture seem a
more fitting part of his surroundings than when on Arbor Day,
1894, he stood uncovered under the towering trees and among the
aspiring shrubs, upon the flower clad lawn of his great
department; and there, with firm hand, steadied in place the
Morton Oak of the future.
And equally true to nature and the occasion did
inspired intellect entwine the moral and epitaph:
It seems to me that a tree and a
truth are the two longest lived things of which mankind has any
knowledge. Therefore it behooves all men in rural life besides
planting truths to plant trees; it behooves all men in public
life to plant economic and political truths, and as the tree
grows from a small twig to a grand overs-preading oak, so the
smallest economic truth, as we have seen in the United States,
even in the last year, can so grow as to revolutionize the
government of the great Republic. I say, then, that we should
all plant trees and plant truths, and let every man struggle so
that when we shall all have passed away we shall have earned a
great epitaph which we find in St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
You remember Sir Christopher Wren was the architect of that
wondrous consummation of beauty in building, and there among
the heroic dead of England's greatest heroes upon land or sea
repose his remains. On other tombs are marked words of eulogy,
fulsome sometimes, always intense, but upon the sarcophagus
where Sir Christopher Wren's remains repose is inscribed only
these simple words: "Si quaris monumentum
circumspic"--If you seek my monument look around you. So
every man, woman and child who plants trees shall be able to
say, on coming as I have come, toward the evening of life, in
all sincerity and truth--"If you seek my monument, look around
you."
This occasion was a surprise arranged by the
officials of his department; but one year afterward it was more
than duplicated on Congress Heights, D. C., April 22, 1895, being
Arbor Day and his sixty-third birthday, when sixty-three trees
were planted in his honor and named for distinguished persons. One
of these he planted and named "Sound Money."
Mr. Morton's ability as a platform Speaker made
him a favorite in many states long before his introduction to a
president's
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cabinet, not only on the stump but in the lecture hall as well;
and whether his efforts were reported from cosmopolitan Chicago or
primitive Boston, prairie garlands twined gracefully with
conservative chaplets.
Had his fortune been cast in a democratic state,
he would, in national politics, have at once wielded the rudder as
well as the oar. In 1890, Prof. Perry of Williams College, being
ready to dedicate the crowning effort of his life, "Principles of
Political Economy," inscribed that supreme analysis:
TO MY PERSONAL FRIEND OF LONG STANDING
J. STERLING MORTON
OF NEBRASKA
A FRIEND OF THE PEOPLE, ALSO
FOUNDER OF ARBOR DAY.
For forty years Mr. Morton has illustrated
the "survival of the fittest," and the Roman motto, "Semper
paratis"--always prepared.
Mr. Morton unintentionally and unexpectedly
evoked a storm of denunciation as the result of clear conceptions,
bold utterances and intellectual aggressiveness, from a speech
delivered in the "Congress of Agriculture," at Chicago, Ill., Oct.
16, 1893.
The American farmer has foes to
contend with. They are not merely the natural foes--not the
weevil in wheat, nor the murrain in cattle, nor the cholera in
swine, nor the drouth, nor the chinch-bug. The most insidious
and destructive foe to the farmer is the "professional" farmer
who, as a "promoter" of granges and alliances, for political
purposes, farms the farmer.
He thought "individual investigation of
economic questions" of more value to farmers than granges or
alliances attempting "to run railroads and banks, and even to
establish new systems of coinage." He affirmed that "no man should
give a power of attorney to any society or organization or person,
to think for him." Immediately upon the delivery of the address,
he was denounced as an enemy of agriculture, and the president was
importuned by granges and editors for his summary removal as
Secretary of Agriculture.
© 2001 for the NEGenWeb Project by Pam Rietsch,
Ted & Carole Miller
