The Green Ba VOL. IX.
No. 8.
BOSTON.
AUGUST, 1897.
THE LATE MR. JUSTICE BUSHROD WASHINGTON. BY BUSHROD C. WASHINGTON. THE closing years of the nineteenth century are marked by a very signifi cant tendency to retrospection in the mind of Americans, and the tendency appears both individual and national in its manifes tations. As to the individual, it takes a genealogical turn, an inquiry into his ances try. The searching of attics for old letters, documents and family bibles, the overhaul ing of court records, parish registers and other like sources of private history, is with out precedent. The silent cities of the dead are invaded, and long-neglected tombstones and exhumed coffin-plates are put in evi dence to prove that this or that citizen of to day is descended from this or that soldier, statesman or other patriot of times colonial. The national, or public tendency, takes on the form of historical revision, a glancing backward into the processes by which this democratic, constitutional republic, came to live, move and have its being; a turning of search-lights back upon the path by which it has climbed into its exalted station in the family of nations. This tendency, though in a degree phenomenal, is not, as some aver, an epidemic craze possessing the public mind. Cause and effect are clearly discerned in it, and its manifestation at this time is both natural and according to the eternal fitness of things. It is an intuition born of the hour, and for which the times are ripe. American citizens realize that their country has passed from its experi mental into its realistic era. It has survived the greatest of internecine wars and has
bound itself together in an inseverable union. The commonwealths and states compos ing it, reserving unto themselves a reason able autonomy, moving each in its orbit of local self-government, which is indeed the Palladium of civil liberty, are yet held to gether by the attractive power of their cen tral sun, which is the American Union — a union of states as from within, but as to the world, a nation. A nation of self-govern ing people, many minded, and agreeing to disagree as to matters of internal polity, but of one mind and one heart as to the wel fare of their country. The average American has come to appreciate the greatness of his country, and realizing also that the great ness of a country is the sum of the great ness of its people, he naturally researches his ancestral record with the laudable am bition to establish for himself and family honorable place in his country's annals. The public mind, moved by the same spirit of retrospection, is demanding a rewriting of the constitutional history, and a revising of the biographies of the great men called the fathers and founders of the American Union. It is demanding also, that those master-builders succeeding them shall have due recognition and honor; who upon the foundation of national liberty already laid have well and wisely builded the superstruc ture of our great Republic. Responding to this spirit of retrospection, and recognizing in it the element of patriotic and robust Americanism, the writer presents to the 329
