Jefferson Davis, The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

[477] the British flag on the ensanguined, burning plains of India. He has restored the glory of the British name in Asia. I honor him. Scotland, England, Wales, and Ireland are open, for their counties, as well as their countries, and their poets, orators, and statesmen, and their generals, belong to our history as well as theirs. I will never disavow Henry V on the plains of Agincourt; never Oliver Cromwell on the fields of Marston Moor and Naseby; never Sarsfield on the banks of the Boyne. The glories and honors of Sir Campbell are the glories of the British race, and the races of Great Britain and Ireland, from whom we are descended.

But what gained Sir Colin Campbell the opportunity to achieve those glorious results in India? Remember that, and let us see what it was. On one of those bloody battles fought by the British before the fortress of Sebastopol, in the midst of the perils, the most perilous of all the battle-fields England ever encountered in Europe, in one of the bloody charges of the Russian cavalry, there was an officer—a man who felt and who possessed sufficient confidence in the troops he commanded, and in the authority of his own voice and example—received that charge not in the ordinary, commonplace, and accustomed manner, by forming his troops into a hollow square, and thus arresting the charge, but by forming into two diverging lines, and thus receiving upon the rifles of his Highlandmen the charge of the Russian cavalry and repelling it. How all England rang with the glory of that achievement! How the general voice of England placed upon the brows of Sir Colin Campbell the laurels of the future mastership of victory for the arms of England! And well they might do so. But who originated that movement; who set the example of that gallant operation—who but Colonel Jefferson Davis, of the First Mississippi Regiment, on the field of Buena Vista? He was justly entitled to the applause of the restorer of victory to the arms of the Union. Gentlemen, in our country, in this day, such a man, such a master of the art of war, so daring in the field, such a man may not only aspire to the highest places in the executive government of the Union, but such a man may acquire what nowhere else, since the days of Cimon and Miltiades, of the Cincinnati and the Cornelii of Athens and of Rome, has been done by the human race, the combination of eminent powers, of intellectual cultivation, and of eloquence with the practical qualities of a statesman and general.

But, gentlemen, I am again betrayed beyond my purpose. Sir [addressing General Davis], we welcome you to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. You may not find here the ardent skies of your own sunny South, but you will find as ardent hearts, as warm and generous hands to welcome you to our Commonwealth. We welcome you to the city of Boston, and you have already experienced how open-hearted, how generous, how free from all possible taint of sectional thought are the hospitality and cordiality of the city of Boston. We welcome you to Faneuil Hall. Many an eloquent voice has in all times resounded from the walls of Faneuil Hall. It is said that no voice is uttered by man in this air we breathe but enters into that air. It continues there immortal as the portion of the universe into which it has passed. If it be so, how instinct is Faneuil Hall with the voice of the great, good, and glorious of past generations, and of our own, whose voices have echoed through its wall, whose eloquent words have thrilled the hearts of hearers, as if a pointed sword were passing them through and through. Here Adams aroused his countrymen in the War of Independence, and Webster