- end_line
- 12083
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T03:55:03.886Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 12034
- text
- MAJOR GENTIAN AND COLONEL J. BUNKUM
... As witness this long newspaper clipping without caption inserted in
somebody’s scrap-book.
‘Note that badge Major Gentian wears upon occasion. It is a military
badge. It is the badge of the national brotherhood of veterans in whose
Chapters the grade of the field is ignored, and the general salutes the
private--comrade! Is Major Gentian’s badge this badge?’ touching a
bronze button on his lapel. ‘Is it the badge of the Grand Army of the
Republic? No, men and brethren, it is another sort of badge. A badge
which by the original constitution of the order it symbolises was
restricted to the officers of the Army of the Revolution, to them, and
in primogeniture to their descendants. I remember long ago in my youth
the eldest son of a revolutionary officer, and as such an inheritor of
the Cincinnati badge, saying, over the Madeira, to his own son, then a
stripling, “My boy, if ever there is a recognised order of nobility in
this land, it will be formed of the sons of the officers of the
Revolution.” What a frank letting-out was that--thanks to the old
Madeira--of the spirit animating the Cincinnati in the second
generation, even as in the first. And to the Cincinnati Major Gentian
belongs; and he prides himself upon it; and his pride here makes him
throw back his shoulders, old man though he be--yea, and lends an inch
to his stature.
‘Now, gratefully and very fervently do we hold in reverence the memory
of the heroes of Seventy-six. Yet who but they founded this order? Did
John Hancock withstand King George’s tea-tax in the spirit of John
Hampden resisting King Charles’s impost of ship-money? Yes, so; but only
so. Unto John Hancock the rich merchant, no more than to John Hampden
the rich country gentleman of a prior generation, had any practical
purpose revealed the gospel of man’s unconditioned equality. Urge not
against this aught in the Declaration of Independence. For when the
passage “All men are born free and equal,” when that passage was being
written were not some of the signers legalised owners of slaves?
‘Too evident is it that in throwing off the British plush, the men of
Seventy-six did not shed the colonial skin. In divers respects, social
and political, they remained loyal to British tradition, though
justified rebels to the British crown. Assuredly no, in the
characterising significance of the word as now current, they can hardly
be considered _Americans_. It is we, their posterity, that are
Americans--we, the people, the sovereign American people, who from
English and European colonists have in process of time, and under the
special guidance of God, developed into _Americans_. And in view of all
this, does not Major Gentian’s Society, the Society of the Cincinnati,
lag among us as much out of place as would the old Spanish Order of the
Knights of the Holy Ghost.
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