The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [23]
Still, Francis’s mother must have been impressive. And Rome, the place Bellamy considered his hometown, no doubt played an important role in his formation. It is where he was schooled, where his mother continued to live until her death in 1898, where his ashes are enshrined. Redolent of history, the area was important for many generations. Called variously the Great Portage, or Oneida Carrying Place, or sometimes just Carry, it was where Indian travelers and traders had carried their canoes and their contents overland from the Mohawk River to Wood Creek, the sole connection from the Hudson River to Lake Ontario. Not far from Rome, at Fort Stanwix, the Third New York Regiment under the command of Colonel Peter Gansevoort held off a prolonged attack by British, German, Loyalist, Canadian, and American Indian troops under the command of British general Barry St. Leger in 1777. Following the Revolution, many of the soldiers that served at Fort Stanwix returned to the area, to live on the land nearby.
In the 1850s and 1860s, these rough-and-ready places were still very much part of a boy’s life in a region that was part frontier, part economic and social mixing bowl. Francis was raised and educated in a region that felt the growing country’s many surges keenly. And he came of age during the Civil War and Reconstruction, a time of tremendous national strife, only to see the country lose its way decades later when, as he put it, “the shameless, indecent, almighty dollar came in and turned the heads of our people from the contemplation of our better traditions.”
All these currents fed a young mind that was also surrounded by books and religion. He was lucky to be educated at a new school and he had most surely heard his father pacing the family living room practicing his Sunday orations. He learned and became a practiced speaker. “A very natural orator is Frank J. Bellamy,” said the Rome Sentinel newspaper following his high-school commencement address in July 1872. “The speaker possesses a very full and round voice, speaks fluently and distinctly, and appears upon the stage with most of the graces of a practiced orator.” For his essay on Horace Greeley, one of two compositions awarded prizes, young Frank received a poetry collection that included works of Spencer, Dante, Chaucer, Milton, and Tasso.
At the University of Rochester, he also won essay prizes, both as a sophomore and as a senior. As a commencement orator in June 1876, the centennial year of the Declaration of Independence, Francis extolled the moral power of American poetry as a galvanizing force in opposition to slavery:
[It is] in the new world, in our own day, that the Poetry of Man has found its noblest mission. Here, in the birthplace of liberty, was heard the clank of the fetter, the despairing moan of a race of slaves. In America, the lash had drunk of human blood and the wail of the oppressed awaked response in America’s finest poets—Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier. To arouse a nation from apathy, to stimulate to action, to reconquer Freedom was the Poet’s mission.
While some of the twenty-one-year-old scholar’s rhetoric may seem overwrought to twenty-first-century readers, a newspaper reporter covering the commencement judged the speech to be “one of the very finest” of the occasion. “The oration was carefully and elegantly written and delivered with great earnestness and power,” the reporter wrote in a review of the commencement proceedings.
As a Baptist minister—first in the prosperous Mohawk valley town of Little Falls and later in Boston—Bellamy gained plenty of practice putting words together and became especially adept at phrasing ideas to be delivered orally—whether in formal sermons and invocations or extemporaneous remarks at the baptismal bath, at grace over meals, at the wedding bower, at the sick bed, the graveside, and in the multitude of other circumstances a man of the cloth is called on to say the right thing.
There is some irony in Francis Bellamy