When fighting under Bradstreet on the Oswego River in the old French war, when laboring against great odds at Fort Edward, when retarding the British advance after the evacuation of Ticonderoga, when urging on a force to the relief of Fort Stanwix, when planning the campaign which ended in the capture of Burgoyne, and placing laurels, now faded, on the head of Gates, the character of our own Knickerbocker General, Philip Schuyler, the pure patriot, the noble soldier, is lustrous with evidences of his sagacious counsels, his wonderful energy, and his military skill. [Renewed applause.]

The good blood of the patroons never flowed purer or brighter than when, as soldiers, they battled for a nation’s rights.  In the fight at Saratoga, Colonel Henry Kiliaen Van Rensselaer greatly distinguished himself and carried from the field an ounce of British lead, which remained in his body thirty-five years.  Captain Solomon Van Rensselaer fought most courageously by the side of Mad Anthony Wayne in the Miami campaign.  Being seriously wounded in a brilliant charge, he refused to be carried off the field on a litter, but insisted that, as a dragoon, he should be allowed to ride his horse from the battle and, if he dropped, to die where he fell. [Applause.]

Worn and bleeding were the feet, scant the clothing of our ragged Continentals, as, turning upon their foe, they recrossed the icy Delaware on Christmas night, surprised Rall and his revellers in Trenton’s village, punished the left of Cornwallis’s column at Princeton, and then, on their way to the mountains of Morris County, fell by the wayside with hunger and wretchedness, perishing with the intense cold.  But, in the darkness of the night, a partisan trooper, with twenty horsemen, surrounded the baggage-wagons of the British force, fired into the two hundred soldiers guarding them, and, shouting like a host of demons, captured the train, and the doughty captain with my own ancestral name woke up the weary soldiers of Washington’s army with the rumbling of wagons heavily laden with woollen clothing and supplies, bravely stolen from the enemy. [Applause.]

The poisoned arrows whistled in the Newtown fight as the New York contingent pressed forward toward Seneca Castle, the great capitol-house of the Six Nations.  The redskins and their Tory allies, under Brant, tried hard to resist the progress of that awful human wedge that was driven with relentless fury among the wigwams of those who had burned the homes in beautiful Wyoming, who had despoiled with the bloody tomahawk the settlement at German Flats, and had closed the horrid campaign with the cruel massacre at Cherry Valley.  Bold and daring in this revengeful expedition was Colonel Philip Van Cortlandt, a name honored in all Dutch civil and military history. [Continued applause.]

As a leader of three thousand cavalrymen the youthful General Bayard [great cheers], proud of his Dutch descent, fell on the heights of bloody Fredericksburg.  Like the good knight, he was “without fear and without reproach.”  Full of zeal for the cause, the bravest of the brave, his sword flashed always where dangers were the thickest.  When a bursting shell left him dead on the field of honor, his brave men mourned him and the foe missed him. [Cheers.]