“When the stakes are as significant as life and liberty”

Earlier this week the president of Yale, Marie McInnis, offered inspiration to the graduating class from a work by much earlier graduate.

Here’s an article from the university:

A Yale-trained art historian, McInnis turned to an artwork from the Yale University Art Gallery collection for answers, focusing on John Trumbull’s celebrated painting “The Battle of Bunker’s Hill.” The canvas marks that moment, 250 years ago in June, when a band of American rebels stood their ground on a hillside in Charlestown, then just north of Boston, against the might of the British military.

In Trumbull’s painting, the scene unfolds beneath acrid plumes of smoke as British forces breach the revolutionaries’ lines. Joseph Warren, an American major general, lies mortally wounded in the arms of a comrade. A redcoat tries to bayonet the fallen general — but British Major John Small has stepped in to stop him.

“In that moment, one man preserves the dignity of a dying foe with an unexpected gesture of compassion amid chaos,” McInnis said. “One man, taming the passions of war, chooses mercy. Chooses to see the man who was his friend, instead of the general of an opposing force.”

In highlighting Small’s intervention, McInnis said, Trumbull invites viewers to recognize a frequently overlooked kind of courage: The ability to show compassion to a bitter adversary.

“Compassion, as I suspect Major Small understood, is not the absence of conviction. It is not weakness,” she said. “And it is certainly not retreat. It is, in fact, an act of radical strength in its rarest form. It is the idea that even in our most consequential disagreements — that even when the stakes are as significant as life and liberty — we must find ways to recognize our common humanity.”

And displaying compassion does not mean avoiding conflict or denying differences, McInnis said.

“In a vibrant, pluralistic society, disagreement is inevitable, indeed welcomed,” she said in her speech, titled “Overcoming divides and embracing our shared humanity.”

“But what I would like to impress on you today is that compassion can coexist with our most deeply held beliefs.”

Here’s the full text of President McInnis’s speech.

Historically, I have to point out that Trumbull constructed his scene to convey just such a message. According to Alexander Garden, Maj. Small himself said that the artist “paid me the compliment of trying to save the life of Warren; but the fact is, that life had fled before I saw his remains.”

Also, Trumbull produced multiple copies of this scene with subtle differences. The image shown above from Yale is one of his preliminary studies. The university also owns a finished, full-color version, as do the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Wadsworth Athenaeum. (Notably, the colors aren’t the same on those two canvases, particularly in the flags Trumbull inserted into the scene.)