Our American Holidays
INDEPENDENCE DAY

Our American Holidays

INDEPENDENCE
DAY

ITS CELEBRATION, SPIRIT, AND SIGNIFICANCE
AS RELATED IN PROSE AND VERSE

EDITED BY
ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER

NEW YORK
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
1912

Copyright, 1912, by
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY
New York

Published, February, 1912

CONTENTS

PREFACE

This book is an anthology of American Independence: of the document that announced its birth; of the struggle that established it in life; and of the patriotism that was to it both sire and son. It aims to present a clear review of the origin, spirit and significance of Independence Day and of its celebration both by the now discredited methods of brutal, meaningless noise and indiscriminate carnage, which disgraced the larger part of the previous century, and by the recent methods of sane and safe, reverent and meaningful celebration.

The volume contains a selection of the best prose and verse that bears in any way on our nation’s birthday; and closes with many constructive suggestions for the celebration of our new, more beautiful and more patriotic Fourth.

NOTE

Thanks are due to Miss Jessie Welles, superintendent of circulation in the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh, for the suggestion which originated “Our American Holidays.” And gratitude is also expressed to the Misses Tobey, to Miss Helen Miles and all the other librarians of the Bloomingdale Branch Library in New York who have generously given the editor such invaluable aid in the preparation of these volumes.

The Editor also wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to Houghton, Mifflin & Company; The Century Co.; J. B. Lippincott & Co.; Bobbs-Merrill Co., and others who have very kindly granted permission to reprint selections from works bearing their copyright.

Robert Haven Schauffler.

INTRODUCTION

When, on the fourth day of each July, Americans keep the birthday of the nation we celebrate as our greatest secular holiday, the one which has the honor of being sanctioned by statute in every state of the Union.

From times as early as any living memory can reach, this anniversary has been observed in much the same fashion: by spread-eagle oratory, by unlimited and quite meaningless noise, and hospitals filled with the wounded and dying. It is curious that the festival should have gone on in this monotonous manner decade after decade until nearly the middle of its second century of life, and then suddenly should have encountered a revolution far more abrupt than the early, heroic one which it commemorates.

For our attitude toward the Fourth is undergoing swift revolution as regards our understanding both of the causes that underlay American independence, of the real spirit in which the Declaration was penned, and of the reasons why July fourth rather than some other day was fixed upon. Finally, the swiftest Fourth of July revolution of all is taking place in the way we celebrate it.

Until quite recently all historians have, consciously or unconsciously, been consistent in misrepresenting the War of Seventy-Six and the events leading thereto. And we owe no small debt of gratitude to writers like Mr. Owen Wister and Mr. Sydney George Fisher for telling us the truth. Mr. Wister writes[1] of the Revolution that while “As a war, its real military aspect is slowly emerging from the myth of uninterrupted patriotism and glory, universally taught to school children, its political hue is still thickly painted and varnished over by our writers.

“How many Americans know, for instance, that England was at first extremely lenient to us? fought us (until 1778) with one hand in a glove, and an olive branch in the other? had any wish rather than to crush us; had no wish save to argue us back into the fold, and enforce argument with an occasional victory not followed up?... For any American historian to speak the truth on these matters is a very recent phenomenon, their common design having been to leave out any facts which spoil the political picture of the Revolution they chose to paint for our edification: a ferocious, blood-shot tyrant on the one side, and on the other a compact band of ‘Fathers,’ down-trodden and martyred, yet with impeccable linen and bland legs. A wrong conception even of the Declaration of Independence as Jefferson’s original invention still prevails; Jefferson merely drafted the document, expressing ideas well established in the contemporary air. Let us suppose that some leader of our own time were to write: ‘Three dangers to-day threaten the United States, any one of which could be fatal: unscrupulous capital, destroying man’s liberty to compete; unscrupulous Labor, destroying man’s liberty to work; and undesirable Immigration, in which four years of naturalization are not going to counteract four hundred years of heredity. Unless the people check all of these, American liberty will become extinct.’ If some one were to write a new Declaration of Independence, containing such sentences, he could not claim originality for them; he would be merely stating ideas that are among us everywhere. This is what Jefferson did, writing his sentences loosely, because the ideas they expressed were so familiar as to render exact definitions needless.”

Mr. Wister deserves gratitude for giving us these unpalatable truths in such palatable form; but he should have far more gratitude for introducing to a wide body of readers his chief source of information, the historian Mr. Sydney George Fisher, one of whose most valuable chapters has fortunately been secured for reproduction in the body of this book. Mr. Fisher writes:[2]

“I cannot feel satisfied with any description of the Revolution which treats the desire for independence as a sudden thought, and not a long growth and development, or which assumes that every detail of the conduct of the British government was absurdly stupid, even from its own point of view, and that the loyalists were few in numbers and their arguments not worth considering....

“The historians seem to have assumed that we do not want to know about that controversy” (over Gen. Howe’s lenient methods), “or that it will be better for us not to know about it. They have assumed that it will be better for Americans to think that independence was a sudden and deplorable necessity and not a desire of long and ardent growth and cautiously planned intention. They have assumed that we want to think of England as having lost the colonies by failure to be conciliatory, and that the Revolution was a one-sided, smooth affair, without any of the difficulties or terrors of a rebellion or a great upheaval of settled opinion.”

There can be small doubt that when this true inner history of our independence becomes generally known it will do much to mitigate the blind, provincial spread-eagleism that still clings to even our safest and sanest celebrations of the Fourth and that has so ably thwarted every motion toward fraternal intimacy between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. The following[3] paragraph is fairly typical of the British attitude toward the celebration of our national birthday.

“Where a country or a government has been baffled in its efforts to attain or preserve a hated rule over another people, it must be content to see its failure made the subject of never-ending triumph and exultation. The joy attached to the sense of escape or emancipation tends to perpetuate itself by periodical celebrations, in which it is not likely that the motives of the other party, or the general justice of the case, will be very carefully considered or allowed for. We may doubt if it be morally expedient thus to keep alive the memory of facts which as certainly infer mortification to one party as they do glorification to another: but we must all admit that it is only natural, and in a measure to be expected.”

When we come to view the facts as they are, to realize of what shocking sportsmanship our own one-sided view of independence convicts us, we shall have removed one of the chief obstacles to Anglo-Saxon solidarity. But it will be necessary first to learn something about the day we celebrate. How many, for instance, even know that July fourth was fixed upon as a compromise date between two other rival claimants?

Walsh writes:[4]

“It may not be generally known that no less than three dates might reasonably compete for designation as the natal day of American Independence and for the honors of the anniversary of that event.

“On the second of July, 1776, was adopted the resolution of independence, the sufficient legislative act; and it was this day that Mr. Adams designated as the anniversary in the oft-quoted letter written on his desk at the time, prophesying its future celebration, by bells, bonfires, cannonades, etc. On the fourth of July occurred the Declaration of Independence. On the second of August following took place the ceremony of signature, which has furnished to the popular imagination the common pictorial and dramatic conceptions of the event.

“The history connecting these three dates may be intelligently told in a brief space. On the fifteenth of May, 1776, a convention in Virginia had instructed its delegates in the General Congress ‘to propose to that body to declare the United Colonies free and independent States, absolved from all allegiance to or dependence on the Crown or Parliament of Great Britain, and that they give the assent of this Colony to such declaration, and to whatever measures may be thought proper and necessary by the Congress for forming foreign alliances and a confederation of the Colonies.’ The motion thus ordered was on the seventh of June made in Congress by Richard Henry Lee, as the oldest member of the Virginia delegation. It was to the effect that ‘these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown; and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.’ The resolution was slightly debated for two or three days, but from considerations of prudence or expediency the discussion was intermitted. As texts for the action of Congress there were the resolution referred to, and the more formal, or at least more lengthy, document which the committee of five—Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston—had been instructed on the eleventh of June to prepare. This document was draughted by Jefferson and presented under the title of ‘A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled.’

“On the first of July there was again called up in Congress the resolution proposed by Mr. Lee. On the second of July it passed. Two days later (the fourth of July) was adopted, after various amendments, the ‘Declaration’ from Mr. Jefferson’s pen. The document was authenticated, like the other papers of the Congress, by the signature of the president and the secretary, and, in addition, was signed by the members present, with the exception of Mr. Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who, as Mr. Jefferson has testified, ‘refused to sign it.’

“But it did not then bear the names of the members of Congress as they finally appeared on it. A number of these still opposed it, and had voted against it; it was passed unanimously only as regarded states. Thus, a majority of the Pennsylvania delegation had persistently opposed it, and it was only the absence of two of their delegates on the final vote that left a majority for this state in its favor. Some days after the Declaration had thus passed, and had been proclaimed at the head of the army, it was ordered by Congress that it be engrossed on parchment and signed by every member; and it was not until the second of August that these signatures were made, and the matter concluded by this peculiar and august ceremony of personal pledges in the autographs of the members. It is this copy or form of the Declaration which has, in fact, been preserved as the original: the first signed paper does not exist, and was probably destroyed as incomplete.

“If the natal day of American Independence is to be derived from the ceremony of these later signatures, and the real date of what has been preserved as the legal original of the Declaration, then it would be the second of August. If derived from the substantial, legal act of separation from the British Crown, which was contained rather in the resolution of Congress than in its Declaration of Independence, it would be the second of July. But common consent has determined to date the great anniversary from the apparently subordinate event of the passage of the Declaration, and thus celebrates the Fourth of July as the birthday of the nation.”

Finally, after making ourselves reasonably intelligent as to the origin, spirit and true significance of Independence Day it behooves us as true Americans to enter the splendid new movement which is endeavoring to make the Fourth over from a day of shallow jingoism and unmeaning brutality and carnage into a day of initiation into the meaning of true citizenship and a festival of deep and genuine and beautiful patriotism.

R. H. S.

INDEPENDENCE DAY

I
CELEBRATION

THE GREAT AMERICAN HOLIDAY

ANONYMOUS

Among all the holidays of the year, one stands out as preëminently American; one appeals especially to that sentiment of patriotism and national pride which glows in every loyal American heart. Independence Day—the Fourth of July—is observed in every State in the Union as our distinctive national holiday; and rightly so, for the event which it celebrates is by far the most important in American history—an event no less, indeed, than the birth of the nation.

Independence Day celebrates the signing, on the Fourth of July, 1776, of the paper which declared this country forever free from British rule. It had been under consideration for some time by the Continental Congress, assembled at Philadelphia, and final action was finally taken on July 4. From that time forward, the American colonists were no longer rebels in arms against their country, but a free people fighting for their independence.

That the Declaration of Independence was mainly the work of Thomas Jefferson has been established beyond reasonable doubt; and it stands to-day one of the most remarkable state papers in the history of the world.

At the time of the passage of the act, John Adams wrote to his wife a letter which has become historic. “I am apt to believe,” he wrote, “that this day will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.”

Bonfires and guns there have been without limit; and the deaths that have resulted from these celebrations would form no inconsiderable fraction of those lost during the Revolution. For years, the celebration of this great holiday has consisted mainly of meaningless noise; but there is a steadily growing sentiment in favor of a more worthy observance of the day, as a time when every loyal American should rejoice in the welfare of his country, and recall with pride the manner in which the Nation was established.

THE NATION’S BIRTHDAY

BY MARY E. VANDYNE

Ring out the joy bells! Once again,

With waving flags and rolling drums,

We greet the Nation’s Birthday, when,

In glorious majesty, it comes.

Ah, day of days! Alone it stands,

While, like a halo round it cast,

The radiant work of patriot hands,

Shines the bright record of the past.

Among the nations of the earth,

What land hath story like our own?

No thought of conquest marked her birth;

No greed of power was ever shown

By those who crossed the ocean wild,

That they might plant upon her sod

A home for Peace and Virtue mild,

And altars rear to Freedom’s God.

How grand the thought that bade them roam!

Those pilgrim bands, by Faith inspired—

That bade them leave their cherished home,

And, with the martyr’s spirit fired,

Guide their frail vessels o’er the main

Upon the glorious mission bound

On alien soil a grave to gain,

Or else a free born nation found.

What land has heroes like to ours?

Their names are as the lightning’s gleams,

When, on the darkling cloud that lowers,

In blinding majesty it streams.

Great Washington, the man of faith,

Who conquered doubt with patient might;

Warren and Putnam, true till death,

The “Swamp Fox,” eager for the fight.

See Major Molly’s woman hand

Drive home the murderous cannon ball;

How bravely Lydia Darrach planned,

For home and country risking all.

A glorious list, and without end;

Forgotten were both sex and age;

Their names in radiant luster blend,

And shine like stars on history’s page.

Like stars to light the firmament,

And show the world what men may do

Who, as God’s messengers, are sent

And to their mission still are true.

No end had they to seek or gain;

Their work was there before their sight;

There lay their duty, stern and plain,

To dare and suffer for the right.

The right that conquered, and whose power

Is shown in our broad land to-day;

Shown in this bright and prosperous hour,

When peace and plenty gild our way;

Shown in the glorious song that swells

The hearts of men from South to North,

And in its rapturous accents tell

The story of our glorious Fourth.

HOW THE FOURTH OF JULY SHOULD BE CELEBRATED

BY JULIA WARD HOWE

I have been invited to present some hints as to the proper observance of our great national holiday, the Fourth of July, and the false education implied by warlike celebrations in a nation whose corner stone is peace and whose freedom is a standing protest against old-world militarism.

The topic carries me back in thought to days of childhood, when, in my native city of New York, the endless crackling of torpedoes, the explosion of firecrackers and the booming of cannon, made the day one of joyous confusion and fatigue, culminating in a distant view of the city fireworks sent up from Castle Garden. It then seemed to be a day wholly devoted to boyish pleasure and mischief, sure to be followed by reports of hairbreadth escapes and injuries more or less serious, sometimes even fatal. The day was one of terror to parents, who, while deeming it unwise to interdict to their sons the enjoyment of gunpowder, dreaded to see them maimed or disfigured for life by some unlooked-for accident. It was not uncommon then, nor is it now, to read of some sudden death, some irretrievable blindness or other injury caused by the explosion of a toy cannon or the misadventure of some fireworks on “the Fourth,” as the day has come to be called.

These were tragical events truly, but they appear less real to me in remembrance than do the laughing faces of my young brothers who were allowed to arrange a small table for their greater convenience on the pavement of ancient Bond Street, a very quiet byway in those days. From this spot went forth a perpetual popping and fizzing, varied by the occasional thud of a double-headed firecracker. Shouts of merriment followed these explosions. The girls within doors enjoyed the fracas from the open windows, and in the evening our good elders brought forth a store of Roman candles, blue lights, and rockets. I remember a year, early in the thirties, in which good Gideon Lee, a democratic Mayor of New York, issued an edict prohibitive of all home fireworks. Just as we had settled ourselves in the determination to regard him thenceforth as our natural enemy, the old gentleman’s heart failed him, and, living next door to us, he called to say that he would make a few exceptions to the rule for the day, and that we should count among these.

Removing to Boston some ten years later, I found the night of the third of July rendered almost sleepless by the shrill gamut of gunpowder discharges. The ringing of bells and the booming of cannon destroyed the last chance of an early morning nap, and in self-defense most people left their beds and went forth to see what could be seen. This was sometimes a mock procession of the Antiques and Horribles, so called in parody of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery, so well known in and about Boston. Or, one might join the throng on the Common, where a brass band performed popular airs, American and Irish-American. I do indeed recall certain notable performances connected with the usual observance of the National Festival. I was a dweller in Boston when Charles Sumner, then chiefly known as a rising lawyer and incipient philanthropist, was appointed to deliver the Fourth of July oration, and chose for his theme the true grandeur of nations. This grandeur he found entirely in the conquests of peace as opposed to the popular worship of military renown. His audience, composed in part of men in soldier’s garb, were but little in sympathy with his views, and I remember the performance as having called forth more irritation than approbation.

These prophetic glimpses of good which seem far from the practical questions of the time do visit earnest souls in this way, like some ray of light from an undiscovered star. The same train of thought, at about the same time, took shape in Mr. Longfellow’s fine poem on the Arsenal in Springfield. It may be remembered that the poet was Mr. Sumner’s most intimate friend. While the two men held the same views regarding the great questions of the time, Mr. Longfellow’s bonhomie rendered him very inapt to give offense, while Sumner seemed destined to arouse violent opposition in those from whom he differed.

I remember another Fourth of July at which Edward Everett’s measured rhetoric and silver voice held the attention of a numerous assemblage. Mr. Everett was certainly master of the art of graceful oratory, and was always heard with appreciation, even by those who felt little satisfaction in his public career.

One of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s finest poems was written for the celebration of the Fourth in his own town of Concord. The two opening lines of this dwell always in my memory:

“Oh! tenderly the haughty Day

Fills his blue urn with fire.”

But, beautiful as they are, the solemn lesson of the poet exceeds them in interest.

“United States! the Ages plead,

Present and Past in under-song;

Go, put your creed into your deed,

Nor speak with double tongue.

“Be just at home, then write your scroll

Of honor o’er the sea,

And bid the broad Atlantic roll

A ferry of the Free.”

Here is a thought picture which we may love to dwell upon. Emerson, the descendant of the Puritans, himself a transfigured Puritan, reading these stanzas of his, whose fire is tempered by the weight of thought, in that old town of Concord, where, in his own phrase:

“—the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world.”

A fiercer fight was then before us, whose issue is simply prefigured in the words: “Be just at home.” Surely, we might take this saying for a national motto, its reminder still needed, though the slave is freed from the whip and fetter. Of the day on which our Independence was declared John Adams said:

“It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be celebrated with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.”

These words show how comprehensive was the view which the old statesman took of a Nation’s holiday. He desired that all classes and all ages should participate in the joy expressed. The time which has elapsed since his memorable utterance has brought nothing to diminish this joy. It has however brought into being a new society for which “pomp and parade, bells, guns and bonfires” are less available for good than pleasures of a more elevated character. We now desire a celebration which shall speak less to the bodily sense and more to the inner sense. This is because the historic development of the race goes ever forward. John Adams would have had both sober and wild rejoicing over the birth of a new state, representing a new order of things. We stand face to face with the question: How shall we maintain our deliverance from old-world trammels? This freedom which was declared in 1776, what are its conditions, what its true uses?

History is full of paradoxes whose meaning does not lie upon the surface of what we see. Many of these recall the riddle of Samson: “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.” Even so, the things that make for peace often come out of contests full of violence and bloodshed, while the elements of anarchy ripen best in the submission enforced by autocratic despotism, the ominous quiet which is sure to be broken by some terrific social cataclysm. In the first instance, which alone concerns our theme, we must remember that the bloodshed came, not of the peaceable principles of eternal justice, but of the effort on the part of tyrants to gainsay and oppose these. It follows from this that in commemorating the events which have had most to do with the liberation of mankind from the yoke of despotism and superstition, we must keep in view these underlying truths which in themselves involve no violence, but the vindication of which may involve great sacrifices of devoted lives.

The fact that our heroes fought for freedom against almost hopeless odds should be brought to mind, and their names should be hallowed in perpetual remembrance. But, if we would crown their conquest, we must give more attention to the good for which they died than to the mere circumstance of their death. The ordinary procedure of mankind is quite the opposite of this. They are proud of the military success, careless of the civic and ethical gain. Even the Christian church accentuates too much the death of its Founder, is too little concerned with the truth for which he really gave his life. A Lent of prayer and fasting, with dramatic repetition of the betrayal and crucifixion of the Blessed One, may merely bring with it suggestions of devotion and gratitude. But far more important would be a Lent of study of the deep meaning of his words and works. It makes one sick at heart to think of the formal rehearsal of great events by those who have no understanding of their true significance, and can therefore claim but a small part in their real benefit.

The parallelisms too of history are very instructive. In the confusions and difficulties of our own time it is useful for us to learn that men in other times have had similar problems to solve, and have found their solutions. It is helpful for us to know that our pure and blameless Washington was, in his day, the subject of malignant slander and mischievous cabal. Our own best public men are liable to the grossest misinterpretations of their utterances and of their measures. Unworthy demagogues to-day will present very dangerous evils in a light attractive to the multitude. This has always been so. No man marches to victory over a bed of roses. The roses crown his perseverances, but the thorns lacerate his bleeding feet. But, with these sad recollections, we must keep in sight the immortal hope sung by the poets, reasoned out by the philosophers, and acted out by earth’s saints and heroes, the hope which is justified by the great progress of the ages, the elevation of the natural man into the dignity of the spiritual man.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who saw one of the great Italian festivals in which the poet Dante was especially commemorated, saw also the pressing need of wise counsel and brave action throughout the struggling country, and asks what will become of the new Italy if her young men shall “stand still strewing violets all the time?” We may ask too what will become of our new Republic if the hours of its highest festival continue to be occupied with fustian oratory, gunpowder enthusiasm, and the exercise of every poor and mean trade, the sale of toys, bad food, and worse liquor?

Now, I would by no means abridge the childish pleasure of the day, if I could do so. We must allow children the explosion of animal spirits, and they will delight, as some grown-up people will, in much that is irrational. But the day itself is too important to be made one of mere noise and parade. It should be made highly valuable for impressing upon the minds of the young the history of their national liberty, and its cause. Besides our own young people, we have with us the youth of many nations, whose parents have come to our shores, drawn by various hopes of gain and benefit. These children will form an important part of our future body politic, in whose government to-day, their parents are, too, easily able to participate.

The question will be, how to make the Fourth of July a true festival, a national solemnity, without forgetting the claims of the young to be amused, as well as to be instructed. In the first place, I should think that the day might fitly be made one of reunion, by different clubs and associations of culture and philanthropy. Those whose thoughts go deep enough to understand the true conditions of human freedom, might meet and compare their studies and experiences. Very fitly, after such a meeting, each individual of them might seek a group, to whose members he might present a popular statement of the philosophy of freedom. Mothers, who should be the true guardians of peace, might well come together to study all that promotes its maintenance. In gatherings of older children, prize essays might be presented and discussed. I can imagine civic banquets, of a serious and stately character, in which men and women might sit together and pledge each other, in the exhilaration of friendship and good feeling.

I would have processions, but I would have them less military in character, and more pacific in suggestion. Congregations of the various religious confessions might walk in order, headed by their ministers, who should all exchange the right hand of fellowship with each other. I would have no monster concerts, which cannot be fully enjoyed, but divers assemblages, at which music of the highest order should be presented. Letters of greeting should be exchanged between cities and states, and the device of the day should be, “In the Name of the Republic.” The history of the war which culminated in our national independence should be amply illustrated by graphic lectures, and possibly by living pictures. Mr. John Fiske has an admirable talent for bringing the past and its heroes as vividly before us as if he himself had seen them but the day before. If it were possible to multiply his valued personality, I would have many sketches given in various places, of the brave struggle of our forefathers and of those who were foremost in it.

“Going out of town to avoid the Fourth,” has been a phrase so common in my time that it ceases to awaken attention, and is taken as a matter of course. I cannot indeed wonder that people of refined tastes and sensitive nerves should seek to free themselves from the noise and crowd of the usual observance. The question is whether, with a wiser administration, the same people might not be led to gather, rather than to disperse for the celebration.

How would the following programme answer?

On the evening of the third of July, quiet gatherings in halls or churches, in which the true love of country should be explained and illustrated. How many a name, half or wholly forgotten, would then be recalled from oblivion, and with it the labor and sacrifice of some noble life, some example precious for the community!

The morning of the Fourth to be ushered in by martial music, and a military display sufficient to recall the services of the brave men who gave our fathers liberty. At ten o’clock orations in various public buildings, the ablest speakers of the commonwealth doing their best to impart the lesson of the day. At one a Spartan feast, wholesome and simple. No liquor to be served thereat, and none to be sold during the day. From twelve to half past four in the afternoon, I would have exercises for the children of the public schools, examination of classes in American history, prizes given for essays on historical and patriotic subjects. Later, a gathering in public gardens, and a tea, with fruit and flowers, served for the children of the city. In the evening, the singing of national anthems, tableaux vivants and fireworks, and in some form, a pastoral benediction.

To these exercises I would add the signing of a pledge of good citizenship. We take much pains, and not unwisely, to persuade men and women to sign a pledge of total abstinence from alcoholic liquors. But why should we not go further than this, and lead them to pledge themselves to some useful service in the community? This pledge might be either general or particular in its terms, but the act of signing it should imply a disinterested public service of some sort, a participation in some work useful for the health, beauty, or order of the city, without other reward than the badge or button which would represent the agreement entered into. I would have the history of other Republics brought forward on this day, and especially, the heroic struggles of our own time. Among these, I would certainly accord a place to the story of the great-hearted men to whom Italy owes her freedom. And I would if I could compel the attendance of our men and women of fashion upon lectures in which the true inwardness of European society should be exposed, and the danger shown of the follies and luxurious pomp which they delight in imitating, and which, however æsthetically adorned and disguised, are for us to lead in the pathway of moral and intellectual deterioration.

I would have the great political offenses of the century fitly shown, the crimes of Louis Napoleon, the rapacious wars of Germany, France and England, the wicked persecution of the Jews. Now that we are nearing the close of our nineteenth century, it becomes most important for us that its historic record should be truly rehearsed, its great saints and sinners characterized, its wonderful discoveries and inventions explained.

The very meager programme suggested here for our great day may appear to many Utopian and impossible. I shall be glad if it can serve to pave the way for kindred suggestions, to which individual minds may give a broader and more varied scope. Let us unite our efforts in behalf of a suitable and serious honoring of the day in such wise that every heart, old and young, shall have therein its especial joy, and every mind its especial lesson.

I had at one time a plan of my own, of setting apart one day in the year as a Mother’s Day. This festival was to be held in the interest of a world’s peace, and for quite a number of years it was so observed by groups of women in various parts of the country, while in England and even in far-off Smyrna friends met together, with song, prayer, and earnest discourse to emphasize the leading thought, which was that women, as the mothers of the race, knowing fully the cost of human life, should unite their efforts throughout the world to restrain the horrors of war, and to persuade men to keep the sacred bond of peace. It now occurs to me that we should make our Fourth of July a Mother’s, as well as a Father’s day. In the public programme of every town throughout our vast Commonwealth, women should have some word to say and some part to play. What we have already seen of their culture and ability is enough to assure us that their participation in such proceedings would intensify their good features and discourage their objectionable ones. And as in the forms of oratory with which we are familiar, much is made of what the world owes to America, we might suggest that our women speakers might especially bring forward the antithesis of this question, in another, viz., What America owes to the world.

II
SPIRIT AND SIGNIFICANCE

ENGLAND AND AMERICA

BY JAMES BRYCE

This is a memorable day to Englishmen as well as to Americans. It is to us a day both of regret and of rejoicing: of regret at the severance of the political connection which bound the two branches of our race together, and of regret even more for the unhappy errors which brought that severance about, and the unhappy strife by which the memory of it was embittered. But it is also a day of rejoicing, for it is the birthday of the eldest daughter of England—the day when a new nation, sprung from our own, first took its independent place in the world. And now with the progress of time, rejoicing has prevailed over regret, and we in England can at length join heartily with you in celebrating the beginning of your national life. All sense of bitterness has passed away, and been replaced by sympathy with all which this anniversary means to an American heart.

England and America now understand one another far better than they ever did before. In 1776 there was on one side a monarch and a small ruling caste, on the other side a people. Now our government can no longer misrepresent the nation, and across the ocean a people speaks to a people. We have both come, and that most notably within recent months, to perceive that all over the world the interests of America and of England are substantially the same.

The sense of our underlying unity over against the other races and forms of civilization has been a potent force in drawing us together. It is said that the Fourth of July is a day of happy augury for mankind. This is true because on that day America entered on a course and proclaimed principles of government which have been of profound significance for mankind. Many nations have had a career of conquest and of civilizing dominion: but to make an immense people prosperous, happy, and free is a nobler and grander achievement than the most brilliant conquests and the widest dominion.

THE BIRTHDAY OF THE NATION

(From address delivered July 4, 1851, at laying the cornerstone of the new wing of the Capitol.)

BY DANIEL WEBSTER

This is that day of the year which announced to mankind the great fact of American Independence! This fresh and brilliant morning blesses our vision with another beholding of the birthday of our Nation; and we see that Nation, of recent origin, now among the most considerable and powerful, and spreading from sea to sea over the continent.

On the fourth day of July, 1776, the representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, declared that these Colonies are, and ought to be, free and independent States. This declaration, made by most patriotic and resolute men, trusting in the justice of their cause and the protection of Heaven,—and yet not without deep solicitude and anxiety—has now stood for seventy-five years. It was sealed in blood. It has met dangers and overcome them. It has had detractors, and abashed them all. It has had enemies, and conquered them. It has had doubting friends, but it has cleared all doubts away; and now, to-day, raising its august form higher than the clouds, twenty millions of people contemplate it with hallowed love, and the world beholds it, and the consequences that have followed from it, with profound admiration.

This anniversary animates and gladdens all American hearts. On other days of the year we may be party men, indulging in controversies more or less important to the public good. We may have likes and dislikes, and we may maintain our political differences, often with warm, and sometimes with angry feelings. But to-day we are Americans all; nothing but Americans.

As the great luminary over our heads, dissipating fogs and mist, now cheers the whole atmosphere, so do the associations connected with this day disperse all sullen and cloudy weather in the minds and feelings of true Americans. Every man’s heart swells within him. Every man’s port and bearing becomes somewhat more proud and lofty as he remembers that seventy-five years have rolled away, and that the great inheritance of Liberty is still his,—his, undiminished and unimpaired; his, in all its original glory; his to enjoy; his to protect; his to transmit to future generations.

THE FOURTH OF JULY

BY CHARLES LEONARD MOORE

(From The Forum.)

Let be the herds and what the harvest brings;

Give to oblivion all that’s sold and bought,

The count of unrememberable things;—

Our better birthright is this day’s report!

Live our sires in us? Keep we their old skill

To know Occasion’s whisper and be great?

Can our proud blood in one contagious thrill

Put admiration in the eyes of Fate?

Wide is our realm, and twin seas feel our yoke,

Aye, and the oarless ocean of the North;—

Are we then mightier than that scattered folk,

That fringe of clingers by the sea-beach froth

Whose loins begat us? Let to-morrow show

If their stern arts hereditary grow.

LIFT UP YOUR HEARTS

ANONYMOUS

Sursum corda. We have in our own time seen the Republic survive an irrepressible conflict, sown in the blood and marrow of the social order. We have seen the Federal Union, not too strongly put together in the first place, come out of a great war of sections stronger than when it went into it, its faith renewed, its credit rehabilitated, and its flag saluted with love and homage by sixty millions of God-fearing men and women, thoroughly reconciled and homogeneous. We have seen the Federal Constitution outlast the strain, not merely of a Reconstructory ordeal and a Presidential impeachment, but a disputed count of the Electoral vote, a Congressional deadlock, and an extra constitutional tribunal, yet standing firm against the assaults of its enemies, while yielding itself with admirable flexibility to the needs of the country and the time. And finally we saw the gigantic fabric of the Federal Government transferred from the hands that held it a quarter of a century to other hands, without a protest, although so close was the poll in the final count that a single blanket might have covered both contestants for the Chief Magisterial office. With such a record behind us, who shall be afraid of the future?

The young manhood of the country may take this lesson from those of us who lived through times that did indeed try men’s souls—when, pressed down from day to day by awful responsibilities and suspense, each night brought a terror with every thought of the morrow, and when, look where we would, there were light and hope nowhere—that God reigns and wills, and that this fair land is and has always been in His own keeping.

The curse of slavery is gone. It was a joint heritage of woe, to be wiped out and expiated in blood and flame. The mirage of the Confederacy has vanished. It was essentially bucolic, a vision of Arcadie, the dream of a most attractive economic fallacy. The Constitution is no longer a rope of sand. The exact relation of the States to the Federal Government, left open to double construction by the authors of our organic being, because they could not agree among themselves, and union was the paramount object, has been clearly and definitely fixed by the three last amendments to the original chart, which constitute the real treaty of peace between the North and the South, and seal our bonds as a nation forever.

The Republic represents at last the letter and the spirit of the sublime Declaration. The fetters that bound her to the earth are burst asunder. The rags that degraded her beauty are cast aside. Like the enchanted princess in the legend, clad in spotless raiment and wearing a crown of living light, she steps in the perfection of her maturity upon the scene of this, the latest and proudest of her victories, to bid welcome to the world.

Need I pursue the theme? This vast assemblage speaks with a resonance and meaning which words can never reach. It speaks from the fields that are blessed by the never-failing waters of the Kennebec and from the farms that sprinkle the valley of the Connecticut with mimic principalities more potent and lasting than the real; it speaks in the whirr of the mills of Pennsylvania and in the ring of the wood-cutter’s axe from the forests of the lake peninsulas; it speaks from the great plantations of the South and West, teeming with staples that insure us wealth and power and stability, yea, from the mines and forests and quarries of Michigan and Wisconsin, of Alabama and Georgia, of Tennessee and Kentucky far away to the regions of silver and gold, that have linked the Colorado and the Rio Grande in close embrace, and annihilated time and space between the Atlantic and the Pacific; it speaks in one word, from the hearthstone in Iowa and Illinois, from the home in Mississippi and Arkansas, from the hearts of seventy millions of fearless, freeborn men and women, and that one word is “Union!”

There is no geography in American manhood. There are no sections to American fraternity. It needs but six weeks to change a Vermonter into a Texan, and there has never been a time, when, upon the battle-field, or the frontier, Puritan and Cavalier were not convertible terms, having in the beginning a common origin, and so diffused and diluted on American soil as no longer to possess a local habitation or a nativity, except in the National unit.

The men who planted the signals of American civilization upon that sacred Rock by Plymouth Bay were Englishmen, and so were the men who struck the coast a little lower down, calling their haven of rest after the great Republican commoner, and founding by Hampton Roads a race of heroes and statesmen, the mention of whose names brings a thrill to every heart. The South claims Lincoln, the immortal, for its own; the North has no right to reject Stonewall Jackson, the one typical Puritan soldier of the war, for its own! Nor will it! The time is coming, is almost here, when hanging above a mantel-board in fair New England—glorifying many a cottage in the sunny South—shall be seen bound together, in everlasting love and honor, two cross swords carried to battle respectively by the grandfather who wore the blue and the grandfather who wore the gray.

God bless our country’s flag! and God be with us now and ever. God in the roof-tree’s shade and God on the highway, God in the winds and waves, and God in our hearts!

ENGLAND AND THE FOURTH OF JULY

BY W. T. STEAD

(From The Independent.)

I wish with all my heart that we could adopt the Fourth of July as the Festival Day of the whole English-speaking race. If this suggestion should seem strange to Americans, it is not unfamiliar to many Englishmen. We consider that the triumph of the American revolt against George III was a vindication of the essentially English idea of democratic self-government, and we believe that we have benefited by it almost as much as the Americans. It taught us a lesson which made the British Colonial Empire a possibility, and if we are now involved in a suicidal war in South Africa, it is largely because our Government has forgotten the principles of George Washington, and has gone back to the principles of George III.

For some years past I have presided at a distinctly British celebration of the Fourth of July at my brother’s settlement in Southeast London, at Browning Hall, and I have always repudiated the idea that Americans should be allowed to monopolize the Fourth of July. It is one of the great days of the English-speaking race in the celebration of which all members of the English-speaking nations should participate.

SOME EARLY INDEPENDENCE DAY ADDRESSES

ADDRESS OF JOEL BARLOW (JULY 4, 1787)

(At Hartford, Conn.)

On the anniversary of so great an event as the birth of the empire in which we live, none will question the propriety of passing a few moments in contemplating the various objects suggested to the mind by the important occasion; and while the nourishment, the growth, and even the existence of our empire depend upon the united efforts of an extensive and divided people, the duties of this day ascend from amusement and congratulation to a serious patriotic employment.

We are assembled, not to boast, but to realize, not to inflate our national vanity by a pompous relation of past achievements in the council or the field, but, from a modest retrospect of the truly dignified part already acted by our countrymen, from an accurate view of our present situation, and from an anticipation of the scenes that remain to be unfolded, to discern and familiarize the duties that still await us as citizens, as soldiers, and as men.

Revolutions in other countries have been affected by accident. The faculties of human reason and the rights of human nature have been the sport of chance and the prey of ambition. When indignation has burst the bands of slavery, to the destruction of one tyrant, it was only to impose the manacles of another. This arose from the imperfection of that early stage of society, the foundations of empires being laid in ignorance, with a total inability of foreseeing the improvements of civilization, or of adapting government to a state of social refinement. On the western continent a new task, totally unknown to the legislators of other nations, was imposed upon the fathers of the American empire. Here was a people, lords of the soil on which they trod, commanding a prodigious length of coast, and an equal breadth of frontier, a people habituated to liberty, professing a mild and benevolent religion, and highly advanced in science and civilization. To conduct such a people in a revolution, the address must be made to reason, as well as the passions.

In what other age or nation has a people, at ease upon their own farms, secure and distant from the approach of fleets and armies, tide-waiters and stamp-masters, reasoned, before they had felt, and, from the dictates of duty and conscience, encountered dangers, distress, and poverty, for the sake of securing to posterity a government of independence and peace? Here was no Cromwell to inflame the people with bigotry and zeal; no Cæsar to reward his followers with the spoils of vanquished foes; and no territory to be acquired by conquest. Ambition, superstition, and avarice, those universal torches of war, never illumined an American field of battle. But the permanent principles of sober policy spread through the colonies, roused the people to assert their rights, and conducted the revolution. Those principles were noble, as they were new and unprecedented in the history of human nations. The majority of a great people, on a subject which they understand, will never act wrong.

Our duty calls us to act worthy of the age and the country that gave us birth. Every possible encouragement for great and generous exertions is presented before us. The natural resources are inconceivably various and great. The enterprising genius of the people promises a most rapid improvement in all the arts that embellish human nature. The blessings of a rational government will invite emigrations from the rest of the world and fill the empire with the worthiest and happiest of mankind; while the example of political wisdom and sagacity, here to be displayed, will excite emulation through the kingdoms of the earth, and meliorate the condition of the human race.

ADDRESS OF JOHN QUINCY ADAMS (JULY 4, 1793)

(At Boston.)

Americans! let us pause for a moment to consider the situation of our country at that eventful day when our national existence commenced. In the full possession and enjoyment of all those prerogatives for which you then dared to adventure upon “all the varieties of untried being,” the calm and settled moderation of the mind is scarcely competent to conceive the tone of heroism to which the souls of freemen were exalted in that hour of perilous magnanimity.

Seventeen times has the sun, in the progress of his annual revolution, diffused his prolific radiance over the plains of independent America. Millions of hearts, which then palpitated with the rapturous glow of patriotism, have already been translated to brighter worlds; to the abodes of more than mortal freedom.

Other millions have arisen, to receive from their parents and benefactors an inestimable recompense of their achievements.

A large proportion of the audience, whose benevolence is at this moment listening to the speaker of the day, like him, were at that period too little advanced beyond the threshold of life to partake of the divine enthusiasm which inspired the American bosom; which prompted her voice to proclaim defiance to the thunders of Britain; which consecrated the banners of her armies; and finally erected the holy temple of American Liberty over the tomb of departed tyranny.

It is from those who have already passed the meridian of life; it is from you, ye venerable assertors of the rights of mankind, that we are to be informed what were the feelings which swayed within your breasts and impelled you to action; when, like the stripling of Israel, with scarcely a weapon to attack, and without a shield for your defense, you met and, undismayed, engaged with the gigantic greatness of the British power.

Untutored in the disgraceful science of human butchery; destitute of the fatal materials which the ingenuity of man has combined to sharpen the scythe of death; unsupported by the arm of any friendly alliance, and unfortified against the powerful assaults of an unrelenting enemy, you did not hesitate at that moment, when your coasts were infested by a formidable fleet, when your territories were invaded by a numerous and veteran army, to pronounce the sentence of eternal separation from Britain, and to throw the gauntlet at a power, the terror of whose recent triumphs was almost coextensive with the earth.

The interested and selfish propensities which, in times of prosperous tranquillity, have such powerful dominion over the heart, were all expelled, and in their stead the public virtues, the spirit of personal devotion to the common cause, a contempt of every danger, in comparison with the subserviency of the country, had assumed an unlimited control.

The passion for the public had absorbed all the rest, as the glorious luminary of heaven extinguishes, in a flood of refulgence, the twinkling splendor of every inferior planet. Those of you, my countrymen, who were actors in those interesting scenes will best know how feeble and impotent is the language of this description, to express the impassioned emotions of the soul with which you were then agitated.

Yet it were injustice to conclude from thence, or from the greater prevalence of private and personal motives in these days of calm serenity, that your sons have degenerated from the virtues of their fathers. Let it rather be a subject of pleasing reflection to you that the generous and disinterested energies which you were summoned to display, are permitted, by the bountiful indulgence of heaven, to remain latent in the bosoms of your children.

From the present prosperous appearance of our public affairs, we may admit a rational hope that our country will have no occasion to require of us those extraordinary and heroic exertions, which it was your fortune to exhibit.

But from the common versatility of all human destiny, should the prospect hereafter darken, and the clouds of public misfortune thicken to a tempest; should the voice of our country’s calamity ever call us to her relief, we swear, by the precious memory of the sages who toiled and of the heroes who bled in her defense, that we will prove ourselves not unworthy of the prize which they so dearly purchased; that we will act as the faithful disciples of those who so magnanimously taught us the instructive lesson of republican virtue.

EXTRACT FROM ADDRESS OF JOHN LATHROP (JULY 4, 1796)

(At Boston.)

In the war for independence America had but one object in view, for in independence are concentrated and condensed every blessing that makes life desirable, every right and privilege which can tend to the happiness, or secure the native dignity, of man. In the attainment of independence were all their passions, their desires, and their powers engaged. The intrepidity and magnanimity of their armies, the wisdom and inflexible firmness of their Congress, the ardency of their patriotism, their unrepining patience when assailed by dangers and perplexed with aggravated misfortune, have long and deservedly employed the pen of panegyric and the tongue of oratory.

Through the whole Revolutionary conflict a consistency and systematic regularity were preserved, equally honorable as extraordinary. The unity of design and classically correct arrangement of the series of incidents which completed the epic story of American independence, were so wonderful, so well wrought, that political Hypercriticism was abashed at the mighty production, and forced to join her sister, Envy, in applauding the glorious composition.

On the last page of Fate’s eventful volume, with the raptured ken of prophecy, I behold Columbia’s name recorded, her future honors and happiness inscribed. In the same important book, the approaching end of tyranny and the triumph of right and justice are written, in indelible characters. The struggle will soon be over; the tottering thrones of despots will quickly fall, and bury their proud incumbents in their massy ruins.

THE FOURTH OF JULY

BY CHARLES SPRAGUE

To the sages who spoke, to the heroes who bled,

To the day and the deed, strike the harp-strings of glory!

Let the song of the ransomed remember the dead,

And the tongue of the eloquent hallow the story!

O’er the bones of the bold

Be the story long told,

And on fame’s golden tablets their triumphs enrolled

Who on freedom’s green hills freedom’s banner unfurled,

And the beacon-fire raised that gave light to the world!

They are gone—mighty men!—and they sleep in their fame:

Shall we ever forget them? Oh, never! no, never!

Let our sons learn from us to embalm each great name,

And the anthem send down—“Independence forever!”

Wake, wake, heart and tongue!

Keep the theme ever young;

Let their deeds through the long line of ages be sung

Who on freedom’s green hills freedom’s banner unfurled,

And the beacon-fire raised that gave light to the world!

OUR NATIONAL ANNIVERSARY

BY A. H. RICE

We celebrate to-day no idle tradition—the deeds of no fabulous race; for we tread in the scarcely obliterated footsteps of an earnest and valiant generation of men, who dared to stake life, and fortune, and sacred honor, upon a declaration of rights, whose promulgation shook tyrants on their thrones, gave hope to fainting freedom, and reformed the political ethics of the world.

The greatest heroes of former days have sought renown in schemes of conquest, based on the love of dominion or the thirst for war; and such had been the worship of power in the minds of men, that adulation had ever followed in the wake of victory. How daring then the trial of an issue between a handful of oppressed and outlawed colonists, basing their cause, under God, upon an appeal to the justice of mankind and their own few valiant arms. And how immeasurably great was he, the fearless commander, who, after the fortunes and triumph of battle were over, scorned the thought of a regal throne in the hearts of his countrymen. Amidst the rejoicings of this day, let us mingle something of gratitude with our joy—something of reverence with our gratitude—and something of duty with our reverence.

Let us cultivate personal independence in the spirit of loyalty to the State, and may God grant that we may always be able to maintain the sovereignty of the State in the spirit of integrity to the Union.

Whatever shall be the fate of other governments, ours thus sustained, shall stand forever. As has been elsewhere said, nation after nation may rise and fall, kingdoms and empires crumble into ruin, but our own native land, gathering energy and strength from the lapse of time, shall go on and still go on its destined way to greatness and renown. And when thrones shall crumble into dust, when scepters and diadems shall have been forgotten, till heaven’s last thunder shall shake the world below, the flag of the Republic shall still wave on, and its Stars, its Stripes, and its Eagle, shall still float in pride, and strength, and glory,

“Whilst the earth bears a plant,

Or the sea rolls a wave.”

AMERICA’S NATAL DAY

BY JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE

The United States is the only country with a known birthday. All the rest began, they know not when, and grew into power, they know not how. If there had been no Independence Day, England and America combined would not be so great as each actually is. There is no “Republican,” no “Democrat,” on the Fourth of July,—all are Americans. All feel that their country is greater than party.

CRISES OF NATIONS

BY DR. FOSS

There are brief crises in which the drift of individual and national history is determined, sometimes unexpectedly; critical moments on which great decisions hang; days which, like a mountain in a plain, lift themselves above the dead level of common days into everlasting eminence. Our Day of Independence was such a day; so was the day of Marathon, and the day of Waterloo. Napoleon admitted that the Austrians fought grandly on the field of Rivoli, and said, “They failed because they do not understand the value of minutes.” Humboldt refers the discovery of America to “a wonderful concatenation of trivial circumstances,” including a flight of parrots.

THE FOURTH OF JULY IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY

BY PHILLIPS BROOKS (JULY 4, 1880)

To all true men the birthday of a nation must always be a sacred thing. For in our modern thought the nation is the making-place of man. Not by the traditions of its history, nor by the splendor of its corporate achievements, nor by the abstract excellence of its Constitution, but by its fitness to make men, to beget and educate human character, to contribute to the complete humanity the perfect man that is to be,—by this alone each nation must be judged to-day. The nations are the golden candlesticks which hold aloft the glory of the Lord. No candlestick can be so rich or venerable that men shall honor it if it hold no candle. “Show us your man,” land cried to land.

It is not for me to glorify to-night the country which I love with all my heart and soul. I may not ask your praise for anything admirable which the United States has been or done. But on my country’s birthday I may do something far more solemn and more worthy of the hour. I may ask for your prayers in her behalf: that on the manifold and wondrous chance which God is giving her,—on her freedom (for she is free, since the old stain of slavery was washed out in blood); on her unconstrained religious life; on her passion for education and her eager search for truth; on her zealous care for the poor man’s rights and opportunities; on her quiet homes where the future generations of men are growing; on her manufactories and her commerce; on her wide gates open to the east and to the west; on her strange meeting of the races out of which a new race is slowly being born; on her vast enterprise and her illimitable hopefulness,—on all these materials and machineries of manhood, on all that the life of my country must mean for humanity, I may ask you to pray that the blessing of God, the Father of man, and Christ, the Son of man, may rest forever.

III
BEFORE THE DAWN OF INDEPENDENCE

AMERICA RESENTS BRITISH DICTATION

BY HENRY B. CARRINGTON

(From The Patriotic Reader, J. B. Lippincott & Co., Phila.)

During the agitation of 1765, concerning the British Stamp Act, a convention of its opponents was assembled in New York City under the name of “The Stamp Act Congress.” Among the most conspicuous of the delegates from the Massachusetts Colony was James Otis. As early as 1761 he protested so earnestly against permitting the British officers of the customs to have “writs of assistance” in their enforcement of the British revenue laws, that John Adams, who listened to his argument, thus described it:

“Otis was a flame of fire! With a promptitude of classical allusions, a depth of research, a rapid summary of historical events and dates, a profusion of legal authorities, a prophetic glance of his eye into futurity, and a rapid torrent of impetuous eloquence, he hurried away all before him. Every man of an immense audience appeared to me to go away, as I did, ready to take up arms against any ‘writs of assistance.’”

The all-absorbing sentiment of his life, the wealth of his diction, and the fire of his oratory have been embodied in a form which stands among the best of American classics. In the romance of “The Rebels,” Miss Lydia Maria Francis (afterwards Mrs. Child) introduces James Otis as a leading character. After the opening statement, that “there was hurrying to and fro through the streets of Boston on the night of the 14th of August, 1765,” his patriotic American woman shows such a right conception of the power and oratory of Otis, as well as of the actual tone and spirit of his times, that the fragments of her hero’s conversation during the story, gathered in the form of a speech, have often been mistaken for some actual appeal to the people of his period. The youth of America will do well to keep it fresh in mind, and thereby honor both its author and its subject.

SPEECH OF JAMES OTIS IN 1765

England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the steps of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland. Arbitrary principles, like those against which we now contend, have cost one king of England his life, another his crown, and they may yet cost a third his most flourishing colonies.

We are two millions, one-fifth fighting-men. We are bold and vigorous, and we call no man master. To the nation from whom we are proud to derive our origin we ever were, and we ever will be, ready to yield unforced assistance; but it must not, and it never can be extorted.

Some have sneeringly asked, Are the Americans too poor to pay a few pounds on stamped paper? No! America, thanks to God and herself, is rich. But the right to take ten pounds implies the right to take a thousand; and what must be the wealth that avarice, aided by power, cannot exhaust? True, the specter is now small; but the shadow he casts before him is huge enough to darken all this fair land.

Others, in sentimental style, talk of the immense debt of gratitude which we owe to England. And what is the amount of this debt? Why, truly, it is the same that the young lion owes to the dam which has brought it forth on the solitude of the mountain, or left it amid the winds and storms of the desert.

We plunged into the wave, with the great charter of freedom in our teeth, because the fagot and torch were behind us. We have waked this new world from its savage lethargy; forests have been prostrated in our path; towns and cities have grown up suddenly as the flowers of the tropics; and the fires in our autumnal woods are scarcely more rapid than the increase of our wealth and population.

And do we owe all this to the kind succor of the mother-country? No; we owe it to the tyranny that drove us from her; to the pelting storms which invigorated our helpless infancy!

But perhaps others will say, We ask no money from your gratitude; we only demand that you should pay your own expenses. And who, I pray, is to judge of their necessity? Why, the king! (And, with all due reverence to his sacred majesty, he understands the real wants of his distant subjects as little as he does the language of the Choctaws.) Who is to judge concerning the frequency of these demands? The ministry. Who is to judge whether the money is properly expended? The cabinet behind the throne.

In every instance, those who take are to judge for those who pay. If this system is suffered to go into operation, we shall have reason to esteem it a great privilege that rain and dew do not depend upon Parliament; otherwise, they would soon be taxed and dried.

But, thanks to God! There is freedom enough left upon earth to resist such monstrous injustice. The flame of liberty is extinguished in Greece and Rome, but the light of its glowing embers is still bright and strong on the shores of America. Actuated by its sacred influence, we will resist unto death.

But we will not countenance anarchy and misrule. The wrongs that a desperate community have heaped upon their enemies shall be amply and speedily repaired. Still, it is lighted in these colonies which one breath of their king may kindle into such fury that the blood of all England cannot extinguish it.

INDEPENDENCE A SOLEMN DUTY

BY RICHARD HENRY LEE

The time will certainly come when the fated separation between the mother-country and these colonies must take place, whether you will or no, for it is so decreed by the very nature of things, by the progressive increase of our population, the fertility of our soil, the extent of our territory, the industry of our countrymen, and the immensity of the ocean which separates the two countries. And if this be true, as it is most true, who does not see that the sooner it takes place the better?—that it would be the height of folly not to seize the present occasion, when British injustice has filled all hearts with indignation, inspired all minds with courage, united all opinions in one, and put arms in every hand? And how long must we traverse three thousand miles of a stormy sea to solicit of arrogant and insolent men either counsel, or commands to regulate our domestic affairs? From what we have already achieved it is easy to presume what we shall hereafter accomplish. Experience is the source of sage counsels, and liberty is the mother of great men. Have you not seen the enemy driven from Lexington by citizens armed and assembled in one day? Already their most celebrated generals have yielded in Boston to the skill of ours. Already their seamen, repulsed from our coasts, wander over the ocean, the sport of tempests and the prey of famine. Let us hail the favorable omen, and fight, not for the sake of knowing on what terms we are to be the slaves of England, but to secure to ourselves a free existence, to found a just and independent government.

Why do we longer delay? why still deliberate? Let this most happy day give birth to the American Republic. Let her arise, not to devastate and conquer, but to reëstablish the reign of peace and the laws. The eyes of Europe are fixed upon us; she demands of us a living example of freedom that may contrast, by the felicity of her citizens, with the ever-increasing tyranny which desolates her polluted shores. She invites us to prepare an asylum where the unhappy may find solace and the persecuted repose. She entreats us to cultivate a propitious soil, where that generous plant which first sprang up and grew in England, but is now withered by the poisonous blasts of Scottish tyranny, may revive and flourish, sheltering under its salubrious and interminable shade all the unfortunate of the human race. This is the end presaged by so many omens; by our first victories; by the present ardor and union; by the flight of Howe, and the pestilence which broke out among Dunmore’s people; by the very winds which baffled the enemy’s fleets and transports, and that terrible tempest which engulfed seven hundred vessels upon the coast of Newfoundland.

If we are not this day wanting in our duty to our country, the names of the American legislators will be placed, by posterity, at the side of those of Theseus, of Lycurgus, of Romulus, of Numa, of the three Williams of Nassau, and of all those whose memory has been and will be forever dear to virtuous men and good citizens.

AN APPEAL FOR AMERICA

BY WILLIAM PITT (LORD CHATHAM)

(In Parliament, January 20, 1775)

My Lords:

These papers, brought to your table at so late a period of this business, tell us what? Why, what all the world knew before: that the Americans, irritated by repeated injuries, and stripped of their inborn rights and dearest privileges, have resisted, and entered into associations for the preservation of their common liberties.

Had the early situation of the people of Boston been attended to, things would not have come to this. But the infant complaints of Boston were literally treated like the capricious squalls of a child, who, it is said, did not know whether it was aggrieved or not.

But full well I knew, at that time, that this child, if not redressed, would soon assume the courage and voice of a man. Full well I knew that the sons of ancestors, born under the same free constitution and once breathing the same liberal air as Englishmen, would resist upon the same principles and on the same occasions.

What has government done? They have sent an armed force consisting of seventeen thousand men, to dragoon the Bostonians into what is called their duty; and, so far from once turning their eyes to the policy and destructive consequence of this scheme, are constantly sending out more troops. And we are told, in the language of menace, that if seventeen thousand men won’t do, fifty thousand shall.

It is true, my lords, with this force they may ravage the country, waste and destroy as they march; but, in the progress of fifteen hundred miles, can they occupy the places they have passed? Will not a country which can produce three millions of people, wronged and insulted as they are, start up like hydras in every corner, and gather fresh strength from fresh opposition?

Nay, what dependence can you have upon the soldiery, the unhappy engines of your wrath? They are Englishmen, who must feel for the privileges of Englishmen. Do you think that these men can turn their arms against their brethren? Surely no. A victory must be to them a defeat, and carnage a sacrifice.

But it is not merely three millions of people, the produce of America, we have to contend with in this unnatural struggle; many more are on their side, dispersed over the face of this wide empire. Every Whig in this country and in Ireland is with them.

In this alarming crisis I come with this paper in my hand to offer you the best of my experience and advice; which is, that a humble petition be presented to his Majesty, beseeching him that, in order to open the way toward a happy settlement of the dangerous troubles in America, it may graciously please him that immediate orders be given to General Gage for removing his Majesty’s force from the town of Boston.

Such conduct will convince America that you mean to try her cause in the spirit of freedom and inquiry, and not in letters of blood.

There is no time to be lost. Every hour is big with danger. Perhaps, while I am now speaking, the decisive blow is struck which may involve millions in the consequence. And, believe me, the very first drop of blood which is shed will cause a wound which may never be healed.

When your lordships look at the papers transmitted to us from America, when you consider their firmness, decency, and wisdom, you cannot but respect their cause and wish to make it your own. For myself, I must affirm, declare, and avow that, in all my reading and observation (and it has been my favorite study, for I have read Thucydides, and have studied and admired the master-states of the world), I say, I must declare that, for solidity of reasoning, force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication of difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in preference to the General Congress at Philadelphia. I trust it is obvious to your lordships that all attempts to impose servitude upon such men, to establish despotism, over such a mighty continental nation, must be vain, must be fatal.

We shall be forced, ultimately, to retract. Let us retract while we can, not when we must. I say we must necessarily undo these violent, oppressive acts. They Must be repealed. You Will repeal them. I pledge myself for it that you will, in the end, repeal them. I stake my reputation on it. I will consent to be taken for an idiot if they are not finally repealed.

CONCILIATION OR WAR

EDMUND BURKE, IN PARLIAMENT, MARCH 22, 1775

We are called again, as it were by a superior warning voice, to attend to America, and to review the subject with an unusual degree of calmness. Surely, it is an awful subject, or there is none this side the grave. The proposition is peace; not peace hunted through the medium of war, but peace sought in its natural course, in its ordinary haunts, and laid in principles purely pacific. I propose to restore the former unsuspecting confidence of the colonies in the mother-country, and reconcile them each to each. My hold of the colonies is in the close affection which grows from common names, from kindred blood, from similar privileges and equal protection. These are ties which, though light as air, are as strong as links of iron.

Let the colonies always keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government; they will cling and grapple to you, and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it once be understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another; that these two things may exist without any mutual relation; and the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and everything hastens to decay and dissolution.

As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have. The more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience.

Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They may have it from Spain, they may have it from Prussia. But until you become lost to all feelings of your true interest and your national dignity, freedom they can have from none but you. This is the commodity of price, of which you have the monopoly.

This is the true Act of Navigation, which binds to you the commerce of the colonies, and through them secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break that sole bond which originally made, and must still preserve, the unity of the empire.

Do not entertain so weak an imagination as that your registers and your bonds, your affidavits and your sufferances, your cockets and your clearances, are what form the great securities of your commerce. Do not dream that your letters of office, and your instructions, and your suspending clauses, are the things that hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole.

These things do not make your government, dead instruments, passive tools as they are; it is the spirit of the English constitution that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English constitution which, infused, through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member.

Is it not the same virtue which does everything for us here in England? Do you imagine, then, that it is the land tax which raises your revenue? that it is the annual vote in the committee of supply which gives you your army? or that it is the mutiny bill which inspires it with bravery and discipline?

No! surely no! It is the love of the people, it is their attachment to their government from the sense of the deep stake they have in such a glorious institution, which gives you your army and your navy, and infuses into both that liberal obedience without which your army would be a base rabble and your navy nothing but rotten timber.

All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians who have no place among us; a sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine.

But to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles, which in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned have no substantial existence, are, in truth, everything and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation, and glow with zeal to fill our place as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to auspicate all our public proceedings on America with the old warning of the church, Sursum corda![5] We ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us.

By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire, and have made the most extensive and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness, of the human race.

“WAR IS ACTUALLY BEGUN”

BY PATRICK HENRY

(Mr. Henry in the Convention of Delegates of Virginia, March 23, 1775, urges that the colony be immediately put in a state of defense.)

This, sir, is no time for ceremony. The question before the house is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at this time through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country and of an act of disloyalty towards the majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.

Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. And, judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the house? Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received? Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss. Ask yourself how this gracious reception of our petition comports with those warlike preparations which cover our waters and darken our land.

Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation? Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled that force must be called in to win back our love? Let us not deceive ourselves, sir. These are the implements of war and subjugation, the last arguments to which kings resort. I ask, sir, what means this martial array, if its purpose be not to force us to submission? Can the gentlemen assign any other possible motive for it? Has Great Britain any enemy in this quarter of the world, to call for all this accumulation of navies and armies? No, sir, she has none. They are meant for us; they can be meant for no other. They are sent over to bind and rivet upon us those chains which the British ministry have been so long forging.

And what have we to oppose them. Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years. Have we anything new to offer upon the subject? Nothing. We have held the subject up in every light of which it is capable, but it has been all in vain. Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication? What terms shall we find which have not been already exhausted? Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves longer.

Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm that is now coming on. We have petitioned, we have remonstrated, we have supplicated, we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded, and we have been spurned with contempt from the foot of the throne.

In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free, if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending, if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained, we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us!...

They tell us, sir, that we are weak—unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs, and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power.

Three millions of people armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us.

The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged. Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable, and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come!

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry peace, peace, but there is no peace. The war has actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that the gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

EMANCIPATION FROM BRITISH DEPENDENCE

BY PHILIP FRENEAU

(The following note in explanation of proper names, etc., in this poem is copied from Duyckinck’s edition of Freneau.)

Note.—Sir James Wallace, Admiral Graves, and Captain Montague, were British naval officers, employed on our coast. The Viper and Rose were vessels in the service. Lord Dunmore, the last royal governor of Virginia, had recently in April, 1775, removed the public stores from Williamsburg, and, in conjunction with a party of adherents, supported by the naval force on the station, was making war on the province. William Tryon, the last Royal governor of New York, informed of a resolution of the Continental Congress: “That it be recommended to the several provincial assemblies in conventions and councils, or committees of safety, to arrest and secure every person in their respective colonies whose going at large may, in their opinion, endanger the safety of the colony or the liberties of America,” discerning the signs of the times, took refuge on board the Halifax packet in the harbor, and left the city in the middle of October, 1775.

Libera nos, Domine—Deliver us, O Lord,

Not only from British dependence, but also,

From a junto that labor for absolute power,

Whose schemes disappointed have made them look sour;

From the lords of the council, who fight against freedom

Who still follow on where delusion shall lead ’em.

From groups at St. James’s who slight our Petitions,

And fools that are waiting for further submissions;

From a nation whose manners are rough and abrupt,

From scoundrels and rascals whom gold can corrupt.

From pirates sent out by command of the king

To murder and plunder, but never to swing;

From Wallace, and Graves, and Vipers and Roses,

Whom, if Heaven pleases, we’ll give bloody noses.

From the valiant Dunmore, with his crew of banditti

Who plunder Virginians at Williamsburg city,

From hot-headed Montague, mighty to swear,

The little fat man with his pretty white hair.

From bishops in Britain, who butchers are grown,

From slaves that would die for a smile from the throne,

From assemblies that vote against Congress’ proceedings,

(Who now see the fruit of their stupid misleadings).

From Tryon, the mighty, who flies from our city,

And swelled with importance, disdains the committee;

(But since he is pleased to proclaim us his foes,

What the devil care we where the devil he goes.)

From the caitiff, Lord North, who could bind us in chains,

From our noble King Log, with his toothful of brains,

Who dreams, and is certain (when taking a nap)

He has conquered our lands as they lay on his map.

From a kingdom that bullies, and hectors, and swears,

I send up to Heaven my wishes and prayers

That we, disunited, may freemen be still,

And Britain go on—to be damn’d if she will.

IV
THE DECLARATION

THE ORIGIN OF THE DECLARATION[6]

BY SYDNEY GEORGE FISHER

Besides the semi-independent character of their political governments, there were other circumstances which tended to inspire a large part of the colonists with a strong passion for independence, and led them to resist with unusual energy the remodeling plans which England began in 1764.

The sturdy influences of Protestantism and American life had, however, not so great an effect on that large body of people called loyalists, whose numbers have been variously estimated at from one-third to over half the population. They remained loyal to England, and were so far from being inspired with a love of independence that they utterly detested the whole patriot cause and sacrificed their property and lives in the effort to stamp out its principles and put in their place the British empire method of alien control as the best form of government for America.

Patriot parties have existed in other countries without the aid of the particular influences which Burke described. The love of national independence is, in fact, the most difficult passion to eradicate, as the Irish, the Poles, and other broken nationalities bear witness. The desire for independence is natural to all vigorous communities, is generally regarded as more manlike and honorable than dependence, and usually springs up spontaneously whether in Holland, Switzerland or America, in spite of the commercial and conservative influences of loyalism. But, nevertheless, the influences mentioned by Burke, and several that he did not mention, had no doubt considerable effect in creating the patriot party in America and inspiring it with enthusiasm and energy.

The self-confidence aroused in the colonists by their success in subduing the wilderness, felling the vast forests, hunting the wild game and still wilder red men, has often been given as a cause of the Revolution and the American love of independence. Eloquence is easily tempted to enlarge upon such causes, and to describe in romantic language the hunter and the woodsman, the farmer in the fresh soil of primeval forests, the fishermen of the Grand Banks, the merchants and sailors who traded with the whole world in defiance of the British navigation laws, and the crews of the whaling ships that pursued their dangerous game from the equator to the poles.

The American lawyers, according to Burke, were an important cause of the Revolution. They were very numerous in the colonies; law and theories of government were much read and studied, and the people were trained to discussion of political rights as well as of religious doctrine. Burke described in picturesque detail how, in the South, the ruling class lived scattered and remote from one another, maintaining themselves in self-reliant authority on plantations with hundreds of slaves; and slavery, he said, inspired in the white master a fierce love of independence for himself and an undying dread of any form of the bondage which his love of gain had inflicted on a weaker race.

The geographical position of the thirteen contiguous colonies, so situated that they could easily unite and act together, and having a population that was increasing so rapidly that it seemed likely in a few years to exceed the population of England, was possibly a more effective cause of the Revolution than any of those that have been named. The consciousness of possessing such a vast fertile continent, which within a few generations would support more than double the population of little England, furnished a profound encouragement for theories of independence. People in England were well aware of this feeling in the colonies, and Joshua Gee, a popular writer on political economy in 1738, tried to quiet their fears. Some, he said, were objecting that “if we encourage the Plantations they will grow rich and set up for themselves and cast off the English government”; and he went on to show that this fear was groundless because the colonists nearly all lived on the navigable rivers and bays of America, where the British navy could easily reach and subdue them. He also attempted to argue away the advantage of the contiguous situation of the colonies and described them as split up into a dozen or more separate provinces, each with its own governor; and it was inconceivable, he said, that such diverse communities would be able to unite against England.

English statesmen, however, saw the danger of union among the colonies long before the outbreak of the Revolution; and they shrewdly rejected the plan of union of the Albany conference of 1754; and in the Revolution itself a large part of England’s diplomatic and military efforts were directed towards breaking up the easy communication among the colonies.

In modern times England’s colonies have been widely separated from one another. There has been no large and rapidly increasing white population on contiguous territory with ability for union. The dark-skinned population of India is enormous in numbers, but incapable of the united action of the Americans of 1776, and India is not considered a colony but a territory continuously held by overwhelming military force. Instead of a colonial population which threatened in a short time to outnumber her own people, England’s power and population have, in modern times, grown far beyond any power or population in her well-scattered white colonies.

The colonists at the time of the Revolution have often been described as speaking of England as home and regarding the mother-country with no little degree of affection; and while there is no doubt some truth in this, especially as regards the people who were loyalists, yet a very large proportion of the colonists had become totally differentiated from the people of England. This was the inevitable result of having lived for over a hundred years in the American environment. They were no longer Englishmen. They had become completely Americanized. Certain classes kept up their connection with England, and many of the rich planters of the South sent their sons to England to be educated. But a very large part of the colonists, especially in the older settled provinces, like Massachusetts and Virginia, had forgotten England and were another people.

Instead of speaking, as novelists often describe them, in a formal archaic way, using quaint phrases of old English life, the colonists spoke with mannerisms and colloquial slang which were peculiarly American. These peculiarities were ridiculed by Englishmen of the time and formed part of Grant’s famous speech in Parliament, the burden of which appears to have been that the colonists had become entirely different from English people, and Grant is said to have given imitations of what he considered their strange speech and manners. Mrs. Knight, in her Journal of Travel from Boston to New York, had, many years before the Revolution, given specimens of this difference; and the language of the New Englanders which she describes was certainly not like anything in England.

“Law for me—what in the world brings you here at this time of night? I never see a woman on the Rode so Dreadful late in all the days of my versall life. Who are you? Where are you going?”—Mrs. Knight’s Journal, p. 23.

In 1775 some one wrote a set of humorous verses, said to have been the original Yankee Doodle song, to illustrate the colloquial Americanism of the time. “Slapping” was used for “large,” as in the phrase “a slapping stallion.” “Nation” was used for “a great deal,” as in such a phrase as “only a nation louder.” “Tarnal” was used for “very.” “I see” was used for “I saw,” “I come” for “I came,” and “I hooked it off” in place of “I went away.”

Not only did the patriots feel themselves to be quite different from Englishmen, but they had a consciousness of ability and power, the result of having governed themselves so long in their towns, counties, and provinces, and of having carried on a commerce of their own in defiance of the English navigation laws. They felt that they, not Englishmen, had created the country; and they had a resolute intention to develop its future greatness in their own way without the advice of aliens across three thousand miles of ocean.

This high confidence, which was a conspicuous motive in the patriot party, was always ridiculed by the loyalists as mere bumptiousness and conceit. It was difficult for a loyalist to understand how any one could seriously put himself in opposition to the British empire or want any form of government except the British constitution. But the patriot estimate of their own ability was by no means an exaggeration. They could be overcome, of course, as the Boer republics and other peoples have been overcome, by the superior numbers or wealth of Great Britain. But the history of the Revolution disclosed qualities in which the Americans notoriously excelled Europeans as well as the Anglo-Saxon stock in England from which they were derived. They were of keener practical intelligence, more promptness in action, more untiring energy, more originality in enterprise, better courage and endurance, and more natural military skill among the rank and file. These distinctively American qualities, we now call them, seem to have been much more in evidence among the patriot party than among the loyalists.

Every circumstance of their past and every consideration of their present convinced the patriot of the infinite pleasure and value of home rule and they had codified their opinions into a political philosophy which not only justified their semi-independence and disregard of acts of Parliament, but would also justify them in breaking off from England, at the first opportunity and becoming absolutely independent. They had gathered this philosophy from the works of certain European writers—Grotius, Puffendorf, Locke, Burlamaqui, Beccaria, Montesquieu, and others—who had applied to politics and government the doctrines of religious liberty and the right of private judgment which had been developed by the Reformation. Being such extreme Protestants, and having carried so far the religious ideas of the Reformation, the colonists naturally accepted in their fullest meaning the political principles of the Reformation. If we are looking for profound influences in the Revolution, it would be difficult to find any that were stronger than two of the writers just mentioned, Locke and Burlamaqui, whose books had a vast effect in the break-up of the British empire which we are about to record.

Beginning with Grotius, who was born in 1582, and ending with Montesquieu, who died in 1755, the writers mentioned covered a period of about two hundred years of political investigation, thought and experience. In fact, they covered the period since the Reformation. They represented the effect of the Reformation on political thought. They represented also all those nations whose opinions on such subjects were worth anything. Grotius was a Dutchman, Puffendorf a German, Locke an Englishman, Burlamaqui an Italian Swiss, and Montesquieu a Frenchman.

Hooker, who lived from 1553 to 1600, and whom Locke cites so freely, might be included in the number, and that would make the period quite two hundred years. Hooker, in his “Ecclesiastical Polity,” declared very emphatically that governments could not be legitimate unless they rested on the consent of the governed; and this principle forms the foundation of Locke’s famous essays.

There were, of course, other minor writers; and the colonists relied upon them all; but seldom troubled themselves to read the works of the earlier ones, or to read Hutchinson, Clarke and other followers of that school, because Locke, Burlamaqui, and Beccaria had summarized them all and brought them down to date. To this day any one going to the Philadelphia Library, and asking for No. 77, can take in his hands the identical, well-worn volume of Burlamaqui which delegates to the Congress and many an unsettled Philadelphian read with earnest, anxious minds. It was among the first books that the library had obtained; and perhaps the most important and effective book it has ever owned.

The rebellious colonists also read Locke’s “Two Treatises on Government” with much profit and satisfaction to themselves. Locke was an extreme Whig, an English revolutionist of the school of 1688. Before that great event, he had been unendurable to the royalists, who were in power, and had been obliged to spend a large part of his time on the continent. In the preface of his “Two Treatises,” he says that they will show how entirely legitimate is the title of William III to the throne, because it is established on the consent of the people. That is the burden of his whole argument—the consent of the people as the only true foundation of government. That principle sank so deep into the minds of the patriot colonists that it was the foundation of all their political thought, and became an essentially American idea.

Beccaria, who, like Burlamaqui, was an Italian, also exercised great influence on the colonists. His famous book, “Crimes and Punishments,” was also a short, concise, but very eloquent volume. It caused a great stir in the world. The translation circulated in America had added to it a characteristic commentary by Voltaire. Beccaria, though not writing directly on the subject of liberty, necessarily included that subject, because he dealt with the administration of the criminal law. His plea for more humane and just punishments, and for punishments more in proportion to the offense, found a ready sympathy among the Americans, who had already revolted in disgust from the brutality and extravagant cruelty of the English criminal code.

But Beccaria also stated most beautifully and clearly the essential principles of liberty. His foundation doctrine, that “every act of authority of one man over another for which there is not absolute necessity is tyrannical,” made a most profound impression in America. He laid down also the principle that “in every human society there is an effort continually tending to confer on one part the highest power and happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and misery.” That sentence became the life-long guide of many Americans. It became a constituent part of the minds of Jefferson and Hamilton. It can be seen as the foundation, the connecting strand, running all through the essays of the Federalist. It was the inspiration of the “checks and balances” in the national Constitution. It can be traced in American thought and legislation down to the present time.

Burlamaqui’s book, devoted exclusively to the subject of liberty and independence, is still one of the best expositions of the true doctrines of natural law, or the rights of man. At the time of the Revolution these rights of man were often spoken of as our rights as men, which is a very descriptive phrase, because the essence of those rights is political manhood, honorable self-reliance as opposed to degenerate dependence.

Burlamaqui belonged to a Protestant family that had once lived at Lucca, Italy; but had been compelled, like the family of Turretini, and many others, to take refuge in Switzerland. He became a professor at Geneva, which gave him the reputation of a learned man. He also became a counselor of state and was noted for his practical sagacity. He had intended to write a great work in many volumes on the subject to which he had devoted so much of his life, “The Principles of Natural Law,” as it was then called. Ill health preventing such a huge task, he prepared a single volume, which he said was only for beginners and students, because it dealt with the bare elements of the science in the simplest and plainest language.

This little book was translated into English in 1748, and contained only three hundred pages; but in that small space of large, clear type, Burlamaqui compressed everything that the patriot colonists wanted to know. He was remarkably clear and concise, and gave the Americans the qualities of the Italian mind at its best. He aroused them by his modern glowing thought and his enthusiasm for progress and liberty. His handy little volume was vastly more effective and far-reaching than would have been the blunderbuss he had intended to load to the muzzle.

If we examine the volumes of Burlamaqui’s predecessors, Grotius, Puffendorf, and the others, we find their statements about natural law and our rights as men rather brief, vague, and general, as is usual with the old writers on any science. Burlamaqui brought them down to date, developed their principles, and swept in the results of all the thought and criticism since their day.

The term natural law, which all these writers used, has long since gone out of fashion. They used it because, inspired by the Reformation, they were struggling to get away from the arbitrary system, the artificial scholasticism, the despotism of the middle ages. They were seeking to obtain for law and government a foundation which should grow out of the nature of things, the common facts of life that everybody understood. They sought a system that, being natural, would become established and eternal like nature; a system that would displace that thing of the middle ages which they detested, and called “arbitrary institution.”

Let us, they said, contemplate for a time man as he is in himself, the natural man, his wants and requirements.

“The only way,” said Burlamaqui, “to attain to the knowledge of that natural law is to consider attentively the nature and constitution of man, the relations he has to the beings that surround him, and the states from thence resulting. In fact, the very term of natural law and the notion we have given of it, show that the principles of this science must be taken from the very nature and constitution of man.”

Men naturally, he said, draw together to form societies for mutual protection and advantage. Their natural state is a state of union and society, and these societies are merely for the common advantage of all of the members.

This was certainly a very simple proposition, but it had required centuries to bring men’s minds back to it; and it was not altogether safe to put forth because it implied that each community existed for the benefit of itself, for the benefit of its members, and not for the benefit of a prince or another nation, or for the church, or for an empire.

It was a principle quickly seized upon by the Americans as soon as their difficulties began in 1764. In their early debates and discussions we hear a great deal about a “state of nature,” which at first seems rather meaningless to us. But it was merely their attempt to apply to themselves the fundamental principles of the Reformation. Were the colonies by the exactions and remodeling of the mother-country thrown into that “state of nature,” where they could reorganize society afresh, on the basis of their own advantage? How much severity or how much oppression or dissatisfaction would bring about this state of nature? Was there any positive rule by which you could decide? Patrick Henry, who was always very eloquent on the subject, declared that the boundary had been passed; that the colonies were in a state of nature.

Any one who is at all familiar with the trend of thought for the last hundred years can readily see how closely this idea of going back to natural causes and first conceptions for the discovery of political principles is allied to every kind of modern progress; to the modern study of natural history, the study of the plants and animals in their natural environment, instead of by preconceived scholastic theories; the study of the human body by dissection instead of by supposition; the study of heat, light, electricity, the soil, the rocks, the ocean, the stars by actual observation, without regard to what the Scriptures and learned commentators had to say.

A large part of the American colonists were very far advanced in all the ideas of the Reformation. Burlamaqui’s book, applying to politics and government, these free and wonderful principles, came to a large number of them as the most soul-stirring and mind-arousing message they had ever heard. It has all become trite enough to us; but to them it was fresh and marvelous. Their imaginations seized on it with the indomitable energy and passion which the climate inspired, and some who breathed the air of Virginia and Massachusetts were on fire with enthusiasm.

“This state of nature,” argued Burlamaqui, “is not the work of man, but established by divine institution.”

“Natural society is a state of equality and liberty; a state in which all men enjoy the same prerogatives, and an entire independence on any other power but God. For every man is naturally master of himself, and equal to his fellow-creatures so long as he does not subject himself to another person’s authority by a particular convention.”

Here we find coupled with liberty that word equality which played such a tremendous part in history for the succeeding hundred years. And we must bear in mind that what the people of that time meant by it was political equality, equality of rights, equality before the law and the government; and not equality of ability, talents, fortunes, or gifts, as some have fancied.

Burlamaqui not only found liberty, independence, and equality growing out of nature itself; but he argued that all this was part of the divine plan, the great order of nature and the universe. Indeed, that was what he and his Reformation predecessors had set out to discover, to unravel the system of humanity, to see if there really was a system that could be gathered from the actual plain facts; and to see also if there was a unity and completeness in this system.

“The human understanding,” he says, “is naturally right, and has within itself a strength sufficient to arrive at the knowledge of truth, and to distinguish it from error.” That he announces as the fundamental principle of his book, “the hinge whereon the whole system of humanity turns,” and it was simply his way of restating the great doctrine of the Reformation, the right of private judgment.

But he goes on to enlarge on it in a way particularly pleasing to the patriot colonists, for he says we have this power to decide for ourselves, “especially in things wherein our respective duties are concerned.”

“Yes,” said the colonists, “we have often thought that we were the best judges of all our own affairs.”

“Those who feel,” said Franklin, in his examination before Parliament, “can best judge.”

The daring Burlamaqui went on to show that liberty instead of being, as some supposed, a privilege to be graciously accorded, was in reality a universal right, inherent in the nature of things.

Then appears that idea common to the great leaders of thought in that age, that man’s true purpose in the world is the pursuit of happiness. To this pursuit, they said, every human being has a complete right. It was part of liberty; a necessary consequence of liberty. This principle of the right to pursue happiness, which is merely another way of stating the right of self-development, has played as great a part in subsequent history as equality. It is one of the foundation principles of the Declaration of Independence. It is given there as the ground-work of the right of revolution, the right of a people to throw off or destroy a power which interferes with this great pursuit, “and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its power in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”

It has been interpreted in all sorts of ways—as the right to improve your condition, to develop your talents, to grow rich, or to rise into the class of society above you. It is now in its broadest meaning so axiomatic in this country that Americans can hardly realize that it was ever disputed.

But it was, and still is, disputed in England and on the continent. Even so liberal an Englishman as Kingsley resented with indignation the charge that he favored the aspiration of the lower classes to change their condition. Once a cobbler, remain a cobbler, and be content to be a good cobbler. In other words, the righteousness which he so loudly professed was intended to exalt certain fortunate individuals, and not to advance society.

This desire and pursuit of happiness being part of nature, or part of the system of Providence, and as essential to every man and as inseparable from him as his reason, it should be freely allowed him, and not repressed. This, Burlamaqui declares, is a great principle, “the key of the human system,” opening to vast consequences for the world.

The consequences have certainly been vaster than he dreamed of. Millions of people now live their daily life in the sunshine of this doctrine. Millions have fled to us from Europe to seek its protection. Not only the whole American system of laws, but whole philosophies and codes of conduct have grown up under it. The abolitionists appealed to it, and freed six millions of slaves. The transcendental philosophy of New England, that extreme and beautiful attempt to develop conscience, nobility, and character from within; that call of the great writers like Lowell to every humble individual to stand by his own personality, fear it not, advance it by its own lines; even our education, the elective system of our colleges—all these things have followed under that “pursuit of happiness,” which the patriot colonists seized upon so gladly in 1765 and enshrined in their Declaration of Independence in 1776.

They found in the principles of natural law how government, civil society, or “sovereignty,” as those writers were apt to call it, was to be built up and regulated. Civil government did not destroy natural rights and the pursuit of happiness. On the contrary, it was intended to give those rights greater security and a fresh force and efficiency. That was the purpose men had in coming together to form a civil society for the benefit of all; that was the reason, as Burlamaqui put it, that “the sovereign became the depositary, as it were, of the will and strength of each individual.”

This seemed very satisfactory to some of the colonists. You choose your sovereign, your government, for yourself, and make it your mere depositary or agent. Then as to the nature of the government, the right to govern, they were very much pleased to find that the only right there was of this sort was the right of each community to govern itself. Government by outside power was absolutely indefensible, because the notion that there was a divine right in one set of people to rule over others was exploded nonsense, and the assertion that mere might or superior power necessarily gave such right was equally indefensible. There remained only one plausible reason, and that was that superior excellence, wisdom, or ability might possibly give such right.

As to this “superior excellence” theory, if you admitted it you denied man’s inherent right to liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness; you denied his moral accountability and responsibility; you crippled his independent development, his self-development, his individual action; in a word, you destroyed the whole natural system.

Because a man is inferior to another is no reason why he should surrender his liberty, his accountability, his chance for self-development, to the superior. We do not surrender our property to the next man who is richer or an abler business manager. Our inferiority does not give him a right over us. On the contrary, the inferiority of the inferior man is an additional reason why he should cling to all those rights of nature which have been given to him, that he may have wherewithal to raise himself, and be alone accountable for himself. Or, as Burlamaqui briefly summarized it:

“The knowledge I have of the excellency of a superior does not alone afford me a motive sufficient to subject myself to him, and to induce me to abandon my own will in order to take his for my rule; ... and without any reproach of conscience I may sincerely judge that the intelligent principle within me is sufficient to direct my conduct.”

Only the people, Burlamaqui explained, have inherent inalienable rights; and they alone can confer the privilege of commanding. It had been supposed that the sovereign alone had rights, and the people only privileges. But here were Burlamaqui, Puffendorf, Montesquieu, Locke, and fully half the American colonists, undertaking to reverse this order and announcing that the people alone had rights, and the sovereign merely privileges.

These principles the Americans afterwards translated in their documents by the phrase, “a just government exists only by consent of the governed.” All men being born politically equal, the colonies, as Dickinson and Hamilton explained, are equally with Great Britain entitled to happiness, equally entitled to govern themselves, equally entitled to freedom and independence.

It is curious to see the cautious way in which some of the colonists applied these doctrines by mixing them up with loyalty arguments. This is very noticeable in the pamphlets written by Alexander Hamilton. He gives the stock arguments for redress of grievances, freedom from internal taxation, government by the king alone, and will not admit that he is anything but a loyal subject. At the same time there runs through all he says an undercurrent of strong rebellion which leads to his ultimate object. “The power,” he says, “which one society bestows upon any man or body of men can never extend beyond its own limits.” This he lays down as a universal truth, independently of charters and the wonderful British Constitution. It applied to the whole world. Parliament was elected by the people of England, therefore it had no authority outside of the British isle. That British isle and America were separate societies.

“Nature,” said Hamilton, “has distributed an equality of rights to every man.” How then, he asked, can the English people have any rights over life, liberty, or property in America? They can have authority only among themselves in England. We are separated from Great Britain, Hamilton argued, not only by the ocean, by geography, but because we have no part or share in governing her. Therefore, as we have no share in governing her, she, by the law of nature, can have no share in governing us; she is a separate society.

The British, he said, were attempting to involve in the idea of a colony the idea of political slavery, and against that a man must fight with his life. To be controlled by the superior wisdom of another nation was ridiculous, unworthy of the consideration of manhood; and at this point he used that sentence which has so often been quoted—“Deplorable is the condition of that people who have nothing else than the wisdom and justice of another to depend upon.”

Charters and documents, he declared, must yield to natural laws and our rights as men.

“The sacred rights of man are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of divinity itself and can never be erased by mortal power.”

The Declaration of Independence was an epitome of these doctrines of natural law applied to the colonies. The Declaration of Independence originated in these doctrines, and not in the mind of Jefferson, as so many people have absurdly supposed. In order to see how directly the Declaration was an outcome of these teachings we have only to read its opening paragraphs:

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

By understanding the writings of Burlamaqui, Locke, and Beccaria, which the colonists were studying so intently, we know the origin of the Declaration, and need not flounder in the dark, as so many have done, wondering where it came from, or how it was that Jefferson could have invented it. Being unwilling to take the trouble of examining carefully the influences which preceded the Declaration, historical students are sometimes surprised to find a document like the Virginia Bill of Rights or the supposed Mecklenburg resolutions, issued before the Declaration and yet containing the same principles. They instantly jump to the conclusion that here is the real origin and author of the Declaration, and from this Jefferson stole his ideas.

Jefferson merely drafted the Declaration. Neither he, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, nor Livingston, who composed the committee which was responsible for it, ever claimed any originality for its principles. They were merely stating principles which were already familiar to the people, which had been debated over and over again in Congress; which were so familiar in fact, that they stated them rather carelessly and took too much for granted. It would have been better, instead of saying, “all men are created equal,” to have said that all men are created politically equal, which was what they meant, and what every one at that time understood. By leaving out the word “politically” they gave an opportunity to a generation unfamiliar with the doctrines of natural law to suppose that they meant that all men are created, or should be made, equal in conditions, opportunities or talents.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

BY JOHN D. LONG

Recall the quaint and homely city of Philadelphia, the gloom that hung over it from the terrible responsibility of the step there taken, the modest hall still standing and baptized as the Cradle of Liberty. On its tower swung the bell which yet survives with its legend,—“Proclaim liberty throughout all the world to all the inhabitants thereof.” That day it rang out a proclamation of liberty that will indeed echo round the world and in the ears of all the inhabitants thereof long after the bell itself shall have crumbled into dust.

Hancock is in the president’s chair; before him sit the half-hundred delegates who at that time represent America. Among the names it is remarkable how many there are that have since been famous in our annals. The committee appointed to draft the declarations are Jefferson, youngest and tallest; John Adams; Sherman, shoemaker; Franklin, printer; and Robert R. Livingston. If the patriot, Samuel Adams, at the sunrise of Lexington could say,—“Oh, what a glorious morning!” how well might he have renewed in the more brilliant noontime of July 4, 1776, the same prophetic words!

There is nothing in the prophecies of old more striking and impressive than the words of John Adams, who declared the event would be celebrated by succeeding generations as a great anniversary festival and commemorated as a day of deliverance, from one end of the continent to the other; that through all the gloom he could see the light; that the end was worth all the means and that posterity would triumph in the transaction. I am not of those who overrate the past. I know that the men of 1776 had the common weaknesses and shortcomings of humanity. I read the Declaration of Independence with no feeling of awe; and yet if I were called upon to select from the history of the world any crisis grander, loftier, purer, more heroic, I should not know where to turn.

It seems simple enough to-day, but it was something else in that day. The men who signed the Declaration knew not but they were signing warrants for their own ignominious execution on the gibbet. The bloody victims of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 were still a warning to rebels; and the gory holocaust of Culloden was fresh in the memory. But it was not only the personal risk; it was risking the homes, the commerce, the lives, the property, the honor, the future destiny of three million innocent people,—men, women, and children. It was defying on behalf of a straggling chain of colonies clinging to the sea-board, the most imperial power of the world. It was, more than all, like Columbus sailing into awful uncertainty of untried space, casting off from an established and familiar form of government and politics, drifting away to unknown methods, and upon the dangerous and yawning chaos of democratic institutions, flying from ills they had to those they knew not of, and perhaps laying the way for a miserable and bloody catastrophe in anarchy and riot.

There are times when ordinary men are borne by the tide of an occasion to crests of grandeur in conduct and action. Such a time, such an occasion, was that of the Declaration. While the signers were picked men, none the less true is it that their extraordinary fame is due not more to their merits than to the crisis at which they were at the helm and to the great popular instinct which they obeyed and expressed. And why do we commemorate with such veneration and display this special epoch and event in our history? Why do we repeat the words our fathers spoke or wrote? Why cherish their names, when our civilization is better than theirs and when we have reached in science, art, education, religion, politics, in every phase of human development, even in morals, a higher level?

It is because we recognize that in their beginnings the eternal elements of truth and right and justice were conspicuous. To those eternal verities we pay our tribute, and not to their surroundings, except so far as we let the form stand for the spirit, the man for the idea, the event for the purpose. And it is also because we can do no better work than to perpetuate virtue in the citizen by keeping always fresh in the popular mind the great heroic deeds and times of our history. The valuable thing in the past is not the man or the events,—which are both always ordinary and which under the enchantment of distance and the pride of descent, we love to surround with exaggerated glory,—it is rather in the sentiment for which the man and the event stand. The ideal is alone substantial and alone survives.

THE SIGNING OF THE DECLARATION

BY GEORGE LIPPARD

It is a cloudless summer day; a clear blue sky arches and expands above a quaint edifice rising among the giant trees in the center of a wide city. That edifice is built of plain red brick, with heavy window frames, and a massive hall door.

Such is the State House of Philadelphia in the year of our Lord 1776.

In yonder wooden steeple, which crowns the summit of that red brick State House, stands an old man with snow-white hair and sunburnt face. He is clad in humble attire, yet his eye gleams as it is fixed on the ponderous outline of the bell suspended in the steeple there. By his side, gazing into his sunburnt face in wonder, stands a flaxen-haired boy, with laughing eyes of summer blue. The old man ponders for a moment upon the strange words written upon the bell, then, gathering the boy in his arms, he speaks: “Look here, my child; will you do this old man a kindness? Then hasten down the stairs, and wait in the hall below till a man gives you a message for me; when he gives you that word, run out into the street and shout it up to me. Do you mind?” The boy sprang from the old man’s arms and threaded his way down the dark stairs.

Many minutes passed. The old bell-keeper was alone. “Ah!” groaned the old man, “he has forgotten me.” As the word was upon his lips a merry, ringing laugh broke on his ear. And there, among the crowd on the pavement, stood the blue-eyed boy, clapping his tiny hands while the breeze blew his flaxen hair all about his face, and, swelling his little chest, he raised himself on tiptoe, and shouted the single word, “Ring!”

Do you see that old man’s eye fire? Do you see that arm so suddenly bared to the shoulder? Do you see that withered hand grasping the iron tongue of the bell? That old man is young again. His veins are filling with a new life. Backward and forward, with sturdy strokes, he swings the tongue. The bell peals out; the crowds in the street hear it, and burst forth in one long shout. Old Delaware hears it, and gives it back on the cheers of her thousand sailors. The city hears it, and starts up from desk and workshop, as if an earthquake had spoken.

Under that very bell, pealing out at noonday, in an old hall, fifty-six traders, farmers and mechanics had assembled to break the shackles of the world. The committee, who had been out all night, are about to appear. At last the door opens, and they advance to the front. The parchment is laid on the table. Shall it be signed or not? Then ensues a high and stormy debate. Then the faint-hearted cringe in corners. Then Thomas Jefferson speaks his few bold words, and John Adams pours out his whole soul.

Still there is a doubt; and that pale-faced man, rising in one corner, speaks out something about “axes, scaffolds, and a gibbet.” A tall, slender man rises, and his dark eye burns, while his words ring through the halls: “Gibbets! They may stretch our necks on every scaffold in the land. They may turn every rock into a gibbet, every tree into a gallows; and yet the words written on that parchment can never die. They may pour out our blood on a thousand altars, and yet, from every drop that dyes the axe, or drips on the sawdust of the block, a new martyr to freedom will spring into existence. What! are there shrinking hearts and faltering voices here, when the very dead upon our battle-fields arise and call upon us to sign that parchment, or be accursed forever?

“Sign! if the next moment the gibbet’s rope is around your neck. Sign! if the next moment this hall rings with the echo of the falling axe. Sign! by all your hopes in life or death, as husbands, as fathers, as men! Sign your names to that parchment.

“Yes! were my soul trembling on the verge of eternity; were this voice choking in the last struggle, I would still, with the last impulse of that soul, with the last gasp of that voice, implore you to remember this truth: God has given America to the free. Yes! as I sink down in the gloomy shadow of the grave, with my last breath I would beg of you sign that parchment.”

SUPPOSED SPEECH OF JOHN ADAMS

BY DANIEL WEBSTER

Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote. It is true, indeed, that in the beginning we aimed not at independence. But there is a Divinity which shapes our ends. The injustice of England has driven us to arms; and, blinded to her own interest and our good she has obstinately persisted, till independence is now within our grasp. We have but to reach forth to it, and it is ours. Why, then, should we defer the Declaration? Is any man so weak as now to hope for a reconciliation with England, which shall leave neither safety to the country and its liberties, nor safety to his life and his own honor? Are you not, sir, who sit in that chair, is not he, our venerable colleague near you, are you not both already the proscribed and predestined objects of punishment and of vengeance? Cut off from all hope of royal clemency, what are you, what can you be, while the power of England remains, but outlaws?

If we postpone independence, do we mean to carry on or give up the war? Do we mean to submit to the measures of Parliament, Boston Port-Bill and all? Do we mean to submit, and consent that we ourselves shall be ground to powder, and our country and its rights, trodden down in the dust? I know we do not mean to submit. We never shall submit. Do we mean to violate that most solemn obligation ever entered into by men, that plighting before God, of our sacred honor to Washington, when, putting him forth to incur the dangers of war, as well as the political hazards of the times, we promised to adhere to him, in every extremity, with our fortunes and our lives? I know there is not a man here, who would not rather see a general conflagration sweep over the land, or an earthquake sink it, than one jot or tittle of that plighted faith fall to the ground. For myself, having, twelve months ago, in this place, moved you, that George Washington be appointed commander of the forces raised, or to be raised, for defense of American liberty, may my right hand forget her cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I hesitate or waver in the support I give him.

The war, then, must go on. We must fight it through. And if the war must go on, why put off longer the Declaration of Independence? That measure will strengthen us. It will give us character abroad. The nations will then treat with us, which they never can do while we acknowledge ourselves subjects in arms against our sovereign. Nay, I maintain that England herself will sooner treat for peace with us on the footing of independence than consent, by repealing her Acts, to acknowledge that her whole conduct toward us has been a course of injustice and oppression. Her pride will be less wounded by submitting to that course of things which now predestinates our independence than by yielding the points in controversy to her rebellious subjects. The former she would regard as the result of fortune; the latter she would feel as her own deep disgrace. Why, then, why, then, sir, do we not as soon as possible change this from a civil to a national war? And, since we must fight it through, why not put ourselves in a state to enjoy all the benefits of victory, if we gain the victory?

If we fail, it can be no worse for us. But we shall not fail. The cause will raise up armies; the cause will create navies. The people, the people, if we are true to them, will carry us, and will carry themselves, gloriously through the struggle. I care not how fickle other people have been found. I know the people of these Colonies, and I know that resistance to British aggression is deep and settled in their hearts, and cannot be eradicated. Every Colony, indeed, has expressed its willingness to follow, if we but take the lead.

Sir, the Declaration will inspire the people with increased courage. Instead of a long and bloody war for restoration of privileges, for redress of grievances, for chartered immunities, held under a British King, set before them the gloriousness of entire independence, and it will breathe into them anew the breath of life. Read this Declaration at the head of the army; every sword will be drawn from its scabbard, and the solemn vow uttered to maintain it, or to perish on the bed of honor. Publish it from the pulpit; religion will approve it, and the love of religious liberty will cling round it, resolved to stand with it, or fall with it. Send it to the public halls; proclaim it there; let them hear it who heard the first roar of the enemy’s cannon; let them see it who saw their brothers and their sons fall on the field of Bunker Hill, and in the streets of Lexington and Concord, and the very walls will cry out in its support.

Sir, I know the uncertainty of human affairs, but I see, I see clearly, through this day’s business. You and I, indeed, may rue it. We may not live to the time when this Declaration shall be made good. We may die; die, colonists; die, slaves; die, it may be, ignominiously and on the scaffold. Be it so; be it so! If it be the pleasure of heaven that my country shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready at the appointed hour of sacrifice, come when that hour may. But, while I do live, let me have a country, or at least, the hope of a country, and that a free country.

But whatever may be our fate, be assured, be assured that this Declaration will stand. It may cost treasure, and it may cost blood, but it will stand, and it will richly compensate for both. Through the thick gloom of the present, I see the brightness of the future, as the sun in heaven. We shall make this a glorious, an immortal day. When we are in our graves, our children will honor it. They will celebrate it with thanksgiving, with festivity, with bonfires and illuminations. On its annual return, they will shed tears, copious, gushing tears, not of subjection and slavery, not of agony and distress, but of exultation, of gratitude and of joy. Sir, before God, I believe the hour is come. My judgment approves this measure, and my whole heart is in it. All that I have, and all that I am, and all that I hope, in this life, I am now ready here to stake upon it. And I leave off as I began, that, live or die, survive or perish, I am for the Declaration. It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment, Independence now, and INDEPENDENCE FOREVER!

THE LIBERTY BELL

BY J. T. HEADLEY

On July fourth, 1776, the representatives of the American people gathered at the State House in Philadelphia to take final action upon the Declaration of Independence, which had been under discussion for three days.

It was soon known throughout the city; and in the morning, before Congress assembled, the streets were filled with excited men, some gathered in groups engaged in eager discussion, and others moving toward the State House. All business was forgotten in the momentous crisis which the country had now reached. No sooner had the members taken their seats than the multitude gathered in a dense mass around the entrance. The bell-man mounted to the belfry, to be ready to proclaim the joyful tidings of freedom as soon as the final vote was passed. A bright-eyed boy was stationed below to give the signal.

Around the bell, brought from England, had been cast, more than twenty years before, the prophetic motto: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.” Although its loud clang had often sounded over the city, the proclamation engraved on its iron lip had never yet been spoken aloud.

It was expected that the final vote would be taken without delay; but hour after hour wore on, and no report came from the mysterious hall where the fate of a continent was in suspense. The multitude grew impatient. The old man leaned over the railing, straining his eyes downward, till his heart misgave him, and hope yielded to fear. But at length, about two o’clock the door of the hall opened, and a voice exclaimed, “It has passed!”

The word leaped like lightning from lip to lip, followed by huzzas that shook the building. The boy-sentinel turned to the belfry, clapped his hands, and shouted, “Ring! ring!” The desponding bell-man, electrified into life by the joyful news, seized the iron tongue and hurled it backward and forward with a clang that startled every heart in Philadelphia like a bugle blast.

“Clang! Clang!” the bell of Liberty resounded on, higher and clearer and more joyous, blending in its deep and thrilling vibration, and proclaiming in loud and long accents over all the land the motto that encircled it.

INDEPENDENCE BELL, PHILADELPHIA

INSCRIPTION, “PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT THE LAND TO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF.” JULY 4, 1776.

ANONYMOUS

There was tumult in the city,

In the quaint Old Quaker town,

And the streets were rife with people

Pacing restless up and down,—

People gathering at corners,

Where they whispered each to each,

And the sweat stood on their temples

With the earnestness of speech.

As the bleak Atlantic currents

Lash the wild Newfoundland shore,

So they beat against the State House,

So they surged against the door;

And the mingling of their voices

Made a harmony profound,

Till the quiet street of Chestnut

Was all turbulent with sound.

“Will they do it?” “Dare they do it?”

“Who is speaking?” “What’s the news?”

“What of Adams?” “What of Sherman?”

“Oh, God grant they won’t refuse!”

“Make some way, there!” “Let me nearer!”

“I am stifling!” “Stifle, then!

When a nation’s life’s at hazard,

We’ve no time to think of men!”

So they beat against the portal,

Man and woman, maid and child;

And the July sun in heaven

On the scene looked down and smiled:

The same sun that saw the Spartan

Shed his patriot blood in vain,

Now beheld the soul of freedom,

All unconquered, rise again.

See! See! The dense crowd quivers

Through all its lengthy line,

As the boy beside the portal

Looks forth to give the sign!

With his little hands uplifted,

Breezes dallying with his hair,

Hark! with deep, clear intonation,

Breaks his young voice on the air.

Hushed the people’s swelling murmur,

List the boy’s exultant cry!

“Ring!” he shouts, “Ring! Grandpa,

Ring! oh, ring for Liberty!”

Quickly at the given signal

The bell-man lifts his hand,

Forth he sends the good news, making

Iron music through the land.

How they shouted! What rejoicing!

How the old bell shook the air,

Till the clang of freedom ruffled

The calmly gliding Delaware!

How the bonfires and the torches

Lighted up the night’s repose,

And from the flames, like fabled Phœnix,

Our glorious Liberty arose!

That old State House bell is silent,

Hushed is now its clamorous tongue;

But the spirit it awakened

Still is living,—ever young;

And when we greet the smiling sunlight

On the Fourth of each July,

We will ne’er forget the bell-man

Who, betwixt the earth and sky,

Rung out, loudly, “INDEPENDENCE;”

Which, please God, shall never die!

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

In Congress July 4, 1776

(The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America.)

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having, in direct object, the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world:—

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in the legislature; a right inestimable to them, and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have returned to the people at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of, and superior to, the civil power.

He has combined, with others, to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock trial, from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province, establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and altering, fundamentally, the powers of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is, at this time, transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms; our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts made by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them, by the ties of our common kindred, to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace, friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved; and that, as Free and Independent States, they have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which Independent States may of right do. And, for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

John Hancock

(New Hampshire) Josiah Bartlett, Wm. Whipple, Matthew Thornton.

(Massachusetts Bay) Saml. Adams, John Adams, Robt. Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry.

(Rhode Island) Step. Hopkins, William Ellery.

(Connecticut) Roger Sherman, Sam’el Huntington, Wm. Williams, Oliver Wolcott.

(New York) Wm. Floyd, Phil. Livingston, Franc. Lewis, Lewis Morris.

(New Jersey) Richd. Stockton, Jno. Witherspoon, Frans. Hopkinson, John Hart, Abra. Clark.

(Pennsylvania) Robt. Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benj. Franklin, John Morton, Geo. Clymer, Jas. Smith, Geo. Taylor, James Wilson, Geo. Ross.

(Delaware) Cæsar Rodney, Geo. Reed, Tho. M’Kean.

(Maryland) Samuel Chase, Wm. Paca, Thos. Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton.

(Virginia) George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Th. Jefferson, Benja. Harrison, Thos. Nelson, jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton.

(North Carolina) Wm. Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn.

(South Carolina) Edward Rutledge, Thos. Heyward, Junr., Thomas Lynch, Junr., Arthur Middleton.

(Georgia) Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, Geo. Walton.

INDEPENDENCE EXPLAINED

BY SAMUEL ADAMS

(Delivered in Philadelphia, August 1, 1776, twenty-seven days after the Declaration of Independence.)

My countrymen, from the day on which an accommodation takes place between England and America on any other terms than as independent States, I shall date the ruin of this country. We are now, to the astonishment of the world, three millions of souls united in one common cause. This day we are called on to give a glorious example of which the wisest and best of men were rejoiced to view only in speculation. This day presents the world with the most august spectacle that its annals ever unfolded,—millions of freemen voluntarily and deliberately forming themselves into a society for their common defense and common happiness. Immortal spirits of Hampden, Locke, and Sidney! will it not add to your benevolent joys to behold your posterity rising to the dignity of men—evincing to the world the reality and expediency of your systems, and in the actual enjoyment of that equal liberty which you were happy when on earth in delineating and recommending to mankind?

Other nations have received their laws from conquerors; some are indebted for a constitution to the sufferings of their ancestors through revolving centuries; the people of this country alone have formally and deliberately chosen a government for themselves, and, with open, uninfluenced consent, bound themselves into a social compact. And, fellow countrymen, if ever it was granted to mortals to trace the designs of Providence and interpret its manifestations in favor of their cause, we may, with humility of soul, cry out, NOT UNTO US, NOT UNTO US, BUT TO THY NAME BE THE PRAISE. The confusion of the devices of our enemies, and the rage of the elements against them, have done almost as much towards our success as either our counsels or our arms.

The time at which this attempt in our liberties was made,—when we were ripened into maturity, had acquired a knowledge of war, and were free from the incursions of intestine enemies,—the gradual advances of our oppressors, enabling us to prepare for our defense, the unusual fertility of our lands, the clemency of the seasons, the success which at first attended our feeble arms, producing unanimity among our friends and compelling our internal foes to acquiescence,—these are all strong and palpable marks and assurances that Providence IS YET GRACIOUS UNTO ZION, THAT IT WILL TURN AWAY THE CAPTIVITY OF JACOB! Driven from every other corner of the earth, freedom of thought and the right of private judgment in matters of conscience direct their course to this happy country as their last asylum. Let us cherish the noble guests! Let us shelter them under the wings of universal toleration! Be this the seat of UNBOUNDED RELIGIOUS FREEDOM! She will bring with her in her train, Industry, Wisdom, and Commerce.

Our union is now complete. You have in the first armies sufficient to repel the whole force of your enemies. The hearts of your soldiers beat high with the spirit of freedom. Go on, then, in your generous enterprise, with gratitude to heaven for past success, and confidence of it in the future! For my own part, I ask no greater blessing than to share with you the common danger and the common glory. If I have a wish dearer to my soul than that my ashes may be mingled with those of a Warren and a Montgomery, it is, THAT THESE AMERICAN STATES MAY NEVER CEASE TO BE FREE AND INDEPENDENT!

THE DIGNITY OF OUR NATION’S FOUNDERS

BY WILLIAM M. EVARTS

The Declaration of Independence was, when it occurred, a capital transaction in human affairs; as such it has kept its place in history; as such it will maintain itself while human interest in human institutions shall endure. The scene and the actors, for their profound impression on the world, at the time and ever since, have owed nothing to dramatic effects, nothing to epical exaggerations. To the eye there was nothing wonderful or vast or splendid or pathetic in the movement or the display. Imagination or art can give no sensible grace or decoration to the persons, the place, or the performance which made up the business of that day. The worth and force that belong to the agents and the action rest wholly on the wisdom, the courage and the faith that formed and executed the great design, and the potency and permanence of its operation upon the affairs of the world which followed as foreseen and legitimate consequences.

The dignity of the act is the deliberate, circumspect, open and serene performance by these men, in the clear light of day and by a concurrent purpose, of a civic duty which embraced the greatest hazards to themselves and to all the people from whom they held this disputed discretion but which to their sober judgments promised benefits to that people and to their posterity, exceeding these hazards and commensurate with its own fitness. The question of their conduct is to be measured by the actual weight and pressure of the manifold considerations which surrounded the subject before them and by the abundant evidence that they comprehended their vastness and variety. By a voluntary and responsible choice they willed to do what was done and what without their will would not have been done.

Thus estimated, the illustrious act covers all who participated in it with its own renown and makes them forever conspicuous among men, as it is forever famous among events. And thus the signers of our Declaration of Independence “wrote their names where all nations should behold them and all time should not efface them.” It was “in the course of human events” intrusted to them to determine whether the fullness of time had come when a nation should be born in a day. They declared the independence of a new nation in the sense in which men declare emancipation or declare war,—the declaration created what was declared.

Famous always among men are the founders of states and fortunate above all others in such fame are these, our fathers, whose combined wisdom and courage began the great structure of our national existence and laid sure the foundations of liberty and justice on which it rests. Fortunate first in the clearness of their title and in the world’s acceptance of their rightful claim. Fortunate next in the enduring magnitude of the State they founded and the beneficence of its protection of the vast interests of human life and happiness which have here had their home. Fortunate again in the admiring imitations of their work which the institutions of the most powerful and most advanced nations more and more exhibit. Fortunate last of all in the full demonstration of our later time that their work is adequate to withstand the most disastrous storms of human fortunes and survive unwrecked, unshaken and unharmed.

THE CHARACTER OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

BY GEORGE BANCROFT

This immortal State paper, which for its composer was the aurora of enduring fame, was “the genuine effusion of the soul of the country at that time,” the revelation of its mind, when, in its youth, its enthusiasm, its sublime confronting of danger, it rose to the highest creative powers of which man is capable. The bill of rights which it promulgates is of rights that are older than human institutions, and spring from the eternal justice that is anterior to the State.

Two political theories divided the world: one founded the Commonwealth on the reason of State, the policy of expediency; the other on the immutable principles of morals. The new Republic, as it took its place among the powers of the world, proclaimed its faith in the truth and reality and unchangeableness of freedom, virtue and right.

The heart of Jefferson, in writing the Declaration, and of Congress in adopting it, beat for all humanity; the assertion of right was made for the entire world of mankind, and all coming generations, without any exception whatever; for the proposition which admits of exceptions can never be self-evident. As it was put forth in the name of the ascendant people of that time, it was sure to make the circuit of the world, passing everywhere through the despotic countries of Europe; and the astonished nations, as they read that all men are created equal, started out of their lethargy, like those who have been exiles from childhood, when they suddenly hear the dimly remembered accents of their mother tongue.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

BY HENRY T. RANDALL

To the Patriots, the Declaration gave strength and courage. It gave them a definite purpose,—and a name and object commensurate with the cost. When it was formally read by the magistracy from the halls of justice and in the public marts by the officers of the army at the head of their divisions, by the clergy from their pulpits, its grandeur impressed the popular imagination. The American people pronounced it a fit instrument, clothed in fitting words. The public enthusiasm burst forth, sometimes in gay and festive, and sometimes in solemn and religious, observances—as the Cavalier or Puritan taste predominated.

In the Southern and Middle cities and villages, the riotous populace tore down the images of monarchs and Colonial governors and dragged them with ropes round their necks through the streets—cannon thundered, bonfires blazed—the opulent feasted, drank toasts, and joined in hilarious celebrations. In New England, the grimmer joy manifested itself in prayers and sermons, and in religious rites.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

BY JOHN QUINCY ADAMS

The Declaration of Independence! The interest which in that paper has survived the occasion upon which it was issued; the interest which is of every age and every clime; the interest which quickens with the lapse of years, spreads as it grows old, and brightens as it recedes, is in the principles which it proclaims. It was the first solemn declaration, by a nation, of the only legitimate foundation of civil government. It was the corner stone of a new fabric, destined to cover the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. It swept away all the rubbish of accumulated centuries of servitude. It announced in practical form to the world the transcendent truth of the inalienable sovereignty of the people. It proved that the social compact was no figment of the imagination, but a real, solid, and sacred bond of the social union. From the day of this declaration the people of North America were no longer the fragment of a distant empire, imploring justice and mercy from an inexorable master in another hemisphere. They were no longer children, appealing in vain to the sympathies of a heartless mother; no longer subjects, leaning upon the shattered columns of royal promises, and invoking the faith of parchment to secure their rights. They were a nation, asserting as of right, and maintaining by war, its own existence. A nation was born in a day.

“How many ages hence

Shall this, their lofty scene, be acted o’er

In states unborn, and accents yet unknown?”

It will be acted o’er, but it never can be repeated. It stands, and must forever stand, alone; a beacon on the summit of the mountain, to which all the inhabitants of the earth may turn their eyes for a genial and saving light, till time shall be lost in eternity, and this globe itself dissolves, nor leave a wreck behind. It stands forever, a light of admonition to the rulers of men, a light of salvation and redemption to the oppressed. So long as this planet shall be inhabited by human beings, so long as man shall be of social nature, so long as government shall be necessary to the great moral purposes of society, so long as it shall be abused to the purposes of oppression—so long shall this Declaration hold out to the sovereign and to the subject the extent and boundaries of their respective rights and duties, founded in the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE[7]

BY TUDOR JENKS

“What is the most dramatic incident in American history and why?”

The emphatic and determining word in this question is the adverb “most.” To answer conclusively, the method must be comparative; it is not enough to stir the emotions of patriotism, to excite the imagination of the poetic soul, to depict with skill bygone scenes so that they live again. The intellectual faculties must be satisfied that the chosen incident is truly an incident, that it is dramatic, and that it is more dramatic than all others in our history.

Definition seems but a poor prelude to the drama, but as the defender of the Constitution began his reply to Hayne by asking for the reading of the resolution before the Senate, it may be permissible to refer to the dictionary for guidance, as the storm-tossed mariner of Webster’s metaphor glanced at the sun to rectify his course.

“Incident,” as used in the given question, can mean only “something which takes place in connection with an event or series of events of greater importance” (Century Dictionary), since any broader meaning of the word would be too inclusive, and might permit the naming of a whole epoch.

“Dramatic” (by the same author) is “characterized by the force and animation in act or expression appropriate to the drama.” Force and animation may of course be psychical or physical; but if psychical they must find expression in some form appreciable by the senses, else they are not dramatic.

Bearing these guiding principles in mind, let us see in what moment of American history we shall find that incident so connected with greater events, and so expressed as to be “The most dramatic”—that incident toward which all preceding events led, and from which subsequent events have sprung. Let us then select as expressing that incident the most forceful and animated action that would be appropriate to dramatic representation.

The periods of American history are the traditionary, that of discovery and exploration, that of colonization. These three are preparatory, and “American” only in a geographical sense. Then come the period of revolution, that of nationality and rebellion and finally the present—which may be called the period of expansion, since it marks for good or for evil the birth of the nation as a world power.

These periods group naturally into two great classes: I. America as an appanage of Europe. II. America as independent. The transition from one existence to the other took place in an instant of time. Before the Declaration of Independence our nation did not exist; once that document was ratified, the United States was created a nation.

Here, then, is the dividing of the ways; here the act of divine creation of which our forefathers were but the human instruments. This is the one universally celebrated and commemorated moment in our history—the birth of “a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The great Civil war was but the test whether that nation could endure; so said Lincoln, whom we are learning to know as our greatest statesman. All our subsequent history is but the voyage of the ship of state by the chart then drafted.

Toward the Declaration converge all previous lines of historical development; from the Declaration diverge all the lines along which patriotic statesmanship must hereafter guide the national future. Deviations from these converging and diverging paths have been but blind trails to be painfully retraced.

Here, then, let us repeat, is the focus of our national life.

In what act, in what incident shall we find this moment of time expressed most dramatically?

The streets of Philadelphia were thronged with citizens awaiting news of the action of Congress. Within the old State House were the councilors of the colonies—the group of contemporaries whom Gladstone declared unequaled in the history of the world. One by one the names of the representatives were signed to that document which was to commit them to death as rebels or to immortality as patriots.

As the last name was affixed, a little boy ran from the doorway out into the street, and, tossing his arms above his head, gave forth the tidings of a nation’s birth in the words:

“Ring! Ring! RING!”

and then the Liberty Bell echoed the gospel, as foreordained in its inscription: “Proclaim liberty to the land: to all the inhabitants thereof.”

That is the most dramatic incident in American history.

Whether we view its inception or its outcome, it stands unrivaled. We shall forever “celebrate it with thanksgiving” so long as the nation endures.

This incident responds to every test. It is the action of a single person actuated by intense emotion; he, a child, was a type of the fact he expressed; through his puny action began the independent life of a nation to whose future none dares prescribe limits.

Discovery and colonization were inevitable, and are common to all lands. Civil wars are expressions rather than causes of great crises. Civil and commercial progress are inevitable. But the Declaration of Independence was an act of conscious choice.

No other incident in our history was so momentous, none so dramatic and comprehensive of past and future.

Columbus was an unconscious instrument in opening a new world; the Spanish, French, Dutch, and English explorers were all working toward a consummation none foresaw; the founders of colonies had their ideals, but all have been swallowed up in our national development. The Revolution alone looked both backward and forward, and the fathers of the republic gave us the law of our national being.

The birth-cry of the nation came from the lips of the child who cried aloud in the streets:

“Ring! Ring! RING!”

THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN CRITICISM[8]

BY MOSES COIT TYLER

(Professor of History in Cornell University.)

I

It can hardly be doubted that some hindrance to a right estimate of the Declaration of Independence is occasioned by either of two opposite conditions of mind, both of which are often to be met with among us; on the one hand, a condition of hereditary, uncritical awe and worship of the American Revolution, and of that state paper as its absolutely perfect and glorious expression; on the other hand, a later condition of cultivated distrust of the Declaration, as a piece of writing lifted up into inordinate renown by the passionate and heroic circumstances of its origin, and ever since then extolled beyond reason by the blind energy of patriotic enthusiasm. Turning from the former state of mind, which obviously calls for no further comment, we may note, as a partial illustration of the latter, that American confidence in the supreme intellectual merit of this all-famous document received a serious wound some forty years ago from the hand of Rufus Choate, when, with a courage greater than would now be required for such an act, he characterized it as made up of “glittering and sounding generalities of natural right.” What the great advocate then so unhesitatingly suggested, many a thoughtful American since then has at least suspected—that our great proclamation, as a piece of political literature, cannot stand the test of modern analysis; that it belongs to the immense class of over-praised productions; that it is, in fact, a stately patchwork of sweeping propositions of somewhat doubtful validity; that it has long imposed upon mankind by the well-known effectiveness of verbal glitter and sound; that, at the best, it is an example of florid political declamation belonging to the sophomoric period of our national life, a period which, as we flatter ourselves, we have now outgrown.

Nevertheless, it is to be noted that whatever authority the Declaration of Independence has acquired in the world, has been due to no lack of criticism, either at the time of its first appearance, or since then; a fact which seems to tell in favor of its essential worth and strength. From the date of its original publication down to the present moment, it has been attacked again and again, either in anger, or in contempt, by friends as well as by enemies of the American Revolution, by liberals in politics as well as by conservatives. It has been censured for its substance, it has been censured for its form, for its misstatements of fact, for its fallacies in reasoning, for its audacious novelties and paradoxes, for its total lack of all novelty, for its repetition of old and threadbare statements, even for its downright plagiarisms; finally, for its grandiose and vaporing style.

II

One of the earliest and ablest of its assailants was Thomas Hutchinson, the last civil governor of the colony of Massachusetts, who, being stranded in London by the political storm which had blown him thither, published there, in the autumn of 1776, his “Strictures upon the Declaration of the Congress at Philadelphia,” wherein, with an unsurpassed knowledge of the origin of the controversy, and with an unsurpassed acumen in the discussion of it, he traverses the entire document, paragraph by paragraph, for the purpose of showing that its allegations in support of American Independence are “false and frivolous.”

A better written, and, upon the whole, a more plausible and a more powerful arraignment of the great Declaration was the celebrated pamphlet by Sir John Dalrymple, “The Rights of Great Britain Asserted against the Claims of America: Being an Answer to the Declaration of the General Congress,”—a pamphlet scattered broadcast over the world at such a rate that at least eight editions of it were published during the last three or four months of the year, 1776. Here, again, the manifesto of Congress is subjected to a searching examination, in order to prove that “the facts are either willfully or ignorantly misrepresented, and the arguments deduced from premises that have no foundation in truth.” It is doubtful if any disinterested student of history, any competent judge of reasoning, will now deny to this pamphlet the praise of making out a very strong case against the historical accuracy and the logical soundness of many parts of the Declaration of Independence.

Undoubtedly, the force of such censures is for us much broken by the fact that they proceeded from men who were themselves partisans in the Revolutionary controversy, and bitterly hostile to the whole movement which the Declaration was intended to justify. Such is not the case, however, with the leading modern English critics of the same document, who while blaming in severe terms the policy of the British Government toward the Thirteen Colonies, have also found much to abate from the confidence due to this official announcement of the reasons for our secession from the empire. For example, Earl Russell, after frankly saying that the great disruption proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence was a result which Great Britain had “used every means most fitted to bring about,” such as “vacillation in council, harshness in language, feebleness in execution, disregard of American sympathies and affections,” also pointed out that “the truth of this memorable Declaration” was “warped” by “one singular defect,” namely, its exclusive and excessive arraignment of George the Third, “as a single and despotic tyrant,” much like Philip the Second to the people of the Netherlands.

This temperate criticism from an able and a liberal English statesman of the present century may be said to touch the very core of the problem as to the historic justice of our great indictment of the last King of America; and there is deep significance in the fact that this is the very criticism upon the document, which, as John Adams tells us, he himself had in mind when it was first submitted to him in committee, and even, when, shortly afterward, he advocated its adoption by Congress. After mentioning certain things in it with which he was delighted, he adds:

“There were other expressions which I would not have inserted if I had drawn it up—particularly that which called the king tyrant. I thought this too personal; for I never believed George to be a tyrant in disposition and in nature. I always believed him to be deceived by his courtiers on both sides of the Atlantic, and in his official capacity only cruel. I thought the expression too passionate, and too much like scolding, for so grave and solemn a document; but, as Franklin and Sherman were to inspect it afterwards I thought it would not become me to strike it out. I consented to report it.”

A more minute and a more poignant criticism of the Declaration of Independence has been made in recent years by still another English writer of liberal tendencies, who, however, in his capacity as critic, seems here to labor under the disadvantage of having transferred to the document which he undertakes to judge much of the extreme dislike which he has for the man who wrote it, whom, indeed, he regards as a sophist, as a demagogue, as quite capable of inveracity in speech, and as bearing some resemblance to Robespierre “in his feline nature, his malignant egotism, and his intense suspiciousness, as well as in his bloody-minded, yet possibly sincere, philanthropy.” In the opinion of Prof. Goldwin Smith, our great national manifesto is written “in a highly rhetorical strain; it opens with sweeping aphorisms about the natural rights of man, at which political science now smiles, and which ... might seem strange when framed for slave-holding communities by a publicist who himself held slaves”; while, in his specifications of fact, it “is not more scrupulously truthful than are the general utterances” of the statesman who was its scribe. Its charges that the several offensive acts of the king, besides “evincing a design to reduce the colonists under absolute despotism,” “all had as their direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny,” are simply “propositions which history cannot accept.” Moreover, the Declaration “blinks the fact that many of the acts, styled steps of usurpation, were measures of repression, which, however unwise or excessive, had been provoked by popular outrage. No government could allow its officers to be assaulted and their houses sacked, its loyal lieges to be tarred and feathered, or the property of merchants sailing under its flag to be thrown by lawless hands into the sea.” Even “the preposterous violence and the manifest insincerity of the suppressed clause” against slavery and the slave-trade “are enough to create suspicion as to the spirit in which the whole document was framed.”

III

Finally, as has been already intimated, not even among Americans themselves has the Declaration of Independence been permitted to pass on into the enjoyment of its superb renown, without much critical disparagement at the hands of statesmen and historians. No doubt Calhoun had its preamble in mind when he declared that “nothing can be more unfounded and false” than “the prevalent opinion that all men are born free and equal”; for “it rests upon the assumption of a fact which is contrary to universal observation.” Of course, all Americans who have shared to any extent in Calhoun’s doctrines respecting human society could hardly fail to agree with him in regarding as fallacious and worthless those general propositions in the Declaration which seem to constitute its logical starting point, as well as its ultimate defense.

Perhaps, however, the most frequent form of disparagement to which Jefferson’s great state paper has been subjected among us is that which would minimize his merit in composing it, by denying to it the merit of originality. For example, Richard Henry Lee sneered at it as a thing “copied from Locke’s Treatise on Government.” The author of a life of Jefferson, published in the year of Jefferson’s retirement from the presidency, suggests that the credit of having composed the Declaration of Independence “has been perhaps more generally, than truly, given by the public” to that great man. Charles Campbell, the historian of Virginia, intimates that some expressions in the document were taken without acknowledgment from Aphra Behn’s tragi-comedy, “The Widow-Ranter, or the History of Bacon in Virginia.” John Stockton Littell describes the Declaration of Independence as “that enduring monument at once of patriotism, and of genius and skill in the art of appropriation”—asserting that “for the sentiments and much of the language” of it, Jefferson was indebted to Chief Justice Brayton’s charge to the grand jury of Charleston, delivered in April, 1776, as well as to the Declaration of Independence said to have been adopted by some citizens of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, in May, 1775. Even the latest and most critical editor of the writings of Jefferson calls attention to the fact that a glance at the Declaration of Rights, as adopted by Virginia on the 12th of June, 1776, “would seem to indicate the source from which Jefferson derived a most important and popular part” of his famous production. By no one, however, has the charge of a lack of originality been pressed with so much decisiveness as by John Adams, who took evident pleasure in speaking of it as a document in which were merely “recapitulated” previous and well-known statements of American rights and wrongs, and who, as late as in the year 1822, deliberately wrote:

“There is not an idea in it but what had been hackneyed in Congress for two years before. The substance of it is contained in the declaration of rights and the violation of those rights, in the Journals of Congress, in 1774. Indeed, the essence of it is contained in a pamphlet, voted and printed by the town of Boston, before the first Congress met, composed by James Otis, as I suppose, in one of his lucid intervals, and pruned and polished by Samuel Adams.”

IV

Perhaps nowhere in our literature would it be possible to find a criticism brought forward by a really able man against any piece of writing less applicable to the case, and of less force and value, than is this particular criticism by John Adams and others, as to the lack of originality in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, for such a paper as Jefferson was commissioned to write, the one quality which it could not properly have had, the one quality which would have been fatal to its acceptance either by the American Congress or by the American people—is originality. They were then at the culmination of a tremendous controversy over alleged grievances of the most serious kind—a controversy that had been steadily raging for at least twelve years. In the course of that long dispute, every phase of it, whether as to abstract right or constitutional privilege or personal procedure, had been presented in almost every conceivable form of speech. At last, they had resolved, in view of all this experience, no longer to prosecute the controversy as members of the empire; they had resolved to revolt, and, casting off forever their ancient fealty to the British crown, to separate from the empire, and to establish themselves as a new nation among the nations of the earth. In this emergency as it happened, Jefferson was called upon to put into form a suitable statement of the chief considerations which prompted them to this great act of revolution, and which, as they believed, justified it. What, then, was Jefferson to do? Was he to regard himself as a mere literary essayist, set to produce before the world a sort of prize-dissertation—a calm, analytic, judicial treatise on history and politics with a particular application to Anglo-American affairs—one essential merit of which would be its originality as a contribution to historical and political literature? Was he not, rather, to regard himself, as, for the time being, the very mouthpiece and prophet of the people whom he represented, and as such required to bring together and to set in order, in their name, not what was new, but what was old; to gather up into his own soul, as much as possible, whatever was then also in their souls, their very thoughts and passions, their ideas of constitutional law, their interpretations of fact, their opinions as to men and as to events in all that ugly quarrel, their notions of justice, of civic dignity, of human rights; finally, their memories of wrongs which seemed to them intolerable, especially of wrongs inflicted upon them during those twelve years by the hands of insolent and brutal men, in the name of the king, and by his apparent command?

Moreover, as the nature of the task laid upon him made it necessary that he should thus state, as the reasons for their intended act, those very considerations both as to fact and as to opinion which had actually operated upon their minds, so did it require him to do so, to some extent, in the very language which the people themselves, in their more formal and deliberate utterances, had all along been using. In the development of political life in England and America, there had already been created a vast literature of constitutional progress—a literature common to both portions of the English race, pervaded by its own stately traditions, and reverberating certain great phrases which formed, as one may say, almost the vernacular of English justice, and of English aspiration for a free, manly and orderly political life. In this vernacular the Declaration of Independence was written. The phraseology thus characteristic of it is the very phraseology of the champions of constitutional expansion, of civic dignity and progress, within the English race ever since Magna Charta; of the great state papers of English freedom in the seventeenth century, particularly the Petition of Right in 1629, and the Bill of Rights in 1789; of the great English Charters for colonization in America; of the great English exponents of legal and political progress—Sir Edward Coke, John Milton, Sir Philip Sidney, John Locke; finally, of the great American exponents of political liberty, and of the chief representative bodies, whether local or general, which had convened in America from the time of Stamp Act Congress until that of the Congress which resolved upon our independence. To say, therefore, that the official declaration of that resolve is a paper made up of the very opinions, beliefs, unbeliefs, the very sentiments, prejudices, passions, even the errors in judgment and the personal misconstructions—if they were such—which then actually impelled the American people to that mighty act, and that all these are expressed in the very phrases which they had been accustomed to use, is to pay to that state-paper the highest tribute as to its fitness for the purpose for which it was framed.

Of much of this, also, Jefferson himself seems to have been conscious; and perhaps never does he rise before us with more dignity, with more truth, than when, late in his lifetime, hurt by the captious and jangling words of disparagement then recently put into writing by his old comrade, to the effect that the Declaration of Independence “contained no new ideas, that it is a commonplace compilation, its sentences hackneyed in Congress for two years before, and its essence contained in Otis’s pamphlet,” Jefferson quietly remarked that perhaps these statements might “all be true: of that I am not to be the judge.... Whether I had gathered my ideas from reading or reflection, I do not know. I know only that I turned to neither book nor pamphlet while writing it. I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether and to offer no sentiment which had ever been expressed before.”

Before passing from this phase of the subject, however, it should be added that, while the Declaration of Independence lacks originality in the sense just indicated, in another and perhaps in a higher sense, it possesses originality—it is individualized by the character and by the genius of its author. Jefferson gathered up the thoughts and emotions and even the characteristic phrases of the people for whom he wrote, and these he perfectly incorporated with what was already in his mind, and then to the music of his own keen, rich, passionate, and enkindling style, he mustered them into that stately and triumphant procession wherein, as some of us still think, they will go marching on to the world’s end.

There were then in Congress several other men who could have written the Declaration of Independence, and written it well—notably Franklin, either of the two Adamses, Richard Henry Lee, William Livingston, and, best of all, but for his own opposition to the measure, John Dickinson; but had any one of these other men written the Declaration of Independence, while it would have contained, doubtless, nearly the same topics and nearly the same great formulas of political statement, it would yet have been a wholly different composition from this of Jefferson’s. No one at all familiar with his other writings, as well as with the writings of his chief contemporaries, could ever have a moment’s doubt, even if the fact were not already notorious, that this document was by Jefferson. He put into it something that was his own, and that no one else could have put there. He put himself into it—his own genius, his own moral force, his faith in God, his faith in ideas, his love of innovation, his passion for progress, his invincible enthusiasm, his intolerance of prescription, of injustice, of cruelty; his sympathy, his clarity of vision, his affluence of diction, his power to fling out great phrases which will long fire and cheer the souls of men struggling against political unrighteousness.

And herein lies its essential originality, perhaps the most precious, and, indeed, almost the only originality ever attaching to any great literary product that is representative of its time. He made for himself no improper claim, therefore, when he directed that upon the granite obelisk at his grave should be carved the words: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence.”

V

If the Declaration of Independence is now to be fairly judged by us, it must be judged with reference to what it was intended to be, namely, an impassioned manifesto of one party, and that the weaker party, in a violent race-quarrel; of a party resolved, at last, upon the extremity of revolution, and already menaced by the inconceivable disaster of being defeated in the very act of armed rebellion against the mightiest military power on earth. This manifesto, then, is not to be censured because, being avowedly a statement of his own side of the quarrel, it does not also contain a moderate and judicial statement of the opposite side; or because, being necessarily partisan in method, it is likewise both partisan and vehement in tone; or because it bristles with accusations against the enemy so fierce and so unqualified as now to seem in some respects overdrawn; or because it resounds with certain great aphorisms about the natural rights of man, at which, indeed, political science cannot now smile, except to its own discomfiture and shame—aphorisms which are likely to abide in this world as the chief source and inspiration of heroic enterprises among men for self-deliverance from oppression.

Taking into account, therefore, as we are bound to do, the circumstances of its origin, and especially its purpose as a solemn and piercing appeal to mankind on behalf of a small and weak nation against the alleged injustice and cruelty of a great and powerful one, it still remains our duty to inquire whether, as has been asserted in our time, history must set aside either of the two central charges embodied in the Declaration of Independence.

The first of these charges affirms that the several acts complained of by the colonists evinced “a design to reduce them under absolute despotism,” and had as their “direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny” over the American people. Was this, indeed, a groundless charge, in the sense intended by the words “despotism” and “tyranny”—that is, in the sense commonly given to those words in the usage of the English-speaking race? According to that usage, it was not an Oriental despotism that was meant, nor a Greek tyranny, nor a Roman, nor a Spanish. The sort of despot, the sort of tyrant, whom the English people, ever since the time of King John and especially during the period of the Stuarts, had been accustomed to look for and to guard against, was the sort of tyrant or despot that could be evolved out of the conditions of English political life. Furthermore, he was not by them expected to appear among them at the outset in the fully developed shape of a Philip or an Alva in the Netherlands. They were able to recognize him, they were prepared to resist him, in the earliest and most incipient stage of his being—at the moment, in fact, when he should make his first attempt to gain all power over his people, by assuming the single power to take their property without their consent. Hence it was, as Edmund Burke pointed out in the House of Commons only a few weeks before the American Revolution entered upon its military phase, that:

“The great contests for freedom ... were from the earliest times chiefly upon the question of taxing. Most of the contests in the ancient commonwealths turned primarily on the right of election of magistrates, or on the balance among the several orders of the state. The question of money was not with them so immediate. But in England it was otherwise. On this point of taxes the ablest pens and most eloquent tongues have been exercised, the greatest spirits have acted and suffered.... They took infinite pains to inculcate, as a fundamental principle, that in all monarchies the people must in effect, themselves, mediately or immediately, possess the power of granting their own money, or no shadow of liberty could subsist. The colonies draw from you, as with their life-blood, these ideas and principles. Their love of liberty, as with you, fixed and attached on this specific point of taxing. Liberty might be safe or might be endangered in twenty other particulars without their being much pleased or alarmed. Here they felt its pulse, and as they found that beat, they thought themselves sick or sound.”

Accordingly, the meaning which the English race on both sides of the Atlantic were accustomed to attach to the words “tyranny” and “despotism,” was a meaning to some degree ideal; it was a meaning drawn from the extraordinary political sagacity with which the race is endowed, from their extraordinary sensitiveness as to the use of the taxing-power in government, from their instinctive perception of the commanding place of the taxing-power among all the other forms of power in the state, from their perfect assurance that he who holds the purse with the power to fill it and to empty it, holds the key of the situation—can maintain an army of his own, can rule without consulting Parliament, can silence criticism, can crush opposition, can strip his subjects of every vestige of political life; in other words, he can make slaves of them, he can make a despot and a tyrant of himself. Therefore, the system which in the end might develop into results so palpably tyrannic and despotic, they bluntly called a tyranny and a despotism in the beginning. To say, therefore, that the Declaration of Independence did the same, is to say that it spoke good English. Of course, history will be ready to set aside the charge thus made in language not all liable to be misunderstood, just so soon as history is ready to set aside the common opinion that the several acts of the British government, from 1764 to 1776, for laying and enforcing taxation in America, did evince a somewhat particular and systematic design to take away some portion of the property of the American people without their consent.

The second of the two great charges contained in the Declaration of Independence, while intimating that some share in the blame is due to the British Parliament and to the British people, yet fastens upon the king himself as the one person chiefly responsible for the scheme of American tyranny therein set forth, and culminates in the frank description of him as “a prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant.” Is this accusation of George the Third now to be set aside as unhistoric? Was that king, or was he not, chiefly responsible for the American policy of the British government between the years 1764 and 1776? If he was so, then the historic soundness of the most important portion of the Declaration of Independence is vindicated.

Fortunately, this question can be answered without hesitation, and in a few words; and for these few words, an American writer of to-day, conscious of his own bias of nationality, will rightly prefer to cite such words as have been uttered upon the subject by the ablest English historians of our time. Upon their statements alone it must be concluded that George the Third ascended his throne with the fixed purpose of resuming to the crown many of those powers which, by the constitution of England, did not then belong to it, and that in this purpose, at least during the first twenty-five years of his reign, he substantially succeeded—himself determining what should be the policy of each administration, what opinions his ministers should advocate in Parliament, and what measures Parliament itself should adopt. Says Sir Erskine May:

“The king desired to undertake personally the chief administration of public affairs, to direct the policy of his ministers, and himself to distribute the patronage of the crown. He was ambitious not only to reign, but to govern. Strong as were the ministers, the king was resolved to wrest all power from their hands, and to exercise it himself. But what was this in effect but to assert that the king should be his own minister?... The king’s tactics were fraught with danger, as well to the crown itself as to the constitutional liberties of the people.”

Already prior to the year 1778, according to Lecky, the king had “laboriously built up” in England a “system of personal government”; and it was because he was unwilling to have this system disturbed that he then refused, “in defiance of the most earnest representations of his own minister and of the most eminent politicians of every party ... to send for the greatest of living statesmen at the moment when the empire appeared to be in the very agonies of dissolution.... Either Chatham or Rockingham should have insisted that the policy of the country should be directed by its responsible ministers and not dictated by an irresponsible sovereign.”

This refusal of the king to pursue the course which was called for by the constitution, and which would have taken the control of the policy of the government out of his hands, was, according to the same great historian, an act “the most criminal in the whole reign of George the Third; ... as criminal as any of those acts which led Charles the First to the scaffold.”

Even so early as the year 1768, according to John Richard Green,

“George the Third had at last reached his aim.... In the early days of the ministry” (which began in that year) “his influence was felt to be predominant. In its later and more disastrous days it was supreme; for Lord North, who became the head of the ministry on Grafton’s retirement in 1770, was the mere mouthpiece of the king. ‘Not only did he direct the minister,’ a careful observer tells us, ‘in all important matters of foreign and domestic policy, but he instructed him as to the management of debates in Parliament, suggested what motions should be made or opposed, and how measures should be carried. He reserved for himself all the patronage, he arranged the whole cast of the administration, settled the relative place and pretentions of ministers of state, law officers, and members of the household, nominated and promoted the English and Scotch judges, appointed and translated bishops and deans, and dispensed other preferments in the church. He disposed of military governments, regiments, and commissions, and himself ordered the marching of troops. He gave and refused titles, honors, and pensions.’ All this immense patronage was steadily used for the creation of a party in both houses of Parliament attached to the king himself.... George, was, in fact, sole minister during the fifteen years which followed; and the shame of the darkest hour of English history lies wholly at his door.”

Surely, until these tremendous verdicts of English history shall be set aside, there need be no anxiety in any quarter as to the historic soundness of the two great accusations which together make up the principal portion of the Declaration of Independence. In the presence of these verdicts also, even the passion, the intensity of language, in which those accusations are uttered, seem to find a perfect justification. Indeed, in the light of the most recent and most unprejudiced expert testimony, the whole document, both in its substance and in its form, seems to have been the logical response of a nation of brave men to the great words of the greatest of English statesmen, as spoken in the House of Commons precisely ten years before:

“This kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the colonies. Sir, I rejoice that America has resisted. Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of the rest.”

VI

Thus, ever since its first announcement to the world, and down almost to the present moment, has the Declaration of Independence been tested by criticism of every possible kind—by criticism intended and expected to be destructive. Apparently, however, all this criticism has failed to accomplish its object.

It is proper for us to remember, also, that what we call criticism is not the only valid test of the genuineness and worth of any piece of writing of great practical interest to mankind; there is, in addition, the test of actual use and service, in direct contact with the common sense and the moral sense of large masses of men, under various conditions, and for a long period. Probably no writing which is not essentially sound and true has ever survived this test.

Neither from this test has the great Declaration any need to shrink. As to the immediate use for which it was sent forth—that of rallying and uniting the friends of the Revolution, and bracing them for their great task—its effectiveness was so great and so obvious that it has never been denied. During the century and a quarter since the Revolution, its influence on the political character and the political conduct of the American people has been great beyond calculation. For example, after we had achieved our own national deliverance, and had advanced into that enormous and somewhat corrupting material prosperity which followed the adoption of the constitution and the development of the cotton-interest and the expansion of the Republic into a transcontinental power, we fell under an appalling temptation—the temptation to forget, or to repudiate, or to refuse to apply to the case of our human brethren in bondage, the principles which we had once proclaimed as the basis of every rightful government. The prodigious service rendered to us in this awful moral emergency by the Declaration of Independence, was, that its public repetition, at least once every year, in the hearing of vast throngs of the American people in every portion of the Republic, kept constantly before our minds, in a form of almost religious sanctity, those few great ideas as to the dignity of human nature, and the sacredness of personality, and the indestructible rights of man as mere man, with which it had so gloriously identified the beginnings of our national existence. It did at last become very hard for us to listen each year to the preamble of the Declaration and still remain the owners and users and catchers of slaves; still harder, to accept the doctrine that the righteousness and prosperity of slavery was to be accepted as the dominant policy of the nation. The logic of Calhoun was as flawless as usual, when he concluded that the chief obstruction in the way of his system was the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. Had it not been for the inviolable sacredness given by it to those sweeping aphorisms about the natural rights of man, it may be doubted whether Calhoun might not have won over an immense majority of the American people to the support of his compact and plausible scheme for making slavery the basis of the Republic. It was the preamble of the Declaration of Independence which elected Lincoln, which sent forth the Emancipation Proclamation, which gave victory to Grant, which ratified the Thirteenth Amendment.

We shall not here attempt to delineate the influence of this state paper upon mankind in general. Of course, the emergence of the American Republic as an imposing world-power is a phenomenon which has now for many years attracted the attention of the human race. Surely, no slight effect must have resulted from the fact that, among all civilized peoples, the one American document best known is the Declaration of Independence, and that thus the spectacle of so vast and beneficent a political success has been everywhere associated with the assertion of the natural rights of man. “The doctrines it contained,” says Buckle, “were not merely welcomed by a majority of the French nation, but even the government itself was unable to withstand the general feeling. Its effect in hastening the approach of the French Revolution ... was indeed most remarkable.” Elsewhere, also, in many lands, among many peoples, it has been cited again and again as an inspiration to political courage, as a model for political conduct; and if, as the brilliant historian just alluded to has affirmed, “that noble Declaration ... ought to be hung up in the nursery of every king, and blazoned on the porch of every royal palace,” it is because it has become the classic statement of political truths which must at last abolish kings altogether, or else teach them to identify their existence with the dignity and happiness of human nature.

V
THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

BY JOSIAH QUINCY

When we speak of the glory of our fathers, we mean not that vulgar renown to be attained by physical strength; nor yet that higher fame, to be acquired by intellectual power. Both often exist without lofty thought, pure intent, or generous purpose. The glory which we celebrate was strictly of a moral and religious character: righteous as to its ends; just as to its means.

The American Revolution had its origin neither in ambition, nor avarice, nor envy, nor in any gross passion; but in the nature and relation of things, and in the thence-resulting necessity of separation from the parent state. Its progress was limited by that necessity. Our fathers displayed great strength and great moderation of purpose. In difficult times they conducted it with wisdom; in doubtful times, with firmness; in perilous times, with courage; under oppressive trials, erect; amidst temptations, unseduced; in the dark hour of danger, fearless; in the bright hour of prosperity, faithful.

It was not the instant feeling and pressure of despotism that roused them to resist, but the principle on which that arm was extended. They could have paid the impositions of the British government, had they been increased a thousandfold; but payment acknowledged right, and they spurned the consequences of that acknowledgment. But, above all, they realized that those burdens, though light in themselves, would to coming ages—to us, their posterity—be heavy, and probably insupportable. They preferred to meet the trial in their own times, and to make the sacrifices in their own persons, that we and our descendants, their posterity, might reap the harvest and enjoy the increase.

Generous men, exalted patriots, immortal statesmen! For this deep moral and social affection, for this elevated self-devotion, this bold daring, the multiplying millions of your posterity, as they spread backward to the lakes, and from the lakes to the mountains, and from the mountains to the western waters, shall annually, in all future time, come up to the temples of the Most High, with song and anthem, and thanksgiving; with cheerful symphonies and hallelujahs, to repeat your names; to look steadfastly on the brightness of your glory; to trace its spreading rays to the points from which they emanate; and to seek in your character and conduct a practical illustration of public duty in every occurring social exigency.

THE SONG OF THE CANNON

BY SAM WALTER FOSS

When the diplomats cease from their capers,

Their red-tape requests and replies,

Their shuttlecock battle of papers,

Their saccharine parley of lies;

When the plenipotentiary wrangle

Is tied in a chaos of knots,

And becomes an unwindable tangle

Of verbals unmarried to thoughts;

When they’ve anguished and argued profoundly,

Asserted, assumed, and averred,

Then I end up the dialogue roundly

With my monosyllabical word.

Not mine in a speech academic,

No lexicon lingo is mine,

And in politic parley, polemic,

I was never created to shine.

But I speak with some show of decision,

And I never attempt to be bland,

I hurl my one word with precision,

My hearers—they all understand.

It requires no labored translation,

Its pith and its import to glean;

They gather its signification;

They know at the first what I mean.

The codes of the learned legations,

Of form, and of rule, and decree,

The etiquette books of the nations,—

They were never intended for me.

When your case is talked into confusion,

Then hush you, my diplomat friend,

Give me just a word in conclusion,

Let me bring the dispute to an end.

Ye diplomats, cease to aspire,

A case that’s appealed to debate,

It has gone to a court that is higher,

And I’m the Attorney for Fate.

PAUL REVERE’S RIDE[9]

(April 18, 1775.)

BY HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Listen, my children, and you shall hear

Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,

On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five:

Hardly a man is now alive

Who remembers that famous day and year.

He said to his friend, “If the British march

By land or sea from the town to-night,

Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch

Of the North Church tower as a signal-light,

One, if by land, and two, if by sea;

And I on the opposite shore will be,

Ready to ride and spread the alarm

Through every Middlesex village and farm,

For the country folk to be up and to arm.”

Then he said, good night! and with muffled oar

Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,

Just as the moon rose over the bay,

Where swinging wide at her moorings lay

The Somerset, British man-of-war;

A phantom ship, with each mast and spar

Across the moon like a prison-bar,

And a huge black hulk, that was magnified

By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend, through alley and street

Wanders and watches with eager ears,

Till in the silence around him he hears

The muster of men at the barrack door,

The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,

And the measured tread of the grenadiers,

Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed to the tower of the Old North Church,

By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,

To the belfry-chamber overhead,

And startled the pigeons from their perch

On the somber rafters, that round him made

Masses and moving shapes of shade,—

By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,

To the highest window in the wall,

Where he paused to listen and look down

A moment on the roofs of the town,

And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,

In their night-encampment on the hill,

Wrapped in silence so deep and still,

That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,

The watchful night-wind, as it went

Creeping along from tent to tent,

And seeming to whisper, “All is well!”

A moment only he feels the spell

Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread

Of the lonely belfry and the dead;

For suddenly all his thoughts are bent

On a shadowy something far away,

Where the river widens to meet the bay,

A line of black that bends and floats

On the rising tide, like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,

Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride

On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.

Now he patted his horse’s side,

Now gazed at the landscape far and near,

Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,

And turned and tightened his saddle-girth;

But mostly he watched with eager search

The belfry-tower of the Old North Church,

As it rose above the graves on the hill,

Lonely, and spectral, and somber and still.

And lo! as he looks, on the belfry’s height

A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!

He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,

But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight

A second lamp in the belfry burns!

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,

A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,

And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark

Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet:

That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,

The fate of a nation was riding that night;

And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,

Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

He has left the village and mounted the steep,

And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep

Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;

And under the alders, that skirt its edge,

Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,

Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock

When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.

He heard the crowing of the cock,

And the barking of the farmer’s dog,

And felt the damp of the river fog,

That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,

When he rode into Lexington.

He saw the gilded weathercock

Swim in the moonlight as he passed,

And the meeting-house windows, blank and bare,

Gaze at him with a spectral glare,

As if they already stood aghast

At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,

When he came to the bridge in Concord town,

He heard the bleating of the flock,

And the twitter of birds among the trees,

And felt the breath of the morning breeze

Blowing over the meadows brown.

And one was safe and asleep in his bed

Who at the bridge would be first to fall,

Who that day would be lying dead,

Pierced by a British musket-ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read,

How the British Regulars fired and fled,—

How the farmers gave them ball for ball,

From behind each fence and farm-yard wall,

Chasing the red-coats down the lane,

Then crossing the fields to emerge again

Under the trees at the turn of the road,

And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;

And so through the night went his cry of alarm

To every Middlesex village and farm,—

A cry of defiance and not of fear,

A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,

And a word that shall echo forevermore!

For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,

Through all our history, to the last,

In the hour of darkness and peril and need,

The people will waken and listen to hear

The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,

And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

HYMN

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

(This poem was written to be sung at the completion of the Concord Monument, April 19, 1836.)

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood,

And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;

Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;

And Time the ruined bridge has swept

Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,

We set to-day a votive stone;

That memory may their deed redeem

When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare

To die, or leave their children free,

Bid Time and Nature gently spare

The shaft we raise to them and thee.

A SONG FOR LEXINGTON

BY ROBERT KELLEY WEEKS

The spring came earlier on

Than usual that year;

The shadiest snow was gone,

The slowest brook was clear,

And warming in the sun

Shy flowers began to peer.

’Twas more like middle May,

The earth so seemed to thrive,

That Nineteenth April day

Of Seventeen Seventy-Five;

Winter was well away,

New England was alive!

Alive and sternly glad!

Her doubts were with the snow;

Her courage, long forbade,

Ran full to overflow;

And every hope she had

Began to bud and grow.

She rose betimes that morn,

For there was work to do;

A planting, not of corn,

Of what she hardly knew,—

Blessings for men unborn;

And well she did it, too!

With open hand she stood,

And sowed for all the years,

And watered it with blood,

And watered it with tears,

The seed of quickening food

For both the hemispheres.

This was the planting done

That April morn of fame;

Honor to every one

To that seed-field that came!

Honor to Lexington,

Our first immortal name!

THE REVOLUTIONARY ALARM

BY GEORGE BANCROFT

Darkness closed upon the country and upon the town, but it was no night for sleep. Heralds on swift relays of horses transmitted the war-message from hand to hand, till village repeated it to village; the sea to the backwoods; the plains to the highlands; and it was never suffered to droop till it had been borne North and South, and East and West, throughout the land.

It spread over the bays that receive the Saco and the Penobscot. Its loud reveille broke the rest of the trappers of New Hampshire, and, ringing like bugle-notes from peak to peak, overleapt the Green Mountains, swept onward to Montreal, and descended the ocean river, till the responses were echoed from the cliffs of Quebec. The hills along the Hudson told to one another the tale.

As the summons hurried to the south, it was one day at New York; in one more at Philadelphia; the next it lighted a watchfire at Baltimore; thence it waked an answer at Annapolis. Crossing the Potomac near Mount Vernon, it was sent forward without a halt to Williamsburg. It traversed the Dismal Swamp to Nansemond, along the route of the first emigrants to North Carolina. It moved onwards and still onwards, through boundless groves of evergreen, to New-Berne and to Wilmington.

“For God’s sake, forward it by night and by day,” wrote Cornelius Harnett, by the express which sped for Brunswick. Patriots of South Carolina caught up its tones at the border and despatched it to Charleston, and through pines and palmettos and moss-clad live-oaks, farther to the south, till it resounded among the New England settlements beyond Savannah.

The Blue Ridge took up the voice, and made it heard from one end to the other of the valley of Virginia. The Alleghanies, as they listened, opened their barriers, that the “loud call” might pass through to the hardy riflemen on the Holston, the Watauga, and the French Broad. Ever renewing its strength, powerful enough even to create a commonwealth, it breathed its inspiring word to the first settlers of Kentucky; so that hunters who made their halt in the matchless valley of the Elkhorn commemorated the 19th day of April, 1775, by naming their encampment Lexington.

With one impulse the colonies sprung to arms; with one spirit they pledged themselves to each other “to be ready for the extreme event.” With one heart the continent cried, “Liberty or Death!”

THE VOLUNTEER

BY ELBRIDGE JEFFERSON CUTLER

“At dawn,” he said, “I bid them all farewell,

To go where bugles call and rifles gleam.”

And with the restless thought asleep he fell,

And glided into dream.

A great hot plain from sea to mountain spread,—

Through it a level river slowly drawn;

He moved with a vast crowd, and at its head

Streamed banners like the dawn.

There came a blinding flash, a deafening roar,

And dissonant cries of triumph and dismay;

Blood trickled down the river’s reedy shore,

And with the dead he lay.

The morn broke in upon his solemn dreams,

And still with steady pulse and deepening eye,

“Where bugles call,” he said, “and rifles gleam,

I follow, though I die!”

Wise youth! By few is glory’s wreath attained;

But death, or late or soon, awaiteth all,

To fight in Freedom’s cause is something gained,—

And nothing lost to fall.

TICONDEROGA

(May 10, 1775.)

BY V. B. WILSON

The cold, gray light of the dawning

On old Carillon falls,

And dim in the mist of the morning

Stand the grim old fortress walls.

No sound disturbs the stillness

Save the cataract’s mellow roar,

Silent as death is the fortress,

Silent the misty shore.

But up from the wakening waters

Comes the cool, fresh morning breeze

Lifting the banner of Britain,

And whispering to the trees