Produced by Kent Fielden
THE WORLD'S BEST ORATIONS, Vol. 1 (of 10)
THE ADVISORY COUNCIL
The Right Hon. Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke. Bart., Member of
Parliament—Author of 'Greater Britain,' etc., London, England.
William Draper Lewis, PH. D., Dean of the Department of Law,
University Of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
William P. Trent, M.A., Professor of English and History, Colombia
University, in the city of New York.
W. Stuart Symington, Jr., PH. D., Professor of the Romance Languages,
Amherst College, Amherst, Mass.
Alcee Fortier, Lit.D., Professor of the Romance Languages,
Tulane University, New Orleans, La.
William Vincent Byars, Journalist, St Louis, Mo.
Richard Gottheil, PH. D., Professor of Oriental Languages,
Columbia University, in the city of New York.
Austin H. Merrill, A.M., Professor of Elocution, Vanderbilt
University, Nashville, Tenn.
Sheldon Jackson. D. D., LL. D., Bureau of Education, Washington, D. C.
A. Marshall Elliott, PH.D. LL. D., Professor of the Romance Languages,
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md.
John W. Million, A.M., President of Hardin College, Mexico, Mo.
J. Raymond Brackett. PH. D., Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and Professor of Comparative Literature, University Of Colorado, Boulder, Colo.
W. F. Peirce. M.A., LL. D., President Of Kenyox College, Gambier,
Ohio.
S. Plantz, PH.D., D. D., President of Lawrence University,
Appleton, Wis.
George Tayloe Winston, LL.D., President of the University Of Texas,
Austin, Texas.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
VOL. I
Preface: Justice David J. Brewer
The Oratory Of Anglo-Saxon Countries: Prof. Edward A. Allen
ABELARD, PIERRE 1079-1142
The Resurrection of Lazarus
The Last Entry into Jerusalem
The Divine Tragedy
ADAMS, CHARLES FRANCIS 1807-1886
The States and the Union
ADAMS, CHARLES FRANCIS, JUNIOR 1835-
The Battle of Gettysburg
ADAMS, JOHN 1735-1826
Inaugural Address
The Boston Massacre
ADAMS, JOHN QUINCY 1767-1848
Oration at Plymouth Lafayette The
Jubilee of the Constitution
ADAMS, SAMUEL 1722-1803
American Independence
AELRED 1109-1166
A Farewell
A Sermon after Absence
On Manliness
AESCHINES 389-314 B. C.
Against Crowning Demosthenes
AIKEN, FREDERICK A. 1810-1878
Defense of Mrs. Mary E, Surratt
ALBERT THE GREAT (ALBERTUS MAGNUS) 1205-1280
The Meaning of the Crucifixion
The Blessed Dead
ALLEN, ETHAN
A Call to Arms
AMES, FISHER 1758-1808
On the British Treaty
ANSELM, SAINT 1032-1109
The Sea of Life
ARNOLD, THOMAS 1795-1842
The Realities of Life and Death
ARTHUR, CHESTER ALAN 1830-1886
Inaugural Address
ATHANASIUS 298-373
The Divinity of Christ
AUGUSTINE, SAINT 354-430
The Lord's Prayer
BACON, FRANCIS 1561-1626
Speech against Dueling
BARBOUR, JAMES 1775-1842
Treaties as Supreme Laws
BARNAVE, ANTOINE PIERRE JOSEPH MARIE 1761-1793
Representative Democracy against Majority Absolutism
Commercial Politics
BARROW, ISAAC 1630-1677
Slander
BASIL THE GREAT 329-379
On a Recreant Nan
BAXTER, RICHARD 1615-1691
Unwillingness to Improve
BAYARD. JAMES A. 1767-1815
The Federal Judiciary
Commerce and Naval Power
BAYARD, THOMAS F. 1828-1898
A Plea for Conciliation in 1876
BEACONSFIELD, LORD 1804-1881
The Assassination of Lincoln
Against Democracy for England
The Meaning of "Conservatism"
BEDE, THE VENERABLE 672-735
The Meeting of Mercy and Justice
A Sermon for Any Day
The Torments of Hell
BEECHER. HENRY WARD 1813-1887
Raising the Flag over Fort Sumter
Effect of the Death of Lincoln
BELHAVEN, LORD 1656-1708
A Plea for the National Life of Scotland
BELL, JOHN 1797-1869
Against Extremists, North and South
Transcontinental Railroads
BENJAMIN, JUDAH P. 1811-1884
Farewell to the Union
Slavery as Established by Law
PREFACE
Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire; but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being he is master. Through the clearness of his logic, the keenness of his wit, the power of his appeal, or that magnetic something which is felt and yet cannot be defined, or through all together, he sways his audience as the storm bends the branches of the forest. Hence it is that in all times this wonderful power has been something longed for and striven for. Demosthenes, on the beach, struggling with the pebbles in his mouth to perfect his articulation, has been the great example. Yet it is often true of the orator, as of the poet; nascitur non fit. Patrick Henry seemed to be inspired as "Give me liberty or give me death" rolled from his lips. The untutored savage has shown himself an orator.
Who does not delight in oratory? How we gather to hear even an ordinary speaker! How often is a jury swayed and controlled by the appeals of counsel! Do we not all feel the magic of the power, and when occasionally we are permitted to listen to a great orator how completely we lose ourselves and yield in willing submission to the imperious and impetuous flow of his speech! It is said that after Webster's great reply to Hayne every Massachusetts man walking down Pennsylvania Avenue seemed a foot taller.
This marvelous power is incapable of complete preservation on the printed page. The presence, the eye, the voice, the magnetic touch, are beyond record. The phonograph and kinetoscope may some day seize and perpetuate all save the magnetic touch, but that weird, illusive, indefinable yet wonderfully real power by which the orator subdues may never be caught by science or preserved for the cruel dissecting knife of the critic. It is the marvelous light flashing out in the intellectual heavens which no Franklin has yet or may ever draw and tie to earth by string of kite.
But while there is a living something which no human art has yet been able to grasp and preserve, there is a wonderful joy and comfort in the record of that which the orator said. As we read we see the very picture, though inarticulate, of the living orator. We may never know all the marvelous power of Demosthenes, yet Proton, meg, o andres Athenaioi, suggests something of it. Cicero's silver speech may never reach our ears, and yet who does not love to read Quousque tandem abutere, O Catilina, patientia nostra? So if on the printed page we may not see the living orator, we may look upon his picture—the photograph of his power. And it is this which it is the thought and purpose of this work to present. We mean to photograph the orators of the world, reproducing the words which they spake, and trusting to the vivid imagination of the thoughtful reader to put behind the recorded words the living force and power. In this we shall fill a vacant place in literature. There are countless books of poetry in which the gems of the great poets of the world have been preserved, but oratory has not been thus favored. We have many volumes which record the speeches of different orators, sometimes connected with a biography of their lives and sometimes as independent gatherings of speeches. We have also single books, like Goodrich's 'British Eloquence,' which give us partial selections of the great orations. But this is intended to be universal in its reach, a complete encyclopedia of oratory. The purpose is to present the best efforts of the world's greatest orators in all ages; and with this purpose kept in view as the matter of primary importance, to supplement the great orations with others that are representative and historically important—especially with those having a fundamental connection with the most important events in the development of Anglo-Saxon civilization. The greatest attention has been given to the representative orators of England and America, so that the work includes all that is most famous or most necessary to be known in the oratory of the Anglo-Saxon race. Wherever possible, addresses have been published in extenso. This has been the rule followed in giving the great orations. In dealing with minor orators, the selections made are considerable enough to show the style, method, and spirit. Where it has been necessary to choose between two orations of equal merit, the one having the greater historical significance has been selected. Of course it would not be possible, keeping within reasonable limits, to give every speech of every one worthy to be called an orator. Indeed, the greatest of orators sometimes failed. So we have carefully selected only those speeches which manifest the power of eloquence; and this selection, we take pleasure in assuring our readers, has been made by the most competent critics of the country.
We have not confined ourselves to any one profession or field of eloquence. The pulpit, the bar, the halls of legislation, and the popular assembly have each and all been called upon for their best contributions. The single test has been, is it oratory? the single question, is there eloquence? The reader and student of every class will therefore find within these pages that which will satisfy his particular taste and desire in the matter of oratory.
As this work is designed especially for the American reader, we have deemed it proper to give prominence to Anglo-Saxon orators; and yet this prominence has not been carried so far as to make the work a one-sided collection. It is not a mere presentation of American or even of English-speaking orators. We submit the work to the American public in the belief that all will find pleasure, interest, and instruction in its pages, and in the hope that it will prove an Inspiration to the growing generation to see to it that oratory be not classed among the "lost arts," but that it shall remain an ever-present and increasing power and blessing to the world.
David J. Brewer
THE ORATORY OF ANGLO-SAXON COUNTRIES
By Edward A. Allen, Professor of Anglo-Saxon and English Literature in the University of Missouri
English-speaking people have always been the freest people, the greatest lovers of liberty, the world has ever seen. Long before English history properly begins, the pen of Tacitus reveals to us our forefathers in their old home-land in North Germany beating back the Roman legions under Varus, and staying the progress of Rome's triumphant car whose mighty wheels had crushed Hannibal, Jugurtha, Vercingetorix, and countless thousands in every land. The Germanic ancestors of the English nation were the only people who did not bend the neck to these lords of all the world besides. In the year 9, when the Founder of Christianity was playing about his humble home at Nazareth, or watching his father at work in his shop, our forefathers dealt Rome a blow from which she never recovered. As Freeman, late professor of history at Oxford, said in one of his lectures: "In the blow by the Teutoburg wood was the germ of the Declaration of Independence, the germ of the surrender of Yorktown." Arminius was our first Washington, "haud dubie liberator," as Tacitus calls him,—the savior of his country.
When the time came for expansion, and our forefathers in the fifth century began the conquest and settlement of the island that was to become their New England, they pushed out the Celts, the native inhabitants of the island, just as their descendants, about twelve hundred years later, were to push out the indigenous people of this continent, to make way for a higher civilization, a larger destiny. No Englishman ever saw an armed Roman in England, and though traces of the Roman conquest may be seen everywhere in that country to-day, it is sometimes forgotten that it was the Britain of the Celts, not the England of the English, which was held for so many centuries as a province of Rome.
The same love of freedom that resisted the Roman invasion in the first home of the English was no less strong in their second home, when Alfred with his brave yeomen withstood the invading Danes at Ashdown and Edington, and saved England from becoming a Danish province. It is true that the Normans, by one decisive battle, placed a French king on the throne of England, but the English spirit of freedom was never subdued; it rose superior to the conquerors of Hastings, and in the end English speech and English freedom gained the mastery.
The sacred flame of freedom has burned in the hearts of the Anglo-Saxon race through all the centuries of our history, and this spirit of freedom is reflected in our language and in our oratory. There never have been wanting English orators when English liberty seemed to be imperiled; indeed, it may be said that the highest oratory has always been coincident with the deepest aspirations of freedom.
It is said of Pitt,—the younger, I believe,—that he was fired to oratory by reading the speeches in Milton's 'Paradise Lost.' These speeches—especially those of Satan, the most human of the characters in this noble epic,—when analyzed and traced to their source, are neither Hebrew nor Greek, but English to the core. They are imbued with the English spirit, with the spirit of Cromwell, with the spirit that beat down oppression at Marston Moor, and ushered in a freer England at Naseby. In the earlier Milton of a thousand years before, whether the work of Caedmon or of some other English muse, the same spirit is reflected in Anglo-Saxon words. Milton's Satan is more polished, better educated, thanks to Oxford and Cambridge, but the spirit is essentially one with that of the ruder poet; and this spirit, I maintain, is English.
The dry annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are occasionally lighted up with a gleam of true eloquence, as in the description of the battle of Brunanburh, which breaks forth into a pean of victory. Under the year 991, there is mention of a battle at Maldon, between the English and the Danes, in which great heroism must have been displayed, for it inspired at the time one of the most patriotic outbursts of song to be found in the whole range of English literature. During an enforced truce, because of a swollen stream that separated the two armies, a messenger is sent from the Danes to Byrhtnoth, leader of the English forces, with a proposition to purchase peace with English gold. Byrhtnoth, angry and resolute, gave him this answer:—
"Hearest thou, pirate, what this folk sayeth? They will give you spears for tribute, weapons that will avail you nought in battle. Messenger of the vikings, get thee back. Take to thy people a sterner message, that here stands a fearless earl, who with his band wilt defend this land, the home of Aethelred, my prince, folk and fold. Too base it seems to me that ye go without battle to your ships with our money, now that ye have come thus far into our country. Ye shall not so easily obtain treasure. Spear and sword, grim battle-play, shall decide between us ere we pay tribute."
Though the battle was lost and Byrhtnoth slain, the spirit of the man is an English inheritance. It is the same spirit that refused ship-money to Charles I., and tea-money to George III.
The encroachments of tyranny and the stealthier step of royal prerogative have shrunk before this spirit which through the centuries has inspired the noblest oratory of England and America. It not only inspired the great orators of the mother country, it served at the same time as a bond of sympathy with the American colonies in their struggle for freedom. Burke, throughout his great speech on Conciliation, never lost sight of this idea:—
"This fierce spirit of liberty is stronger in the English colonies probably than in any other people of the earth. The people of the colonies are descendants of Englishmen. England, sir, is a nation which still, I hope, respects, and formerly adored, her freedom. The colonists emigrated from you when this part of your character was most predominant; and they took this bias and direction the moment they parted from your bands. They are therefore not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas and our English principles. … The temper and character which prevail in our colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We cannot, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition; your speech would betray you. … In order to prove that Americans have no right to their liberties, we are every day endeavoring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free, we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never gain a paltry advantage over them in debate without attacking some of those principles, or deriding some of those feelings, for which our ancestors have shed their blood. . . . 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 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 can have it from Spain; they may have it from Prussia. But until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you."
So, too, in the speeches of Chatham, the great Commoner, whose eloquence has never been surpassed, an intense spirit of liberty, the animating principle of his life, shines out above all things else. Though opposed to the independence of the colonies, he could not restrain his admiration for the spirit they manifested:—
"The Americans contending for their rights against arbitrary exactions I love and admire. It is the struggle of free and virtuous patriots. … My Lords, you cannot conquer America. You may swell every expense and every effort still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every pitiful little German prince that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince; your efforts are forever vain and impotent If I were an American as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country I would never lay down my arms—never—never—never!"
Wherever the principle of Anglo-Saxon freedom and the rights of man have been at stake, the all-animating voice of the orator has kept alive the sacred flame. In the witenagemote of the earlier tongs, in the parliament of the later kings, in the Massachusetts town-meeting and in the Virginia House of Burgesses, in the legislature of every State, and in the Congress of the United States, wherever in Anglo-Saxon countries the torch of liberty seemed to burn low, the breath of the orator has fanned it into flame. It fired the eloquence of Sheridan pleading against Warren Hastings for the down-trodden natives of India in words that have not lost their magnetic charm:—
"My Lords, do you, the judges of this land and the expounders of its rightful laws, do you approve of this mockery and call that the character of Justice which takes the form of right to execute wrong? No. my Lords, justice is not this halt and miserable object; it is not the ineffective bauble of an Indian pagoda; it is not the portentous phantom of despair; it is not like any fabled monster, formed in the eclipse of reason and found in some unhallowed grove of superstitious darkness and political dismay. No, my Lords! In the happy reverse of all this I turn from the disgusting caricature to the real image. Justice I have now before me, august and pure, the abstract ideal of all that would be perfect in the spirits and aspirings of men—where the mind rises; where the heart expands; where the countenance is ever placid and benign; where the favorite attitude is to stoop to the unfortunate, to hear their cry, and help them; to rescue and relieve, to succor and save; majestic from its mercy, venerable from its utility, uplifted without pride, firm without obduracy, beneficent in each preference, lovely though in her frown."
This same spirit fired the enthusiasm of Samuel Adams and James Otis to such a pitch of eloquence that "every man who heard them went away ready to take up arms." It inspired Patrick Henry to hurl his defiant alternative of "liberty or death" in the face of unyielding despotism. It inspired that great-hearted patriot and orator, Henry Clay, in the first quarter of this century, to plead, single-handed and alone, in the Congress of the United States, session after session before the final victory was won, for the recognition of the provinces of South America in their struggle for independence.
"I may be accused of an imprudent utterance of my feelings on this occasion. I care not: when the independence, the happiness, the liberty of a whole people is at stake, and that people our neighbors, our brethren, occupying a portion of the same continent, imitating our example, and participating in the same sympathies with ourselves. I will boldly avow my feelings and my wishes in their behalf, even at the hazard of such an imputation. I maintain that an oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters. This was the great principle of the English revolution. It was the great principle of our own. Spanish-America has been doomed for centuries to the practical effects of an odious tyranny. If we were justified, she is more than justified. I am no propagandist. I would not seek to force upon other nations our principles and our liberty, if they do not want them. But if an abused and oppressed people will their freedom; if they seek to establish it; if, in truth, they have established it, we have a right, as a sovereign power, to notice the fact, and to act as circumstances and our interest require. I will say in the language of the venerated father of my country, 'born in a land of liberty, my anxious recollections, my sympathetic feelings, and my best wishes, are irresistibly excited, whensoever, in any country, I see an oppressed nation unfurl the banners of freedom.'"
This same spirit loosed the tongue of Wendell Phillips to plead the cause of the enslaved African in words that burned into the hearts of his countrymen. It emboldened George William Curtis to assert the right to break the shackles of party politics and follow the dictates of conscience:—
"I know,—no man better,—how hard it is for earnest men to separate their country from their party, or their religion from their sect. But, nevertheless, the welfare of the country is dearer than the mere victory of party, as truth is more precious than the interest of any sect. You will hear this patriotism scorned as an impracticable theory, as the dream of a cloister, as the whim of a fool. But such was the folly of the Spartan Leonidas, staying with his three hundred the Persian horde, and teaching Greece the self-reliance that saved her. Such was the folly of the Swiss Arnold von Winkelried, gathering into his own breast the points of Austrian spears, making his dead body the bridge of victory for his countrymen. Such was the folly of the American Nathan Hale, gladly risking the seeming disgrace of his name, and grieving that be had but one life to give for his country. Such are the beacon-lights of a pure patriotism that burn forever in men's memories and answer each other through the illuminated ages."
So long as there are wrongs to be redressed, so long as the strong oppress the weak, so long as injustice sits in high places, the voice of the orator will be needed to plead for the rights of man. He may not, at this stage of the republic, be called upon to sound a battle cry to arms, but there are bloodless victories to be won as essential to the stability of a great nation and the uplifting of its millions of people as the victories of the battlefield.
When the greatest of modern political philosophers, the author of the Declaration of Independence, urged that, if men were left free to declare the truth the effect of its great positive forces would overcome the negative forces of error, he seems to have hit the central fact of civilization. Without freedom of thought and absolute freedom to speak out the truth as one sees it, there can be no advancement, no high civilization. To the orator who has heard the call of humanity, what nobler aspiration than to enlarge and extend the freedom we have inherited from our Anglo-Saxon forefathers, and to defend the hope of the world?
Edward A. Allen
PIERRE ABELARD (1079-1142)
Abelard's reputation for oratory and for scholarship was so great that he attracted hearers and disciples from all quarters. They encamped around him like an army and listened to him with such eagerness that the jealousy of some and the honest apprehension of others were excited by the boldness with which he handled religious subjects. He has been called the originator of modern rationalism, and though he was apparently worsted in his contest with his great rival, St. Bernard, he remains the most real and living personality among the great pulpit orators of the Middle Ages. This is due in large part, no doubt, to his connection with the unfortunate Heloise. That story, one of the most romantic, as it is one of the saddest of human history, must be passed over with a mere mention of the fact that it gave occasion for a number of the sermons of Abelard which have come down to us. Several of those were preached in the convent of the Paraclete of which Heloise became abbess,— where, in his old age, her former lover, broken with the load of a life of most extraordinary sorrows, went to die. These sermons do not suggest the fire and force with which young Abelard appealed to France, compelling its admiration even in exciting its alarm, but they prevent him from being a mere name as an orator.
He was born near Nantes, A. D. 1079. At his death in 1142, he was buried in the convent of the Paraclete, where the body of Heloise was afterwards buried at his side.
The extracts from his sermons here given were translated by Rev. J. M. Neale, of Sackville College, from the first collected edition of the works of Abelard, published at Paris in 1616. There are thirty-two such sermons extant. They were preached in Latin, or, at least, they have come down to us in that language.
THE RESURRECTION OF LAZARUS
The Lord performed that miracle once for all in the body which much more blessedly he performs every day in the souls of penitents. He restored life to Lazarus, but it was a temporal life, one that would die again. He bestows life on the penitent; life, but it is life that will remain, world without end. The one is wonderful in the eyes of men; the other is far more wonderful in the judgment of the faithful; and in that it is so much the greater, by so much the more is it to be sought. This is written of Lazarus, not for Lazarus himself, but for us and to us. "Whatsoever things," saith the Apostle, "were written of old, were written for our learning." The Lord called Lazarus once, and he was raised from temporal death. He calls us often, that we may rise from the death of the soul. He said to him once, "Come forth!" and immediately he came forth at one command of the Lord. The Lord every day invites us by Scripture to confession, exhorts us to amendment, promises the life which is prepared for us by him who willeth not the death of a sinner. We neglect his call, we despise his invitation, we contemn his promise. Placed between God and the devil, as between a father and a foe, we prefer the enticement of the enemy to a father's warning. "We are not ignorant," says the Apostle, "of the devices of Satan,"—the devices, I say, by which he induces us to sin, and keeps us back from repentance. Suggesting sin, he deprives us of two things by which the best assistance might be offered to us, namely, shame and fear. For that which we avoid, we avoid either through fear of some loss, or through the reverence of shame…. When, therefore, Satan impels any one to sin, he easily accomplishes the object, if, as we have said, he first deprives him of fear and shame. And when he has effected that, he restores the same things, but in another sense, which he has taken away; that so he may keep back the sinner from confession, and make him die in his sin. Then he secretly whispers into his soul: "Priests are light-minded, and it is a difficult thing to check the tongue. If you tell this or that to them, it cannot remain a secret; and when it shall have been published abroad, you will incur the danger of losing your good character, or bearing some injury, and being confounded from your own vileness." Thus the devil deceives that wretched man; he first takes from him that by which he ought to avoid sin, and then restores the same thing, and by it retains him in sin. His captive fears temporal, and not spiritual, evil; he is ashamed before men and he despises God. He is ashamed that things should come to the knowledge of men which he was not ashamed to commit in the sight of God, and of the whole heavenly host. He trembles at the judgment of man, and he has no respect to that of God. Of which the Apostle says: "It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God"; and the Truth saith himself, "Fear not them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do; but fear him rather who can cast body and soul into hell."
There are diseases of the soul, as there are of the body; and therefore the Divine mercy has provided beforehand physicians for both. Our Lord Jesus Christ saith, "I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." His priests now hold his place in the Church, to whom, as unto physicians of the soul, we ought to confess our sins, that we may receive from them the plaister of satisfaction. He that fears the death of the body, in whatever part of the body he may suffer, however much he may be ashamed of the disease, makes no delay in revealing it to the physician, and setting it forth, so that it may be cured. However rough, however hard may be the remedy, he avoids it not, so that he may escape death. Whatever he has that is most precious, he makes no hesitation in giving it, if only for a little while he may put off the death of the body. What, then, ought we to do for the death of the soul? For this, however terrible, may be forever prevented, without such great labor, without such great expense. The Lord seeks us ourselves, and not what is ours. He stands in no need of our wealth who bestows all things. For it is he to whom it is said, "My goods are nothing unto thee." With him a man is by so much the greater, as, in his own judgment, he is less. With him a man is as much the more righteous, as in his own opinion he is the more guilty. In his eyes we hide our faults all the more, the more that here by confession we manifest them.
THE LAST ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM
"He came unto his own, and his own received him not." That is, he entered Jerusalem. Yet now he entered, not Jerusalem, which by interpretation is "The Vision of Peace," but the home of tyranny. For now the elders of the city have so manifestly conspired against him, that he can no longer find a place of refuge within it. This is not to be attributed to his helplessness but to his patience. He could be harbored there securely, seeing that no one can do him harm by violence, and that he has the power to incline the hearts of men whither he wills. For in that same city he freely did whatever he willed to do; and when he sent his disciples thither, and commanded them that they should loose the ass and the colt, and bring them to him, and said that no man would forbid them, he accomplished that which he said, although he was not ignorant of the conspiracy against himself. Of which he saith to his disciples whom he sends, "Go ye into the castle over against you"; that is, to the place which is equally opposed to God and to you; no longer to be called a city, an assembly of men living under the law, but a castle of tyrannical fortification. Go confidently, saith he, into the place, though such it is, and though it is therefore opposed to you, and do with all security that which I command you. Whence he adds, also: "And if any man say aught unto you, say that the Lord hath need of them, and he will straightway send them away." A wonderful confidence of power! As if the Lord, using his own right of command, lays his own injunction on those whom he knows already to have conspired for his death. Thus he commands, thus he enjoins, thus he compels obedience. Nor do they who are sent hesitate in accomplishing that which is laid upon them, confident as they are in the strength of the power of him who sends them. By that power they who were chiefly concerned in this conspiracy had been more than once ejected from the Temple, where many were not able to resist one. And they, too, after this ejection and conspiracy, as we have said, when he was daily teaching in the Temple, knew how intrepid he showed himself to be, into whose hands the Father had given all things. And last of all, when he desired to celebrate the Passover in the same night in which he had foreordained to be betrayed, he again sent his Disciples whither he willed, and prepared a home for himself in the city itself, wherein he might keep the feast. He, then, who so often showed his power in such things as these, now also, if he had desired it, could have prepared a home wherever he would, and had no need to return to Bethany. Therefore, he did these two things intentionally: he showed that they whom he avoided were unworthy of his dwelling among them; and he gave himself, in the last hours of his life, to his beloved hosts, that they might have their own reception of him as the reward of their hospitality.
THE DIVINE TRAGEDY
Whether, therefore, Christ is spoken of as about to be crowned or about to be crucified, it is said that he "went forth"; to signify that the Jews, who were guilty of so great wickedness against him, were given over to reprobation, and that his grace would now pass to the vast extent of the Gentiles, where the salvation of the Cross, and his own exaltation by the gain of many peoples, in the place of the one nation of the Jews, has extended itself. Whence, also, to-day we rightly go forth to adore the Cross in the open plain; showing mystically that both glory and salvation had departed from the Jews, and had spread themselves among the Gentiles. But in that we afterwards returned (in procession) to the place whence we had set forth, we signify that in the end of the world the grace of God will return to the Jews; namely, when, by the preaching of Enoch and Elijah, they shall be converted to him. Whence the Apostle: "I would not, brethren, that ye should be ignorant of this mystery, that blindness in part has fallen upon Israel, until the fullness of the Gentiles shall be come, and so all Israel shall be saved." Whence the place itself of Calvary, where the Lord was crucified, is now, as we know, contained in the city; whereas formerly it was without the walls. "The crown wherewith his Mother crowned him in the day of his espousals, and in the day of the gladness of his heart." For thus kings are wont to exhibit their glory when they betroth queens to themselves, and celebrate the solemnities of their nuptials. Now the day of the Lord's crucifixion was, as it were, the day of his betrothal; because it was then that he associated the Church to himself as his bride, and on the same day descended into Hell, and, setting free the souls of the faithful, accomplished in them that which he had promised to the thief: "Verily I say unto thee, to-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise."
"To-day," he says, of the gladness of his heart; because in his body he suffered the torture of pain; but while the flesh inflicted on him torments through the outward violence of men, his soul was filled with joy on account of our salvation, which he thus brought to pass. Whence, also, when he went forth to his crucifixion, he stilled the women that were lamenting him, and said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for yourselves and your children." As if he said, "Grieve not for me in these my sufferings, as if by their means I should fall into any real destruction; but rather lament for that heavy vengeance which hangs over you and your children, because of that which they have committed against me." So we, also, brethren, should rather weep for ourselves than for him; and for the faults which we have committed, not for the punishments which he bore. Let us so rejoice with him and for him, as to grieve for our own offenses, and for that the guilty servant committed the transgression, while the innocent Lord bore the punishment. He taught us to weep who is never said to have wept for himself, though he wept for Lazarus when about to raise him from the dead.
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS (1807-1886)
The son of one President of the United States and the grand-son of another, Charles Francis Adams won for himself in his own right a position of prominence in the history of his times. He studied law in the office of Daniel Webster, and after beginning practice was drawn into public life by his election to the Massachusetts legislature in which he served from 1831 to 1838. A Whig in politics until the slavery issue became prominent, he was nominated for Vice-President on the Free Soil ticket with Van Buren in 1848. The Republican party which grew out of the Free Soil movement elected him to Congress as a representative of the third Massachusetts district in 1858 and re-elected him in 1860. In 1861 President Lincoln appointed him minister to England, and he filled with credit that place which had been filled by his father and grandfather before him. He died November 21st, 1886, leaving besides his own speeches and essays an edition of the works of John and John Quincy Adams in twenty-two volumes octavo.
THE STATES AND THE UNION
(Delivered in the House of Representatives, January 31st, 1861)
I confess, Mr. Speaker, that I should be very jealous, as a citizen of Massachusetts, of any attempt on the part of Virginia, for example, to propose an amendment to the Constitution designed to rescind or abolish the bill of rights prefixed to our own form of government. Yet I cannot see why such a proposition would be more unjustifiable than any counter proposition to abolish slavery in Virginia, as coming from Massachusetts. If I have in any way succeeded in mastering the primary elements of our forms of government, the first and fundamental idea is, the reservation to the people of the respective States of every power of regulating their own affairs not specifically surrendered in the Constitution. The security of the State governments depends upon the fidelity with which this principle is observed.
Even the intimation of any such interference as I have mentioned by way of example could not be made in earnest without at once shaking the entire foundation of the whole confederated Union. No man shall exceed me in jealousy of affection for the State rights of Massachusetts. So far as I remember, nothing of this kind was ever thought of heretofore; and I see no reason to apprehend that what has not happened thus far will be more likely to happen hereafter. But if the time ever come when it does occur, I shall believe the dissolution of the system to be much more certain than I do at this moment.
For these reasons, I cannot imagine that there is the smallest foundation for uneasiness about the intentions of any considerable number of men in the free States to interfere in any manner whatever with slavery in the States, much less by the hopeless mode of amending the Constitution. To me it looks like panic, pure panic. How, then, is it to be treated? Is it to be neglected or ridiculed? Not at all. If a child in the nursery be frightened by the idea of a spectre, common humanity would prompt an effort by kindness to assuage the alarm. But in cases where the same feeling pervades the bosoms of multitudes of men, this imaginary evil grows up at once into a gigantic reality, and must be dealt with as such. It is at all times difficult to legislate against a possibility. The committee have reported a proposition intended to meet this case. It is a form of amendment of the Constitution which, in substance, takes away no rights whatever which the free States ever should attempt to use, whilst it vests exclusively in the slave States the right to use them or not, as they shall think proper, the whole treatment of the subject to which they relate being conceded to be a matter of common interest to them, exclusively within their jurisdiction, and subject to their control. A time may arrive, in the course of years, when they will themselves desire some act of interference in a friendly and beneficent spirit. If so, they have the power reserved to them of initiating the very form in which it would be most welcome. If not, they have a security, so long as this government shall endure, that no sister State shall dictate any change against their will.
I have now considered all the alleged grievances which have thus far been brought to our attention, 1. The personal liberty laws, which never freed a slave. 2. Exclusion from a Territory which slaveholders will never desire to occupy. 3. Apprehension of an event which will never take place. For the sake of these three causes of complaint, all of them utterly without practical result, the slaveholding States, unquestionably the weakest section of this great Confederacy, are voluntarily and precipitately surrendering the realities of solid power woven into the very texture of a government that now keeps nineteen million freemen, willing to tolerate, and, in one sense, to shelter, institutions which, but for that, would meet with no more sympathy among them than they now do in the remainder of the civilized world.
For my own part, I must declare that, even supposing these alleged grievances to be more real than I represent them, I think the measures of the committee dispose of them effectually and forever. They contribute directly all that can be legitimately done by Congress, and they recommend it to the legislatures of the States to accomplish the remainder. Why, then, is it that harmony is not restored? The answer is, that you are not satisfied with this settlement, however complete. You must have more guarantees in the Constitution. You must make the protection and extension of slavery in the Territories now existing, and hereafter to be acquired, a cardinal doctrine of our great charter. Without that, you are determined to dissolve the Union. How stands the case, then? We offer to settle the question finally in all of the present territory that you claim, by giving you every chance of establishing slavery that you have any right to require of us. You decline to take the offer, because you fear it will do you no good. Slavery will not go there. But, if that be true, what is the use of asking for the protection anyhow, much less in the Constitution? Why require protection where you will have nothing to protect? All you appear to desire it for is New Mexico. Nothing else is left. Yet, you will not accept New Mexico at once, because ten years of experience have proved to you that protection has been of no use thus far. But, if so, how can you expect that it will be of so much more use hereafter as to make it worth dissolving the Union?
But, if we pass to the other condition, is it any more reasonable? Are we going to fight because we cannot agree upon the mode of disposing of our neighbor's lands? Are we to break up the Union of these States, cemented by so many years of common sufferings, and resplendent with so many years of common glory, because it is insisted that we should incorporate into what we regard as the charter of our freedom a proclamation to the civilized world that we intend to grasp the territory of other nations whenever we can do it, for the purpose of putting into it certain institutions which some of us disapprove, and that, too, whether the people inhabiting that territory themselves approve of it or not?
I am almost inclined to believe that they who first contrived this demand must have done so for the sake of presenting a condition which they knew beforehand must be rejected, or which, if accepted, must humiliate us in the dust forever. In point of fact, this proposal covers no question of immediate moment which may not be settled by another and less obnoxious one. Why is it, then, persevered in, and the other rejected? The answer is obvious. You want the Union dissolved. You want to make it impossible for honorable men to become reconciled. If it be, indeed, so, then on you, and you alone, shall rest the responsibility of what may follow. If the Union be broken up, the reason why it happened shall remain on record forever. It was because you rejected one form of settling a question which might be offered and accepted with honor, in order to insist upon another which you knew we could not accept without disgrace. I answer for myself only when I say that, if the alternative to the salvation of the Union be only that the people of the United States shall, before the Christian nations of the earth, print in broad letters upon the front of their charter of republican government the dogma of slave propagandism over the remainder of the countries of the world, I will not consent to brand myself with what I deem such disgrace, let the consequences be what they may.
But it is said that this answer closes the door of reconciliation.
The slaveholding States will secede, and what then?
This brings me to the last point which I desire to touch today, the proper course for the government to pursue in the face of these difficulties. Some of the friends with whom I act have not hesitated to express themselves in favor of coercion; and they have drawn very gloomy pictures of the fatal consequences to the prosperity and security of the whole Union that must ensue. For my own sake, I am glad that I do not partake so largely in these fears. I see no obstacle to the regular continuance of the government in not less than twenty States, and perhaps more, the inhabitants of which have not in a moment been deprived of that peculiar practical wisdom in the management of their affairs which is the secret of their past success. Several new States will, before long, be ready to take their places with us and make good, in part, the loss of the old ones. The mission of furnishing a great example of free government to the nations of the earth will still be in our hands, impaired, I admit, but not destroyed; and I doubt not our power to accomplish it yet in spite of the temporary drawback. Even the problem of coercion will go on to solve itself without our aid. For if the sentiment of disunion become so far universal and permanent in the dissatisfied States as to show no prospect of good from resistance, and there be no acts of aggression attempted on their part, I will not say that I may not favor the idea of some arrangement of a peaceful character, though I do not now see the authority under which it can be originated. The new Confederacy can scarcely be other than a secondary Power. It can never be a maritime State. It will begin with the necessity of keeping eight millions of its population to watch four millions, and with the duty of guarding, against the egress of the latter, several thousand miles of an exposed border, beyond which there will be no right of reclamation. Of the ultimate result of a similar experiment, I cannot, in my own mind, have a moment's doubt. At the last session I ventured to place on record, in this House, a prediction by which I must abide, let the effect of the future on my sagacity be what it may. I have not yet seen any reason to doubt its accuracy. I now repeat it. The experiment will ignominiously fail.
But there are exceptions to the adoption of this peaceful policy which it will not be wise to overlook. If there be violent and wanton attacks upon the persons or the property of the citizens of the United States or of their government, I see not how demands for immediate redress can be avoided. If any interruptions should be attempted of the regular channels of trade on the great water-courses or on the ocean, they cannot long be permitted. And if any considerable minorities of citizens should be persecuted or proscribed on account of their attachment to the Union, and should call for protection, I cannot deny the obligation of this government to afford it. There are persons in many of the States whose patriotic declarations and honorable pledges of support of the Union may bring down upon them more than the ill-will of their infatuated fellow-citizens. It would be impossible for the people of the United States to look upon any proscription of them with indifference. These are times which should bring together all men, by whatever party name they may have been heretofore distinguished, upon common ground.
When I heard the gentlemen from Virginia the other day so bravely and so forcibly urging their manly arguments in support of the Union, the Constitution, and the enforcement of the laws, my heart involuntarily bounded towards them as brethren sacredly engaged in a common cause. Let them, said I to myself, accept the offered settlement of the differences that remain between us, on some fair basis like that proposed by the committee, and then, what is to prevent us all, who yet believe that the Union must be preserved, from joining heart and hand our common forces to effect it? When the cry goes out that the ship is in danger of sinking, the first duty of every man on board, no matter what his particular vocation, is to lend all the strength he has to the work of keeping her afloat. What! shall it be said that we waver in the view of those who begin by trying to expunge the sacred memory of the fourth of July? Shall we help them to obliterate the associations that cluster around the glorious struggle for independence, or stultify the labors of the patriots who erected this magnificent political edifice upon the adamantine base of human liberty? Shall we surrender the fame of Washington and Laurens, of Gadsden and the Lees, of Jefferson and Madison, and of the myriads of heroes whose names are imperishably connected with the memory of a united people? Never, never!
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, JUNIOR
CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, Jr. son of Charles Francis Adams, keeps up the tradition of his family so well that, unless it is John Adams himself, no other member of the family surpasses him as an orator. He was born in Boston, May 27th, 1835; graduating at Harvard and studying law in the office of R. H. Dana, Jr. His peaceful pursuits were interrupted by the Civil War which he entered a first lieutenant, coming out a brevet-brigadier general. He was a chief of squadron in the Gettysburg campaign and served in Virginia afterwards. He was for six years president of the Union Pacific railroad and is well known both as a financier and as an author. The address on the Battle of Gettysburg is generally given as his masterpiece, but he has delivered a number of other orations of high and well-sustained eloquence.
THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG (Delivered at Quincy, Mass., July 4th, 1869)
Six years ago this anniversary, we, and not only we who stood upon the sacred and furrowed field of battle, but you and our whole country, were drawing breath after the struggle of Gettysburg. For three long days we had stood the strain of conflict, and now, at last, when the nation's birthday dawned, the shattered rebel columns had suddenly withdrawn from our front, and we drew that long breath of deep relief which none have ever drawn who have not passed in safety through the shock of doubtful battle. Nor was our country gladdened then by news from Gettysburg alone. The army that day twined noble laurel garlands round the proud brow of the motherland. Vicksburg was, thereafter, to be forever associated with the Declaration of Independence, and the glad anniversary rejoicings, as they rose from every town and village and city of the loyal North, mingled with the last sullen echoes that died away from our cannon over Cemetery Ridge, and were answered by glad shouts of victory from the far Southwest. To all of us of this generation, —and especially to such of us as were ourselves part of those great events,—this celebration, therefore, now has and must ever retain a special significance. It belonged to us, as well as to our fathers. As upon this day ninety-three years ago this nation was brought into existence through the efforts of others, so upon this day six years ago I am disposed to believe through our own efforts, it dramatically touched the climax of its great argument.
The time that has since elapsed enables us now to look back and to see things in their true proportions. We begin to realize that the years we have so recently passed through, though we did not appreciate it at the time, were the heroic years of American history. Now that their passionate excitement is over, it is pleasant to dwell upon them; to recall the rising of a great people; the call to arms as it boomed from our hilltops and clashed from our steeples; the eager patriotism of that fierce April which kindled new sympathies in every bosom, which caused the miser to give freely of his wealth, the wife with eager hands to pack the knapsack of her husband, and mothers with eyes glistening with tears of pride, to look out upon the shining bayonets of their boys; then came the frenzy of impatience and the defeat entailed upon us by rashness and inexperience, before our nation settled down, solidly and patiently, to its work, determined to save itself from destruction; and then followed the long weary years of doubt and mingled fear and hope, until at last that day came six years ago which we now celebrate— the day which saw the flood, tide of rebellion reach the high-water mark, whence it never after ceased to recede. At the moment, probably, none of us, either at home or at the seat of war, realized the grandeur of the situation, the dramatic power of the incidents, or the Titanic nature of the conflict. To you who were at home, mothers, fathers, wives, sisters, brothers, citizens of the common country, if nothing else, the agony of suspense, the anxiety, the joy, and, too often, the grief which was to know no end, which marked the passage of those days, left little either of time or inclination to dwell upon aught save the horrid reality of the drama. To others who more immediately participated in those great events, the daily vexations and annoyances—the hot and dusty day —the sleepless, anxious night—the rain upon the unsheltered bivouac—the dead lassitude which succeeded the excitement of action —the cruel orders which recognized no fatigue and made no allowance for labors undergone—all these small trials of the soldier's life made it possible to but few to realize the grandeur of the drama to which they were playing a part. Yet we were not wholly oblivious of it. Now and then I come across strange evidences of this in turning over the leaves of the few weather-stained, dogeared volumes which were the companions of my life in camp. The title page of one bears witness to the fact that it was my companion at Gettysburg, and in it I recently found some lines of Browning's noble poem of 'Saul' marked and altered to express my sense of our situation, and bearing date upon this very fifth of July. The poet had described in them the fall of snow in the springtime from a mountain, under which nestled a valley; the altering of a few words made them well describe the approach of our army to Gettysburg.
"Fold on fold, all at once, we crowded thundrously down to your
feet;
And there fronts yon, stark black but alive yet, your army of old
With its rents, the successive bequeathing of conflicts untold.
Yea, each harm got in fighting your battles, each furrow and scar
Of its head thrust twixt you and the tempest—all hail, here we
are."
And there we were, indeed, and then and there was enacted such a celebration as I hope may never again be witnessed there or elsewhere on another fourth of July. Even as I stand here before you, through the lapse of years and the shifting experiences of the recent past, visions and memories of those days rise thick and fast before me. We did, indeed, crowd thundrously down to their feet. Of the events of those three terrible days I may speak with feeling and yet with modesty, for small, indeed, was the part which those with whom I served were called upon to play. When those great bodies of infantry drove together in the crash of battle, the clouds of cavalry which had hitherto covered up their movements were swept aside to the flanks. Our work for the time was done, nor had it been an easy or a pleasant work. The road to Gettysburg had been paved with our bodies and watered with our blood. Three weeks before, in the middle days of June, I, a captain of cavalry, had taken the field at the head of one hundred mounted men, the joy and pride of my life. Through twenty days of almost incessant conflict the hand of death had been heavy upon us, and now, upon the eve of Gettysburg, thirty-four of the hundred only remained, and our comrades were dead on the field of battle, or languishing in hospitals, or prisoners in the hands of the enemy. Six brave young fellows we had buried in one grave where they fell on the heights of Aldie. It was late on the evening of the first of July, that there came to us rumors of heavy fighting at Gettysburg, nearly forty miles away. The regiment happened then to be detached, and its orders for the second were to move in the rear of Sedgwick's corps and see that no man left the column. All that day we marched to the sound of the cannon. Sedgwick, very grim and stern, was pressing forward his tired men, and we soon saw that for once there would be no stragglers from the ranks. As the day grew old and as we passed rapidly up from the rear to the head of the hurrying column, the roar of battle grew more distinct, until at last we crowned a hill, and the contest broke upon us. Across the deep valley, some two miles away, we could see the white smoke of the bursting shells, while below the sharp incessant rattle of the musketry told of the fierce struggle that was going on. Before us ran the straight, white, dusty road, choked with artillery, ambulances, caissons, ammunition trains, all pressing forward to the field of battle, while mixed among them, their bayonets gleaming through the dust like wavelets on a river of steel, tired, foot-sore, hungry, thirsty, begrimed with sweat and dust, the gallant infantry of Sedgwick's corps hurried to the sound of the cannon as men might have flocked to a feast. Moving rapidly forward, we crossed the brook which ran so prominently across the map of the field of battle, and halted on its further side to await our orders. Hardly had I dismounted from my horse when, looking back, I saw that the head of the column had reached the brook and deployed and halted on its other bank, and already the stream was filled with naked men shouting with pleasure as they washed off the sweat of their long day's march. Even as I looked, the noise of the battle grew louder, and soon the symptoms of movement were evident. The rappel was heard, the bathers hurriedly clad themselves, the ranks were formed, and the sharp, quick snap of the percussion caps told us the men were preparing their weapons for action. Almost immediately a general officer rode rapidly to the front of the line, addressed to it a few brief, energetic words, the short sharp order to move by the flank was given, followed immediately by the "double-quick"; the officer placed himself at the head of the column, and that brave infantry which had marched almost forty miles since the setting of yesterday's sun,—which during that day had hardly known either sleep, or food, or rest, or shelter from the July heat,—now, as the shadows grew long, hurried forward on the run to take its place in the front of battle and to bear up the reeling fortunes of the day.
It is said that at the crisis of Solferino, Marshal McMahon appeared with his corps upon the field of battle, his men having run for seven miles. We need not go abroad for examples of endurance and soldierly bearing. The achievement of Sedgwick and the brave Sixth Corps, as they marched upon the field of Gettysburg on that second day of July, far excels the vaunted efforts of the French Zouaves.
Twenty-four hours later we stood on that same ground. Many dear friends had yielded up their young lives during the hours which had elapsed, but, though twenty thousand fellow-creatures were wounded or dead around us, though the flood gates of heaven seemed opened and the torrents fell upon the quick and the dead, yet the elements seemed electrified with a certain magic influence of victory, and as the great army sank down over-wearied in its tracks it felt that the crisis and danger was passed,—that Gettysburg was immortal.
May I not, then, well express the hope that never again may we or ours be called upon so to celebrate this anniversary? And yet now that the passionate hopes and fears of those days are all over,— now that the grief which can never be forgotten is softened and modified by the soothing hand of time,—now that the distracting doubts and untold anxieties are buried and almost forgotten,—we love to remember the gathering of the hosts, to bear again in memory the shock of battle, and to wonder at the magnificence of the drama. The passion and the excitement are gone, and we can look at the work we have done and pronounce upon it. I do not fear the sober second judgment. Our work was a great work,—it was well done, and it was done thoroughly. Some one has said, "Happy is the people which has no history." Not so! As it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, so it is better to have lived greatly, even though we have suffered greatly, than to have passed a long life of inglorious ease. Our generation,—yes, we ourselves have been a part of great things. We have suffered greatly and greatly rejoiced; we have drunk deep of the cup of joy and of sorrow; we have tasted the agony of defeat, and we have supped full with the pleasures of victory. We have proved ourselves equal to great deeds, and have learnt what qualities were in us, which in more peaceful times we ourselves did not suspect.
And, indeed, I would here in closing fain address a few words to such of you, if any such are here, who like myself may nave been soldiers during the War of the Rebellion. We should never more be partisans. We have been a part of great events in the service of the common country, we have worn her uniform, we have received her pay and devoted ourselves to the death, if need be, in her service. When we were blackened by the smoke of Antietam, we did not ask or care whether those who stood shoulder to shoulder beside us, whether he who led us, whether those who sustained us, were Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or radicals; we asked only that they might prove as true as was the steel we grasped, and as brave as we ourselves would fain have been. When we stood like a wall of stone vomiting fire from the heights of Gettysburg,—nailed to our position through three long days of mortal Hell,—did we ask each other whether that brave officer who fell while gallantly leading the counter-charge—whether that cool gunner steadily serving his piece before us amid the storm of shot and shell—whether the poor wounded, mangled, gasping comrades, crushed and torn, and dying in agony around us—had voted for Lincoln or Douglas, for Breckenridge or Bell? We then were full of other thoughts. We prized men for what they were worth to the common country of us all, and recked not of empty words. Was the man true, was he brave, was he earnest, was all we thought of then;—not, did he vote or think with us, or label himself with our party name? This lesson let us try to remember. We cannot give to party all that we once offered to country, but our duty is not yet done. We are no longer, what we have been, the young guard of the Republic; we have earned an exemption from the dangers of the field and camp, and the old musket or the crossed sabres hang harmless over our winter fires, never more to be grasped in these hands henceforth devoted to more peaceful labors; but the duties of the citizen, and of the citizen who has received his baptism in fire, are still incumbent upon us. Though young in years, we should remember that henceforth, and as long as we live in the land, we are the ancients,—the veterans of the Republic. As such, it is for us to protect in peace what we preserved in war; it is for us to look at all things with a view to the common country and not to the exigencies of party politics; it is for us ever to bear in mind the higher allegiance we have sworn, and to remember that he who has once been a soldier of the motherland degrades himself forever when he becomes the slave of faction. Then at last, if through life we ever bear these lessons freshly in mind will it be well for us, will it be well for our country, will it be well for those whose names we bear, that our bones also do not molder with those of our brave comrades beneath the sods of Gettysburg, or that our graves do not look down on the swift-flowing Mississippi from the historic heights of Vicksburg?
JOHN ADAMS (1735-1826)
John Adams, second President of the United States, was not a man of the strong emotional temperament which so often characterizes the great orator. He was fitted by nature for a student and scholar rather than to lead men by the direct appeal the orator makes to their emotions, their passions, or their judgment His inclinations were towards the Church; but after graduating from Harvard College, which he entered at the age of sixteen, he had a brief experience as a school-teacher and found it so distasteful to him that he adopted the law as a relief, without waiting to consult his inclinations further. "Necessity drove me to this determination," he writes, "but my inclination was to preach." He began the practice of law in his native village of Braintree, Massachusetts, and took no prominent part in public affairs until 1765, when he appeared as counsel for the town of Boston in proceedings growing out of the Stamp Act difficulties.
From this time on, his name is constantly associated with the great events of the Revolution. That be never allowed his prejudices as a patriot to blind him to his duties as a lawyer, he showed by appearing as counsel for the British soldiers who killed Crispus Attucks, Samuel Gray, and others, in the Boston riot of 1770. He was associated in this case with Josiah Quincy, and the two distinguished patriots conducted the case with such ability that the soldiers were acquitted—as no doubt they should have been.
Elected a member of the Continental Congress, Mr. Adams did work in it which identified him in an enduring way with the formative period of republican institutions in America. This must be remembered in passing upon his acts when as President, succeeding Washington, he is brought into strong contrast with the extreme republicans of the French school. In the Continental Congress, contrasted with English royalists and conservatives Mr. Adams himself appeared an extremist, as later on, under the same law of contrast, he appeared conservative when those who were sometimes denounced as "Jacobins" and "Levellers" were fond of denouncing him as a disguised royalist.
Prior to his administration as President, he had served as commissioner to the court of France, "Minister Plenipotentiary for the Purpose of Negotiating a Treaty of Peace and Commerce with Great Britain"; commissioner to conclude a treaty with the States-General of Holland; minister to England after the conclusion of peace, and finally as Vice-President under Washington. His services in every capacity in which he was engaged for his country showed his great ability and zeal: but in the struggle over the Alien and Sedition Laws his opponents gave him no quarter and when he retired from the Presidency it was with the feeling, shared to some extent by his great opponent Jefferson, that republics never have a proper regard for the services and sacrifices of statesmen, though they are only too ready to reward military heroes beyond their deserts. The author of 'Familiar Letters on Public Affairs' writes of Mr. Adams:—
"He was a man of strong mind, great learning, and eminent ability to use knowledge both in speech and writing. He was ever a firm believer in Christianity, not from habit and example but from a diligent investigation of its proofs. He had an uncompromising regard for his own opinion and was strongly contrasted with Washington in this respect. He seemed to have supposed that his opinions could not have been corrected by those of other men or bettered by any comparison."
It might be inferred from this that Mr. Adams was as obstinate in prejudice as in opinion, but as he had demonstrated to the contrary in taking the unpopular cause of the British soldiers at the beginning of his public career, he showed it still more strikingly by renewing and continuing until his death a friendship with Jefferson which had been interrupted by the fierce struggle over the Alien and Sedition Act.
INAUGURAL ADDRESS (March 4th. 1797)
When it was first perceived, in early times, that no middle course for America remained, between unlimited submission to a foreign legislature and a total independence of its claims, men of reflection were less apprehensive of danger from the formidable powers of fleets and armies they must determine to resist, than from those contests and dissensions which would certainly arise concerning the forms of government to be instituted over the whole and over the parts of this extensive country. Relying, however, on the purity of their attentions, the justice of their cause, and the integrity and intelgence of the people, under an over-ruling Providence, which had so signally protected this country from the first, the representatives of this nation, then consisting of little more than half its present numbers, not only broke to pieces the chains which were forging, and the rod of iron that was lifted up, but frankly cut asunder the ties which had bound them, and launched into an ocean of uncertainty.
The zeal and ardor of the people during the Revolutionary War, supplying the place of government, commanded a degree of order, sufficient, at least, for the temporary preservation of society. The confederation, which was early felt to be necessary, was prepared from the models of the Bavarian and Helvetic confederacies, the only examples which remain, with any detail and precision, in history, and certainly the only ones which the people at large had ever considered. But, reflecting on the striking difference, in so many particulars, between this country and those where a courier may go from the seat of government to the frontier in a single day, it was then certainly foreseen by some who assisted in Congress at the formation of it, that it could not be durable.
Negligence of its regulations, inattention to its recommendations, if not disobedience to its authority, not only in individuals but in States, soon appeared with their melancholy consequences— universal languor, jealousies, rivalries of States, decline of navigation and commerce, discouragement of necessary manufactures, universal fall in the value of lands and their produce, contempt of public and private faith, loss of consideration and credit with foreign nations; and, at length, in discontents, animosities, combinations, partial conventions, and insurrection, threatening some great national calamity.
In this dangerous crisis, the people of America were not abandoned by their usual good sense, presence of mind, resolution, or integrity. Measures were pursued to concert a plan to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty. The public disquisitions, discussions, and deliberations issued in the present happy constitution of government.
Employed in the service of my country abroad during the whole course of these transactions, I first saw the Constitution of the United States in a foreign country. Irritated by no literary altercation, animated by no public debate, heated by no party animosity, I read it with great satisfaction, as the result of good heads, prompted by good hearts; as an experiment better adapted to the genius, character, situation, and relations of this nation and country than any which had ever been proposed or suggested. In its general principles and great outlines, it was conformable to such a system of government as I had ever most esteemed, and in some States, my own native State in particular, had contributed to establish. Claiming a right of suffrage common with my fellow-citizens in the adoption or rejection of a constitution, which was to rule me and my posterity, as well as them and theirs, I did not hesitate to express my approbation of it on all occasions, in public and in private. It was not then, nor has been since, any objection to it, in my mind, that the Executive and Senate were not more permanent. Nor have I entertained a thought of promoting any alteration in it, but such as the people themselves, in the course of their experience, should see and feel to be necessary or expedient, and by their representatives in Congress and the State legislature, according to the constitution itself, adopt and ordain.
Returning to the bosom of my country, after a painful separation from it for ten years, I had the honor to be elected to a station under the new order of things; and I have repeatedly laid myself under the most serious obligations to support the constitution. The operation of it has equaled the most sanguine expectations of its friends; and from an habitual attention to it, satisfaction in its administration, and delight in its effects upon the peace, order, prosperity, and happiness of the nation, I have acquired an habitual attachment to it, and veneration for it.
What other form of government, indeed, can so well deserve our esteem and love?
There may be little solidity in an ancient idea that congregations of men into cities and nations are the most pleasing objects in the sight of superior intelligences; but this is very certain, that to a benevolent human mind there can be no spectacle presented by any nation more pleasing, more noble, majestic, or august, than an assembly like that which has so often been seen in this and the other chamber of Congress—of a government in which the executive authority, as well as that of all the branches of the legislature, are exercised by citizens selected at regular periods by their neighbors, to make and execute laws for the general good. Can any thing essential, any thing more, than mere ornament and decoration be added to this by robes or diamonds? Can authority be more amiable or respectable when it descends from accident or institutions established in remote antiquity than when it springs fresh from the hearts and judgments of an honest and enlightened people? For it is the people that are represented; it is their power and majesty that is reflected, and only for their good, in every legitimate government, under whatever form it may appear. The existence of such a government as ours for any length of time is a full proof of a general dissemination of knowledge and virtue throughout the whole body of the people. And what object of consideration more pleasing than this can be presented to the human mind? If natural pride is ever justifiable or excusable, it is when it springs, not from power or riches, grandeur or glory, but from conviction of national innocence, information, and benevolence.
In the midst of these pleasing ideas, we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties—if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections. If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured by a party through artifice or corruption, the government may be the choice of a party, for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good. If that solitary suffrage can be obtained by foreign nations by flattery or menaces, by fraud or violence, by terror, intrigue, or venality, the government may not be the choice of the American people, but of foreign nations. It may be foreign nations who govern us, and not we, the people, who govern ourselves; and candid men will acknowledge that, in such cases, choice would have little advantage to boast of over lot or chance.
Such is the amiable and interesting system of government (and such are some of the abuses to which it may be exposed) which the people of America have exhibited to the admiration and anxiety of the wise and virtuous of all nations for eight years, under the administration of a citizen, who, by a long course of great actions, regulated by prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, conducting a people inspired with the same virtues, and animated with the same ardent patriotism and love of liberty, to independence and peace, to increasing wealth and unexampled prosperity, has merited the gratitude of his fellow-citizens, commanded the highest praises of foreign nations, and secured immortal glory with posterity.
In that retirement, which is his voluntary choice, may he long live to enjoy the delicious recollection of his services—the gratitude of mankind; the happy fruits of them to himself and the world, which are daily increasing, and that splendid prospect of the future fortunes of his country, which is opening from year to year. His name may be still a rampart and the knowledge that he lives a bulwark against all open or secret enemies of his country's peace.
This example has been recommended to the imitation of his successors, by both houses of Congress, and by the voice of the legislatures and the people, throughout the nation.
On this subject it might become me better to be silent, or to speak with diffidence; but as something may be expected, the occasion, I hope, will be admitted as an apology, if I venture to say, that if a preference upon principle, of a free republican government, formed upon long and serious reflection, after a diligent and impartial inquiry after truth; if an attachment to the Constitution of the United States, and a conscientious determination to support it, until it shall be altered by the judgments and wishes of the people, expressed in the mode prescribed in it; if a respectful attention to the constitution of the individual States, and a constant caution and delicacy towards the State governments; if an equal and impartial regard to the rights, interests, honor, and happiness of all the States in the Union, without preference or regard to a northern or southern, eastern or western position, their various political opinions on essential points, or their personal attachments; if a love of virtuous men, of all parties and denominations; if a love of science or letters and a wish to patronize every rational effort to encourage schools, colleges, universities, academies, and every institution of propagating knowledge, virtue, and religion among all classes of people, not only for their benign influence on the happiness of life, in all its stages and classes, and of society in all its forms, but as the only means of preserving our constitution from its natural enemies, the spirit of sophistry, the spirit of party, the spirit of intrigue, profligacy, and corruption, and the pestilence of foreign influence, which is the angel of destruction to elective governments, if a love of equal laws, of justice and humanity, in the interior administration; if an inclination to improve agriculture, commerce, and manufactures for necessity, convenience, and defense; if a spirit of equity and humanity towards the aboriginal nations of America, and a disposition to ameliorate their condition by inclining them to be more friendly to us, and our citizens to be more friendly to them; if an inflexible determination to maintain peace and inviolable faith with all nations, and the system of neutrality and impartiality among the belligerent powers of Europe which has been adopted by the government, and so solemnly sanctioned by both houses of Congress, and applauded by the legislatures of the States and by public opinion, until it shall be otherwise ordained by Congress; if a personal esteem for the French nation, formed in a residence of seven years chiefly among them, and a sincere desire to preserve the friendship, which has been so much for the honor and interest of both nations; if, while the conscious honor and integrity of the people of America and the internal sentiment of their own power and energies must be preserved, an earnest endeavor to investigate every just cause, and remove every colorable pretense of complaint; if an intention to pursue, by amicable negotiation, a reparation for the injuries that have been committed on the commerce of our fellow-citizens, by whatever nation; and, if success cannot be obtained, to lay the facts before the legislature, that they may consider what further measures the honor and interest of the government and its constituents demand; if a resolution to do justice, as far as may depend upon me, at all times and to all nations, and maintain peace, friendship, and benevolence with all the world; if an unshaken confidence in the honor, spirit, and resources of the American people, on which I have so often hazarded my all, and never been deceived; if elevated ideas of the high destinies of this country, and of my own duties towards it, founded on a knowledge of the moral principles and intellectual improvements of the people, deeply engraven on my mind in early life, and not obscured, but exalted, by experience and age; and with humble reverence, I feel it my duty to add, if a veneration for the religion of the people who profess and call themselves Christians, and a fixed resolution to consider a decent respect for Christianity among the best recommendations for the public service, can enable me, in any degree, to comply with your wishes, it shall be my strenuous endeavor that this sagacious injunction of the two houses shall not be without effect.
With this great example before me—with the sense and spirit, the faith and honor, the duty and interest of the same American people, pledged to support the Constitution of the United States, I entertain no doubt of its continuance in all its energy; and my mind is prepared, without hesitation, to lay myself under the most solemn obligations to support it to the utmost of my power.
And may that Being who is supreme over all, the patron of order, the fountain of justice, and the protector, in all ages of the world, of virtuous liberty, continue his blessing upon this nation and its government, and give it all possible success and duration, consistent with the ends of his providence!
THE BOSTON MASSACRE
(First Day's Speech in Defense of the British Soldiers Accused of
Murdering Attucks, Gray and Others, in the Boston Riot of 1770)
May If Please Your Honor, and You, Gentlemen of the Jury:—
I am for the prisoners at the bar, and shall apologize for it only in the words of the Marquis Beccaria:—
"If I can but be the instrument of preserving one life, his blessings and tears of transport shall be a sufficient consolation for me for the contempt of all mankind."
As the prisoners stand before you for their lives, it may be proper to recollect with what temper the law requires we should proceed to this trial. The form of proceeding at their arraignment has discovered that the spirit of the law upon such occasions is conformable to humanity, to common sense and feeling; that it is all benignity and candor. And the trial commences with the prayer of the court, expressed by the clerk, to the Supreme Judge of judges, empires, and worlds, "God send you a good deliverance."
We find in the rules laid down by the greatest English judges, who have been the brightest of mankind: We are to look upon it as more beneficial that many guilty persons should escape unpunished than one innocent should suffer. The reason is, because it is of more importance to the community that innocence should be protected than it is that guilt should be punished; for guilt and crimes are so frequent in the world that all of them cannot be punished; and many times they happen in such a manner that it is not of much consequence to the public whether they are punished or not. But when innocence itself is brought to the bar and condemned, especially to die, the subject will exclaim, "It is immaterial to me whether I behave well or ill, for virtue itself is no security." And if such a sentiment as this should take place in the mind of the subject, there would be an end to all security whatsoever, I will read the words of the law itself.
The rules I shall produce to you from Lord Chief-Justice Hale, whose character as a lawyer, a man of learning and philosophy, and a Christian, will be disputed by nobody living; one of the greatest and best characters the English nation ever produced. His words are these:—
(2 H. H. P. C.): Tutius semper est errare, in acquietando quam in puniendo, ex parte misericordiae quam ex parte justitiae.—"It is always safer to err in acquitting than punishing, on the part of mercy than the part of justice."
The next is from the same authority, 305:—
Tutius erratur ex parte mitiori,—"It is always safer to err on the milder side, the side of mercy."
(H. H. P. C. 509): "The best rule in doubtful cases is rather to incline to acquittal than conviction."
And on page 300:—
Quod dubitas, ne feceris.—"Where you are doubtful, never act; that is, if you doubt of the prisoner's guilt, never declare him guilty."
This is always the rule, especially in cases of life. Another rule from the same author, 289, where he says:—
"In some cases presumptive evidences go far to prove a person guilty, though there is no express proof of the fact to be committed by him; but then it must be very warily expressed, for it is better five guilty persons should escape unpunished than one innocent person should die."
The next authority shall be from another judge of equal character, considering the age wherein he lived; that is, Chancellor Fortescue in 'Praise of the Laws of England,' page 59. This is a very ancient writer on the English law. His words are:—
"Indeed, one would rather, much rather, that twenty guilty persons escape punishment of death, than one innocent person be condemned and suffer capitally."
Lord Chief-Justice Hale says:—
"It is better five guilty persons escape, than one innocent person suffer."
Lord Chancellor Fortescue, you see, carries the matter further, and says:—
"Indeed, one had rather, much rather, that twenty guilty persons should escape than one innocent person suffer capitally."
Indeed, this rule is not peculiar to the English law; there never was a system of laws in the world in which this rule did not prevail. It prevailed in the ancient Roman law, and, which is more remarkable, it prevails in the modern Roman law. Even the judges in the Courts of Inquisition, who with racks, burnings, and scourges examine criminals,—even there they preserve it as a maxim, that it is better the guilty should escape punishment than the innocent suffer. Satius esse nocentem absolvi quam innocentem damnari. This is the temper we ought to set out with, and these the rules we are to be governed by. And I shall take it for granted, as a first principle, that the eight prisoners at the bar had better be all acquitted, though we should admit them all to be guilty, than that any one of them should, by your verdict, be found guilty, being innocent.
I shall now consider the several divisions of law under which the evidence will arrange itself.
The action now before you is homicide; that is, the killing of one man by another. The law calls it homicide; but it is not criminal in all cases for one man to slay another. Had the prisoners been on the Plains of Abraham and slain a hundred Frenchmen apiece, the English law would have considered it as a commendable action, virtuous and praiseworthy; so that every instance of killing a man is not a crime in the eye of the law. There are many other instances which I cannot enumerate—an officer that executes a person under sentence of death, etc. So that, gentlemen, every instance of one man's killing another is not a crime, much less a crime to be punished with death. But to descend to more particulars.
The law divides homicide into three branches; the first is "justifiable," the second "excusable," and the third "felonious." Felonious homicide is subdivided into two branches; the first is murder, which is killing with malice aforethought; the second is manslaughter, which is killing a man on a sudden provocation. Here, gentlemen, are four sorts of homicide; and you are to consider whether all the evidence amounts to the first, second, third or fourth of these heads. The fact was the slaying five unhappy persons that night. You are to consider whether it was justifiable, excusable, or felonious; and if felonious, whether it was murder or manslaughter. One of these four it must be. You need not divide your attention to any more particulars. I shall, however, before I come to the evidence, show you several authorities which will assist you and me in contemplating the evidence before us.
I shall begin with justifiable homicide. If an officer, a sheriff, execute a man on the gallows, draw and quarter him, as in case of high treason, and cut off his head, this is justifiable homicide. It is his duty. So also, gentlemen, the law has planted fences and barriers around every individual; it is a castle round every man's person, as well as his house. As the love of God and our neighbor comprehends the whole duty of man, so self-love and social comprehend all the duties we owe to mankind; and the first branch is self-love, which is not only our indisputable right, but our clearest duty. By the laws of nature, this is interwoven in the heart of every individual. God Almighty, whose law we cannot alter, has implanted it there, and we can annihilate ourselves as easily as root out this affection for ourselves. It is the first and strongest principle in our nature. Justice Blackstone calls it "The primary canon in the law of nature." That precept of our holy religion which commands us to love our neighbor as ourselves does not command us to love our neighbor better than ourselves, or so well. No Christian divine has given this interpretation. The precept enjoins that our benevolence to our fellow-men should be as real and sincere as our affection to ourselves, not that it should be as great in degree. A man is authorized, therefore, by common sense and the laws of England, as well as those of nature, to love himself better than his fellow-subject. If two persons are cast away at sea, and get on a plank (a case put by Sir Francis Bacon), and the plank is insufficient to hold them both, the one has a right to push the other off to save himself. The rules of the common law, therefore which authorize a man to preserve his own life at the expense of another's, are not contradicted by any divine or moral law. We talk of liberty and property, but if we cut up the law of self-defense, we cut up the foundations of both; and if we give up this, the rest is of very little value, and therefore this principle must be strictly attended to; for whatsoever the law pronounces in the case of these eight soldiers will be the law to other persons and after ages. All the persons that have slain mankind in this country from the beginning to this day had better have been acquitted than that a wrong rule and precedent should be established.
I shall now read to you a few authorities on this subject of self-defense. Foster, 273 (in the case of justifiable self-defense):
"The injured party may repel force with force in defense of person, habitation, or property, against one who manifestly intendeth and endeavoreth with violence or surprise to commit a known felony upon either. In these cases he is not obliged to retreat, but pursue his adversary till he finds himself out of danger; and a conflict between them he happeneth to kill, such killing is fiable."
I must entreat you to consider the words of this authority. The injured person may repel force by force against any who endeavoreth to commit any kind of felony on him or his. Here the rule is, I have a right to stand on my own defense, if you intend to commit felony. If any of the persons made an attack on these soldiers, with an intention to rob them, if it was but to take their hats feloniously, they had a right to kill them on the spot, and had no business to retreat. If a robber meet me in the street and command me to surrender my purse, I have a right to kill him without asking any questions. If a person commit a bare assault on me, this will not justify killing; but if he assault me in such a manner as to discover an intention to kill me, I have a right to destroy him, that I may put it out of his power to kill me. In the case you will have to consider, I do not know there was any attempt to steal from these persons; however, there were some persons concerned who would, probably enough, have stolen, if there had been anything to steal, and many were there who had no such disposition. But this is not the point we aim at. The question is, Are you satisfied the people made the attack in order to kill the soldiers? If you are satisfied that the people, whoever they were, made that assault with a design to kill or maim the soldiers, this was such an assault as will justify the soldiers killing in their own defense. Further, it seems to me, we may make another question, whether you are satisfied that their real intention was to kill or maim, or not? If any reasonable man in the situation of one of these soldiers would have had reason to believe in the time of it, that the people came with an intention to kill him, whether you have this satisfaction now or not in your own minds, they were justifiable, at least excusable, in firing. You and I may be suspicious that the people who made this assault on the soldiers did it to put them to flight, on purpose that they might go exulting about the town afterwards in triumph; but this will not do. You must place yourselves in the situation of Weems and Killroy—consider yourselves as knowing that the prejudice of the world about you thought you came to dragoon them into obedience, to statutes, instructions, mandates, and edicts, which they thoroughly detested—that many of these people were thoughtless and inconsiderate, old and young, sailors and landsmen, negroes and mulattoes—that they, the soldiers, had no friends about them, the rest were in opposition to them; with all the bells ringing to call the town together to assist the people in King Street, for they knew by that time that there was no fire; the people shouting, huzzaing, and making the mob whistle, as they call it, which, when a boy makes it in the street is no formidable thing, but when made by a multitude is a most hideous shriek, almost as terrible as an Indian yell; the people crying, "Kill them, kill them. Knock them over," heaving snowballs, oyster shells, clubs, white-birch sticks three inches and a half in diameter; consider yourselves in this situation, and then judge whether a reasonable man in the soldiers' situation would not have concluded they were going to kill him. I believe if I were to reverse the scene, I should bring it home to our own bosoms. Suppose Colonel Marshall when he came out of his own door and saw these grenadiers coming down with swords, etc., had thought it proper to have appointed a military watch; suppose he had assembled Gray and Attucks that were killed, or any other person in town, and appointed them in that situation as a military watch, and there had come from Murray's barracks thirty or forty soldiers with no other arms than snowballs, cakes of ice, oyster shells, cinders, and clubs, and attacked this military watch in this manner, what do you suppose would have been the feelings and reasonings of any of our householders? I confess, I believe they would not have borne one-half of what the witnesses have sworn the soldiers bore, till they had shot down as many as were necessary to intimidate and disperse the rest; because the law does not oblige us to bear insults to the danger of our lives, to stand still with such a number of people around us, throwing such things at us, and threatening our lives, until we are disabled to defend ourselves.
(Foster, 274): "Where a known felony is attempted upon the person, be it to rob or murder, here the party assaulted may repel force with force, and even his own servant, then attendant on him, or any other person present, may interpose for preventing mischief, and if death ensue, the party so interposing will be justified. In this case nature and social duty co-operate."
Hawkins, P. C., Chapter 28, Section 25, towards the end:—"Yet it seems that a private person, a fortiori, an officer of justice, who happens unavoidably to kill another in endeavoring to defend himself from or suppress dangerous rioters, may justify the fact in as much as he only does his duty in aid of the public justice."
Section 24:—"And I can see no reason why a person, who, without provocation, is assaulted by another, in any place whatsoever, in such a manner as plainly shows an intent to murder him, as by discharging a pistol, or pushing at him with a drawn sword, etc., may not justify killing such an assailant, as much as if he had attempted to rob him. For is not he who attempts to murder me more injurious than he who barely attempts to rob me? And can it be more justifiable to fight for my goods than for my life?"
And it is not only highly agreeable to reason that a man in such circumstances may lawfully kill another, but it seems also to be confirmed by the general tenor of our books, which, speaking of homicide se defendo, suppose it done in some quarrel or affray.
(Hawkins, p. 71. section 14); "And so, perhaps, the killing of dangerous rioters may be justified by any private persons, who cannot otherwise suppress them or defend themselves from them, inasmuch as every private person seems to be authorized by the law to arm himself for the purposes aforesaid."
Here every private person is authorized to arm himself; and on the strength of this authority I do not deny the inhabitants had a right to arm themselves at that time for their defense, not for offense. That distinction is material, and must be attended to.
(Hawkins, p. 75, section 14): "And not only he who on an assault retreats to the wall, or some such strait, beyond which he can go no further before he kills the other, is judged by the law to act upon unavoidable necessity; but also he who being assaulted in such a manner and in such a place that he cannot go back without manifestly endangering his life, kills the other without retreating at all."
(Section 16); "And an officer who kills one that insults him in the execution of his office, and where a private person that kills one who feloniously assaults him in the highway, may justify the fact without ever giving back at all."
There is no occasion for the magistrate to read the riot act. In the case before you, I suppose you will be satisfied when you come to examine the witnesses and compare it with the rules of the common law, abstracted from all mutiny acts and articles of war, that these soldiers were in such a situation that they could not help themselves. People were coming from Royal Exchange Lane, and other parts of the town, with clubs and cord-wood sticks; the soldiers were planted by the wail of the Customhouse; they could not retreat; they were surrounded on all sides, for there were people behind them as well as before them; there were a number of people in the Royal Exchange Lane; the soldiers were so near to the Customhouse that they could not retreat, unless they had gone into the brick wall of it. I shall show you presently that all the party concerned in this unlawful design were guilty of what any one of them did; if anybody threw a snowball it was the act of the whole party; if any struck with a club or threw a club, and the club had killed anybody, the whole party would have been guilty of murder in the law. Lord Chief-Justice Holt, in Mawgrige's case (Keyling, 128), says:—
"Now, it has been held, that if A of his malice prepense assaults B to kill him, and B draws his sword and attacks A and pursues him, then A, for his safety, gives back and retreats to a wall, and B still pursuing him with his drawn sword, A in his defense kills B; this is murder in A. For A having malice against B, and in pursuance thereof endeavoring to kill him, is answerable for all the consequences of which he was the original cause. It is not reasonable for any man that is dangerously assaulted, and when he perceives his life in danger from his adversary, but to have liberty for the security of his own life, to pursue him that maliciously assaulted him; for he that has manifested that he has malice against another is not at to be trusted with a dangerous weapon in his hand. And so resolved by all the judges when they met at Seargeant's Inn, in preparation for my Lord Morley's trial."
In the case here we will take Montgomery, if you please, when he was attacked by the stout man with a stick, who aimed it at his head, with a number of people round him crying out, "Kill them, kill them." Had he not a right to kill the man? If all the party were guilty of the assault made by the stout man, and all of them had discovered malice in their hearts, had not Montgomery a right, according to Lord Chief-Justice Holt, to put it out of their power to wreak their malice upon him? I will not at present look for any more authorities in the point of self-defense; you will be able to judge from these how far the law goes in justifying or excusing any person in defense of himself, or taking away the life of another who threatens him in life or limb. The next point is this: that in case of an unlawful assembly, all and every one of the assembly is guilty of all and every unlawful act committed by any one of that assembly in prosecution of the unlawful design set out upon.
Rules of law should be universally known, whatever effect they may have on politics; they are rules of common law, the law of the land; and it is certainly true, that wherever there is an unlawful assembly, let it consist of many persons or of a few, every man in it is guilty of every unlawful act committed by any one of the whole party, be they more or be they less, in pursuance of their unlawful design. This is the policy of the law; to discourage and prevent riots, insurrections, turbulence, and tumults.
In the continual vicissitudes of human things, amidst the shocks of fortune and the whirls of passion that take place at certain critical seasons, even in the mildest government, the people are liable to run into riots and tumults. There are Church-quakes and State-quakes in the moral and political world, as well as earthquakes, storms, and tempests in the physical. Thus much, however, must be said in favor of the people and of human nature, that it is a general, if not a universal truth, that the aptitude of the people to mutinies, seditions, tumults, and insurrections, is in direct proportion to the despotism of the government. In governments completely despotic,—that is, where the will of one man is the only law, this disposition is most prevalent. In aristocracies next; in mixed monarchies, less than either of the former; in complete republics the least of all, and under the same form of governments as in a limited monarchy, for example, the virtue and wisdom of the administrations may generally be measured by the peace and order that are seen among the people. However this may be, such is the imperfection of all things in this world, that no form of government, and perhaps no virtue or wisdom in the administration, can at all times avoid riots and disorders among the people.
Now, it is from this difficulty that the policy of the law has framed such strong discouragements to secure the people against tumults; because, when they once begin, there is danger of their running to such excesses as will overturn the whole system of government. There is the rule from the reverend sage of the law, so often quoted before:—
(1 H. H. P. C. 437): "All present, aiding and assisting, are equally principal with him that gave the stroke whereof the party died. For though one gave the stroke, yet in interpretation of law it is the stroke of every person that was present, aiding and assisting."
(1 H. H. P. C. 440): "If divers come with one assent to do mischief, as to kill, to rob or beat, and one doeth it, they are all principals in the felony. If many be present and one only give the stroke whereof the party dies, they are all principal, if they came for that purpose."
Now, if the party at Dock Square came with an intention only to beat the soldiers, and began to affray with them, and any of them had been accidentally killed, it would have been murder, because it was an unlawful design they came upon. If but one does it they are all considered in the eye of the law guilty; if any one gives the mortal stroke, they are all principals here, therefore there is a reversal of the scene. If you are satisfied that these soldiers were there on a lawful design, and it should be proved any of them shot without provocation, and killed anybody, he only is answerable for it.
(First Kale's Pleas of the Crown, 1 H. H. P. C. 444): "Although if many come upon an unlawful design, and one of the company till one of the adverse party in pursuance of that design, all are principals; yet if many be together upon a lawful account, and one of the company kill another of the adverse party, without any particular abetment of the rest to this fact of homicide, they are not all guilty that are of the company, but only those that gave the stroke or actually abetted him to do it."
(1 H. H. P. C. 445): "In case of a riotous assembly to rob or steal deer, or to do any unlawful act of violence, there the offense of one is the offense of all the company."
(In another place, 1 H. H. P. C. 439): "The Lord Dacre and divers others went to steal deer in the park of one Pellham. Raydon, one of the company, killed the keeper in the park, the Lord Dacre and the rest of the company being in the other part of the park. Yet it was adjudged murder in them all, and they died for it." (And he quotes Crompton 25, Dalton 93. p. 241.) "So that in so strong a case as this, where this nobleman set out to hunt deer in the ground of another, he was in one part of the park and his company in another part, yet they were all guilty of murder."
The next is:—
(Kale's Pleas of the Crown, 1 H. H. P. C. 440): "The case of Drayton Bassit; divers persons doing an unlawful act, all are guilty of what is done by one."
(Foster 353, 354): "A general resolution against all opposers, whether such resolution appears upon evidence to have been actually and implicitly entered into by the confederates, or may reasonably be collected from their number, arms or behavior, at or before the scene of action, such resolutions so proved have always been considered as strong ingredients in cases of this kind. And in cases of homicide committed in consequence of them, every person present, in the sense of the law, when the homicide has been involved in the guilt of him that gave the mortal blow."
(Foster): "The cases of Lord Dacre, mentioned by Hale, and of Pudsey, reported by Crompton and cited by Hale, turned upon this point. The offenses they respectively stood charged with, as principals, were committed far out of their sight and hearing, and yet both were held to be present. It was sufficient that at the instant the facts were committed, they were of the same party and upon the same pursuit, and under the same engagements and expectations of mutual defense and support with those that did the facts."
Thus far I have proceeded, and I believe it will not be hereafter disputed by anybody, that this law ought to be known to every one who has any disposition to be concerned in an unlawful assembly, whatever mischief happens in the prosecution of the design they set out upon, all are answerable for it. It is necessary we should consider the definitions of some other crimes as well as murder; sometimes one crime gives occasion to another. An assault is sometimes the occasion of manslaughter, sometimes of excusable homicide. It is necessary to consider what is a riot, (1 Hawkins, ch. 65, section 2): I shall give you the definition of it:—
"Wheresoever more than three persons use force or violence, for the accomplishment of any design whatever, all concerned are rioters."
Were there not more than three persons in Dock Square? Did they not agree to go to King Street, and attack the main guard? Where, then, is the reason for hesitation at calling it a riot? If we cannot speak the law as it is, where is our liberty? And this is law, that wherever more than three persons are gathered together to accomplish anything with force, it is a riot.
(1 Hawkins, ch. 65, section 2): "Wherever more than three persons use force and violence, all who are concerned therein are rioters. But in some cases wherein the law authorizes force, it is lawful and commendable to use it. As for a sheriff [2 And. 67 Poph. 121], or constable [3 H. 7, 10, 6], or perhaps even for a private person [Poph. 121, Moore 656], to assemble a competent number of people, in order with force to oppose rebels or enemies or rioters, and afterwards, with such force actually to suppress them."
I do not mean to apply the word rebel on this occasion; I have no reason to suppose that ever there was one in Boston, at least among the natives of the country; but rioters are in the same situation, as far as my argument is concerned, and proper officers may suppress rioters, and so may even private persons.
If we strip ourselves free from all military laws, mutiny acts, articles of war and soldiers' oaths, and consider these prisoners as neighbors, if any of their neighbors were attacked in King Street, they had a right to collect together to suppress this riot and combination. If any number of persons meet together at a fair or market, and happen to fall together by the ears, they are not guilty of a riot, but of a sudden affray. Here is another paragraph, which I must read to you:—
(1 Hawkins, ch. 65, section 3): "If a number of persons being met together at a fair or market, or on any other lawful or innocent occasion, happen, on a sudden quarrel, to fall together by the ears, they are not guilty of a riot, but of a sudden affray only, of which none are guilty but those who actually began it," etc.
It would be endless, as well as superfluous, to examine whether every particular person engaged in a riot were in truth one of the first assembly or actually had a previous knowledge of the design thereof. I have endeavored to produce the best authorities, and to give you the rules of law in their words, for I desire not to advance anything of my own. I choose to lay down the rules of law from authorities which cannot be disputed. Another point is this, whether and how far a private person may aid another in distress? Suppose a press-gang should come on shore in this town and assault any sailor or householder in King Street, in order to carry him on board one of his Majesty's ships, and impress him without any warrant as a seaman in his Majesty's service; how far do you suppose the inhabitants would think themselves warranted by law to interpose against that lawless press-gang? I agree that such a press-gang would be as unlawful an assembly as that was in King Street. If they were to press an inhabitant and carry him off for a sailor, would not the inhabitants think themselves warranted by law to interpose in behalf of their fellow-citizen? Now, gentlemen, if the soldiers had no right to interpose in the relief of the sentry, the inhabitants would have no right to interpose with regard to the citizen, for whatever is law for a soldier is law for a sailor and for a citizen. They all stand upon an equal footing in this respect. I believe we shall not have it disputed that it would be lawful to go into King Street and help an honest man there against the press-master. We have many instances in the books which authorize it.
Now, suppose you should have a jealousy in your minds that the people who made this attack upon the sentry had nothing in their intention more than to take him off his post, and that was threatened by some. Suppose they intended to go a little further, and tar and feather him, or to ride him (as the phrase is in Hudibras), he would have had a good right to have stood upon his defense—the defense of his liberty; and if he could not preserve that without the hazard of his own life, he would have been warranted in depriving those of life who were endeavoring to deprive him of his. That is a point I would not give up for my right hand—nay, for my life.
Well, I say, if the people did this, or if this was only their intention, surely the officers and soldiers had a right to go to his relief; and therefore they set out upon a lawful errand. They were, therefore, a lawful assembly, if we only consider them as private subjects and fellow-citizens, without regard to mutiny acts, articles of war, or soldiers' oaths. A private person, or any number of private persons, has a right to go to the assistance of a fellow-subject in distress or danger of his life, when assaulted and in danger from a few or a multitude.
(Keyl. 136): "If a man perceives another by force to be injuriously treated, pressed, and restrained of his liberty, though the person abused doth not complain or call for aid or assistance, and others, out of compassion, shall come to his rescue, and kill any of those that shall so restrain him, that is manslaughter."
Keyl.: "A and others without any warrant impress B to serve the king at sea. B quietly submitted, and went off with the pressmaster. Hugett and the others pursued them, and required a sight of their warrant; but they showing a piece of paper that was not a sufficient warrant, thereupon Hugett with the others drew their swords, and the pressmasters theirs, and so there was a combat, and those who endeavored to rescue the pressed man killed one of the pretended pressmasters. This was but manslaughter; for when the liberty of one subject is invaded, it affects all the rest. It is a provocation to all people, as being of ill example and pernicious consequences."
Lord Raymond, 1301. The Queen versus Tooley et al. Lord Chief-Justice Holt says: "The prisoner (i.e. Tooley) in this had sufficient provocation; for if one be impressed upon an unlawful authority, it is a sufficient provocation to all people out of compassion; and where the liberty of the subject is invaded, it is a provocation to all the subjects of England, etc.; and surely a man ought to be concerned for Magna Charta and the laws: and if any one, against the law, imprisons a man, he is an offender against Magna Charta."
I am not insensible to Sir Michael Foster's observations on these cases, but apprehend they do not invalidate the authority of them as far as I now apply them to the purposes of my argument. If a stranger, a mere fellow-subject, may interpose to defend the liberty, he may, too, defend the life of another individual. But, according to the evidence, some imprudent people, before the sentry, proposed to take him off his post; others threatened his life; and intelligence of this was carried to the main guard before any of the prisoners turned out. They were then ordered out to relieve the sentry; and any of our fellow-citizens might lawfully have gone upon the same errand. They were, therefore, a lawful assembly.
I have but one point of law more to consider, and that is this: In the case before you I do not pretend to prove that every one of the unhappy persons slain was concerned in the riot. The authorities read to you just now say it would be endless to prove whether every person that was present and in a riot was concerned in planning the first enterprise or not. Nay, I believe it but justice to say some were perfectly innocent of the occasion. I have reason to suppose that one of them was—Mr. Maverick. He was a very worthy young man, as he has been represented to me, and had no concern in the rioters' proceedings of that night; and I believe the same may be said in favor of one more at least, Mr. Caldwell, who was slain; and, therefore, many people may think that as he and perhaps another was innocent, therefore innocent blood having been shed, that must be expiated by the death of somebody or other. I take notice of this, because one gentleman was nominated by the sheriff for a juryman upon this trial, because he had said he believed Captain Preston was innocent, but innocent blood had been shed, and therefore somebody ought to be hanged for it, which he thought was indirectly giving his opinion in this cause. I am afraid many other persons have formed such an opinion. I do not take it to be a rule, that where innocent blood is shed the person must die. In the instance of the Frenchmen on the Plains of Abraham, they were innocent, fighting for their king and country; their blood is as innocent as any. There may be multitudes killed, when innocent blood is shed on all sides; so that it is not an invariable rule. I will put a case in which, I dare say, all will agree with me. Here are two persons, the father and the son, go out a-hunting. They take different roads. The father hears a rushing among the bushes, takes it to be game, fires, and kills his son, through a mistake. Here is innocent blood shed, but yet nobody will say the father ought to die for it. So that the general rule of law is, that whenever one person has a right to do an act, and that act, by any accident takes away the life of another, it is excusable. It bears the same regard to the innocent as to the guilty. If two men are together, and attack me, and I have a right to kill them, I strike at them, and by mistake strike a third and kill him, as I had a right to kill the first, my killing the other will be excusable, as it happened by accident. If I, in the heat of passion, aim a blow at the person who has assaulted me, and aiming at him I kill another person, it is but manslaughter.
(Foster. 261. section 3): "If an action unlawful in itself is done deliberately, and with intention of mischief, or great bodily harm to particulars, or of mischief indiscriminately, fall it where it may, and death ensues, against or beside the original intention of the party, it will be murder. But if such mischievous intention doth not appear, which is matter of fact, and to be collected from circumstances, and the act was done heedlessly and inconsiderately, it will be manslaughter, not accidental death; because the act upon which death ensued was unlawful."
Suppose, in this case, the mulatto man was the person who made the assault; suppose he was concerned in the unlawful assembly, and this party of soldiers, endeavoring to defend themselves against him, happened to kill another person, who was innocent—though the soldiers had no reason, that we know of, to think any person there, at least of that number who were crowding about them, innocent; they might, naturally enough, presume all to be guilty of the riot and assault, and to come with the same design—I say, if on firing on those who were guilty, they accidentally killed an innocent person, it was not their fault. They were obliged to defend themselves against those who were pressing upon them. They are not answerable for it with their lives; for on supposition it was justifiable or excusable to kill Attucks, or any other person, it will be equally justifiable or excusable if in firing at him they killed another, who was innocent; or if the provocation was such as to mitigate the guilt of manslaughter, it will equally mitigate the guilt, if they killed an innocent man undesignedly, in aiming at him who gave the provocation, according to Judge Foster; and as this point is of such consequence, I must produce some more authorities for it:
(1 Hawkins. 84): "Also, if a third person accidentally happen to be killed by one engaged in a combat, upon a sudden quarrel, it seems that he who killed him is guilty of manslaughter only," etc. (H. H P. C. 442, to the same point; and 1 H. H. P. C. 484. and 4 Black, 27.)
I shall now consider one question more, and that is concerning provocation. We have hitherto been considering self-defense, and how far persons may go in defending themselves against aggressors, even by taking away their lives, and now proceed to consider such provocations as the law allows to mitigate or extenuate the guilt of killing, where it is not justifiable or excusable. An assault and battery committed upon a man in such a manner as not to endanger his life is such a provocation as the law allows to reduce killing down to the crime of manslaughter. Now, the law has been made on more considerations than we are capable of making at present; the law considers a man as capable of bearing anything and everything but blows. I may reproach a man as much as I please; I may call him a thief, robber, traitor, scoundrel, coward, lobster, bloody-back, etc., and if he kill me it will be murder, if nothing else but words precede; but if from giving him such kind of language I proceed to take him by the nose, or fillip him on the forehead, that is an assault; that is a blow. The law will not oblige a man to stand still and bear it; there is the distinction. Hands off; touch me not. As soon as you touch me, if I run you through the heart, it is but manslaughter. The utility of this distinction, the more you think of it the more you will be satisfied with it. It is an assault whenever a blow is struck, let it be ever so slight, and sometimes even without a blow. The law considers man as frail and passionate. When his passions are touched, he will be thrown off his guard, and therefore the law makes allowance for this frailty —considers him as in a fit of passion, not having the possession of his intellectual faculties, and therefore does not oblige him to measure out his blows with a yard-stick, or weigh them in a scale. Let him kill with a sword, gun, or hedge-stake, it is not murder, but only manslaughter.
(Keyling's Report, 135. Regina versus Mawgrige.) "Rules supported by authority and general consent, showing what are always allowed to be sufficient provocations. First, if one man upon any words shall make an assault upon another, either by pulling him by the nose or filliping him on the forehead, and he that is so assaulted shall draw his sword and immediately run the other through, that is but manslaughter, for the peace is broken by the person killed and with an indignity to him that received the assault. Besides, he that was so affronted might reasonably apprehend that he that treated him in that manner might have some further design upon him."
So that here is the boundary, when a man is assaulted and kills in consequence of that assault, it is but manslaughter. I will just read as I go along the definition of assault:—
(1 Hawkins. ch. 62, section 1): "An assault is an attempt or offer, with force or violence, to do a corporal hurt to another, as by striking at him with or without a weapon, or presenting a gun at him at such a distance to which the gun will carry, or pointing a pitchfork at him, or by any other such like act done in angry, threatening manner, etc.; but no words can amount to an assault,"
Here is the definition of an assault, which is a sufficient provocation to soften killing down to manslaughter:—
(1 Hawkins, ch. 31, section 36): "Neither can he be thought guilty of a greater crime than manslaughter, who, finding a man in bed with his wife, or being actually struck by him, or pulled by the nose or filliped upon the forehead, immediately kills him, or in the defense of his person from an unlawful arrest, or in the defense of his house from those who, claiming a title to it, attempt forcibly to enter it, and to that purpose shoot at it," etc.
Every snowball, oyster shell, cake of ice, or bit of cinder, that was thrown that night at the sentinel, was an assault upon him; every one that was thrown at the party of soldiers was an assault upon them, whether it hit any of them or not. I am guilty of an assault if I present a gun at any person; and if I insult him in that manner and he shoots me, it is but manslaughter.
(Foster. 295, 396): "To what I have offered with regard to sudden rencounters let me add, that the blood already too much heated, kindleth afresh at every pass or blow. And in the tumult of the passions, in which the mere instinct of self-preservation has no inconsiderable share, the voice of reason is not heard; and therefore the law, in condescension to the infirmities of flesh and blood, doth extenuate the offense."
Insolent, scurrilous, or slanderous language, when it precedes an assault, aggravates it.
(Foster, 316): "We all know that words of reproach, how grating and offensive soever, are in the eye of the law no provocation in the case of voluntary homicide: and yet every man who hath considered the human frame, or but attended to the workings of his own heart knoweth that affronts of that kind pierce deeper and stimulate in the veins more effectually than a slight injury done to a third person, though under the color of justice, possibly can."
I produce this to show the assault in this case was aggravated by the scurrilous language which preceded it. Such words of reproach stimulate in the veins and exasperate the mind, and no doubt if an assault and battery succeeds them, killing under such provocation is softened to manslaughter, but killing without such provocation makes it murder.
End of the first day's speech
JOHN QUINCY ADAMS (1767-1848)
No other American President, not even Thomas Jefferson, has equaled John Quincy Adams in literary accomplishments. His orations and public speeches will be found to stand for a tradition of painstaking, scholastic finish hardly to be found elsewhere in American orations, and certainly not among the speeches of any other President. As a result of the pains he took with them, they belong rather to literature than to politics, and it is possible that they will not be generally appreciated at their real worth for several generations still to come. If, as is sometimes alleged in such cases, they gain in literary finish at the expense of force, it is not to be forgotten that the forcible speech which, ignoring all rules, carries its point by assault, may buy immediate effect at the expense of permanent respectability. And if John Quincy Adams, who labored as Cicero did to give his addresses the greatest possible literary finish, does not rank with Cicero among orators, it is certain that respectability will always be willingly conceded him by every generation of his countrymen.
Some idea of the extent of his early studies may be gained from his father's letter to Benjamin Waterhouse, written from Auteuil, France, in 1785. John Quincy Adams being then only in his eighteenth year, the elder Adams said of him:—
"If you were to examine him in English and French poetry, I know not where you would find anybody his superior; in Roman and English history few persons of his age. It is rare to find a youth possessed of such knowledge. He has translated Virgil's 'Aeneid,' 'Suetonius,' the whole of 'Sallust'; 'Tacitus,' 'Agricola'; his 'Germany' and several other books of his 'Annals,' a great part of Horace, some of Ovid, and some of Caesar's 'Commentaries,' in writing, besides a number of Tully's orations. … In Greek his progress has not been equal, yet he has studied morsels in Aristotle's 'Poetics,' in Plutarch's 'Lives,' and Lucian's 'Dialogues,' 'The Choice of Hercules,' in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books of Homer's 'Iliad.'"
The elder Adams concludes the list of his son's accomplishments with a catalogue of his labors in mathematics hardly inferior in length to that cited in the classics. Even if it were true, as has been urged by the political opponents of the Adams family, that no one of its members has ever shown more than respectable natural talent, it would add overwhelming weight to the argument in favor of the laborious habits of study which have characterized them to the third and fourth generations, and, from the time of John Adams until our own, have made them men of mark and far-reaching national influence.
In national politics, John Quincy Adams, the last of the line of colonial gentlemen who achieved the presidency, stood for education, for rigid ideas of moral duty, for dignity, for patriotism, for all the virtues which are best cultivated through processes of segregation. He ended an epoch in which it was possible for a man who, as he did, wrote 'Poems on Religion and Society' and paraphrased the Psalms into English verse to be elected President. It has hardly been possible since his day.
Chosen as a Democrat in 1825, Mr. Adams was really the first Whig President. His speeches are important, historically, because they define political tendencies as a result of which the Whig party took the place of the Federalist.
ORATION AT PLYMOUTH
(Delivered at Plymouth on the Twenty-Second Day of December, 1802, in Commemoration of the Landing of the Pilgrims)
Among the sentiments of most powerful operation upon the human heart, and most highly honorable to the human character, are those of veneration for our forefathers, and of love for our posterity.
They form the connecting links between the selfish and the social passions. By the fundamental principle of Christianity, the happiness of the individual is interwoven, by innumerable and imperceptible ties, with that of his contemporaries. By the power of filial reverence and parental affection, individual existence is extended beyond the limits of individual life, and the happiness of every age is chained in mutual dependence upon that of every other. Respect for his ancestors excites, in the breast of man, interest in their history, attachment to their characters, concern for their errors, involuntary pride in their virtues. Love for his posterity spurs him to exertion for their support, stimulates him to virtue for their example, and fills him with the tenderest solicitude for their welfare. Man, therefore, was not made for himself alone. No, he was made for his country, by the obligations of the social compact; he was made for his species, by the Christian duties of universal charity; he was made for all ages past, by the sentiment of reverence for his forefathers; and he was made for all future times, by the impulse of affection for his progeny. Under the influence of these principles,
"Existence sees him spurn her bounded reign."
They redeem his nature from the subjection of time and space; he is no longer a "puny insect shivering at a breeze"; he is the glory of creation, formed to occupy all time and all extent; bounded, during his residence upon earth, only to the boundaries of the world, and destined to life and immortality in brighter regions, when the fabric of nature itself shall dissolve and perish.
The voice of history has not, in all its compass, a note but answers in unison with these sentiments. The barbarian chieftain, who defended his country against the Roman invasion, driven to the remotest extremity of Britain, and stimulating his followers to battle by all that has power of persuasion upon the human heart, concluded his persuasion by an appeal to these irresistible feelings: "Think of your forefathers and of your posterity." The Romans themselves, at the pinnacle of civilization, were actuated by the same impressions, and celebrated, in anniversary festivals, every great event which had signalized the annals of their forefathers. To multiply instances where it were impossible to adduce an exception would be to waste your time and abuse your patience; but in the sacred volume, which contains the substance of our firmest faith and of our most precious hopes, these passions not only maintain their highest efficacy, but are sanctioned by the express injunctions of the Divine Legislator to his chosen people.
The revolutions of time furnish no previous example of a nation shooting up to maturity and expanding into greatness with the rapidity which has characterized the growth of the American people. In the luxuriance of youth, and in the vigor of manhood, it is pleasing and instructive to look backwards upon the helpless days of infancy; but in the continual and essential changes of a growing subject, the transactions of that early period would be soon obliterated from the memory but for some periodical call of attention to aid the silent records of the historian. Such celebrations arouse and gratify the kindliest emotions of the bosom. They are faithful pledges of the respect we bear to the memory of our ancestors and of the tenderness with which we cherish the rising generation. They introduce the sages and heroes of ages past to the notice and emulation of succeeding times; they are at once testimonials of our gratitude, and schools of virtue to our children.
These sentiments are wise; they are honorable; they are virtuous; their cultivation is not merely innocent pleasure, it is incumbent duty. Obedient to their dictates, you, my fellow-citizens, have instituted and paid frequent observance to this annual solemnity. And what event of weightier intrinsic importance, or of more extensive consequences, was ever selected for this honorary distinction?
In reverting to the period of our origin, other nations have generally been compelled to plunge into the chaos of impenetrable antiquity, or to trace a lawless ancestry into the caverns of ravishers and robbers. It is your peculiar privilege to commemorate, in this birthday of your nation, an event ascertained in its minutest details; an event of which the principal actors are known to you familiarly, as if belonging to your own age; an event of a magnitude before which imagination shrinks at the imperfection of her powers. It is your further happiness to behold, in those eminent characters, who were most conspicuous in accomplishing the settlement of your country, men upon whose virtue you can dwell with honest exultation. The founders of your race are not handed down to you, like the father of the Roman people, as the sucklings of a wolf. You are not descended from a nauseous compound of fanaticism and sensuality, whose only argument was the sword, and whose only paradise was a brothel. No Gothic scourge of God, no Vandal pest of nations, no fabled fugitive from the flames of Troy, no bastard Norman tyrant, appears among the list of worthies who first landed on the rock, which your veneration has preserved as a lasting monument of their achievement. The great actors of the day we now solemnize were illustrious by their intrepid valor no less than by their Christian graces, but the clarion of conquest has not blazoned forth their names to all the winds of heaven. Their glory has not been wafted over oceans of blood to the remotest regions of the earth. They have not erected to themselves colossal statues upon pedestals of human bones, to provoke and insult the tardy hand of heavenly retribution. But theirs was "the better fortitude of patience and heroic martyrdom." Theirs was the gentle temper of Christian kindness; the rigorous observance of reciprocal justice; the unconquerable soul of conscious integrity. Worldly fame has been parsimonious of her favor to the memory of those generous companions. Their numbers were small; their stations in life obscure; the object of their enterprise unostentatious; the theatre of their exploits remote; how could they possibly be favorites of worldly Fame—that common crier, whose existence is only known by the assemblage of multitudes; that pander of wealth and greatness, so eager to haunt the palaces of fortune, and so fastidious to the houseless dignity of virtue; that parasite of pride, ever scornful to meekness, and ever obsequious to insolent power; that heedless trumpeter, whose ears are deaf to modest merit, and whose eyes are blind to bloodless, distant excellence?
When the persecuted companions of Robinson, exiles from their native land, anxiously sued for the privilege of removing a thousand leagues more distant to an untried soil, a rigorous climate, and a savage wilderness, for the sake of reconciling their sense of religious duty with their affections for their country, few, perhaps none of them, formed a conception of what would be, within two centuries, the result of their undertaking. When the jealous and niggardly policy of their British sovereign denied them even that humblest of requests, and instead of liberty would barely consent to promise connivance, neither he nor they might be aware that they were laying the foundations of a power, and that he was sowing the seeds of a spirit, which, in less than two hundred years, would stagger the throne of his descendants, and shake his united kingdoms to the centre. So far is it from the ordinary habits of mankind to calculate the importance of events in their elementary principles, that had the first colonists of our country ever intimated as a part of their designs the project of founding a great and mighty nation, the finger of scorn would have pointed them to the cells of bedlam as an abode more suitable for hatching vain empires than the solitude of a transatlantic desert.
These consequences, then so little foreseen, have unfolded themselves, in all their grandeur, to the eyes of the present age. It is a common amusement of speculative minds to contrast the magnitude of the most important events with the minuteness of their primeval causes, and the records of mankind are full of examples for such contemplations. It is, however, a more profitable employment to trace the constituent principles of future greatness in their kernel; to detect in the acorn at our feet the germ of that majestic oak, whose roots shoot down to the centre and whose branches aspire to the skies. Let it be, then, our present occupation to inquire and endeavor to ascertain the causes first put in operation at the period of our commemoration, and already productive of such magnificent effects; to examine with reiterated care and minute attention the characters of those men who gave the first impulse to a new series of events in the history of the world; to applaud and emulate those qualities of their minds which we shall find deserving of our admiration; to recognize with candor those features which forbid approbation or even require censure, and, finally, to lay alike their frailties and their perfections to our own hearts, either as warning or as example.
Of the various European settlements upon this continent, which have finally merged in one independent nation, the first establishments were made at various times, by several nations, and under the influence of different motives. In many instances, the conviction of religious obligation formed one and a powerful inducement of the adventures; but in none, excepting the settlement at Plymouth, did they constitute the sole and exclusive actuating cause. Worldly interest and commercial speculation entered largely into the views of other settlers, but the commands of conscience were the only stimulus to the emigrants from Leyden. Previous to their expedition hither, they had endured a long banishment from their native country. Under every species of discouragement, they undertook the vogage; they performed it in spite of numerous and almost insuperable obstacles; they arrived upon a wilderness bound with frost and hoary with snow, without the boundaries of their charter, outcasts from all human society, and coasted five weeks together, in the dead of winter, on this tempestuous shore, exposed at once to the fury of the elements, to the arrows of the native savage, and to the impending horrors of famine.
Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman, before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish into air. These qualities have ever been displayed in their mightiest perfection, as attendants in the retinue of strong passions. From the first discovery of the Western Hemisphere by Columbus until the settlement of Virginia which immediately preceded that of Plymouth, the various adventurers from the ancient world had exhibited upon innumerable occasions that ardor of enterprise and that stubbornness of pursuit which set all danger at defiance, and chained the violence of nature at their feet. But they were all instigated by personal interests. Avarice and ambition had tuned their souls to that pitch of exaltation. Selfish passions were the parents of their heroism. It was reserved for the first settlers of New England to perform achievements equally arduous, to trample down obstructions equally formidable, to dispel dangers equally terrific, under the single inspiration of conscience. To them even liberty herself was but a subordinate and secondary consideration. They claimed exemption from the mandates of human authority, as militating with their subjection to a superior power. Before the voice of heaven they silenced even the calls of their country.
Yet, while so deeply impressed with the sense of religious obligation, they felt, in all its energy, the force of that tender tie which binds the heart of every virtuous man to his native land. It was to renew that connection with their country which had been severed by their compulsory expatriation, that they resolved to face all the hazards of a perilous navigation and all the labors of a toilsome distant settlement. Under the mild protection of the Batavian government, they enjoyed already that freedom of religious worship, for which they had resigned so many comforts and enjoyments at home; but their hearts panted for a restoration to the bosom of their country. Invited and urged by the open-hearted and truly benevolent people who had given them an asylum from the persecution of their own kindred to form their settlement within the territories then under their jurisdiction, the love of their country predominated over every influence save that of conscience alone, and they preferred the precarious chance of relaxation from the bigoted rigor of the English government to the certain liberality and alluring offers of the Hollanders. Observe, my countrymen, the generous patriotism, the cordial union of soul, the conscious yet unaffected vigor which beam in their application to the British monarch:—
"They were well weaned from the delicate milk of their mother country, and inured to the difficulties of a strange land. They were knit together in a strict and sacred bond, to take care of the good of each other and of the whole. It was not with them as with other men, whom small things could discourage, or small discontents cause to wish themselves again at home."
Children of these exalted Pilgrims! Is there one among you who can hear the simple and pathetic energy of these expressions without tenderness and admiration? Venerated shades of our forefathers! No, ye were, indeed, not ordinary men! That country which had ejected you so cruelly from her bosom you still delighted to contemplate in the character of an affectionate and beloved mother. The sacred bond which knit you together was indissoluble while you lived; and oh, may it be to your descendants the example and the pledge of harmony to the latest period of time! The difficulties and dangers, which so often had defeated attempts of similar establishments, were unable to subdue souls tempered like yours. You heard the rigid interdictions; you saw the menacing forms of toil and danger, forbidding your access to this land of promise; but you heard without dismay; you saw and disdained retreat. Firm and undaunted in the confidence of that sacred bond; conscious of the purity, and convinced of the importance of your motives, you put your trust in the protecting shield of Providence, and smiled defiance at the combining terrors of human malice and of elemental strife. These, in the accomplishment of your undertaking, you were summoned to encounter in their most hideous forms; these you met with that fortitude, and combatted with that perseverance, which you had promised in their anticipation; these you completely vanquished in establishing the foundations of New England, and the day which we now commemorate is the perpetual memorial of your triumph.
It were an occupation peculiarly pleasing to cull from our early historians, and exhibit before you every detail of this transaction; to carry you in imagination on board their bark at the first moment of her arrival in the bay; to accompany Carver, Winslow, Bradford, and Standish, in all their excursions upon the desolate coast; to follow them into every rivulet and creek where they endeavored to find a firm footing, and to fix, with a pause of delight and exultation, the instant when the first of these heroic adventurers alighted on the spot where you, their descendants, now enjoy the glorious and happy reward of their labors. But in this grateful task, your former orators, on this anniversary, have anticipated all that the most ardent industry could collect, and gratified all that the most inquisitive curiosity could desire. To you, my friends, every occurrence of that momentous period is already familiar. A transient allusion to a few characteristic instances, which mark the peculiar history of the Plymouth settlers, may properly supply the place of a narrative, which, to this auditory, must be superfluous.
One of these remarkable incidents is the execution of that instrument of government by which they formed themselves into a body politic, the day after their arrival upon the coast, and previous to their first landing. This is, perhaps, the only instance in human history of that positive, original social compact, which speculative philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate source of government. Here was a unanimous and personal assent, by all the individuals of the community, to the association by which they became a nation. It was the result of circumstances and discussions which had occurred during their passage from Europe, and is a full demonstration that the nature of civil government, abstracted from the political institutions of their native country, had been an object of their serious meditation. The settlers of all the former European colonies had contented themselves with the powers conferred upon them by their respective charters, without looking beyond the seal of the royal parchment for the measure of their rights and the rule of their duties. The founders of Plymouth had been impelled by the peculiarities of their situation to examine the subject with deeper and more comprehensive research. After twelve years of banishment from the land of their first allegiance, during which they had been under an adoptive and temporary subjection to another sovereign, they must naturally have been led to reflect upon the relative rights and duties of allegiance and subjection. They had resided in a city, the seat of a university, where the polemical and political controversies of the time were pursued with uncommon fervor. In this period they had witnessed the deadly struggle between the two parties, into which the people of the United Provinces, after their separation from the crown of Spain, had divided themselves. The contest embraced within its compass not only theological doctrines, but political principles, and Maurice and Barnevelt were the temporal leaders of the same rival factions, of which Episcopius and Polyander were the ecclesiastical champions.
That the investigation of the fundamental principles of government was deeply implicated in these dissensions is evident from the immortal work of Grotius, upon the rights of war and peace, which undoubtedly originated from them. Grotius himself had been a most distinguished actor and sufferer in those important scenes of internal convulsion, and his work was first published very shortly after the departure of our forefathers from Leyden. It is well known that in the course of the contest Mr. Robinson more than once appeared, with credit to himself, as a public disputant against Episcopius; and from the manner in which the fact is related by Governor Bradford, it is apparent that the whole English Church at Leyden took a zealous interest in the religious part of the controversy. As strangers in the land, it is presumable that they wisely and honorably avoided entangling themselves in the political contentions involved with it. Yet the theoretic principles, as they were drawn into discussion, could not fail to arrest their attention, and must have assisted them to form accurate ideas concerning the origin and extent of authority among men, independent of positive institutions. The importance of these circumstances will not be duly weighed without taking into consideration the state of opinion then prevalent in England. The general principles of government were there little understood and less examined. The whole substance of human authority was centred in the simple doctrine of royal prerogative, the origin of which was always traced in theory to divine institution. Twenty years later, the subject was more industriously sifted, and for half a century became one of the principal topics of controversy between the ablest and most enlightened men in the nation. The instrument of voluntary association executed on board the Mayflower testifies that the parties to it had anticipated the improvement of their nation.
Another incident, from which we may derive occasion for important reflections, was the attempt of these original settlers to establish among them that community of goods and of labor, which fanciful politicians, from the days of Plato to those of Rousseau, have recommended as the fundamental law of a perfect republic. This theory results, it must be acknowledged, from principles of reasoning most flattering to the human character. If industry, frugality, and disinterested integrity were alike the virtues of all, there would, apparently, be more of the social spirit, in making all property a common stock, and giving to each individual a proportional title to the wealth of the whole. Such is the basis upon which Plato forbids, in his Republic, the division of property. Such is the system upon which Rousseau pronounces the first man who enclosed a field with a fence, and, said, "This is mine," a traitor to the human species. A wiser, and more useful philosophy, however, directs us to consider man according to the nature in which he was formed; subject to infirmities, which no wisdom can remedy; to weaknesses, which no institution can strengthen; to vices, which no legislation can correct. Hence, it becomes obvious that separate property is the natural and indisputable right of separate exertion; that community of goods without community of toil is oppressive and unjust; that it counteracts the laws of nature, which prescribe that he only who sows the seed shall reap the harvest; that it discourages all energy, by destroying its rewards; and makes the most virtuous and active members of society the slaves and drudges of the worst. Such was the issue of this experiment among our forefathers, and the same event demonstrated the error of the system in the elder settlement of Virginia. Let us cherish that spirit of harmony which prompted our forefathers to make the attempt, under circumstances more favorable to its success than, perhaps, ever occurred upon earth. Let us no less admire the candor with which they relinquished it, upon discovering its irremediable inefficacy. To found principles of government upon too advantageous an estimate of the human character is an error of inexperience, the source of which is so amiable that it is impossible to censure it with severity. We have seen the same mistake, committed in our own age, and upon a larger theatre. Happily for our ancestors, their situation allowed them to repair it before its effects had proved destructive. They had no pride of vain philosophy to support, no perfidious rage of faction to glut, by persevering in their mistakes until they should be extinguished in torrents of blood.
As the attempt to establish among themselves the community of goods was a seal of that sacred bond which knit them so closely together, so the conduct they observed towards the natives of the country displays their steadfast adherence to the rules of justice and their faithful attachment to those of benevolence and charity.
No European settlement ever formed upon this continent has been more distinguished for undeviating kindness and equity towards the savages. There are, indeed, moralists who have questioned the right of the Europeans to intrude upon the possessions of the aboriginals in any case, and under any limitations whatsoever. But have they maturely considered the whole subject? The Indian right of possession itself stands, with regard to the greatest part of the country, upon a questionable foundation. Their cultivated fields; their constructed habitations; a space of ample sufficiency for their subsistence, and whatever they had annexed to themselves by personal labor, was undoubtedly, by the laws of nature, theirs. But what is the right of a huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey? Shall the liberal bounties of Providence to the race of man be monopolized by one of ten thousand for whom they were created? Shall the exuberant bosom of the common mother, amply adequate to the nourishment of millions, be claimed exclusively by a few hundreds of her offspring? Shall the lordly savage not only disdain the virtues and enjoyments of civilization himself, but shall he control the civilization of a world? Shall he forbid the wilderness to blossom like a rose? Shall he forbid the oaks of the forest to fall before the ax of industry, and to rise again, transformed into the habitations of ease and elegance? Shall he doom an immense region of the globe to perpetual desolation, and to hear the howlings of the tiger and the wolf silence forever the voice of human gladness? Shall the fields and the valleys, which a beneficent God has formed to teem with the life of innumerable multitudes, be condemned to everlasting barrenness? Shall the mighty rivers, poured out by the hand of nature, as channels of communication between numerous nations, roll their waters in sullen silence and eternal solitude to the deep? Have hundreds of commodious harbors, a thousand leagues of coast, and a boundless ocean, been spread in the front of this land, and shall every purpose of utility to which they could apply be prohibited by the tenant of the woods? No, generous philanthropists! Heaven has not been thus inconsistent in the works of its hands. Heaven has not thus placed at irreconcilable strife its moral laws with its physical creation. The Pilgrims of Plymouth obtained their right of possession to the territory on which they settled, by titles as fair and unequivocal as any human property can be held. By their voluntary association they recognized their allegiance to the government of Britain, and in process of time received whatever powers and authorities could be conferred upon them by a charter from their sovereign. The spot on which they fixed had belonged to an Indian tribe, totally extirpated by that devouring pestilence which had swept the country shortly before their arrival. The territory, thus free from all exclusive possession, they might have taken by the natural right of occupancy. Desirous, however, of giving ample satisfaction to every pretense of prior right, by formal and solemn conventions with the chiefs of the neighboring tribes, they acquired the further security of a purchase. At their hands the children of the desert had no cause of complaint. On the great day of retribution, what thousands, what millions of the American race will appear at the bar of judgment to arraign their European invading conquerors! Let us humbly hope that the fathers of the Plymouth Colony will then appear in the whiteness of innocence. Let us indulge in the belief that they will not only be free from all accusation of injustice to these unfortunate sons of nature, but that the testimonials of their acts of kindness and benevolence towards them will plead the cause of their virtues, as they are now authenticated by the record of history upon earth.
Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous weapons of theological warfare are antiquated; the field of politics supplies the alchemists of our times with materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments of cruelty and destruction. Our age is too enlightened to contend upon topics which concern only the interests of eternity; the men who hold in proper contempt all controversies about trifles, except such as inflame their own passions, have made it a commonplace censure against your ancestors, that their zeal was enkindled by subjects of trivial importance; and that however aggrieved by the intolerance of others, they were alike intolerant themselves. Against these objections, your candid judgment will not require an unqualified justification; but your respect and gratitude for the founders of the State may boldly claim an ample apology. The original grounds of their separation from the Church of England were not objects of a magnitude to dissolve the bonds of communion, much less those of charity, between Christian brethren of the same essential principles. Some of them, however, were not inconsiderable, and numerous inducements concurred to give them an extraordinary interest in their eyes. When that portentous system of abuses, the Papal dominion, was overturned, a great variety of religious sects arose in its stead in the several countries, which for many centuries before had been screwed beneath its subjection. The fabric of the reformation, first undertaken in England upon a contracted basis, by a capricious and sanguinary tyrant, had been successively overthrown and restored, renewed and altered, according to the varying humors and principles of four successive monarchs. To ascertain the precise point of division between the genuine institutions of Christianity and the corruptions accumulated upon them in the progress of fifteen centuries, was found a task of extreme difficulty throughout the Christian world.
Men of the profoundest learning, of the sublimest genius, and of the purest integrity, after devoting their lives to the research, finally differed in their ideas upon many great points, both of doctrine and discipline. The main question, it was admitted on all hands, most intimately concerned the highest interests of man, both temporal and eternal. Can we wonder that men who felt their happiness here and their hopes of hereafter, their worldly welfare and the kingdom of heaven at stake, should sometimes attach an importance beyond their intrinsic weight to collateral points of controversy, connected with the all-involving object of the reformation? The changes in the forms and principles of religious worship were introduced and regulated in England by the hand of public authority. But that hand had not been uniform or steady in its operations. During the persecutions inflicted in the interval of Popish restoration under the reign of Mary, upon all who favored the reformation, many of the most zealous reformers had been compelled to fly their country. While residing on the continent of Europe, they had adopted the principles of the most complete and rigorous reformation, as taught and established by Calvin. On returning afterwards to their native country, they were dissatisfied with the partial reformation, at which, as they conceived, the English establishment had rested; and claiming the privilege of private conscience, upon which alone any departure from the Church of Rome could be justified, they insisted upon the right of adhering to the system of their own preference, and, of course, upon that of nonconformity to the establishment prescribed by the royal authority. The only means used to convince them of error and reclaim them from dissent was force, and force served but to confirm the opposition it was meant to suppress. By driving the founders of the Plymouth Colony into exile, it constrained them to absolute separation from the Church of England; and by the refusal afterwards to allow them a positive toleration, even in this American wilderness, the council of James I. rendered that separation irreconcilable. Viewing their religious liberties here, as held only by sufferance, yet bound to them by all the ties of conviction, and by all their sufferings for them, could they forbear to look upon every dissenter among themselves with a jealous eye? Within two years after their landing, they beheld a rival settlement attempted in their immediate neighborhood; and not long after, the laws of self-preservation compelled them to break up a nest of revelers, who boasted of protection from the mother country, and who had recurred to the easy but pernicious resource of feeding their wanton idleness, by furnishing the savages with the means, the skill, and the instruments of European destruction. Toleration, in that instance, would have been self-murder, and many other examples might be alleged, in which their necessary measures of self-defense have been exaggerated into cruelty, and their most indispensable precautions distorted into persecution. Yet shall we not pretend that they were exempt from the common laws of mortality, or entirely free from all the errors of their age. Their zeal might sometimes be too ardent, but it was always sincere. At this day, religious indulgence is one of our clearest duties, because it is one of our undisputed rights. While we rejoice that the principles of genuine Christianity have so far triumphed over the prejudices of a former generation, let us fervently hope for the day when it will prove equally victorious over the malignant passions of our own.
In thus calling your attention to some of the peculiar features in the principles, the character, and the history of our forefathers, it is as wide from my design, as I know it would be from your approbation, to adorn their memory with a chaplet plucked from the domain of others. The occasion and the day are more peculiarly devoted to them, and let it never be dishonored with a contracted and exclusive spirit. Our affections as citizens embrace the whole extent of the Union, and the names of Raleigh, Smith, Winthrop, Calvert, Penn, and Oglethorpe, excite in our minds recollections equally pleasing and gratitude equally fervent with those of Carver and Bradford. Two centuries have not yet elapsed since the first European foot touched the soil which now constitutes the American Union. Two centuries more and our numbers must exceed those of Europe itself. The destinies of this empire, as they appear in prospect before us, disdain the powers of human calculation. Yet, as the original founder of the Roman state is said once to have lifted upon his shoulders the fame and fortunes of all his posterity, so let us never forget that the glory and greatness of all our descendants is in our hands. Preserve in all their purity, refine, if possible, from all their alloy, those virtues which we this day commemorate as the ornament of our forefathers. Adhere to them with inflexible resolution, as to the horns of the altar; instill them with unwearied perseverance into the minds of your children; bind your souls and theirs to the national Union as the chords of life are centred in the heart, and you shall soar with rapid and steady wing to the summit of human glory. Nearly a century ago, one of those rare minds to whom it is given to discern future greatness in its seminal principles upon contemplating the situation of this continent, pronounced, in a vein of poetic inspiration, "Westward the star of empire takes its way." Let us unite in ardent supplication to the Founder of nations and the Builder of worlds, that what then was prophecy may continue unfolding into history,—that the dearest hopes of the human race may not be extinguished in disappointment, and that the last may prove the noblest empire of time.
LAFAYETTE (Delivered in Congress, December 31st, 1834)
On the sixth of September, 1757, Lafayette was born. The kings of Prance and Britain were seated upon their thrones by virtue of the principle of hereditary succession, variously modified and blended with different forms of religious faith, and they were waging war against each other, and exhausting the blood and treasure of their people for causes in which neither of the nations had any beneficial or lawful interest.
In this war the father of Lafayette fell in the cause of his king but not of his country. He was an officer of an invading army, the instrument of his sovereign's wanton ambition and lust of conquest. The people of the electorate of Hanover had done no wrong to him or to his country. When his son came to an age capable of understanding the irreparable loss that he had suffered, and to reflect upon the causes of his father's fate, there was no drop of consolation mingled in the cup from the consideration that he had died for his country. And when the youthful mind was awakened to meditation upon the rights of mankind, the principles of freedom, and theories of government, it cannot be difficult to perceive in the illustrations of his own family records the source of that aversion to hereditary rule, perhaps the most distinguishing feature of his own political opinions and to which he adhered through all the vicissitudes of his life….
Lafayette was born a subject of the most absolute and most splendid monarchy of Europe, and in the highest rank of her proud and chivalrous nobility. He had been educated at a college of the University of Paris, founded by the royal munificence of Louis XIV., or Cardinal Richelieu. Left an orphan in early childhood, with the inheritance of a princely fortune, he had been married, at sixteen years of age, to a daughter of the house of Noailles, the most distinguished family of the kingdom, scarcely deemed in public consideration inferior to that which wore the crown. He came into active life, at the change from boy to man, a husband and a father, in the full enjoyment of everything that avarice could covet, with a certain prospect before him of all that ambition could crave. Happy in his domestic affections, incapable, from the benignity of his nature, of envy, hatred, or revenge, a life of "ignoble ease and indolent repose" seemed to be that which nature and fortune had combined to prepare before him. To men of ordinary mold this condition would have led to a life of luxurious apathy and sensual indulgence. Such was the life into which, from the operation of the same causes, Louis XV. had sunk, with his household and court, while Lafayette was rising to manhood surrounded by the contamination of their example. Had his natural endowments been even of the higher and nobler order of such as adhere to virtue, even in the lap of prosperity, and in the bosom of temptation, he might have lived and died a pattern of the nobility of France, to be classed, in aftertimes, with the Turennes and the Montausiers of the age of Louis XIV., or with the Villars or the Lamoignons of the age immediately preceding his own.
But as, in the firmament of heaven that rolls over our heads, there is, among the stars of the first magnitude, one so pre-eminent in splendor as, in the opinion of astronomers, to constitute a class by itself, so in the fourteen hundred years of the French monarchy, among the multitudes of great and mighty men which it has evolved, the name of Lafayette stands unrivaled in the solitude of glory.
In entering upon the threshold of life, a career was to open before him. He had the option of the court and the camp. An office was tendered to him in the household of the King's brother, the Count de Provence, since successively a royal exile and a reinstated king. The servitude and inaction of a court had no charms for him; he preferred a commission in the army, and, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, was a captain of dragoons in garrison at Metz.
There, at an entertainment given by his relative, the Marechal de Broglie, the commandant of the place, to the Duke of Gloucester, brother to the British king, and then a transient traveler through that part of France, he learns, as an incident of intelligence received that morning by the English Prince from London, that the congress of rebels at Philadelphia had issued a Declaration of Independence. A conversation ensues upon the causes which have contributed to produce this event, and upon the consequences which may be expected to flow from it. The imagination of Lafayette has caught across the Atlantic tide the spark emitted from the Declaration of Independence; his heart has kindled at the shock, and, before he slumbers upon his pillow, he has resolved to devote his life and fortune to the cause.
You have before you the cause and the man. The self-devotion of Lafayette was twofold. First to the people, maintaining a bold and seemingly desperate struggle against oppression, and for national existence. Secondly, and chiefly, to the principles of their declaration, which then first unfurled before his eyes the consecrated standard of human rights. To that standard, without an instant of hesitation, he repaired. Where it would lead him, it is scarcely probable that he himself then foresaw. It was then identical with the Stars and Stripes of the American Union, floating to the breeze from the Hall of Independence, at Philadelphia. Nor sordid avarice, nor vulgar ambition, could point his footsteps to the pathway leading to that banner. To the love of ease or pleasure nothing could be more repulsive. Something may be allowed to the beatings of the youthful breast, which make ambition virtue, and something to the spirit of military adventure, imbibed from his profession, and which he felt in common with many others. France, Germany, Poland, furnished to the armies of this Union, in our revolutionary struggle, no inconsiderable number of officers of high rank and distinguished merit. The names of Pulaski and De Kalb are numbered among the martyrs of our freedom, and their ashes repose in our soil side by side with the canonized bones of Warren and of Montgomery. To the virtues of Lafayette, a more protracted career and happier earthly destinies were reserved. To the moral principle of political action, the sacrifices of no other man were comparable to his. Youth, health, fortune; the favor of his king; the enjoyment of ease and pleasure; even the choicest blessings of domestic felicity—he gave them all for toil and danger in a distant land, and an almost hopeless cause; but it was the cause of justice, and of the rights of human kind. …
Pronounce him one of the first men of his age, and you have not yet done him justice. Try him by that test to which he sought in vain to stimulate the vulgar and selfish spirit of Napoleon; class him among the men who, to compare and seat themselves, must take in the compass of all ages; turn back your eyes upon the records of time, summon from the creation of the world to this day the mighty dead of every age and every clime—and where, among the race of merely mortal men, shall one be found, who, as the benefactor of his kind, shall claim to take precedence of Lafayette?
There have doubtless been, in all ages, men whose discoveries or inventions, in the world of matter or of mind, have opened new avenues to the dominion of man over the material creation; have increased his means or his faculties of enjoyment; have raised him in nearer approximation to that higher and happier condition, the object of his hopes and aspirations in his present state of existence.
Lafayette discovered no new principle of politics or of morals. He invented nothing in science. He disclosed no new phenomenon in the laws of nature. Born and educated in the highest order of feudal nobility, under the most absolute monarchy of Europe, in possession of an affluent fortune, and master of himself and of all his capabilities, at the moment of attaining manhood the principle of republican justice and of social equality took possession of his heart and mind, as if by inspiration from above. He devoted himself, his life, his fortune, his hereditary honors, his towering ambition, his splendid hopes, all to the cause of liberty. He came to another hemisphere to defend her. He became one of the most effective champions of our independence; but, that once achieved, he returned to his own country, and thenceforward took no part in the controversies which have divided us. In the events of our revolution, and in the forms of policy which we have adopted for the establishment and perpetuation of our freedom, Lafayette found the most perfect form of government. He wished to add nothing to it. He would gladly have abstracted nothing from it. Instead of the imaginary republic of Plato, or the Utopia of Sir Thomas Moore, he took a practical existing model, in actual operation here, and never attempted or wished more than to apply it faithfully to his own country.
It was not given to Moses to enter the promised land; but he saw it from the summit of Pisgah. It was not given to Lafayette to witness the consummation of his wishes in the establishment of a republic and the extinction of all hereditary rule in France. His principles were in advance of the age and hemisphere in which he lived. A Bourbon still reigns on the throne of France, and it is not for us to scrutinize the title by which he reigns. The principles of elective and hereditary power, blended in reluctant union in his person, like the red and white roses of York and Lancaster, may postpone to aftertime the last conflict to which they must ultimately come. The life of the patriarch was not long enough for the development of his whole political system. Its final accomplishment is in the womb of time.
The anticipation of this event is the more certain, from the consideration that all the principles for which Lafayette contended were practical. He never indulged himself in wild and fanciful speculations. The principle of hereditary power was, in his opinion, the bane of all republican liberty in Europe. Unable to extinguish it in the Revolution of 1830, so far as concerned the chief magistracy of the nation, Lafayette had the satisfaction of seeing it abolished with reference to the peerage. An hereditary crown, stript of the support which it may derive from an hereditary peerage, however compatible with Asiatic despotism, is an anomaly in the history of the Christian world, and in the theory of free government. There is no argument producible against the existence of an hereditary peerage but applies with aggravated weight against the transmission, from sire to son, of an hereditary crown. The prejudices and passions of the people of France rejected the principle of inherited power, in every station of public trust, excepting the first and highest of them all; but there they clung to it, as did the Israelites of old to the savory deities of Egypt.
This is not the time nor the place for a disquisition upon the comparative merits, as a system of government, of a republic, and a monarchy surrounded by republican institutions. Upon this subject there is among us no diversity of opinion; and if it should take the people of France another half century of internal and external war, of dazzling and delusive glories; of unparalleled triumphs, humiliating reverses, and bitter disappointments, to settle it to their satisfaction, the ultimate result can only bring them to the point where we have stood from the day of the Declaration of Independence—to the point where Lafayette would have brought them, and to which he looked as a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Then, too, and then only, will be the time when the character of Lafayette will be appreciated at its true value throughout the civilized world. When the principle of hereditary dominion shall be extinguished in all the institutions of France; when government shall no longer be considered as property transmissible from sire to son, but as a trust committed for a limited time, and then to return to the people whence it came; as a burdensome duty to be discharged, and not as a reward to be abused; when a claim, any claim, to political power by inheritance shall, in the estimation of the whole French people, be held as it now is by the whole people of the North American Union—then will be the time for contemplating the character of Lafayette, not merely in the events of his life, but in the full development of his intellectual conceptions, of his fervent aspirations, of the labors and perils and sacrifices of his long and eventful career upon earth; and thenceforward, till the hour when the trump of the Archangel shall sound to announce that Time shall be no more, the name of Lafayette shall stand enrolled upon the annals of our race, high on the list of the pure and disinterested benefactors of mankind.
THE JUBILEE OF THE CONSTITUTION (Delivered at New York, April 30th, 1839)
Fellow-Citizens and Brethren, Associates of the New York Historical
Society:—
Would it be an unlicensed trespass of the imagination to conceive that on the night preceding the day of which you now commemorate the fiftieth anniversary—on the night preceding that thirtieth of April, 1789, when from the balcony of your city hall the chancellor of the State of New York administered to George Washington the solemn oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States, and to the best of his ability to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States—that in the visions of the night the guardian angel of the Father of our country had appeared before him, in the venerated form of his mother, and, to cheer and encourage him in the performance of the momentous and solemn duties that he was about to assume, had delivered to him a suit of celestial armor—a helmet, consisting of the principles of piety, of justice, of honor, of benevolence, with which from his earliest infancy he had hitherto walked through life, in the presence of all his brethren; a spear, studded with the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence; a sword, the same with which he had led the armies of his country through the war of freedom to the summit of the triumphal arch of independence; a corslet and cuishes of long experience and habitual intercourse in peace and war with the world of mankind, his contemporaries of the human race, in all their stages of civilization; and, last of all, the Constitution of the United States, a shield, embossed by heavenly hands with the future history of his country.
Yes, gentlemen, on that shield the Constitution of the United States was sculptured (by forms unseen, and in characters then invisible to mortal eye), the predestined and prophetic history of the one confederated people of the North American Union.
They had been the settlers of thirteen separate and distinct English colonies, along the margin of the shore of the North American continent; contiguously situated, but chartered by adventurers of characters variously diversified, including sectarians, religious and political, of all the classes which for the two preceding centuries had agitated and divided the people of the British islands —and with them were intermingled the descendants of Hollanders, Swedes, Germans, and French fugitives from the persecution of the revoker of the Edict of Nantes.
In the bosoms of this people, thus heterogeneously composed, there was burning, kindled at different furnaces, but all furnaces of affliction, one clear, steady flame of liberty. Bold and daring enterprise, stubborn endurance of privation, unflinching intrepidity in facing danger, and inflexible adherence to conscientious principle, had steeled to energetic and unyielding hardihood the characters of the primitive settlers of all these colonies. Since that time two or three generations of men had passed away, but they had increased and multiplied with unexampled rapidity; and the land itself had been the recent theatre of a ferocious and bloody seven-years' war between the two most powerful and most civilized nations of Europe contending for the possession of this continent.
Of that strife the victorious combatant had been Britain. She had conquered the provinces of France. She had expelled her rival totally from the continent, over which, bounding herself by the Mississippi, she was thenceforth to hold divided empire only with Spain. She had acquired undisputed control over the Indian tribes still tenanting the forests unexplored by the European man. She had established an uncontested monopoly of the commerce of all her colonies. But forgetting all the warnings of preceding ages— forgetting the lessons written in the blood of her own children, through centuries of departed time, she undertook to tax the people of the colonies without their consent.
Resistance, instantaneous, unconcerted, sympathetic, inflexible resistance, like an electric shock, startled and roused the people of all the English colonies on this continent.
This was the first signal of the North American Union, The struggle was for chartered rights—for English liberties—for the cause of Algernon Sidney and John Hampden—for trial by jury—the Habeas Corpus and Magna Charta.
But the English lawyers had decided that Parliament was omnipotent—and Parliament, in its omnipotence, instead of trial by jury and the Habeas Corpus, enacted admiralty courts in England to try Americans for offenses charged against them as committed in America; instead of the privileges of Magna Charta, nullified the charter itself of Massachusetts Bay; shut up the port of Boston; sent armies and navies to keep the peace and teach the colonies that John Hampden was a rebel and Algernon Sidney a traitor.
English liberties had failed them. From the omnipotence of Parliament the Colonists appealed to the rights of man and the omnipotence of the God of battles. Union! Union! was the instinctive and simultaneous cry throughout the land. Their congress, assembled at Philadelphia, once—twice—had petitioned the king; had remonstrated to Parliament; had addressed the people of Britain, for the rights of Englishmen—in vain. Fleets and armies, the blood of Lexington, and the fires of Charlestown and Falmouth, had been the answer to petition, remonstrance, and address. …
The dissolution of allegiance to the British crown, the severance of the colonies from the British empire, and their actual existence as independent States, were definitively established in fact, by war and peace. The independence of each separate State had never been declared of right. It never existed in fact. Upon the principles of the Declaration of Independence, the dissolution of the ties of allegiance, the assumption of sovereign power, and the institution of civil government, are all acts of transcendent authority, which the people alone are competent to perform; and, accordingly, it is in the name and by the authority of the people, that two of these acts—the dissolution of allegiance, with the severance from the British empire, and the declaration of the United Colonies, as free and independent States, were performed by that instrument.
But there still remained the last and crowning act, which the people of the Union alone were competent to perform—the institution of civil government, for that compound nation, the United States of America.
At this day it cannot but strike us as extraordinary, that it does not appear to have occurred to any one member of that assembly, which had laid down in terms so clear, so explicit, so unequivocal, the foundation of all just government, in the imprescriptible rights of man, and the transcendent sovereignty of the people, and who in those principles had set forth their only personal vindication from the charges of rebellion against their king, and of treason to their country, that their last crowning act was still to be performed upon the same principles. That is, the institution, by the people of the United States, of a civil government, to guard and protect and defend them all. On the contrary, that same assembly which issued the Declaration of Independence, instead of continuing to act in the name and by the authority of the good people of the United States, had, immediately after the appointment of the committee to prepare the Declaration, appointed another committee, of one member from each colony, to prepare and digest the form of confederation to be entered into between the colonies.
That committee reported on the twelfth of July, eight days after the Declaration of Independence had been issued, a draft of articles of confederation between the colonies. This draft was prepared by John Dickinson, then a delegate from Pennsylvania, who voted against the Declaration of Independence, and never signed it, having been superseded by a new election of delegates from that State, eight days after his draft was reported.
There was thus no congeniality of principle between the Declaration of Independence and the articles of confederation. The foundation of the former was a superintending Providence—the rights of man, and the constituent revolutionary power of the people. That of the latter was the sovereignty of organized power, and the independence of the separate or dis-united States. The fabric of the Declaration and that of the confederation were each consistent with its own foundation, but they could not form one consistent, symmetrical edifice. They were the productions of different minds and of adverse passions; one, ascending for the foundation of human government to the laws of nature and of God, written upon the heart of man; the other, resting upon the basis of human institutions, and prescriptive law, and colonial charter. The corner stone of the one was right, that of the other was power. …
Where, then, did each State get the sovereignty, freedom, and independence, which the articles of confederation declare it retains?—not from the whole people of the whole Union—not from the Declaration of Independence—not from the people of the State itself. It was assumed by agreement between the legislatures of the several States, and their delegates in Congress, without authority from or consultation of the people at all.
In the Declaration of Independence, the enacting and constituent party dispensing and delegating sovereign power is the whole people of the United Colonies. The recipient party, invested with power, is the United Colonies, declared United States.
In the articles of confederation, this order of agency is inverted. Each State is the constituent and enacting party, and the United States in Congress assembled the recipient of delegated power—and that power delegated with such a penurious and carking hand that it had more the aspect of a revocation of the Declaration of Independence than an instrument to carry it into effect.
None of these indispensably necessary powers were ever conferred by the State legislatures upon the Congress of the federation; and well was it that they never were. The system itself was radically defective. Its incurable disease was an apostasy from the principles of the Declaration of Independence. A substitution of separate State sovereignties, in the place of the constituent sovereignty of the people, was the basis of the Confederate Union.
In the Congress of the confederation, the master minds of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were constantly engaged through the closing years of the Revolutionary War and those of peace which immediately succeeded. That of John Jay was associated with them shortly after the peace, in the capacity of secretary to the Congress for foreign affairs. The incompetency of the articles of confederation for the management of the affairs of the Union at home and abroad was demonstrated to them by the painful and mortifying experience of every day. Washington, though in retirement, was brooding over the cruel injustice suffered by his associates in arms, the warriors of the Revolution; over the prostration of the public credit and the faith of the nation, in the neglect to provide for the payment even of the interest upon the public debt; over the disappointed hopes of the friends of freedom; in the language of the address from Congress to the States of the eighteenth of April, 1783 —"the pride and boast of America, that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature."
At his residence at Mount Vernon, in March 1785, the first idea was started of a revisal of the articles of confederation, by an organization, of means differing from that of a compact between the State legislatures and their own delegates in Congress. A convention of delegates from the State legislatures, independent of the Congress itself, was the expedient which presented itself for effecting the purpose, and an augmentation of the powers of Congress for the regulation of commerce, as the object for which this assembly was to be convened. In January 1786 the proposal was made and adopted in the legislature of Virginia, and communicated to the other State legislatures.
The convention was held at Annapolis, in September of that year. It was attended by delegates from only five of the central States, who, on comparing their restricted powers with the glaring and universally acknowledged defects of the confederation reported only a recommendation for the assemblage of another convention of delegates to meet at Philadelphia, in May 1787, from all the States, and with enlarged powers.
The Constitution of the United States was the work of this convention. But in its construction the convention immediately perceived that they must retrace their steps, and fall back from a league of friendship between sovereign States to the constituent sovereignty of the people; from power to right—from the irresponsible despotism of State sovereignty to the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence. In that instrument, the right to institute and to alter governments among men was ascribed exclusively to the people—the ends of government were declared to be to secure the natural rights of man; and that when the government degenerates from the promotion to the destruction of that end, the right and the duty accrues to the people to dissolve this degenerate government and to institute another. The signers of the Declaration further averred, that the one people of the United Colonies were then precisely in that situation—with a government degenerated into tyranny, and called upon by the laws of nature and of nature's God to dissolve that government and to institute another. Then, in the name and by the authority of the good people of the colonies, they pronounced the dissolution of their allegiance to the king, and their eternal separation from the nation of Great Britain—and declared the United Colonies independent States. And here as the representatives of the one people they had stopped. They did not require the confirmation of this act, for the power to make the declaration had already been conferred upon them by the people, delegating the power, indeed, separately in the separate colonies, not by colonial authority, but by the spontaneous revolutionary movement of the people in them all.