Page images
PDF
EPUB

As an evil brought upon us without our fault and before the formation of our government, through the sin of that nation from which we revolted, we must of necessity legislate upon this subject; and it is our business so to legislate as never to encourage, but always to restrict it.

You boast of the freedom of your institutions and your laws. You have proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And yet you have slaves in your country! The enemies of your government point to your inconsistencies, and blazon your alleged defects. Confine slavery to the original slave-holding States, where you found it at the formation of your government, and you stand acquitted of these imputations. Allow it to pass into territories whence you have the lawful power to exclude it, and you take upon yourselves all these charges of inconsistency.

Ex. CXXVII.-OUR COUNTRY.

WILLIAM JEWETT PABODIE.

OUR country!-'tis a glorious land,

With broad arms stretched from shore to shore;
The proud Pacific chafes her strand,
She hears the dark Atlantic roar;
And nurtured on her ample breast
How many a goodly prospect lies,
In nature's wildest grandeur dressed,
Enamelled with her loveliest dyes!

Rich prairies, decked with flowers of gold,
Like sunlit oceans roll afar;
Broad lakes her azure heavens behold,
Reflecting clear each trembling star;
And mighty rivers, mountain-born,

Go sweeping onward, dark and deep,
Through forests, where the bounding fawn
Beneath their sheltering branches leap.

And, cradled 'mid her clustering hills,
Sweet vales in dreamlike beauty bide,

LIBERTY AND GREATNESS.

Where love the air with music fills,
And calm content and peace abide.
For Plenty here her fulness pours
In rich profusion o'er the land,
And, sent to seize her generous stores,
There prowls no tyrant's hireling band.

Great God! we thank thee for this home,
This bounteous birth-right of the free,
Where wanderers from afar may come
And breathe the air of liberty!
Still may her flowers untrampled spring,
Her harvests wave, her cities rise;
And yet, till time shall fold her wing,
Remain earth's loveliest paradise!

203

Ex. CXXVIII.—LIBERTY AND GREATNESS.

HUGH S. LEGARÉ.*

THE name of Republic is inscribed upon the most imperishable monuments of the species, and it is probable that it will continue to be associated, as it has been in all past ages, with whatever is heroic in character, sublime in genius, elegant and brilliant in the cultivation of arts and letters. It would not have been difficult to prove that the base hirelings who, in this age of legitimacy and downfall, have so industriously inculcated a contrary doctrine, have been compelled to falsify history and abuse reason. I might have called up antiquity from the old schools of Greece," to show that these apostles of despotism would have passed at Athens for barbarians and slaves. I might have asked triumphantly, what land had ever been visited with the influences of liberty, that did not flourish like the spring? What people had ever worshipped at her altars, without kindling with a loftier spirit, and putting forth more noble energies? Where she had ever acted, that her deeds had not been heroic? Where she

* Pronounced Legree. Mr. Legaré was a citizen of South Carolina, distinguished for his legal attainments, which procured him the position of Attorney-General of the United States, and for his brilliancy as a writer. He was strongly opposed to Mr. Calhoun's scheme of "nullification."

had ever spoken, that her eloquence had not been triumphant and sublime? It might have been demonstrated that a state of society in which nothing is obtained by patronage, nothing is yielded to the accidents of birth and fortune, where those who are already distinguished must exert themselves lest they be speedily eclipsed by their inferiors, and these inferiors are, by every motive, stimulated to exert themselves that they may become distinguished, and where, the lists being open to the whole world without any partiality or exclusion, the champion who bears off the prize must have tasked his prowess to the very uttermost, and proved himself the first of a thousand competitors, is necessarily more favorable to a bold, vigorous and manly way of thinking and acting than any other. I should have asked with Longinus, Who but a republican could have spoken the philippics of Demosthenes? and what has the patronage of despotism ever done to be compared with the spontaneous productions of the Attic, the Roman and the Tuscan muse?

With respect to ourselves, would it not be enough to say that we live under a form of government and in a state of society to which the world has never yet exhibited a parallel? Is it then nothing to be free? How many nations, in the whole annals of human kind, have proved themselves worthy of being so? Is it nothing that we are republicans? Were all men as enlightened, as brave, as proud as they ought to be, would they suffer themselves to be insulted with any other title? Is it nothing that so many independent sovereignties should be held together in such a confederation as ours? What does history teach us of the difficulty of instituting and maintaining such a polity, and of the glory that of consequence ought to be given to those who enjoy its advantages in so much perfection and on so grand a scale? For can anything be more striking and sublime than the idea of an IMPERIAL REPUBLIC, spreading over an extent of territory more immense than the empire of the Cæsars in the accumulated conquests of a thousand years; without prefects or proconsuls or publicans; founded in the maxims of common sense; employing within itself no arms but those of reason, and known to its subjects only by the blessings it bestows or perpetuates, yet capable of directing, against a foreign foe, all the energies of a military despotism; a republic, in which men are completely insignificant, and principles and laws exercise, throughout its vast dominions, a peaceful and irresistible sway, blending in one divine har

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

205

mony such various habits and conflicting opinions, and mingling in our institutions the light of philosophy with all that is dazzling in the associations of heroic achievement, and extended domination, and deep-seated and formidable power?

Ex. CXXIX. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

JOHN QUINCY ADAMS.

*

Ar the opening of the American revolution, Great Britain had been victorious in her long and bloody conflict with France. She had expelled her rival totally from the continent over which, bounded herself by the Mississippi, she was thence to hold divided empire only with Spain. She had acquired undisputed control over the Indian tribes, still tenanting the forests unexplored by 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, for habeas corpus and Magna Charta.

But the English lawyers had decided that parliament was omnipotent; and parliament in their omnipotence, instead of trial by jury and the habeas corpus, enacted admiralty courts in England to try Americans for offences 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.

* Sixth President of the United States. Mr. Adams, like his father, occupied many positions of trust and distinction, including that of ambassador at several European courts. His son, Charles Francis Adams, our present minister to England, is the third of his family who has represented our country at the court of St. James.

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, oncetwice 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 Charleston and Falmouth, had been the answer to petition, remonstrance and address.

Independence was declared. The colonies were transformed into States. Their inhabitants were proclaimed to be one people, renouncing all allegiance to the British crown; all claims to chartered rights as Englishmen. Therefore their charter was the Declaration of Independence. Their rights, the natural rights of mankind. Their government, such as should be instituted by themselves, under the solemn mutual pledges of perpetual union, founded on the self-evident truths proclaimed in the Declaration.

The Declaration of Independence was issued in the excruciating agonies of a civil war, and by that war independence was to be maintained. Six long years the war raged with unabated fury, and the Union was yet no more than a mutual pledge of faith, and a mutual participation of common sufferings and common dangers.

At last, the omnipotence of the British parliament was vanquished. The independence of the United States was not granted, but recognized. The nation had assumed that separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitled it among the powers of the earth.

Ex. CXXX.-ODE COMPOSED AFTER LISTENING TO THE ORATION, OF WHICH THE ABOVE FORMS A PART. "The ark of our covenant is the Declaration of Independence; our Mount Ebal, the Articles of Confederation; our Gerizim, the Constitution." J. Q. ADAMS. WILLIAM CUTTER.

PRIESTS of this holy land,

Bear on the hallowed ark,
Blest symbol of the God at hand,
Our guide through deserts dark.

« PreviousContinue »