Speech of General J. Watson Webb: At the Great Mass Meeting on the Battle Ground of Tippecanoe; 60, 000 Freemen in Council (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Speech of General J. Watson Webb: At the Great Mass Meeting on the Battle Ground of Tippecanoe; 60, 000 Freemen in Council

Homes, of nearly five millions of Freemen. My old gar rison, Chicago, then more than a hundred miles in advance of the most adventurous white man's home, now contains a population of more than a hundred thousand souls; and untold villages and cities, and the most active and thriving farming population on the face of the Globe, now dwell and prosper, where so recently, the death like silence of the wilderness, had never been broken by the busy hum of civilization. Only thirty-six years have passed since the period of which I speak. I then stood here in the vigor of youthful manhood. I stand before you today, having numbered but little over half a cen tury of the years allotted to man - still in my prime and able as ever to do battle in the cause of Liberty - and yet I may lay claim among the millions, who inhabit the great north-west, to be that mysterious person of whom everybody has heard, but who is so rarely seen the oldest inhabitant. When Rip Van Winkle awoke from his twenty years' sleep in the caverns of the Cats kills, he knew not the faces of the neighbors with whom he supposed he had parted on the previous day; and in like manner, when I wake as from my sleep of more than a third of a century, I look in vain for the old land marks of my hunting grounds, and the familiar faces of my companions of the hunt and the mess-room. All, all have been gathered to their rest; but I find in their stead, millions of people, in whose stalwart forms and smiling faces, I perceive at once, the evidences of univer sal prosperity, and a manly, fearless independence, which delights in honest labor, and reaps its never-failing rewards. Your faces are all unknown to me; but God has planted his image there; and I know that in the.

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