451 AN ORATION, DELIVERED AT CAMBRIDGE, ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE DECLARATION OF THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. BY EDWARD EVERETT. FELLOW CITIZENS, It belongs to us, with strong propriety, to celebrate this day. The town of Cambridge, and the county of Middlesex, are filled with the vestiges of the revolution; whithersoever we turn our eyes, we behold some memento of its glorious scenes. Within the walls, in which we are now assembled, was convened the first provincial congress, after its adjournment at Concord. The rural magazine at Medford reminds us of one of the earliest acts of British aggression. The march of both divisions of the royal army, on the memorable nineteenth of April, was through the limits of Cambridge; in the neighboring towns of Lexington and Concord, the first blood of the revolution was shed; in West Cambridge, the royal convoy of provisions was, the same day, gallantly surprised by the aged citizens, who staid to protect their homes, while their sons pursued the foe. Here the first American army was formed; from this place, on the seventeenth of June, was detached the Spartan band, that immortalized the heights of Charlestown, and consecrated that day, with blood and fire, to the cause of American liberty. Beneath the venerable elm, which still shades the south-western corner of the common, General Washington first unsheathed his sword at the head of an American army, and to that seat was wont every Sunday to repair, to join in the supplications which were made for the welfare of his country. How changed is now the scene! The foe is gone! The din and the desolation of war are passed; science has long resumed her station in the shades of our venerable university, no longer * The first wall pew, on the right hand of the pulpit. glittering with arms; the anxious war-council is no longer in session, to offer a reward for the discovery of the best mode of making saltpetre, an unpromising stage of hostilities, when an army of twenty thousand men is in the field in front of the foe; the tall grass now waves in the trampled sally-port of some of the rural redoubts, that form a part of the simple lines of circumvallation, within which a half-armed American militia held the flower of the British army blockaded: the plough has done, what the English batteries could not do,—has levelled others of them with the earth; and the men, the great and good men, their warfare is over, and they have gone quietly down to the dust they redeemed from oppression. At the close of a half century, since the declaration of our independence, we are assembled to commemorate that great and happy event. We come together, not because it needs, but because it deserves these acts of celebration. We do not meet each other, and exchange our felicitations, because we should otherwise fall into forgetfulness of this auspicious era, but because we owe it to our fathers and to our children, to mark its return with grateful festivities. The major part of this assembly is composed of those who had not yet engaged in the active scenes of life when the revolution commenced. We come not to applaud our own work, but to pay a filial tribute to the deeds of our fathers. It was for their children that the heroes and sages of the revolution labored and bled. They were too wise not to know, that it was not personally their own cause in which they were embarked; they felt that they were engaging in an enterprise which an entire generation must be too short to bring to its mature and perfect issue. The most they could promise themselves was, that, having cast forth the seed of liberty; having shielded its tender germ from the stern blasts that beat upon it; having watered it with the tears of waiting eyes, and the blood of brave hearts,— their children might gather the fruit of its branches, while those who planted it should moulder in peace beneath its shade. Nor was it only in this, that we discern their disinterestedness, their heroic forgetfulness of self. Not only was the independence, for which they struggled, a great and arduous adventure, of which they were to encounter the risk, and others to enjoy the benefits; but the oppressions, which roused them, had assumed, in their day, no worse form than that of a pernicious principle. No intolerable acts of oppression had ground them to the dust. They were not slaves rising in desperation from beneath the agonies of the lash; but free men, snuffing from afar "the tainted gale of tyranny." The worst encroachments, on which the British ministry had ventured, might have been borne, consistently with the practical enjoyment of many of the advantages resulting from good government. On the score of calculation alone, that generation had much better have paid the duties on glass, painters' colors, stamped paper, and tea, than have plunged into the expenses of the revolutionary war. But they thought not of shuffling off upon posterity the burden of resistance. They well understood the part which Providence had assigned to them. They perceived that they were called to discharge a high and perilous office to the cause of freedom; that their hands were elected to strike the blow, for which near two centuries of preparation-never remitted, though often unconscious-had been making, on one side or the other, of the Atlantic. They felt that the colonies had now reached that stage in their growth, when the difficult problem of colonial government must be solved; difficult, I call it, for such it is, to the statesman, whose mind is not sufficiently enlarged for the idea, that a wise colonial government must naturally and rightfully end in independence; that even a mild and prudent sway, on the part of the mother country, furnishes no reason for not severing the bands of the colonial subjection; and that when the rising state has passed the period of adolescence, the only alternative which remains, is that of a peaceable separation, or a convulsive rupture. The British ministry, at that time weaker than it had ever been since the infatuated reign of James II., had no knowledge of political science, but that which they derived from the text of official records. They drew their maxims, as it was happily said of one of them, that he did his measures, from the file. They heard that a distant province had resisted the execution of an act of parliament. Indeed! and what is the specific, in cases of resistance? -a military force;—and two more regiments are ordered to Boston. Again they hear, that the General Court of Massachusetts Bay has taken counsels subversive of the allegiance due to the crown. A case of a refractory corporation;-what is to be done? First try a mandamus; and if that fails, seize the franchises into his majesty's hands. They never asked the great questions, whether nations, like man, have not the principles of growth; whether Providence has assigned no laws to regulate the changes in the condition of that most astonishing of human things, a nation of kindred men. They did not inquire, I will not say whether it were rightful and expedient, but whether it were practicable to give law across the Atlantic, to a people who possessed within themselves every imaginable element of self-government;—a people rocked in the cradle of liberty, brought up to hardship, inheriting nothing but their rights on earth, and their hopes in heaven. But though the rulers of Britain appear not to have caught a glimpse of the great principles involved in these questions, our fathers had asked and answered them. They perceived, with the rapidity of intuition, that the hour of separation had come; because a principle was assumed by the British government, which put an instantaneous check to the further growth of liberty. Either the race of civilized man happily planted on our shores, at first slowly and painfully reared, but at length auspiciously multiplying in America, is destined never to constitute a free and independent state; or these measures must be resisted, which go to bind it in a mild but abject colonial vassalage. Either the hope must be forever abandoned, the hope that had been brightening and kindling toward assurance, like the glowing skies of the morning,-the hope that a new centre of civilization was to be planted on the new continent, at which the social and political institutions of the world may be brought to the standard of reason and truth, after thousands of years of degeneracy, either this hope must be abandoned, and forever, or the battle was now to be fought, first in the political assemblies, and then, if need be, in the field. In the halls of legislation, scarcely can it be said that the battle was fought. A spectacle, indeed, seemed to be promised to the civilized world, of breathless interest and uncalculated consequence. "You are placed," said the provincial congress of Massachusetts, in their address to the inhabitants, of December 4th, 1774,-an address promulgated at the close of a session held in this very house where we are now convened,-" You are placed by Providence in a post of honor, because it is a post of danger; and while struggling for the noblest objects, the liberties of our country, the happiness of posterity, and the rights of human nature, the eyes, not only of North America and the whole British empire, but of all Europe, are upon you.' A mighty question of political right was at issue between the two hemispheres. Europe and America, in the face of mankind, are going to plead the great cause on which the fate of popular government forever is suspended. One circumstance, and one alone, exists, to diminish the interest of the contention the perilous inequality of the parties; an inequality far exceeding that which gives animation to a contest; and so great as to destroy the hope of an ably-waged encounter. On the one side were arrayed the two houses of the British parliament, the modern school of political eloquence, the arena where great minds had for a century and a half strenuously wrestled themselves into strength and power, and in better days the common and upright chancery of an empire, on which the sun never set. Upon the other side rose up the colonial assemblies of Massachusetts and Virginia, and the continental congress of Philadelphia, composed of men whose training had been within a small provincial circuit; who had never before felt the inspiration which the consciousness of a station before the world imparts; who brought no power into * Massachusetts State Papers, p. 416. the contest but that which they drew from their cause and their bosoms. It is by champions like these, that the great principles of representative government, of chartered rights, and constitutional liberty, are to be discussed; and surely never, in the annals of national controversy, was exhibited a triumph so complete of the seemingly weaker party, a rout so disastrous of the stronger. Often as it has been repeated, it will bear another repetition; it never ought to be omitted in the history of constitutional liberty; it ought especially to be repeated this day;—the various addresses, petitions, and appeals, the correspondence, the resolutions, the legislative and popular debates, from 1764, to the declaration of independence, present a maturity of political wisdom, a strength of argument, a gravity of style, a manly eloquence, and a moral courage, of which unquestionably the modern world affords no other example. This meed of praise, substantially accorded at the time by Chatham, in the British parliament, may well be repeated by us. For most of the venerated men to whom it is paid, it is but a pious tribute to departed worth. The Lees and the Henries, Otis, Quincy, Warren, and Samuel Adams, the men who spoke those words of thrilling power, which raised and ruled the storm of resistance, and rang like the voice of fate across the Atlantic, are beyond the reach of our praise. To most of them it was granted to witness some of the fruits of their labors; such fruit as revolutions do not often bear. Others departed at an untimely hour, or nobly fell in the onset; too soon for their country, too soon for liberty, too soon for every thing but their own undying fame. But all are not gone; some still survive among us; the favored, enviable men, to hail the jubilee of the independence they declared. Go back, fellow-citizens, to that day, when Jefferson and Adams composed the sub-committee who reported the declaration of independence. Think of the mingled sensations of that proud but anxious day, compared to the joy of this. What honor, what crown, what treasure, could the world and all its kingdoms afford, compared with the honor and happiness of having been united in that commission, and living to see its most wavering hopes turned into glorious reality. Venerable men! you have outlived the dark days which followed your more than heroic deed; you have outlived your own strenuous contention, who should stand first among the people whose liberty you vindicated. You have lived to bear to each other the respect which the nation bears to you both; and each has been so happy as to exchange the honorable name of the leader of a party, for that more honorable one, the Father of his Country. While this our tribute of respect, on the jubilee of our independence, is paid to the gray hairs of the venerable survivor in our neighborhood; let it not less heartily be sped to him whose hand traced the lines |