Man, George i'.
x-ja Oration. . .
Providence, 1838,

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AN

ORATION

DELIVERED BEFORE THE

CITIZENS OF THE COUNTY OF KENT,

AT APPONAUG, WARWICK,

JULY 4, 1838.

BY GEORGE F. MAN.
ifi

PROVIDENCE:
KNOWLES, VOSE, AND.COMPANY.
1838.

Warwick, July 9, 1838.
Sir : In behalf of the citizens of Kent, we respectfully solicit, for
publication, a copy of your Oration, pronounced on the anniversary of
American Independence, at the village of Apponaug.
We are aware, Sir, that, in many cases, this has been done as a mere
matter of form ; but, in this instance, we beg leave to observe, that its
historical reminiscences alone will make it a valuable document for
reference, not only to our citizens, but to every American who values
the preservation of our liberties.
With the best wishes for your happiness, we are, very respectfully,
your obedient servants. CALEB WESTCOTT, Jr., ^
JONATHAN REMINGTON, f „
ALFRED READ, ( Committee.
JOSIAH BAKER, )
George F. Man, Esq.

Providence, July 14, 1838.
Gentlemen : A copy of the Oration delivered by me, on the fourth
instant, at Warwick, is at your service. Should its publication but
partially subserve the purposes by you so flatteringly anticipated, it
will amply compensate for any regret that I may feel in having acceded
to your wishes.
Please accept. Gentlemen, in behalf of the citizens of Kent, and for
yourselves, the assurances of the high consideration with which I have
the honor to be your most obedient and humble servant,
GEORGE F. MAN.
Messrs. Caleb Westcott, Jr.,
Jonathan Remington,
Alfred Read,
JosiAH Baker.

ORATION.

We are assembled once more, fellow-citizens, to en
deavor to mark, with a distinction commensurate, in a
degree, with its illustrious dignity of character, the occa
sion of the return of that great and memorable day upon
which the founders of our Republic, who are now no
more, resolved that these United States are, and of right
ought to be, free and independent, and pledged their
lives, fortunes, and sacred honor for the fulfilment of
their high and perilous resolve. An anniversary the most
august known in the history of mankind, it exhibits a
great people forgetting all the dissensions of conflicting
opinion, all the distinctions of social condition, and as the
descendants of a common ancestry, the possessors of a
common inheritance, the guardians of a common trust,
liberty and independence, assembling together from the
Atlantic to the Pacific, in the solitude of the ocean, and
upon the hills of Europe, to unite in thanksgiving for
the establishment of their own freedom, and in prayer for
the resurrection of the entombed but immortal liberties
of man throughout the earth.
Without adverting to the important effects of the Amer
ican Revolution, it will be merely attempted, upon the '
present occasion, to illustrate some of its causes, or, in
other words, to take a rapid glance at England, as to
America, from the discovery of the latter to the battle of
Bunker Hill. From any efforts of mine, however, upon
a theme so exhausted as to have almost ceased to inspire

with hope the labors of the highest genius, an enlight
ened audience will not be so deficient in sagacity and
prudence as to anticipate much, either of pleasure or
instruction. The great commercial intercourse which existed for
several centuries between Italy and the East Indies by
way of the Red Sea and Persian Gulf, till the hardihood
of Vasco de Gama laid open a new path through the
waters of the South Atlantic, by possessing the Italians
with more nautical skill and geographical knowledge,
with more accurate and noble conceptions of the figure
of the earth than all the other modern European nations,
decreed them at once the distinguishing praise of being
the boldest mariners and ablest navigators of their times,
together with the immortal honor of discovering and
exploring a great portion of this new western world. In
1497, five years after the great Genoese, Columbus, in
attempting, under Spanish auspices, to regain the Indies
by a western passage, had, by the discovery of the island
of St. Salvador for Spain, anticipated his discovery of the
southern continent of America for the same power in
1498, John Cabot, a Venetian, in attempting, under the
auspices of England, the accomplishment of the same
object by a northwestern course, discovered Labrador or
the coast of the United States, — afterwards explored by
Sebastian Cabot, his son, as far as North Carolina in
1498, — and thus laid the foundation of the claims of
Great Britain to the continent of North America.
Nearly one hundred years succeeded the discovery of
North America before England made any efl"ort to people,
with her children, the vast solitudes which had thus been
nominally subjected to her power ; and when, to gild
with a blighter ray the declining star of her Maiden
dueen, the important experiment was made, the utter ruin
of those intrepid adventurers, who, far from their native
skies sought a distant home through the storms of an

ocean which, at that period, when the barks that encoun
tered it were frail, — when its winds and currents were
unknown, and even the practicability of a direct passage
to America was undiscovered, proved only less terrible
in its wrath than the darker savage that lowered on the
western confines of its waters, so completely damped the
ardor of the English nation, that nothing but the alluring
tales of a traveller, emblazoning the riches of the west,
assisted by the mellowing influence of time, could re
awaken, after a lapse of twenty years, in the reign of
James the First, the baffled but inextinguishable enter
prise of our parent isle of the ocean.
The first successful establishment of a permanent Eng
lish colonial settlement in the United States was effected
in 1607, and was hailed in Europe as a signal to emi
grate, by the energy of soaring enterprise, the untiring
fortitude of laborious toil, the sternness of religious faith,
and the enthusiasm of civil hberty. Hence the brief
space of seventy-four years originated twelve of those
thirteen colonies which revolutionized America, and
shook to its centre the whole civihzed world.
The establishment of mere agricultural communities
was at first or soon became the undoubted object of
Great Britain in promoting or permitting the colonization
of these shores. It was her policy, at once selfish and
profound, that she should take from them, upon her own
terms, whatever they might produce, and that they
should take from her, upon equally unfavorable conditions,
whatever they might consume ; that they should be an
outlet for British manufactures ; that she, acting like the
once renowned metropolis of Curdistan, as a kind of
commercial isthmus between the east and the west,
should be the grand staple to furnish Europe with the
productions of America, and America with the products
of Eur-ope. It was also intended by imposts, direct or
iadirect, upon the exports and iraports.of the colonies, to

6
enrich the national exchequer ; and, by a monopoly of
all the navigation and marine interests connected with
the American trade, to develope and extend her mercan
tile and maritime resources. And it may be observed,
as a fair illustration of the general efficacy of the trade
laws in aggrandizing the mother country at the expense
of the colonies, that, by means of even an imperfect
execution of those relating to the last-mentioned branch
of her policy, the augmentation of her tonnage in sixty-
eight years, equalled in amount the whole of that, which,
unaided by colonial industry, she was hardly able to
accumulate in seventeen hundred ! And thus it happen
ed, that when, afterwards, menaced by the armed neu
trality of the north, instead of clinging, through weak
ness, to the protecting embraces of her shores, — with her
head canopied by the blazing ensigns, and her feet embo
somed in the cloud and thunder, the roar and darkness of
her thousand merchantmen and battle-ships, she rode
gallantly forth, and, deserted of all save the interminable
expanse of the silent heavens above, and of the solitary
waters around and beneath, she sought, found, and told
the confederated armaments of the world, that she needed
" no bulwark, no towers along the steep ; " that " her
march was o'er the mountain wave, her home upon the
deep." But however clearly conceived, deliberately matured,
or fully determined the purpose of Great Britain might
have been, she resolved that nothing but its gradual
execution, attempted from time to time, as circumstances
apparently concurred, should ever unfold it to America.
Conscious of the nature of her designs, she intended to
creep to the cradle of infant liberty amidst the stillness
of a reprobated press and the darkness of dishonored learn
ing ; and, like the serpent monster of Lybia, stolen upon
the slumbers of the Numidian lion, she hoped, by wreath
ing with coil after coil its unprotected limbs, to have
rendered forever impotent the mighty spirit of her victim.

About the year 1621 appeared the earliest of those
systematically successive developments of the hostile
dispositions of Great Britain, which began, as it were,
with faintly crimsoning the horizon, but gradually mount
ing upwards, kindled into conflagration more and more
of the political firmament, till what was a mere speck,
scarce worthy the eye of the pilgrim, broke out upon his
descendants the portent of an inevitably dreadful revo
lution. It seems, that, at the period last mentioned, 1621, an
exportation of colonial produce from America to England,
presented the latter, for commencing the fulfilment of
her schemes, one of those favorable opportunities which
the petty traffic of the colonies then occasionally aff'orded,
and the temptation of improving which the mother coun
try had found it for some time difficult, and, at length,
impossible to withstand. She accordingly surrendered
herself to the guidance or rather impulse of avarice,
and while the colonists were yet waging a dubious con
flict for existence, greeted the almost first fruits of their
toil, the almost first products of American labor ever
landed on the shores of England, with an overwhelming
profusion of duties.
The colonists, far from desiring a repetition of this
kindness, immediately betook themselves to the shipping
of Holland, and, by a direct transportation of their goods
to foreign ports, avoided, for the period of thirty years, in
defiance of the prohibitions of the crown, the ills they
had previously encountered by touching at their native
land. This conduct of the colonists was regarded by England
as an afflictive dispensation on her part, and a grievous
delinquency on theirs; but, like most prudent parents,
instead of abandoning her offspring to the perversity of
their temper, she thought it wiser to endeavor to reclaim
them from the error of their ways.

8
For this purpose, in 1651, was passed the celebrated
Navigation Act, restricting all trade with the colonies to
English built ships, owned by Englishmen ; which act,
however, by excluding the Dutch and all other shipping
except the English, was not merely intended to secure to
England the duties imposed by her on colonial exports in
1621, but, as the hour had at length come, it was also
designed to introduce and execute that branch of her
policy which aimed at a monopoly of all the navigation
and marine interests connected with the American trade.
But England was not satisfied with merely requiring the
colonies to carry their goods to her, in English built ships,
owned by Englishmen, and to pay her a duty on them
previous to their transportation for sale elsewhere, and
therefore by an act passed nine years afterwards, 1660,
they were commanded to sell them to her, and sell them
too with that inevitable loss or sacrifice which they must
incur or sustain, from all being forced to a market whose
demands were greatly inadequate to the supply, and
which market, therefore, could not fail to be greatly over
stocked. Still the mother country could not be satisfied,
till she extended to the import trade of the colonies the
same restrictions she had already imposed upon their
exports. Accordingly, three years afterwards, in 1663,
the colonies were commanded to bring every thing they
imported of the growth or manufacture of Europe, di
rectly from England, in English built ships, owned by
Englishmen, and mostly navigated by Englishmen, and
for the same to pay her an exorbitant price, partly con
sisting of the tax which she had already assessed and
collected on those goods while in the hands of the British
manufacturer or merchant, and partly consisting of that
excess over the regular market price, wh,ich England was
enabled to exact by reason of the great inadequacy of
the supply to the demand, and of the competition which
all the colonies, being obliged to resort to her, necessarily
produced.

9
In short, the language of the Trade Laws thus far
was simply this : Almost every thing the colonies pro
duce, they must carry to England, in English built ships,
owned by Englishmen, and pay her a high duty for the
privilege of selling it very cheap ; and, on the other
hand, almost every thing the colonies consume, they
must bring from England, in English built ships, owned
by Englishmen, and mostly navigated by Englishmen,
and pay her another duty for the privilege of purchasing
it very dear. Thus by the restriction of their facilities
of acquiring what they needed, and of disposing of what
they had, the incitement and reward of their industry
were greatly diminished, although not entirely destroyed.
The trade between the colonies was still permitted to
exist, but it was spared only to be greatly taxed or wholly
prohibited in 1672. In 1733, the West India trade, from
the extent of its restrictions, was also virtually prohib
ited, though it was this and the fur trade, had with the
natives of America, that enabled the northern colonies to
discharge the balance which was always against them in
their direct commerce with Great Britain. Finally, in
1750, when, considering that the climate, soil, and pro
duce of their native and adopted country were not mate
rially unlike ; that they possessed no staple commodity
of their own growth, nor the liberty of procuring any
elsewhere, to exchange for the manufactures of England ;
and when, also, considering that agriculture, relaxing in
her claims, permitted industry to explore and traverse
new and untried paths, the people of New England began
to manufacture for themselves, the fixed determination to
proscribe the manufactures of America, first attempted to
be executed in 1699, was now enforced to the utmost
practicability of its nature, by declaring the establish
ments abatable as nuisances, and subjecting the manu
facturers to a penalty.
To an American, who has inherited, with freedom, the
2

10
spirit that preserved, maintained, and bequeathed it, it is
idle to say, that these enormities of arbitrary power,
styled, with the exception of the last, the Laws of Trade
and Navigation, our ancestors always reprobated as wrong,
and, for years, utterly despised as nugatory. Could they
have been permitted to resist England alone, — could
they, while struggling with her, have protected the ob
jects of even a patriot's care from the murderous incur
sion of the French, Spanish, and aborigines, they would
have scorned not to have staked existence in an eflfort to
live like men, rather than brook the debasement and tur
pitude heroically imagined to exist in the slighest recog
nition of the Trade Laws. As it was. New England
could never be forced to yield these laws more than the
mockery of a submisssion ; not that, till after an age of
conflict between a parent's hopes and a patriot's fears ;
nor then, till she had proclaimed their intrinsic invalidity
by subjecting them to the indignity of a formal re-
enactment. Still, the Trade Laws were fraught with consequences
the most important to mankind, not only because the
disaff'ection engendered by their enactment, and the im
placable animosity enkindled by their enforcement, incon
siderable as it was, made them successively a remote and
an immediate cause of the great revolutionary struggle ,-
but also because, by originating the charter and other
contemporaneous disputes, involving the reciprocal rights
of the colonies and the crown, they gave birth to another
remote cause, distinct from but equally productive with
the former, of the same memorable contest. For so
surely does one misstep persisted in compel the commis
sion of a second, that, no sooner did Great Britain com
plete her scheme of the Trade Laws, than she was forced,
in order to execute it, to devise a plan, still more infa
mous, embracing in its aims the utter subjugation of
America. In pursuance of this latter plan, she contended,

11
that the charters of the New England colonies were mere
acts of incorporation, alterable by Parliament, and revo
cable at the pleasure of the crown ! The colonists main
tained, that these muniments of freedom, confirming their
right to the soil and investing them with powers of
jurisdiction, were solemn compacts, unalterable without
their consent and irrevocable without their default. Fail
ing in this attempt to seize the charters, the mother
country next endeavored to impair their efficacy by con
struction ; or, in the language of arms, to spike that
artillery which the intrepidity of its defenders would not
allow her to bear oflT. Accordingly, she contended, that
the words in the charters prohibiting the enactment of
all such laws as were incompatible with the laws of
England, alluded to the ordinary laws of England ; but
the spirit of Lexington referred them to the fundamental
laws of England, secured by Magna Charta, and con
firmed by the Bill of Rights. As if to convict Old Eng
land of a systematic design to subjugate the colonies ; as
if to acquit New England of having originated, by her
perversity, these precursors of civil strife, and to cast
upon the real author of them the shame of those calami
ties they were shortly destined to produce, the royal or
unchartered colonies were afflicted with similar dissen
sions as strongly presaging the necessity of an ultimate
arbitrament by the sword ; England alleging, among
other absurdities, that representation was a privilege al
lowed by the crown ; the colonies insisting, with equal
firmness, that it was a right inherent in the people.
Such were the indeterminate relations subsisting be
tween a pretended mother and her offspring, till the
arrival of one of the most memorable eras in the annals
of the latter, the year 1763, brought with it events,
importing, that the last hold England had upon America
was gone. The French, — who, under the guidance of
Verrazano, a Florentine, in 1525, followed Sebastian

12
Cabot's route along the eastern shores of our continent ;
and, profiting by the neglect of England to improve her
discoveries, in 1535 nominally, and in 1604 actually and
permanently, took possession of the Canadas; after the
peace of 1745, gradually proceeded to connect them
with Louisiana by a chain of posts and forts from (Que
bec to New Orleans, and either by themselves or their
Indian allies, were perpetually burning, plundering, and
butchering our eastern, northern, and western frontiers, —
the French, after an arduous conflict of seven years.
from 1756 to 1763, by the united arms of England and
America, were completely overthrown and forever driven
back to the westward of the thread of the Mississippi.
New Netherlands or New York, — which was as need
lessly hostile in the hands of the Dutch, as in those of
our own enterprising countrymen, its capital. New Am
sterdam or New York, has since been necessarily inau
spicious to the commercial greatness of New England, —
after being possessed by the subjects of the stadtholder
for fifty years, from 1614 to 1664, — upon the ground of
its having been discovered first by Cabot the younger, in
1498, and afterwards, in 1609, by Hudson, a British
subject, sailing, as it was falsely alleged, under a British
commission, and of the incapacity of a British subject,
thus commissioned, to alienate his discoveries as his
own, — had been demanded years before the overthrow of
the French, and pacifically surrendered by the Dutch to
commissioners of the British crown ; thus sealing, at a
very early period, a fountain of many disquietudes, which,
unlike most of those our brave ancestors partook of, was
a fountain, we hope, of ills anticipated rather than of
evils felt. The Spaniard, — who, from his vicinity to the
Carolinas, which he claimed as beyond the line of coast
explored by Sebastian Cabot in 1498, and as first discov
ered by Juan Ponce de Leon in 1512, was to the south
what the Canadian, similarly situated, was to New Eng-

io
land, and in his irruption from Augustine faintly imaged
to the southerner the sufferings of his brethren at the
north, — the Spaniard, to procure the restitution of Havana,
ceded Britain the possession of the Floridas, and as he
and the Frenchman, by a family compact, had become
allied in blood as they were associated in guilt and mis
fortune, (neither of them having preserved unconquered
nor left unstained what there he found,) they both joined
hand in hand, and both, at the same time, "through
Eden took their solitary way." Exiled from the borders
of the old Atlantic's gray and melancholy waste, where
his ancestors had lived through the still lapse of ages,
the Indian had never intermitted a patriotism that steeped
the heavens in fire and the earth in blood ; but grown at
last a broken, dispirited, melancholy fragment of the
sublime, and overawed by the stupendous energy and
inexhaustible resources of a being who had swept him
from shore to shore, he either stood at a distance on the
verge of the forest, gazing in silent awe and wonder at
the mysterious workings of the transforming power of
industry and art, or bereft of all the native sunshine of
his soul, and accompanied only by the splendor's of fading
day, journeyed on far away up into the wilderness, as it
were, to acquaint Nature, his mother, that all she had
kindly bestowed, the simplicity of her child had lost.
In short, those peculiar difficulties and dangers, which,
from the beginning, had hampered and harassed the col
onies, and by constraining them to disguise, beneath an
exterior of loyalty and submission, the rebel soul and
traitor purposes of freedom, had always been the basis
and sole guarantee for the perpetuity of the little author
ity which great Britain possessed in America, were
entirely and forever gone. And yet, after having proved,
by experiments made and repeated for more than a cen
tury, under every possible advantage, her utter incapacity
to force upon the colonies the laws of trade or a system

14
of external government, so infatuated was she, as to
attempt now, at this time, when every circumstance was
reversed against her, — in defiance of the universal jealou-
s}' of Europe, of France burning to avenge her recent dis
comfitures, and of America fresh from the teachings of a
long and arduous conflict, — the introduction and enforce
ment of the more exceptionable system of an internal
form of government, or the assertion and maintenance of
a right to tax the colonies without those colonies' consent.
A right, which Plymouth, Maryland, Rhode Island, Yir-
gihia. New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, com
prising a majority of the colonies, had successively nega
tived by the most express and solemn legislative declara
tions almost the moment it was possible to legislate ; — a
right, which, in 1680, had been practically asserted and
successfully resisted in the Jerseys under the dominion of
Sir Edmund Andros ; — a right, the bare suggestion of
whose exercise, but a short time previous, in 1754, had
been indignantly and universally repelled, under circum
stances which showed, beyond mistake, that no end,
however equitable, could alleviate for a moment, in the
eyes of America, the aspect of so obnoxious a means,
because so alarming a precedent ; — a right, which neither
Walpole nor Chatham, though alike distinguished by a
kind of supernatural potency of character, ever dared to
breathe of asserting; and though the former of these
men exerted so terrible an agency over the baser affections,
that it bowed rebuked only in presence of the godlike
empire of the latter over the nobler attributes of our
nature. — And under the preposterous pretence, too, of
raising a revenue in America to defray the expenses of
defending, protecting, and maintaining the same ! When
the British ministry well knew, that Great Britain had
been more than indemnified by a monopoly of its trade
and the entire control of its commerce; — when they
equally knew that the colonies had never refused, and

15
were still willing to comply with the requisitions of the
crown for these purposes, — offering blood or treasure, or
both, if sought through the legitimate media of their own
legislatures ; — when it was also notorious, that, hereto
fore, their zeal had so far transcended their abilities, that
the mother country had refunded them, annually, nearly
a million of dollars for the last five years of the French
war; — when, in fine, three thousand of her young men,
the very flower of New England, lay then, at that very
moment, stark and mouldering under the ramparts of
Louisburg, or fallen with Wolfe on the heights of Abra
ham! What, then, were the immediate causes of the stamp
act ? To say, that the king was of an arbitrary temper ;
that his secret counsellor, Lord Bute, more passionate
than wise, quickened and propelled the natural tendencies
of his character ; that his prime minister. Lord Grenville,
who, to a narrowness of mind which had been fostered
and confirmed by his official and professional habits,
superadded the vanity of financial skill and an utter igno
rance of America, was wholly unequal to the manage
ment of great affairs; and, in short, that a majority of
Parliament, who should have withstood the torrent of
despotism, only accelerated, by their selfishness and cor
ruption, the impetuosity of its course; — to say all this,
would be stating, it might seem to many, a very ordinary
coincidence in the history of monarchy. If we add to
this, the insatiate avarice of the British manufacturer and
merchant, who foresaw, in the passage of the stamp act,
the restoration and re-enforcement of its elder born but
twin sister, the Trade Laws, but who did not perceive at
first what, as their subsequent petitions and remonstran
ces apparently implied, was ultimately discovered, that
the colonies, constituting an integral part of the empire,
could not suffer without inflicting proportionate distress
upon the whole ; the unprincipled selfishness of the

16
landed aristocracy, the pillars of a state neighbored to
destruction by the enormous requisitions of eternal war,
and who Avould basely be beholden to America to ease
them of a burden, which, they insolently said, that she,
America, had not the spirit to accumulate; — if we also
consider the natural pride of the British nation, raised to
an unprecedented height by great triumphs succeeding a
long depression of the national arms; — a pride, which
became ferocious upon the unexpected discovery, that,
by these great triumphs, they were covered with honor,
but more loaded with debt, and which prompted them to
oppress, while it deluded them with the belief, that, in
the relative disproportion of the countries, however op
pressive their requirements, America would not, or, if so
hardy as to attempt it, could not, present any serious
opposition to their will ; — as observed, when we take
into consideration all these particulars, the despotism,
folly, ignorance, incapacity, selfishness and corruption of
Gov^ernment incited and sustained by the pride and dis
tress of the subject, which induced, in turn, laxity of
principle and callousness of heart, and a mistaken estimate
of the temper and resources of the colonies, it seems as
if we could discover a combination of circumstances
peculiarly calculated and well worthy to have helped on,
at this particular time, a measure, which, though diff'er-
ing in its title and avowed object from all preceding acts
of Parliament in relation to the colonies, yet, being de
signed to increase her revenue and hghten her burdens,
was, notwithstanding the disclaimer of Burke and Chat
ham, manifestly in perfect accordance with the settled
designs and long-established policy of England, but
which, whether regarded in its purpose or eff"ects, was
one of the most stupendous monuments of wickedness
and folly that ever dishonored a naturally brave and
philanthropic, wealthy and enterprising, free and enlight
ened people.

17
It is a fact, familiar to us all, that the stamp act was
passed in 1765, under the administration of Sir George
Grenville, by an almost unanimous vote in the House of
Lords, and by a vote of five-sixths in the House of
Commons. It is likewise familiar to us, that, in conse
quence of the determined resolution, indefatigable zeal,
and ceaseless activity of America, its execution could not
be enforced ; and that, owing to the adoption of measures
tending to operate upon those mercenary feelings which
originally prompted, or greatly promoted, its enactment,
the stamp act was repealed in 1766, under the adminis
tration of Lord Rockingham, ostensibly because opposed
to political equity and the true principles of commerce,
but really because it could not be enforced. At the same
time, likewise, was carried, by a great majority, the
famous Resolution, that Parliament had a right to bind
the colonies in all cases whatsoever ! A most ominous
resolve, since, as early as 1698, it was a common opinion
in all the colonies, particularly Connecticut and Rhode
Island, — whose charters were the least restrictive, —
that Parliament had a right to bind the colonies in no
case whatsoever. We know too, that, in 1767, under
the nominal administration of Lord Chatham, but the
actual management of Charles Townshend, during Chat
ham's illness, the subject of colonial taxation was revived,
and that, with little opposition in either House of Parlia
ment, an act was passed, imposing duties upon a consid
erable number of the most important colonial imports,
accompanied by another act establishing a new board of
commissioners, as well to secure the execution of itself
as the enforcement of the previously existing laws of
trade and navigation. It is equally notorious, that, by
recurring to the same measures, or measures similar to
those which produced a repeal of the stamp act, namely,
measures for non-importation or non-consumption and
non-exportation as regarded the mother country, America
3

18
again forced England to retrace her steps ; and that, in
1770, under the administration of Lord North, all the
duties imposed in 1767 were repealed, excepting those
on tea. These were still retained, and as they were man
ifestly too inconsiderable to furnish even a pretext for
alleging, as they did in the case of the stamp act, that
they were imposed or retained for the purpose of raising
a revenue in America to defray the charges of its defence,
protection, and maintenance, it was now contended, that
they ought be submitted to, because they were so incon
siderable as to yield no revenue ! And when it was
objected, that the ground of complaint was the assertion
of the abstract right, and not the actual burden of taxa
tion ; that submission to the remaining duties, though
inconsiderable, would be an acknowledgment of the right
of taxation, which, if moderately asserted now, might
still, hereafter, be enforced to the utter ruin of America,
they were very gravely assured, that these duties were
retained only as an evidence of the right of taxation ;
which right as it would not be exercised at present, so
neither was it intended that it should hereafter be enforc
ed to the injury of America or the benefit of herself!
Therefore America ought to submit to it, and therefore
England was determined to contend for it ; — that is, for
something which was good for nothing, and never would
be ; and contend for it, too, for that very reason, because
it was good for' nothing, and never would be !
Had Lord North gone to war for something which was
good for nothing, and never would be, he would hav&
diff"ered but very little from most of those who have
embarked on similar enterprises ; but when he made the
¦W(0rthl6ssness of the thing the very reason of contending
for it, he threw over the contemplated contest an air of
originality, as regarded his lordship, which, notwithstand
ing; the. many wars-before and' since, it still retains down
to the. present day.

19
It is quite remarkable, that the expression, "march of
mind," and the Georgian star were first seen in Great
Britain about this time ; but it is still more remarkable,
that, in descanting upon the singular fitness of the one to
mark the progress of her sages in the knowledge of things
above, a British reviewer should have never observed the
absolute necessity of the other to denote the progression
of her rulers in the comprehension of things below. For,
under Grenville, the object of American taxation was
first revenue to England, then revenue to America ; —
under Townshend, both; — under Lord North, neither!
The war of words being ended, after raging for the
period of five years, and both parties, as usual, during
the time of its continuance, having either fortified their
original positions with additional entrenchments, or press
ing forward in the eagerness of strife, assumed new ones
more in advance, America stood waiting, in tempestuous
silence, the movements of her grand adversary, when
tidings came through the medium of her trusty sentinels,
that the tea, shipped by the East India Company at the
suggestion of Parliament, was coming on, and to be sus
tained, if necessary, by all the power and patronage of
Government. To the kingdom of Great Britain at large,
and more especially to the ministers, who had watched
over that kingdom till none were so poor as to do it
reverence, the hour now passing, no doubt, seemed heav
ily laden with the shadows, clouds, and darkness that are
wont to overcast the horrid interim that intervenes the
incipient movement and the final acting of all unhallowed
deeds. But to our fathers, whose grievous lot it was,
instead of ours, to have fallen upon times that emphati
cally tried men's souls, and particularly to the chosen
few, Avho, in an hour so rude, were called, by the general
Voice, to sustain, as pillars, on its first shock, the trem
bling arch of ah empire resting ultimately upon the people
themselves, the present was a season of unprecedented

20
difficulty, danger, and distress ; such a sea of troubles as
the eye of young Liberty never looked out upon, and
which the heart can as little conceive as the tongue
adequately'portray. If the tea is landed, said they, the
duty must be paid, the principle established, and, instead
of possessing ourselves, or transmitting to others, the
proud inheritance of freedom, we and our children will
be broken and debased beneath the exercise of a power
as boundless in extent as it is endless in duration. Nay,
more ; this obnoxious plant now coming, so insignificant
in the eyes of a philosopher, yet destined to shake the
pillars of the world, was, as it were, another forbidden
fruit, and it depended wholly on the virtue of America,
whether mankind were to be now politically, as, it is
said, they were once morally, lost. Triumphant over
sea and sky the tea finally arrived. But what are the
most refractory powers of nature compared to men en
gaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty! A
professed enemy of contention, the Philadelphian was
content to refrain from any further opposition thau just
sufficient to impress upon the instruments of oppression
the expediency of an immediate return, and a necessity
of the tea's reconveyance. The Manhattanese, or New
Yorker, was satisfied to follow his example. The New
Englander, the descendant of the pilgrims, quite as cha
racteristically, cast it into the bosom of the deep ! And
as Otis, Warren, Quincy, and Adams beheld the dark
blue walers receive into their chambers the thing of strife,
and, indifferent to an event which would soon bring on
one of the most trying and terrible struggles the children
of men ever saw, relapse at last into their habitual sullen-
ness of repose ; — when they reflected, through what
variety of untried scenes and changes they might pass,
upon the wide, the unbounded prospect stretched before
them, like those of the suspended aeronaut, when he feels,
the first time, the disruption of the cord that bound him

21
to his mother earth, their emotions must have been such
as can be taught only as they were learnt, at the hazard
of all we hold dear ; whilst o'er the vast assemblage of
spectators there must have stolen a tremor of remorse,
as, respiring from the grandeur of the scene, they were
permitted to reflect, that they had urged these intrepid
spirits abroad upon an element, whence it was then not
improbable, and soon became certain, that some of them
were destined never to return.
Things now began to wear a more clouded aspect.
The attack upon the king's commissioners, at Boston, in
1768; upon the king's sloop. Liberty, at Newport, in
1769 ; upon the king's troops, at Boston, in 1770; upon
the king's schooner, Gaspee, at Providence, in 1772,
were events that had already transpired ; and having
played back and forth, like the electric corruscations of a
troubled and laboring sky, were acknowledged of all,
save the devoted head, the irrepressible combustion of an
atmosphere stored with accumulated wrath. And now,
in 1774, the year succeeding the destruction of the tea,
the seizure of the royal arms and munitionary stores at
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and the dismantling of the
king's fort at Newport, flew, like signal rockets, from
diff"erent and distant points of the Atlantic coast, which,
while they told the vast inland by their trails of fire, the
crisis was at hand, proclaimed by their simultaneous but
unpremeditated movement, that America was one. The
storm burst, the crash came, the bolt fell at Lexington.
It shook America and was felt throughout the whole
civilized world. The cry, that war was inevitable, straight
broke from every part of New England, and the fiery
south and rock-ribbed west returned, " Let it come ! "
Man had now successively traversed every quarter of the
globe and found no rest. The name of Revolution had
not yet grown stale to the common ear. Deep had not
yet called unto deep in the grand jubilee of freedom.

22
South America, then as now, lay floating, many a league,
but not then as now like some huge leviathan pursuing
his gigantic play to the vast theatre of nature, but like
this mighty tenant of her shores hampered, maimed, and
bleeding under the savagery of its merciless pursuers,
she was yielding her life-blood to the Portuguese and
Spanish despot. Africa, unemancipated, was crying unto
Europe, and Asia, from the Carnatic, was appealing to the
same source. In Europe, Denmark, herself long enured
to despotism, had but lately seen Sweden pass into the
same abyss. Russia, Prussia, and Austria had scarce
done feeding the first time their cannibal appetites upon
the hmbs of dismembered Poland. Holland, decaying,
gave no signs. The Switzer amid the glaciers, in the
inaccessibility of his liberty, seemed to intimate the im
practicability of general freedom. The star of America
climbing through cloud and battle-smoke, its silver man
tle had not yet revealed to the Spaniard nor the French
man the terrible secrets of his prison-house. Italy, the
land of Brutus, lay sunk in sloth, and the Turk was
holding high carnival over the unransomed monuments
of Greece. Ireland ran blood, and on England's pale-
faced shore, the beacon of liberty, which had shone for
ages a star amid the storms of commotion, had at last fal
len into the custody of men, who seemed determined, by
corrupting its consecrated aliment, to quench, if possible,
its imperishable flame. But the American people arose,
and, like the Israelite in the wilderness, led on by a dark
cloud, went up unto Bunker's Mount, to see, if where
Franklin might have snatched the thunderbolt from
heaven, they could not, under the guidance of their im
mortal heroes, pull down the thunderer of the earth.
But the millions of human beings, here and beyond
the deep, whose counsels in the cabinet, whose valor in
the field, or whose sympathy with the oppressor or the
oppressed, made them partakers in heart or hand of the

23
great revolutionary struggle, departing one by one, have
nearly all disappeared. A few more suns, and every
lingerer, whose lids are dimly unbarred, whose ears are
feebly waked to the fleeting pageantry of earth, will
have been lighted beyond the regions of unrest. The
tattered flag of '76 can no longer chase its staff, and the
mound over which it waved has stooped its timeworn
head upon the greensward that wraps the sleep of its
defenders. In the solemn round of creation, throughout
all the provinces of animated being, a world of new life
has arisen, and the renovated landscape and splendor-
teeming seashore bespeak art's emulous concurrence with
nature in obliterating the memorials of the strife of a
kindred people. Suffice it therefore to say, that having
done and suffered for mankind beyond the recompense of
earth, with bodies bruised and spirits worn, the remnant
of a band thinned by every form of ill, the heroes of '76,
under the guidance of their sages, " dropped on Washing
ton " and Lafayette " the wreath of victory, and stamped
on" their country "the seal of independence;" thus
evincing to the world and teaching their posterity, that
no aims are too exalted for Americans united within
themselves, and resolved, under God,
" To live like Freemen, or like Freemen die ! "

Ik M'

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