their superiority to all the troops in the world, upon our burdened minds, when we recall his they have scarcely dared to set their feet out of loved idea! when we reflect upon the manner of their strong holds since that time; and instead of his death; when we fancy that we see his savage ravaging the American continent in a single cam- enemies exulting o'er his corpse, beautiful aven in paign, with a single regiment, they have proceed- death, when we remember that, destitute of the ed- -one mile and an half in the conquest of it. rites of sepulture, he was cast into the ground, The heights of Charlestown witnessed to the without the distinction due to his rank and merit; world, that Americans, fighting in the cause of we cannot restrain the starting tear, we cannot freedom, were a formidable foe: although they repress the bursting sigh! we mourn thine exit, were surrounded by troops hitherto deemed in-illustrious shade, with undissembled grief; we vincible, although they saw the habitations of their countrymen inveloped with flames; although cannon roared on every quarter, and they beheld scenes of desolation and bloodshed, to which they were entirely unused, yet they retired not till they had compelled their enemy twice to retreat, and had expended the whole of their ammunition: the British forces gained the ground, but they lost the flower of their army. From one end of the continent to the other, a series of successes hath attended the American arms; instead of having troops of savages poured down to our frontiers (which the murderous policy of the tyrant of Britain induced him to attempt) we have, through the favor of heaven, carried our victorious arms into the very bowels of Canada; instead of having our stores and provisions cut off by the enemy, we have made important captures from them: success hath crowned our enterprizes, while disappointment hath followed those who oppose us. venerate thine exalted character; we will erect a When we traverse the Canadian wilds, and come to the plains of Abraham, where WOLFE once fell, we are there again compelled to pay a tribute to exalted merit, and to lament the fall of the great MONTGOMERY! warmed with a spirit of patriotism, too little felt by his venal countrymen, he espoused the cause of American freedom: he sword which he had long laid aside, and jeoparded left domestic ease and affluence: he girded on the his life in the high places of the field: victory followed his standard; she hovered over his head, and crowned it with the laurel wreath; she was just ready to hail him the conqueror of Canada, when the fatal sisters snapped, in a moment, the thread of life, and seized, from his eager grasp, the untasted conquest! Americans, bear witness to his hu manity and his valor, for he died fighting in your That elation of spirit, which is excited by our cause, and the cause of mankind! let his memory victories, is damped by our feeling the calamities live in your breasts; let it be handed down to your of war. To hear the expiring groans of our beloved posterity, that millions yet unborn may rise up and countrymen; to behold the flames of our habita- call him blessed! tions, once the abodes of peace and plenty, ascend. ing to Heaven; to see ruin and desolation spread over our fruitful villages, must occasion sensations in the highest degree painful. The tender feelings of the human heart are deeply affected with the fate of these and the other heroes who have bled and died, that their country may be free: but at the same time, sensations of indignant wrath, are excited in the breast of every friend to freedom: he will listen to the voice of their blood, which cries aloud to heaven and to him, for. This day, upon which the gloomy scene was first ●pened, calls upon us to mourn for the heroes who have already died in the bed of honor, fighting for God and their country. Especially, does it lead us vengeance! he will feel himself animated with new to recollect the name and the virtues of general vigor in the glorious cause: nothing daunted by WARREN! the kind, the humane, the benevolen their untimely fate, he will rush into the midst of friend, in the private walks of life; the ina.xible danger, that he may share their glory and avenge patriot, the undaunted commander in his public their death! every idea which can warm and animate sphere, deserves to be recollected with gratitude aim to glorious deeds, will rush at once upon his and esteem! this audience, acquainted, in the most mind; and, when engaged in the warmest battle, intimate manner, with his numberless virtues, must he will hear them, from their heaven, urging him feel his loss, and bemoan their beloved, theiro action: he will feel their spirits transfused into entrusted fellow-citizen! ah! my countrymen, what his breast; he will sacrifice whole hecatombs of tender, what excrutiating sensations rush at once their murderers to their illustrious manes! Indeed, my countrymen, the people of America | defend her from their power, and transmit her have every thing to animate and encourage them blessings to millions upon millions of our posterity. in the present contest. Formidable as was once Let us then arouse to arms; for, upon our exer. the power of the British lion, he hath now lost his tions, under GoD, depends their freedom; upon our teeth; universal dissipation hath taken pl. e of that exertions depends the important question, whether simplicity of manners, and hardiness of integrity, the rising empire of America, shall be an empire of for which the nation was once remarkable: the slaves or of freemen. officers of the British army, instead of inuring Animated by these considerations, my friends themselves to discipline, and seeking for glory in and fellow-citizens, let us strain every nerve in the the blood-stained field, wish alone to captivate the service of our country! what are our lives when Efter sex, and triumph over their virtue. The viewed in competition with the happiness of such legislature of Great Britain is totally corrupt; her an empire! what is our private interest when opadministration is arbitrary and tyrannical; the peo-posed to that of three millions of men! let our ple have lost their spirit of resentment; and, like bosoms glow with the warmth of patriotism; let the most contemptible of animals, bow the shoulder us sacrifice our ease, our fortunes, and our lives, to bear, and become servants unto tribute. The na- that we may save our country. tional resources are cut off; she is loaded with an intolerable public debt; she is become the scorn of That a spirit of public virtue may transcend those foreigners to whom she was once terrible; inhabitants of the town of Boston, have plainly every private consideration, you, the respected and it is easy to see that her glory is in the wane. manifested: with pleasure you have sacrificed what How different from this is the present state of selfish men hold most dear, to save this oppressed our country; descended from a race of hardy land! with firmness you have resisted every attack ancestors, who loved their freedom better than of arbitrary power! like the sturdy oak, you have they loved their lives, the Americans are jealous stood unmoved, and to you, under Gon, will be of the least infringement of their rights; strangers owing the salvation of this extensive continent. to that luxury, which effeminates the mind and We feel, my beloved friends, our obligations to body, they are capable of enduring incredible hard-you! our hearts confess them; we cordially wish it ships; with eagerness they rush into the field of were in our power to reward you for your patriobattle, and brave, with coolness, every danger; they tism; to restore you to that ease and affluence of possess a rich and a fruitful country, sufficient to which, for our sakes, you have deprived yourselves supply them with every necessary and convenience it is not. But our morning and evening petitions; of life; they have inexhaustible resources for carry-to the guardian God of America shall be, that he ing on war, and bid fair soon to be courted for their will bless and reward you. alliance, by the proudest monarchs of the earth. Their statesmen are equal to the task of forming forward to the bright day, which shall bail us a With transport, my countrymen, let us look and defending a free and extensive empire: their free and independent state. generals are brave and humane, intrepid and With earnestness let prudent. When I name a WASHINGTON, my the Being of all beings, who holds the fate of emus implore the forgiveness and the patronage of audience will feel the justice of the remark, and pires in his hands! with zeal let us exert ourselves acquit me of the charge of flattery. in the service of our country, in life: and when the ORATION DELIVERED AT BOSTON, MARCH 5, 1777, Possessed of these advantages, we should be earthly scene shall be closing with us, let us expire inexcusable to Gon, to our posterity, to the whole with this prayer upon our quivering lips, O GOD world, if we hesitated, a single moment, in assert-LET AMERICA BE FREE! ing our rights and repelling the attacks of lawless power. Freedom is offered to us, she invites us to accept her blessings; driven from the other regions BY BENJAMIN HICHBORN, ESQ. -Tum vos, O Tyrii, stirpem et genus omne futurum of the globe, she wishes to find an asylum in the Exercete odiis; cinerique hæc mittite nostro wilds of America; with open arms let us receive Muuera: muilus amor populis, nee fædera sunto.- Virgil. the persecuted fair; let us imitate the example of Friends and countrymen'—Îμving apologies for our venerable ancestors, who loved and courted day's solemnity, to those who might have remedied my inability to act the part I am to take, in this her into these desert climes. With determined the evil, by a more suitable appointment, I shall bravery, let us resist the attacks of her impudent offer my sentiments upon the subject with the same ravishers; by resolution and firmness we may freedom that 1 conceived them. The advantages of social life, are the result of frefinement, and learning, should ever be subdued such evident necessity, so extensively diffusive and by a power that never could have crept into life, universally felt, that all mankind will readily but through the channel of their indulgence. acknowledge their existence without the aid of But alas! their fate remains a standing MONUMENT metaphysics or history. of this truth; that freedom, at sufference, is a The right that every individual has to reasonsolecism in politics. freely upon the nature of that government he is To avoid the pain that humanity must suffer, called to submit to, having nature for its source,pon finding so few instances of virtue that have is no less obvious and perceptible-and hence, as been proof against the temptations to prostitute a a necessary foundation for the exercise of this delegated power, I am inclined to think, that the right, I define civil liberty to be, not "a govern- great FOUNDER of societies has caused the CURSE ment by laws," made agreeable to charters, bills of infatuating ambition, and relentless cruelty, to of rights or compacts, but a power existing in the be entailed on those whose vanity may lead them people at large, at any time, for any cause, or for to assume his prerogative among any of his peono cause, but their own sovereign pleasure, to alter ple as they are cantoned about in the world, and to or annihilate both the mode and essence of any prevent mankind from paying that adoration and former government, and adopt a new one in its respect to the most dignified mortal, which is due only to infinite wisdom and goodness, in the direction Placing ourselves then upon this broad basis of of almighty power, and therefore that he alone is fit civil liberty, founded on natural right, we will, to be a MONARCH. stead. unawed by the standing armies of any tyrant's Were we to traverse the whole field of human tools, or monarchs, deliberate freely upon the transactions, and expect any where to find an nature of their institutions, and their dangerous exemption from this general charge, we should tendency to the rights of man. most naturally fix our eyes upon the Romans-but Every military force must necessarily imply a how mortified do we find ourselves by the survey? right of exercising an arbitrary power, so far as At the very time this people were most famed respects the objects against which it is to be for their virtue and greatness-while they were directed; and what will be the objects, against regaling themselves with luxurious ease in the lap which it will be in constant exercise, in proportion of freedom-the provinces, they obtained by fraud to its extent, we may collect from the experience of and violence, were suffering under every species ages, and the well known source of human actions. of the vilest servitude, and made to contribute to The page of history seldom groans with the calamities of mankind, but we may trace the source of their unhappiness to this engine of oppression. We Projected in the blackest principles of the hu man mind, and supported by ambition and a lust of unbounded sway, this armed monster hath spread havoc and misery throughout the world. find the bloody traces of its footsteps through all the ruins of greatness and freedom, either in ancient or modern times: the most free and opulent cities of the world, by conniving at its birth, have, at last, fallen a prey to its relentless fury.† While we are ravished with the politeness, wis. dom, and greatness of the Grecian states, we can scarce believe that the productions of such art, that very ease and luxury at the discretion of the most merciless unfeeling task-masters. But they themselves, by the same tools they had armed to execute their bloody purposes, in their turn, became the subjects of the same kind of oppression they so liberally dealt out to others, and stand recorded in history equal monuments of the greatness and depravity of human nature. Taught by the experience of former ages, that a general, at the head of an armed force, would ever make himself superior to the laws, Europe, for several centuries, raised effectual barriers against the danger (and, I may say, the possibility) of their usurpations; for the tenure of their landa, though they acknowledge a superior lord, was up. on conditions so abhorrent to the idea of stand The petty states and princes who have raised ing armies, that it offered at once, both a promise their armies as a peasant would his game cocks, and a pledge against them. and sent them to market for a price, are in the most infamous sense of the word, tools. But to convince us that no human institutions Pisis ratus of Athens, Dyonisius of Syracuse, and [c.n_insure permanent felicity to mankind—security, Cæsar of Rome, furnish a few among numberless examples, that history affords. The feudal tenure. the offspring of ease and freedom, opened the door for one enterprising usurper after another, till the inhabitants of the whole eastern world had but little lek of the property of their species but what they possessed in their shape. pleasure in stripping others of the noblest orna. ments and gifts of nature, to countenance their own deformity and wretchedness. A trifling farce, therefore, upon the question of right in parliament, was all the previous parade that was thought necessary to the introduction of a standing army, with all the ensigns of war, into Strange metamorphosis! but is it not much stranger still, to see these pitiable wretches stript of every enjoyment that can render life a blessing, the bowels of our country. meanly courting favor and protection from the tyrants who enslaved them, and easily mistaking the chains of servitude for the garb of nature? It is needless to recount the various preludes to hostilities, the fatal day we now commemorate, opened a scene that filled every honest mind with The formalities of a free, and the ends of a despotic indignation, and every tender heart with distress. state (says a modern writer) have often subsisted-It is impossible for any who were not witnesses together, Britain furnishes a most unhappy example of that shocking event, to conceive the terrors of of this shocking truth: as if the relish of liberty that dreadful night, and they who were must have was pampered to make s'very itself more intoler-images of horror upon the mind they never can ably loathsome, they feel all the mortifying conse communicate. quences of the basest servitude, and are left to The variety of contending passions that once console themselves with this consideration, that fall upon and distract the mind, upon the arrival the weight of their grievances can never be increas of such an important crisis, can never be realized ed while they are complimented, or rather tantalized but once. with the name of freemen. These are some of the To see the peaceful inhabitants of a city, glorious effects of standing armies among foreign deliberately murdered by the very men, who, in nations. Let us now consider their consequences pretence, were supported for their protection-to in that part of the world, in whose affairs me take hear the piercing groans-to see the mangled a more interesting part. bodies and ghastly visages of the dying and the It is easy to conceive that those men who would dead-to hear the shrieks and cries of the timid, not scruple to make use of every artifice and with the promiscuous, mingling horrid sound of violence to reduce the very people to whose gene- arms, execrations, and vengeance, produced a rosity they were indebted for their splendor, scene of confusion and wretchedness, so com. wealth, and greatness, to a state of vassalage, would plicated and complete, that the power of the richest never hesitate to make their conquests as exten-language must ever fail in describing it.† sive as their power; they can feel the influence of no law but that of the sword, and therefore (what- the sufferings, and patriotism to pour the balm of The eye of pity is yet called to drop a tear at ever may be their pretensions) you will, in every charity over the wounds of half-murdered citizens, case, find them ultimately make an appeal to its dragging out a miserable life, and fresh bleeding decisions. with the blows aimed at our country. If such are the governors, what must the people We could dwell, with a melancholy pleasure, on be? having been robbed of liberty themselves, with this sad catastrophe, did not a more ample field out the faintest struggle in its defence,† they are of violence, bloodshed, and cruelty, demand our just fit to be made the instruments of wresting it attention. from others. How can we expect that they who know nothing of the happiness of freedom themselves, should feel any reluctance at reducing all mankind to their own disgraceful situation? indeed the reverse is true, for we generally find them taking an unnatural Charles VII. Lewis XI. of France, having set the example, all the crowned heads in Europe soon followed it. The murder of two or three people in St. George's fields, seems to be all the ceremony at. tending the death and burial of British liberty. The palpable absurdity of making use of the name of a king, to give a sanction to those very operations which were carrying on against him, has been so sensibly felt, through all ranks of men, that we have not yet altogether got rid of its disagreea. ble effects. And I must confess I should blush at the ludicrous -Quis talia fando, Myrmidonum, dolopumve, aut duri miles Ulyssei, Temperet a lachrymis. Virgil. †Non mihi si linguæ centum sint, oraque centum, Ferrea vox, omnes scelerum comprendere formas possim. Virgil. figure in which this part of our history must exhibit severity, which, however just, humanity shudders to view, in future time, were we not countenanced to inflict. But we cannot think it strange to find by the same, or more striking inconsistencies which people in the subordinate departments of life, in. are to be found attendant (and perhaps necessarily fluenced by such ridiculous notions, while their 80) upon all important revolutions. haughty masters seem to labor under the misfortune of the same infatuation. We can easily conceive a mixture of prejudice and fear, that will excite such awful ideas of the person, to whom w we have been taught from our cradles, to annex the properties of a most gracious sovereign, most sacred majesty, and a train of such GoD-like attributes, as would make us feel con scious of a degree of impiety, in calling a villain by his proper name, while shrouded under this garb of sanctity. Slaves always rate the consequence of those they serve, by the treatment they receive from them, and wonder that others do not feel the weight of the same importance. To call men of distinguished rank, in any go. vernment; knaves, fools and scoundrels, however they may deserve it, is esteemed neither polite or decent: I am, therefore, at a loss for names while I But it is exceedingly diverting to view the am describing the oppressors of my country. Who, influence of this chimerical divinity in those who without deserving these reproachful appellations, are made the immediate tools of supporting it could have conceived the horrid wish of decking they will tell you it is a task most ungrateful to his crown with the idle plume of foreign empire men of their sensibility and refinement, to be made at the expense of the peace, wealth, and very being the instruments of sending fire and death indis-[of a nation? and who but a pompous blockhead, in criminately among the innocent, the helpless, and the execution of this impious design, could expect the fair-but they have sworn to be faithful to to conquer a hard, virtuous set of men, by ineffectheir sovereign, and were they ordered to scale the tual threats and empty promises, contained in a set walls of the new Jerusalem, they should not dare of proclamations, he wanted either courage or power to decline the impious attempt. to disperse among the people they were designed to subdue? Were it not for this ridiculous faith in the omnipotence of the tyrant whom they serve, we Possibly they may conceive the length of their must suppose them fools or madmen:--Indeed that master's purse, at the rate of thirty crowns a man, very faith, would justify the charge of extreme to be equal to all the armed force of Europe, and madness and folly against all mankind, who had not been nurtured in this cradle of infatuation. therefore they should be able ultimately to effect that by the point of the bayonet, which they rather wished, than expected, to obtain on any other terms. Were it not for the indulgence that a generous mind will always shew to the weakness and prejudices of the worst of men, many whom the chance Here let us pause, and for the honor of our speof war has thrown into our hands, must have felt cies, give a moment to reflection upon this shockthe severity and comtempt of a justly enraged peo-ing idea! is it possible that any race of men, should ple, while they, with all their vanity and ostenta- be so lost to a sense of the rights of nature, and tion, remain the unhurt objects of our pity." the dignity of their rank in the chain of beings, as It is surely rather a subject of merry ridicule, to suffer themselves (like the horses which they than deserving of serious resentment, to see many ride) to be tutored to the field of war, to have a of this kind of gentry affecting to deny the cha price set upon their lives, which their masters will racter of prisoners, and attributing that indulgence which is the effect of unparalleled generosity, to destroy the little credit they ever had for humanity; and the sufferings of some to which I have myself the mean motive of fear; but we will let them know, been a witness, exposed to all the inconveniences that they cannot provoke us even to justice in the and hazards of a languishing disease in confinement line of punishment, and we leave them to their own tions of their nearest friends, and a sympathizing on ship board, in view of the persons and habitaconsciences and the impartial censures of surround-parent turned over the side with reproaches, for ing nations, to make some returns for the un- attempting to speak to his sick, suffering, dying exampled cruelties that many of our friends have ble, humane admiral Graves, and his nephew Sam, child, must give the characters of the polite, sensisuffered from their barbarous hands; in lieu of that a stamp of infamy, which the power of time can never wipe away. *Captain Johnson and his crew, the prisoners in general at New-York and Halifax, Mr. Lovell and many others in Boston, are instances sufficient to The generals Gage and Howe, have been playing this warlike game ever since they have been in the country. |