The
Jubilee
of the Constitution, delivered at New York, April
30, 1839, before the New York Historical Society:
Fellow-Citizens and Brethren, Associates of the New
York Historical Society:
Would it be an unlicensed trespass of the imagination
to conceive that on the night preceding the day of which
you now commemorate the fiftieth anniversary--on the
night preceding that thirtieth of April, 1789, when from
the balcony of your city hall the chancellor of the State
of New York administered to George Washington the solemn
oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the
United States, and to the best of his ability to
preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the
United States--that in the visions of the night the
guardian angel of the Father of our Country had appeared
before him, in the venerated form of his mother, and, to
cheer and encourage him in the performance of the
momentous and solemn duties that he was about to assume,
had delivered to him a suit of celestial armor--a helmet,
consisting of the principles of piety, of justice, of
honor, of benevolence, with which from his earliest
infancy he had hitherto walked through life, in the
presence of all his brethren; a spear, studded with the
self- evident truths of the Declaration of Independence;
a sword, the same with which he had led the armies of his
country through the war of freedom to the summit of the
triumphal arch of independence; a corselet and cuishes of
long experience and habitual intercourse in peace and war
with the world of mankind, his contemporaries of the
human race, in all their stages of civilization; and,
last of all, the Constitution of the United States, a
shield, embossed by heavenly hands with the future
history of his country?
Yes, gentlemen, on that shield the Constitution of the
United States was sculptured (by forms unseen, and in
characters then invisible to mortal eye), the predestined
and prophetic history of the one confederated people of
the North American Union.
They had been the settlers of thirteen separate and
distinct English colonies, along the margin of the shore
of the North American Continent; contiguously situated,
but chartered by adventurers of characters variously
diversified, including sectarians, religious and
political, of all the classes which for the two preceding
centuries had agitated and divided the people of the
British islands--and with them were intermingled the
descendants of Hollanders, Swedes, Germans, and French
fugitives from the persecution of the revoker of the
Edict of Nantes.
In the bosoms of this people, thus heterogeneously
composed, there was burning, kindled at different
furnaces, but all furnaces of affliction, one clear,
steady flame of liberty. Bold and daring enterprise,
stubborn endurance of privation, unflinching intrepidity
in facing danger, and inflexible adherence to
conscientious principle, had steeled to energetic and
unyielding hardihood the characters of the primitive
settlers of all these colonies. Since that time two or
three generations of men had passed away, but they had
increased and multiplied with unexampled rapidity; and
the land itself had been the recent theatre of a
ferocious and bloody seven years' war between the two
most powerful and most civilized nations of Europe
contending for the possession of this continent.
Of that strife the victorious combatant had been
Britain. She had conquered the provinces of France. She
had expelled her rival totally from the continent, over
which, bounding herself by the Mississippi, she was
thenceforth to hold divided empire only with Spain. She
had acquired undisputed control over the Indian tribes
still tenanting the forests unexplored by the 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- -the Habeas Corpus and Magna
Charta.
But the English lawyers had decided that Parliament
was omnipotent--and Parliament, in its 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.
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, once--twice--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
Charlestown and Falmouth, had been the answer to
petition, remonstrance, and address....
The dissolution of allegiance to the British crown,
the severance of the colonies from the British Empire,
and their actual existence as independent States, were
definitively established in fact, by war and peace. The
independence of each separate State had never been
declared of right. It never existed in fact. Upon the
principles of the Declaration of Independence, the
dissolution of the ties of allegiance, the assumption of
sovereign power, and the institution of civil government,
are all acts of transcendent authority, which the people
alone are competent to perform; and, accordingly, it is
in the name and by the authority of the people, that two
of these acts--the dissolution of allegiance, with the
severance from the British Empire, and the declaration of
the United Colonies, as free and independent States--were
performed by that instrument.
But there still remained the last and crowning act,
which the people of the Union alone were competent to
perform--the institution of civil government, for that
compound nation, the United States of America.
At this day it cannot but strike us as extraordinary,
that it does not appear to have occurred to any one
member of that assembly, which had laid down in terms so
clear, so explicit, so unequivocal, the foundation of all
just government, in the imprescriptible rights of man,
and the transcendent sovereignty of the people, and who
in those principles had set forth their only personal
vindication from the charges of rebellion against their
king, and of treason to their country, that their last
crowning act was still to be performed upon the same
principles. That is, the institution, by the people of
the United States, of a civil government, to guard and
protect and defend them all. On the contrary, that same
assembly which issued the Declaration of Independence,
instead of continuing to act in the name and by the
authority of the good people of the United States, had,
immediately after the appointment of the committee to
prepare the Declaration, appointed another committee, of
one member from each colony, to prepare and digest the
form of confederation to be entered into between the
colonies.
That committee reported on the twelfth of July, eight
days after the Declaration of Independence had been
issued, a draft of articles of confederation between the
colonies. This draft was prepared by John Dickinson, then
a delegate from Pennsylvania, who voted against the
Declaration of Independence, and never signed it, having
been superseded by a new election of delegates from that
State, eight days after his draft was reported.
There was thus no congeniality of principle between
the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of
Confederation. The foundation of the former was a
superintending Providence- -the rights of man, and the
constituent revolutionary power of the people. That of
the latter was the sovereignty of organized power, and
the independence of the separate or dis-united States.
The fabric of the Declaration and that of the
Confederation were each consistent with its own
foundation, but they could not form one consistent,
symmetrical edifice. They were the productions of
different minds and of adverse passions; one, ascending
for the foundation of human government to the laws of
nature and of God, written upon the heart of man; the
other, resting upon the basis of human institutions, and
prescriptive law, and colonial charter. The cornerstone
of the one was right, that of the other was power....
Where, then, did each State get the sovereignty,
freedom, and independence, which the Articles of
Confederation declare it retains?--not from the whole
people of the whole Union--not from the Declaration of
Independence--not from the people of the State itself. It
was assumed by agreement between the Legislatures of the
several States, and their delegates in Congress, without
authority from or consultation of the people at all.
In the Declaration of Independence, the enacting and
constituent party dispensing and delegating sovereign
power is the whole people of the United Colonies. The
recipient party, invested with power, is the United
Colonies, declared United States.
In the Articles of Confederation, this order of agency
is inverted. Each State is the constituent and enacting
party, and the United States in Congress assembled the
recipient of delegated power--and that power delegated
with such a penurious and carking hand that it had more
the aspect of a revocation of the Declaration of
Independence than an instrument to carry it into
effect.
None of these indispensably necessary powers were ever
conferred by the State Legislatures upon the Congress of
the federation; and well was it that they never were. The
system itself was radically defective. Its incurable
disease was an apostasy from the principles of the
Declaration of Independence. A substitution of separate
State sovereignties, in the place of the constituent
sovereignty of the people, was the basis of the
Confederate Union.
In the Congress of the Confederation, the master minds
of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were constantly
engaged through the closing years of the Revolutionary
War and those of peace which immediately succeeded. That
of John Jay was associated with them shortly after the
peace, in the capacity of Secretary to the Congress for
Foreign Affairs. The incompetency of the Articles of
Confederation for the management of the affairs of the
Union at home and abroad was demonstrated to them by the
painful and mortifying experience of every day.
Washington, though in retirement, was brooding over the
cruel injustice suffered by his associates in arms, the
warriors of the Revolution; over the prostration of the
public credit and the faith of the nation, in the neglect
to provide for the payments even of the interest upon the
public debt; over the disappointed hopes of the friends
of freedom; in the language of the address from Congress
to the States of the eighteenth of April, 1788--"the
pride and boast of America, that the rights for which she
contended were the rights of human nature."
At his residence at Mount Vernon, in March, 1785, the
first idea was started of a revisal of the Articles of
Confederation, by the organization, of means differing
from that of a compact between the State Legislatures and
their own delegates in Congress. A convention of
delegates from the State Legislatures, independent of the
Congress itself, was the expedient which presented itself
for effecting the purpose, and an augmentation of the
powers of Congress for the regulation of commerce, as the
object for which this assembly was to be convened. In
January, 1785, the proposal was made and adopted in the
Legislature of Virginia, and communicated to the other
State Legislatures.
The Convention was held at Annapolis, in September of
that year. It was attended by delegates from only five of
the central States, who, on comparing their restricted
powers with the glaring and universally acknowledged
defects of the Confederation, reported only a
recommendation for the assemblage of another convention
of delegates to meet at Philadelphia, in May, 1787, from
all the States, and with enlarged powers.
The Constitution of the United States was the work of
this Convention. But in its construction the Convention
immediately perceived that they must retrace their steps,
and fall back from a league of friendship between
sovereign States to the constituent sovereignty of the
people; from power to right--from the irresponsible
despotism of State sovereignty to the self-evident truths
of the Declaration of Independence. In that instrument,
the right to institute and to alter governments among men
was ascribed exclusively to the people--the ends of
government were declared to be to secure the natural
rights of man; and that when the government degenerates
from the promotion to the destruction of that end, the
right and the duty accrues to the people to dissolve this
degenerate government and to institute another. The
signers of the Declaration further averred, that the one
people of the United Colonies were then precisely in that
situation--with a government degenerated into tyranny,
and called upon by the laws of nature and of nature's God
to dissolve that government and to institute another.
Then, in the name and by the authority of the good people
of the colonies, they pronounced the dissolution of their
allegiance to the king, and their eternal separation from
the nation of Great Britain--and declared the United
Colonies independent States. And here as the
representatives of the one people they had stopped. They
did not require the confirmation of this act, for the
power to make the declaration had already been conferred
upon them by the people, delegating the power, indeed,
separately in the separate colonies, not by colonial
authority, but by the spontaneous revolutionary movement
of the people in them all.
From the day of that Declaration, the constituent
power of the people had never been called into action. A
confederacy had been substituted in the place of a
government, and State sovereignty had usurped the
constituent sovereignty of the people.
The Convention assembled at Philadelphia had
themselves no direct authority from the people. Their
authority was all derived from the State Legislatures.
But they had the Articles of Confederation before them,
and they saw and felt the wretched condition into which
they had brought the whole people, and that the Union
itself was in the agonies of death. They soon perceived
that the indispensably needed powers were such as no
State government, no combination of them, was by the
principles of the Declaration of Independence competent
to bestow. They could emanate only from the people. A
highly respectable portion of the assembly, still
clinging to the confederacy of States, proposed, as a
substitute for the Constitution, a mere revival of the
Articles of Confederation, with a grant of additional
powers to the Congress. Their plan was respectfully and
thoroughly discussed, but the want of a government and of
the sanction of the people to the delegation of powers
happily prevailed. A constitution for the people, and the
distribution of legislative, executive, and judicial
powers was prepared. It announced itself as the work of
the people themselves; and as this was unquestionably a
power assumed by the Convention, not delegated to them by
the people, they religiously confined it to a simple
power to propose, and carefully provided that it should
be no more than a proposal until sanctioned by the
Confederation Congress, by the State Legislatures, and by
the people of the several States, in conventions
specially assembled, by authority of their Legislatures,
for the single purpose of examining and passing upon
it.
And thus was consummated the work commenced by the
Declaration of Independence--a work in which the people
of the North American Union, acting under the deepest
sense of responsibility to the Supreme Ruler of the
universe, had achieved the most transcendent act of power
that social man in his mortal condition can perform--even
that of dissolving the ties of allegiance by which he is
bound to his country; of renouncing that country itself;
of demolishing its government; of instituting another
government; and of making for himself another country in
its stead.
And on that day, of which you now commemorate the
fiftieth anniversary--on that thirtieth day of April,
1789--was this mighty revolution, not only in the affairs
of our own country, but in the principles of government
over civilized man, accomplished.
The Revolution itself was a work of thirteen
years--and had never been completed until that day. The
Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the
United States are parts of one consistent whole, founded
upon one and the same theory of government, then new in
practice, though not as a theory, for it had been working
itself into the mind of man for many ages, and had been
especially expounded in the writings of Locke, though it
had never before been adopted by a great nation in
practice.
There are yet, even at this day, many speculative
objections to this theory. Even in our own country there
are still philosophers who deny the principles asserted
in the Declaration, as self-evident truths--who deny the
natural equality and inalienable rights of man--who deny
that the people are the only legitimate source of
power--who deny that all just powers of government are
derived from the consent of the governed. Neither your
time, nor perhaps the cheerful nature of this occasion,
permit me here to enter upon the examination of this
anti-revolutionary theory, which arrays State sovereignty
against the constituent sovereignty of the people, and
distorts the Constitution of the United States into a
league of friendship between confederate corporations. I
speak to matters of fact. There is the Declaration of
Independence, and there is the Constitution of the United
States--let them speak for themselves. The grossly
immoral and dishonest doctrine of despotic State
sovereignty, the exclusive judge of its own obligations,
and responsible to no power on earth or in heaven, for
the violation of them, is not there. The Declaration
says, it is not in me. The Constitution says, it is not
in me.
Oration at
Plymouth, December 22, 1802, in Commemoration of
the Landing of the Pilgrims:
Among the sentiments of most powerful operation upon
the human heart, and most highly honorable to the human
character, are those of veneration for our forefathers,
and of love for our posterity. They form the connecting
links between the selfish and the social passions. By the
fundamental principle of Christianity, the happiness of
the individual is interwoven, by innumerable and
imperceptible ties, with that of his contemporaries. By
the power of filial reverence and parental affection,
individual existence is extended beyond the limits of
individual life, and the happiness of every age is
chained in mutual dependence upon that of every other.
Respect for his ancestors excites, in the breast of man,
interest in their history, attachment to their
characters, concern for their errors, involuntary pride
in their virtues. Love for his posterity spurs him to
exertion for their support, stimulates him to virtue for
their example, and fills him with the tenderest
solicitude for their welfare. Man, therefore, was not
made for himself alone. No, he was made for his country,
by the obligations of the social compact; he was made for
his species, by the Christian duties of universal
charity; he was made for all ages past, by the sentiment
of reverence for his forefathers; and he was made for all
future times, by the impulse of affection for his
progeny. Under the influence of these principles,
"Existence sees him spurn her bounded reign."
They redeem his nature from the subjection of time and
space; he is no longer a "puny insect shivering at a
breeze"; he is the glory of creation, formed to occupy
all time and all extent; bounded, during his residence
upon earth, only to the boundaries of the world, and
destined to life and immortality in brighter regions,
when the fabric of nature itself shall dissolve and
perish.
The voice of history has not, in all its compass, a
note but answers in unison with these sentiments. The
barbarian chieftain, who defended his country against the
Roman invasion, driven to the remotest extremity of
Britain, and stimulating his followers to battle by all
that has power of persuasion upon the human heart,
concluded his persuasion by an appeal to these
irresistible feelings: "Think of your forefathers and of
your posterity." The Romans themselves, at the pinnacle
of civilization, were actuated by the same impressions,
and celebrated, in anniversary festivals, every great
event which had signalized the annals of their
forefathers. To multiply instances where it were
impossible to adduce an exception would be to waste your
time and abuse your patience; but in the sacred volume,
which contains the substances of our firmest faith and of
our most precious hopes, these passions not only maintain
their highest efficacy, but are sanctioned by the express
injunctions of the Divine Legislator to his chosen
people.
The revolutions of time furnish no previous example of
a nation shooting up to maturity and expanding into
greatness with the rapidity which has characterized the
growth of the American people. In the luxuriance of
youth, and in the vigor of manhood, it is pleasing and
instructive to look backward upon the helpless days of
infancy; but in the continual and essential changes of a
growing subject, the transactions of that early period
would be soon obliterated from the memory but for some
periodical call of attention to aid the silent records of
the historian. Such celebrations arouse and gratify the
kindliest emotions of the bosom. They are faithful
pledges of the respect we bear to the memory of our
ancestors and of the tenderness with which we cherish the
rising generation. They introduce the sages and heroes of
ages past to the notice and emulation of succeeding
times; they are at once testimonials of our gratitude,
and schools of virtue to our children.
These sentiments are wise; they are honorable; they
are virtuous; their cultivation is not merely innocent
pleasure, it is incumbent duty. Obedient to their
dictates, you, my fellow- citizens, have instituted and
paid frequent observance to this annual solemnity. and
what event of weightier intrinsic importance, or of more
extensive consequences, was ever selected for this
honorary distinction?
In reverting to the period of our origin, other
nations have generally been compelled to plunge into the
chaos of impenetrable antiquity, or to trace a lawless
ancestry into the caverns of ravishers and robbers. It is
your peculiar privilege to commemorate, in this birthday
of your nation, an event ascertained in its minutest
details; an event of which the principal actors are known
to you familiarly, as if belonging to your own age; an
event of a magnitude before which imagination shrinks at
the imperfection of her powers. It is your further
happiness to behold, in those eminent characters, who
were most conspicuous in accomplishing the settlement of
your country, men upon whose virtue you can dwell with
honest exultation. The founders of your race are not
handed down to you, like the fathers of the Roman people,
as the sucklings of a wolf. You are not descended from a
nauseous compound of fanaticism and sensuality, whose
only argument was the sword, and whose only paradise was
a brothel. No Gothic scourge of God, no Vandal pest of
nations, no fabled fugitive from the flames of Troy, no
bastard Norman tyrant, appears among the list of worthies
who first landed on the rock, which your veneration has
preserved as a lasting monument of their achievement. The
great actors of the day we now solemnize were illustrious
by their intrepid valor no less than by their Christian
graces, but the clarion of conquest has not blazoned
forth their names to all the winds of heaven. Their glory
has not been wafted over oceans of blood to the remotest
regions of the earth. They have not erected to themselves
colossal statues upon pedestals of human bones, to
provoke and insult the tardy hand of heavenly
retribution. But theirs was "the better fortitude of
patience and heroic martyrdom." Theirs was the gentle
temper of Christian kindness; the rigorous observance of
reciprocal justice; the unconquerable soul of conscious
integrity. Worldly fame has been parsimonious of her
favor to the memory of those generous companions. Their
numbers were small; their stations in life obscure; the
object of their enterprise unostentatious; the theatre of
their exploits remote; how could they possibly be
favorites of worldly Fame--that common crier, whose
existence is only known by the assemblage of multitudes;
that pander of wealth and greatness, so eager to haunt
the palaces of fortune, and so fastidious to the
houseless dignity of virtue; that parasite of pride, ever
scornful to meekness, and ever obsequious to insolent
power; that heedless trumpeter, whose ears are deaf to
modest merit, and whose eyes are blind to bloodless,
distant excellence?
When the persecuted companions of Robinson, exiles
from their native land, anxiously sued for the privilege
of removing a thousand leagues more distant to an untried
soil, a rigorous climate, and a savage wilderness, for
the sake of reconciling their sense of religious duty
with their affections for their country, few, perhaps
none of them, formed a conception of what would be,
within two centuries, the result of their undertaking.
When the jealous and niggardly policy of their British
sovereign denied them even that humblest of requests, and
instead of liberty would barely consent to promise
connivance, neither he nor they might be aware that they
were laying the foundations of a power, and that he was
sowing the seeds of a spirit, which, in less than two
hundred years, would stagger the throne of his
descendants, and shake his united kingdoms to the centre.
So far is it from the ordinary habits of mankind to
calculate the importance of events in their elementary
principles, that had the first colonists of our country
ever intimated as a part of their designs the project of
founding a great and mighty nation, the finger of scorn
would have pointed them to the cells of Bedlam as an
abode more suitable for hatching vain empires than the
solitude of a transatlantic desert.
These consequences, then so little foreseen, have
unfolded themselves, in all their grandeur, to the eyes
of the present age. It is a common amusement of
speculative minds to contrast the magnitude of the most
important events with the minuteness of their primeval
causes, and the records of mankind are full of examples
for such contemplations. It is, however, a more
profitable employment to trace the constituent principles
of future greatness in their kernel; to detect in the
acorn at our feet the germ of that majestic oak, whose
roots shoot down to the centre, and whose branches aspire
to the skies. Let it be, then, our present occupation to
inquire and endeavor to ascertain the causes first put in
operation at the period of our commemoration, and already
productive of such magnificent effects; to examine with
reiterated care and minute attention the characters of
those men who gave the first impulse to a new series of
events in the history of the world; to applaud and
emulate those qualities of their minds which we shall
find deserving of our admiration; to recognize with
candor those features which forbid approbation or even
require censure, and, finally, to lay alike their
frailties and their perfections to our own hearts, either
as warning or as example.
Of the various European settlements upon this
continent, which have finally merged in one independent
nation, the first establishments were made at various
times, by several nations, and under the influence of
different motives. In many instances, the conviction of
religious obligation formed one and a powerful inducement
of the adventures; but in none, excepting the settlement
at Plymouth, did they constitute the sole and exclusive
actuating cause. Worldly interest and commercial
speculation entered largely into the views of other
settlers, but the commands of conscience were the only
stimulus to the emigrants from Leyden. Previous to their
expedition hither, they had endured a long banishment
from their native country. Under every species of
discouragement, they undertook the voyage; they performed
it in spite of numerous and almost insuperable obstacles;
they arrived upon a wilderness bound with frost and hoary
with snow, without the boundaries of their charter,
outcasts from all human society, and coasted five weeks
together, in the dead of winter, on this tempestuous
shore, exposed at once to the fury of the elements, to
the arrows of the native savage, and to the impending
horrors of famine.
Courage and perseverance have a magical talisman,
before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish
into air. These qualities have ever been displayed in
their mightiest perfection, as attendants in the retinue
of strong passions. From the first discovery of the
Western Hemisphere by Columbus until the settlement of
Virginia which immediately preceded that of Plymouth, the
various adventurers from the ancient world had exhibited
upon innumerable occasions that ardor of enterprise and
that stubbornness of pursuit which set all danger at
defiance, and chained the violence of nature at their
feet. But they were all instigated by personal interests.
Avarice and ambition had tuned their souls to that pitch
of exaltation. Selfish passions were the parents of their
heroism. It was reserved for the first settlers of new
England to perform achievements equally arduous, to
trample down obstructions equally formidable, to dispel
dangers equally terrific, under the single inspiration of
conscience. To them even liberty herself was but a
subordinate and secondary consideration. They claimed
exemption from the mandates of human authority, as
militating with their subjection to a superior power.
Before the voice of Heaven they silenced even the calls
of their country.
Yet, while so deeply impressed with the sense of
religious obligation, they felt, in all its energy, the
force of that tender tie which binds the heart of every
virtuous man to his native land. It was to renew that
connection with their country which had been severed by
their compulsory expatriation, that they resolved to face
all the hazards of a perilous navigation and all the
labors of a toilsome distant settlement. Under the mild
protection of the Batavian Government, they enjoyed
already that freedom of religious worship, for which they
had resigned so many comforts and enjoyments at home; but
their hearts panted for a restoration to the bosom of
their country. Invited and urged by the open-hearted and
truly benevolent people who had given them an asylum from
the persecution of their own kindred to form their
settlement within the territories then under their
jurisdiction, the love of their country predominated over
every influence save that of conscience alone, and they
preferred the precarious chance of relaxation from the
bigoted rigor of the English Government to the certain
liberality and alluring offers of the Hollanders.
Observe, my countrymen, the generous patriotism, the
cordial union of soul, the conscious yet unaffected vigor
which beam in their application to the British
monarch:
"They were well weaned from the delicate milk of their
mother country, and inured to the difficulties of a
strange land. They were knit together in a strict and
sacred bond, to take care of the good of each other and
of the whole. It was not with them as with other men,
whom small things could discourage, or small discontents
cause to wish themselves again at home."
Children of these exalted Pilgrims! Is there one among
you ho can hear the simple and pathetic energy of these
expressions without tenderness and admiration? Venerated
shades of our forefathers! No, ye were, indeed, not
ordinary men! That country which had ejected you so
cruelly from her bosom you still delighted to contemplate
in the character of an affectionate and beloved mother.
The sacred bond which knit you together was indissoluble
while you lived; and oh, may it be to your descendants
the example and the pledge of harmony to the latest
period of time! The difficulties and dangers, which so
often had defeated attempts of similar establishments,
were unable to subdue souls tempered like yours. You
heard the rigid interdictions; you saw the menacing forms
of toil and danger, forbidding your access to this land
of promise; but you heard without dismay; you saw and
disdained retreat. Firm and undaunted in the confidence
of that sacred bond; conscious of the purity, and
convinced of the importance of your motives, you put your
trust in the protecting shield of Providence, and smiled
defiance at the combining terrors of human malice and of
elemental strife. These, in the accomplishment of your
undertaking, you were summoned to encounter in their most
hideous forms; these you met with that fortitude, and
combated with that perseverance, which you had promised
in their anticipation; these you completely vanquished in
establishing the foundations of New England, and the day
which we now commemorate is the perpetual memorial of
your triumph.
It were an occupation peculiarly pleasing to cull
from our early historians, and exhibit before you every
detail of this transaction; to carry you in imagination
on board their bark at the first moment of her arrival in
the bay; to accompany Carver, Winslow, Bradford, and
Standish, in all their excursions upon the desolate
coast; to follow them into every rivulet and creek where
they endeavored to find a firm footing, and to fix, with
a pause of delight and exultation, the instant when the
first of these heroic adventurers alighted on the spot
where you, their descendants, now enjoy the glorious and
happy reward of their labors. But in this grateful task,
your former orators, on this anniversary, have
anticipated all that the most ardent industry could
collect, and gratified all that the most inquisitive
curiosity could desire. To you, my friends, every
occurrence of that momentous period is already familiar.
A transient allusion to a few characteristic instances,
which mark the peculiar history of the Plymouth settlers,
may properly supply the place of a narrative, which, to
this auditory, must be superfluous.
One of these remarkable incidents is the execution of
that instrument of government by which they formed
themselves into a body politic, the day after their
arrival upon the coast, and previous to their first
landing. That is, perhaps, the only instance in human
history of that positive, original social compact, which
speculative philosophers have imagined as the only
legitimate source of government. Here was a unanimous and
personal assent, by all the individuals of the community,
to the association by which they became a nation. It was
the result of circumstances and discussions which had
occurred during their passage from Europe, and is a full
demonstration that the nature of civil government,
abstracted from the political institutions of their
native country, had been an object of their serious
meditation. The settlers of all the former European
colonies had contented themselves with the powers
conferred upon them by their respective charters, without
looking beyond the seal of the royal parchment for the
measure of their rights and the rule of their duties. The
founders of Plymouth had been impelled by the
peculiarities of their situation to examine the subject
with deeper and more comprehensive research. After twelve
years of banishment from the land of their first
allegiance, during which they had been under an adoptive
and temporary subjection to another sovereign, they must
naturally have been led to reflect upon the relative
rights and duties of allegiance and subjection. They had
resided in a city, the seat of a university, where the
polemical and political controversies of the time were
pursued with uncommon fervor. In this period they had
witnessed the deadly struggle between the two parties,
into which the people of the United Provinces, after
their separation from the crown of Spain, had divided
themselves. The contest embraced within its compass not
only theological doctrines, but political principles, and
Maurice and Barnevelt were the temporal leaders of the
same rival factions, of which Episcopius and Polyander
were the ecclesiastical champions.
That the investigation of the fundamental principles
of government was deeply implicated in these dissensions
is evident from the immortal work of Grotius, upon the
rights of war and peace, which undoubtedly originated
from them. Grotius himself had been a most distinguished
actor and sufferer in those important scenes of internal
convulsion, and his work was first published very shortly
after the departure of our forefathers from Leyden. It is
well known that in the course of the contest Mr. Robinson
more than once appeared, with credit to himself, as a
public disputant against Episcopius; and from the manner
in which the fact is related by Governor Bradford, it is
apparent that the whole English Church at Leyden took a
zealous interest in the religious part of the
controversy. As strangers in the land, it is presumable
that they wisely and honorably avoided entangling
themselves in the political contentions involved with it.
Yet the theoretic principles, as they were drawn into
discussion, could not fail to arrest their attention, and
must have assisted them to form accurate ideas concerning
the origin and extent of authority among men, independent
of positive institutions. The importance of these
circumstances will not be duly weighed without taking
into consideration the state of opinion then prevalent in
England. The general principles of government were there
little understood and less examined. The whole substance
of human authority was centred in the simple doctrine of
royal prerogative, the origin of which was always traced
in theory to divine institution. Twenty years later, the
subject was more industriously sifted, and for half a
century became one of the principal topics of controversy
between the ablest and most enlightened men in the
nation. The instrument of voluntary association executed
on board the "Mayflower" testifies that the parties to it
had anticipated the improvement of their nation.
Another incident, from which we may derive occasion
for important reflections, was the attempt of these
original settlers to establish among them that community
of goods and of labor, which fanciful politicians, from
the days of Plato to those of Rousseau, have recommended
as the fundamental law of a perfect republic. This theory
results, it must be acknowledged, from principles of
reasoning most flattering to the human character. If
industry, frugality, and disinterested integrity were
alike the virtues of all, there would, apparently, be
more of the social spirit, in making all property a
common stock, and giving to each individual a
proportional title to the wealth of the whole. Such is
the basis upon which Plato forbids, in his Republic, the
division of property. Such is the system upon which
Rousseau pronounces the first man who inclosed a field
with a fence, and said, "This is mine," a traitor to the
human species. A wiser and more useful philosophy,
however, directs us to consider man according to the
nature in which he was formed; subject to infirmities,
which no wisdom can remedy; to weaknesses, which no
institution can strengthen; to vices, which no
legislation can correct. Hence, it becomes obvious that
separate property is the natural and indisputable right
of separate exertion; that community of goods without
community of toil is oppressive and unjust; that it
counteracts the laws of nature, which prescribe that he
only who sows the seed shall reap the harvest; that it
discourages all energy, by destroying its rewards; and
makes the most virtuous and active members of society the
slaves and drudges of the worst. Such was the issue of
this experiment among our forefathers, and the same event
demonstrated the error of the system in the elder
settlement of Virginia. Let us cherish that spirit of
harmony which prompted our forefathers to make the
attempt, under circumstances more favorable to its
success than, perhaps, ever occurred upon earth. Let us
no less admire the candor with which they relinquished
it, upon discovering its irremediable inefficacy. To
found principles of government upon too advantageous an
estimate of the human character is an error of
inexperience, the source of which is so amiable that it
is impossible to censure it with severity. We have seen
the same mistake committed in our own age, and upon a
larger theatre. Happily for our ancestors, their
situation allowed them to repair it before its effects
had proved destructive. They had no pride of vain
philosophy to support, no perfidious rage of faction to
glut, by persevering in their mistakes until they should
be extinguished in torrents of blood.
As the attempt to establish among themselves the
community of goods was a seal of that sacred bond which
knit them so closely together, so the conduct they
observed toward the natives of the country displays their
steadfast adherence to the rules of justice and their
faithful attachment to those of benevolence and
charity.
No European settlement ever formed upon this continent
has been more distinguished for undeviating kindness and
equity toward the savages. There are, indeed, moralists
who have questioned the right of the Europeans to intrude
upon the possessions of the aboriginals in any case, and
under any limitations whatsoever. But have they maturely
considered the whole subject? The Indian right of
possession itself stands, with regard to the greater part
of the country, upon a questionable foundation. Their
cultivated fields; their constructed habitations; a space
of ample sufficiency for their subsistence, and whatever
they had annexed to themselves by personal labor, was
undoubtedly, by the laws of nature, theirs. But what is
the right of a huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles
over which he has accidentally ranged in quest of prey?
Shall the liberal bounties of Providence to the race of
man be monopolized by one of ten thousand for whom they
were created? Shall the exuberant bosom of the common
mother, amply adequate to the nourishment of millions, be
claimed exclusively by a few hundreds of her offspring?
Shall the lordly savage not only disdain the virtues and
enjoyments of civilization himself, but shall he control
the civilization of a world? Shall he forbid the
wilderness to blossom like a rose? Shall he forbid the
oaks of the forest to fall before the axe of industry,
and to rise again, transformed into the habitations of
ease and elegance? shall he doom an immense region of the
globe to perpetual desolation, and to hear the howlings
of the tiger and the wolf silence forever the voice of
human gladness? Shall the fields and the valleys, which a
beneficent God has formed to teem with the life of
innumerable multitudes, be condemned to everlasting
barrenness? Shall the mighty rivers, poured out by the
hand of nature, as channels of communication between
numerous nations, roll their waters in sullen silence and
eternal solitude of the deep? Have hundreds of commodious
harbors, a thousand leagues of coast, and a boundless
ocean, been spread in the front of this land, and shall
every purpose of utility to which they could apply be
prohibited by the tenant of the woods? No, generous
philanthropists! Heaven has not been thus inconsistent in
the works of its hands. Heaven has not thus placed at
irreconcilable strife its moral laws with its physical
creation. The Pilgrims of Plymouth obtained their right
of possession to the territory on which they settled, by
titles as fair and unequivocal as any human property can
be held. By their voluntary association they recognized
their allegiance to the government of Britain, and in
process of time received whatever powers and authorities
could be conferred upon them by a charter from their
sovereign. The spot on which they fixed had belonged to
an Indian tribe, totally extirpated by that devouring
pestilence which had swept the country shortly before
their arrival. The territory, thus free from all
exclusive possession, they might have taken by the
natural right of occupancy. Desirous, however, of giving
amply satisfaction to every pretence of prior right, by
formal and solemn conventions with the chiefs of the
neighboring tribes, they acquired the further security of
a purchase. At their hands the children of the desert had
no cause of complaint. On the great day of retribution,
what thousands, what millions of the American race will
appear at the bar of judgment to arraign their European
invading conquerors! Let us humbly hope that the fathers
of the Plymouth Colony will then appear in the whiteness
of innocence. Let us indulge in the belief that they will
not only be free from all accusation of injustice to
these unfortunate sons of nature, but that the
testimonials of their acts of kindness and benevolence
toward them will plead the cause of their virtues, as
they are now authenticated by the record of history upon
earth.
Religious discord has lost her sting; the cumbrous
weapons of theological warfare are antiquated; the field
of politics supplies the alchemists of our times with
materials of more fatal explosion, and the butchers of
mankind no longer travel to another world for instruments
of cruelty and destruction. Our age is too enlightened to
contend upon topics which concern only the interests of
eternity; the men who hold in proper contempt all
controversies about trifles, except such as inflame their
own passions, have made it a commonplace censure against
your ancestors, that their zeal was enkindled by subjects
of trivial importance; and that however aggrieved by the
intolerance of others, they were alike intolerant
themselves. Against these objections, your candid
judgment will not require an unqualified justification;
but your respect and gratitude for the founders of the
State may boldly claim an ample apology. The original
grounds of their separation from the Church of England
were not objects of a magnitude to dissolve the bonds of
communion, much less those of charity, between Christian
brethren of the same essential principles. Some of them,
however, were not inconsiderable, and numerous
inducements concurred to give them an extraordinary
interest in their eyes. When that portentous system of
abuses, the Papal dominion, was overturned, a great
variety of religious sects arose in its stead in the
several countries, which for many centuries before had
been screwed beneath its subjection. The fabric of the
Reformation, first undertaken in England upon a
contracted basis, by a capricious and sanguinary tyrant,
had been successively overthrown and restored, renewed
and altered, according to the varying humors and
principles of four successive monarchs. To ascertain the
precise point of division between the genuine
institutions of Christianity and the corruptions
accumulated upon them in the progress of fifteen
centuries, was found a task of extreme difficulty
throughout the Christian world.
Men of the profoundest learning, of the sublimest
genius, and of the purest integrity, after devoting their
lives to the research, finally differed in their ideas
upon many great points, both of doctrine and discipline.
The main question, it was admitted on all hands, most
intimately concerned the highest interests of man, both
temporal and eternal. Can we wonder that men who felt
their happiness here and their hopes of hereafter, their
worldly welfare and the kingdom of heaven at stake,
should sometimes attach an importance beyond their
intrinsic weight to collateral points of controversy,
connected with the all- involving object of the
Reformation? The changes in the forms and principles of
religious worship were introduced and regulated in
England by the hand of public authority. But that hand
had not been uniform or steady in its operations. During
the persecutions inflicted in the interval of Popish
restoration under the reign of Mary, upon all who favored
the Reformation, many of the most zealous reformers had
been compelled to fly their country. While residing on
the continent of Europe, they had adopted the principles
of the most complete and rigorous reformation, as taught
and established by Calvin. On returning afterward to
their native country, they were dissatisfied with the
partial reformation, at which, as they conceived, the
English establishment had rested; and claiming the
privilege of private conscience, upon which alone any
departure from the Church of Rome could be justified,
they insisted upon the right of adhering to the system of
their own preference, and, of course, upon that of
non-conformity to the establishment prescribed by the
royal authority. The only means used to convince them of
error and reclaim them from dissent was force, and force
served but to confirm the opposition it was meant to
suppress. By driving the founders of the Plymouth Colony
into exile, it constrained them to absolute separation
irreconcilable. Viewing their religious liberties here,
as held only by sufferance, yet bound to them by all the
ties of conviction, and by all their sufferings for them,
could they forbear to look upon every dissenter among
themselves with a jealous eye? Within two years after
their landing, they beheld a rival settlement attempted
in their immediate neighborhood; and not long after, the
laws of self- preservation compelled them to break up a
nest of revellers, who boasted of protection from the
mother country, and who had recurred to the easy but
pernicious resource of feeding their wanton idleness, by
furnishing the savages with the means, the skill, and the
instruments of European destruction. Toleration, in that
instance, would have been self-murder, and many other
examples might be alleged, in which their necessary
measures of self-defence have been exaggerated into
cruelty, and their most indispensable precautions
distorted into persecution. Yet shall we not pretend that
they were exempt from the common laws of mortality, or
entirely free from all the errors of their age. Their
zeal might sometimes be too ardent, but it was always
sincere. At this day, religious indulgence is one of our
clearest duties, because it is one of our undisputed
rights. While we rejoice that the principles of genuine
Christianity have so far triumphed over the prejudices of
a former generation, let us fervently hope for the day
when it will prove equally victorious over the malignant
passions of our own.
In thus calling your attention to some of the peculiar
features in the principles, the character, and the
history of our forefathers, it is as wide from my design,
as I know it would be from your approbation, to adorn
their memory with a chaplet plucked from the domain of
others. The occasion and the day are more peculiarly
devoted to them, and let it never be dishonored with a
contracted and exclusive spirit. Our affections as
citizens embrace the whole extent of the Union, and the
names of Raleigh, Smith, Winthrop, Calvert, Penn and
Oglethorpe excite in our minds recollections equally
pleasing and gratitude equally fervent with those of
Carver and Bradford. Two centuries have not yet elapsed
since the first European foot touched the soil which now
constitutes the American Union. Two centuries more and
our numbers must exceed those of Europe itself. The
destinies of their empire, as they appear in prospect
before us, disdain the powers of human calculation. Yet,
as the original founder of the Roman State is said once
to have lifted upon his shoulders the fame and fortunes
of all his posterity, so let us never forget that the
glory and greatness of all our descendants is in our
hands. Preserve in all their purity, refine, if possible,
from all their alloy, those virtues which we this day
commemorate as the ornament of our forefathers. Adhere to
them with inflexible resolution, as to the horns of the
altar; instil them with unwearied perseverance into the
minds of your children; bind your souls and theirs to the
national Union as the chords of life are centred in the
heart, and you shall soar with rapid and steady wing to
the summit of human glory. Nearly a century ago, one of
those rare minds to whom it is given to discern future
greatness in its seminal principles, upon contemplating
the situation of this continent, pronounced, in a vein of
poetic inspiration, "Westward the star of empire takes
its way." Let us unite in ardent supplication to the
Founder of nations and the Builder of worlds, that what
then was prophecy may continue unfolding into
history--that the dearest hopes of the human race may not
be extinguished in disappointment, and that the last may
prove the noblest empire of time.