i837 
 
AN 
 
 ORATION 
 
 DELiTKRED 
 
 BEFORE THE INHABITANTS 
 
 THE TOWN OF NEWBURYPORT, * 
 
 AT THEIR REQUEST, 
 OV 
 
 THE SIXTY-FIRST ANNIYERSARY 
 
 or 
 
 THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDEiVCE, 
 
 JJtlls 4t5, 1837. 
 
 BY JOHN QUIACY ADAMS. 
 
 m 
 
 " Say yg not, A Conf«d<iracy, to all them to whom this people shall say 
 A Confederacy; neither fear ya their fear, ncr l^ afrsid.' liAiAH, 8, IS. 
 
 NEWBURYPORT: 
 
 CHARLES WHIPPLE 
 
 1837. 
 
Nbwburtpobt, Julj 10, 1837. 
 
 Hov. /oM» QciwcT Adams — 
 
 Dear Sir, — The undersigned, a Committee of Arrangements, 
 appointed by the T©wn of Newburyport, to conduct the lato cel- 
 ebration of the Independence of the United States, respectfully 
 request you, in behalf of the Town, to furnish for publication a 
 copy of the able and eloquent Oration delivered by you in Ne#r- 
 buryport, on that day. 
 
 We have the honor to be. 
 
 Your obedient servants, 
 
 SAMUEL T. DEFOBD, 
 THOMAS DAVIS, 
 JOHN BRADBURY, 
 EBEN. D. PETTINOmLL, 
 EDWARD BURRILL. 
 
 QuiNCY, nth July, 1837. 
 
 MxfiSRB. Samuel T. DeFord, Edward Burrill, John Bradbury, Thomas 
 Davis, and Ebenezer D. Pettingell, Committee of Arrangements for 
 the celebration of the eixty-first Anniversary of National Independenc* at 
 JNewburyport. 
 
 Fellow Citizens '— I cheerfully furnish a copy of the Oration 
 prepared at the invitation of the inhabitants of Newbury port, for 
 their celebration of the recent anniversary of our National Inde- 
 pendence. To avoid trespassing too much upon their time, some 
 parts of it were omitted in the delivery. I avail myself of this 
 occasion to repeat to you, gentlemen, and through you to all the 
 inhabitants of the town, my thanks for the kind reception they 
 were pleased to give me, and for the indulgent hearing of that 
 pcwtion of them which composed the auditory on that day. 
 I am, with great respect, Fellow Citizens, 
 Your grateful friend, 
 
 JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. 
 
ORATION. 
 
 Why is it, Friends and Fellow Citizens, that you 
 are here assembled ? Why is it, that, entering upon the 
 sixty-second year of our national existence, you have 
 honored with an invitation to address you from this place, 
 a fellow citizen of a former age, bearing in the records of 
 his memory, the warm and vivid affections which attach- 
 ed him, at the distance of a full half century, to your 
 town, and to your forefathers, then the cherished asso- 
 ciates of his youthful days 7 Why is it that, next to the 
 birth day of the Saviour of the World, your most joyous 
 and most venerated festival returns on this day ? — And 
 why is it that, among the swarming myriads of our pop- 
 ulation, thousands and tens of thousands among us, ab- 
 staining, under the dictate of religious principle, from the 
 commemoration of that birth-day of Him, who brought 
 life and immortality to light, yet unite with all their breth- 
 ren of this community, year after year, in celebrating this, 
 the birth- day of the nation ? 
 
 Is it not that, in the chain of human events, the birth- 
 day of the nation is indissolubly linked with the birth-day 
 of the Saviour? That it forms a leading event i^ the 
 progress of the gospel d^^j^fgatm ^ Is it not that the 
 
.D^<'l3raii'oiV'bf fadepeTLdence first organized the social 
 compact on the foundation of the Redeemer's mission 
 upon earth 1 That it laid the comer stone of human 
 government upon the first precepts of Christianity, and 
 gave to the world the first irrevocable pledge of the fulfil- 
 ment of the prophecies, announced directly from Heaven 
 at the birth of the Saviour and predicted by the greatest 
 of the Hebrev/ prophets six hundred years before 1 
 
 Cast your eyes backvvards upon the progress of time, 
 sixty-one years from this day ; and in the midst of the 
 horrors and desolations of civil war, you behold an as- 
 sembly of Planters, Shopkeepers and Lav/yers, the Rep- 
 resentatives of the People of thirteen EngUsh Colonies 
 in North America, sitting in the City of Philadelphia. 
 These fifty-five men, on that day, unanimously adopt and 
 publish to the world, a state paper under the simple title 
 of 'A Declaration/ 
 
 The object of this Declaration was two-fold. 
 
 First, to proclaim the People of the thirteen United 
 Colonies, ons People, and in their name, and by their 
 authority, to dissolve the political bands which had con- 
 nected them with another People, that is, the People of 
 Great Britain. 
 
 Secondly, to assume, in the name of this one People, 
 of the thirteen United Colonies, among the powers of the 
 earth, the separate and equal station, to which the Laws 
 of Nature, and of Nature's God, entitled them. 
 
 With regard to the first of these purposes, the Decla- 
 ration alleges a decent respect to the opinions of man- 
 kind, as requiring that the one people, separating them- 
 selves from another, should declare the causes, which 
 impel them to the separation. — The specification of 
 these causes, and the conclusion resulting from them, 
 constitute the whole paper. 
 
The Declaration was a manifesto, issued from a de- 
 cent respect to the opinions of mankind, to justify the 
 People of the North American Union, for their voluntary 
 reparation from the People of Great Britain, by alleging 
 the causes which rendered this separation necessary. 
 
 The Declaration was, thus far, merely an occasional 
 state paper, issued for a temporary purpose, to justify, 
 in the eyes of the world, a People, in revolt against their 
 acknowledged Sovereign, for renouncing their allegiance 
 to him, and dissolving their poUtical relations with the 
 nation over which he presided. 
 
 For the second object of the Declaration, the assump- 
 tion among the powers of the earth of the separate and 
 equal station, to which the Laws of Nature and of Na- 
 ture's God entitled them, no reason was assigned, — no 
 justification was deemed necessary. 
 
 The first and chief purpose of the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence was interesting to those by whom it was issu- 
 ed, to the people, their constituents in whose name it was 
 promulgated, and to the world of mankind to whom it 
 was addressed, only during that period of time, in which 
 the independence of the newly constituted people was 
 contested, by the wager of battle. Six years of War, 
 cruel, unrelenting, merciless War, — War, at once 
 civil and foreign, were waged, testing the firmness and 
 fortitude of the one People, in their inflexible adherence 
 to that separation from the other, which their Represen- 
 tatives in Congress had proclaimed. By the signature 
 of the Preliminary Articles of Peace, on the 30th of Nov- 
 ember 1782, their warfare was accomplished, and the 
 Spirit of the Lord, with a voice reaching to the latest of 
 future ages, might have exclaimed, like the sublime pro- 
 phet of Israel, — Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, 
 saith your God."^ 
 
 * Isaiah 40 : 1 . 
 
But, from that day forth, the separation of the one Peo- 
 ple from the other was a solitary fact in their common 
 history ; a mere incident in the progress of human events, 
 not more deserving of special and annual commemoration 
 by one of the separated parts, than by the other. Still 
 less were the causes of the separation subjects for joyous 
 retrospection by either of the parties. — The causes were 
 acts of misgovemment committed by the King and Par- 
 liament of Great Britain. In the exasperation of the mo- 
 meat they were alleged to be acts of personal tyranny 
 and oppression by the King. George the third was held 
 individually responsible for them all. The real and most 
 cHl|)able oppressor, the British Parliament, was not even 
 named, in the bill of pains and penalties brought against 
 the monarch. — They were described only as " others" 
 combined with him ; and, after a recapitulation of all the 
 grievances with which the Colonies had been afflicted by 
 usuq^ed British Legislation, the dreary catalogue was 
 closed by the sentence of unqualified condemnation, that 
 a prince, whose character v/as thus marked by every act 
 which might define a tyrant, was unworthy to be the 
 ruler of a free people. 
 
 The King, thus denounced by a portion of his subjects, 
 casting off their allegiance to his crown, has long since 
 gone to his reward. His reign was long, and disastrous 
 to his people, and his life presents a melancholy picture 
 of the wretchedness of all human grandeur ; but we may 
 now, with the candour of impartial history, ackaowledge 
 that he was not a tyrant. His personal character was 
 endowed with many estimable qualities. His intentions 
 were good ; his disposition benevolent ; his integrity un- 
 sullied; his domestic virtues exemplary; his religious 
 impressions strong and conscientious ; his private morals 
 pure ; his spirit munificent, in the promotion of the arts, 
 
literature and sciences ; and his most fervent wishes de- 
 voted to the welfare of his people. But he was born to 
 he a hereditary king, and to exemplify in his life and his- 
 tory the irremediable vices of that poUtical institution, 
 which substitutes birth for merit, as the only qualification 
 for attaining the supremacy of powder. George the third 
 beheved that the Parliament of Great Britain had the 
 right to enact law^s for the government of the people 
 of the British Colonies in all cases. An immense 
 majority of the people of the British Islands believed the 
 same. That people were exclusively the constituents 
 of the British House of Commons, where the project of 
 taxing the people of the Colonies for a revenue originat- 
 ed ; and where the People of the Colonies w^ere not rep- 
 resented. The purpose of the project was to alleviate 
 the burden of taxation bearing upon the people of Bri- 
 tain, by levying a portion of it upon the people of the 
 Colonies. — At the root of all this there was a plausible 
 theory of sovereignty, and unlimited powder in Parlia- 
 ment, conflicting with the vital principle of English Free- 
 dom, that taxation and representation are inseparable, 
 and that taxation without representation is a violation of 
 the right of property. Here was a conflict betw^een tw o 
 first principles of government, resulting from a defect in 
 the British Constitution: the principle that sovereign 
 power in human Government is in its nature unlimited; 
 and the principle that property can lawfully be taxed on- 
 ly with the consent of its owner. Now these two prin- 
 ciples, carried out into practice, are utterly irreconcil cable 
 with each other. The lawyers of Great Britain held 
 ^hem both to be essential principles of the British Con- 
 stitution. — In their practical application, the King and 
 Parliament and people of Great Britain, appealed for the 
 right to tax the Colonies to the unlimited and illimitable 
 
10 
 
 sovereignty of the Parliament. — The Colonists appeal- 
 ed to the natural right o^ property, and the articles of the 
 Great Charter. The collision in the application of these 
 tvwo principles was the primitive cause of the severance 
 of the North American Colonies, from the British Empire. 
 The grievances alleged in the Declaration of Indepen- 
 dence were all secondary causes, amply sufficient to 
 justify before God and man the separation itself; and 
 that resolution, to the support of which the fifty-five Rep- 
 resentatives of the One People of the United Colonies 
 pledged their fives, their fortunes, and their sacred hon- 
 our, after passing through the fiery ordeal of a six years 
 war, was sanctioned by the God of Battles, and by the 
 unquahfied acknowledgment of the defeated adversary. 
 
 This, my countrymen, was the first and immediate 
 purpose of the Declaration of Independence. It was to 
 justify before the tribunal of public opinion, throughout 
 the world, the solemn act of separation of the one people 
 from the other. 
 
 Bait this is not the reason for which you are here as- 
 sdnbled. The question of right and wrong involved in 
 the resolution of North American Independence was of 
 transcendant importance to those who were actors in the 
 scene. A question of life, of fortune, of fame, of eter- 
 nal w^elfare. To you, it is a question of nothing more 
 than historical interest. The separation itself was a pain- 
 ful and distressing event ; a measure resorted to by your 
 forefathers with extreme reluctance, and justified by 
 them, in their own eyes, only as a dictate of necessity. — 
 They had glorie'd in the name of Britons : It was a pass- 
 port of honour throughout the civilized v.orld. They 
 were now to discard it forever, with ail its tender and all 
 its generous sympathies, for a name obscure and un- 
 known, the honest fame of which was to be achieved by 
 
11 
 
 the gallantry of their own exploits and the wisdom of 
 their own counsels. 
 
 But, with the separation of the one people from the 
 other, was indissolubly connected another event. They 
 had been British Colonies, — distinct and separate sub- 
 ordinate portions of one great community. In the strug- 
 gle of resistance against one common oppressor, by a 
 moral centripetal impulse they had spontaneously coale»- 
 c^d into One People, They declare themselves such in 
 eg^press terms by this paper. — The members of the 
 Congi-ess, who signed their names to the Declaration, 
 style themselves the Representatives, not of the separate 
 Ck)lonies,but of the United States of America m Congresrs 
 assembled. No one Colony is named in the Declaration, 
 nor is there any thing on its face, indicating from which of 
 the Colonies, any one of the signers was delegated They 
 proclaim the separation of one people from another. — 
 They affirm the right of the People, to institute, alter, and 
 abolish their Government : — and their final language rs, 
 ** we do, in the name, and by the authority of the good 
 People of tliese Colonies, solemnly publish and declaee 
 fhat these United Colonies, are and of right ought to b« 
 Free and Ij^dependent States." The Declaratwn 
 was not, that each of the States was separately Free and 
 Independent, but that such was their united condition. 
 And so essential was their union, both in principle and in 
 fact, to their freedom and independence, that, had one of 
 the Colonies seceded from the rest, and undertaken to 
 declare herself free and independent, she could have 
 maintained neither her independence nor her fi^e- 
 dom. 
 
 And, by this paper, this One People did notify the 
 world of mankmd that they thereby did assume among 
 the powers of the earth the separate and equal station. 
 
12 
 
 to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God enti- 
 tled them. 
 
 This was indeed a great and solemn event. The sub- 
 hmest of the prophets of antiquity with the voice of in- 
 spiration had exclaimed, "Who hath heard such a thing? 
 Who hath seen such things 1 Shall the earth be made to 
 bring forth in one day 1 Or shall a nation be bom at 
 once?""^ In the two thousand five hundred years^ that 
 had elapsed since the days of that prophecy, no such 
 event had occurred. It had never been seen before^ 
 In the annals of the human race, then, for the first time, 
 did one People announce themselves as a member of that 
 great community of the powers of the earth, acknowl- 
 edging the obligations and claiming the rights of the Laws 
 of Na^ture and of Nature's God. The earth was made 
 to bring forth in one day ! A Nation was bom at once t 
 
 Well, hideed, may such a day be commemorated by 
 such a Nation, from year to year ! But whether as a day 
 of festivity and joy, or pi humiUation and mourning, — 
 that, fellow-citizens, — that, 
 
 In the various turns of chance below, 
 depends not upon the event itself, but upon its conse- 
 quences ; and after threescore years of existence, not so 
 much upon the responsibilities of those who brought the 
 Nation forth, as upon the moral, pohticat and intellectual 
 character of the present generation, — of yourselves. In 
 the common intercourse of social hfe, the birth-day of in- 
 dividuals is often held as a yearly festive day by them- 
 selves, and their immediate relatives ; yet, as early as the 
 age of Solomon, that wisest of men told the people of 
 Jeinisalem, that, as a good name was better than precious 
 ointment, so the day of death was better than the day of 
 one's birth.f 
 
 ♦Isaiah GQ: 8. f Ecclesiastes T: U 
 
IS 
 
 Are you then assembled here, my brethren, children 
 of those who declared your National Independence, in 
 sorrow or in joy ? In gratitude for blessings enjoyed, or 
 in affliction for blessings lost ? In exultation at the ener- 
 vgies of your fathers, or in shame and confusion of face at 
 y.our ow^n degeneracy from their virtues ? Forgive the 
 apparent rudeness of these enquiries: — they are not ad- 
 dressed to you under the influence of a doubt what your 
 answer to them will be. You are not here to unite in 
 echoes of mutual gratulation for the separation of your 
 forefathers from their kindred freemen of the British Isl- 
 ands. You are not here even to commemorate the mere 
 accidental incident, that, in the annual revolution of the 
 earth in her orbit round the sun, this w^as the birth-day 
 of the Nation. You are here, to pause a moment and take 
 breath, in the ceaseless and rapid race of time; — to look 
 back and forward ; — to take your point of departure from 
 the ever memorable transactions of the day of which this 
 is the anniversary, and while offering your tribute of 
 thanksgiving to the Creator of all worlds, for the bounties 
 of his Providence lavished upon your fathers and upon 
 you, by the dispensations of that day, and while record- 
 ing with filial piety upon your memories, the grateful af- 
 fections of your hearts to the good name, the sufferings, 
 and the services of that age, to turn your final reflections 
 inward upon yourselves, and to say: — These are the 
 glories of a generation past away, — what are the duties 
 which they devolve upon us 1 
 
 The Declaration oflndependence, in announcing to the 
 w'orld of mankind, that the People comprising the thirteen 
 British Colonies on the continent of North America as- 
 sumed, from that day, as One People, their separate and 
 equal station among the powers of the earth, explicitly 
 unfolded the principles upon which their national associ- 
 
 2 
 
14 
 
 ation had, by their unanimous consent, ^ind by the mutual 
 pledges of their faith, been formed. It was an associa- 
 tion of mutual covenants. Every intelligent individual 
 niember of that self-constituted People did, by his repre- 
 sentative in Congress, the majority speaking for the 
 whole, and the husband and parent for the wife and child, 
 bind his and their souls to a promise, appealing to t-he 
 Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of his in- 
 tentions, covenanting with all the rest that they woiild 
 for life and death be faithful members of that community, 
 and bear true allegiance to that Sovereign, upon the 
 principles set forth in that paper. The Hves, the for- 
 tunes, and the honour, of every free human being form- 
 ing a part of those Colonies, were pledged, in the face of 
 God and man, to the principles therein promulgated. 
 
 My countrymen! — the exposition of these principles 
 will furnish the solution to the question of the purpose 
 for which you arc here assembled. 
 
 In recurring to those principles, let us remark. 
 
 First, that the People of the thirteen Colonies an- 
 nounced themselves to the world, and solemnly bound 
 themselves, with an appeal to God, to be One People. 
 And this One People, by their Representatives, declared 
 the United Colonies free and independent States. 
 
 Secondly, they declared the People, and not the 
 Slates, to be the only legitimate source of power ; and 
 that to the People alone belonged the right to institute, 
 to alter, to abolish, and to re-institute government. And 
 hence it follows, that as the People of the separate Colonies 
 or States formed only parts of t\ie fine People assuming 
 their station among the powers of the earth, so the Peo- 
 ple of no one State could separate from the rest, but by 
 a revolution, similar to that by which the whole People 
 had separated themselves from the People of the British 
 
15 
 
 Islands, nor without the violation of that solemn covenant, 
 by which they bound themselves to support and main- 
 tain the United Colonies, as free and independent States. 
 
 An error of the most dangerous character, more than 
 once threatening the dissolution by violence of the Union 
 itself, has occasionally found countenance and encourage- 
 ment in several of the States, by an inference not only 
 unwarranted by the language and import of the Declara- 
 tjon, but subversive of its fundamental principles. This 
 inference is, that because by this paper the United Colo- 
 nies were declared free and independent States, therefore 
 each of the States, separately, was free, independent and 
 ^o-verc^gn. The pernicious and fatal malignity of this 
 doctrine consists, not in the mere attribution of sove- 
 reignty to the separate States ; for within their appropri- 
 ate functions and boundaries Xhey are sovereign ; — but in 
 adopting that very definition of sovereignty, w^hich had 
 bewildered the senses of the British Parliament, and 
 which rent in twain the Empire ; — that principle, the re- 
 sistance to which was the vital spark of the American 
 revolutionary cause, namely, that sovereignty is iden- 
 tical with unlimited and illimitable power. 
 
 The origin of this error was of a very early date after 
 the Declaration of Independence, and the infusion of its 
 spirit into the Articles of Confederation, first formed for 
 the government of the Union, was the seed of dissolu- 
 tion sown in the soil of that compact, which palsied all its 
 energies from the day of its birth, and exhibited it to the 
 world only as a monument of impotence and imbecility. 
 
 The Declaration did not proclaim the separate States 
 free and independent; much less did it announce them 
 as sovereign States, or affirm that they separately pos- 
 sessed the war-making or the peace-making power. 
 The fact was directly the reverse. 
 
16 
 
 The Declaration was, that the United Colonies, fortri- 
 ing one People, were free and independent States; that 
 they were absolved from all allegiance to the British 
 Crown ; that all political cannection, between them and 
 the State of Great Britain, was and ought to be totally 
 dissolved; and tliat as free and independent States, they 
 had full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract 
 alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts and 
 things, which independent States may of right do. But 
 all this was affirmed and declared not of the separate, but 
 of the United, States. And so far was it from the inten- 
 tion of that Congress, or of the One People whom they 
 represented, to declare that all the powers of sovereign- 
 ty were possessed by the separate States, that the spe- 
 cification of the several powers of levying war, conclud- 
 ing peace, contracting alliances, and establishing com- 
 merce, was obviously introduced as the indication o£ 
 powers exclusively possessed by the one People of the 
 United States, and not appertaining to the People df. 
 each of the separate States. This distinction was indeed 
 indispensable to the necessities of their condition. The 
 Declaration was issued in the midst of a war, commenced 
 by insurrection against their common sovereign, and un- 
 til then raging as a civil war. Not the insurrection of 
 one of the Colonies; not the insun-ection of the organiz- 
 ed government of any one of the Colonies ; but the in- 
 surrection of the People of the whole thirteen. The ia- 
 surrecdon was one. The civil war was one. In consti- 
 tuting themselves one People, it could not possibly be 
 their intention to leave the power of concluding peace to 
 each of the States of which the Union was composed. 
 The war was waged against all The war itself had 
 united the inhabitants of the thirteen Colonies into one 
 People. The lyre of Orpheus v/as the standard of the 
 
17 
 
 Union. By the representatives of that one People, and 
 by them alone, could the peace be concluded. Had the 
 people of any one of the States pretended to the right of 
 concluding a separate peace, the very fact would have 
 operated as a dismemberment of the Union, and could 
 have been carried into effect only by the return of that 
 portion of the People to the condition of Bridsh subjects. 
 
 Thirdly, the Declaration of Independence announced 
 the One People^ assuming their station among the powers 
 of" the earth, as acivihzed, religious, and Christian People, 
 — acknowledging themselves bound by the obhgations, 
 and claiming the rights, to which they were endded by 
 the laws of Nature and of Nature's God, 
 
 They had formed a subordinate portion of an Europe- 
 an Chi'istian nation, in the condition of Colonies. The 
 laws of social intercourse between sovereign commun- 
 ities constitute the laws of nations, all derived from 
 three sources : — the laws of nature, or in other words 
 the dictates of justice ; usages, sanctioned by custom ; 
 and treaties, or national covenants. Superadded to 
 these, the Christian nations, between themselves, admit, 
 with various latitudes of interpretation, and litde consist- 
 ency of pracdce, the laws of humanity and mutual be- 
 nevolence taught in the gospel of Christ. The Europe- 
 an Colonies in America had all been setded by Christian 
 nations; and the first of them, settled before the reforma- 
 tion of Luther, had sought their jusdfication for taking 
 possession of lands inhabited by men of another race, in 
 a grant of authority from the successor of Saint' Peter at 
 Rome, for converting the natives of the country to the 
 Christian code of religion and morals. After the reforma- 
 tion, the kings of England, subsdtuting themselves in 
 the place of the Roman PontiiF, as heads of the Church, 
 granted charters for the same benevolent purposes ; and 
 as these colonial establishments successively arose, 
 worldly purp: \s, the spirit of adventure, and religious 
 2* 
 
18 
 
 persecution took their place, together with the conver- 
 sion of the heathen, among the motives for the European 
 establishments in this Western Hemisphere. Hence 
 had arisen among the colonizing nations, a customary 
 law, under which the commerce of all colonial settle- 
 ments was confined exclusively to the metropolis or 
 mother country. The Declaration of Independence cast 
 off all the shackles of this dependency. The United 
 States of America were no longer Colonies. They w^ere 
 an independent Nation of Christians, recognizing the 
 general principles of the Europaan law of nations^. 
 
 But to, justify their separation from the parent State^ 
 it became necessary for them to set forth the wrongs 
 which they had endured. Their colonial condition had 
 been instituted by charters from British kings. These 
 they considered as compacts between the King as their 
 sovereign and them as his subjects. In all these char- 
 ters, there were stipulations for securing to the colonists 
 the enjoyment of the rights of natural born Englishmen. 
 The attempt to tax them by Act of ParUament was a 
 violation of their charters. And as the Parliament, to 
 sustain their right of taxing the Colonies had appealed 
 ta the prerogative of sovereign power, the colonists, to 
 refute that claim, after appeahng in vain tojheir charters, 
 and to the Great Charter of England, were obliged to re- 
 sort to the natural rights of mankind ; — to the laws of 
 Nature and of Nature's God. 
 
 And now, my friends and fellow citizens, have we not 
 reached the cause of your assemblage here ? Have we 
 not ascended to the source of that deep, intense, and 
 never-fading interest, which, to your fathers, from the 
 day of the issuing of this Declaration, — to you, on this 
 sixty-first anniversary after that event, — and to your 
 children and theirs of the fiftieth generation, — haSrUiade 
 and will continue to make it the first and happiest o€ 
 festive days ? 
 
19 
 
 In setting forth the justifying causes of their separa- 
 tion from Great Britain, your fathers opened the foun- 
 tains of the great deep. For the first time since thq 
 creation of the world, the act, which constituted a great! 
 people, laid the foundation of their government upom 
 the unalterable and eternal principles of human rights. 
 
 They were comprized in a few short sentences, and ^ 
 were delivered with the unquaUfied confidence of self- 
 evident truths. 
 
 "We hold," says the Declaration, "these truths to be 
 self-evident: — that all men are created equal; that thej 
 are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable 
 rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit 
 of happiness ; that to secure these rights, governments 
 are instituted among men, deriving their just powers 
 fi'om the consent of the governed ;, that whenever any 
 form of government becomes destructive of these ends, 
 it is the right of the People to alter or to abolish it^ and 
 to institute a new government, laying its foundations on 
 such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, 
 as to diem shall seem most likely to effect their safety 
 and happiness." -:^- — 
 
 It is afterwards stated to be the duty of the People, 
 when their governments become incorrigibly oppressive, 
 to throw them off, and to provide new guards for their 
 future security ; and it is alleged that such was the cour 
 dition of the British Colonies at that time, and that they 
 were constrained by necessity to alter their systems of 
 government. 
 
 The origin of lawful government among men had formr 
 ed a subject of profound investigation and of ardent dis- 
 cussion among the philosophers of ancient Greece. The 
 theocratic government of the Hebrews had been found- 
 ed upon a covenant between God and man ; a law, 
 given by the Creator of the world, and solemnly accept- 
 ed by the people of Israel. It derived all its powers, 
 
20 
 
 thereforej from the consent of the governed, and gave 
 the sanction of Heaven itself to the principle, that the 
 consent of the governed is the only legitimate source of 
 authority to man over man. 
 
 But the history of mankind had never before furnished 
 an example of a government directly and expressly in- 
 stituted upon this principle. The associations of men,'- 
 bearing the denomination of the People, had been vari- 
 ously formed, and the term itself was of very indefinite 
 signification. In the most ordinary acceptation of the 
 word, dL people, was understood to mean a multitude of 
 human beings united under one supreme government, 
 and one and the same civil poUty. But the same term 
 was equally applied to subordinate divisions of the same 
 nation ; and the inhabitants of every province, county, 
 city, town, or village, bore the name, as habitually as the 
 whole population of a kingdom or an empire. In the 
 theories of government, it was never imagined that the 
 people of every hamlet or subordinate district of territo- 
 ry should possess the power of constituting themselves 
 an independent State ; yet are they justly entitled to the 
 appellation of people, and to exemption from all authori- 
 ty derived from any other source than their own con- 
 sent, express or implied. 
 
 The Declaration of Independence constituted all the 
 inhabitants of European descent in the thirteen English 
 Colonies of North America, one People, with all the at- 
 tributes of rightful sovereign power. They had, until 
 then, been ruled by thirteen different systems of govern- 
 ment ; none of them sovereign ; but all subordinate to 
 one sovereign, separated from them by the Atlantic 
 Ocean. The Declaration of Independence altered these 
 systems of government, and transformed these depend- 
 ant Colonies into united, free, and independent States. 
 
 The distribution of the sovereign powers of govern- 
 ment, between the body representing the whole People, 
 
21 
 
 and the municipal authorities substitirted for the colonial 
 governments, was left for after consideration. The Peo- 
 ple of each Colony, absolved by the People of the whole 
 Union from their allegiance to the British crown, became 
 themselves, upon the principles of the Declaration, the 
 sovereigns to institute and organize new systems of gov- 
 ernment, to take the place of those which had been abol- 
 ished by the will of the whole People, as proclaimed in 
 the Declaration of Independence. 
 
 It will be remembered, that, until that time, the w^hok 
 movement of resistance against the usurpations of the 
 British government had been revolutionary, and there- 
 fore irregular. The colonial governments were still un- 
 der tlie organization of their charters, except that of 
 Massachusetts-Bay, which had been formally vacated, 
 and the royal government was administered by a military 
 commander and regiments of soldiers. The country 
 was in a state of civil war. The people were in revolt, 
 claiming only the restoration of their violated rights as 
 subjects of the British king. The members of the Con- 
 gress had been elected by the Legislative assemblies of 
 the Colonies, or by self-constituted popular conventions 
 or assemblies, in opposition to the Governors. Their 
 original mission had been to petition, to remonstrate ; to 
 disclaim all intention or purpose of independence; to seek, 
 with earnest entreaty, the redress of grievances, and ree- 
 onciliation with the parent State. They had received 
 no authority, at their first appointment, to declare inde- 
 pendence, or to dissolve the political connection between 
 the Colonies and Great Britain. But they had petition-^ 
 ed once and again, and their petitions had been slighted. 
 They had remonstrated, and their remonstrances had, 
 been contemned. They had disclaimed all intention of 
 independence, and their disclaimer had been despised. 
 
22 
 
 They had finally recommended to the People to look for 
 their redemption to themselves, and they had been an* 
 swered by voluntary and spontaneous calls for indepen- 
 dence. They declared it, therefore, in the name and by 
 the authority of the People, and their declaration was 
 confirmed from New-Hampshire to Georgia with one 
 universal shout of approbation. 
 
 And never, from that to the present day, has there 
 beeii one moment of regret, on the part of the People, 
 whom they thus declared independent, at this mighty 
 change of their condition, nor one moment of distrust, of 
 the justice of that declaration. In the mysterious ways 
 of Providence, manifested by the course ol human events, 
 the feeble light of reason is often at a loss to discover 
 the coincidence between the laws of eternal justice, and 
 the decrees of fortune or of fate in the affairs of men. 
 In the corrupted currents of this world, not only is the 
 race not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong,* 
 but the heart is often wrung with anguish at the sight of 
 the just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and of 
 the wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wicked- 
 ness.f Far different and happier is the retrospect upon 
 that great and memorable transaction. Every individual, 
 whose name was affixed to that paper, has finished his 
 career upon earth ; and who, at this day w^ould not deem 
 it a blessing to have had his name recorded on that Hst? 
 The act of aboHshing the government under which they 
 had lived, — of renouncing and abjuring the allegiaRce by 
 which they had been bound, — of dethroning their sove- 
 reign, and of discarding their country herself, — purified 
 and elevated by the principles which they proclaim- 
 ed, and by the motives which they promulgated as their 
 stimulants to action, — stands recorded in the annals of the 
 * fkclesiastes 9:11. t Eccl. 7 ; 15, 
 
23 
 
 human race, as one among the brightest achievements 
 of human virtue : — applauded on earth, ratified and con- 
 firmed by the fiat of Heaven. 
 
 The principles, thus triumphantly proclaimed and es- 
 tablished, were the natural and unalienable rights of man, 
 and the supreme authority of the People, as the only le- 
 gitimate source of power in the institution of civil gov- 
 ernment. But let us not mistake the extent, nor turn 
 our eyes from the limitations necessary for the applica- 
 tion, of the principles themselves. Who were the Peo- 
 ple, thus invested by the laws of Nature and of Nature's 
 God, with sovereign powers? And what were the sove- 
 reign powers thus vested in the People ? 
 
 First, the whole free People of the thirteen United 
 British Colonies in North America. The Declaration 
 was their act ; prepared by their Representatives ; in 
 their name, and by their authority. An act of the most 
 transcendant sovereignty ; abolishing the governments of 
 thirteen Colonies ; absolving their inhabitants from the 
 bands of their allegiance, and declaring the whole Peo- 
 ple of the British Islands, theretofore their fellow sub^'ects 
 and countrymen, aliens and foreigners. 
 
 Secondly, the free People of each of the thirteen Col- 
 onies, thus transformed into united, free, and independ- 
 ent States. Each of these formed a constituent portion 
 of the whole People ; and it is obvious that the power 
 SKiknowledged to be in them could neither be co-exten- 
 sive, nor inconsistent with, that rightfully exercised by 
 the whole People. 
 
 In absolving the People of the thirteen United Colo- 
 nies from th« bands of their allegiance to the British 
 crown, the Congress, representing the whole People, 
 neither did nor could a1)solve them, or any one individ- 
 ual among them, from the obligation ol any other con- 
 
24 
 
 tract by which he had been previously bound. Th^y 
 neither did nor could, for example, release any portion 
 of the People from the duties of private and domestic 
 life. They could not dissolve the relations of husband 
 and wife ; of parent and child ; of guardian and w^ard ; 
 of master and servant ; of partners in trade ; of debtor and 
 creditor ; — nor by the investment of each of the Colonies 
 wdth sovereign power could they bestow upon them the 
 power of dissolving any of those relations, or of absolv- 
 ing any one of the individual citkens of the Colony from 
 the fulfilment of all the obhgations resulting from them. 
 
 The sovereign authority, conferred upon the People of 
 the Colonies by the Declaration of Independence, could 
 not dispense them, nor any individual citizen of them, 
 from the fulfilment of all their moral obligations ; for to 
 these they were bound by the laws of Nature's God ; 
 nor is there any power upon earth capable of granting 
 absolution from them. The People, who assumed their 
 equal and separate station among the powders of the 
 Giarth by the laws of Nature's God, by that very act ac- 
 knowledged themselves bound to the observance of 
 t^ose laws, and could neither exercise nor confer any 
 power inconsistent wath them. 
 
 The sovereign authority, conferred by the Declaration 
 of Independence upon the people of each of the Colo- 
 nies, could n'ot exterfcd to the exercise of any powder in- 
 consistent with that Declaration itself. It could not, for 
 example, authorize any one of the United States to con- 
 clude a separate peace with Great Britain ; to connect 
 itself as a Colony with France, or any other Euriopean 
 power; to contract a separate alliance wath any other 
 State of the Union ; or separately to establish cora- 
 merce. These are all acts of sovereignty, which tHe 
 Declaration of Independence affirmed the United States 
 
were competent to perform, but which for that very rea- 
 son were necessarily excluded from the powers of sove- 
 reignty conferred upon each of the separate States. The 
 Declaration itself was at once a social compact of the 
 whole People of the Union, embracing thirteen distinct 
 eoramunities united in one, and a manifesto proclaiming 
 themselves to the world of mankind, as one Nation, pos* 
 «essed of all the attributes of sovereign power. But this 
 nnited sovereignty could not possibly consist with the 
 absolute sovereignty of each of the separate States. 
 
 ** That were to make 
 Strange contradiction, which to God hinaself 
 Irapossible is held, as argument 
 Of weakness, not of power."* 
 
 The position, thus assumed by this one People con- 
 sisdng of thirteen free and independent States, was new 
 in the history of the world. It was complicated and 
 compounded of elements never before believed suscep- 
 tible of being blended together. The error of the Brit- 
 ish Parliament, the proximate cause of the Revolution, 
 that sovereignty was in its nature unlimited and illimita- 
 ble, taught as a fundamental doctrine by all the English 
 lawyers, was too deeply imprinted upon the minds of the 
 lawyers of our own country to be eradicated, even by the 
 civil war, which it had produced. The most celiebrated 
 British moralist of the age. Dr. Samuel Johnson, in a con- 
 troversial tract on the dispute between Britain and her 
 Colonies, had expressly laid down as the basis of his ar- 
 gument, that — "All government is essentially absolute. 
 That in sovereignty there are no gradations. That there 
 may be limited royalty ; there may be limited consul- 
 ship ; but there can be no limited government. There 
 must in every society be some power or other from 
 which there is no appeal ; which admits no restrictions ; 
 which pervades the whole mass of the community ; reg- 
 
 * Milton. Paradise Lost,— B. tO— 1. 798. 
 
 3 
 
26 
 
 ulates and adjusts all subordination ; enacts laws or re- 
 peals them ; erects or annuls judicatures ; extends or 
 contracts privileges; exempts itself from question or 
 control ; and bounded only by physical necessity."* 
 
 The Declaration of Independence was founded upon 
 the direct reverse of all these propositions. It did not 
 recognize, but implicitly denied, the unlimited nature of 
 sovereignty. By the affirmation that the principal natural 
 rights of mankind are unalienable, it placed them beyond 
 the reach of organized human power ; and by affirming 
 that governments are instituted to secure them, and may 
 and ought to be abolished if they become destructive of 
 those ends, they made all government subordinate to the 
 moral supremacy of the People, 
 
 The Declaration itself did not even announce the 
 States as sovereign, but as united, free and independent, 
 and having power to do all acts and things which inde- 
 pendent States may of right do. It acknowledged, 
 therefore, a rule o^ right, paramount to the power of in- 
 dependent States itself, and virtually disclaimed all pow- 
 er to do wrong. This was a novelty in the moral phi- 
 losophy of nations, and it is the essential point of difFer- 
 .enoe between the system of government announced in 
 the Declaration of Independence, and those systems 
 which had until then prevailed among men. A moral 
 Ruler of the universe, the Governor and Controller of all 
 human power, is the only unlimited sovereign acknow- 
 ledged by the Declaration of Independence; and it claims 
 for the United States of America, when assuming their 
 equal station among the nations of the earth, only the 
 power to do all that may be done of right. 
 
 Threescore and one years have passed away, sine© 
 this Declaration w^as issued, and we may now judge of 
 the tree by its fruit. It was a bold and hazardous step, 
 when considered merely as the act of separation of th« 
 
 ^ Johnson's Taxation no Tyranny. 
 
27 
 
 Golonies from Great Britain. Had the cause in which it 
 was issued failed, it w^ould have subjected every individ- 
 ual who signed it to the pains and penalties of treason ; 
 to a cruel and ignominious death. But, inflexible as w^ere 
 the spirits, and intrepid as w^ere the hearts of the patri- 
 ots, who by this act set at defiance the colossal power of 
 the British Empire, bolder and more intrepid still were 
 the souls, which, at that crisis in human affairs, dared to 
 proclaim the new and fundamental principles upon which 
 their incipient Repubhc was to be founded. It was an 
 experiment upon the heart of man. All the legislators 
 of the human race, until that day, had laid the founda- 
 tions of all government among men in power ; and hence 
 it w^as, that, in the maxims of theory, as w^ell as in the 
 practice of nations, sovereignty was held to be unhmited 
 and illimitable. The Declaration of Independence pro- 
 claimed another law. A law^ of resistance against sove- 
 reign power, when wielded for oppression. A law^ as- 
 cending the tribunal of the universal law giver and judge. 
 A law^ of right y binding upon nations as well as individu- 
 als, upon sovereigns as well as upon subjects. By that 
 law the colonists had resisted their sovereign. By that 
 Iaw% when that resistance had failed to reclaim him to 
 the rule of right, they renounced him, abjured his alleg- 
 iance, and assumed the exercise of rightful sovereignty 
 themselves. But, in assuming the attributes of sovereign 
 power, they appealed to the Supreme Judge of the w^arld 
 for the rectitude of their intentions, and neither claimed 
 Hor conferred authority to do any thing but of right. 
 
 Of the war with Great Britain, by which the indepen- 
 dence thus declared w^as maintained, and of the peace by 
 w^hich it was acknowledged, it is unnecessary to say more. 
 The war was deeply distressing and calamitous, and its 
 most instructive lesson was to teach the nevv confeder- 
 ate Repubhc the inestimable value of the blessings of 
 peace. When the peace came, all controversy with 
 
28 
 
 Great Britain, with regard to the principles upon which 
 the Declaration of Independence had been issued, wa» 
 terminated, and ceased forever. The main purpose for 
 which it had been issued was accomplished. No idle 
 exultation of victory was worthy of the holy cause in 
 which it had been achieved. No ungenerous triumph 
 over the defeat of a generous adversary was consistent 
 with the purity of the principles upon which the strife 
 had been maintained. Had that contest furnished the 
 only motives for the celebration of the day, its anniver- 
 sary should have ceased to be commemorated, and the 
 Fourth of July would thenceforward have passed unno-. 
 ticed from year to year, scarcely numbered among the 
 dies fasti of the Nation. 
 
 But the Declaration of Independence had abolished 
 the government of the thirteen British Colonies in North 
 America. A new government was to be instituted in it» 
 stead. A task more trying had devolved upon the Peo- 
 ple of the Union than the defence of their country against 
 foreign armies ; a duty more arduous than that of lighting 
 the battles of the Revolution. 
 
 The elements and the principles for the formation of 
 the new. government were all contained in the Declara- 
 tion of Independence ; but the adjustment of them to the 
 condition of the parties to the compact was a work of 
 time, of reflection, of experience, of calm dehberation, of 
 moral and intellectual exertion ; for those elements wxre 
 far from being homogeneous, and there were circum- 
 stances in the condition of the parties, far from conform- 
 able to the principles proclaimed. The Declaration had 
 laid the foundation of all civil government, in the unalien- 
 able natural rights of individual man, of which it had spe- 
 cifically named three : — life, liberty, and the purs-uit of 
 happiness, — declaring them to be among others not en- 
 umerated. The revolution had been exclusively popular 
 and democratic, and the Declaration had announced that 
 
29 
 
 the only object of the iastitution of governments among 
 men was to secure their unalienable rights, and that they 
 derived their just powers from the consent of the govern- 
 ed. The Declaration proclaimed the parties to the com- 
 pact as one People, composed of united Colonies, thence- 
 forward free and iulependent States, constrained by ne- 
 cessity to alter their former systems of government. It 
 would seem necessarily to follow from these elements and 
 these principles, that the governmsnt for tha whole Peo- 
 ple should have been instituted by the whole People, 
 and the government of each of the independent States 
 by the People of that State. But obvious as that con- 
 clusion is, it is nevertheless equally true, that it has not 
 been wholly accomphshed even to this day. 
 
 On the tenth of May preceding the day of the Declar- 
 ation, the Congress had adopted a resolution, which may 
 be considered as the herald to that Independence. After 
 its adoption it was considered of such transcendent impor- 
 tance, that a special committee of three members was 
 appointed to prepare a preamble to it. On the fifteenth 
 of May this preamble was reported, adopted, and order- 
 ed to be pubhshed, with the resolution, which had been 
 adopted tn the tenth. The preamble and resolution 
 are in the following words : 
 
 " Whereas his Britannic Majesty, in conjunction with 
 the Lords and Commons of Great Britain, has, by a late 
 Act of Parliament, excluded the inhabitants of the^e 
 United Colonies from the protection of^^is crov*^n ; and 
 whereas no answer whatever to the humble petitions of 
 the Colonies, for redress of grievances and reconciliation 
 with Great Britain^ has been or is likely to be given, but 
 the whole course of that kingdom, aided by foreign mer- 
 cenaries, is to be exerted for the destrucuon of the good 
 people of these Colonies ; and whereas it appears abso- 
 lutely irreconcileable to reason and good conscience for 
 the people of these Colonies now to take the oaths and 
 
30 
 
 affirmations necessary for the support of any govern- 
 ment under the crown of Great Britain, and it is neces- 
 sary that the exercise of every kind of authority under 
 the said crown should he totally suppressed,, and all the 
 powers of government exerted under the authority of tlie 
 people of the Colonies, for the preservation of internal 
 peace, virtue, and good order, as well as for the defence 
 of their Uves, liberties, and properties, against the hos- 
 tile invasions and cruel depredations of their enemies: — 
 Therefore, Resolved, 
 
 "That it be recommended to the respective assem-^ 
 bhes and conventions of the United Colonies, where no 
 government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs 
 kath been hitherto estabUshed, to adopt such govern- 
 ment as shall, in the opinion of the Representatives of 
 the People, best conduce to the happiness and safety of 
 their constituents in particular, and America in general" 
 
 The People of some of the Colonies had not waited 
 for this recommendation, to assume all the powers of 
 their internal goverament into theu^ own hands. In 
 some of them, the governments constituted by the royal 
 charters were continued without alteration ; or with the 
 mere divestment of the portion of the public authority, 
 exercised by the crown. In others, constitutions had 
 been adopted, or were in preparation by representative 
 popular conventions. Massachusetts was represented 
 by a Provincial Congress, elected by the people as the 
 General Court had been under the royal charter, and 
 from that assembly the general Congress had been urg- 
 ently invoked, for their advice in the formation of a gov- 
 ernment adapted to the emergency, and unshackled by 
 transatlantic dependence. 
 
 The institution of civil government by the authority of 
 the People, in each of the separate Colonies, was thus 
 uiuversally recognized as resulting from the dissolution 
 of their jjillegiance to the British crown. But, that the 
 
»r 
 
 union could be cemented and the national powers of 
 government exercised of right, only by a constitution of 
 government emanating from the whole People, was not 
 jet discovered. The powers of the Congress then ex- 
 isting, were revolutionary and undefined ; limited by no 
 constitution ; responsible to no common superior ; dic- 
 tated by the necessities of a death-struggle for freedom ; 
 and embracing all discretionary means to organize and 
 maintain the resistance of the people of all the Coloniei 
 against the oppression of the British Parliament. In de- 
 vising measures for giving permanence, and, as far as hu- 
 man wdsdom could provide, perpetuity, to the Union 
 which had been formed by the common sufferings and 
 dangers of the whole People, they universally concluded 
 that a confederation would suffice ; and that a confeder- 
 ation could be instituted by the authority of the States, 
 without the intervention of the People. 
 
 On the twentyfirst of July, 1775, nearly a year before 
 the Declaration of Independence, a sketch of articles of 
 eonfederation, and contingently perpetual union, had 
 been presented to Congress by Doctor Franklin, for a 
 confederacy, to be styled the United Colonies of North 
 America. It was proposed that this confederacy should 
 continue until a reconciliation with Great Britain should 
 be effected, and only on failure of such reconciliation, to 
 be perpetual. This project, contemplated only a part- 
 nership of Colonies to accomplish their common re-sub- 
 jugation to the British crown. It made no provision for 
 a community of independent States, and was encumber- 
 ed with no burden of sovereignty. No further action 
 upon the subject was had by Congress, till the eleventh 
 of June, 1776. 
 
 Four days before this, that is, on the seventh of Junc^ 
 eertain resolutions respecting independency had be«» 
 
32 
 
 moved and seconded. They were on the next day re- 
 ferred to a committee of the whole, and on Monday, the 
 tenth of June, they were agreed to in the committee of 
 the whole and reported to the Congress. 
 
 The first of these resolutions was that of independence. 
 
 The second was, that a committee be appointed to 
 prepare and digest the form of a confederation, to be en- 
 tered into between these Colonies. 
 
 The third, that a committee be appointed to prepare 
 a plan of treaties to be proposed to foreign powers. 
 
 The consideration of the first resolution, that of inde- 
 pendence, was postponed t© Monday the first day of 
 July ; and, in the meanwhile, that no time should be lost, 
 in case the Congress should agree thereto, it was re- 
 solved, that a committee be appointed to prepare a Dec- 
 laration, to the effect of the resolution. 
 
 On the next day, the eleventh of June, the committee 
 to prepare the Declaration of Independence was ap- 
 pointed ; and immediately afterwards^ the appointment 
 of two other committees was resolved ; one to prepare 
 and digest the plan of a confederation, and the other to 
 prepare the plan of treaties to be proposed to foreign 
 powers. 
 
 These committees were appointed on the twelfth of 
 June. The one, to prepare and digest the plan for a 
 confederation, consisted of one member from each Col- 
 ony. They reported on the twelfth day of Ju\y, eight 
 days after the Declaration of Independence, a draught af 
 articles of confederation and perpetual union between 
 tlie Colonies, naming them all from New-Hampshire to 
 Georgia. 
 
 The most remarkable characteristic of this paper is 
 the indiscriminate use of the terms Colonies and States, 
 pervading the whole document, both the words denoting 
 
33 
 
 the parties to the confederacy. The title declared a 
 confederacy between Colonies, but the first article of the 
 draught was — "The name of this confederacy shall be th« 
 United States of America/' In a passage of the 18th ar- 
 ticle, it was said, — " The United States assembled, shall 
 neMer engage the United Colonies in a w^ar, unless the 
 delegates of nine Colonies freely assent to the same.'' 
 The solution to this singularity was that the draught was 
 in preparation before, and reported after, the Declaration 
 of Independence. The principle upon which it wa» 
 draw n up was, that the separate members of the confed- 
 eracy should still continue Colonies, and only in their 
 united capacity constitute States. The idea of sieparate 
 State sovereignty had evidently no part in the composi- 
 tion of this paper. It was not countenanced in the Dec- 
 laration of Independence ; but appears to have been gen- 
 erated in the debates upon this draught of the articles of 
 confederation, between the twelfth of July, and the ensu- 
 ing twentieth of August, when it w as reported by the. 
 committee of the whole in a new draught, from which 
 the term Colony, as apphed to the contracting parties, 
 was carefully and universally excluded. The revised 
 draught, as reported by the committee of the whole, ex- 
 hibits, in the general tenour of its articles, less of the 
 spirit of union, and more of the separate and sectional 
 feeling, than the draught prepared by the first committee; 
 and far more than the Declaration of Independence. 
 
 This w^as, indeed, what must naturally have been ex- 
 pected, in the progress of a debate, involving all the jar- 
 ring mterests and all the latent prejudices of the several 
 contracting parties ; each member now considering him- 
 self as the representative of a separate and corporate 
 interest, and no longer acting and speaking, as in the 
 Declaration of Independence, in the name and by the 
 
34 
 
 authority of the whole People of the Union. Yet in the 
 revised draught itself, reported by the committee of the 
 whole, and therefore exhibiting the dehberate mind of 
 the majority of Congress at that time, there was no as- 
 sertion of sovereign power as of right intended to be re- 
 served to the separate States. But, in the original draught, 
 reported by the select committee on the twelfth of July,^ 
 the fu'st words of the second article w^ere, — "The said 
 Colonies unite themselves so as never to be divided by 
 any act whatever.^* Precious words ! — words, pronounc- 
 ed by the infant Nation, at the instant of her rising from 
 the baptismal font ! — words bursting from the hearts and 
 uttered by lips yet glowing with the touch from the coal 
 of the Declaration !— why were ye stricken out at the re- 
 visal of the draught, as reported by the committee of the 
 whole 7 — There w^as in the closing article, both of the 
 original and of the revised draught, a provision in these 
 w^ords, following a stipulation that the articles of confed- 
 eration, w^hen ratified, should be observed by the parties 
 — "And the union is to be perpetual." — Words, which, 
 considered asamere repetition of the pledge, the sacred 
 pledge given in those first words of the contracting par- 
 ties m the original draught, — " The said Colonies unite 
 themselves so as never to be divided by any act what- 
 ever," — discover only the intenseness of the spirit of 
 union, w ith which the draught had been prepared ; but 
 which, taken by themselves, and stripped of that pre- 
 cious pledge, given by the personification of the parties 
 announcing their perpetual union to the world, — how 
 cold and lifeless dothey sound ! — '' ^nd the union is to 
 be perpetual r — as if it was an after- thought, to guard 
 against the conclusion that an union so loosely compact- 
 ed, was not even intended to be permanent. 
 
35 
 
 The original draught, prepared by the committee eo- 
 temporaneously with the preparation, by the other com- 
 mittee, of the Declaration of Independence, was in twen- 
 ty articles. In the revised draught reported by the com- 
 mittee of the whole on the twentieth of August, the ar- 
 ticles were reduced to sixteen. The four articles omit- 
 ted, were the very grapphng hooks of the Union. They 
 secured to the citizens of each State, the rights of native 
 citizens in all the rest ; and they conferred upon Con- 
 gress the power of ascertaining the boundaries of the 
 several States, and of disposing of the public lands which 
 should prove to be beyond them. All these were strick- 
 en out of the revised draught. You have seen the mu- 
 tilation of the second article, which constituted the Union. 
 The third article contained the reserved rights of the 
 several parties to the compact, expressed in the original 
 draught thus : 
 
 "Each Colony shall retain and enjoy as much of its 
 present laws, rights, and customs, as it may think fit ; 
 and reserves to itself the sole and exclusive regulation 
 and government of its internal police, in all matters that 
 didll not interfere with the articles of this confederation." 
 
 In the revised draught, the first clause was omitted, 
 and the article read thus : 
 
 "Each State reserves to itself the sole and exdlusive 
 regulation and government of its internal police, in all 
 matters that shall not interfere with the articles of this 
 confederation." 
 
 From the twentieth of August, 1776, to the eighth of 
 April, 1777, although the Congress were in permanent 
 session, without recess but from day to day, no further 
 action upon the revised draught reported by the com- 
 mittee of the whole was had. The interval was the 
 most gloomy and disastrous period of the war. Tke 
 
36 
 
 debates, on the draught of articles reported by the firet 
 committee, had evolved and disclosed all the sources of 
 disunion existing between the several sections of th« 
 eountry, aggravated by the personal rivalries, which, be- 
 tween the leading members of a deliberative assembly, 
 animated by the enthusiastic spirit of liberty, could not 
 fail to arise. When, instead of a constitution of govern- 
 ment for a whole People, a confederation of independent 
 States w^as assumed, as the fundamental principle of the 
 permanent union to be organized for the American na- 
 tion, the centripetal and centrifugal political powers were 
 at once brought into violent conflict with each other. 
 The corporation and the popular spirits assumed oppos- 
 ite and adversary aspects. The federal and anti -federal 
 parties originated. State pride. State prejudice, State 
 jealousy, were soon embodied under the banners of 
 State sovereignty, and while the cause of freedom and 
 independence itself was drooping under the calamities of 
 war and pestilence, with a pennyless treasury, and an 
 all but disbanded army, the Congress of the people had 
 BO heart to proceed in the discussion of a confederacy, 
 overrun by a victorious enemy, and on the point, to all 
 external appearance, of being crushed by the wheels of 
 a conqueror's triumphal car. 
 
 Oh the eighth of April, 1 777, the draught reported by 
 Ae committee of the whole, on the preceding twentieth 
 of August, was nevertheless taken up ; and it was re- 
 solved that two days in each w-eek should be employed 
 #& that subject, until it should be wholly discussed ia 
 Congress. The exigencies of the war, however, did not 
 admit the regular execution of this order. The articles 
 were debated only upon six days in the months of April, 
 May, and June, on the twenty^ixth of which month the 
 ferther consideration of them was indefinitely postponed. 
 
s? 
 
 iOn the eighteenth ef September of that year, the Con- 
 gress were obliged to withdraw from the city of Phila- 
 delphia, possession of which was immediately afterwards 
 taken by the British army under the command of Sir 
 William Howe. Congress met again on the thirtieth of 
 September, at Yorktown, in the state of Pennsylvania, 
 and there, on the second of October, resumed the con- 
 sideration of the articles of confederation. From that 
 tim-e to the fifteenth of November, the debates were un- 
 remitting. The yeas and nays, of which there had un- 
 til then been no example, were rtow taken upon every 
 prominent question submitted for consideration, and the 
 struggle between the party of the States and the party 
 of the People became, from day to day, more vehement 
 and pertinacious. The first question upon which the 
 yeas and nays were called was^ that the representation in 
 the Congress of the confederation should be proportional 
 to a ratio of population, which was presented in two sev- 
 eral modifications, and rejected in both. The next pro- 
 posal vvas, that it should be j^roportional to the tax or 
 contribution paid by the several States to the public 
 treasuryc This was also rejected ; and it was finally 
 Settled as had been reported by the committee, that each 
 State should have one vote. Then came the question of 
 the proportional contributions of the several States. 
 This involved the primary principle of the Revolution it- 
 self, which had been the indissoluble connection between 
 taxation and representation. It follows as a necessary \ 
 consequence from this, that all just taxation must be pro- 
 portioned to representation ; and here was the first 
 stumbling block of the confederation. Statg_^verei^n- 
 ty, which in the colltsibn of debate had become stiff and 
 intractable, insisted that, in the Congress of the Union, 
 Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Virginia and Dela- 
 
 4 
 
38 
 
 ware, should each have one vote and no more. But 
 when the burdens of the confederacy came to be appor- 
 tioned, this equality could no longer be preserved ; a 
 different proportion became indispensable, and a terri- 
 torial basis was assumed, apportioned to the value of 
 improved land in each State. From the moment that 
 these two questions were thus setded, it might have 
 been foreseen that the confederacy must prove an abor- 
 tion. Inequality and injustice v/ere at its root. It was 
 inconsistent with itself, and the seeds of its speedy dis- 
 solution were sown at its birth. 
 
 But the question of the respective contributions of the 
 several States, brought up another and still more formid- 
 able cause of discord and coiUsion. What were the sev- 
 eral /S/a/es themselves? What was their extent, and 
 where were their respective boundaries 1 They claimed 
 their territory by virtue o^ charters from the British kings, 
 and by cessions from sundry tribes of Indians. But the 
 charters of the kings were grossly inconsistent with one 
 another. The charters had granted lands to several of 
 the States, by hnes of latitude from the Atlantic to the 
 Pacific ocean. Yet by the treaty of peace of February, 
 1763, between Great Britain and France, the King of 
 Great Britain had agreed that the boundary of the Brit- 
 ish territories in North America should be the middle of 
 the river jMississippi, from its source to the river Iber- 
 ville, and thence to the ocean. The British colonial set- 
 tlements had never been extended westward of the Ohio, 
 and when the peace should come to be concluded, it 
 was exceedingly doubtful what western boundary could 
 be obtained from the assent of Great Britain. Besides 
 Avhich, there were claims of Spain, and a system of pol- 
 icy in France, in no wise encouraging to the expectation 
 of an extended western fronUer to the United States. 
 
so 
 
 Here then were collisions of interest between the States 
 narrowly and definitely bounded westward, and the 
 States claiming to the South sea or to the Mississippi, 
 which it was in vain attempted to adjust. In the original 
 draught of the articles of confederation, reported on the 
 twelfth of July, among the powers proposed to be with- 
 in the exclusive right of the United States assembled, 
 were those of "limiting the bounds of those Colonies, 
 which, by charter, or proclamation, or under any pretence, 
 are said to extend to the South sea; and ascertaining 
 those bounds of any other Colony that appear to be in- 
 determinate : assigning territories for new Colonies, either 
 in lands to be thus separated from Colonies, and heretc;- 
 fore purchased or obtained by the crown of Great Brit- 
 ain of the Indians, or hereafter to be purchased or ob- 
 tained from them : disposing of ail such lands for the 
 general benefit of all the United Colonies: ascertaining 
 boundaries to such new Colonies, within which forms oi' 
 government are to be established on the principles of 
 hberty." This had been struck out of the revised arti- 
 cles reported by the committee of the whole. A prop- 
 osition was now made to require of the Legislatures of 
 the several States, a description of their territorial lands, 
 ixnd documentary evidence of their claims, to ascertain' 
 theirboundaries by the articles of the confederation. This 
 was rejected. Another proposition was, to bestowupon 
 Congress the power to ascertain and fix the western 
 boundary of the States claiming to the South sea, and to 
 dispose of the lands beyond this boundary for the bene- 
 fit of the Union. This also was rejected ; as was a sim- 
 ilar proposal with regard to the States claiming to the 
 Mississippi, or to the South sea. 
 
 These were all unavailing efforts to restore to the de- 
 finitive articles of confederation, the provisions concern- 
 
40 
 
 ing the boundaries of the several States which had been 
 reported in the original draught, and struck out of the 
 draught reported by the committee of the whole, on the 
 twentieth of August, 1776. An interval of fourteen 
 months had since elapsed,, which seemed rather to Irmve 
 weakened tlie spirit of unions and to have strength- 
 ened the anti-social prejudices, and the lofty pretensiofis 
 of State sovereignty. The articles containing the grant 
 of powers to Congress^ arid prescribing restrictions upon> 
 those of the States, were fruitful of cojatroversial ques- 
 tions and of litigious passions, which consumed much of 
 the. time of Congress till the fifteenth of November, 1777, 
 when, the articles of canfederation, as finally matured and 
 elaborated, were concluded and sent forth to the State 
 Legislatures for- their adoptiom They were to- take ef- 
 fect only when approved by them all, and ratified with 
 their authority by their Delegates in Congress. It was 
 provided, by one of the articles, that no alteration of 
 them should ever be admitted, unless sanctioned. w.itF^ 
 the same unartimity. There was a solemn promise, in- 
 serted in the concluding artitle-,. that the articles of eon- 
 federation should be inviolably observed by every State,, 
 and that the Union should be perpetual 
 
 The consummation of the triumph of unlimited State 
 sovereignty over the spirit of union, was seen in the 
 transposition of the second and third of the articles re- 
 ported by the committees, and the inverted order q£ 
 their insertion Jn the articles finally adopted. 
 
 The first article in them all gave the name, or as it 
 was at last called, the style, of the confederacy, " The 
 United States of ^mrica:' The name, by which the 
 ! nation has ever since been known, and now illustrious 
 among the nations of the earth. The second article, 
 of the plans reported to the Congress by the original 
 
41 
 
 committee and by the committee of the whole, con- 
 stituted and declared the Union, in the first project 
 commencing with those most affecting and ever-mem- 
 orable words, — "The said Colonies unite them- 
 selves so as never to be divided by any act whatever :" 
 la the project reported by the committee of the whole, 
 these words were struck out, but the article still consti- 
 tuted and declared the Union. The third article con- 
 tained, in both projects, the rights reserved by the re- 
 spective States ; rights of internal legislation and police, 
 in all matters 7iot interfering with the articles of the 
 confederation. 
 
 But on the fifteenth of November, 1777, when the par- 
 tial, exclusive, selfish and jealous spirit of State sove- 
 reignty had been fermenting and fretting over the arti- 
 cles, stirring up all the oppositions of the corporate in- 
 terests and humours of the parties, when the articles 
 came to be concluded, the order of the second and third 
 articles was inverted. The reservation of the rights of 
 the separate States was made to precede the institution 
 of the Union itself. Instead of limiting the reservation 
 to its municipal laws and the regulation and government 
 of their internal police, in all matters 7iot interfering with 
 the articles of the confederation, they ascend the throne 
 of State sovereignty, and make the articles of confedera- 
 tion themselves mere specific exceptions to the general 
 reservation of all the powers of government to them- 
 selves. The article was in these words : " Each State 
 retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and 
 every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this • 
 confederation expressly delegated to the United States 
 in Congress assembled." How different from the spirit 
 of the article, which began, — " The said Colonies unite 
 themselves so as never to be divided by any act what- 
 4* 
 
4i 
 
 ever !^ The institution of the Union was now posfpon--- 
 ed to follow and not to precede the reservations ; and 
 cooled into a mere league of friendship and of mutual 
 defence between the States. More than sixteen months 
 of the time of Congress had been absorbed in the prep- 
 aration of this document. More than three years and 
 four months- passed away before its confirmation by the 
 Legislatures of all the States, and no sooner was it rati-^ 
 fiedj than its utter inefficiency to perform the functions 
 of a g.overame»ty &r even to f»l&l the purposes of a con- 
 federacy, became apparent to all ! In the Declaration of 
 Independence, the members of Congress who signed it 
 had spoken ia the name and by the authority of the Peo- 
 ple of the Colonies. In the articles of confederation they 
 had sunk into Representatives of the separate States, 
 The genius of unlimited State sovereignty had usurped • 
 the powers wtdich belonged only to the People, and the 
 State Legislatures and their Representatives had arro-^ 
 gated to themselves the whole constituent power, while 
 they themselves were Representatives only of fragments 
 of the nation. 
 
 The articles of confederation were satisfactory to no 
 one of the States : they were adopted by many of them, 
 after much procrastination, and with great reluctance. 
 The State of xVIai-yland persisted in withholding her rati- 
 fication, until the question relating to the unsettled lands 
 had been adjusted by cessions of them to the United 
 :States,for the benefit of them all, from the States separ- , 
 ately claiming them to the South sea, or the Mississippi. 
 The ratification of the articles was completed on the first 
 oi March, 1781, and the experiment of a merely confed' 
 crated Union of the thirteen States commenced. It was 
 the statue of Pygmalion before its animation, — beautiful 
 and Ufeless. 
 
43 
 
 And where was the vital spark which was to quicken 
 this marble into life? It was in the Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence. Analyze, at this distance of time, the two 
 documents, with cool and philosophical impartiahty, and 
 you will exchim, — Never, never since the creation of the 
 world, did two state papers, emanating from the same 
 body of men, exhibit more dissimilarity of character, or 
 more conflict of principle! The Declaration, glowing 
 with the spirit of union, speaking with one voice the 
 vindication of one People for the act of separating them- 
 selves from another, and ascending to the First Cause, 
 the dispenser of eternal justice, for the foundation of its 
 reasoning: — The articles of confederation, stamped with 
 the features of contention ; beginning with niggardly res- 
 ervations of corporate rights, and in the grant of powers, 
 seeming to have fallen into the frame of mind described 
 by the sentimental traveller, bargaining for a post chaise, 
 and viewing his conventionist with an eye as if he was 
 going with him to fight a duel \ 
 
 Yet, let us not hastily charge our fathers with incon- 
 sistency for these repugnances between their different 
 works. Let us never forget that the jealousy of power 
 is the watchful handmaid to the spirit of freedom. Let 
 the contemplation of these rugged and narrow passes of 
 the mountains first with so much toil and exertion trav- 
 ersed by them, teach us that the smooth surfaces and 
 rapid railways, which have since been opened to us, ar-e 
 but the means furnished to us of arriving by swifter con- 
 veyance to a more advanced stage of improvement in 
 our condition. Let the obstacles, which they encoun- 
 tered and surmounted, teach us how much easier it is in 
 morals and politics, as well as in natural philosophy and 
 physics, to pull down than to build up, to demolish than 
 to construct ; then, how much more arduous and diffi- 
 cult was their task to form a system of polity for the 
 people whom they ushered into the family of nations. 
 
44 
 
 than to separate them from the parent State ; and lastly, 
 the gratitude due from us to that Being whose provi- 
 dence watched over, protected, and guided our pohtical 
 infancy, and led our ancestors finally to retrace their 
 steps, to correct their errors, and resort to the whole 
 People of the Union for a constitution of government, 
 emanating from themselves, which might reahze that un- 
 ion so feelingly expressed by the first draught of their 
 confederation, so as never to be divided by any act what- 
 ever. 
 
 The origin and history of this Constitution is doubtless 
 familiar to most of my hearers, and should be held in 
 perpetual remembrance by us all. It was the consum- 
 mation of the Declaration of Independence. It has giv- 
 en the sanction of half a century's experience to the 
 principles of that Declaration. The attempt to sanction 
 them by a confederation of sovereign States was made 
 and signally failed. It was five years in coming to an 
 immature birth, and expired after five years of languish- 
 ing and impotent existence. 
 
 On the seventeenth of next September, fifty years 
 will have passed away since the Constitution of the Unit- 
 ed States was presented to the People for their accept- 
 ance. On that day the twenty-fifth biennial Congress, 
 organized by this Constitution, will be in session. And 
 what a happy, what a glorious career have the people 
 passed through in the half century of their and your ex- 
 istence associated under it ! When that Constitution was 
 adopted, the States of which it was composed were thir- 
 teen in number, — their whole population not exceeding 
 three millions and a half of souls ; the extent of terri- 
 tory within their boundary so large that it was befieved 
 too unwueldy to be manageable, even under one federa- 
 tive government, but less than one million of square miles ; 
 without revenue ; encumbered with a burdensome rev- 
 olutionary debt, without means of discharging even the 
 
4^ 
 
 annual interest accruing upon it ; with no manufactures ; 
 with a commerce scarcely less restricted than befoFe the 
 revolutionary war; denied by Spain the privilege of de- 
 scending the Mississippi ; denied by Great Britain the 
 stipulated possession of a Hne of forts on the Canadian 
 frontier; with a disastrous Indian war at the west; with 
 a deep-laid Spanish intrigue with many of our own citi- 
 zens, to dismember the Union, and subject to the do- 
 minion of Spain the whole valley of the Mississippi ; with 
 a Congress, imploring a grant of new powers to enable 
 them to redeem the pubhc faith, answered by a flat re- 
 fusal, evasive conditions, or silent contempt ; with popu- 
 lar insurrection scarcely extinguished in this our own 
 native Commonwealth, and smoking into flame in sever- 
 al others of the States ; with an impotent and despised 
 government ; a distressed, discontented, discordant peo- 
 ple, and the fathers of the revolution burning with shame, 
 and almost sinking into despair of its issue. — Fellow 
 citizens of a later generation ! You, whose lot it has 
 been to be born in happier times ; you, who even now 
 are smarting under a transient cloud intercepting the 
 daz-zling sun-shine of your prosperity ; — think you that 
 the pencil of fancy has been borrowed to deepen the 
 shades of this dark and desolate picture ? Ask of 
 your surviving fathers, cotemporaries of him who now 
 addresses you,-' — ask of them, whose hospitable man- 
 sions often welcomed him to their firesides, when he 
 came in early youth to receive instruction from the gi- 
 gantic intellect and profound learning of a Parsons, — ask 
 of them, if there be any among you that survive, and 
 they will tell you, that, far from being overcharged, the 
 portraiture of that dismal day is only deficient in the faint- 
 ness of its colouring and the lack of energy in the paint- 
 er's hand. Such was the condition of this your beloved 
 country after the close of the revolutionary war, under 
 the blast of the desert, in the form of a confederacy ; 
 
46 
 
 when, wafted, as on the spicy gales of Araby the blest, 
 your Constitution, with Washingtox at its head, 
 
 " Came o'er our ears like the sweet south 
 That breathes upon a bank of violets> 
 I Stealing and giving odour." 
 
 And what, under that Constitution, still the supreme 
 law of the land, is the condition of your country at this 
 hour ? Spare me the unwelcome and painful task of ad- 
 verting to that momentary affliction, visiting you through 
 the errors of your own servants, and the overflowing 
 spring-tides of your fortunes. These afflictions, though 
 not joyous but grievous, are but for a moment, and the 
 remedy for them is in your own hands. But what is 
 the condition of your country, — resting upon foundations, 
 if you retain and transmit to your posterity the spirit of 
 your fathers, firm as the everlasting hills! What, look- 
 ing beyond the mist of a thickened atmosphere, fleeting 
 as the wind, and w^hich the first breath of a zephyr will 
 dispel, — what is the condition of your country ? Is a 
 rapid and steady increase of population, an index to the 
 w^elfare of a nation 7 Your numbers are more than twice 
 doubled in the half century since the Constitution was 
 adopted as your fundamental law\ Would those of you 
 whose theories cling more closely to the federative ele- 
 ment of your government, prefer the multiplication of 
 States, to that of the People, as the standard test of 
 prosperous fortunes 1 The number of your free and in- 
 dependent States has doubled in the same space of half 
 a century, and your own soil is yet teeming with more. 
 Is extent of territory, and the enlargement of borders, a 
 blessing to a nation 7 And are you not surfeited with 
 the aggrandizement of your territory ? Instead of one 
 milhon of square miles, have you not more than two 1 
 Are not Louisiana and both the Floridas yours ? Instead 
 of sharing with Spain and Britain the contested waters 
 of the Mississippi, have you not stretched beyond them 
 
47 
 
 westward, bestrided the summits of the Rocky Moun- 
 tains, and planted your stripes and your stars on the 
 shores of the Pacific ocean 1 And, as if this were not 
 enough to fill the measure of your greatness, is not half 
 Mexico panting for admission to your Union 7 Are not 
 the islands of the Western Hemisphere looking with 
 wistful eyes to a participation of your happiness, and a 
 promise ol your protection ? Have not the holders of 
 the Isthmus of Panama sent messengers of friendly 
 greeting and sohcitation to be received as members of 
 your confederation ? Is not the most imminent of your 
 dangers that of expanding beyond the possibility of cohe- 
 sion, even under one federative governm.ent; — and of 
 tainting your atmosphere with the pestilence of exotic 
 slavery 1 
 
 Are the blessings of good government manifested by 
 the enjoyment of liberty, by the security of property, by 
 the freedom of thought, of speech, of action, pervading 
 every portion of the community ? Appeal to your own 
 experience, my fellow citizens ; and, after answering with- 
 out hesitation or doubt, afllrmatively, all these enquiries, 
 savethelast, — if, when you come to them, you pause before 
 you answer, — if, within the last five or seven years of your 
 history, ungracious recollections of untoward events crcAvd 
 upon your memory, and grate upon the feelings appro- 
 priate to this consecrated day, — let them not disturb the 
 serenity of your enjoyments, or interrupt the harmiOny 
 of that mutual gratulation, in which you may yet all cor- 
 dially join. But fix well in your minds, what were the 
 principles first proclaimed by your forefathers, as the 
 only foundations of lawful government upon earth. — 
 Postpone the conclusion, of their appHcation to the re- 
 quirements of your own duties, till to-morrow; — hut then 
 fail not to remember the warnings, while reaping in 
 peace and pleasantness tlie rewards, of this happy day. 
 
 And this, mv fellow citizens, or I have mistaken the 
 
48 
 
 motives by which you have been actuated, is the pur- 
 pose for w^hich you are here assembled. It is to enjoy 
 the bounties of heaven for the past, and to prepare for 
 the duties of the future. It is to review the principles 
 proclaimed by the founders of your empire ; to examine 
 what has been their operation upon your own destinies, 
 and upon the history of mankind ; to scrutinize with an 
 observing eye, and a cool, deliberate judgment, your 
 condition at this day ; to compare it with that of your 
 fathers on the day which you propose to commemorate ; 
 and to discern what portion of their principles has been 
 retained inviolate, — what portion of them heis been weak- 
 ened, impaired, or abandoned ; and what portion of them 
 it is your first of duties to retain, to preserve, to redeem, 
 to transmit to your offspring, to be cherished, maintain- 
 ed, and transmitted to their posterity of unnumbered 
 ages to come. 
 
 We have consulted the records of the past, and I 
 have appealed to your consciousness of the present ; 
 and what is the sound, w^hich they send forth to all the 
 echoes of futurity, but Union ; — Union as one People, — 
 Union so as to be divided by no act whatever. We have 
 a sound of modern days, — could it have come from an 
 American voice t — that the value of the Union is to be 
 calculated ! — Calculated? By what system of Arithme- 
 tic ? By w^hat rule of proportion ? Calculate the value 
 of maternal tenderness and of filial affection ; calculate 
 the value of nuptial vow^s, of compassion to human 
 suffering, of sym.pathy with afBietion^ of piety to God, 
 and of charity to man ; calculate the value of all that is 
 precious to the heart, and all that is binding upoii the 
 soul ; and then you w^ill have the elements w^ith w hich 
 to calculate the value of the Union. But if cotton or 
 tobacco, rocks cr ice, metallic money or mimic paper, 
 are to furnish the measure, the stamp act was the inven- 
 tiin of a calculating statesman. 
 
49 
 
 *'' Great financier ! stupendous calculator /" 
 And what the resuft of his system of computation was 
 to the treasury of Great Britain, that will be the final 
 settlement of every member of this community, who cal- 
 culates, with the primary numbers of State sovereignty 
 and nullification, the value of the Union. 
 
 Our government is a comphcated machine. We hold 
 for an inviolable first principle, that the People are the 
 ^s^ource of all lawful authority upon earth. But we have 
 one People to be governed by a legislative representa- 
 tion of fifteen millions of souls, and twenty -six Peoples, 
 of numbers varying from less than one hundred thousand 
 to more than two millions, governed for their internal 
 police by legislative and executive magistrates of their 
 own choice, and by laws of their own enacting ; 
 and all forming in the aggregate the one People, as which 
 they are known to the other nations of the civihzed 
 world. We have twenty-six States, with governments 
 administered by these separate Legislatures and Execu- 
 tive Chiefs, and represented by equal numbers in the 
 general Senate of the nation. This organization is an 
 anomaly in the history of the world. It is that, which 
 distinguishes us from all other nations ancient and mod- 
 trn ; from the simple monarchies and republics of Eu- 
 rope ; and from all the confederacies, which have figured 
 in any age upon the face of the globe. The seeds oi 
 this complicated machine, were all sown in the Declara- 
 tion of Independence ; and their fruits can never be erad- 
 icated but by the dissolution of the Union. The calcu- 
 lators of the value of the Union, who would palm^ upon 
 jou, in the place pf this subhme invention, a mere clus- 
 ter of sovereign confederated States, do bulj^Qw the wind 
 to reap the whirlwind. One lamentable evidence of 
 de«p degeneracy from the spirit of the Declaration of 
 
50 
 
 Independence, is the countenance, which has been oeea- 
 sionally given, in various parts of the Union, to this doc- 
 trine ; but it is consolatory to know that, whenever it has 
 been distinctly disclosed to the people, it has been re- 
 jected by them with pointed reprobation. It has, indeed, 
 presented itself in its most malignant form in that por- 
 tion of the Union, the civil institutions of w^hich are most 
 infected with the gangrene of slavery. The inconsis- 
 tency of the institution of domestic slavery with the 
 principles of the Declaration of Independence, was seen 
 and lamented by all the southern patriots of the Revolu- 
 tion ; by no one with deeper and more unalterable con- 
 viction, than by the author of the Declaration himself. No 
 charge of insincerity or hypocrisy ^an be fairly laid to their 
 charge. Never from their Kps w^as heard one syllable of 
 attempt to justify the institution of slavery. They uni- 
 versally considered it as a reproach fastened upon them 
 by the unnatural step-mother country, and they saw that 
 before the principles of the Declaration of Independenae, 
 slavery, in common with every other mode of oppres- 
 sion, wT.s destined sooner or later to be banished from the 
 earth. Such was the undoubting conviction of Jefferson 
 to his dying day. In the Mem.oir of his Life, written at 
 the age of seventy-seven, he gave to his countrymen the 
 solemn and emphatic warning, that the day was not dis- 
 tant when they must hear and adopt the general eman- 
 cipation of their slaves. "Nothing is more certainly 
 written," said he, " in the book of fate, than that these 
 people are to be free." * My countrymen ! it is WTitten 
 in a better volume than the book of fate ; it is written in 
 the laws of Nature and of Nature's God. 
 
 We are now told, indeed, by the learned doctors of the 
 nullification school, that colour operates as a forfeiture of 
 
 * Jefferson's Writings, vol. 1, p. 40. 
 
61 
 
 the rights of human nature ; that a dark skin turns a man 
 into a chattel ; that crispy hair transforms a human be- 
 ing into a four-footed beast. The master-priest informs 
 you, that slavery is consecrated and sanctified by the 
 Holy Scriptures oii the old and new Testament ; that 
 Ham ^sls the father of Canaan, and that all his postei'ity 
 vver# doomed by his own father to be hewers of wooil 
 and drawers oi^ water to the descendants of Shem and 
 Japhet ; that the native Americans of African descent 
 are the children of Ham, with the curse of Noah still 
 fastened upon them ; and the native Americans of Europ- 
 Qftn descent are children of Japhet, pure Anglo-Saxon 
 blood, born to command, ^nd to live by the sweat of an- 
 other's brow. The master-philosopher teaches you that 
 slavery is no curse, but a blessing 1 — that Providence — 
 Providence] has so ordered it that this country ^ould 
 be inhabited by two races of men, one born to wield the 
 scourge, and the other to bear the record of its stripes 
 upon his back, one to earn through a toilsome hfe the 
 other's bread, and to feed him on a bed of roses ; that 
 slavery is the guardian ^nd promoter of wisdom and 
 virtue ; that the slave, by labouring for another's eljoy- 
 ment, learns disinterestedness, and humility, and to melt 
 with tenderness and affection for his master ; that the 
 master, nurtured, clothed, and sheltered by another's 
 toils, learns to be generous and grateful to the slave, and 
 sometimes to feel for him as a father for his child ; that, 
 released from the necessity of supplying his own wants, 
 he acquires opportunity of leisure to improve his mind, 
 to purify his heart, to cultivate his taste ; that he has time 
 on his hands to plunge into the depths of philosophy, 
 and to soar to the clear empyrean of seraphic morality. 
 The master-statesman, — ay, the statesman in the land 
 pf the Declaration of Independence, — in the halls of na- 
 
52 
 
 tional legislation, with the muse of history recording his 
 words as they drop from his lips, — with the colossal fig- 
 ure of American liberty, leaning on a column entwined 
 with the emblem of eternity, over his head, — with the 
 forms of Washington and La Fayette, speaking to him 
 from the canvass,^ — turns to the image of the fathe^of hb 
 country,, and forgetting that the last act of his life was to 
 emancipate Ms slaves, to bolster the cause of slav*ery 
 says, — That man was a slaveholder. 
 
 My countrymen ! these are the tenets of the modern 
 nullification, school Can you wonder that they shrink 
 from the light of free discussion % That they skulk from 
 the grasp of freedom and of truth ? Is there among you 
 one who hears me, soHcitous above all things for the 
 preservation of the Union so truly dear to us, — of that 
 Union, proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence,,: — 
 of that Union, never to be divided by any act whatever, — 
 and who dreads that the discussion of the merits of 
 slavery will endanger the continuance of the Union? 
 Let him discard his terrors, and be assured that they are 
 no other than the phantom fears of nullification ; that 
 while doctrines like these are taught in her schools of 
 philosophy, preached in her pulpits, and avowed in her 
 legislative councils, the free and unrestrained discussion 
 of the rights and wrongs of slavery, far from endangering: 
 the union of these States, is the only condition upon 
 w^hich that union can be preserved and perpetuated. 
 What ! Are you to be told with one breath, that the tran-^ 
 scendent glory of this day consists in the proclamation 
 that all lawful government is founded on the unalienable 
 rights of man, and with the next breath that you must 
 not whisper this truth to the winds, lest they should 
 taint the atmosphere with freedom, and kindle the flame 
 of insun^ection ? Are you to bless the earth beneath 
 
63 
 
 your feet, because she spurns the footstep of a slave, 
 and then to choke the utterance of your voice, lest the 
 sound of hberty should be re-echoed from the palmetto 
 groves, mingled with the discordant notes of disunion ? 
 No ! no ! Freedom of speech is the only safety valve, 
 which, under the high pressure ot slavery, can preserve 
 your political boiler from a fearlul and fatal explosion. 
 Let it be admitted that slavery is an institution of inter- 
 nal police, exclusively subject to the separate jurisdic- 
 tion of the States where it is chc^rished as a blessing, or 
 tolerated as an evil as yet irremediable^ But let that 
 slavery^ which intrenches herself within the wdls of her 
 own impregnable fortress, not sally forth to conquest 
 over the domain of freedom. Intrude not beyond the 
 hallowed bounds of oppression ; but if you have by sol- 
 emn compact doomed your ears to hear the distant 
 clanking of the chain, let not the fetters of the slave be 
 forged afresh upon your ow^n soil ; fai; less permit them 
 to be rivetted upon your own feet. Quench not the 
 spirit of freedom. Let it go forth,— not in the panoply 
 of fleshly wisdom, but with the promise of peace, and 
 the voice of persuasion, clad in the whole armour of 
 truth,— conquering and to conquer. 
 
 Friends and fellow citizens ! I speak to you with the 
 voice as of one risen from the dead. Were I now, as I 
 shortly must be, cold in my grave, and could the sepul- 
 chre unbar lis gates, and open to me a passage to this 
 de^k, devoted to the wor*?hip of almighty God, I would 
 repeat the question with which this discourse w^as in- 
 troduced : — " Why are you assembled in this place" ? — 
 and one of you would answer me for all, — Because the 
 PecJaration of Independence, with the voice of an angel /,- 
 from heaven, " put to his mouth, the sounding alchemy," 
 ^nd proclaimed universal emancipation upon earth ! It 
 
 5^ 
 
54 
 
 is not the separation of your forefathers from their 
 kindred race beyond the Atlantic tide. It is not the 
 union of thirteen British Colonies into one People and 
 the entrance of that People upon the theatre, where king- 
 doms, and empires, and nations are the persons of the 
 drama. It is not that this is the birth-day of the North 
 American Union, the last and noblest offspring of time. 
 It is that the first words uttered by the Genius of our 
 country, in announcing his existence to the world of 
 mankind, was, — Freedom to the slave ! Liberty to the 
 captives i Redemption ! redemption forever to the race 
 of man,, from, the yoke of oppression ! It is not the work 
 of a day; it is not the labour of an age ; it is not the con- 
 summation of a century, that we are assenibled to com- 
 memorate. It is the emancipation of our race. Itiithe^ 
 emancipation of man from the thraldom'of man ! 
 
 And is this the language of enthusiasm ? The di^eam of 
 a distempered fancy ? Is it not rather the voice of in- 
 spirationT The language of holy writ 7 Why is it that 
 the Scriptujpi^s^, both of the old and new Covenant, teaaii^ 
 you upon every page to look forward to the time, whei> 
 the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall 
 lie down Vv ith the kid 7 Why is it that six hundred years 
 before the birth of t;he Redeemer, the subiimest of proph- 
 ets, with lips touched by the hallowed fire from the hand 
 of God, spake and said, — " The Spirit of the Lord God is 
 upon me ; because the Lord hath anointed me to preacli 
 good tidings unto the meek ; he hath setit me to bind up 
 the broken hearted^ to proclaim liber ly to the captives, 
 nnd the opening of the prison to them that are bound T*^ 
 And why is it, tlvdt, at the first dawn of the fulfilment of 
 tliis prophesy, — at the birth-day of the Saviour in the 
 lowest condition of human existence, --= the angel of the 
 
 * laaiah. 6 1 ' K 
 
55 
 
 Lord came in a flood of supernatural light upon the 
 shepherds, witnesses of the scene and said, — Fear not, 
 for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy which 
 5hall be to all people ? Why is it, that there was Sud- 
 denly with that angel, a multitude of the heavenly 
 hosts, praising God, and saying, — Glory to God in 
 the highest, and on earth peace, — good will towai?d 
 men?* 
 
 What are the good tidings of great joy, which shall be 
 to all people ? The prophet had told you six hundred 
 years before, — liberty to the captives^ — the opening of the 
 prison to them that are bound. — The multitude of the 
 heavenly host pronounced the conclusion, to be 
 •houted hereafter by the universal choir of all intelligent 
 created beings, — Glory to God in the highest; and on 
 earth peace, — good will toward men. 
 
 Fellow citizens ! fellow christians ! fellow men ! Am 
 I speaking to believers in the gospel of peace ? To oth- 
 ers, I am aware that the capacities of man for self or so- 
 cial improvement are subjects of distrust, or of derision. 
 The sincere believer receives the rapturous promises of 
 the future improvement of his kind, with humble hope 
 smd cheering confidence of their final fulfilment. He re- 
 ceives them too, with the admonition of God to his con- 
 science, to contribute himself, by all the aspirations of his 
 heart, and all the faculties of his soul, to their accom- 
 plishment. Tell not him of impossibilities, when human 
 improvement is the theme. Nothing can be impossible, 
 which may be effected by human will. See what Aa,f 
 been efl^ected ! An attentive r<3ader of the history of 
 mankind, whether in the words of inspiradon, or in ths 
 records of antiquity, or in the memory of his own expe- 
 rience, must perceive that the gradual improvement of 
 
 ♦ Luke^ 2, 9, 10, 13, H, 
 
56 
 
 his own condition upon earth is the inextinguishable 
 mark of distinction between the animal man, and every 
 o^her animated being, with the innumerable multitudes of 
 which every element of this sublunary globe is peopled. 
 And yet, from the earliest records of time, this animal 
 the only one in the visible creation, who preys upon his 
 kind. The savage man destroys and devours his cap- 
 tive foe. The partially civihzed man spares his hfe, but 
 makes him his slave. In the progress of civiUzation, 
 both the life and liberty of the enemy vanquished or dis- 
 armed are spared ; ransoms for prisoners are given and 
 received. Progressing still in the paths to perpeti*al 
 peace, exchanges are established, and restore the 
 prisoner of war to his country and to the enjoyment of 
 all his rights of property and of person. A custom, 
 first introduced by mutual special convention, grows into 
 a settled rule of the laws of nations, that persons occu- 
 pied exclusively upon the arts of peace, shall with their 
 property remain wholly unmolested in the conflicts of 
 nations by arms. We ourselves have been bound by 
 solemn engagements with one of the most warlike na- 
 tions of Europe, to observe this rule, even in the utmost 
 extremes of war ; and in one of the most merciless 
 periods of modern times, I have seen, towards the close 
 o^ the last century, three members of the Society of 
 Friends, with Barclay's Apology and Penn's Maxinw^ 
 m their hands, pass, peaceful travellers through the em- 
 battled hosts of France and Britain, unharmed, and 
 unmolested, as the three children of Israel in the f^irnaee 
 of Nebuchadnezzar. 
 
 War, then, by the common consent and mere wiH of 
 « vilized man, has not only been divest#d of its most atro- 
 cious cruelties, but for multitudes, growing multitude* 
 Cff individuals, has already been and is abolished. Why 
 
67 
 
 should it not be abolished for all ? Let it be impressed 
 upon the heart of every one of you, — impress it upon 
 the minds of your children, that this, total aboUtion of 
 wai' upon earth, is an improvement in the condition of 
 man, entirely dependant on his own will. He cannot 
 repeal or change the laws of physical nature. He can- 
 not redeem Iwmself from ti>e ills that flesh is heir to ; 
 but the ills of war and slavery are all of his own crea- 
 tion. He has but to will, and he effects the cessation of 
 them altogether. 
 
 The improvements in the condition of mankind upon 
 earth have been achieved from time to time by slow 
 progression, sometimes retarded, by long stationary pe- 
 riods, and even by retrograde movements toward?? 
 primidve barbarism. The invention of the alphabet 
 and of printing are separated from each other by an 
 interval of more than three thousand years. The art of 
 navigation loses its origin in the darknessi of antiquity ; 
 but the polarity of the magnet was yet undiscovered 
 in the tw^elfth century of the Chrisdan era ; nor, when 
 discovered, was it till three centuries later, that it dis- 
 dosed to the European man, the continents of North 
 and South America. The discovery of the laws of 
 gravitadon, and the still more recent appUcadon of the 
 power of steam, have made large additions to the phys- 
 ical powers of man ; and the invendons of machinery, 
 within our own memory, have multiplied a thousand fold 
 the capacities of improvement practicable by the agency 
 of a ^gle hand. 
 
 It is surely in the order of nature, as well as in the pro- 
 mises of inspiradon, that the moral improvement in ih« 
 condition of man, should keep pace with the multiplica- 
 tion of his physical capacities, comforts, and enjoyments. 
 The mind, while exerUng its energies in the pursuit of bap- 
 
58 
 
 piness upon matter, cannot remain inactive or powerless 
 to operate upon itself. The mind of the mariner, float- 
 ing upoa the ocean, dives to the bottom of the deep, and 
 ascends to the luminaries of the skies. The useful man- 
 ufactures exercise and sharpen the ingenuity of the 
 workman ; the libej^al sciences absorb the silent medi- 
 tations of the student ; the elegant arts sotten the tem- 
 per and refine the taste of the artist ; and all in concert 
 contribute to the expansion of the intellect and the puri- 
 fication of the moral sense of our species. But man is 
 a gregarious animal. Assoc-iation is the second law of 
 his nature, as self-preservation is the first. The most 
 pressing want of association is government, and the gov- 
 e«*nm€nt of nature is the ] atriarchal law, the authority 
 oi' the parent over his children. With the division of 
 families commences the conflict of interests. AvaricH3 
 and ambition, jealousy and envy, take possession of the 
 human heart and kindle the flames of war. Then it is 
 that the laws of Nature become perverted, and the rul- 
 ing passion of man is the destruction of his fellow-crea- 
 ture, man. This is the origin and the character of war, 
 in the first stages of human societies. But war, waged 
 by communities, requires a leader with absolute and un- 
 controuled command ; and hence it is that monarchy 
 and war have one and the same origin, and Nimrod, the 
 mighty hunter before the Lord, was the first king and 
 the first conqueror upon the record of time. 
 
 " A mighty hunter, and hii prey was man." 
 
 In process of time, when the passions of hatred, arid fear, 
 and revenge, have been glutted with the destruction of 
 vanquished enemies, — when mercy claims her tribute 
 from the satiated yet unsatisfied heart, and cupidity 
 whispers that the fife of the captive may be turned to 
 useful account to the victor, — the practice of sparing hi* 
 
59 
 
 life on condition of his submission to perpetual slavery 
 was introduced, and that was the condition of the Asiatic 
 nations, and among them of the ki»gdoms of Israel and 
 of Judah, when the prophesies of Isaiah were delivered. 
 Then it was that this further great improvement in the 
 condition of mankind was announced by the burning lips 
 of the prophet. Then it was that the voice oommis- 
 sioned from Heaven proclaimed good tidings to the 
 meek, mercy to the afflicted, liberty to the captives, 
 and the opening of the prison to them that are bound. 
 
 It is generally admitted by Christians of all denomin- 
 ations, that the fulfilment of this prophesy commenced at 
 the birth of the Redeemer, six hundred years after it 
 was promulgated. That it did so commence was ex- 
 pressly affirmed by Jesus himself, who, on his appear- 
 ance in his missionary character at Nazareth, we are told 
 by the gospel of Luke, went into the synagogue on the 
 sabbath-day, and st©od up to read. And there was 
 delivered to him the book ol the prophet Isaiah. And 
 when he had opened the book, he found this very pas- 
 sage which I have cited. " The Spirit of the Lord God 
 is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me to 
 preach good tidings unto the meek ; he hath sent me to 
 biiid up the broken hearted ; to proclawi liberty to the 
 captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are 
 bound ! And he closed the book, and gave it again to 
 the minister, and sat down."* 
 
 This was the deliberate declaration of the earthly ob- 
 ject of his mission. He merely read the passage from 
 the b©ok of Isaiah. He returned the book to the min- 
 ister, and, without application of what he had read, sat 
 down. But that passage had been written six hundred 
 years before. It was universally understood to refer to 
 the expected Messiah. With what astonishment then 
 must the worshippers in the synagogue of Nazareth 
 
 * Luke, 4: 17, 18,20,21. 
 
60 
 
 have seen him, an unknown stranger, in the prime of 
 manhood, stand up to read ; on receiving the book, de- 
 hberately select and read that particular passage of the 
 prophet ; and without another word, close the volume, 
 return it to the minister, and sit down ! The historian 
 adds, " and the eyes of all them that were in the syna- 
 gogue, w^ere fastened on him. And he began to say 
 unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your 
 ears'^ 
 
 The advent of the Messiah, so long expected, was 
 tlien self- declared. That day was that scripture fulfilled 
 in their ears. They had heard him, at once reading 
 from the book of the prophet, and speaking in the first 
 person, declaring that the Spirit of the Lord God was 
 upon himself. They heard him give a reason for this 
 effluence of the Spirit of God upon him ; hecaitse the 
 Lord had anointed him to preach good tidings to the 
 meek. Th&y had i\eard him expressly affirm that the 
 Lord had sent him to bind up the broken hearted ; to 
 proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the 
 prison to them that are bound. The prophesy will 
 therefore be fulfilled, not only in the ears, but in the 
 will and in the practice, of mankind. But how many • 
 generations of men, how many ages of time, will pass 
 away before its entire and final fulfilment? Alas ! 
 more than eighteen hundred years have passed away 
 since the fulfilment of the t scripture, which announced 
 the advent of the Saviour, and the blessed object of 
 his mission. How long — Oh! how long will it be be- 
 fore that object itself shall be accompUshed ? Not yel 
 are w^e permitted to go out with joy, and to be led 
 forth with peace. Not yet shall the mountains and the 
 hills break forth before us into singing, and all the trees 
 of the field clap their hands. Not yet shall the fir- 
 tree Gome up instead of the thorn, nor the myrtle -tin^e 
 instead of the brier. But let no one despair of tl>e 
 
61 
 
 final accomplishment of the whole prophesy. Still 
 ahdH it be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting 
 sign that shall not be cut off.^' The prediction of the 
 prophet, the self- declaration of the Messiah, and his 
 annunciation of the objects of his mission, have been 
 and are fulfilled, so far as depended upon his own 
 agency. He declared himself anointed to preach good 
 tidings to the meek ; and faithfully was that mission 
 performed. He declared himself sent to bind up the 
 broken hearted ; and this, too, how faithfully has it been 
 performed ! Yes, through all ages since his appearance 
 upon earth, he has preached, and yet preaches, good 
 tidings to the meek. He has bound up, he yet binds 
 up the broken hearted. ^ He said he was sent to pro- 
 claim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the 
 prison doors to them that are bound. But the execu- 
 tion of that promise was entrusted to the will of man. 
 Twenty centuries have nearly passed away, and it is yet 
 to be performed. But let no one surrender his Chris- 
 tian faith, that the Lord of creation will, in his own good 
 time, reaUze a declaration made in his name, — made in 
 words such as were never uttered by the uninspired lips 
 of man, — in words w^orthy of omnipotence. The pro- 
 gress of the accomplishment of the prophesy is slow.- 
 It has baffled the hopes, and disappointed the wishes, of 
 generation after generation of men. Yet, observe well 
 the history of the human family since the birth of the 
 Saviour, and you will see great, remarkable, and pro- 
 gressive approximations tow^ards it. Such is the preva- 
 lence, over so large a portion of the race of man, of the 
 doctrines promulgated by Jesus and his apostles, — les- 
 sons of peace, of benevolence, of meekness, of brotherly 
 love, of charity, — all utterly incompatible with the fero- 
 cious spirit of slavery. Such is the total extirpation of 
 the licentious and romantic religion of the heathen world. 
 
 ^ Isaiah, 55 : V2, If^. 
 
62 
 
 Sueh it the incontrovertible decline and ap^^roaching 
 dissolution of the sensual and sanguinary religion of Ma- 
 hornet Such is the general substitution of the Chris- 
 /tian faith for the Jewish dispensadon of the Levitical 
 law. Such is the modern system of the European law 
 of nations, founded upon the laws of Nature, which is 
 gradually reducing the intercourse between sovereign 
 states to an authoritative code of international law. 
 Such is the wider and wider expansion of public opinion, 
 already commensurate with the faith of Christendom ; 
 holding emperors, and kings, and pontiffs, and republics, 
 responsible before its tribunals, and recalKng them from 
 all injustice and all oppression to the standard maxims of 
 Christian benevolence and mercy, always animated with 
 the community of principles promulgated by the Gospel, 
 and armed with a two edged sword, more rapid and con^ 
 spuming than the thunder bolt, by the invention of printing. 
 
 But of all the events tending to the blessed accom- 
 plishment of the prophesy so often repeated in the book 
 of Isaiah, and re-proclaimed by the multitude of the 
 heavenly host at the birth of the Saviour, there is not 
 one that can claim, since the propagation of the Chris- 
 tian faith, a tenth, nay a hundredth part of the influence 
 of the resolution, adopted on the second day of July, 
 1776, and promulgated to the world, in the Declaration 
 of Independence, on the fourth of that month, of which 
 this is the sixty-first anniversary. And to prove this 
 has been the theme of my discourse. 
 
 And now, friends and fellow citizens, what are the 
 duties thence resulting to yourselves 1 Need I remind 
 you of them ? You feel that they are not to waste in 
 idle festivity the hours of this day, — to your fathers, 
 when they issued their decree, the most solemn hours 
 of their lives. It is because this day is consecrated to 
 the cause of human liberty, that you are here assembled ^ 
 and if the connection of that cause, with the fulfilment 
 
63 
 
 of those dear, speGitis predictions of the greatest of the 
 Hebrew prophets, re-announced and repeated by the 
 unnumbered voices of the li?eavenly host, at the birth of 
 the Saviour, has not heretofore been traced an4 exhibit- 
 ed in the celebrations of this day, may I not hope for 
 your indulgence in presenting to you a new ray of giory 
 in the halo that surrounds the memory of the day o( 
 your national independence 7 Yes ; from that day forth 
 shall the nations of the earth hereafter say, wiih the 
 prophet, — "How beautiful Hpon the mountaiiis are the 
 feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth 
 peace !"* " From that day forth shall they exclaim, 
 Sing, O heavens, and be joyful, O earth ; and break forth 
 into singing, O mountains ! for the Lord hath comforted 
 his people, and will have mercy uppn his afflicted."t 
 From that day forth, to the question, — " Shall the prey be 
 taken from the mighty, or the lawful captive be deUver- 
 edi" — shall be returned the answer of the prophet, — r«But 
 thussaith the Lord,— Even the captives of the mighty 
 shall be taken away, and the prey of the terrible shall 
 be deliverj^; for I will contend with him that contends 
 with thee, and I will save thy children."—" From that 
 •day forth, shall they say, commenced the opening of the 
 last seal of prophetic felicity to the race of man upon 
 earth, when the Lord God shall judge among the na- 
 tions, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat 
 dieir swords into ploughs-hares, and their spears into 
 pruning hooks ; nation shall not lift up sword against na- 
 tion, neither shall they learn war any more."t 
 
 My countrymen ! I w^ould anxiously desire, and with 
 a deep sense of responsibility, bearing upon myself and 
 upon you, to speak to the hearts of you all Are there 
 among you those, doubtful of the hopes or distrustful of 
 the promises of the Gospel 1 Are there among you tliose, 
 who disbelieve them altogether? Bear with me one 
 
 * Isaiah, 52 : 7. t Isaiah, 49 ; 13, 24, 25. J lefliah, 2, 4. 
 
64 
 
 moment longer. Let us admit, for a moment, that the 
 prophesies of Isaiah have no reference to the advent of 
 the Saviour ; — let us admit that the passage in the Gos- 
 pel of Luke, in which he so directly makes the applica- 
 tion of this particular prophesy to himself, is an interpola- 
 tion ; — go further, and if, without losing your reverence 
 for the God to whom your fathers, in their Declaration 
 of Independence, made their appeal, you can shake off 
 all belief, both of the prophesies and revelations of the 
 Scriptures ; — suppose them all to be fables of human in- 
 vention ; yet say with me, that thousands of years have 
 passed away since these volumes were composed, and 
 have been believed by the most enlightened of mankind 
 as the oracles of truth ; — say, that they contain the high 
 and cheering promise, as from the voice of God himself, 
 of that specific future improvement in the condition of 
 man, which consists in the extirpation of slavery and war 
 from the face of the earth. Sweep from the pages of 
 history all the testimonies of the Scriptures, and believe 
 no more in the prophesies of Isaiah, than in those of the 
 Cumaean sybil ; but acknowledge that in both there is 
 shadowed forth a future improvement in the condition of 
 our race, — an improvement of good tidings to the meek; 
 of comfort to the broken hearted ; of dehverance to the 
 captives ; of the opening of the prison to them that are 
 bound. Turn then your faces and raise your hands to 
 God, and pray that, in the merciful dispensations of his 
 providence, he would hasten that happy time. Turn to 
 yourselves, and, in the Declaration of Independence of 
 your fathers, read the command to you, by the unremit- 
 ting exercise of your highest energies, to hasten, your- 
 selves, its consummation ! 
 
APPENDIX 
 
 On the arrival of Mr. Adams in Newbury, on the day pre- 
 vious to the celebration, he was met by the Committee of 
 Arrangements, accompanied by a large body of the citizens 
 of Newbury and Newburyport, in behalf of whom he was 
 addressed by Samuel T. Deford, Esq. as Chairman of 
 the Committee of Arrangements, to the following effect: — 
 
 Sir, — In behalf of the citizens of Newburyport, and at 
 the request, also, of the municipal authorities of the ancient town of 
 Newbury, I congratulate you on your safe arrival amongst us. 
 You see, in the glad countenances around you, a proof of the joy 
 you confer upon your friends, who are present on this occasion, 
 and also evidence of anticipated happiness, when they will soon 
 behold you surrounded by numerous friends, who are impatient 
 to greet you on your entrance into Newburyport. 
 
 To one, who, like yourself, has resided in early life amid these 
 scenes, and those which you are now again about to witness after 
 an absence of many years, — the recollection of incidents that 
 may have laid their impressions too deep in your memory even 
 now to be forgotten, — the remembrance of friends and acquaint- 
 ances, who were of those days, but who now arc passed away, — 
 the joys and the sorrows that may crowd upon your feelings on 
 recurring to that period, — will find response in the liearts of 
 many, who, as I have said before, are ready to greet you- 
 
66 
 
 Our friends may die, and those we love may leave us ; but still 
 our fields are green and beautiful ; and the Old Town hills will 
 yet endure ; and the Merrimack, free and fair, rolls on its wont- 
 ed course, bearing its tribute of waters to the Ocean, as you may 
 almost see but yonder, — to that Ocean, for whose rights of navi- 
 gation and for whose free use your country owes you so much. 
 
 I again present to you the cordial welcome of your numerous 
 friends, in whose behalf I act. 
 
 To which IMr Adams replied as follows: — 
 
 Mr, Chairman — Gentlemen of the Committee of Ar- 
 rangements: — When the heart is full, the power of expression 
 is often found to fail, under the weight of feelings too intense to 
 find- utterance in words. So it is with me at this moment ; and 
 if I am unable to express to you the sensibility with which I am 
 affected, by the kindness \yith which the citizens of Newbury- 
 j3ort, and you in their behalf, are pleased to welcome me to this 
 place, endeared to me by the indelible impressions of early 
 jouth, but from which the destinies of a long and wandering life 
 have since kept me many years removed, I pray you to be asaur- 
 ed that it is not the deep feeling of gratitude, but the power to 
 express it, that is wanting. 
 
 The present season completes fifty years, since I came as a 
 student at law, to reside for a term of three years at Newbury- 
 port. The beautiful natural scenery around me is fami4iar to my 
 memory now, as it was to my frequent visitation then, — The face 
 of nature has so little changed, that, standing on this spot, I 
 seem to fill the long interval of time since elapsed, as were it 
 t)ut one day ; — but I look around me, and the faces are no lon- 
 ger the same. 
 
 Yet, this numerous assemblage of citizens, yon cavalcade of 
 youthful horsemen, those cheerful and lively countenances of 
 children before us, most forcibly remind me of a similar scene, 
 of which, during my residence at Newburyporl, I was on the 
 same spot a witness, and a participatpr ; — I mean, the reception 
 of the first President of the United States, upon his visit, on the 
 first year of his Presidency, to this place. As an inhabitant of 
 Newbury port, I was one of those who then greeted him with a 
 hearty welcome ; and nothing is more deeply fixed in my memory 
 .than the procession of children of both sexes, through which he 
 passed, upon his entrance into thp town. 
 
67 
 
 How naturally the question arises to my mind, where are now 
 those children ? And how afiecting is the thought, surely more 
 than a conjecture, that I see before me the representatives of 
 many of them in their grand-children, now in my eye. Little did 
 I then imagine that the day would come, when I should witness 
 so delightful a repetition of the scene. 
 
 Gentlemen, I can but repeat the request, that if I am unable 
 to express, in adequate language, my sense of the kindness of the 
 citizens of Newburyport on the present occasion, you would at- 
 tribute the deficiency, not to the emotions of the heart, but to 
 the utterance of them in words ; and if, as you have been pleased 
 to intimate, it has been, in the course of my public life, in any 
 station which I have occupied, my good fortune to render to the 
 inhabitants of Newburyport, or to any one of them any accepta- 
 ble service, their recollection of it is more than an adequate re- 
 ward to me, and could my most earnest wishes be realized, they 
 would be to have multiplied such services an hundred and a thou- 
 sand fold. 
 
 Letter addressed by Mr Adams to the Chairman of the Com- 
 mittee of Arrangements: 
 
 QuiNCY, July 17th, 1837. 
 
 Dear Sir, — I enclose herewith the manuscript of the Ora- 
 tion, prepared for delivery on the 4th instant, at Newburyport, 
 in compliance with the invitation of the inhabitants of that town. 
 The parts of it, omitted in the delivery, are pencil marked in the 
 margin ; the omissions were for the single purpose of sparing the 
 time and patience of my respected auditory. The omitted parts 
 are all cumulative illustrations of the double argument of the 
 Discourse, — the principle of perpetual Union, inculcated by the 
 Declaration of Independence, and the inseparable connection of 
 the doctrines promulgated by that paper, with the progress and 
 final consummation of the ancient prophesies and gospel promises 
 of the Christian faith. The publication of the whole would be 
 most satisfactory to me; but if the Committee of Arrangements 
 would prefer the publication of only the parts delivered, the pen- 
 cil marks will indicate them to the printer. I place the whole at 
 your disposal. 
 
6S 
 
 1 shall, ibi Ihe remainder of my days, consider this visit to 
 Newburyport as one of the most memorable incidents of my life. 
 The mere circumstance of revisiting, after an interval of fifty 
 years, the scene of my abode, at the time of life at once of the 
 expansion of the mind, and of the deepest impressions upon the 
 heart, was itself inexpressibly interesting. The kindness and 
 cordiality of your reception, so congenial to that which I had ev- 
 er experienced from the forefathers of the present town, linking, 
 with a pleasing and a tender melancholy, the enjoyments of the 
 passing day with most delightful associations of a departed age, 
 will dwell upon my meipory, while she holds a seat in my bosom. 
 Circumstances in my own life have rendered the anniversary of 
 our independence, to me, a day, not only of festive enjoyment, 
 but of awful solemnity ; for it is also the anniversary of my fath- 
 er's death. Drawing, myself, so rapidly to the close^of my own 
 career, it will not be SMrpnrmo* that the impressions, under which 
 the enclosed discourse was written, were of a religious character ; 
 and entertaining sincerely the opinion, that the continual appeal, 
 in the Declaration of Independence, to a rule o^ right transcend- 
 ing all human power, and that the principles irresistibly flowing 
 from the rule of right, or of eternal justice, must lead to the ex- 
 tinction of slavery and of war from the earth, 
 
 I deem it fortunate to have had the opportunity afforded by 
 this invitation of the inhabitants of Newburyport, of disclosing to 
 ray countrymen, so shortly before I shall cease to be with them, 
 not only my own adherence to the principles of the Declaration, 
 but my firm belief that the hand of Providence was in it, pointing 
 to the fulfilment of the extatic promises of the Old Testament, 
 and of the good tidings which shall be to all people, so solemnly 
 promised in the New. 
 
 With the renewed expression of my warmest thanks to you, 
 to all the members of the Committee of Arrangements, and to all 
 the inhabitants of the town, I remain, dear Sir, your friend and 
 servant, JOHN QUINCY ADAMS. 
 
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 deft; 
 
 CIRCULATION 
 
 SDfroNia 
 
 JAN 1 6 280 
 
 U.C. BERKELEY 
 
Gaylamount 
 
 Pamphlet 
 
 Binder 
 
 Gaylord Bros.. Inc. 
 
 Stockton, Calif. 
 T. M. Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. 
 
 I'C 50452 
 
 ^mi-"