a land where minds as well as bodies were chained, for regions where Freedom might be found to dwell, though her dwelling should prove to be amid wilds and wolves, or savages less hospitable than wilds and wolves. An ocean three thousand miles wide, with its winds and its waves, rolled in vain between them and liberty. They performed the grand enterprise, and landed on this then uncultivated shore. Here, on their first arrival, they found The wilderness "all before them, where to choose Their courage and industry soon surmounted all the difficulties incident to a new settlement. The savages retired, the forests were exchanged for fields waving with richest harvests, and the dreary haunts of wild beasts for the cheerful abodes of civilized man. Increasing in wealth and population with a rapidity which excited the astonishment of the Old World, our nation flourished about a century and a half, when England, pressed down with the enormous weight of accumulating debts, and considering the inhabitants of these States as slaves, who owed their existence and preservation to her care and protection, now began to form the unjust, tyrannical, and impolitic plan of taxing this country without its consent. The right of taxation, however, not being relinquished, but the same principle under a different shape being pursued, the awful genius of Freedom arose; not with the ungovernable ferocity of the tiger, to tear and devour, but with the cool, determined, persevering courage of the lion, who, disdaining to be a slave, resists the chain. As liberty was the object of contest, that being secured, the offer of peace was joyfully accepted, and peace was restored to free, united, independent Columbia. WILLIAM MERCHANT RICHARDSON. THE PILGRIMS. FROM the dark portals of the Star Chamber, and in the stern text of the Acts of Uniformity, the pilgrims received a commission more efficient than any that ever bore the royal seal. Their banishment to Holland was fortunate; the decline of their little company in the strange land was fortunate; the difficulties which they experienced in getting the royal consent to banish themselves to this wilderness were fortunate; all the tears and heart-breakings of that ever-memorable parting at Delfthaven had the happiest influence on the rising destinies of New England. All this purified the ranks of the settlers. These rough touches of fortune brushed off the light, uncertain, selfish spirits. They made it a grave, solemn, self-denying expedition, and required of those who engaged in it to be so too. They cast a broad shadow of thought and seriousness over the cause, and if this sometimes deepened into melancholy and bitterness, can we find no apology for such a human weakness? Their trials of wandering and of exile, of the ocean, the winter, the wilderness, and the savage foe, were the final assurances of success. It was these that put far away from our fathers' cause all patrician softness, all hereditary claims to pre-eminence. No effeminate nobility crowded into the dark and austere ranks of the pilgrims. No Carr nor Villiers would lead on the ill-provided band of despised Puritans. No well-endowed clergy were on the alert to quit their cathedrals and set up a pompous hierarchy in the frozen wilderness. No craving governors were anxious to be sent over to our cheerless El Dorados of ice and snow. No, they could not say they had encouraged, patronized, or helped the pilgrims; their own cares, their own labors, their own counsels, their own blood, contrived all, achieved all, bore all, sealed all. They could not afterwards fairly pretend to reap where they had not strewn; and as our fathers reared this broad and solid fabric with pains and watchfulness, unaided, barely tolerated, it did not fall when the favor which had always been withholden was changed into wrath, when the arm which had never supported was raised to destroy. Methinks I see it now, that one solitary, adventurous vessel, the Mayflower of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future state, and bound across the unknown sea. I behold it pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore. I see them now scantily supplied with provisions; crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison; delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route, and now driven in fury before the raging tempest, on the high and giddy waves. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly, from billow to billow; the ocean breaks and settles with engulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening, shivering weight against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landing at last, after five months' passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth, weak and weary from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, depending on the charity of their ship-master for a draught of beer on board, drinking nothing but water on shore, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile tribes. Shut now the volume of history, and tell me, on any principle of human probability, what shall be the fate of this handful of adventurers. Tell me, man of military science, in how many months were they all swept off by the thirty savage tribes enumerated within the early limits of New England? Tell me, politician, how long did this shadow of a colony, on which your conventions and treaties had not smiled, languish on the distant coast? Student of history, compare for me the baffled projects, the deserted settlements, the abandoned adventures of other times, and find the parallel of this. Was it the winter's storm beating on the houseless heads of women and children? was it hard labor and spare meals? was it disease? was it the tomahawk? was it the deep malady of a blighted hope, a ruined enterprise, and a broken heart, aching in its last moments at the recollection of the loved and left beyond the sea? was it some, or all of these united, that hurried this forsaken company to their melancholy fate? And is it possible that neither of these causes, that not all combined, were able to blast this bud of hope? Is it possible that from a beginning so feeble, so frail, so worthy, not so much of admiration as of pity, there has gone forth a progress so steady, a growth so wonderful, an expansion so ample, a reality so important, a promise, yet to be fulfilled, so glorious? EDWARD EVERETT. CHARACTER OF THE PURITAN FATHERS. ONE of the most prominent features which distinguished our forefathers was their determined resistance to oppression. They seemed born and brought up for the high and special purpose of showing to the world that the civil and religious rights of man, the rights of self-government, of conscience and independent thought, are not merely things to be talked of and woven into theories, but to be adopted with the whole strength and ardor of the mind, and felt in the profoundest recesses of the heart, carried out into the general life, and made the foundation of practical usefulness, visible beauty, and true nobility. Liberty, with them, was an object of too serious desire and stern resolve to be personified, allegorized, and enshrined. They made no goddess of it, as the ancients did; they had no time nor inclination for such trifling; they felt that liberty was the simple birthright of every human creature; they called it so; they claimed it as such; they reverenced and held it fast as the unalienable gift of the Creator, which was not to be surrendered to power nor sold for wages. It was theirs as men (without it they did not esteem themselves men; more than any other privilege or possession it was essential to their happiness, for it was essential to their original nature), and therefore they preferred it above wealth and ease and country; and, that they might enjoy and exercise it fully, they forsook houses and lands and kindred, their homes, their native soil, and their fathers' graves. The principles of revolution were not the suddenly acquired property of a few bosoms; they were abroad in the land in the ages before; they had always been taught, like the truths of the Bible; they had descended from father to son, down from those primitive days when the pilgrim, established in his simple dwelling, and seated at his blazing fire, piled high from the forest which shaded his door, repeated to his listening children the story of his wrongs and his resistance, and bade them rejoice, though the wild winds and the wild beasts were howling without, that they had nothing to fear from great men's opposi tion and the bishops' rage. Here were the beginnings of the revolution. Every settler's hearth was a school of independence; the scholars were apt, and the lessons sunk deeply; and thus it came that our country was always free; it could not be other than free. As deeply seated as was the principle of liberty and resistance to arbitrary power in the breasts of the Puritans, it was not more so than their piety and sense of religious obligation. They were emphatically a people whose God was the Lord. Their form of government was as strictly theocratical, if direct communication be excepted, as was that of the Jews; insomuch that it would be difficult to say where there was any civil authority among them entirely distinct from ecclesiastical jurisdiction. God was their king; and they regarded him as truly and literally so as if he had dwelt in a visible palace in the midst of their state. They were his devoted, resolute, humble subjects; they undertook nothing which they did not beg of him to prosper; they accomplished nothing without rendering to him the praise; they suffered nothing without carrying up their sorrows to his throne; they ate nothing which they did not implore him to bless. That there were hypocrites among them is not to be doubted; but they were rare; the men who voluntarily exiled themselves to an unknown coast, and endured there every toil and hardship for conscience' sake, and that they might serve God in their own manner, were not likely to set conscience at defiance and make the service of God a mockery; they were not likely to be, neither were they, hypocrites. I do not know that it would be arrogating too much for them to say that, on the extended surface of the globe, there was not a single community of men to be compared with them in the respects of deep religious impressions, and an exact performance of moral duty. FRANCIS WILLIAM PITT GREENWOOD. |
