B6 9 59 PV ^ ANNIVERSARY ORATION or IHK. CINCINNATI OF NEW JERSEY. JULY 4, 185 9. BY JOHN HALL, D. 1). C. SCOTT & Co., Publishers. .-^'^ Slje d^^'^mples of t\t "^tkMmi THE ANNIVERSARY ORATION CINCINNATI OF NEW JERSEY, AT TRENTON, J"T7Xj"Z' 4, 1S59. BY JOHN HALL, D. D. TRENTON, N. J.: MURrHY &. BECHTEL, PRINTERS, OPPOSITE THK CITY HALL. 1 859. m EXCHANGF fAA«- «tt>K U»w»^ jWr .JAN 21 1921 OEATION^. Gentlemen (f the Cincinnati of New Jersey, and Fellow Citizens : Thursday, the Fourth day of July, 177G, was a day of grave, of solemn, as well as of exciting in- terest. It was a small company of thoughtful, anx- ious men — not a crowd such as now fills the Capitol — w^hich on that day was assembled in the old State House in Philadelphia. They were men of boldness and decision, of determination and courage, but they were men ; men of deep-rooted, hereditary attach- ment to England and the English throne, men of families and of property ; men of high honor ; not actuated by selfish ambition ; not seeking political independence fram faction or for personal gain. All was at stake which such high-minded patriots knew how to value, more than the unreflecting who may have loved the occurrence of revolution for the sake of the excitement, and had less care for its results, because they had nothing valuable to lose, nothing sacred to abandon. The very term revolution is a fearful one to such patriots as were presided over by John Hancock. Its ideas are those of changing what is established, overturning old foundations, innovating upon ancient institutions. The revolution of the heavens is their order ; they revolve in regularity ; their cycles, though in perpetual movement, are as fixed as the granite foundations of the everlasting hills. But when revo- lution is applied to civil government, it denotes dis- ruption, confusion, diecord, war ; and the fear of change perplexes not monarclis only, but their best subjects. Such subjects had George the Third in those men who camo to the old State House of the colony of Pennsylvania eighty-three years ago, to convert it into a Hall of National Independence. But the gravity and solemnity of the day we cele- brate have begun to disappear from our associations. The men who signed for themselves and us, for the mighty constituencj- which has only begun to show its extent, the Declaration of American Nationality, have disappeared from our sight, and every year that widens our distance from them diminishes the influ- ence of their names and their examples. As long as any of the signers lingered among us, as long as their revolutionary contemporaries in the mass of citizens survived, the spirit of the great day of '76 was jDro- portionately reverenced. The presence of those shadows of the past overawed the new generations. But when they were at length extinct, the Fourth began to be a common day, the Declaration to fall into the grade of a common State paper, and the sig- natures of the illustrious fifty-six, from Josiah Bart- lett to George Walton, to represent comparative strangers to the new age of Americans. Such is the result of time ; of continued prosperity ; such the effect of being accustomed to blessings with- out having first known what it was to be without them ; such the effect of inheriting privileges without knowing, except historically, the cost at which they were procured. The great object then, my fellow citizens, in keep- ing up the observance of the anniversary of Inde- pendence should be to keep up the memory and the influence of its Principles and its Men. The chief purpose of history, in all its forms, (and the anniver- sary is one of them,) is not to preserve antiquarian records, to transmit facts, to relate that such and such persons lived, and that such and such deeds were performed ; or even to extol the deeds and eulogize the men. History is not an amusement, but a study. Its office is to instruct, to admonish, to show us the valuableness or worthlessness of what we find about us ; to infuse, by the recital, the vir- tues we are made to admire in the past, and which are capable of being imitated in the present. TVe know very well that we are independent, without keeping the Fourth of July. The Declaration of In- dependence, as a document, is in our school books. But the day, as a monument to principles, the Dccla- 6 ration, as a grave moral sentiment, as a covenant and avowal binding us as well as the nation of that day, this whole reproduction of the scenes, the actors, and the jourposes that make that day and its great deed so worthy of memor}^, these are the impressions which if not sought and declared, and readopted in our own names, turn our commemorations into mock- eries, and make us guilty of dishonor to the graves of our Fathers. But, on the other hand, what a means of preserving our true position, of purifying our political sentiments, of maintaining the sound patriotism of the country, would it be, if, with the birth-day of our liberties, we could even annually re- vive the spirit in which they were engendered and born ! We are familiar with the designation of a period in intellectual history as the revival of learning ; with other periods in economical history called revivals of trade and commerce ; with others in moral history called revivals of religion. The same declensions which in these several dejDartments of human interests necessitated the reaction that goes by this name, when they exist in political history, caH for a revival of patriotism — ^of genuine politics. I say a revival ; for it is not the necessity of our age to create — to originate American patriotism. We have it in its purest mould, in its perfect models, in the men who achieved our separation from an unsuitable and de- grading connection abroad ; who framed our consti- tution and laws ; who inaugurated and administered the system ; and who stamped on all they did the impress of their personal virtue. What greater blessing could wo ask for our country than to be able to summon to the Capitol next December the men who founded our Republic ? What part of the con- federacy, which this day adds the thirty-third star to its flag, would not consent to submit the whole coun- try to the legislation of such representatives as com- posed the first Congress ? What American, native or naturalized, would hesitate to commit the entire executive power, this day or any day, to the first President ? But the next thing after the impossible revival of the men, is the revival of their wisdom, their purity, their principles. All these survive. They are imperishably wrought into the fabric of our institutions. We have their debates, their essays, their correspondence, their enactments, their nego- tiations. Their personal history remains, attesting their sincerity and disinterestedness. Their success remains — attesting their sagacity, and indicating that there was a higner and more efficient guidance of their counsels and proceedings than unaided human wisdom. For I trust it will not be considered by this audience a mere professional sentiment on my part, when I say that the thirteen tribes of Israel (for tliir- teen was their actual number by the double tribe of 8 Joseph) were not more obviously guided by Divine Providence, were not more distinctly placed under tlie instrumentality of men raised up and endowed for the accomplishing of high and far-reaching pur- poses for mankind, than were the thirteen American Colonies, when the time had come for the exodus from their vassalage to a land now for the first time truly their own. And the most profitable, and per- haps the least tedious discourse, that could be pro- nounced this day would be a selection of passages from the Books of Moses, setting forth the source and the principles of national prosperity, and the obliga- tions of a free and religious people to abide by the Supreme Law of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And this reminds us of the acknowledgements due this day, of the ecclesiastical independence effected by the revolution, which placed the church of the United States on the primitive basis of a spiritual body under a Divine head, requiring no ' ' conformity," asking and accepting no identification with the pow- ers of civil government. " Head and Supreme Gov- ernor of the Church," is one of the constitutional titles of the British monarch ; and though religious liberty has made some progress in Britain since the great " dissent" of '76, so that the Jew and Roman Catholic sit in Parliament, and her Majesty is a Pres- byterian at Balmoral and an Episcopalian at Wind- 9 sor, and I suppose, as a grandmother, a Lutheran at Berhn — yet enough remams, even in the glorious empire of Victoria, to make us content with our more free and vohmtary system, as compared with her church estabhshments. We have the church. Our history, from the beginning, is full of proof that the ark of the covenant, as well as the rod of Moses, came over and remained with our fathers ; and the continued presence of the Holy Spirit of God, in mul- tiplying, extending and making effective His inspired word, has never ceased to accredit the genuineness of our free Christianity in the variety of its outward forms. We are accustomed on the Fourth of July to hear more of the sword of the revolution, than of almost any other agency. Yet what particular day in all the an- nals of that epoch ought to be more suggestive of the power of the pen and of the tongue ? The only sword drawn on the Fourth of July, '76, was the paper one adopted on the evening of that day, after a three days' debate. True, more material arguments had been already resorted to. The fields of Lexington and Bunker's Hill had anticipated, by more than a year, the calmer proceedings of Chestnut street. But the battles prior to the Declaration were not the vv^or. They were local resistances of some immediate ag- gressions. They were provincial, not national. The military acts of Congress had only been advisory and 10 defensive. It was not till the signing of the declara- tion that the Congress assumed, as we have just heard, on the ground of ''free and independent states," " full power to levy war, conclude peace, con- tract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent states may of right do." In that paper, in its clear logic, its plain facts, its self-evident conclusions, la}^ the power which was to cast off tyranny, and justify to the world then and for ever, all the consequences that might follow. The Declaration of Independence contains no decla- ration of war. The pen of Jefferson only wrote the- final conclusions of what had already been discussed in the " Farmer's Letters" of Dickinson, the " Mon- itor" of Lee, Bland's " Inquiry," Nicholas's "Con- siderations," Paine's "Common Sense," and the writings of a host of coadjutors in newspapers and pamphlets. The pens of the signers only made the eiKlorsement of the national SG^ntiment in the name of the thirteen states they represented. The same may be asserted of the contribution to the moral power of the act of independence, made by the arguments of the colonial statesmen and public speakers from 'New Hampshire to Georgia. They were not, as a general thing, inflammatory harangues, bombastic appeals to the ignorant. It was necessary to show the facts of the issue, and prove the legal right of the people to redress themselves in order to 11 bring them to their proper position. We have a specimen of what was depended on as the true basis of success, in the fact that Congress sent two clergy- men, one from his church in Newark, and another from his church in Trenton, to visit parts of Virginia, the Carohnas and Georgia, to give the people in cer- tain remote settlements an intelligent understanding of the controversy, and of their rights and duties in relation to it. It was not yet the day when the pa- triotic sentiments of America, and the exercise of a free political choice, were to be turned about and guided as by a bit in the horse's mouth, or, by what is still more degrading, the bribes of office. Here is the political revival we need — a recurrence tq the in- telligence, the virtue, the trust in Providence which signalized the founding of our national fabric, and marked the personal character of its founders, in- cluding the great body of the people. That was no fanaticism which spoke in such terms as those em- ployed by Chief Justice Drayton, of South Carolina, in April, '76, in his official charge to the grand jury, when, at the close of a cool constitutional statement of the question of rights between king and people, he said : "I think it is my duty to declare in this awful seat of justice, and before Almighty God, that in my opinion the Americans can have no safety but by the Divine favor, their own virtue, and their being so prudent as not to leave it in the power of the British 12 rulers to injure them. * * * rpj^^ Almiglity created America to be independent of Britain. Let us beware of the impiety of being backward to act as instruments in the Almighty hand, now extended to accomplish his purpose. * * * In a word, our piety and political safety are so blended, that to refuse our labors in this Divine work, is to refuse to be a great, a free, a pious, and a happy people." I shall not undertake to draw the contrast between the politics of those days and the present. I will remember the inspired caution: "Say not thou, what is the cause that the former days were better than these ? For thou dost not inquire wisely con- cerning this." There are many and natural reasons for the change, besides such as imply degeneracy ; and perhaps, after all, our fathers were not so im- maculate, nor are we so depraved, as Fourth of July speeches would make out. But still it well becomes us to take care that we do not exhaust our patriot- ism in the applause of the past, or in complacency with ourselves. There is a New America all the time developing ; to adjust that developement to the vital elements of our political existence is the trying problem of successive ages. We need to do some- thing more than celebrate our Independence. We are independent, and by the Divine blessing mean to keep so. But to study how to use our nationality, 13 liow to preserve it sound and pure, how to recom- mend it and diffuse it, by the evidence of our welfare under it, over the rest of our American continent, and over the other hemisphere — this is the highest celebration of the great deed of '76. If to the mass of those who vote for legislators, representatives, governors, president, the only question is, whom does our party nominate ? if to such the whole science and morals of civil governn:ent consist in succeeding with the nominee ; if what a man's moral character, his capacity, his intelligence are, has little or nothing to do with supporting his election ; if the money, whether of the party or of the candidate himself, buys his place ; if men thrust themselves forward as seekers of place, and demand public posi- tions as the reward of their partisanship ; if intelli- gence and integrity become nothing in comparison with availability — if such signs as these should ever appear among us, then, in spite of all the cant about " progress," we cannot do better than go back to our beginning, fourscore and three years ago, and sit at the feet of those honest men who signed the Decla- ration, and sealed it before God with the pledge of their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. These considerations show the importance of train- ing American youth in a familiarity with the history and biography, as well as the constitution of their country. The mere chronicles of events will not do 14 this. The battles show the practical force of the principles contended for, but the diplomacy, the debates, the writings, and above all, the personal qualities of the leaders of opinion, and the movers of the whole proceedings, contain the oil which is to revive and keep burning the true fire of the Ameri- can altar. In speaking thus of the training of our sons and of ourselves in the substantial doctrines of our nation- ality, I do not detract from the claims on the per- petual memory of the country, of that class of patriots who literally fought for the cause. On their account, in their honor, let monuments arise on every spot where they contended, whether with success or defeat ; not raised as a memorial of the conflict itself, not to boast how many died, and how many suffered, or how deep the soil was wet with human blood, but to commemorate the spirit of devotion to justice, liberty, and humanity, which compelled those re- cruits of a day to defend their country and their homes against aggression. The battle monuments of a civilized and christian people should honor first of all the cause of the warfare. As it is not the signature of the declaration, but the declaration of itself, that is the chief object of our regard, and we honor the men for the sentiments they held, and the manner in which they avowed them, so we honor the parties in the battle according to the merits of 15 their cause, more than accordmg to the mere method or effect of their deeds in the field of contest. Who has thought of a monument to the thousands, whether of Austria or France, whose corpses fill the trenches of Montebello, Malegnano, and Magenta ? The real heroes of those latest fields of carnage are the few who are scarcely heard of, except in some feeble echo of the name of Garibaldi, the Piedmontese, and other obscure, that is, weak subjects of Austrian oppression, with whose cause, as the " down-trodden 23eoples," our sj^mpathy was awakened a few years since, in the very spot where I stand, by that great master of English eloquence (whatever he may be in European politics) Louis Kossuth. They are the Emperors, and their hundreds of thousands of slaves in regimentals, who flaunt before the world in this drama, and take all the glory, (excepting that the Irish General McMahon is metamorphosed into a French Duke ;) but the humble Provinces, whose liberties are to be the prey of the successful power, the people whose are the fields and homes and churches invaded by the two great duellists, this is the party that must fill our thoughts, as spectators of the war, and they, because of the sentiments they represent. Yet let me not do the third Napoleon the injustice of omitting the acknowledgement that he wrote good doctrine on the 8th of last month, when 16 in his address to Lombardy, dated at Milan, lie said : " In the enlightened state of public opinion, there is more grandeur to be acquired by the moral influence that is exercised than by fruitless conquests, and that moral influence I seek with pride in contribut- ing to restore to freedom one of the finest parts of Europe." Let us hope that his Imperial Majesty, in his zeal for the precedents of his uncle, has not adopted the theory of his great minister Talleyrand, that the political use of words is to say what is not meant. So (to return to our philosophy of monu- ments) when we keep our days, and build our obelisks, and buy Mount Yernon, in memory of the triumphs of our noble Continentals, Army, Congress, People, and of him who was head of all and the spirit of all — the great Commander-in-Chief and President — let it be in love and honor for the soul, rather than the outward body of the cause, and to give it the highest possible honor and reward — the perpetuation of that soul in the successive genera- tions of our republican world. "We want not only the memories of Washington, and the other men of '76 — not only columns and statues — but new, living men, like them, to guide and adorn every era of our history. Such, I have no doubt, are the most effective motives that actuate the enterprise of constructing, 17 in our own town, a suitable memorial of the great incident of the 26th of December, '76, and its fol- lowing week. And seldom has so truly appropri- ate a design for a patriotic monument been devised, as will be laid before the corporators to-day. That enterprise is in the best hands, and the impulse it is receiving is a worthy feature of the general celebra- tion. I shall not trespass on ground so faithfully occupied by that company of our fellow citizens who are doing their best to eclipse us to-day ; but in illustration of the general topic I may say, that, in commemorating the Battle of Trenton, the smallest part of the great subject is the skill of the tactics, the success of its manoeuvre, the surprise of the German regiment, the victorious retreat, or the great aggregate of sagacity in the American leader, and fortitude in the troops, as evinced in every step of that week's work of mind and body from McKonkey's Ferry to Princeton. No heart, quicker than that of the Commander-in-Chief himself, would turn away from the mere details of the conflict. But the glory of the day, its monumental triumph, was its moral effect. The great victory of Washington on thig ground was not over a few Hessians, but over the fears and despondencies of his own countrymen, and over the pride and prestige represented by Sir Wil- liam Howe and Lord Cornwallis. The great honor which those days added to Washington's fame can 2 18 never be told by any inscription, however minute in statistics of the battle-fields. That honor was but the developeinent of the occasion. It -showed what the man was, what he always was, equal to any emergency, prompt to every call of duty, faithful and fearless with many or with few, and having the trust of a Moses or a Joshua in the Providence whose favor to the just cause is stronger than armies. These sentiments, gentlemen of the Cincinnati, ought to be, and I am- confident are yours. They are both Roman and American. Our old friend Lucius Quintius — or Serranus (as he is called by Virgil* in allusion to his sowing his field, more ap- propriately for us, than Cincinnatus, from his curled hair) — is a hero, not because he conquered the -