Yale University Library 39002006307426 Hedge, Fi-'edoric H. An Ortitijn... Bangor, 1336. * f ^-"v' [''. / . 1 .^ , ,•' ' , I T '''\ y-}\ .^iy}j -itmi.'y C-Ua 4aQh YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 1942 AN ORATION, PRONOUNCED BEFORE THE CITIZENS OF BANGOR, ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1838. THE SIXTY-SECOND ANNIVERSARY OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE. BY FREDERIC H. HEDGE. PUBLISHED AT THE REftUEST OF THE CITY GOVERNMENT. BANGOR: SAMUEL S. SMITH, PRINTER. 1838. ORATION. Fellow Citizens: — I congratulate you on the sixty-second anniversary of American Inde pendence. In discharging the duty assigned to me on this occasion, I am happy to meet an as sembly like this, convened on the broad ground of American citizenship. Other grounds and other interests have been made too prominent, of late years, in the celebration of this day. The day belongs not to any partial interest or single cause, however sacred in itself. It belongs to the American citizen — a name, an interest which includes all others and transcends all others. The day is national, and strictly national should our celebration of it be. Other interests shall have their due. Education, Temperance — the whole year shall be theirs ; but on this day we will know only our country, we will consider only those great principles of national polity which have made our country what it is ; and through which alone we can hope to maintain what we are and have. The anniversary of American Independence is distinguished from most festivals of secular origin, by its moral character. Other days have been set apart for the commemoration of indi viduals or events. But this commemorates an act — an act, not of violence but of deliberation, not of the sword but of the pen — an act whose significance is strictly and purely moral. It may be regarded as characteristic of this age and peo ple, that while the most striking events of the Revolution, its battles and its triumphs, pass un noticed ; while Yorktown and Saratoga, so loud in their day, are voiceless now ; the quiet act of that provincial Congress which gave birth to the Declaration you have just heard, is proclaimed to us year after year, from the cannon's mouth, in vollies that sweep the coast from St. John's to Cape Sable — " And thence, perhaps, rebounding may Echo beyond the Mexique bay. " I consider this fact as one instance among many of that growing ascendancy of the intellectual over the physical in man, which marks and mea sures the progress of society. As mankind ad vance, mind gradually prevails over matter. Force is displaced by thought. In the field, it is no longer animal vigor but scientific calculation that carries the day. In civil affairs, moral power preponderates more and more over brute strength. It is no longer the tallest, but, theoretically at least, the wisest that governs. The very sym bols of government assume a more and more ideal character. Instead of the/asce* and the sceptre, and the grosser ensigns of ancient dominion, we have written constitutions which define the power they represent, showing that mankind are gov erned by ideas and not by force — a fact equally certain though not equally apparent in all ages and governments ; in despotic Asia as in republi can America ; in the ninth century, under Char lemagne and imperial edicts as in the nineteenth, under citizen kings and popular assemblies. Mankind, I say, are governed by ideas and not by force. By these ideas I do not mean abstract speculations — I do not mean conclusions which have been obtained by any conscious process of the understanding, but those views and principles which a people imbibes with its earliest instruc tion, which it sees reflected from all its institu tions, and which it reflects back again in all its habits and associations. These constitute the only true sources of human authority. These give to governments a validity which mere external force could never impart. No external force can hold a nation in subjection any longer than it finds support in the popular idea. We wonder at the passive obedience which the subjects of despotic governments yield to unjust and oppres sive enactments. What hinders this people that they rebel not against their rulers ? It is not the fear of armed force that keeps them down, but those hereditary ideas of subjection which cen turies of misrule have fixed in their minds and linked with all their associations and ways of life. Until these associations can be broken up, the 6 condition of that people admits of no permanent improvement. To them revolt itself brings no deliverance. They may conspire and slay their rulers. But what then? No enlargement of privilege, no solid advantage accrues from such violence. To-day a tyrant is deposed, to-morrow a new one has assumed the rein, and the people submit because they know only submission ; and because the idea of arbitrary rule is ever upper most in their minds. In the position to which I have now been led, we have a standpoint from which to interpret the whole philosophy of civil history and civil insti tutions. Every nation is governed by its preva lent ideas or habits of mind. These determine all its movements and shape all its laws. Hence the peculiar character of our revolution and its result in our present condition as a people. When we contrast that movement in American history with similar movements in the history of other nations, and particularly with the subsequent rev olution in France, we are struck with what I will venture to call its naturalness. I mean its reason and necessity in the nature of the people, and the comparative ease with which its objects were accomplished, so far as their accomplish ment depended on the popular will. It was not so much a revolution as an evolution. It was not an act of desperation, to which the nation were impelled by extreme pressure. We did not wait till stung by actual suffering. It was not here as in revolutionary France, M^here there existed no provision for liberty in popular sentiment, no in troduction to equal rights in long-cherished hab its and traditions, but where the people, wronged and overburdened, lay still and patient until they felt the griping of hunger in their bowels and the prick of outrage upon their backs. We revolted at the faint shadow of a distant force, attenuated and enfeebled by protecting seas. They rebel led against present want and the fear of death — against wrongs that had lashed into foaming fury whatever is foulest and fellest in unbridled souls. We owed every thing to the character and habits of the people — they owed every thing to the cogency of circumstances. With us it was the honoured of the land — our Adamses, our Otis, our Hancock and our Quincy — that headed the righteous cause ; there ragged sans culottes, train ed in Bakers' queues, and the mothers of Saint Antoine, with ribald tongues and streaming hair, rushing into National Assemblies, led the van in the march of crime. Our revolution, in short, was the healthy offspring of a healthy parent ; of theirs it might be said — "Thy mother felt more than a mother's pain, And yet brought forth less than a mother's hope ; To wit, an indigest, deformed lump, Unlike the fruit of such a goodly tree. Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born, To signify — thou cam'st to bite the world. " Whoever will study the condition of these colonies during their dependence on the mother country will find there already developed, in all 8 the distinctness and force with which they were afterwards asserted, those ideas of liberty and principles of government embodied in our con stitution. British aggression was only the pre cipitating impulse which gave polarity and form to tendencies and attractions long held in solu tion. The causes which led to our separation would hardly have been deemed sufficient to warrant that step by any people less ripe for inde pendence than we were. The stamp act, which the stern resistance of our fathers forced the British government to repeal before it could fairly take effect, however odious in its principle, was by no means so threatening in its consequen ces, that the citizens of Boston and of Ports mouth should have ushered it in with ominous ringing of bells and funeral orations to departed Liberty. The additional expense of three-pence a pound in the article of tea, could hardly be re garded as a national calamity. And even the Boston Port Bill, by far the most portentous at tack on American liberty, mitigated as it was by sympathy and aid from other towns and States, did not, perhaps, impose a heavier burthen than the country has sustained, with more or less pa tience, during the last year of republican admin istration. Had not the people of these States been already free and independent in every habit and feeling of their natures, there would have been no difficulty in collecting that revenue. Peace would have seemed more desirable than the assertion of an abstract right by hopeless op- position, involving immeasurable evils. The na tion would have paid the tax and pocketed the injustice, indemnifying themselves how and where they might. Nay, taxation might have been carried much farther than it was ever con templated by the British government in relation to this country. The screw whose faintest ap plication, whose very exhibition our fathers re sisted so warmly, might have been pressed home through all its spiral revolutions, the whole length of its thread ; before it could have screwed to the sticking-point of revolution, men who were not already screwed and braced in every nerve and purpose of their souls, by having breathed for a century and a half the thin air of freedom. They were already independent ; they always had been so, ever since Smith, and Carver, and Winthrop, and Williams, and Penn. It was for the sake of this independence that they had come, as they expressed it, " to the outside of the world, " and stumbled upon famine and pestilence and the tomahawk. For this they had braved the rude welcome with which the new continent received its future lord, and sown their first fields with death, at Jamestown, at Charlestown and at Ply mouth. With a great sum they had obtained this freedom ; they had no intention "of selling it cheaply. They were already independent; they knew they were, they felt they were ; they al ways had been; God willing, they always meant 2 10 to be ; and when the decisive moment came, they had nothing to do but to declare that intention. The main interest of American history has, naturally enough, accumulated around the crisis which finally divorced us from the mother land. In the contemplation of this period, our atten tion is diverted from the true date and origin of American liberty. The Declaration of 1776 as serted our independence, but did not by any means create it; neither the sentiment in the mind of the States, nor the reality in their insti tutions. Both the sentiment and the institutions of the country were as essentially democratic, two hundred years ago, as they are this day. They were the natural growth of the soil. Other sentiment or institutions, or aught unfriendly to liberty, could never gain. foothold on these shores. In the first organization of their legislative as semblies, the prophetic sense of the colonists re sisted the encroachments of their rulers. "For" said they, " the waves of the sea do not more cer tainly waste the shore, than the minds of ambi tious men are led to invade the liberties of their brethren."* In justice to them, and in the spirit of their comparison, we may say that the stern and rock-bound coast does not more surely repel the advancing surge, than the stern and sturdy souls of the pilgrims repelled the advances of * Bancroft's History of the United States, 1834, from whence the anecdotes that follow, are principally taken. 11 civil usurpation. Not only did they strenuously oppose Parliamentary dictation, holding their charter from the King alone, but Royalty itself might not lean too hard on the privileges which that charter guaranteed. In 1620, when King James undertook to appoint a successor to the vacant office of Treasurer to the London Com pany for Virginia, his interference was resisted as an infringement of the Company's charter, and another candidate was elected in the place of the royal nominee. As the colonies succes sively kindled their fires along the coast, they successively formed themselves into representa tive assemblies, in which the popular branch soon acquired the significance it has ever since possessed. In 1619, the first assembly of this kind, ever convened in the western hemisphere, met at Jamestown in Virginia. In 1621 that State received a written Constitution, nearly re sembling the present, and essentially the same with those which were afterward adopted in the other colonies. With this Constitution it was or dained, that " after the government of the colony shall have once been framed, no orders of the Court in London shall bind the colony, unless they be, in like manner, ratified by the General Assembly." Three years after, the Assembly decreed, with an early jealousy of arbitrary tax ation, that " the Governor shall not lay any taxes or impositions upon the colony, their lands or commodities, other way than by the authority of the General Assembly, to be levied and imposed 12 as the said Assembly shall appoint." When Cromwell usurped the government of the mother country, Virginia still clung to the house of Stu art, to which she owed her existence and her liberties. The conditions on which she was finally induced to accept the authority of the Protectorate, while they mark the wise policy of the government that proposed them, show how strong the hold, which the love of liberty then had upon the minds of the planters. What force could not effect, was accomplished by a voluntary deed which secured to them their char tered rights and popular government. It was agreed upon surrender, " that the people of Vir ginia should have all the liberties of the freeborn people of England, should entrust their business, as formerly, to their own General Assembly, and have no taxes levied but by their own burgesses, no forts erected or garrisons maintained but by their own consent." To select from the history of this State one more illustration of the inde pendent feeling which characterized the early settlers; when, in 1658, the Governor and Coun cil declared the dissolution of the Assembly because they had been excluded from its sessions, the Assembly not only denied the legality of the dissolution, but having first, through a commit tee, solemnly declared the popular sovereignty, they removed the Governor and Council from office, thus asserting their right, not only to make but also to unmake their rulers. The Governor was then re-elected, and by taking the new oath 13 prescribed to him, acknowledged the validity of his ejection. Nor was Massachusetts less forward than her sister colony, in securing the independence of her institutions. Here, indeed, the principle of universal suffrage was not, as in Virginia, made the basis of representation. That privilege was restricted to the members of churches within the colony ; in order, it was said, " that the body of the commons might be preserved of honest and good men." This limitation of the elective franchise had its oriscin in the theolooical charac- ter of the Puritan settlement. Men who had emigrated for the sole purpose of enjoying reli gious libert}', as they termed it, that is, of estab- lishinor a church accordino' to their own notions of ecclesiastical polity, may well be pardoned for adopting every precaution that would serve to secure the purity of their religious institutions. A check on the right of suffrage was considered to be necessary, and doubtless was necessary to guard the church from episcopal influence on the one hand, and from heretical corruptions on the other. Nor was an ordinance of this nature, by any means, so unfriendly to the liberties of the colony as, judging from our standpoint, we might suppose, or as such a restriction would be at the present day. The unanimity of sentiment, in matters of civil polity, was so great, that a limita tion of the elective franchise Avas likely to affect only the ecclesiastical affairs of the colony, and these were cheerfully entrusted to those who 14 felt the strongest interest in their prosperity. The restriction was not felt to be burdensome, and therefore was not. On the other hand, while due care was taken to assert the prerogative of the church, the Puritans were not slow to resist the influence of the clergy, whenever it came in collision with the democratic tendencies of the times. As early as 1632 it was thought best that there should be an annual choice of Governor and Council ; the same incumbents, however, be ing, as now, liable to re-election. Accordingly they were re-elected that year. But in 1634 the Rev. John Cotton, who had lately come to the colony, opposed the policy of rotation in office, and attempted, by his professional influence, in the election sermon of that year, to prevent the removal of the then magistrates. But notwith standing the deference paid to the pulpit at that time ; when it came to the polls, the old officers were removed and new ones chosen ; a fact which shows how little the Puritans at that period, in the conduct of their civil affairs, were disposed to accept dictation, even from those whom their feelings and habits had taught them to revere above all human authority. With the same quick sense of rights, which resisted encroachment at home, did these colonists oppose the interference of the mother country in the management of their concerns. Occasions were not wanting when it was deemed necessary to show a bold front to King and noble. It was in the y ea:r just mentioned, that jealousy of English influence in- 15 troduced the Freeman's Oath, " by which every freeman was obliged to pledge his allegiance, not to King Charles, but to Massachusetts." And when, two years later, some of the English no bility, induced by the example of Sir Henry Vane, and tempted with the hope of gain on this side the water, offered to join their fortunes with the new colony, on condition of an hereditary seat in the Assembly ; the pilgrims answered, with a noble disregard to the immediate advanta ges of such an alliance ; that " where God bles- seth any branch of any noble and generous fam ily with a spirit and gifts fit for government, it would be a taking of God's name in vain, to put such a talent under a bushel ; but if God should not delight to furnish some of their posterity with gifts fit for magistracy, we should expose them rather to reproach and prejudice, and the commonwealth with them, than exalt them to honor, if we should call them forth when God doth not, to public authority." I cite these instances from the early history of the colonies, to show in what spirit they were founded, and what was the character of their first institutions. If, in later years, there was any change in the character of these institutions, it grew from a necessity imposed by foreign rela tions, and not from any change in the temper and habits of the people. The people were never other than free in their temper and spirit. Liber ty was not with them, as it was and is elsewhere, a speculation to reason about, or a name to swear 16 by, but a long experience and a habit of life. The noblest examples of it lay at the foundation of their country and at the bottom of their hearts ; and never, so far as their will can be gathered from popular acts, were they known to swerve from the old ideal and the early love. So notorious was the independent spirit of the American colonies, that Mr. Burke, in his well known speech before the British Parliament in 1775, makes it the pivot of his argument in favor of conciliatory measures. " There are only three ways of proceeding," he says, " relative to this stubborn spirit — either to change it as incon venient, or to prosecute it as criminal, or to com ply with it as necessary." The former he pro nounces impracticable. " The temper and char acter which prevail in our colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We can not, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition. Your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into Slavery."* Thus planted and thus nurtured the States grcAV toward the harvest that Avas to pluck them from the parent stem ; and when the fulness of time came, it found them fully ripe. To this * Burke's Speech on Conciliation Mith America. 17 training, and their long, practical acquaintance with the spirit and use of liberty, that we are to ascribe the peculiar character and consequences of the American Revolution. In which two things are specially noteworthy. First, the ab sence of those destructive outbursts of popular violence by which revolutions are usually char acterized. Not liberty but bondage is the parent of excess. The most convulsive movements of that exciting period developed no tendencies to anarchy or outrage. There was nothing mon strous or inhuman, no culbute generale, no break ing forth of the devil in man, to triumph over law and love. No " insurrection against God," no invasion of ancient sanctities, no uprooting of cherished faiths. The very mobs of the Revolu tion had in them a spirit of justice, and leave the historian little to regret. When the province of Massachusetts occupied the novel position of a civilized and populous community without mag istrate or ruler or any acknowledged authority, the old government having been abrogated by the arbitrary policy of England, it was hoped that the prospect of anarchy would instantly enforce complete submission. But what hap pened? The suspension of public authority brought no suspension of the public peace. No infraction of ancient laws gave reason to appre hend the necessity of invoking the protection of that force whose authority the State had disa vowed. All things went on as before. The citizens met in their unchartered conventions 3 18 and passed resolutions, and recommended mea sures which had all the force of laws with a peo ple in whose experience law and liberty were but diverse operations of one spirit ; — showing what a mere formula is legislation, where good sense and good will rule, and how, as Mr. Burke says, " it is obedience which constitutes govern ment and not the names by which it is called." I shall not attempt to contrast with this sobriety those atrocities which, fifteen years later, under the name of the French Revolution, amazed the world, and threatened to make liberty a name for outrage and crime. I shall rather ask your attention to another characteristic feature in our own Revolution, and that is, the ready formation of our Constitution from elements then existing in the minds and habits of the people. And here it is, that the connection, to which I have alluded, between the form of a government and the prev alent ideas, or moral character, of the people gov- ern'ed, is most apparent. The American Consti tution has been sometimes represented as a sys tem formed upon abstract principles. A late traveller in this country cites it as an instance of a purely a priori scheme of polity, carried into successful operation.* This view, it seems to me, entirely mistakes the true origin of our Gov ernment. So far from being an a priori system framed on abstract principles, it has probably less of this character than pertains to most gov- Harriet Martincau; Society in Aniei-ica. 19 ernments ; less, certainly, than the Constitutions of the several States. It was not a theory, hatch ed in the brains of speculative men, but a system of policy which owed its origin entirely to exist ing circumstances and obvious necessities. What ever of theory there is in it, was of ex post facto creation. All the elements lay close at hand. The union of the States was spontaneous, the result of their position. This furnished the pri mary fact which the first conventions did but express. The Federal compact defined the du ties and relations implied in that union ; and the Constitution of 1788, consummated that compact with permanent provisions for the fulfilment of its terms, but without changing the character or policy of the States themselves. The Govern ment of the country, so far as its daily operation on the citizen is concerned, was essentially the same before the adoption of the Constitution, as after. When, therefore, we speak of our institu tions as an experiment, let it be remembered that they are an experiment for whose success, two hundred years of actual operation furnish no inconsiderable security. Had it not been so, had not the Constitution originated, as it did, in the circumstances of the times and the character of the people, had it been a mere theory founded in speculation, it never could have had a mo ment's authority. It must have failed in its first application. For no fact in human experience is better established, than the impracticability of such theories. It is not in the power of man, 20 departing from no government at all, to frame one, a •prion, which shall apply to any given peo ple. Governments are not formed, but grow. "All the most important institutions of the world," says an acute French writer on this sub ject,* " are the result of circumstances, and not of deliberation." Man not only does not possess the power to create institutions, but he has not even the power to create their names. And unless the name which an institution bears is subsequent to the thing, and the necessary pro duct of the thing, it may be regarded as a sure sign that the institution so designated will not work, will not live. We have thus in the nom enclature of governments, the sign of their origin and of their destiny. Constitutions formed on abstract principles, have names invented for the purpose, antecedent to the thing. Of such bubble Constitutions, which burst as soon as blown, history, and particularly modern history, has many examples. Men of speculative minds, in all times, have loved to blow them for their own amusement. The Ens:- lish philosopher, Locke, blew one for the people of South Carolina, with three orders of nobility, which they blew to pieces as soon as it was waft ed to them. The kingdoms south of us, Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, are blowing new ones continually, and never yet can produce one that * Compte de Maistre. Essai sur Le Principe Generateur des Constitutions Politiques. 21 will hold together. But the most remarkable ef fort in this kind, was that which the Constituent Assembly in France, during the Revolution, after twenty-nine months of diligent inflation, gave to their country, and which immediately dissolved by its extreme tension. On the other hand. Governments, which are formed of existing elements, and have their ori gin in the character and habits of the people governed, are known by this, that the names by which their functions are called, are not made for the occasion, but have either grown from the institutions they designate, or else, having previ ously existed, are assumed by those institutions; as their most fitting and natural designation. Whoever will apply this theory to American institutions will find, in the names which they bear, the history of their origin, a,nd the promise of their perpetuity. Names, which are destined to be permanent, and to have a wide significance in the history of mankind, like the institutions they designate, are not made, but grow. They are accidental, and, for the most part, humble in their origin, and derive from some secondary meaning, the importance which they acquire. The word, throne, which, for more than two thousand years has been the symbol of despotic power, meant originally a footstool, then a seat with a footstool attached to it, one of the earliest distinctions of Royalty. It had probably, the same force as the term " Chair," in Representa tive Assemblies ; and " Chair," may one day, by 22 the same process, become as significant as throne. So, to cite an instance of an opposite character, drawn from our own institutions, the word, Cau- c&s, is supposed to have originated in the meet ings of some ship-caulkers, held more than a hundred years ago, in the ship-yard at Boston. Having outgrown its original application, this word has now come to designate an institution which, though not one of the written functions of our Government, is vitally connected with all its functions, and lies at the foundation of all its movements. I accept as a good omen the exist ence of such a word in our political vocabulary. As it is impossible to frame a theory of govern ment which shall be found applicable to any given time or people, so it is impossible to trans plant the government of one age or country, and graft it upon another. Suppose, for example, the people of Turkey, smitten with the love of liberty, and enamoured of American prosperity, should undertake to copy our institutions. Sup pose a few revolutionary Spirits to succeed in overthrowing the existing Government. Sup pose the Sultan converted into a President. In stead of the Sublime Porte, there is a House of Representatives ; the Cadis are become District Judges, the Agas, Captains of Militia. All this might be done, but the moment the new system was to take effect, it would be found to have no effect at all. It would be found that Asiatic ideas had nothing in common with American in stitutions, that the new wine was too smart for 23 the old bottles. It would be found, in short, just as impossible to establish a Republican Govern ment in despotic Turkey, as it would be, at the present moment, to establish an absolute Monar chy in the United States. The only efficient government is that which arises spontaneously in the character and habits of a nation. It was owing to their utter neglect of this fundamental principle, that the theorists of the French Rev olution failed in their attempts to regenerate France. They could pull down, but they could not build up. Hence, those wild abortions, which under the name of Constitutions, there and else where, have been sent into the Avorld, as if to show the incompetence of man to originate those ideas which he and all his institutions can only reflect. We owe the success of our Revolution, in es tablishing for us an independent, and, as we trust, a permanent form of government, not to any nice arrangement of functions, or careful balance of powers in that instrument, but mainly, I ap prehend, to the spirit of Jiberty which animated the people, for whom that system Avas framed. And it is to this spirit, FelloAV Citizens, that Ave must look for the perpetuity of our institutions. We do wrong, if we suffer ourselves to depend on the perfection of our Government, for the preservation of our liberties. What is to pre serve the Government? It is not the body that makes the spirit, but the spirit the body. It is not your Temperance Societies that make tem- 24 perance, nor your Anti-Slavery Societies that make anti-slavery. These societies could never have existed, had not the sentiment which they express, existed before them. In the same man ner and for the same reason, it is not the free government that makes the free-man, but the man the government. Let the sentiment of lib erty become extinct in the breasts of this people to-day, and to-morrow the government has be come a despotism. Whatever may be the name by which it is called, or the forms under which it is administered, it is no longer free. The form ef a government affords no true criterion of its character. There may be a form of freedom where no freedom is. Government more des potic never existed, than the French Democracy in the reign of terror. When Csesar Augustus usurpe'd the supreme control of the Roman State, he was careful to leave unchanged, the old Re publican forms. He Avaived the imperial name, while most intent on securing the imperial poAver. He even reformed what seemed to be encroach ment on the popular liberties in his predecessor. He caused his authority to be confirmed to him from term to - *' ^ f f-j^ ^ * J .- b ' ! 3 1 ' ' . . 'fl - 1 J. , ^ w -\*''r -^ . "1 '¦- ^' ' , :i^^y'^y i '^ /' ^ ", I '^ .^. ? ' \ ^i:*^ ^ ' . / * ^1 •'^ 4 i-\ jf' ^ -I ' "^ r i." ¦ll '^^^' \^^' ^ V I. ^ ^