Besides the semi-independent character of their political governments, there were other circumstances which tended to inspire a large part of the colonists with a strong passion for independence, and led them to resist with unusual energy the remodeling plans which England began in 1764.
The sturdy influences of Protestantism and American life had, however, not so great an effect on that large body of people called loyalists, whose numbers have been variously estimated at from one-third to over half the population. They remained loyal to England, and were so far from being inspired with a love of independence that they utterly detested the whole patriot cause and sacrificed their property and lives in the effort to stamp out its principles and put in their place the British empire method of alien control as the best form of government for America.
Patriot parties have existed in other countries without the aid of the particular influences which Burke described. The love of national independence is, in fact, the most difficult passion to eradicate, as the Irish, the Poles, and other broken nationalities bear witness. The desire for independence is natural to all vigorous communities, is generally regarded as more manlike and honorable than dependence, and usually springs up spontaneously whether in Holland, Switzerland or America, in spite of the commercial and conservative influences of loyalism. But, nevertheless, the influences mentioned by Burke, and several that he did not mention, had no doubt considerable effect in creating the patriot party in America and inspiring it with enthusiasm and energy.
The self-confidence aroused in the colonists by their success in subduing the wilderness, felling the vast forests, hunting the wild game and still wilder red men, has often been given as a cause of the Revolution and the American love of independence. Eloquence is easily tempted to enlarge upon such causes, and to describe in romantic language the hunter and the woodsman, the farmer in the fresh soil of primeval forests, the fishermen of the Grand Banks, the merchants and sailors who traded with the whole world in defiance of the British navigation laws, and the crews of the whaling ships that pursued their dangerous game from the equator to the poles.
The American lawyers, according to Burke, were an important cause of the Revolution. They were very numerous in the colonies; law and theories of government were much read and studied, and the people were trained to discussion of political rights as well as of religious doctrine. Burke described in picturesque detail how, in the South, the ruling class lived scattered and remote from one another, maintaining themselves in self-reliant authority on plantations with hundreds of slaves; and slavery, he said, inspired in the white master a fierce love of independence for himself and an undying dread of any form of the bondage which his love of gain had inflicted on a weaker race.
The geographical position of the thirteen contiguous colonies, so situated that they could easily unite and act together, and having a population that was increasing so rapidly that it seemed likely in a few years to exceed the population of England, was possibly a more effective cause of the Revolution than any of those that have been named. The consciousness of possessing such a vast fertile continent, which within a few generations would support more than double the population of little England, furnished a profound encouragement for theories of independence. People in England were well aware of this feeling in the colonies, and Joshua Gee, a popular writer on political economy in 1738, tried to quiet their fears. Some, he said, were objecting that “if we encourage the Plantations they will grow rich and set up for themselves and cast off the English government”; and he went on to show that this fear was groundless because the colonists nearly all lived on the navigable rivers and bays of America, where the British navy could easily reach and subdue them. He also attempted to argue away the advantage of the contiguous situation of the colonies and described them as split up into a dozen or more separate provinces, each with its own governor; and it was inconceivable, he said, that such diverse communities would be able to unite against England.
English statesmen, however, saw the danger of union among the colonies long before the outbreak of the Revolution; and they shrewdly rejected the plan of union of the Albany conference of 1754; and in the Revolution itself a large part of England’s diplomatic and military efforts were directed towards breaking up the easy communication among the colonies.
In modern times England’s colonies have been widely separated from one another. There has been no large and rapidly increasing white population on contiguous territory with ability for union. The dark-skinned population of India is enormous in numbers, but incapable of the united action of the Americans of 1776, and India is not considered a colony but a territory continuously held by overwhelming military force. Instead of a colonial population which threatened in a short time to outnumber her own people, England’s power and population have, in modern times, grown far beyond any power or population in her well-scattered white colonies.
The colonists at the time of the Revolution have often been described as speaking of England as home and regarding the mother-country with no little degree of affection; and while there is no doubt some truth in this, especially as regards the people who were loyalists, yet a very large proportion of the colonists had become totally differentiated from the people of England. This was the inevitable result of having lived for over a hundred years in the American environment. They were no longer Englishmen. They had become completely Americanized. Certain classes kept up their connection with England, and many of the rich planters of the South sent their sons to England to be educated. But a very large part of the colonists, especially in the older settled provinces, like Massachusetts and Virginia, had forgotten England and were another people.
Instead of speaking, as novelists often describe them, in a formal archaic way, using quaint phrases of old English life, the colonists spoke with mannerisms and colloquial slang which were peculiarly American. These peculiarities were ridiculed by Englishmen of the time and formed part of Grant’s famous speech in Parliament, the burden of which appears to have been that the colonists had become entirely different from English people, and Grant is said to have given imitations of what he considered their strange speech and manners. Mrs. Knight, in her Journal of Travel from Boston to New York, had, many years before the Revolution, given specimens of this difference; and the language of the New Englanders which she describes was certainly not like anything in England.
“Law for me—what in the world brings you here at this time of night? I never see a woman on the Rode so Dreadful late in all the days of my versall life. Who are you? Where are you going?”—Mrs. Knight’s Journal, p. 23.
In 1775 some one wrote a set of humorous verses, said to have been the original Yankee Doodle song, to illustrate the colloquial Americanism of the time. “Slapping” was used for “large,” as in the phrase “a slapping stallion.” “Nation” was used for “a great deal,” as in such a phrase as “only a nation louder.” “Tarnal” was used for “very.” “I see” was used for “I saw,” “I come” for “I came,” and “I hooked it off” in place of “I went away.”
Not only did the patriots feel themselves to be quite different from Englishmen, but they had a consciousness of ability and power, the result of having governed themselves so long in their towns, counties, and provinces, and of having carried on a commerce of their own in defiance of the English navigation laws. They felt that they, not Englishmen, had created the country; and they had a resolute intention to develop its future greatness in their own way without the advice of aliens across three thousand miles of ocean.
This high confidence, which was a conspicuous motive in the patriot party, was always ridiculed by the loyalists as mere bumptiousness and conceit. It was difficult for a loyalist to understand how any one could seriously put himself in opposition to the British empire or want any form of government except the British constitution. But the patriot estimate of their own ability was by no means an exaggeration. They could be overcome, of course, as the Boer republics and other peoples have been overcome, by the superior numbers or wealth of Great Britain. But the history of the Revolution disclosed qualities in which the Americans notoriously excelled Europeans as well as the Anglo-Saxon stock in England from which they were derived. They were of keener practical intelligence, more promptness in action, more untiring energy, more originality in enterprise, better courage and endurance, and more natural military skill among the rank and file. These distinctively American qualities, we now call them, seem to have been much more in evidence among the patriot party than among the loyalists.
Every circumstance of their past and every consideration of their present convinced the patriot of the infinite pleasure and value of home rule and they had codified their opinions into a political philosophy which not only justified their semi-independence and disregard of acts of Parliament, but would also justify them in breaking off from England, at the first opportunity and becoming absolutely independent. They had gathered this philosophy from the works of certain European writers—Grotius, Puffendorf, Locke, Burlamaqui, Beccaria, Montesquieu, and others—who had applied to politics and government the doctrines of religious liberty and the right of private judgment which had been developed by the Reformation. Being such extreme Protestants, and having carried so far the religious ideas of the Reformation, the colonists naturally accepted in their fullest meaning the political principles of the Reformation. If we are looking for profound influences in the Revolution, it would be difficult to find any that were stronger than two of the writers just mentioned, Locke and Burlamaqui, whose books had a vast effect in the break-up of the British empire which we are about to record.
Beginning with Grotius, who was born in 1582, and ending with Montesquieu, who died in 1755, the writers mentioned covered a period of about two hundred years of political investigation, thought and experience. In fact, they covered the period since the Reformation. They represented the effect of the Reformation on political thought. They represented also all those nations whose opinions on such subjects were worth anything. Grotius was a Dutchman, Puffendorf a German, Locke an Englishman, Burlamaqui an Italian Swiss, and Montesquieu a Frenchman.
Hooker, who lived from 1553 to 1600, and whom Locke cites so freely, might be included in the number, and that would make the period quite two hundred years. Hooker, in his “Ecclesiastical Polity,” declared very emphatically that governments could not be legitimate unless they rested on the consent of the governed; and this principle forms the foundation of Locke’s famous essays.
There were, of course, other minor writers; and the colonists relied upon them all; but seldom troubled themselves to read the works of the earlier ones, or to read Hutchinson, Clarke and other followers of that school, because Locke, Burlamaqui, and Beccaria had summarized them all and brought them down to date. To this day any one going to the Philadelphia Library, and asking for No. 77, can take in his hands the identical, well-worn volume of Burlamaqui which delegates to the Congress and many an unsettled Philadelphian read with earnest, anxious minds. It was among the first books that the library had obtained; and perhaps the most important and effective book it has ever owned.
The rebellious colonists also read Locke’s “Two Treatises on Government” with much profit and satisfaction to themselves. Locke was an extreme Whig, an English revolutionist of the school of 1688. Before that great event, he had been unendurable to the royalists, who were in power, and had been obliged to spend a large part of his time on the continent. In the preface of his “Two Treatises,” he says that they will show how entirely legitimate is the title of William III to the throne, because it is established on the consent of the people. That is the burden of his whole argument—the consent of the people as the only true foundation of government. That principle sank so deep into the minds of the patriot colonists that it was the foundation of all their political thought, and became an essentially American idea.
Beccaria, who, like Burlamaqui, was an Italian, also exercised great influence on the colonists. His famous book, “Crimes and Punishments,” was also a short, concise, but very eloquent volume. It caused a great stir in the world. The translation circulated in America had added to it a characteristic commentary by Voltaire. Beccaria, though not writing directly on the subject of liberty, necessarily included that subject, because he dealt with the administration of the criminal law. His plea for more humane and just punishments, and for punishments more in proportion to the offense, found a ready sympathy among the Americans, who had already revolted in disgust from the brutality and extravagant cruelty of the English criminal code.
But Beccaria also stated most beautifully and clearly the essential principles of liberty. His foundation doctrine, that “every act of authority of one man over another for which there is not absolute necessity is tyrannical,” made a most profound impression in America. He laid down also the principle that “in every human society there is an effort continually tending to confer on one part the highest power and happiness, and to reduce the other to the extreme of weakness and misery.” That sentence became the life-long guide of many Americans. It became a constituent part of the minds of Jefferson and Hamilton. It can be seen as the foundation, the connecting strand, running all through the essays of the Federalist. It was the inspiration of the “checks and balances” in the national Constitution. It can be traced in American thought and legislation down to the present time.
Burlamaqui’s book, devoted exclusively to the subject of liberty and independence, is still one of the best expositions of the true doctrines of natural law, or the rights of man. At the time of the Revolution these rights of man were often spoken of as our rights as men, which is a very descriptive phrase, because the essence of those rights is political manhood, honorable self-reliance as opposed to degenerate dependence.
Burlamaqui belonged to a Protestant family that had once lived at Lucca, Italy; but had been compelled, like the family of Turretini, and many others, to take refuge in Switzerland. He became a professor at Geneva, which gave him the reputation of a learned man. He also became a counselor of state and was noted for his practical sagacity. He had intended to write a great work in many volumes on the subject to which he had devoted so much of his life, “The Principles of Natural Law,” as it was then called. Ill health preventing such a huge task, he prepared a single volume, which he said was only for beginners and students, because it dealt with the bare elements of the science in the simplest and plainest language.
This little book was translated into English in 1748, and contained only three hundred pages; but in that small space of large, clear type, Burlamaqui compressed everything that the patriot colonists wanted to know. He was remarkably clear and concise, and gave the Americans the qualities of the Italian mind at its best. He aroused them by his modern glowing thought and his enthusiasm for progress and liberty. His handy little volume was vastly more effective and far-reaching than would have been the blunderbuss he had intended to load to the muzzle.
If we examine the volumes of Burlamaqui’s predecessors, Grotius, Puffendorf, and the others, we find their statements about natural law and our rights as men rather brief, vague, and general, as is usual with the old writers on any science. Burlamaqui brought them down to date, developed their principles, and swept in the results of all the thought and criticism since their day.
The term natural law, which all these writers used, has long since gone out of fashion. They used it because, inspired by the Reformation, they were struggling to get away from the arbitrary system, the artificial scholasticism, the despotism of the middle ages. They were seeking to obtain for law and government a foundation which should grow out of the nature of things, the common facts of life that everybody understood. They sought a system that, being natural, would become established and eternal like nature; a system that would displace that thing of the middle ages which they detested, and called “arbitrary institution.”
Let us, they said, contemplate for a time man as he is in himself, the natural man, his wants and requirements.
“The only way,” said Burlamaqui, “to attain to the knowledge of that natural law is to consider attentively the nature and constitution of man, the relations he has to the beings that surround him, and the states from thence resulting. In fact, the very term of natural law and the notion we have given of it, show that the principles of this science must be taken from the very nature and constitution of man.”
Men naturally, he said, draw together to form societies for mutual protection and advantage. Their natural state is a state of union and society, and these societies are merely for the common advantage of all of the members.
This was certainly a very simple proposition, but it had required centuries to bring men’s minds back to it; and it was not altogether safe to put forth because it implied that each community existed for the benefit of itself, for the benefit of its members, and not for the benefit of a prince or another nation, or for the church, or for an empire.
It was a principle quickly seized upon by the Americans as soon as their difficulties began in 1764. In their early debates and discussions we hear a great deal about a “state of nature,” which at first seems rather meaningless to us. But it was merely their attempt to apply to themselves the fundamental principles of the Reformation. Were the colonies by the exactions and remodeling of the mother-country thrown into that “state of nature,” where they could reorganize society afresh, on the basis of their own advantage? How much severity or how much oppression or dissatisfaction would bring about this state of nature? Was there any positive rule by which you could decide? Patrick Henry, who was always very eloquent on the subject, declared that the boundary had been passed; that the colonies were in a state of nature.
Any one who is at all familiar with the trend of thought for the last hundred years can readily see how closely this idea of going back to natural causes and first conceptions for the discovery of political principles is allied to every kind of modern progress; to the modern study of natural history, the study of the plants and animals in their natural environment, instead of by preconceived scholastic theories; the study of the human body by dissection instead of by supposition; the study of heat, light, electricity, the soil, the rocks, the ocean, the stars by actual observation, without regard to what the Scriptures and learned commentators had to say.
A large part of the American colonists were very far advanced in all the ideas of the Reformation. Burlamaqui’s book, applying to politics and government, these free and wonderful principles, came to a large number of them as the most soul-stirring and mind-arousing message they had ever heard. It has all become trite enough to us; but to them it was fresh and marvelous. Their imaginations seized on it with the indomitable energy and passion which the climate inspired, and some who breathed the air of Virginia and Massachusetts were on fire with enthusiasm.
“This state of nature,” argued Burlamaqui, “is not the work of man, but established by divine institution.”
“Natural society is a state of equality and liberty; a state in which all men enjoy the same prerogatives, and an entire independence on any other power but God. For every man is naturally master of himself, and equal to his fellow-creatures so long as he does not subject himself to another person’s authority by a particular convention.”
Here we find coupled with liberty that word equality which played such a tremendous part in history for the succeeding hundred years. And we must bear in mind that what the people of that time meant by it was political equality, equality of rights, equality before the law and the government; and not equality of ability, talents, fortunes, or gifts, as some have fancied.
Burlamaqui not only found liberty, independence, and equality growing out of nature itself; but he argued that all this was part of the divine plan, the great order of nature and the universe. Indeed, that was what he and his Reformation predecessors had set out to discover, to unravel the system of humanity, to see if there really was a system that could be gathered from the actual plain facts; and to see also if there was a unity and completeness in this system.
“The human understanding,” he says, “is naturally right, and has within itself a strength sufficient to arrive at the knowledge of truth, and to distinguish it from error.” That he announces as the fundamental principle of his book, “the hinge whereon the whole system of humanity turns,” and it was simply his way of restating the great doctrine of the Reformation, the right of private judgment.
But he goes on to enlarge on it in a way particularly pleasing to the patriot colonists, for he says we have this power to decide for ourselves, “especially in things wherein our respective duties are concerned.”
“Yes,” said the colonists, “we have often thought that we were the best judges of all our own affairs.”
“Those who feel,” said Franklin, in his examination before Parliament, “can best judge.”
The daring Burlamaqui went on to show that liberty instead of being, as some supposed, a privilege to be graciously accorded, was in reality a universal right, inherent in the nature of things.
Then appears that idea common to the great leaders of thought in that age, that man’s true purpose in the world is the pursuit of happiness. To this pursuit, they said, every human being has a complete right. It was part of liberty; a necessary consequence of liberty. This principle of the right to pursue happiness, which is merely another way of stating the right of self-development, has played as great a part in subsequent history as equality. It is one of the foundation principles of the Declaration of Independence. It is given there as the ground-work of the right of revolution, the right of a people to throw off or destroy a power which interferes with this great pursuit, “and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its power in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
It has been interpreted in all sorts of ways—as the right to improve your condition, to develop your talents, to grow rich, or to rise into the class of society above you. It is now in its broadest meaning so axiomatic in this country that Americans can hardly realize that it was ever disputed.
But it was, and still is, disputed in England and on the continent. Even so liberal an Englishman as Kingsley resented with indignation the charge that he favored the aspiration of the lower classes to change their condition. Once a cobbler, remain a cobbler, and be content to be a good cobbler. In other words, the righteousness which he so loudly professed was intended to exalt certain fortunate individuals, and not to advance society.
This desire and pursuit of happiness being part of nature, or part of the system of Providence, and as essential to every man and as inseparable from him as his reason, it should be freely allowed him, and not repressed. This, Burlamaqui declares, is a great principle, “the key of the human system,” opening to vast consequences for the world.
The consequences have certainly been vaster than he dreamed of. Millions of people now live their daily life in the sunshine of this doctrine. Millions have fled to us from Europe to seek its protection. Not only the whole American system of laws, but whole philosophies and codes of conduct have grown up under it. The abolitionists appealed to it, and freed six millions of slaves. The transcendental philosophy of New England, that extreme and beautiful attempt to develop conscience, nobility, and character from within; that call of the great writers like Lowell to every humble individual to stand by his own personality, fear it not, advance it by its own lines; even our education, the elective system of our colleges—all these things have followed under that “pursuit of happiness,” which the patriot colonists seized upon so gladly in 1765 and enshrined in their Declaration of Independence in 1776.
They found in the principles of natural law how government, civil society, or “sovereignty,” as those writers were apt to call it, was to be built up and regulated. Civil government did not destroy natural rights and the pursuit of happiness. On the contrary, it was intended to give those rights greater security and a fresh force and efficiency. That was the purpose men had in coming together to form a civil society for the benefit of all; that was the reason, as Burlamaqui put it, that “the sovereign became the depositary, as it were, of the will and strength of each individual.”
This seemed very satisfactory to some of the colonists. You choose your sovereign, your government, for yourself, and make it your mere depositary or agent. Then as to the nature of the government, the right to govern, they were very much pleased to find that the only right there was of this sort was the right of each community to govern itself. Government by outside power was absolutely indefensible, because the notion that there was a divine right in one set of people to rule over others was exploded nonsense, and the assertion that mere might or superior power necessarily gave such right was equally indefensible. There remained only one plausible reason, and that was that superior excellence, wisdom, or ability might possibly give such right.
As to this “superior excellence” theory, if you admitted it you denied man’s inherent right to liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness; you denied his moral accountability and responsibility; you crippled his independent development, his self-development, his individual action; in a word, you destroyed the whole natural system.
Because a man is inferior to another is no reason why he should surrender his liberty, his accountability, his chance for self-development, to the superior. We do not surrender our property to the next man who is richer or an abler business manager. Our inferiority does not give him a right over us. On the contrary, the inferiority of the inferior man is an additional reason why he should cling to all those rights of nature which have been given to him, that he may have wherewithal to raise himself, and be alone accountable for himself. Or, as Burlamaqui briefly summarized it:
“The knowledge I have of the excellency of a superior does not alone afford me a motive sufficient to subject myself to him, and to induce me to abandon my own will in order to take his for my rule; ... and without any reproach of conscience I may sincerely judge that the intelligent principle within me is sufficient to direct my conduct.”
Only the people, Burlamaqui explained, have inherent inalienable rights; and they alone can confer the privilege of commanding. It had been supposed that the sovereign alone had rights, and the people only privileges. But here were Burlamaqui, Puffendorf, Montesquieu, Locke, and fully half the American colonists, undertaking to reverse this order and announcing that the people alone had rights, and the sovereign merely privileges.
These principles the Americans afterwards translated in their documents by the phrase, “a just government exists only by consent of the governed.” All men being born politically equal, the colonies, as Dickinson and Hamilton explained, are equally with Great Britain entitled to happiness, equally entitled to govern themselves, equally entitled to freedom and independence.
It is curious to see the cautious way in which some of the colonists applied these doctrines by mixing them up with loyalty arguments. This is very noticeable in the pamphlets written by Alexander Hamilton. He gives the stock arguments for redress of grievances, freedom from internal taxation, government by the king alone, and will not admit that he is anything but a loyal subject. At the same time there runs through all he says an undercurrent of strong rebellion which leads to his ultimate object. “The power,” he says, “which one society bestows upon any man or body of men can never extend beyond its own limits.” This he lays down as a universal truth, independently of charters and the wonderful British Constitution. It applied to the whole world. Parliament was elected by the people of England, therefore it had no authority outside of the British isle. That British isle and America were separate societies.
“Nature,” said Hamilton, “has distributed an equality of rights to every man.” How then, he asked, can the English people have any rights over life, liberty, or property in America? They can have authority only among themselves in England. We are separated from Great Britain, Hamilton argued, not only by the ocean, by geography, but because we have no part or share in governing her. Therefore, as we have no share in governing her, she, by the law of nature, can have no share in governing us; she is a separate society.
The British, he said, were attempting to involve in the idea of a colony the idea of political slavery, and against that a man must fight with his life. To be controlled by the superior wisdom of another nation was ridiculous, unworthy of the consideration of manhood; and at this point he used that sentence which has so often been quoted—“Deplorable is the condition of that people who have nothing else than the wisdom and justice of another to depend upon.”
Charters and documents, he declared, must yield to natural laws and our rights as men.
“The sacred rights of man are not to be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records. They are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human nature by the hand of divinity itself and can never be erased by mortal power.”
The Declaration of Independence was an epitome of these doctrines of natural law applied to the colonies. The Declaration of Independence originated in these doctrines, and not in the mind of Jefferson, as so many people have absurdly supposed. In order to see how directly the Declaration was an outcome of these teachings we have only to read its opening paragraphs:
“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable 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 from 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 foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”
By understanding the writings of Burlamaqui, Locke, and Beccaria, which the colonists were studying so intently, we know the origin of the Declaration, and need not flounder in the dark, as so many have done, wondering where it came from, or how it was that Jefferson could have invented it. Being unwilling to take the trouble of examining carefully the influences which preceded the Declaration, historical students are sometimes surprised to find a document like the Virginia Bill of Rights or the supposed Mecklenburg resolutions, issued before the Declaration and yet containing the same principles. They instantly jump to the conclusion that here is the real origin and author of the Declaration, and from this Jefferson stole his ideas.
Jefferson merely drafted the Declaration. Neither he, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, nor Livingston, who composed the committee which was responsible for it, ever claimed any originality for its principles. They were merely stating principles which were already familiar to the people, which had been debated over and over again in Congress; which were so familiar in fact, that they stated them rather carelessly and took too much for granted. It would have been better, instead of saying, “all men are created equal,” to have said that all men are created politically equal, which was what they meant, and what every one at that time understood. By leaving out the word “politically” they gave an opportunity to a generation unfamiliar with the doctrines of natural law to suppose that they meant that all men are created, or should be made, equal in conditions, opportunities or talents.
Recall the quaint and homely city of Philadelphia, the gloom that hung over it from the terrible responsibility of the step there taken, the modest hall still standing and baptized as the Cradle of Liberty. On its tower swung the bell which yet survives with its legend,—“Proclaim liberty throughout all the world to all the inhabitants thereof.” That day it rang out a proclamation of liberty that will indeed echo round the world and in the ears of all the inhabitants thereof long after the bell itself shall have crumbled into dust.
Hancock is in the president’s chair; before him sit the half-hundred delegates who at that time represent America. Among the names it is remarkable how many there are that have since been famous in our annals. The committee appointed to draft the declarations are Jefferson, youngest and tallest; John Adams; Sherman, shoemaker; Franklin, printer; and Robert R. Livingston. If the patriot, Samuel Adams, at the sunrise of Lexington could say,—“Oh, what a glorious morning!” how well might he have renewed in the more brilliant noontime of July 4, 1776, the same prophetic words!
There is nothing in the prophecies of old more striking and impressive than the words of John Adams, who declared the event would be celebrated by succeeding generations as a great anniversary festival and commemorated as a day of deliverance, from one end of the continent to the other; that through all the gloom he could see the light; that the end was worth all the means and that posterity would triumph in the transaction. I am not of those who overrate the past. I know that the men of 1776 had the common weaknesses and shortcomings of humanity. I read the Declaration of Independence with no feeling of awe; and yet if I were called upon to select from the history of the world any crisis grander, loftier, purer, more heroic, I should not know where to turn.
It seems simple enough to-day, but it was something else in that day. The men who signed the Declaration knew not but they were signing warrants for their own ignominious execution on the gibbet. The bloody victims of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 were still a warning to rebels; and the gory holocaust of Culloden was fresh in the memory. But it was not only the personal risk; it was risking the homes, the commerce, the lives, the property, the honor, the future destiny of three million innocent people,—men, women, and children. It was defying on behalf of a straggling chain of colonies clinging to the sea-board, the most imperial power of the world. It was, more than all, like Columbus sailing into awful uncertainty of untried space, casting off from an established and familiar form of government and politics, drifting away to unknown methods, and upon the dangerous and yawning chaos of democratic institutions, flying from ills they had to those they knew not of, and perhaps laying the way for a miserable and bloody catastrophe in anarchy and riot.
There are times when ordinary men are borne by the tide of an occasion to crests of grandeur in conduct and action. Such a time, such an occasion, was that of the Declaration. While the signers were picked men, none the less true is it that their extraordinary fame is due not more to their merits than to the crisis at which they were at the helm and to the great popular instinct which they obeyed and expressed. And why do we commemorate with such veneration and display this special epoch and event in our history? Why do we repeat the words our fathers spoke or wrote? Why cherish their names, when our civilization is better than theirs and when we have reached in science, art, education, religion, politics, in every phase of human development, even in morals, a higher level?
It is because we recognize that in their beginnings the eternal elements of truth and right and justice were conspicuous. To those eternal verities we pay our tribute, and not to their surroundings, except so far as we let the form stand for the spirit, the man for the idea, the event for the purpose. And it is also because we can do no better work than to perpetuate virtue in the citizen by keeping always fresh in the popular mind the great heroic deeds and times of our history. The valuable thing in the past is not the man or the events,—which are both always ordinary and which under the enchantment of distance and the pride of descent, we love to surround with exaggerated glory,—it is rather in the sentiment for which the man and the event stand. The ideal is alone substantial and alone survives.
It is a cloudless summer day; a clear blue sky arches and expands above a quaint edifice rising among the giant trees in the center of a wide city. That edifice is built of plain red brick, with heavy window frames, and a massive hall door.
Such is the State House of Philadelphia in the year of our Lord 1776.
In yonder wooden steeple, which crowns the summit of that red brick State House, stands an old man with snow-white hair and sunburnt face. He is clad in humble attire, yet his eye gleams as it is fixed on the ponderous outline of the bell suspended in the steeple there. By his side, gazing into his sunburnt face in wonder, stands a flaxen-haired boy, with laughing eyes of summer blue. The old man ponders for a moment upon the strange words written upon the bell, then, gathering the boy in his arms, he speaks: “Look here, my child; will you do this old man a kindness? Then hasten down the stairs, and wait in the hall below till a man gives you a message for me; when he gives you that word, run out into the street and shout it up to me. Do you mind?” The boy sprang from the old man’s arms and threaded his way down the dark stairs.
Many minutes passed. The old bell-keeper was alone. “Ah!” groaned the old man, “he has forgotten me.” As the word was upon his lips a merry, ringing laugh broke on his ear. And there, among the crowd on the pavement, stood the blue-eyed boy, clapping his tiny hands while the breeze blew his flaxen hair all about his face, and, swelling his little chest, he raised himself on tiptoe, and shouted the single word, “Ring!”
Do you see that old man’s eye fire? Do you see that arm so suddenly bared to the shoulder? Do you see that withered hand grasping the iron tongue of the bell? That old man is young again. His veins are filling with a new life. Backward and forward, with sturdy strokes, he swings the tongue. The bell peals out; the crowds in the street hear it, and burst forth in one long shout. Old Delaware hears it, and gives it back on the cheers of her thousand sailors. The city hears it, and starts up from desk and workshop, as if an earthquake had spoken.
Under that very bell, pealing out at noonday, in an old hall, fifty-six traders, farmers and mechanics had assembled to break the shackles of the world. The committee, who had been out all night, are about to appear. At last the door opens, and they advance to the front. The parchment is laid on the table. Shall it be signed or not? Then ensues a high and stormy debate. Then the faint-hearted cringe in corners. Then Thomas Jefferson speaks his few bold words, and John Adams pours out his whole soul.
Still there is a doubt; and that pale-faced man, rising in one corner, speaks out something about “axes, scaffolds, and a gibbet.” A tall, slender man rises, and his dark eye burns, while his words ring through the halls: “Gibbets! They may stretch our necks on every scaffold in the land. They may turn every rock into a gibbet, every tree into a gallows; and yet the words written on that parchment can never die. They may pour out our blood on a thousand altars, and yet, from every drop that dyes the axe, or drips on the sawdust of the block, a new martyr to freedom will spring into existence. What! are there shrinking hearts and faltering voices here, when the very dead upon our battle-fields arise and call upon us to sign that parchment, or be accursed forever?
“Sign! if the next moment the gibbet’s rope is around your neck. Sign! if the next moment this hall rings with the echo of the falling axe. Sign! by all your hopes in life or death, as husbands, as fathers, as men! Sign your names to that parchment.
“Yes! were my soul trembling on the verge of eternity; were this voice choking in the last struggle, I would still, with the last impulse of that soul, with the last gasp of that voice, implore you to remember this truth: God has given America to the free. Yes! as I sink down in the gloomy shadow of the grave, with my last breath I would beg of you sign that parchment.”
Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote. It is true, indeed, that in the beginning we aimed not at independence. But there is a Divinity which shapes our ends. The injustice of England has driven us to arms; and, blinded to her own interest and our good she has obstinately persisted, till independence is now within our grasp. We have but to reach forth to it, and it is ours. Why, then, should we defer the Declaration? Is any man so weak as now to hope for a reconciliation with England, which shall leave neither safety to the country and its liberties, nor safety to his life and his own honor? Are you not, sir, who sit in that chair, is not he, our venerable colleague near you, are you not both already the proscribed and predestined objects of punishment and of vengeance? Cut off from all hope of royal clemency, what are you, what can you be, while the power of England remains, but outlaws?
If we postpone independence, do we mean to carry on or give up the war? Do we mean to submit to the measures of Parliament, Boston Port-Bill and all? Do we mean to submit, and consent that we ourselves shall be ground to powder, and our country and its rights, trodden down in the dust? I know we do not mean to submit. We never shall submit. Do we mean to violate that most solemn obligation ever entered into by men, that plighting before God, of our sacred honor to Washington, when, putting him forth to incur the dangers of war, as well as the political hazards of the times, we promised to adhere to him, in every extremity, with our fortunes and our lives? I know there is not a man here, who would not rather see a general conflagration sweep over the land, or an earthquake sink it, than one jot or tittle of that plighted faith fall to the ground. For myself, having, twelve months ago, in this place, moved you, that George Washington be appointed commander of the forces raised, or to be raised, for defense of American liberty, may my right hand forget her cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I hesitate or waver in the support I give him.
The war, then, must go on. We must fight it through. And if the war must go on, why put off longer the Declaration of Independence? That measure will strengthen us. It will give us character abroad. The nations will then treat with us, which they never can do while we acknowledge ourselves subjects in arms against our sovereign. Nay, I maintain that England herself will sooner treat for peace with us on the footing of independence than consent, by repealing her Acts, to acknowledge that her whole conduct toward us has been a course of injustice and oppression. Her pride will be less wounded by submitting to that course of things which now predestinates our independence than by yielding the points in controversy to her rebellious subjects. The former she would regard as the result of fortune; the latter she would feel as her own deep disgrace. Why, then, why, then, sir, do we not as soon as possible change this from a civil to a national war? And, since we must fight it through, why not put ourselves in a state to enjoy all the benefits of victory, if we gain the victory?
If we fail, it can be no worse for us. But we shall not fail. The cause will raise up armies; the cause will create navies. The people, the people, if we are true to them, will carry us, and will carry themselves, gloriously through the struggle. I care not how fickle other people have been found. I know the people of these Colonies, and I know that resistance to British aggression is deep and settled in their hearts, and cannot be eradicated. Every Colony, indeed, has expressed its willingness to follow, if we but take the lead.
Sir, the Declaration will inspire the people with increased courage. Instead of a long and bloody war for restoration of privileges, for redress of grievances, for chartered immunities, held under a British King, set before them the gloriousness of entire independence, and it will breathe into them anew the breath of life. Read this Declaration at the head of the army; every sword will be drawn from its scabbard, and the solemn vow uttered to maintain it, or to perish on the bed of honor. Publish it from the pulpit; religion will approve it, and the love of religious liberty will cling round it, resolved to stand with it, or fall with it. Send it to the public halls; proclaim it there; let them hear it who heard the first roar of the enemy’s cannon; let them see it who saw their brothers and their sons fall on the field of Bunker Hill, and in the streets of Lexington and Concord, and the very walls will cry out in its support.
Sir, I know the uncertainty of human affairs, but I see, I see clearly, through this day’s business. You and I, indeed, may rue it. We may not live to the time when this Declaration shall be made good. We may die; die, colonists; die, slaves; die, it may be, ignominiously and on the scaffold. Be it so; be it so! If it be the pleasure of heaven that my country shall require the poor offering of my life, the victim shall be ready at the appointed hour of sacrifice, come when that hour may. But, while I do live, let me have a country, or at least, the hope of a country, and that a free country.
But whatever may be our fate, be assured, be assured that this Declaration will stand. It may cost treasure, and it may cost blood, but it will stand, and it will richly compensate for both. Through the thick gloom of the present, I see the brightness of the future, as the sun in heaven. We shall make this a glorious, an immortal day. When we are in our graves, our children will honor it. They will celebrate it with thanksgiving, with festivity, with bonfires and illuminations. On its annual return, they will shed tears, copious, gushing tears, not of subjection and slavery, not of agony and distress, but of exultation, of gratitude and of joy. Sir, before God, I believe the hour is come. My judgment approves this measure, and my whole heart is in it. All that I have, and all that I am, and all that I hope, in this life, I am now ready here to stake upon it. And I leave off as I began, that, live or die, survive or perish, I am for the Declaration. It is my living sentiment, and by the blessing of God it shall be my dying sentiment, Independence now, and INDEPENDENCE FOREVER!
On July fourth, 1776, the representatives of the American people gathered at the State House in Philadelphia to take final action upon the Declaration of Independence, which had been under discussion for three days.
It was soon known throughout the city; and in the morning, before Congress assembled, the streets were filled with excited men, some gathered in groups engaged in eager discussion, and others moving toward the State House. All business was forgotten in the momentous crisis which the country had now reached. No sooner had the members taken their seats than the multitude gathered in a dense mass around the entrance. The bell-man mounted to the belfry, to be ready to proclaim the joyful tidings of freedom as soon as the final vote was passed. A bright-eyed boy was stationed below to give the signal.
Around the bell, brought from England, had been cast, more than twenty years before, the prophetic motto: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.” Although its loud clang had often sounded over the city, the proclamation engraved on its iron lip had never yet been spoken aloud.
It was expected that the final vote would be taken without delay; but hour after hour wore on, and no report came from the mysterious hall where the fate of a continent was in suspense. The multitude grew impatient. The old man leaned over the railing, straining his eyes downward, till his heart misgave him, and hope yielded to fear. But at length, about two o’clock the door of the hall opened, and a voice exclaimed, “It has passed!”
The word leaped like lightning from lip to lip, followed by huzzas that shook the building. The boy-sentinel turned to the belfry, clapped his hands, and shouted, “Ring! ring!” The desponding bell-man, electrified into life by the joyful news, seized the iron tongue and hurled it backward and forward with a clang that startled every heart in Philadelphia like a bugle blast.
“Clang! Clang!” the bell of Liberty resounded on, higher and clearer and more joyous, blending in its deep and thrilling vibration, and proclaiming in loud and long accents over all the land the motto that encircled it.
INSCRIPTION, “PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT THE LAND TO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF.” JULY 4, 1776.