Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History
Benson Lossing, Ed.

Our fathers were no propagandists of republican institutions in the abstract. Their own adoption of a republican form was, at the moment, almost as much a matter of chance as of choice, of necessity as of preference. The thirteen colonies had, happily, been too long accustomed to manage their own affairs, and were too widely jealous of each other, also, to admit for an instant any idea of centralization; and without centralization a monarchy, or any other form of arbitrary government, was out of the question. Union was then, as it is now, the only safety for liberty; but it could only be a constitutional union, a limited and restricted union, founded on compromises and mutual concessions; a union recognizing a large measure of State rights—resting not only on the division of powers among legislative and executive departments, but resting [415] also on the distribution of powers between the States and the nation, both deriving their original authority from the people, and exercising that authority for the people. This was the system contemplated by the declaration of 1776. This was the system approximated to by the confederation of 1778-81. This was the system finally consummated by the Constitution of 1789. And under this system our great example of self-government has been held up before the nations, fulfilling, so far as it has fulfilled it, that lofty mission which is recognized to-day as “liberty enlightening the world.”

Let me not speak of that example in any vainglorious spirit. Let me not seem to arrogate for my country anything of superior wisdom or virtue. Who will pretend that we have always made the most of our independence, or the best of our liberty? Who will maintain that we have always exhibited the brightest side of our institutions, or always intrusted their administration to the wisest or worthiest men? Who will deny that we have sometimes taught the world what to avoid, as well as what to imitate; and that the cause of freedom and reform has sometimes been discouraged and put back by our shortcomings, or by our excesses? Our light has been at best but a revolving light; warning by its darker intervals or its sombre shades, as well as cheering by its flashes of brilliancy, or by the clear lustre of its steadier shining. Yet, in spite of all its imperfections and irregularities, to no other earthly light have so many eyes been turned; from no other earthly illumination have so many hearts drawn hope and courage. It has breasted the tides of sectional and of party strife. It has stood the shock of foreign and of civil war. It will still hold on, erect and unextinguished, defying, “the returning wave” of demoralization and corruption. Millions of young hearts in all quarters of our land are awakening at this moment to the responsibility which rests peculiarly upon them, for rendering its radiance purer and brighter and more constant. Millions of young hearts are resolving at this hour that it shall not be their fault if it do not stand for a century to come, as it has stood for a century past, a beacon of liberty to mankind. Their little flags of hope and promise are floating to-day from every cottage window along the road-side. With those young hearts it is safe.

Meantime we may all rejoice and take courage, as we remember of how great a drawback and obstruction our example has been disembarrassed and relieved within a few years past. Certainly we cannot forget this day, in looking back over the century which is gone, how long that example was overshadowed, in the eyes of our men, by the existence of African slavery in so considerable a portion of our country. Never, never, however—it may be safely said—was there a more tremendous, a more dreadful problem submitted to a nation for solution than that which this institution involved for the United States of America. Nor were we alone responsible for its existence. I do not speak of it in the way of apology for ourselves. Still less would I refer to it in the way of crimination or reproach towards others, abroad or at home. But the well-known paragraph on this subject in the original draught of the declaration is quite too notable a reminiscence of the little desk before me to be forgotten on such an occasion as this. That omitted clause—which, as Mr. Jefferson tells us, “was struck out in compliance to South Carolina and Georgia,” not without “tenderness,” too, as he adds, to some “Northern brethren, who, though they had very few slaves themselves, had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others” —contained the direct allegation that the King had “prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce.” That memorable clause, omitted for prudential reasons only, has passed into history, and its truth can never be disputed. It recalls to us, and recalls to the world, the historical fact—which we certainly have a special right to remember this day—that not only had African slavery found its portentous and pernicious way into our colonies in their earliest settlement, but that it had been fixed and fastened upon some of them by royal vetoes, prohibiting the passage of laws to restrain its further introduction. It had thus not only entwined and entangled itself about the [416] very roots of our choicest harvests—until slavery and cotton at last seemed as inseparable as the tares and wheat of the sacred parable—but it had engrafted itself upon the very fabric of our government. We all know, the world knows, that our independence could not have been achieved, our Union could not have been maintained, our Constitution could not have been established, without the adoption of those compromises which recognized its continued existence, and left it to the responsibility of the States of which it was the grievous inheritance. And from that day forward the method of dealing with it, of disposing of it, and of extinguishing it became more and more a problem full of terrible perplexity, and seemingly incapable of human solution.

Oh, that it could have been solved at last by some process less deplorable and dreadful than civil war! How unspeakably glorious it would have been for us this day could the great emancipation have been concerted, arranged, and ultimately effected without violence or bloodshed, as a simple and sublime act of philanthropy and justice!

But it was not in the divine economy that so huge an original wrong should be righted by an easy process. The decree seemed to have gone forth from the very registries of heaven:

Cuncta prius tentanda, sed immedicabile vulnus
Ense recidendum est.

The immedicable wound must be cut away by the sword! Again and again as that terrible war went on we might almost hear voices crying out, in the words of the old prophet: “O thou sword of the Lord, how long will it be ere thou be quiet? Put up thyself into thy scabbard; rest, and be still.” But the answering voice seemed not less audible: “How can it be quiet, seeing the Lord hath given it a charge?”

And the war went on—bravely fought on both sides, as we all know—until, as one of its necessities, slavery was abolished. It fell at last under that right of war to abolish it which the late John Quincy Adams had been the first to announce in the way of warning, more than twenty years before, in my own hearing, on the floor of Congress, while I was your representative. I remember well the burst of indignation and derision with which that warning was received. No prediction of Cassandra was ever more scorned than his, and he did not live to witness its verification. But whoever else may have been more immediately and personally instrumental in the final result—the brave soldiers who fought the battles, or the gallant generals who led them—the devoted philanthropists or the ardent statesmen, who, in season and out of season, labored for it—the martyr-President who proclaimed it—the true story of emancipation can never be fairly and fully told without the “old man eloquent,” who died beneath the roof of the Capitol nearly thirty years ago, being recognized as one of the leading figures of the narrative.

But, thanks be to God, who overrules everything for good, that great event, the grandest of our American age, great enough alone and by itself to give a name and a character to any age—has been accomplished, and, by His blessing, we present our country to the world this day without a slave, white or black, upon its soil! Thanks be to God, not only that our beloved Union has been saved, but that it has been made both easier to save and better worth saving hereafter by the final solution of a problem before which all human wisdom had stood aghast and confounded for so many generations. Thanks be to God, and to Him be all the praise and the glory, we can read the great words of the Declaration, on this centennial anniversary, without reservation or evasion: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuits of happiness.” The legend on that new colossal pharos at Long Island may now indeed be “Liberty enlightening the world!”

We come, then, to-day, fellow-citizens, with hearts full of gratitude to God and man, to pass down our country, and its institutions—not only wholly without scars and blemishes upon their front— not without shadows on the past or clouds of the future—but freed forever from at [417] least one great stain, and firmly rooted in the love and loyalty of a united people—to the generations which are to succeed us.

And what shall we say to those succeeding generations, as we commit the sacred trust to their keeping and guardianship?

If I could hope, without presumption, that any humble counsels of mind, on this hallowed anniversary, could be remembered beyond the hour of their utterance, and reach the ears of my countrymen in future days; if I could borrow “the masterly pen” of Jefferson, and produce words which should partake of the immortality of those which he wrote on this little desk; if I could command the matchless tongue of John Adams, when he poured out appeals and arguments which moved men from their seats, and settled the destinies of a nation; if I could catch but a single spark of those electric fires which Franklin wrestled from the skies, and flash down a phrase, a word, a thought, along the magic chords, which stretch across the ocean of the future—what could I, what would I say?

I could not omit, certainly, to reiterate the solemn obligations which rest on every citizen of this republic to cherish and enforce the great principles of our colonial and Revolutionary fathers—the principles of liberty and law, one and inseparable—the principles of the Constitution and the Union.

I could not omit to urge on every man to remember that self-government politically can be successful only if it be accompanied by self-government personally; that there must be government somewhere; and that, if the people are indeed to be sovereigns, they must exercise their sovereignty over themselves individually, as well as over themselves in the aggregate, regulating their own lives, resisting their own temptations, subduing their own passions, and voluntarily imposing upon themselves some measure of that restraint and discipline which, under other systems, is supplied from the armories of arbitrary power—the discipline of virtue in the place of the discipline of slavery.

I could not omit to caution them against the corrupting influences of intemperance, extravagance, and luxury. I could not omit to warn them against political intrigue, as well as against personal licentiousness; and to implore them to regard principle and character, rather than mere party allegiance, in the choice of men to rule over them.

I could not omit to call upon them to foster and further the cause of universal education; to give a liberal support to our schools and colleges; to promote the advancement of science and of art, in all their multiplied divisions and relations; and to encourage and sustain all those noble institutions of charity, which, in our own land, above all others, have given the crowning grace and glory to modern civilization.

I could not refrain from pressing upon them a just and generous consideration for the interests and the rights of their fellow-men everywhere, and an earnest effort to promote peace and good — will among the nations of the earth.

I could not refrain from reminding them of the shame, the unspeakable shame and ignominy, which would attach to those who should show themselves unable to uphold the glorious fabric of self-government which had been formed for them at such cost by their fathers: “Videte, videte, ne, ut illis pulcherrimum fuit tantam vobis imperil gloriam relinquere, sic solis turpissimum sit, illud quod accepistis, tueri et conservare non posse!”

And surely, most surely, I could not fail to invoke them to imitate and emulate the example of virtue and purity and patriotism, which the great founders of our colonies and of our nations had so abundantly left them.

But could I stop there? Could I hold out to them, as the results of a long life of observation and experience, nothing but the principles and examples of great men?

Who and what are great men? “Woe to the country,” said Metternich to our own Ticknor, forty years ago, “whose condition and institutions no longer produce great men to manage its affairs.” The wily Austrian applied his remark to England at that day; but his woe—if it be woe—would have a wider range in our time, and leave hardly any land unreached. Certainly we hear it nowadays, at every turn, that never before has there been so striking a disproportion between [418] supply and demand, as at this moment, the world over, in the commodity of great men.

But who, and what, are great men? “And now stand forth,” says an eminent Swiss historian, who had completed a survey of the whole history of mankind, at the very moment when, as he says, “a blaze of freedom is just bursting forth beyond the ocean” — “And now stand forth, ye gigantic forms, shades of the first chieftains, and sons of God, who glimmer among the rocky halls and mountain fortresses of the ancient world; and you conquerors of the world from Babylon and from Macedonia; ye dynasties of Caesars, of Huns, Arabs, Moguls, and Tartars; ye commanders of the faithful on the Tigris, and commanders of the faithful on the Tiber; you hoary counsellors of kings, and peers of sovereigns; warriors on the car of triumph, covered with scars and crowned with laurels, ye long row of consuls and dictators, famed for your lofty minds, your unshaken constancy, your ungovernable spirit;—stand forth, and let us survey for a while your assembly, like a council of the gods! what were ye? The first among mortals? Seldom can you claim that title! The best of men? Still fewer of you have deserved such praise! Were ye the compellers, the instigators of the human race, the prime movers of all their works? Rather let us say that you were the instruments, that you were the wheels, by whose means the Invisible Being has conducted the incomprehensible fabric of universal government across the ocean of time!”

Instruments and wheels of the Invisible Governor of the universe! This is indeed all which the greatest men ever have been, or ever can be. No flatteries of courtiers, no adulations of the multitude, no audacity of self-reliance, no intoxications of success, no evolutions or developments of science can make more or other of them. This is “the sea-mark of their utmost sail,” the goal of their farthest run, the very round and top of their highest soaring.

Oh, if there could be, to-day, a deeper and more pervading impression of this great truth throughout our land, and a more prevailing conformity of our thoughts and words and acts to the lessons which it involves—if we could lift ourselves to a loftier sense of our relations to the Invisible—if in surveying our past history we could catch larger and more exalted views of our destinies and our responsibilities—if we could realize that the want of good men may be a heavier woe to a land than any want of what the world calls great men—our centennial year would not only be signalized by splendid ceremonials and magnificent commemorations and gorgeous expositions, but it would go far towards fulfilling something of the grandeur of that “acceptable year” which was announced by higher than human lips, and would be the auspicious promise and pledge of the glorious second century of independence and freedom for our country!

For, if that second century of self-government is to go on safely to its close, or is to go on safely and prosperously at all, there must be some renewal of that old spirit of subordination and obedience to divine, as well as human laws, which has been our security in the past. There must be faith in something higher and better than ourselves. There must be a reverent acknowledgment of an unseen, but all-seeing, all-controlling Ruler of the universe. His word, His day, His house, His worship, must be sacred to our children, as they have been to their fathers; and His blessing must never fail to be invoked upon our land and upon our liberties. The patriot voice which cried from the balcony of yonder old Statehouse when the Declaration had been originally proclaimed, “Stability and perpetuity to American independence!” did not fail to add “God save our American States!” I would prolong that ancestral prayer. And the last phrase to pass my lips at this hour, and to take its chance for remembrance or oblivion in years to come, as the conclusion of this centennial oration, and as the sum and summing up of all I can say to the present or the future, shall be: there is, there can be, no independence of God; in Him, as a nation no less than in Him, as individuals, “we live, and move, and have our being! God save our American States!”