Chapter II: July Fourth, 1776, and So Forth

Review of our Historical Journey from the Start up to the Summit of
the 4th of July.—_Résumé_ of our Tramp through Pre-Columbian and
Post-Columbian Times.—Our March from St. Augustine, via Jamestown
and the Manhattan Cabins, to the Temperance Tavern at
Plymouth.—Descriptions of Indian Interruptions.—Polite Interferences
of Gallic Gentlemen at Narrow Parts of the Road in 1689, 1710, 1745,
etc.—Banditti on the Highways of History, English, French, and
Dutch.—Blazing Description of the Summit, the Flagstaff, Flag, and
Eagle.—The Grand Political Picnic there of Fifty-one Wise Men.—The
Thunder-Storms around them; and their Behavior.—General Account of
this Group; and how remarkable and marked.—Special Portraitures of
Thirteen of them.—Some Peculiar Heads there, and how much George
III. wanted them.—Prayer of John Adams.—A Great Freshet of a Speech
and what it carried off.—A Remarkable Declaration made by
Jefferson.—An Electrical Battery charged and discharged.—The
Peppering George III. got.—How he worked Seven Years against the
Declaration.—The Gunpowdery Effect of the first Fourth, and the
Fire-Crackers since touched off by it.—Independence originally
handled without Gloves; now by Aldermen and very Common Councilmen
with a half-dozen Pair apiece.—The Fourths up to 1850.—Tar-Barrel
Eloquence.—Military and Civic Renown snatched on that Day.—What
Eggs, containing Addling Heroes, pip on that Day.—How Swords
embarrass Crooked Legs.—Militia Lines, and what Snarls they get
into.—Dissolving Bursts of Golden Glories.—Effects of Sulphur
administered to a Rural Population.—Cakes of Gingerbread, and how
they stuck in the Teeth, Stomach, and Memory.—Lamentations over the
Decay of the Old-time Fourths.

Long time have we been climbing together up the political eminence, until we have at last reached its high summit,—the Fourth of July. Cold and bleak was the weather, and wholly new and uncleared the path on which we set out, thousands of years ago, among the hitherto unknown, pre-Columbian regions of America. The way was beset with obstructions,—heaps of coal and fossil remains,—and strewn with bones of races, human and animal, as strange even to our museums as they were novel to ourselves. Among these freshly discovered relics of our great ancestors, we trode carefully, and lingered with pleased wonder among ruins, which shamed by their age and size the usurping glories of Egyptian, Chinese, and Assyrian antiquities. At last, however, having traversed those broad plains, over which hung the gray, uncertain twilight of chronicle and geological fiction, we emerged, by a sudden turn in the road, into the clearer light and more solid undebatable ground rediscovered and retouched by more modern nations; convinced by our large inspection and survey, that those who landed on our shores long before Columbus—the Cabots, Cortereals, Verrazannis, Vespuccis, etc.—had, like provident _patres familias_, packed carefully away large stores of carbonized fuel and bone manure for the use of those who should come behind and after them, and had left well-feathered nests for the more helpless brood which might flock here in times long subsequent to their own.

Refreshed from the fatigues of this long wandering tramp, we then took a fresh start 304 years ago from Sainte Augustine, plodded on northwards forty-eight years to Jamestown, in six years more passed the little group of Dutch cabins on Manhattan island, and so, trending off eastward, followed the wavy coast for eight years more, until we brought up, in 1620, at the newly erected temperance inn at Plymouth, where we halted, glad even of its scant and unpromising cheer. Very early after leaving the James, we were accosted by that well-known wag, John Smith, who turned up in high feather with Pocahontas,—the future mother of Virginia,—and who keeps turning up and down everywhere in all humors, moods, and tenses,—active, passive, transitive, and intransitive,—to suit and amuse every taste.

A PURITAN BREAKFAST.
(p. 259)
]

Mile-stone after mile-stone has been left behind us. We have been hindered by Indian ambushes along the wayside, and have been obliged often to pick out arrows shot into our covered emigrant-wagon, as we have toiled up and over the New England hills, through the Mohawk Valley, and along the broad bottom-lands of Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas. French gentlemen with pleasant manners have often stopped us at cross-roads, and attempted by very sharp arguments to convince us that we were on the wrong track. Several large parties of these Gallic gentlemen, at various narrow parts of the way, especially in 1689, 1710, 1745, and notably for nine consecutive years from 1754 to 1763, have warned us back, and indeed endeavored to turn us entirely off the road, claiming that it was a private one of their own. But past all these have we succeeded in pushing our historic journey, shunning the miry places left open by colonial negligence, the shaky bridges full of witch holes, the badly mended ruts of religious bigotry, and the rough patches of corduroy posts, laid crosswise over trembling, low-lying swamps of political scheming and financial speculation. Here and there we have found bits of plank road, laboriously and ambitiously placed over the public highway in front of colleges, school-houses, churches, and occasionally through pleasant thrifty villages.

Now and then we have ascended, after much patient up-hill work, to large, noble summits of civil or religious freedom, commanding wide horizons and broad views; but often, too, have we felt a sinking of spirits, a saddening depression, as we have been compelled to descend to lower levels and to jog along again over wearisome flats.

We have been detained occasionally by civil-spoken English governors and royal councillors, who have persuaded us to alight and partake of their cheer, which, it must be admitted, was much better than that which we obtained along the common road; but well knowing that it had never been honestly paid for or justly earned, we should have found it more palatable had it been thus properly seasoned. Landed proprietors, with smooth, royal manners, have, also, sometimes stopped us to state little points of difference between themselves and their North American tenants.

Several times have we crossed the Atlantic together for the purpose of obtaining certain information about the colonial ways, rights, manners, customs, and costumes, which could only be cleared up by papers which had been either accidentally or carelessly left behind, when the first emigrants packed their chests with the prime necessaries for subsistence on their briny journey. As we returned and again resumed our land travels, we had only proceeded a short distance before we were stopped by unceremonious and hard-visaged European highwaymen, French, Dutch, and English, with whom we have had stout fights, to prevent the party which we were convoying from being captured, plundered, and carried off to foreign lands. But, thanks to a kind Providence and the strong arms and plucky vigor of the brave chaps inside the wagon, we have been able to disperse these banditti. Two of them, however, as we have just noted, escaping from those lesser encounters, entered formally into a set contest with each other for the championship and custody of our historical party,—a contest which came off a few rods from the top of the hill, and which we halted to witness.

At last, however, we have reached the summit of the great pass,—the high beacon-point of American history,—where the sleepless, vigilant eagle sits screaming, while his strong, horny claws grasp the flag-staff, from whose top the flag of the married empires is anxiously ready, day and night, to slap in its saucy, quarrelsome face every wind that whispers a provocation. Here, on this elevated plateau, we come suddenly upon a very nice party of picturesquely dressed, intelligent, earnest, and thoughtful gentlemen, looking like a large gathering of state midwives, called together to consider a most important, impending family event.

Let us take breath for a few moments after our long ascent, and look more carefully at this noteworthy group. It is the 4th of July,—always a very hot day; and yet, although the weather is characteristic, and there is very warm work ahead, all the party—numbering that day fifty-one persons—seem, with few exceptions, to be very cool and unheated. They are quite unconcerned about the thunder-storm, signalled by white caps fringing the black heads which crowd the eastern horizon beyond the Atlantic, and which has shaken from its heavy locks leaden powder, which has sprinkled the exposed plantations, Breed’s Hill, Concord, Lexington, Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and Long Island, and even shaken its disastrous dust upon Quebec and Montreal.

This notable group is sometimes called the Second Continental Congress. Remarkable in looks and marked men are nearly all of the persons there gathered,—remarkable for their average youth, as most of the members became equally famous for great age,—remarkable, too, in a majority of the whole number, for handsome features and intellectual presence, for their aptitude for, and ready proficiency in, the then very mysterious and royal business of statecraft, law-making, and army-raising,—for their thoughtful air and high-bred bearing, and their readiness in argument, logic, and knowledge of human rights and human nature; marked by the heavy Hanoverian displeasure of George III., of the aristocratic Frederic, Lord North, his minister, and of Sir William Howe, his military generalissimo in the Colonies. Many of them, too, were marked by heads so peculiar that the three English gentlemen just named became very desirous of having them to put into the English State Museum, and even went so far as to offer heavy sterling rewards for any one who would secure them.

One of these heads immediately arrests our attention. It is very handsome, and is set upon a fine, tall, gentlemanly figure,—both owned by one John Hancock from Boston, only thirty-nine years of age, of large wealth for those simple days honorably acquired by trade, of manners conspicuously high-bred, and with a soul that, like a lamp burning inside an alabaster vase, illuminates the beautiful characters which the highest culture has traced and wrought. Two years ago, when Boston was patiently biding the expected period of English justice, triumphing over a short-sighted selfishness, and was carrying, as best she might, meanwhile, the cruel burdens of the Boston Port Bill, and when General Gage was sent out to see that she did not cut the straps, shift the load, or escape its grievous weight, John Hancock,—who the evening before had rallied with soul-lifting eloquence his fellow-sufferers at Faneuil Hall to the unjustly imposed duty of throwing off the crushing load,—rode at the head of his Boston Cadets, to bear with restrained courtesy from the Long Wharf to the State House this hard plum from the royal enclosure,—a Gage that he was careful not to pluck, but to preserve until it was fully ripe. Among this group he sits on a raised seat, and acts as president.

A few gentlemen, more advanced in years than the rest, are sprinkled through the company. One, an old acquaintance of ours, the boy who in 1721 furnished through the “New England Courant” such strong food for even Boston, and afterwards set up an intellectual bakery at Philadelphia, now seventy years old, rests his massive benevolent figure in a chair made comfortable by his presence,—his broad mild face, so largely serene, framed in by flowing soft locks, and beaming with a placid composure, as if the ploughshare of hard work had not turned a furrow there. He looks as if he could forgive George III. for his narrow notions, wedged inextricably fast in his narrow brain, and even his sallow, bilious, meadow-bottomed, Hanoverian dulness, dripping in pestilent, unhealthy oozings through his slow liver into his slower understanding. Well does the serenely fronted old sage know all the importance and the character of the business in hand. His clear, philosophic mind has weighed in its calm well-adjusted balances the questions now to be decided. He has but lately escaped from England, where, as agent for the Colonies, he was watched and treated by the government with incised and rigorous dislike; yet, as a man and thinker, he was there welcomed by the best men and most advanced statesmen. With Pitt, Camden, Burke, Charles James Fox, and even Lord North, he met, and with calm, compact, sensible, logical eloquence discussed the nature of the principles, alike dangerous in England as in the Colonies, which the Ministry, in the name of the former, were seeking to fasten, as the shirt of Nessus, upon the latter. While on his ungracious mission, he had, also, encountered that ponderous, fact-clad, political Goliath, Samuel Johnson, who had lately stepped forth in front of the ministerial Philistines, and defied any one to prove that taxation of a people unrepresented was tyranny. In that encounter, the American, armed only with a simple Quaker sling, planted in the giant’s head a stone harder even than itself, and very uncomfortable therein. Few now were Franklin’s words; but each one weighed ten pounds, and though perhaps homely in shape and unrounded at the angles, when hurled out by an honest heart-force, they crashed resistlessly through all the fences and thickets of sophistry or learned show.

Having to manage those two difficult problems in the political economy which then crowded up for solution, namely, how to raise a revenue out of 2,800,000 poor colonists, which, in weight, should put it in equipoise with the heavy stacks of English pounds sterling; and how to make 7,754 soldiers, constituting, as Washington had that very morning reported from head-quarters, the entire colonial army, successfully oppose 28,000 English and 17,000 Hessian troops, this American Witenagemote had conscious need of all poor Richard’s solid, homespun sense and wise-headed prudence and resource. But the grand old man, who by virtuous kiting had obtained naturally lightning out of heaven by an easy discount, was equal to the task of drawing credit out of the well-soiled banks of his country. On a ring, circling his forefinger, and given him by an ardent friend, one may—by a near inspection, when the large head leans against his right hand—see carved that motto, which is his condensed biography,

“Eripuit cœlo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis.”

A little way off stands a tall, scholarly figure, carefully dressed in the gentlemanly costume of that time, a blue coat faced with yellow, a scarlet waistcoat paragraphing an elaborate shirt-frill, and black broadcloth tights, clasped at the knee, and, like his own round periods, closed by polished silver-tongued buckles. He is thirty-one years old. His brick-colored hair and sanguine complexion betoken his ardent temperament. His faultless dress and stainless linen betray a delicacy and refinement of culture and taste, in which he had few peers in his time on either side the Atlantic. This is Thomas Jefferson. Chairman of a committee to report on the question of the right of the Colonies to be hereafter independent of Great Britain, he holds in his womanly-shaped hands a large manuscript written in neat, careful characters.

Close to him stands the short, firm, square, condensed-looking figure of John Adams, coaxed into a well-ripened fulness. He is ten years older than Jefferson; destined to be his generous rival through an eventful life, and to die only a few hours after him, just fifty years from that time, and on the semi-centennial anniversary of that very day. There is a good-natured frankness in his round, generously blooded face, and full-veined forehead; great firmness in his well-pressed lips; and about his massive head a solid, intellectual strength that have already well earned for him the appellation of “the column of Congress.” A hot purpose shows in his pink-heightening complexion, flushing it with an auroral light which plays and flashes up to the very zenith of his head. Faults he has, like his rival, grievous and many; but among them is not that of being indifferent to his country or her freedom.

A little way off sits one of the most accomplished orators in all that gifted group; a genial companion you may see he is at a glance. He is a ripe scholar, educated in an English university, and yet warm with a loving nature that glows on his face and through his graceful discourse. Wielding a ready pen, whose vigorous strokes have already, in the Memorial of Congress to British America, cleft the unwilling hearts of Canadians, and, in The Address of Congress to the People of Great Britain, have imbedded forever in the English Constitution the principles of representation as the basis of taxation, Richard Henry Lee, from South Carolina, three years older than Adams, sits there in cultured ease and thoughtful dignity, a model legislator. In the preceding month of June he had moved a resolution, asserting the rights of the Colonies to be free, and to dissolve in brine the ligaments which wickedly tied them to the money-making law manufactory at home. This resolution, having of course been well debated when it came up for consideration three days ago,—for American Congresses were never deaf or dumb asylums,—had been adopted, and upon it a committee raised, whose report, drawn by Jefferson, and revised by Franklin and Adams, is to be read in to-day’s session.

A few feet away are Edward Rutledge of South Carolina, who, although only in his twenty-third summer, is laden with the sheaves of a rich harvest of oratorical fame; Charles Carroll of Maryland, who, annexing to the Declaration his address, so that he might not be passed by the state executioner for his treason, was spared by death to be the last of that memorable party on earth; Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, who lived to fill acceptably every honorable office known to our system of government, except that of President; and Robert R. Livingston of New York, who survived the recordership of the city of New York, and became eminent, not only in many fields, but notably on the Hudson River, in connection with Robert Fulton’s efforts to subject water to steam,—not one of them, except Carroll, yet thirty-three years of age.

Leaning forward and near this last group stands the bulky figure of one who was for the first twenty-two years of his life a shoemaker; but who, disregarding the maxim of Horace “to stick to the last,” left the lapstone to attend to the understandings of his suffering countrymen. This, all know, is Roger Sherman of Connecticut, true to independence and well-grounded freedom—to the last.

Across the room stand talking together George Wythe of Virginia, sweet-tempered, frolicsome as a boy, yet resolute of purpose, able in debate, and capable of deep research; Robert Morris of Pennsylvania, born in England, an emigrant to Philadelphia in his thirteenth year, whose nature of sterling British oak, seasoned in the counting-house of Charles Willing, and whose solid aptitudes, hardened into financial wisdom, were now so much needed in the new political partnership of States; and Joseph Reed from the same State, whose sturdy, honest face seems to light up a large space all around him, and whose rebuke two years later to the commissioner of Lord North, who sought to bribe him, that “poor as he was, the king of Great Britain was not rich enough to buy him,” raised American securities as high in Europe as the practical answers of some of his congressional successors to similar attempts on their financial virtue by North or South, East or West, have depressed them.

Others there are among those twoscore and eleven whom we should be glad to delineate, as we dearly love to look at them gathered in the morning light of that first Fourth of July; but there is such a serious, thoughtful air, such a felt pressure weighting all brows and hearts, that the loaded hour presses down and hushes all such light thoughts. A prayer so simple, earnest, child-like, and trusting,—uttered amid impressive silence by John Adams,—that it seems to bear the great question up to the Great Heart, hushes the assembly to a balanced calm, and opens the business.

Large sealed packages from Washington, brought on horseback all the way from New York, are then read. They speak of his few men,—most of them without arms, clothing, or food,—in presence of 45,000 fresh and well-supplied English and German troops, under the command of Lord Howe, of his brother the Admiral, and of Sir Henry Clinton. Other letters were read from South Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, and New York, urging the wise men to declare the old, unequal partnership with England at an end,—a partnership to which, they felt, that the colonial partners had furnished the capital and labor, and from which the English associates drew all the profits.

In the name of the Profit, they virtually said, war. Then followed a pause in the proceedings, which at length the full, firm voice of John Adams broke. His speech, rising and rising like a freshet over that tall occasion, swept away by its resistless logical momentum the forces of sophism, carried in its strong hurry all the impediments to its march, brimmed over with its swelling forces the whole territory of debate, until at last, the gathered mass, hurled full against the barriers of prejudice, conservatism, doubt, and fear, prostrated forever the props and supports of British usurpation in the Colonies. It is a singular fact that no reporters were present to take down or even outline this speech. Gathered up, however, from tradition and memory by Daniel Webster, about half a century afterwards, it has floated and collected in almost every school-house and college, and there formed eddies, whirlpools, and geysers, which have sucked in and spouted out much gyrating declamation.

Other speakers followed the fiery Adams, most urging, a few deprecating, immediate action. We need not note here their range, fire, or effect.

At last the patriotic battle abates; and the committee of five,—Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston,—forming around the tall, dignified, picturesque figure of their chairman, advance in front of the president’s seat. There is an expectant, oppressive hush, a sudden settling back into seats; and all eyes, like sunflowers, turn towards the scarlet-waistcoated son of the Revolution. The neatly written paper is slowly unrolled, and its weighty truths, crowding up to its very rim, begin at once to discharge themselves.

That large electrical battery has been ever since at work, charging nationalities and peoples, galvanizing the feeble to effort, producing sparks whenever the current has been interrupted, recovering back to vital action sick communities, and arousing to better health from that hopeless despair which a long course of royal quack doctoring had produced, constitutions, systems, or states originally strong, energetic, and vigorous. Without analyzing or dwelling upon the full, electrical streams then and there evolved by that American independence machine, we will only record here that two principal jets, namely, that of the equality of all in their creation, and the other, that all governments rest solely upon the consent of the governed, have poured upon paralyzed and crippled humanity such a current of blessings, that the old Asiatic, African, and European practices of blood-letting for liberal plethora, drugs for congested rights, anodynes for consciences politically discontented, and cathartics for purging away healthy food necessary for civil nutrition, are fast becoming unpopular.

George III. got a terrible peppering from that machine; but as he lived forty-four years afterwards, it is fair to presume that his royal, burly Hanoverian person, rolling over and over in bucolic clover, repaired without difficulty dents and shocks caused by applications administered at such a distance. For seven years following he was in a great state of irritation, and worked hard to prevent the results with which that Declaration concluded, namely, a determination to cut all connection with him and his little island ways.

How this great struggle, thus earnestly begun, was carried on, and its final issue, must be the office of future chapters to tell.

That first Fourth caused a very gunpowdery smell throughout the Colonies for seven succeeding years, and has touched off more fire-crackers since than would fence in China with a wall higher than its present one.

The lever then thrust beneath the corner-stone of civil right, to pry it out of its undisturbed imbedment into its appropriate place, was handled by ungloved hands; but the anniversary of the event itself cannot be now handled by the municipal jollifiers in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, New Orleans, and even Chicago, with less than six pairs of gloves each, while the very common councilmen sometimes get twelve pairs apiece for the occasion.

Blessings on all the Fourth of Julys up to 1850! What occasions for tar-barrel eloquence, going off into flaming tropes and figures, have they not been! That has not only been “the birthday of freedom,” but the natal initiation into civic or military renown of many a village tyro. The shoemaker, blacksmith, or carpenter, smothered for three hundred and sixty-four days under his own waxed ends, cindery veneering, or plane modesties, has suddenly, on that prolific day, been so brought out on a prancing horse, or caught such a gleam from his well-scoured sword, resting on his trusty thigh, or left to play loose between his crooked legs, as to aspire to be road-master, town-reeve, supervisor of the county, assemblyman, representative in Congress, and even United States senator.

The civic honor of presiding at the old-time traditional public dinner, which crowned, at the principal tavern, the militia morning cantering and inexplicable twistings of crooked military lines,—lines that snarled up until they broke past all sewing by waxed ends, welding by cindered hands, or splicing by plane people,—has again and again pipped the egg, else ingloriously addling, which enclosed the rudimentary germ of a railroad president, it may be even, of a conductor with diamond pin, gold finger-ring, largely accumulating real estate, and all the other incidents. These glorious dinners have been, also, the nurseries of the legal profession, whose young members have thence sent up whizzing sky-rockets, which, mounting and mounting on the straining enthusiastic eye, have burst into such dissolving showers of golden glory, that, by the unexpected explosion, the national horizon and their own have been widened on all sides, and new stars been stuck into its astonished vault.

We pity the American who has been born into our degenerating times, which neglect those primitive occasions of cheap yet great renown, when a little sulphur, administered to a rural population, went further to cure all the scarlet fever of the neighborhood than all the colic-producing iron pills of actual war. We commiserate the condition of the young American, grown so apoplectic ere he arrives of age, by the prodigal display of bunting, fire-works, and red-faced oratory at our frequent elections, that he disdains the frugal but satisfying cakes of gingerbread, then bought with a well-pressed sixpence from the calico-roofed booth on the side of the bars, through which those undulating militia lines managed to unwind without hanging on the fence or getting into puzzling knots.

Gone now are those molasses-plated cards of cake, pleasant to the taste on the Fourth, and sticking to the teeth, stomach, and memory of the patriotic eater for at least one fifty-second part of a year. Gone now are the pranks of horses bestridden by the colonel or major of the regiment,—his first equestrian performance freely exhibited, and in which he showed feats, entirely his own, which could not, or at least would not, be displayed by first-class circuses or turf-bred racers, who, skimmed over in blue, yellow, or green, glide so stunningly through the admiring and opening air. Vanished now, alas! are the groups of innocent children waiting for the show of animals, not those on parade, but the lively monkeys, the pie-colored horses, and the wonderful clown, whose photographs, loading down the staggering fences, blacksmith-shop, horse-shed, and post-office for a whole long fortnight, were all so well known to them before the originals striped the village with their many-colored glories.

Gone glimmering away from this green-backed epoch are the sable groups that danced on the greensward, away from the tangling military lines apparently just as happy as if the American Wittenagemote, led on by Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston, had not solemnly declared, and thereto pledged all that they had, “that all men are created free and equal.”

ENGLISH POOR RELATIONS EATING COLONISTS OUT OF HOUSE AND HOME.
(p. 276)
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