Part 1
Our American Holidays
INDEPENDENCE DAY
Our American Holidays
INDEPENDENCE DAY
ITS CELEBRATION, SPIRIT, AND SIGNIFICANCE AS RELATED IN PROSE AND VERSE
EDITED BY ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER
NEW YORK MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 1912
COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY NEW YORK
_Published, February, 1912_
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 7
NOTE 9
INTRODUCTION 11
I
CELEBRATION
THE GREAT AMERICAN HOLIDAY _Anonymous_ 21
THE NATION’S BIRTHDAY _Mary E. Vandyne_ 22
HOW THE FOURTH OF JULY SHOULD BE CELEBRATED _Julia Ward Howe_ 24
II
SPIRIT AND SIGNIFICANCE
ENGLAND AND AMERICA _James Bryce_ 39
THE BIRTHDAY OF THE NATION _Daniel Webster_ 40
THE FOURTH OF JULY _Charles Leonard Moore_ 42
LIFT UP YOUR HEARTS _Anonymous_ 42
ENGLAND AND THE FOURTH OF JULY _W. T. Stead_ 46
SOME EARLY INDEPENDENCE DAY ADDRESSES 47
THE FOURTH OF JULY _Charles Sprague_ 53
OUR NATIONAL ANNIVERSARY _A. H. Rice_ 54
AMERICA’S NATAL DAY _James Gillespie Blaine_ 55
CRISES OF NATIONS _Dr. Foss_ 56
THE FOURTH OF JULY IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY _Phillips Brooks_ 56
III
BEFORE THE DAWN OF INDEPENDENCE
AMERICA RESENTS BRITISH DICTATION _Henry B. Carrington_ 61
SPEECH OF JAMES OTIS 62
INDEPENDENCE A SOLEMN DUTY 64
AN APPEAL FOR AMERICA _William Pitt_ 66
CONCILIATION OR WAR 69
“WAR IS ACTUALLY BEGUN” _Patrick Henry_ 72
EMANCIPATION FROM BRITISH DEPENDENCE _Philip Freneau_ 76
IV
THE DECLARATION
THE ORIGIN OF THE DECLARATION _Sydney George Fisher_ 81
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE _John D. Long_ 101
THE SIGNING OF THE DECLARATION _George Lippard_ 104
SUPPOSED SPEECH OF JOHN ADAMS _Daniel Webster_ 107
THE LIBERTY BELL _J. T. Headley_ 111
INDEPENDENCE BELL, PHILADELPHIA _Anonymous_ 112
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE 115
INDEPENDENCE EXPLAINED _Samuel Adams_ 121
THE DIGNITY OF OUR NATION’S FOUNDERS _William T. Evarts_ 123
THE CHARACTER OF THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE _George Bancroft_ 125
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE _Henry T. Randall_ 126
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE _John Quincy Adams_ 127
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE _Tudor Jenks_ 128
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE IN THE LIGHT OF MODERN CRITICISM _Moses Coit Tyler_ 132
V
THE STRUGGLE FOR INDEPENDENCE
THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION 157
THE SONG OF THE CANNON _Sam Walter Foss_ 158
PAUL REVERE’S RIDE _Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_ 160
HYMN _Ralph Waldo Emerson_ 164
A SONG FOR LEXINGTON _Robert Kelly Weeks_ 165
THE REVOLUTIONARY ALARM _George Bancroft_ 166
THE VOLUNTEER _Elbridge Jefferson Cutler_ 168
TICONDEROGA _V. B. Wilson_ 169
WARREN’S ADDRESS _John Pierpont_ 171
“THE LONELY BUGLE GRIEVES” _Grenville Mellen_ 172
THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL 173
THE MARYLAND BATTALION _John Williamson Palmer_ 175
THE BATTLE OF TRENTON _Anonymous_ 177
COLUMBIA _Timothy Dwight_ 178
THE FIGHTING PARSON _Henry Ames Blood_ 180
THE SARATOGA LESSON _George William Curtis_ 184
THE SURRENDER OF BURGOYNE _James Watts De Peyster_ 187
THE SARATOGA MONUMENT BEGUN _Horatio Seymour_ 187
MOLLY MAGUIRE AT MONMOUTH _William Collins_ 190
THE SOUTH IN THE REVOLUTION _Robert Young Hayne_ 193
THE SONG OF MARION’S MEN _William Cullen Bryant_ 195
OUR COUNTRY SAVED _James Russell Lowell_ 197
NEW ENGLAND AND VIRGINIA _Robert Charles Winthrop_ 199
VI
SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY
AMERICA _S. F. Smith_ 203
THE REPUBLIC _Henry Wadsworth Longfellow_ 205
THE ANTIQUITY OF FREEDOM _William Cullen Bryant_ 206
AMERICA _William Cullen Bryant_ 208
ODE _Ralph Waldo Emerson_ 210
AMERICA FIRST _Anonymous_ 212
LIBERTY FOR ALL _William Lloyd Garrison_ 213
HYMN _Anonymous_ 214
THE DAWNING FUTURE _William Preston Johnson_ 216
LIBERTY 216
FREEDOM 217
A RHAPSODY _Cassius Marcellus Clay_ 219
COLUMBIA _Frederick Lawrence Knowles_ 221
A RENAISSANCE OF PATRIOTISM _George J. Manson_ 222
CENTENNIAL POEMS _John Greenleaf Whittier_ 230
WELCOME TO THE NATION _Oliver Wendell Holmes_ 232
LIBERTY’S LATEST DAUGHTER _Bayard Taylor_ 233
“SCUM OF THE EARTH” _Robert Haven Schauffler_ 234
LIBERTY AND UNION ONE AND INSEPARABLE _Daniel Webster_ 238
ADDRESS TO LIBERTY _William Cowper_ 240
THE TORCH OF LIBERTY _Thomas Moore_ 241
HOROLOGE OF LIBERTY _Anonymous_ 242
THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC _George Bancroft_ 243
A NEW NATIONAL HYMN _Francis Marion Crawford_ 244
VII
FICTION
JIM’S AUNT _Frances Bent Dillingham_ 249
VIII
THE NEW FOURTH
OUR BARBAROUS FOURTH _Mrs. Isaac L. Rice_ 265
A SAFE AND SANE FOURTH OF JULY _Henry Litchfield West_ 285
THE NEW INDEPENDENCE DAY _Henry B. F. MacFarland and Richard B. Watrous_ 296
NEW FOURTHS FOR OLD _Mrs. Isaac L. Rice_ 299
AMERICANIZING THE FOURTH _Robert Haven Schauffler_ 307
PREFACE
This book is an anthology of American Independence: of the document that announced its birth; of the struggle that established it in life; and of the patriotism that was to it both sire and son. It aims to present a clear review of the origin, spirit and significance of Independence Day and of its celebration both by the now discredited methods of brutal, meaningless noise and indiscriminate carnage, which disgraced the larger part of the previous century, and by the recent methods of sane and safe, reverent and meaningful celebration.
The volume contains a selection of the best prose and verse that bears in any way on our nation’s birthday; and closes with many constructive suggestions for the celebration of our new, more beautiful and more patriotic Fourth.
NOTE
Thanks are due to Miss Jessie Welles, superintendent of circulation in the Carnegie Library, Pittsburgh, for the suggestion which originated “Our American Holidays.” And gratitude is also expressed to the Misses Tobey, to Miss Helen Miles and all the other librarians of the Bloomingdale Branch Library in New York who have generously given the editor such invaluable aid in the preparation of these volumes.
The Editor also wishes to acknowledge his indebtedness to Houghton, Mifflin & Company; The Century Co.; J. B. Lippincott & Co.; Bobbs-Merrill Co., and others who have very kindly granted permission to reprint selections from works bearing their copyright.
ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER.
INTRODUCTION
When, on the fourth day of each July, Americans keep the birthday of the nation we celebrate as our greatest secular holiday, the one which has the honor of being sanctioned by statute in every state of the Union.
From times as early as any living memory can reach, this anniversary has been observed in much the same fashion: by spread-eagle oratory, by unlimited and quite meaningless noise, and hospitals filled with the wounded and dying. It is curious that the festival should have gone on in this monotonous manner decade after decade until nearly the middle of its second century of life, and then suddenly should have encountered a revolution far more abrupt than the early, heroic one which it commemorates.
For our attitude toward the Fourth is undergoing swift revolution as regards our understanding both of the causes that underlay American independence, of the real spirit in which the Declaration was penned, and of the reasons why July fourth rather than some other day was fixed upon. Finally, the swiftest Fourth of July revolution of all is taking place in the way we celebrate it.
Until quite recently all historians have, consciously or unconsciously, been consistent in misrepresenting the War of Seventy-Six and the events leading thereto. And we owe no small debt of gratitude to writers like Mr. Owen Wister and Mr. Sydney George Fisher for telling us the truth. Mr. Wister writes[1] of the Revolution that while “As a war, its real military aspect is slowly emerging from the myth of uninterrupted patriotism and glory, universally taught to school children, its political hue is still thickly painted and varnished over by our writers.
“How many Americans know, for instance, that England was at first extremely lenient to us? fought us (until 1778) with one hand in a glove, and an olive branch in the other? had any wish rather than to crush us; had no wish save to argue us back into the fold, and enforce argument with an occasional victory not followed up?... For any American historian to speak the truth on these matters is a very recent phenomenon, their common design having been to leave out any facts which spoil the political picture of the Revolution they chose to paint for our edification: a ferocious, blood-shot tyrant on the one side, and on the other a compact band of ‘Fathers,’ down-trodden and martyred, yet with impeccable linen and bland legs. A wrong conception even of the Declaration of Independence as Jefferson’s original invention still prevails; Jefferson merely drafted the document, expressing ideas well established in the contemporary air. Let us suppose that some leader of our own time were to write: ‘Three dangers to-day threaten the United States, any one of which could be fatal: unscrupulous capital, destroying man’s liberty to compete; unscrupulous Labor, destroying man’s liberty to work; and undesirable Immigration, in which four years of naturalization are not going to counteract four hundred years of heredity. Unless the people check all of these, American liberty will become extinct.’ If some one were to write a new Declaration of Independence, containing such sentences, he could not claim originality for them; he would be merely stating ideas that are among us everywhere. This is what Jefferson did, writing his sentences loosely, because the ideas they expressed were so familiar as to render exact definitions needless.”
Mr. Wister deserves gratitude for giving us these unpalatable truths in such palatable form; but he should have far more gratitude for introducing to a wide body of readers his chief source of information, the historian Mr. Sydney George Fisher, one of whose most valuable chapters has fortunately been secured for reproduction in the body of this book. Mr. Fisher writes:[2]
“I cannot feel satisfied with any description of the Revolution which treats the desire for independence as a sudden thought, and not a long growth and development, or which assumes that every detail of the conduct of the British government was absurdly stupid, even from its own point of view, and that the loyalists were few in numbers and their arguments not worth considering....
“The historians seem to have assumed that we do not want to know about that controversy” (over Gen. Howe’s lenient methods), “or that it will be better for us not to know about it. They have assumed that it will be better for Americans to think that independence was a sudden and deplorable necessity and not a desire of long and ardent growth and cautiously planned intention. They have assumed that we want to think of England as having lost the colonies by failure to be conciliatory, and that the Revolution was a one-sided, smooth affair, without any of the difficulties or terrors of a rebellion or a great upheaval of settled opinion.”
There can be small doubt that when this true inner history of our independence becomes generally known it will do much to mitigate the blind, provincial spread-eagleism that still clings to even our safest and sanest celebrations of the Fourth and that has so ably thwarted every motion toward fraternal intimacy between the two great branches of the Anglo-Saxon race. The following[3] paragraph is fairly typical of the British attitude toward the celebration of our national birthday.
“Where a country or a government has been baffled in its efforts to attain or preserve a hated rule over another people, it must be content to see its failure made the subject of never-ending triumph and exultation. The joy attached to the sense of escape or emancipation tends to perpetuate itself by periodical celebrations, in which it is not likely that the motives of the other party, or the general justice of the case, will be very carefully considered or allowed for. We may doubt if it be morally expedient thus to keep alive the memory of facts which as certainly infer mortification to one party as they do glorification to another: but we must all admit that it is only natural, and in a measure to be expected.”
When we come to view the facts as they are, to realize of what shocking sportsmanship our own one-sided view of independence convicts us, we shall have removed one of the chief obstacles to Anglo-Saxon solidarity. But it will be necessary first to learn something about the day we celebrate. How many, for instance, even know that July fourth was fixed upon as a compromise date between two other rival claimants?
Walsh writes:[4]
“It may not be generally known that no less than three dates might reasonably compete for designation as the natal day of American Independence and for the honors of the anniversary of that event.
“On the second of July, 1776, was adopted the resolution of independence, the sufficient legislative act; and it was this day that Mr. Adams designated as the anniversary in the oft-quoted letter written on his desk at the time, prophesying its future celebration, by bells, bonfires, cannonades, etc. On the fourth of July occurred the Declaration of Independence. On the second of August following took place the ceremony of signature, which has furnished to the popular imagination the common pictorial and dramatic conceptions of the event.
“The history connecting these three dates may be intelligently told in a brief space. On the fifteenth of May, 1776, a convention in Virginia had instructed its delegates in the General Congress ‘to propose to that body to declare the United Colonies free and independent States, absolved from all allegiance to or dependence on the Crown or Parliament of Great Britain, and that they give the assent of this Colony to such declaration, and to whatever measures may be thought proper and necessary by the Congress for forming foreign alliances and a confederation of the Colonies.’ The motion thus ordered was on the seventh of June made in Congress by Richard Henry Lee, as the oldest member of the Virginia delegation. It was to the effect that ‘these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown; and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.’ The resolution was slightly debated for two or three days, but from considerations of prudence or expediency the discussion was intermitted. As texts for the action of Congress there were the resolution referred to, and the more formal, or at least more lengthy, document which the committee of five—Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Sherman, and Livingston—had been instructed on the eleventh of June to prepare. This document was draughted by Jefferson and presented under the title of ‘A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America in General Congress assembled.’
“On the first of July there was again called up in Congress the resolution proposed by Mr. Lee. On the second of July it passed. Two days later (the fourth of July) was adopted, after various amendments, the ‘Declaration’ from Mr. Jefferson’s pen. The document was authenticated, like the other papers of the Congress, by the signature of the president and the secretary, and, in addition, was signed by the members _present_, with the exception of Mr. Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who, as Mr. Jefferson has testified, ‘refused to sign it.’
“But it did not then bear the names of the members of Congress as they finally appeared on it. A number of these still opposed it, and had voted against it; it was passed unanimously only as regarded states. Thus, a majority of the Pennsylvania delegation had persistently opposed it, and it was only the absence of two of their delegates on the final vote that left a majority for this state in its favor. Some days after the Declaration had thus passed, and had been proclaimed at the head of the army, it was ordered by Congress that it be engrossed on parchment and signed by every member; and it was not until the second of August that these signatures were made, and the matter concluded by this peculiar and august ceremony of personal pledges in the autographs of the members. It is this copy or form of the Declaration which has, in fact, been preserved as the original: the first signed paper does not exist, and was probably destroyed as incomplete.
“If the natal day of American Independence is to be derived from the ceremony of these later signatures, and the real date of what has been preserved as the legal original of the Declaration, then it would be the second of August. If derived from the substantial, legal _act_ of separation from the British Crown, which was contained rather in the resolution of Congress than in its Declaration of Independence, it would be the second of July. But common consent has determined to date the great anniversary from the apparently subordinate event of the passage of the Declaration, and thus celebrates the Fourth of July as the birthday of the nation.”
Finally, after making ourselves reasonably intelligent as to the origin, spirit and true significance of Independence Day it behooves us as true Americans to enter the splendid new movement which is endeavoring to make the Fourth over from a day of shallow jingoism and unmeaning brutality and carnage into a day of initiation into the meaning of true citizenship and a festival of deep and genuine and beautiful patriotism.
R. H. S.
INDEPENDENCE DAY
I
CELEBRATION
THE GREAT AMERICAN HOLIDAY
ANONYMOUS
Among all the holidays of the year, one stands out as preëminently American; one appeals especially to that sentiment of patriotism and national pride which glows in every loyal American heart. Independence Day—the Fourth of July—is observed in every State in the Union as our distinctive national holiday; and rightly so, for the event which it celebrates is by far the most important in American history—an event no less, indeed, than the birth of the nation.
Independence Day celebrates the signing, on the Fourth of July, 1776, of the paper which declared this country forever free from British rule. It had been under consideration for some time by the Continental Congress, assembled at Philadelphia, and final action was finally taken on July 4. From that time forward, the American colonists were no longer rebels in arms against their country, but a free people fighting for their independence.
That the Declaration of Independence was mainly the work of Thomas Jefferson has been established beyond reasonable doubt; and it stands to-day one of the most remarkable state papers in the history of the world.
At the time of the passage of the act, John Adams wrote to his wife a letter which has become historic. “I am apt to believe,” he wrote, “that this day will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.”
Bonfires and guns there have been without limit; and the deaths that have resulted from these celebrations would form no inconsiderable fraction of those lost during the Revolution. For years, the celebration of this great holiday has consisted mainly of meaningless noise; but there is a steadily growing sentiment in favor of a more worthy observance of the day, as a time when every loyal American should rejoice in the welfare of his country, and recall with pride the manner in which the Nation was established.
THE NATION’S BIRTHDAY
BY MARY E. VANDYNE
Ring out the joy bells! Once again, With waving flags and rolling drums, We greet the Nation’s Birthday, when, In glorious majesty, it comes. Ah, day of days! Alone it stands, While, like a halo round it cast, The radiant work of patriot hands, Shines the bright record of the past.
Among the nations of the earth, What land hath story like our own? No thought of conquest marked her birth; No greed of power was ever shown By those who crossed the ocean wild, That they might plant upon her sod A home for Peace and Virtue mild, And altars rear to Freedom’s God.
How grand the thought that bade them roam! Those pilgrim bands, by Faith inspired— That bade them leave their cherished home, And, with the martyr’s spirit fired, Guide their frail vessels o’er the main Upon the glorious mission bound On alien soil a grave to gain, Or else a free born nation found.