"YOU CANNOT CONQUER AMERICA” 23 done nothing and suffered much. Besides the sufferings, perhaps total loss, of the northern force, the best appointed army that ever took the field, commanded by Sir William Howe, has retired from the American lines. He was obliged to relinquish his attempt, and, with great delay and danger, to adopt a new and distant place of operations. We shall soon know, and in any event have reason to lament, what may have happened since. As to conquest, therefore, my lords, I repeat, it is impossible. You may swell every expense and every effort still more extravagantly; pile and accumulate every assistance you can buy or borrow; traffic and barter with every little pitiful German prince that sells and sends his subjects to the shambles of a foreign prince. Your efforts are forever vain and impotent,-doubly so from this mercenary aid on which you rely. For it irritates, to an incurable resentment, the minds of your enemies, to overrun them with the mercenary sons of rapine and plunder; devoting them and their possessions to the rapacity of hireling cruelty! If I were an American, as I am an Englishman, while a foreign troop was landed in my country, I never would lay down. my arms-never-never-never! THE MINUTE-MAN OF THE REVOLUTION GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS This extract is taken from an oration delivered at Concord, Mass., April 19, 1875, at the Centennial Celebration of Concord Fight. It is here reprinted by special permission from the "Orations and Addresses of George William Curtis." Copyright, 1893, by Harper & Brothers. The minute-man of the American Revolutionwho was he? He was the husband and father who, bred to love liberty, and to know that lawful liberty is the sole guarantee of peace and progress, left the plow in the furrow and the hammer on the bench, and, kissing wife and children, marched to die-or to be free. He was the son and lover, the plain, shy youth of the singing-school and the village choir, whose heart beat to arms for his country, and who felt, though he could not say, with the old English cavalier,- "I could not love thee, deare, so much, The minute-man of the Revolution !-he was the old, the middle-aged, and the young. He was Captain Miles of Concord, who said that he went to battle as he went to church. He was Captain Davis of Acton, who reproved his men for jesting on the march. He was Deacon Josiah Haynes of Sudbury, eighty years old, who marched with his company to the South Bridge at Concord, then joined in the hot pursuit to Lexington, and fell as gloriously as Warren at Bunker Hill. He was James Hayward of Acton, twenty-two THE MINUTE-MAN OF THE REVOLUTION 25 years old, foremost in that deadly race from Concord to Charlestown, who raised his piece at the same moment with a British soldier, each exclaiming, "You are a dead man!" The Briton dropped, shot through the heart. James Hayward fell mortally wounded. "Father," he said, "I started with forty balls; I have three left. I never did such a day's work before. Tell mother not to mourn too much; and tell her whom I love more than my mother, that I am not sorry I turned out." This was the minute-man of the Revolution, the rural citizen trained in the common school, the church, and the town-meeting; who carried a bayonet that thought, whose gun, loaded with a principle, brought down, not a man, but a system. Him we gratefully recall to-day; him, in yon manly figure wrought in the metal which but feebly typifies his inexorable will, we commit in his immortal youth to the reverence of our children. And here among these peaceful fields— here in the county whose children first gave their blood for American union and independence, and, eighty-six years later, gave it, first also, for a truer union and a larger liberty-here in the heart of Middlesex, county of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, stand fast, Son of Liberty, as the minute-man stood at the old North Bridge! WASHINGTON'S ADDRESS TO HIS ARMY GEORGE WASHINGTON This speech was delivered by General Washington to his troops just before the battle of Long Island, August 26, 1776. The time is now near at hand, which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves, whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves to be consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and the conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of a brave resistance or the most abject submission. We have, therefore, to resolve to conquer or to die. Our own, our country's honor, calls upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion. If we now shamefully fail, we shall become infamous to the whole world. 1 The eyes of all our countrymen are now upon us, and we shall have their blessings and praises if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the tyranny meditated against them. Let us, therefore, animate and encourage each other, and show the whole world that a freeman contending for liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth. Liberty, property, life, and honor are all at stake. Upon your courage and conduct rest the hopes of our bleeding and insulted country. Our wives, children, and parents expect safety from us only; and they have THE FIRST AMERICAN CONGRESS 27 every reason to believe that Heaven will crown with success so just a cause. The enemy will endeavor to intimidate by show and appearance; but remember that they have been repulsed on various occasions by a few brave Americans. Their cause is bad-their men are conscious of it. If they are opposed with firmness and coolness on their first onset, with our advantage of works and knowledge of the ground, the victory is most assuredly ours. THE FIRST AMERICAN CONGRESS JONATHAN MAXCY The First Continental Congress met at Philadelphia, September 5, 1774. The Rev. Jonathan Maxcy, D.D., (1768–1820), was a Baptist minister and college president. He delivered many occasional addresses and orations. A volume of his "Literary Remains was published in 1844. What men, what patriots, what independent, heroic spirits!-chosen by the unbiased voice of the people; chosen, as all public servants ought to be, without favor and without fear. What an august assembly of sages! Rome, in the height of her glory, fades before it. There never was, in any age or nation, a body of men who, for general information, for the judicious use of the results of civil and political history, for eloquence and virtue, for true dignity, elevation and grandeur of soul, could stand a comparison with the first American Congress. See what the people will do when left to themselves; to their unbiased good sense, and to their true |