unconstitutional legislation, which was destined, after eleven years
of wordy war, to end in a war of blood, Dr. Warren was among the first
to stand forth for the rights of America--to assert, and to labor in
demonstrating to his countrymen, that the _power to tax them_
(claiming, as they did, all the liberties of Englishmen) could not
exist in a government of which no representatives of theirs formed a
part. Fostered by him, and by others like him, the spirit of
resistance to tyranny grew daily more strong. The inhabitants of the
whole country, and especially of Boston, gave token after token of
their fixed resolve, to spurn the chain which they saw preparing for
them. In 1768, Col. Dalrymple with two royal regiments, reinforced
afterwards by additional troops, entered that devoted town, with more
than the usual "pomp and circumstance" of military bravado; and there
remained in garrison, to repress what the king and ministry were
pleased to call "the seditious temper" of the people. Never was
attempt at restraint more impotent; nay, more suicidal. The curb,
feebly and capriciously or unskilfully plied, served but to infuriate
the noble animal it was meant to check and guide: and no wonder that
the rider was at length unseated, and stretched in the dust. The New
Englanders--we should rather say, the _Americans_--were too stubborn
to be driven, and too shrewd to be circumvented. Every measure of
tyranny, they met with an appropriate measure of resistance. Tea had
been brought from India, to be the vehicle of unconstitutional
taxation. They threw part of it into the sea; another part they
hindered from being landed; and the remainder they excluded from use,
by mutual pledges to "touch not, taste not" "the unclean thing."
Judges were sent over to judge them--creatures of the king--the
panders of ministerial oppression. The people would not suffer them to
mount the judgment seat--closed the court houses--referred all their
differences to arbitrators chosen by the parties--and even so far
tamed the spirit of litigation and disorder, as to make tribunals of
any sort in a great degree needless.[2] Between the British troops and
the Boston people, animosities soon ran high. The soldiers seized
every opportunity to exasperate the people: the people assembled in
mobs, to revenge themselves on the soldiers. Amidst these tumults, Dr.
Warren repeatedly exposed his life to soothe and restrain his
countrymen. His eloquent persuasions were generally successful. At
first, the more violent would endeavor to repel him, and would clamor
to drown his voice. "While they did this, he would stand calmly and
look at them. His intrepidity, his commanding and animated
countenance, and above all, their knowledge that he was on their side
so far as it was right to be, would soon make them as eager to hear as
he was to speak: and finally, they would disperse to their homes with
perfect confidence that they could not do better than to leave their
cause in such hands." Those who seek to restrain the excesses of
contending factions, may always expect rough usage from both sides.
Warren incurred the occasional displeasure of his own party; but he
did not escape insult and outrage from the British. They often called
him _rebel_, and threatened him with a rebel's doom. One day, on his
way to Roxbury, to see his mother, he passed near several British
officers, standing in the _Neck_, which joins the peninsula of Boston
to the main land. Not far before him stood a gallows. One of the
officers called out, "Go on, Warren, you will soon come to the
gallows:" and the whole party laughed aloud. Walking directly up to
them, he calmly asked, which of them had thus addressed him? Not one
was bold enough to avow the insolence, and he left them, crest-fallen
and ashamed.
[Footnote 2: We have grouped together here, the events of several
years, in the rapidity of our narrative. The dependence of the judges
for their salaries on the _Crown_, instead of on the Colonial
Legislatures, (whence we date their meriting to be called _creatures_
and _panders_,) began in 1772: and the tea was thrown into Boston
Harbor, Dec. 16th, 1773.]
Distinguished for his eloquence, our young physician was repeatedly
called on to address the people, upon the great and soul-stirring
topics of the times. Far the most interesting of these, was the
Massacre of the Fifth of March. Our authoress has passed too slightly
over this incident. Let us be a little more full.
Insults, recrimination, and outrage, between the soldiers and
citizens, were at length, on the 5th of March, 1770, consummated, by
the former's firing upon the latter in the streets of Boston, and
killing five men--with circumstances shocking to humanity. After one
of the slain (Mr. Gray,) had been shot through the body, and had
fallen on the ground, a bayonet was pushed through his skull, and his
brains fell out upon the pavement. This was the first bloodshed,
consequent on the long festering irritations of the period. The
officer (Capt. Preston) who gave the word "fire!" and six of the
soldiers who had so fatally obeyed it, were in the ensuing October
tried before a Boston jury: and, defended, in spite of obloquy,
popular clamor, and the remonstrances of timid or prudent friends, by
John Adams and Josiah Quincy, Jr., were even by that jury,
_acquitted_. It grieves us that we cannot pause here, to bestow a
merited tribute on the moral courage of the illustrious counsel who
dared defend, on the steady justice of the tribunal that could acquit,
and on the virtue and good sense of the multitude who, when the first
paroxysm of natural excitement was over, could applaud that defence
and approve that acquittal[3]--horrible as had been the
deed--maddening as had been the antecedent circumstances. But though
the killing happened not to be murder, (because the people had been
the assailants,) still, the violent destruction of five human lives by
an armed soldiery in the streets of a free and peaceful city, was too
impressive an example of what mischiefs may come of standing armies
and lawless government, to pass unimproved. It was determined to
solemnize each anniversary of that day, by a public exposition of
those mischiefs; by an oration, commemorative of the tragedy, and of
those great principles, the disregard of which had led to its
perpetration. Warren delivered two of these orations.[4] His first was
on the 5th of March, 1772. It is not contained in the little book now
before us, but we have seen it elsewhere: and on reading it, no one
need be surprised at its having well nigh urged the people, even at
that early day, to forcible measures. Its masterly argumentation is
equalled by its burning appeals to the passions. All the four first of
these orations had wrought so powerfully upon the public mind, that
the British officers declared there should be no more of them: and
that whoever undertook to deliver another, should do so at the peril
of life. This menace daunted others, but only roused Warren. Not
wailing to be _invited_, he _solicited the task_ of addressing the
people; and prepared himself accordingly for the fifth anniversary of
the massacre--1775. Meanwhile, the givings out of the officers, and
the rumors among the populace, imported mortal hazard to him if he
should persist. He persisted but the more resolutely. Early in the
day, the Old South Meeting House--which, as the scene of these
orations, deserves, better than Faneuil Hall, to be termed the cradle
of liberty--was crowded to its very porch. Many a devoted friend of
Warren's was there, determined to see him safely through, or to fall
in his defence. British officers and soldiers filled the aisles, the
pulpit steps, and even the pulpit. Thinking that if he pushed through
them to his place, a pretext might be seized for some disturbance,
which would take from him and his audience the desirable degree of
calmness, he procured a ladder to be placed outside, and by it,
climbed through the window into the pulpit, just as all were expecting
his entrance at the door. The officers quailed and receded, at his
sudden appearance and dauntless air: while he, far from sure that his
first word would not be answered by a bayonet-thrust or a pistol-shot,
addressed the silent, breathless multitude. His countenance was
lighted up with more than its usual glow of patriotic enthusiasm: but
every other face was pale; every auditor could distinctly hear the
throbbings of his own heart. The speech is given at length in the
appendix to the work under examination; from the original, as we may
conjecture, which, in the orator's own hand writing, is now in the
possession of his nephew, Dr. John C. Warren. The opening was brief
and simple: but in it we discern that curbed energy, that impassioned
moderation--_une force contenue, une rèserve animée_--so
characteristic of a great mind, concentrating its powers for some
gigantic effort: and as he passes on from the unaffected humility of
his exordium "to the height of his great argument," we have bodily
before our fancy's eye, a nobler personification of wisdom, courage,
eloquence and virtue, than Homer has displayed in the form of Ulysses.
"MY EVER HONORED FELLOW CITIZENS,
"It is not without the most humiliating conviction of my want of
ability, that I now appear before you; but the sense I have, of the
obligation I am under to obey the calls of my country at all times,
together with the animating recollection of your indulgence, exhibited
upon so many occasions, has induced me once more, undeserving as I am,
to throw myself upon that candor, which looks with kindness upon the
feeblest efforts of an honest mind.
"You will not now expect the elegance, the learning, the fire, the
enrapturing strains of eloquence, which captivated you when a Lovell,
a Church, or a Hancock spake: but you will permit me to say, that with
a sincerity equal to theirs, I mourn over my bleeding country: with
them I weep at her distress, and with them, deeply resent the many
injuries she has received from the hands of cruel and unreasonable
men."
[Footnote 3: Mr. Adams was, at the time, 35 years old; Mr. Quincy only
26. They were both threatened with loss of friends, of popularity, and
of all prospect of political preferment. The "Memoirs of Quincy" (by
his son Josiah, once a prominent federal leader in Congress, now
President of Harvard University,) contain a letter from his venerable
father, earnestly expostulating upon the step. The young barrister's
reply is also given--a triumphant vindication of the motives, and even
of the prudence of his resolution, to undertake the defence. In the
success of that defence, in the universal approbation which soon
followed it, and in the professional and political advancement of the
generous advocates, they found ample rewards for having breasted the
storm of popular feeling, in obedience to the call of duty.]
[Footnote 4: The oration of 1771 was delivered by James Lovell; that
of 1772 by Joseph Warren; of 1773, by Dr. Benjamin Church; of 1774, by
John Hancock; of 1775, by Joseph Warren. These, and eight others of
succeeding years, down to 1783, we have in Mr. H. Niles' inestimable
collection of "Revolutionary Acts and Speeches."]
Having laid down as axioms, the natural right of every man to personal
freedom and to the control of his property, the orator sketched, with
a master's hand, the history of English America: and, deducing the
right of the colonists to the soil from their treaties with the
Indians, and not from the grants of King James or King Charles, (whose
pretended claims of right they undoubtedly despised--whose patents
they probably accepted only "to silence the cavils of their enemies,"
and who "might with equal justice have made them a grant of the planet
Jupiter,") he proved by unanswerable reasoning the rights of America,
and painted in deep and living colors the usurpations and injustice of
England. He traced the progress of these wrongs: he depicted the
halcyon peace, the mutual benefactions, and the common happiness of
the two countries, marred by successive and heightening
aggressions--reaching, at length, that last aggravation short of civil
war--the quartering of an insolent, hireling soldiery upon the people,
to enforce submission to unjust and unconstitutional laws. The danger
of standing armies, always, to liberty--the incompatibility of martial
law with the government of a well regulated city--the certainty of
disputes between the soldier and the citizen, especially when they are
in each other's eyes, respectively, a rebel, and an instrument of
tyranny--all made it but just to fear the most disagreeable
consequences. "Our fears, we have seen," continued the orator, "were
but too well grounded."
"The many injuries offered to the town, I pass over in silence. I
cannot now mark out the path which led to that unequalled scene of
horror, the sad remembrance of which takes full possession of my soul.
The sanguinary theatre again opens itself to view. The baleful images
of terror crowd around me, and discontented ghosts, with hollow
groans, appear to solemnize the anniversary of the FIFTH OF MARCH.
"Approach we then the melancholy walk of death. Hither let me call the
gay companion; here let him drop a farewell tear upon that body, which
so late he saw vigorous and warm with social mirth; hither let me lead
the tender mother, to weep over her beloved son: come, widowed
mourner, here satiate thy grief! behold thy murdered husband gasping
on the ground; and, to complete the pompous show of wretchedness,
bring in each hand thy infant children to bewail their father's fate:
take heed, ye orphan babes, lest, while your streaming eyes are fixed
upon the ghastly corpse, _your feet slide on the stones bespattered
with your father's brains!_ Enough! this tragedy need not be
heightened by an infant weltering in the blood of him that gave it
birth. Nature, reluctant, shrinks already from the view; and the
chilled blood rolls slowly backward to its fountain. We wildly stare
about, and with amazement, ask, _who spread this ruin round us?_ Has
haughty France or cruel Spain, sent forth her myrmidons? Has the grim
savage rushed again from the distant wilderness? Or does some fiend,
fierce from the depth of hell, with all the rancorous malice which the
apostate damned can feel, twang her destructive bow, and hurl her
deadly arrows at our breast? No, none of these. It is the hand of
_Britain_ that inflicts the wound! The arms of George, our rightful
king, have been employed to shed that blood, when justice, or the
honor of his crown, had called his subjects to the field!
"But pity, grief, astonishment, with all the softer movements of the
soul, must now give way to stronger passions. Say, fellow citizens,
what dreadful thought now swells your heaving bosoms? You fly to
arms--sharp indignation flashes from each eye--revenge gnashes her
iron teeth--death grins an hideous smile, secure to drench his jaws in
human gore--whilst hovering furies darken all the air! But stop, my
bold, adventurous countrymen; stain not your weapons with the blood of
Britons! Attend to reason's voice. Humanity puts in her claim, and
sues to be again admitted to her wonted seat, the bosom of the brave.
Revenge is far beneath the noble mind. Many, perhaps, compelled to
rank among the vile assassins, do, from their inmost souls, detest the
barbarous action. The winged death, shot from your arms, may chance to
pierce some breast, that bleeds already for your injured country.
"The storm subsides: a solemn pause ensues: you spare, upon condition
they depart. They go; they quit your city: they no more shall give
offence. Thus closes the important drama.
"And could it have been conceived that we again should see a British
army in our land, sent to enforce obedience to acts of Parliament
destructive to our liberty?... Our streets are again filled with armed
men; our harbor is crowded with ships of war: but these cannot
intimidate us: our liberty must be preserved: it is far dearer than
_life_--we hold it even dear as our _allegiance_. We must defend it
against the attacks of _friends_, as well as _enemies_: we cannot
suffer even Britons to ravish it from us. No longer could we reflect,
with generous pride, on the heroic actions of our American
forefathers; no longer boast our origin from that far famed island,
whose warlike sons have so often drawn their well tried swords to save
her from the ravages of tyranny;--could we, but for a moment,
entertain the thought of giving up our liberty. The man who meanly
will submit to wear a shackle, contemns the noblest gift of Heaven;
and impiously affronts the God that made him free."
Highly wrought as these passages may appear, they accorded, perfectly,
with the minds to which they were addressed.
It may be doubted, if any scene of the kind ever possessed more of the
moral sublime, than that which our young countryman presented,--daring
thus, amidst armed and frowning enemies, to denounce them and their
masters, and to speak forth the startling truths of justice and
freedom, with the naked sword of tyranny suspended over his head. The
rising of Brutus, "refulgent from the stroke of Cæsar's fate," shaking
his crimsoned steel, and hailing Tully aloud as the "father of his
country"--Tully's own denunciations of Catiline, Verres and
Anthony--or the more illustrious Philippics of Demosthenes--all remote
from personal danger--the objects of their enmity and invective being
absent, defenceless, or prostrate--cannot be compared, for moral
sublimity, with the splendid boldness of Warren. And, whatever
classical anathemas await us for it, we are heretical enough to
venture the opinion, that for true _eloquence_, blendedly pathetic and
argumentative, _his_ oration outstrips any that we have read of
Cicero's, and _equals_ aught that we have seen of Demosthenes. To the
most effective effusions of the latter, indeed, it bears the closest
resemblance--rapid, condensed, inornate, impassioned: similar, too, in
its result, if we consider the difference of their auditories--the one
a mercurial mob, ever liable to be swayed by whim or convulsed by
passion; the other a grave, reflecting people, who subjected every
thing--feeling, imagination, and even the love of liberty--to REASON.
The oratory of Demosthenes made the Athenians cry out, "Let us march
against Philip!" When Warren ended, a glow of admiration and respect
pervaded even the hostile bosoms around him; but the people of Boston
were ready at once to abjure allegiance to Great Britain. For this,
however, affairs were not yet ripe.
The celebrated Josiah Quincy, Jr. was at this time in England, on a
mission of remonstrance and observation. His interesting letters, and
more interesting journal, (for parts of which we are indebted to the
"Memoirs" before referred to,) shewed his conviction that the pending
disputes must come to the arbitrament of arms. His countrymen, he
said, "must seal their cause with their blood." This, he was assured
by Warren, (one of his warmest and dearest friends) they were ready to
do. "It is the united voice of America" (Warren wrote him) "to
preserve their freedom, or lose their lives in its defence." Warren
was President of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts. He writes
thus to Quincy concerning it: "Congress met at Concord at the time
appointed. About 260 members were present. You would have thought
yourself in an assembly of Spartans, or ancient Romans, had you seen
the ardor of those who spoke on the important business they were
transacting." Quincy remained but six months in England, and then
embarked for his home in an advanced stage of consumption: having, as
he told the seaman who attended his sick bed, but one desire--that he
might live long enough to have one more interview with Samuel Adams
and Joseph Warren. His prayer was not granted. He died on ship board,
just entering Cape Anne Harbor, on the 26th of April, 1775,[5] eight
days after the battle of Lexington; where, unknown to him, his
countrymen had already "sealed their cause with their blood."
[Footnote 5: Love for his country and her liberties, may be safely
considered the ruling passion of this man's pure and splendid and too
short life. He displayed it also "strong in death." His last reported
words were in a letter to his family, dictated to his sailor nurse; in
which he breathes a dying wish for his country. And his Will contains
the following clause: "I give to my son, when he shall arrive to the
age of 15 years, Algernon Sidney's Works, John Locke's Works--Lord
Bacon's Works--Gordon's Tacitus, and Cato's Letters. May the spirit of
Liberty rest upon him."]
Warren (now a brigadier general of the Massachusetts militia) was not
unconcerned in that battle. Scouts of his had notified him on the 18th
of April, that a detachment of troops was to march that night towards
Concord: and then, remaining himself upon the watch, he saw Colonel
Smith and 8 or 900 men embark for Charlestown. Knowing the stores and
ammunition at Concord to be their object, he instantly sent messengers
over the surrounding country, to give the alarm; and himself rode all
night--passing so near the enemy, as to be more than once in great
danger of capture. His messenger to Lexington was Col. Revere; who, on
suddenly turning a corner as he passed through Charlestown, found
himself close to a party of the British. In a moment he put his horse
at full speed, dashed through them, and before they could well
ascertain him to be a foe, was beyond the reach of the balls which
they fired after him. It was his summons, that called forth the
company of Lexington militia, upon whom, about sunrise on the 19th,
was begun that bloody drama, of which the progress was to shake two
continents, and the catastrophe to dissever an empire. Warren,
sleepless and in motion throughout the night, hurried to the scene of
action: and, when the enemy were retreating from Concord, he was among
the foremost in hanging upon their rear, and assailing their flanks.
By pressing them too closely, he once narrowly escaped death. A musket
ball took off a lock of hair, which curled close to his head, in the
fashion of that time.
When his mother first saw him after the battle, and heard of this
escape, she entreated him with tears not again to risk a life so
precious. "Where danger is, dear mother," he answered, "there must
your son be. _Now_ is no time for any of America's children to shrink
from any hazard. I will see her free, or die."
An exchange of prisoners was soon afterwards agreed on, to be carried
into effect at Charlestown. Generals Warren and Putnam with two select
companies of Massachusetts troops, repaired thither for the purpose.
Here was a touching scene. The British and American officers, on
meeting once more as friends after the recent strife had so rudely
sundered their long subsisting ties of hospitality and mutual
kindness, melted with tenderness, and rushed into each other's arms.
The soldiers caught the infection: and mingled tears, and hands
cordially shaken, softened for awhile the rugged front of war. Putnam
and Warren entertained the British as guests, as sumptuously as the
occasion allowed.