there is probably greater similitude than is to be found elsewhere over
the same extent of country, and in the same number of people. In
language, especially, our people are one; surely much more so than
those of any other country. The diversity between the people of the
different States, even those most remote from each other, is not as
great as that between inhabitants of adjoining countries of England, or
departments of France or Spain, where provinces have their separate
dialects. And chief among the causes for this I would place the primary
book, in which children of my day learned their letters, and took their
first lessons in spelling and reading. I refer to the good old spelling
book of Noah Webster, on which I doubt if there has been any
improvement, and which had the singular advantage of being used over
the whole country. To this unity of language and general similitude, is
to be added a community of sentiment wherever the American is brought
into contrast or opposition to any other people.
If shadows float over our disc and threaten an eclipse; if there be
those who would not avert, but desire to precipitate catastrophe to the
Union, these are not the sentiments of the American heart; they are
rather the exceptions and should not disturb our confidence in that
deep-seated sentiment of nationality which aided our fathers when they
entered into the compact of union, and which has preserved it to us.
You manifest that sentiment to-day in the courtesy which you have
extended to me. In what other land could a countryman go so far from
his home and receive among strangers the attention which could only be
expected from friends? But it is not your kindness only, which has
caused me here to feel at home; I have been brought in contact with men
of my own pursuit, the tillers of the ground and the breeders of stock;
and in my intercourse with this class of your citizens, I have been
further confirmed in the high estimate heretofore placed upon that
portion of our population. Happily for our country and its
institutions, extensive territory and favorable climate, have attracted
a large part of our population to agricultural pursuits. It is in the
individuality, the sobriety, and self reliance of the rural population
that I look for the highest development of those qualities essential to
self-government, and the brightest illustration of patriotic devotion.
They may not be the best informed, but learning and wisdom are by no
means equivalent terms. Isolation and entire dependence upon himself;
give independence of character and favor that self-inquiry which best
enables man to comprehend and measure the motives of his fellow.
Crowded together in cities originality is lost, mind becomes as it were
acadamized; and though the intercourse is favorable to the acquisition
of knowledge, it is most unfriendly to that individuality,
independence, and purity, without which republican governments rapidly
sink into decay. It was probably in this view that Mr. Jefferson said,
great cities were sores upon the body politic. Needful for the purposes
of commerce, required for the exchanges on which agricultural and
manufacturing industry depend for their prosperity,—they are not evils
which we could desire to see abated. My desire, however, is, that the
rural districts shall not lose their relative importance or cease to
control in public affairs. Misled and deceived they may be, interested
in a public wrong they cannot be, and theirs is the sober thought upon
which reliance must be placed for the correction of errors and
delusions, which may temporarily prevail.
In societies like this the farmers have the opportunity of comparing
opinions and results, and thus increasing the amount of their
knowledge. The spirit of emulation which is excited must lead to
improvement, by better directing energy in their pursuit. The
publication of the results and the comparisons thus instituted with
what is done in other States, encourages State pride and developes
community feeling. Whatever tends to the cultivation of the idea of
State sovereignty and community independence, strengthens the
foundation on which rests our federal government—the fruition of that
principle which led our fathers into the war of the revolution, where
they purchased with their blood the rich inheritance transmitted to us.
Man once received the title of Domitor Equi, he being proud of the
achievement of taming the horse, and then, so far as we can learn,
gentler woman sat like Penelope handling the distaff. Subsequently
there arose a race of Amazons, who, aspiring to the feats of man, lost
the gentleness of woman; but in our happy land and day, rising above
the one without running to the excess of the other, lovely woman, with
all the gentle charms which graced a Penelope, musters her energy when
occasion requires, and displays her prowess in commanding the horse.
Among the interesting features of the exhibition I shall remember the
equestrianism of the ladies. Though it was beautiful in every sense of
the word, it was not regarded as mere sport, but the rather looked upon
as part of that mental and physical training which makes a woman more
than the mere ornament of the drawing-room—fits her usefully to act her
appropriate part in the trying scenes to which the most favored may be
subjected—to become the mother of heroes, and live in the admiration of
posterity.
Fears had once been entertained and much opposition was formerly made
to an extension of the area of the United States. A wiser policy,
however, prevailed, and the introduction of new regions, increasing the
variety of our productions, have magnified the advantages of free trade
between the States, and made us almost independent of other countries
for the supply of every object whether of necessity or of luxury. I
would be glad to extend our boundary and make the circle of our
products complete, so that, whilst we would encourage commerce with
christendom we should be, commercially as we are politically,
absolutely independent, whenever it should be proper or necessary to
terminate intercourse with any or every other country. A statesman of
former days wished that the Atlantic was a sea of fire, that it might
be a barrier to shut out European contamination. Whatever fear was once
justifiable, no apprehension now need to exist, that our people will
imitate or seek to adopt the political theories of Europe. We have
recently rejoiced in the success of the attempt to establish
telegraphic communication with England; because in closer commercial
ties we saw no danger of political influence. I was happy this evening
to receive assurances that the success of that enterprise was at last
complete. I have not been of those whose doubts were stronger than
their hopes—thanks to a sanguine temperament. I have from the beginning
anticipated success, and have heretofore said that if the present
attempt riled I was sure that Yankee enterprise and skill could make a
cable and lay it across the Atlantic. And we look forward to the result
with hope, not doubting, that the closest commercial connexion with
other countries can only bring to us benefits. We are not, and have not
been, political propagandists, yet believing our form of government the
best, we properly desire its extension and invite the world to
scrutinize our example of representative liberty.
The stars on our flag, recording the number of the States united, have
already been more than doubled; and I hopefully look forward to the day
when the constellation shall become a galaxy covering the stripes,
which record the original number of our political family, and shall
shed over the nations of the earth the light of regeneration to
mankind. It has sometimes been said to he our manifest destiny that we
should possess the whole of this continent. Whether it shall ever all
be part of the United States is doubtful, and may never be desirable;
but that in some form or other, it should come under the protectorate
or control of the United States, is a result which seems to me, in the
remote future, certain. It waits as the consequence upon intellectual
vigor, upon physical energy, upon the capacity to govern, and can only
be defeated by a suicidal madness, of which it does not belong to the
occasion to treat.
I would not be understood to advocate what is called fillibustering.
Our country has never obtained territory except fairly, honorably and
peaceably. We have conquered territory, but have asserted no title as
the right of conquest, returning to Mexico all except the part she
agreed to sell and for which we paid a liberal price. England having
fillibustered around the world, has reproached us for aggrandizement,
and we point to history and invite a comparison. There is no stain upon
our escutcheon, no smoke upon our garments, and thus may they remain
pure forever! The acquisitions of which I spoke, the protectorate which
was contemplated, were such as the necessities of the future should
demand, and the good of others as much as our own require, and this
step by step, faster or slower, will, I believe, finally embrace the
continent of America and its adjacent islands.
I am not among those who desire to incorporate into our Union,
countries densely populated with a different race. Deserts, ’tis the
province of our people to subdue. A mere handful of inhabitants, such
as existed in Louisiana, are soon enveloped in the tide of immigration;
of this character of acquisition I have no fear; but the mingling of
races is a different thing. I have looked with interest and pleasure
upon the crosses of your cattle and horses, and saw in it the evidence
of improvement. Let your Messengers, your Morgans, your Drews, and your
Eatons be mingled with each other and with new inportations; so with
your Durhams, Devons, Ayreshires and your Jerseys. The limit to these
experiments will be where experience shows deterioration. There is one
cross which it is to be hoped you will avoid: ’tis that which your
Puritan fathers would not adopt or even entertain. They kept pure the
Caucasian blood which flowed in their veins, and therein is the cause
of your present high civilization, your progress, your dignity and your
strength. We are one, let us remain unmixed. In our neighbors of
Southern and Central America we have a sufficient warning; and may it
never be our ill-fortune to learn by experience the lessons taught by
their example.
It is due to the hospitality and kind consideration with which I have
been treated since I first came among you that I should not leave you
under any doubt in relation to the accusations which have been busily
circulated against me. And this, it is to be hoped, will not be
mistaken for egotism, since the greatest interest I have in doing so is
to justify you to yourselves. I know of no selfish purpose, unless a
proper desire for esteem he such, which would lead me to attempt to
undeceive you, so far as any of you may have been imposed upon. I
certainly do not expect to change my residence from the State in which
I was reared; and I long since avowed the intention never again to
receive official trust from any other authority than that of the people
of the State of which I am a citizen. It has been represented to you
that you were showering attentions upon one who was hostile to your
interests, and regardless of your rights. I am grateful to you for the
constant evidence you have given that you discredited the statement,
and I am therefore the more anxious that you should not remain in
doubt. The public record contains all I have said and done, and in it
nothing can be found to sustain the statement. Of this I am quite sure,
because it has always been with me a principle to exercise public
functions in the spirit of the Constitution and the purposes of the
Union. If I know myself, I have never given a vote from a feeling of
hostility to any portion of our common country; but have always kept in
view the common obligation for the common welfare, and desired by
maintaining the constitution in each and every particular, to
perpetuate the blessings it was designed to secure, and to transmit the
inheritance received from our fathers unmutilated and uncontaminated to
remotest posterity. In some positions it has devolved upon me to study
interests in Maine, with a view to secure for them proper provision,
and I feel that I am justified in saying they were considered as became
one who had sworn to protect the Constitution, and who had a function
to perform in relation to a sovereign State of the Union. Heretofore I
have been prompted merely by what I believed to be duty to you from me
as an officer under the Constitution. Hereafter, though the principles
on which I will act cannot vary, I should be less than a man if I did
not feel deeper interest in whatever concerns you. I shall always bear
with me most pleasurable recollections of my sojourn among you, and
hope it may be my good fortune some day to meet some of you in
Mississippi, and thus have it in my power to reciprocate, imperfectly
it may be, the kindness which you bestowed upon me. I thank you for
your polite attention, and cordially wish for you, one and all, present
and future prosperity.
Speech at the Grand Ratification Meeting, Faneuil Hall,
_Monday evening, Oct. 11th, 1858._
Countrymen, Brethren, Democrats—Most happy am I to meet you, and to
have received here renewed assurance—of that which I have so long
believed—that the pulsation of the democratic heart is the same in
every parallel of latitude, on every meridian of longitude throughout
the United States. But it required not this to confirm me in a belief
so long and so happily enjoyed.—Your own great statesman who has
introduced me to this assembly has been too long associated with me,
too nearly connected, we have labored too many hours, sometimes even
until one day ran into another, in the cause of our country, for me to
than to understand that a Massachusetts democrat has a heart
comprehending the whole of our wide Union, and that its pulsations
always beat for the liberty and happiness of its country. Neither could
I be unaware such was the sentiment of the democracy of New England.
For it was lay fortune lately to serve under a President drawn from the
neighboring, State of New Hampshire, [applause,] and I know that he
spoke the language of his heart, for I learned it in tour years of
intimate connection with him, when he said he knew “no north, no south,
no east, no west, but sacred maintenance of the common bond and true
devotion to the common brotherhood.” Never, sir, in the past history of
our country, never, I add, in its future destiny, however bright it may
be, did or will a man of higher and purer patriotism, a man more
devoted to the common weal of his country, hold the helm of our great
ship of State, than that same New Englander, Franklin Pierce.
[Applause.]
I have heard the resolutions read and approved by this meeting; heard
the address of your candidate for Governor; and these added to the
address of my old and intimate friend, Gen. Cushing, bear to me fresh
testimony, which I shall be happy to carry away with me, that the
democracy, in the language of your own glorious Webster, “still lives,”
lives not as his great spirit did, when it hung ’twixt life and death,
like a star upon the horizon’s verge, but lives like the germ that is
shooting upward, like the sapling that is growing to a mighty tree, the
branches of which will spread over the commonwealth, and may redeem and
restore Massachusetts to her once glorious place in the Union.
As I look around me and see this venerable hall thus thronged, it
reminds me of another meeting, when it was found too small to contain
the assembly—that great meeting which assembled here, when the people
were called upon to decide what should be done in relation to the
tea-tax. Faneuil Hall, on that occasion, was found too small, and the
people went to the Old South Church, which still stands—a monument of
your early history. And I hope the day will soon come when many
Democratic meetings in Boston will be too large for Faneuil Hall!
[Applause.] I am welcomed to this hall, so venerable for its
associations with our early history; to this hall of which you are so
justly proud, and the memories of which are part of the inheritance of
every American citizen; and feel, as I remember how many voices of
patriotic fervor have here been heard; that in it originated the first
movements from which the Revolution sprung; that here began that system
of town meetings and free discussion which is the glory and safety of
our country; that I had enough to warn me, that though my theme was
more humble than theirs, (as befitted my poorer ability,) that it was a
hazardous thing for me to attempt to speak in this sacred temple. But
when I heard your statesman (Gen. Cushing) say, that a word once here
spoken never dies, that it becomes a part of the circumambient air, I
felt a reluctance to speak which increases upon me as I recall his
expression. But if those voices which breathed the first instincts into
the Colony of Massachusetts, and into those colonies which formed the
United States, to proclaim community independence, and asserts it
against the powerful mother country, —if those voices live here still,
how must they feel who come here to preach treason to the Constitution,
and assail the Union it ordained and established? [Applause.] It would
seem that their criminal hearts should fear that those voices, so long
slumbering, would break their silence, that the forms which look down
from these walls behind and around me, would walk forth. and that their
sabres would once more be drawn from their scabbards, to drive from
this sacred temple fanatical men, who desecrate it more than did the
changers of money and those who sold doves, the temple of the living
God. [Loud cheers.]
And here, too, you have, to remind you, and to remind all who enter
this hall, the portraits of those men who are dear to every lover of
liberty, and part and parcel of the memory of every American citizen.
Highest among them all I see you have placed Samuel Adams and John
Hancock. [Applause.] You have placed them the highest and properly; for
they were the two, the only two, excepted from the proclamation of
mercy, when Governor Gage issued his anathema against them and their
fellow patriots. These men, thus excepted from the saving grace of the
crown, now occupy the highest place in Faneuil Hall, and thus are
consecrated highest in the reverence of the people of Boston.
[Applause.] This is one of the instances in which we find tradition
more reliable than history; for tradition has borne the name of Samuel
Adams to the remotest corner of our territory, placed it among the
household words taught to the rising generation, and there in the new
States intertwined with our love of representative liberty, it is a
name as sacred among us as it is among you of New England. [Applause.]
We remember how early he saw the necessity of _community independence_.
How, through the dim mists of the future, and in advance of his day, he
looked forward to the proclamation of that independence by
Massachusetts; how he steadily strove, through good report and evil
report, with the same unwavering purpose, whether in the midst of his
fellow citizens, cheered by their voices, or whether isolated, a
refugee, hunted as a criminal, and communing with his own heart, now
under all circumstances his eve was still fixed upon his first, last
hope, the community independence of Massachusetts! And when we see him,
at a later period, the leader in that correspondence which waked the
feelings of the other colonies and brought into fraternal association
the people of Massachusetts with the people of other colonies—when we
see his letters acknowledging the receipt of the rice of South
Carolina, the flour, the pork, the money of Virginia, Maryland, New
York, Pennsylvania, and others, contributions of affection to relieve
Boston of the sufferings inflicted upon her when her port was closed by
the despotism of the British crown—we there see the beginning of that
sentiment which insured the co-operation of the colonies throughout the
desperate struggle of the Revolution, and which, if the present
generation be true to the compact of their sires, to the memory and to
the principles of the noble men from whom they descended, will
perpetuate for them that spirit of fraternity in which the Union began.
[Applause.]
But it is not here alone, nor in reminiscences connected with the
objects which present themselves within this hall, that the people of
Boston have much to excite their patriotism and carry them back to the
great principles of the revolutionary struggle. Where in this vicinity
will you go and not meet some monument to inspire such sentiments? On
one side are Lexington and Concord, where sixty brave countrymen came
with their fowling pieces to oppose six hundred veterans,—where
peaceful citizens animated by the love of independence and covered by
the triple shield of a righteous cause, finally forced those veterans
back, and pursued them on the road, fighting from every barn and bush,
and stock, and stone, till they drove them to the shelters from which
they had gone forth! [Applause.] And there on another side of your city
stand those monuments of your early patriotism, Breed’s and Bunker’s
Hill whose soil drank the sacred blood of men who lived for their
country and died for mankind! Can it be that any of you tread that soil
and forget the great purposes for which those men bravely fought, or
nobly died?” [Applause.] While in yet another direction rise the
Heights of Dorchester, once the encampment of the great Virginian, the
man who came here in the cause of American independence, who did not
ask “Is this a town of Virginia?” but, “Is this a town of my brethren?”
who pitched his camp and commenced his operations with the steady
courage and cautious wisdom characteristic of Washington, hopefully,
resolutely waiting and watching for the day when he could drive the
British troops out of your city. [Cheers.]
Here, too, you find where once the Old Liberty Tree, connected with so
many of your memories, grew. You ask your legend, and learn that it was
cut down for firewood by the British soldiers, as some of your meeting
houses were pulled down. They burned the old tree, and it warmed the
soldiers enough to enable them to evacuate the city. [Laughter.] Had
they been more slowly warmed into motion, had it burned a little
longer, it might have lighted Washington and his followers to their
enemies.
But they were gone, and never again may a hostile foe tread your shore.
Woe to the enemy who shall set his footprint upon your soil; he comes
to a prison or he comes to a grave! [Applause.] American fortifications
are not intended to protect our country from invasion. They are
constructed elsewhere as in your harbor to guard points where marine
attacks can he made; and for the rest, the breasts of Americans are our
parapets. [Applause.]
But, my friends, it is not merely in these military associations, so
honorably connected with the pride of Massachusetts, that one who
visits Boston finds much for gratification. If I were selecting a place
where the advocate of strict construction of the Constitution, the
extreme asserter of democratic state rights doctrine should go for his
text, I would send him into the collections of your historical
association. Instead of finding Boston a place where the records would
teach only federalism, he would find here, in bounteous store, that
sacred doctrine of state rights, which has been called the extreme and
ultra opinion of the South. He would find among your early records that
at the time when Massachusetts was under a colonial government,
administered by a man appointed by the British crown, guarded by
British soldiers; the use of this old Faneuil Hall was refused by the
town authorities to a British Governor, to hold a British festival,
because he was going to bring with him the agents for collecting, and
naval officers sent here to enforce, an unconstitutional tax upon your
commonwealth. Such was the proud spirit of independence manifested even
in your colonial history. Such the great stone your fathers hewed with
sturdy hand, and left the fit foundation for a monument to state
rights! [Applause.] And so throughout the early period of our country
you find Massachusetts leading, most prominent of all the States, in
the assertion of that doctrine which has been recently so much decried.