I hold it to have been a great thing, in the first place, that we had
among us, at that awful moment when the public mind was meditating the
question of submission to the tea tax, or resistance by arms, and at the
more awful moment of the first appeal to arms,--that we had some among
us who personally knew what war was. Washington, Putnam, Stark, Gates,
Prescott, Montgomery, were soldiers already. So were hundreds of others
of humbler rank, but not yet forgotten by the people whom they helped to
save, who mustered to the camp of our first Revolutionary armies. These
all had tasted a soldier's life. They had seen fire, they had felt the
thrilling sensations, the quickened flow of blood to and from the heart,
the mingled apprehension and hope, the hot haste, the burning thirst,
the feverish rapture of battle, which he who has not felt is unconscious
of one-half of the capacities and energies of his nature; which he who
has felt, I am told, never forgets. They had slept in the woods on the
withered leaves or the snow, and awoke to breakfast upon birch-bark and
the tender tops of willow-trees. They had kept guard on the outposts on
many a stormy night, knowing perfectly that the thicket half a
pistol-shot off was full of French and Indian riflemen.
I say it was something that we had such men among us. They helped
discipline our raw first levies. They knew what an army is, and what it
needs, and how to provide for it. They could take that young volunteer
of sixteen by the hand, sent by an Ipswich mother, who after looking
upon her son equipped for battle from which he might not return,
Spartan-like, bid him go and behave like a man--and many, many such
shouldered a musket for Lexington and Bunker Hill--and assure him from
their own personal knowledge that after the first fire he never would
know fear again, even that of the last onset. But the long and peculiar
wars of New England had done more than to furnish a few such officers
and soldiers as these. They had formed that public sentiment upon the
subject of war which re-united all the armies, fought all the battles,
and won all the glory of the Revolution. The truth is that war in some
form or another had been, from the first, one of the usages, one of the
habits, of colonial life. It had been felt from the first to be just as
necessary as planting or reaping--to be as likely to break out every day
and every night as a thunder-shower in summer, and to break out as
suddenly. There have been nations who boasted that their rivers or
mountains never saw the smoke of an enemy's camp. Here the war-whoop
awoke the sleep of the cradle; it startled the dying man on his pillow;
it summoned young and old from the meeting-house, from the burial, and
from the bridal ceremony, to the strife of death. The consequence was
that the steady, composed, and reflecting courage which belongs to all
the English race grew into a leading characteristic of New England; and
a public sentiment was formed, pervading young and old and both sexes,
which declared it lawful, necessary, and honorable to risk life and to
shed blood for a great cause,--for our family, for our fires, for our
God, for our country, for our religion. In such a cause it declared that
the voice of God himself commanded to the field. The courage of New
England was the "courage of conscience." It did not rise to that insane
and awful passion, the love of war for itself. It would not have hurried
her sons to the Nile, or the foot of the Pyramids, or across the great
raging sea of snows which rolled from Smolensko to Moscow, to set the
stars of glory upon the glowing brow of ambition. But it was a courage
which at Lexington, at Bunker Hill, at Bennington, and at Saratoga, had
power to brace the spirit for the patriot's fight, and gloriously roll
back the tide of menaced war from their homes, the soil of their birth,
the graves of their fathers, and the everlasting hills of their freedom.