Independence Day

by Unknown

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.