I stood in the English Court September 20th, 1803, beside the heroic
ROBERT EMMET,
and heard him hurl these javelins of defiant patriotic eloquence against the brazen brutality of British judicial tyranny:
"When my spirit shall be wafted to a more friendly port; when my shade shall have joined the bands of those martyred heroes who have shed their blood on the scaffold and in the field, in defense of their country and virtue, this is my hope: I wish that my memory and name may animate those who survive me, while I look down with complacency on the destruction of this perfidious Government, which upholds its dominion by blasphemy of the Most High.
"The blood which you seek is not congealed by the artificial terrors which surround your victim; it circulates warmly and unruffled through the channels which God created for noble purposes, but which you are bent to destroy for purposes so grievous that they cry to Heaven!
"Let no man write my epitaph; for, as no one who knows my motives dares now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed until other times and other men can do justice to my character and memory. When my country shall take her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written."
Again, in my peripatetic tour of nations, seeking and aiding the hosts of Liberty, I stood with
GENERAL ANDREW JACKSON,
the greatest Irish-American citizen, soldier and President, behind the cotton bales and swamps of New Orleans, and on the 8th of January, 1815, I saw him hurl more than two thousand "Red Coats" into eternity, with only a loss of seven men, three killed and four wounded.
Kentucky and Tennessee "Bushwhackers," with a lot of New Orleans shopkeepers, armed with squirrel rifles, killed and defeated General Pakenham, and the veteran troops of John Bull, in their raids over the globe for land, loot and human blood.