Calumny Refuted by Facts From Liberia

"Still, we honour the heroes of the age that has passed. No slander can tarnish their hard-earned fame – no morbid sentimentalism sully their peerless glory – no mean detraction abate the disinterestedness of their conduct. They bowed to the spirit of their age: and, acting up to the light afforded them, they yielded to the dictates of an honest conscience. While assembled here to-day, on this festal occasion, to commemorate the event for which the founders of our infant Republic toiled, and fought, and bled, we seem to behold the forms of the departed ones mingling in our assembly: we seem to behold them taking their seats by the side of their venerable compeers yet spared among us: watching with intense anxiety the emotions which agitate our bosoms, and marking the character of the resolves which the occasion is ripening. Rest in peace, ye venerable shades! And ye, their living representatives – calm be the evening of your days. We honour you. And though no sculptured marble transmit your fame, a nobler monument shall be yours – the happy hearts of unborn millions shall be the shrine in which your names will be treasured. In your high example – in your noble disinterestedness – in your entire subordination of every thought, and act, and scheme, and interest, to the heaven-born purpose of human regeneration and human elevation, we hear the language of encouragement.

"Fellow-citizens, – on this occasion, so big with subjects of profitable meditation – when it is so natural that the mind should oscillate between the events of the past and the prospects of the future, we can conceive of nothing more proper than the enquiry, how we can best execute the solemn trust committed to our hand – how we may challenge and secure the admiration and the gratitude of a virtuous and a happy posterity, by transmitting to them the patrimony received from our fathers, not only in all its original entireness, but in vastly augmented beauty, order, and strength. In a word, how we may best conduct ourselves so as to encite them to high and sustained exertion in the cause of virtue and humanity.

"In order to impress your minds with the propriety of this enquiry, there is, I trust, no need that I shall remind you of the peculiarity of our condition. It will suffice that I remark, that, should you succeed in rearing upon the foundation already laid, – or, to drop the figure – should you succeed in establishing a community of virtuous, orderly, intelligent, and industrious citizens, this very peculiarity must enter largely into every consideration on the amount of praise to which you shall be held entitled.

"Let us, then, for a moment look back, that from the events of the past we may derive hope for the future.

"We have not yet numbered twenty-six years since he who is the oldest colonist amongst us was the inhabitant – not the citizen – of a country – and that too the country of his birth – where the prevailing sentiment is, that he and his race are incapacitated, by an inherent defect in their mental constitution, to enjoy that greatest of all blessings, and to exercise that greatest of all rights, bestowed by a beneficent God upon his rational creatures – namely, the government of themselves. Acting upon this opinion – an opinion as false as it is foul – acting upon this opinion, as upon a self-evident proposition, those who held it proceeded with a fiendish consistency to deny the rights of citizens to those whom they had declared incapable of performing the duties of citizens. It is not necessary, and therefore I will not disgust you with the hideous picture of that state of things which followed upon the prevalence of this blasphemous opinion. The bare mention that such an opinion prevailed, would be sufficient to call up in the mind, even of those who had never witnessed its operation, images of the most sickening and revolting character. Under the iron reign of this crushing sentiment, most of us who are assembled here to-day, drew our first breath and sighed away the years of our youth. No hope cheered us: no noble object looming in the dim and distant future kindled our ambition. Oppression – cold, cheerless oppression, like the dreary region of an eternal winter, chilled every noble passion and fettered and paralysed every arm. And if among the oppressed millions there were found here and there one in whose bosom the last glimmer of a generous passion was not yet extinguished – one, who, from the midst of the inglorious slumberers in the deep degradation around him, would lift his voice and demand those rights which the God of nature hath bestowed in equal gift upon all His rational creatures, he was met at once by those who had at first denied and then enforced, with the stern reply, that for him and for all his race – Liberty and Expatriation are inseparable.

"Dreadful as the alternative was – fearful as was the experiment now proposed to be tried, there were hearts equal to the task – hearts which quailed not at the dangers which loomed and frowned in the distance, but calm, cool, and fixed in their purpose, prepared to meet them with the watchword – Give me Liberty or give me Death.

"On the 6th day of February, in the year of Our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Twenty, the ship Elizabeth cast loose from her moorings at New York, and on the 8th day of March, of the same year, the pilgrims first beheld the land of their fathers, the cloud-capped mountains of Sierra Leone, and cast anchor in that harbour. A few days afterwards they again weighed anchor, stood to the south, and debarked upon the low and deadly island of Sherbro. On the character of those who formed her noble company, I deem it unnecessary to remark. They are sufficiently commended to our esteem, as being the first to encounter the difficulties and to face the dangers of an enterprise, which, we trust, is to wipe away from us the reproach of ages – to silence the calumny of those who abuse us, and to restore to Africa her long-lost glory. I need not detain you with a narrative of their privations and sufferings: nor will I stop to tell you – though it would be a pleasing task to do so – with what happy hearts they greeted a reinforcement of pilgrims who joined them in 1821, by the Nautilus. Passing by intermediate events, which, did the time allow, it would be interesting to notice, we hasten to that grand event – that era of our separate existence, the 25th day of April, in the year of Grace 1822, when the American flag first threw out its graceful folds to the breeze on the heights of Mesurado, and the pilgrims, relying upon the protection of Heaven and the moral grandeur of their cause, took solemn possession of the land in the name of virtue, humanity, and religion.

"It would discover an unpardonable apathy, were we to pass on without pausing a moment to reflect upon the emotions which heaved the bosoms of the pilgrims, when they stood for the first time where we now stand. What a prospect spread out before them!! They stood in the midst of an ancient wilderness, rank and compacted by the growth of a thousand years, unthinned and unreclaimed by a single stroke of the woodman's axe. Few and far between might be found inconsiderable openings, where the ignorant native erected his rude habitation, or, savage as his patrimonial wilderness, celebrated his bloody rites, and presented his votive gifts, to Demons. Already the late proprietors of the soil had manifested unequivocal symptoms of hostility, and an intention to expel the strangers, as soon as an opportunity to do so should be presented. The rainy season, that terrible ordeal of foreign constitutions, was about setting in; the lurid lightning shot its fiery bolt into the forest around them; the thunder muttered its angry tones over their head; and the frail tenements, the best which their circumstances would afford, to shield them from a scorching sun by day and drenching rains at night, had not yet been completed. To suppose that at this time, when all things above and around them seemed to combine their influences against them, to suppose they did not perceive the full danger and magnitude of the enterprise they had embarked in, would be to suppose, not that they were heroes, but that they had lost the sensibility of men. True courage is equally remote from blind recklessness and unmanning timidity; and true heroism does not consist in insensibility to danger. He is a hero who calmly meets, and fearlessly grapples the dangers which duty and honour forbid him to decline. The pilgrims rose to a full perception of all the circumstances of their condition. But when they looked back to that country from which they had come out, and remembered the degradations in that house of bondage out of which they had been so fortunate as to escape, they bethought themselves; and, recollecting the high satisfaction with which they knew success would gladden their hearts, the rich inheritance they would entail upon their children, and the powerful aid it would lend to the cause of universal humanity, they yielded to the noble inspiration and girded them to the battle, either for doing or for suffering.

"Let it not be supposed, because I have laid universal humanity under a tribute of gratitude to the founders of Liberia, that I have attached to their humble achievements too important an influence, in that grand system of agencies which is now at work, renovating human society, and purifying and enlarging the sources of its enjoyment. In the system of that Almighty Being, without whose notice not a sparrow falls to the ground:

'Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,A hero perish, or a sparrow fall:Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,And now a bubble burst, and now a world:'

– In the system of the Almighty One, no action of a mortal being is unimportant. Every action of every rational creature hath its assigned place in his system of operations, and is made to bear, however undesigned by the agent, with force upon the end which His wisdom and goodness have in view to accomplish.

"On the morning of the 1st day of December, in the year of Our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Twenty-two; on that morning, just when the gloom of night was retiring before the advancing light of day, the portentous cloud which had been some time rising upon the horizon of Liberia, increasing and gathering blackness as it advanced, filling all hearts with fearful apprehension, burst upon the colony with the force of a tornado. The events of that day have marked it as the most conspicuous in our annals, and it is the anniversary of that day we are here assembled to celebrate.

"And what, fellow-citizens, are the particular circumstances of that most eventful day which more than others awaken our exultation? On which one amongst them all is our attention most intensely fixed? Is it on that our fathers fought, and fought bravely, and strewed the ensanguined plain with the dead bodies of their savage assailants? Is it on the bloody lesson of their superiority which they taught them in the hoarse thunder of the murderous cannon? Is it on that greater skill they displayed in the inglorious art of slaughter and death? I trust not. These trophies of their valour serve not to awaken exultation, but to call up a sigh of regret. It was as the possessors of far higher and nobler virtues they desired to be remembered; as such we tenderly cherish the remembrance of them; and to exult over the fallen foe would be to grieve the pure spirit of those by whose arm the savage fell. Necessity, stern necessity, unsheathed their sword and forced upon them an alternative from which all the feelings of their heart turned with instinctive recoil.

"But there is a circumstance connected with the events of that day, with which our hearts cannot be too deeply impressed, as it will serve, on each appropriate occasion, as a check upon presumption and an antidote against despair. Think upon the number of the assailants, and compare it with the number of the assailed, and then say whether any scepticism short of downright, unblushing Atheism, can doubt the interposition, in the events of that day, of an overruling Providence. Most emphatically does the issue of that contest declare, 'The battle is not to the strong.' The Lord was a shield around them, so that when their foes rose up against them, they stumbled and fell. To the interposition of an ever-gracious Providence, manifested in no ordinary way, we owe the privileges and pleasure of this day.

"At this epoch we date the establishment of the colony.

"Having sustained and repulsed every external attack, and maintained its ground against the combined and concentrated forces of the country, it had now to commence its onward career. If there were any, who, because the colonists had repulsed the natives, supposed they had passed the greatest danger, and overcome the most formidable obstacles, they gave, in this very supposition, evidence of a deplorable ignorance of human nature and of human history. It is from within, that the elements of national overthrow have most commonly evolved: and the weakness under which nations expire, generally results from disease of the national heart. Luxury and ambition, oppression on the one side and insubordination on the other; these are the fatal elements which, with more than volcanic force, rend to atoms the fabric of human institutions. A common danger, a danger equally menacing all, is almost sure to sink every minor and merely personal consideration, and to be met by a combination of energy, concentration of effort, and unity of action: and in proportion as the pressure of the danger is great, will there be want of scope for those passions which, in a certain class, possess such fearful and disorganising potency.

"From the period of their landing, up to the moment of which we have just spoken, all minds had been possessed by an undefined apprehension of impending danger, and the first and the constant lesson which their critical position inculcated upon them was, Union and Subordination. The pressure was now taken off, the angry cloud had now passed away, the heavens shone bright and clear, the face of nature was calm and placid, and on every breeze was wafted the fragrance from the surrounding groves. All breathed freely. Each one had time to look around him, to contemplate with calmness and composure the circumstances of his condition, and to select that particular mode of operation, and line of conduct, which was most congenial with his disposition. All were free; All were equal. Here was unbounded scope for the operation of the passions. Will they, who have been declared incapable of enjoying liberty without running into the wildest excesses of anarchy – will they, now the gift is enjoyed in its largest extent, restrain themselves within the bounds of a rational and virtuous freedom? Will they connect those two ideas which are at one and the same time the base and the summit of all just political theories, and which can never be separated? Will their liberty be tempered by just and wholesome law? Is it to be expected that a people just set free from the chains of the most abject oppression and slavery, can be otherwise than turbulent, insubordinate, and impatient of the least restraint? Is it among the things to be hoped, that they into whose minds the idea of political action had not been allowed to enter, will not, now political power is entrusted to their hands, rush into the wildest extremes of crude legislation?

"Fellow-Citizens! the voice of twenty-four years this day gives the answer; and we are assembled to hear it, and let those who abuse us hear it; let them hear it and be for ever silent, when they hear that Liberty regulated by Law, and Religion free from Superstition, form the foundation on which rests the cement which unites, and the ornament which beautifies, our political and social edifice.

"Let us now turn from those who preceded us, and ask, What are the peculiar obligations which rest upon us: what the particular duties to which we are called? Let us not suppose, that because we are not called upon to drive the invading native from our door – that because we can lie down at night without fear – because the savage war-whoop does not now ring upon the midnight air, – therefore we have nothing to do. No mistake can be more fatal. Ours is a moral fight. It is a keener warfare, a sharper conflict.

"For, after indulging to the utmost allowed extent in hyperbolical expression and figurative declamation, still we are forced to confess, the work is but just commenced. The nervous arm of our predecessor marked out the site, and laid the foundation, and reared the walls, of the edifice. The scaffold is still around it. It is ours to mount it – to commence where they ended, and to conduct it on towards a glorious completion. How shall we execute our trust – how shall we conduct ourselves so as to stand acquitted before the bar of coming generations, and obtain from them a favourable and an honorable verdict? By what means shall we secure and perpetuate our own prosperity, and transmit it an inheritance to our children? These are questions which seem peculiarly appropriate to this interesting occasion. And let me congratulate you, fellow-citizens, that you have the experience of others to guide you. The art of government is now elevated to the dignity of a science. The most gifted minds – minds which do honour to human nature, have long been turned to the subject: and maxims and propositions which, consecrated by time, had grown into the strength of axioms – maxims which had obtained universal assent and universal application – maxims which would have overwhelmed him who should have doubted them, with more than sacrilegious turpitude and sent him to atone for his presumption upon the scaffold, or in the gloomy depths of a dungeon – maxims the legitimate offspring of ignorance and oppression, have been successfully explored and the human mind disenthralled. That more than magical phrase, in the hand of the despot, 'the divine right of kings,' has lost its power to charm; and frequent examinations into the foundations of society have at length taught men the interesting truth, that the duties and rights of magistrate and subject are correlate – that government is made for the people, and not the people for the government: thus establishing the eternal truth first enunciated in the Declaration of American Independence, 'That all men are free and equal.' The bare utterance of those ever-memorable words, by the immortal Jefferson, whilst it struck the fetters from the human mind, and sent it bounding on in a career of improvement, wrested the sceptre from the tyrant's hand and dissolved his throne beneath him. 'Magna est veritas et prævalebit.'2– Truth threw a strong and steady light where there was naught but darkness before: man beheld his dignity and his rights, and prepared to demand the one and sustain the other. But I return. By what means shall we advance our prosperity?

"The first requisite, to permanent advancement, if I may so speak, is order. Order is heaven's first law. It is this which imparts stability to human institutions, because, while like the laws of nature it restrains each one in his proper sphere, it leaves all to operate freely and without disturbance. Here will be no jostling. When I say order, I mean not to restrict the term to the ordinary occupations of life; I extend the word to mean, a strict and conscientious submission to established law. It is said to be the boast of that form of government under which we live, that no man, however high in office, can violate with impunity the sacred trust committed to his hand, and long insult the people by trampling upon their rights: that the distinguishing excellence of a republican form of government is, that, under it, oppression can have no place. This opinion I am not disposed to combat; but as it is a fact, that a safe and constitutional remedy for all grievances of this kind is in the hands of the people, this circumstance alone should dispose every one to submit, for a time, to some inconvenience rather than apply a rash and violent corrective. I admit, there are cases in which the minions of office become so intoxicated with a little brief power – that, forgetting all men are free and possess certain constitutional privileges, and forgetting also, that they were elevated to office not to be oppressors but conservators, their haughty, vexatious, and oppressive conduct, becomes intolerable. In such cases as these, let the strong indignation of an outraged public, calmly but firmly expressed, awaken the dreamer from his vision of greatness, and send him back to re-enact his dream in his original obscurity.

"Another argument for order and subordination lies in the fact, that the laws are in the hands of the people. Legislators are not elevated to office for their private emolument and honour, but for the nobler purpose of advancing and securing the happiness of their constituents: and they are bound – by the most solemn considerations – they are bound, to enact such laws, and such laws only, as are suited to the genius and circumstances of the people. If they betray the high trust committed to them, and enact laws either oppressive or partial, the corrective is equally in the hands of the people. They have only to apply the constitutional remedy. Here, then, is no apology for disorder. Order, then, must be our rule; for without subordination, and prompt and constant and conscientious obedience to wholesome law, there can be no security for person nor property. The bands of society would be untwisted, and the whole fabric exposed to ruin on the first popular outbreak. Be it, then, fellow-citizens, our first concern to sustain our officers in the proper discharge of their constitutional duties; to secure obedience to the laws, and to preserve them from violation with the same jealousy with which we watch the first encroachment of power.

"I observe, in the second place, that union among ourselves is absolutely necessary to prosperity. The idea of prosperity and stability where disunion reigns, where the elements of discord are actively at work; the idea of prosperity and stability, in such circumstances, can only serve to mislead. Can that army, in which faction triumphs among the soldiers and disunion and jealousy distract the counsels of the officers, hope to succeed in a campaign? Where each is afraid of the other, where no one has confidence in any, where every one regards every other one with feelings not only of jealousy but of positive hostility, how can there be any hope to bring an unbroken front to bear with undivided force upon any single point? I would observe also, that the complexion of the soldiers' mind will be sure to be tinged by that of their officers. In every community there will be found some few to whom the mass will look up with unenquiring deference. Mankind, generally, are averse to the labour of thinking. This circumstance separates those who should be very friends, and men file off under different leaders as fancy or caprice may dictate. Each party ranges itself under the banner of a leader whom it invests with all perfection of political sagacity and political integrity. To his semi-brutal followers his word is law; his decisions an oracle. Finding in him every attribute of perfection, they abandon the reins to his hand; yield up the glorious privileges of thinking and examining, and prepare to follow with a blind and implicit obedience. This unworthy abandonment of the public interests, this surrender of a privilege to which every man is born, and which every man should exercise, is the capital of intriguing politicians and unprincipled political demagogues. And, let me ask you, fellow-citizens, what scheme, however mad and absurd, which has been set on foot by these unprincipled leaders, has not had among the masses its advocates and adherents? Bad, however, as human nature is, alluring and fascinating as are the glitter and privilege of place and power, this confidence has not been always abused. We could easily point out instances, in which the influence which this disposition we have been adverting to has given to men, has been exerted wholly and exclusively for the public good. But we must take human nature as we find it; and as we find this disposition every where prevalent, the duty becomes imperative on all who have influence, to exert it for the public good. The root of the jealousies and divisions among public men will, generally speaking, be found planted in the soil of selfishness and ambition: not in any real and sincere disagreement as to the proper measures for the public good. This, I admit, is always the avowed, the ostensible, but, I am bold to say, not the real cause.