afraid to meet our worthy associate, Sheriff Clark, lest he should
have a Capias in his pocket, and should serve it upon me with
out ceremony.

It is nearly forty years since I resigned the command of the
Corps, and about forty-five years since I first joined it as Ensign.
I may be pardoned for remembering that I was offered at the
same moment, in 1829, the ensigncy of the Boston Light In-

[281]



282 THE BOSTON LIGHT INFANTRY.

fan try and the captaincy of one of the other volunteer com
panies of Boston. I chose the humbler station in your service,
and have never regretted the decision. I may remember, too, that
I was then fresh from the command of the Harvard Washington
Corps, a company of the undergraduates of the University at
Cambridge, which had no little celebrity in its day, and which
I have often regretted was ever suffered to die out. I know of
no more manly and useful exercise for young men, not even
cricket matches or boat races. John Milton, I think, included
military discipline in his scheme of a perfect education. And
at the very time that essay was written in Old England, the
earliest legislators of New England were giving unequivocal
evidence that they understood the value of training the youth,
and even the children of their day, to the service of defence.
It is a striking historical fact, which I have never seen alluded
to elsewhere, and which recently met my eye in looking over
our old colonial records, that the Great and General Court of
Massachusetts, as early as 1645, provided by law for children,
as young as ten years of age, being exercised with small arms,
and even with bows and arrows. Here is the record, with all
its queer spelling and quaint abbreviations :

" Whereas it is conceived y* yf training up of youth to yf art & prac
tice of armes wilbe of great use in y? country in divers respects, and
amonge yf rest y* yf use of bowes and arrowes may be of good concern
ment in defect of powder, upon any occasion, It is therefore Ordered,
y* all youth wthin this jurisdiction, from ten yeares ould to yf age of
sixteen yeares, shalbe instructed by some one of yf Officers of yf band,
or some other experienced Souldier whom yf chiefe Officer shall appoint,
upon yf usual training dayes, in yf exercise of armes, as small guns, halfe
pikes, bowes & arrowes, &c., according to yf discretion of yf said Officer
or Souldier, provided y? no child shalbe taken to y? exercise against y e ! r
parents minds ; Y? order to be of force wthin one month after yf pub
lication hereof."

This was in May, 1645. It must have been an amusing sight,
those little companies of boys, in their primitive costumes,
with their little guns and bows and arrows, solemnly drilling on
the Common, then, and for a century afterward, in the joint
occupancy of the cows. It was no exercise of sport or play,



THE BOSTON LIGHT INFANTRY. 283

but a matter of legal regulation and enforcement, a part of the
discipline by which our State was built up.

And thus it is in strict accordance with old Puritan pre
cedents that we now find our Latin schools and High schools
and Chauncy schools furnishing some of the best examples of
military drill, and sometimes supplying the chosen escorts of
our civic processions. Our fathers, it is true, in their day, had
wild beasts and wilder men to contend against. But the
extermination or extinction of such dangerous and ferocious
creatures all except the Tigers, 1 which this occasion seems to
show have not been extinguished, has by no means put an
end to the necessity of being prepared for self-defence. We
have too recently been involved in the stern realities of war,
for the preservation of the Union, to require any reminder on
that point. I, certainly, cannot forget that one of the very last
services I performed in connection with this Corps was to pre
sent a standard, in their name, to the Forty-third Regiment
of Massachusetts Volunteers, in November, 1862, on Boston
Common, just as it was going forth to the battle-fields of
the Constitution.

My friends, I am a member of the Peace Society, and one of
its honored vice-presid ents. I sympathize most heartily in the
general aims and principles of that Society, and especially in
that great principle of Arbitration which has been so grandly
signalized and vindicated, during the last year or two, under the
leading influence of the father of one of your recent lieutenants,
Mr. Adams. I pray God that neither foreign war nor civil war
may ever call again for the intervention of force, at home or
abroad, on land or on sea. As deeply as any one I feel, and
have always felt, that war of any sort is a reproach and a stain
upon Christian civilization. But I am by no means sanguine
that preparations for defence can ever be safely abandoned.
More especially do I see little chance of an entire cessation of
those emergencies and exigencies in our great cities, which, like
the terrible Boston Fire last November, may call imperatively for
the employment of bayonets to aid the civil police in repressing
robbery and violence. And hence I am here to offer my best

1 The familiar title of the Company.



284 THE BOSTON LIGHT INFANTRY.

wishes to our Corps on its revival and reorganization, and to
express my ardent hope that it may be numbered again, as it
was in times past, among the cherished ornaments and defences
of our beloved city.

You have called me out first as the oldest Commander, living
and present, of the old Boston Light Infantry. But I must not
forget that there are those around me who, though never Com
manders, were associated with the Corps, either as officers or
members, long before I was. Here is Josiah Quincy, known
to us all as one of the most vigorous and popular Mayors of
Boston, as his father had been before him ; the son of an honored
father and the father of a gallant son, whose service in the late
war will not soon be forgotten. He was many years before me.
And here, too, is my valued friend William Amory, of whom
it may be said that, if he never rose above an ensigncy, it was
our loss and his own fault, as he ran away, not from his enemies,
but from his friends, for a long sojourn in Europe, and hardly
left his peer in our ranks. My own immediate predecessor in
command, the late Edward Blake, a faithful and excellent officer,
whose memory is cherished by many friends as a devoted lawyer
and a worthy citizen, has but recently gone to his rest ; and I
gladly pay this passing tribute to his virtues.

But his predecessor, the Captain under whom I first enlisted,
under whose lead I have marched, and at whose side I have
slept on more than one tented field, is still living, I rejoice
to say, a prosperous gentleman, the head of that great bank
ing house in London, of which Joshua Bates, the benefactor
of our Boston Public Library, was so long one of the honored
members, a house not founded on irredeemable paper, and
which has stood, as it now stands, unshaken by any financial
panic, however sudden or severe. This Company never had a
more popular Commander than Russell Sturgis ; and the only
fault we have to find with him is that he will not break away
occasionally from " No. 8 Bishopsgate within," and come over
to receive the cordial welcome of his countless American
friends.

But I hasten to remark, in conclusion, that there is one at
this table who never, I believe, aspired to be more than a private



THE BOSTON LIGHT INFANTRY. 285

soldier, but who was an active member of the Corps in the year
1802, before almost any of the rest of us were born, seventy-
one years ago, four years only after the Company was organized,
and who, at the close of a long and useful and honorable life,
at the age of ninety-three, has come to exhibit his interest in
this occasion. It is to him, pre-eminently, that the earliest per
sonal honors are due from us all, and I call upon you to rise
with me while I propose the health of the venerable TIMOTHY
DODD.



THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY.
I.

SPEECH AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OP THE "BOSTON TEA-PARTY," IN FAN-
EUIL HALL, DECEMBER 16, 1873, IN REPLY TO A COMPLIMENTARY CALL FROM
HON. JOSIAH QUINCY, THE PRESIDENT OF THE OCCASION.



I THANK you, Mr. President, for the kindness of your allusions
both to the living and to the dead. There is certainly no blood
in my veins which I prize more highly to-day than the old
Huguenot blood of James Bowdoin, the friend of Washing
ton and Franklin, of Samuel Adams and John Adams and
Josiah Quincy, Jr., and who co-operated with them all in the
great work of American independence. Nor would I willingly
forget my somewhat more remote relationship to that John Win-
throp, the eminent Professor of Natural Philosophy at Harvard
College for forty years, who, while he so eagerly observed a
comet, or an earthquake, or a transit of Mercury, did not fail to
keep a sharp look-out upon the political sky also, and counted no
eclipse of sun, or moon, or stars, so important to be watched and
noted as the faintest approach to an eclipse of liberty. I thank
you again, sir, for calling on me in connection with such names
and such men, both of whom had the honor to be dismissed
from the council board of Massachusetts in 1775, by an arbitrary
provincial governor, as unsuited to his purposes, and uncom
promisingly hostile to his policy.

But I may be pardoned, I trust, to-day, for saying what little
more I have to say here, in no representative capacity, and by
no mere right of inheritance, but simply as one who claims the
birthright of a Bostonian. And let me assure you at the out
set, ladies and gentlemen, that I rejoice to understand that only
brief speeches are to be expected here from any one. That

[286]



THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY. 287

was, indeed, distinctly impressed on the complimentary card of
admission with which I was favored; for while your ingenious
artist has portrayed a very large and capacious tea-pot, big
enough to hold ship and cargo, tea-chests, Mohawks and all,
he has plainly indicated a very short spout.

Seriously, my friends, I was most highly honored in being
selected by the ladies as one of the minute-men, or five-minutes-
men, of this occasion ; and I am only afraid that I have used so
much of my time in the preamble that there will be none left
for the peroration, to say nothing of the staple thread of my dis
course. But indeed you desire no discourse. You have not
come here this afternoon to listen to elaborate details of what
was said or done in Boston just a hundred years ago to-day.
Those details are all familiar to you. That rainy, winter morn
ing ; those countless multitudes from all parts of the town, and of
the neighboring towns, thronging to the Old South ; the consulta
tions with the consignees ; the message to Governor Hutchinson,
at Milton ; the wise and eloquent words of Quincy ; the unani
mous vote, at half-past four, that the tea should not be landed ;
the stern and repulsive answer of the Governor reported and
listened to by dimly-burning candles at six ; the final word of
Samuel Adams, " This meeting can do nothing more to save the
country ; " the war-whoop at the door ; the response from the
galleries ; the rush of the Mohawks to Griffin s Wharf ; the
boarding of the vessels ; the drowning of the tea ; the dispersion
of the crowd, and the quiet night which followed, who can
add a fact or a figure, a light or a shade, to a picture already so
indelibly engraved on the pages of history, and even more
deeply imprinted in all our memories and in all our hearts ?
You have not assembled here to be told what you know so well,
and remember so vividly.

Nor are we here to-day, I am sure, to renew our accusations
or revive our resentments against provincial governors, or Brit
ish parliaments or ministries. The presence and participation
of the ladies would alone be a sufficient pledge that we are here
in no spirit of animosity or bitterness toward anybody. We
delight to remember Old England this day and every day as our
mother-country ; and we thank God that she, of all the nations



THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY.

of the earth, was our mother-country. No other mother could
have produced such children. It was from her history and her ex
ample that we imbibed those great lessons of freedom which led
to independence. From the days when the Barons at Runny-
mode extorted the great charter from King John, her history
was the history of advancing freedom. When John Ilampden
so heroically resisted the forced loans and the ship-money of
Charles I., he pointed the way for James Otis and Joseph
Warren and Samuel Adams to resist the stamp act and the tea
tax of George III.

No, no, my friends ; we have not come to Fanenil Hall to-day
to arraign or reproach any one whether tyrants abroad or
tories at home for measures which, as we look back upon
them now, in the calm, clear light of history, and in the rever
ent recognition and grateful acknowledgment of an overruling
God, seem almost to have been providentially arranged and de
signed to rouse up the American colonies to assert and maintain
their rights as freemen and their independence as a nation.
How slowly the evolution of our great Republic might have
gone on, how the grand development of constitutional liberty
and union might have lagged and dragged, but for the persist
ent madness of Hillsborough and Dartmouth and Lord North,
to say nothing of their Royal Master, on the other side of the
ocean, and of Bernard and Hutchinson and Gage, on this side !
I think we may well afford to recall all their memories without
infusing a particle of bitterness in our cup of tea this evening.

Once more, my friends, and I will detain you but little
longer, we are not here to-day, I think, to glory over a mere
act of violence, or a merely successful destruction of property,
however obnoxious that property may have been. 4k Liberty
and law " is, now and ever, the fundamental principle of our
American institutions. And there can be no secure liberty with
out law. Irresponsible and irrepressible resistances to authority
must always be, I suppose, as they always have been, the
beginning of revolutionary movements. But now that a free,
constitutional government has existed and prospered in our land
for more than three-quarters of a century, the very last lesson
we would even run the risk of teaching our children, or of teach-



TIIM BOSTON TEA-PARTY.



289



ing anybody, at borne or abroad, is tbat any tbing but evil and
mischief and wrong is to be accomplished by a resort to lawless
violence.

But let it never be forgotten that the destruction of the tea
was no part of the original purpose of the Boston patriots. They
endeavored in every way to avoid the possibility of such a
necessity, or even of such a temptation. They besought the
consignees, they implored the governor, that it should not be
landed; that it should be sent safely back where it came from.
But when the British Parliament had resolved that taxation " in
all cases whatsoever," and taxation without a shadow of repre
sentation, should be enforced and submitted to, and had sent
over these particular tea-chests to test that issue, it became a
simple question, which should go under, British tea or American
liberty. We all know which did go under, and which remains
uppermost, erect and triumphant ; and we are here to-day to
thank God that it was so, and to honor our fathers for standing
fast and firm, at every hazard, in defence of the great right of
representation.

We know not exactly who prompted the precise mode of
proceeding, or whether any of the patriot leaders of the day,
disguised or undisguised, had a hand in the act. It seemed to
have been performed by a spontaneous rising of the young blood
of the town, from the workshops and the printing-offices of men
like Benjamin Edes and Paul Revere, to whom we owed so
much in the later stages of the Revolution. They knew how to
do what they undertook to do without boasting or blustering, or
even revealing their names, and to go quietly home after it was
over, with the all-sufficient satisfaction of feeling that the tea
was at least beyond the reach of the tax-gatherer, and that the
question of paying duties in all cases whatsoever, or in any case
whatsoever, was settled, finally and for ever. They did the
deed, and let the glory go.

But there was hardly an act ever performed by human hands
which produced more immediate or more permanent results ;
and from it may fairly be dated the practical beginning of the
struggle for independence. From that moment might have
been seen written on every patriot brow the maxim of John

19



290 THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY.

Hampden, " No steps backward." An angry and avenging
spirit was not unnaturally aroused in the British Parliament ;
and blow after blow port bills and military bills, and I know
not what all came pouring down upon our devoted town.
But every blow struck out a new spark, and every spark kindled
a fresh flame, not merely in Massachusetts, but in every colony
on the continent. New York and Pennsylvania, Virginia and
the Carolinas, and all the rest, were heard declaring at once
and together that " the cause of Boston was the cause of all ; "
and all eagerly united in supporting and vindicating that cause.

Yes, my friends, from those scattered tea-leaves not on the
bottom of cup or saucer, after the fashion of the old itinerant
fortune-tellers, whom some of us remember, but strewed along
the sands of yonder shore might have been foreseen and fore
told the rising fortunes of our country, as they have since been
so gloriously unfolded. That illustrious philosopher, Agassiz,
who has done so much more than all other men to give an im
pulse to scientific study and research in our day and land, and
whose death I hardly dare trust myself to speak of him as
dead whose unspeakable loss is, at this very hour, casting so
profound a gloom over the whole scientific world, as well as over
the wide social sphere of which he has so long been the joy and
the pride, has taught us by precept and by example the impor
tance of dredging the bottom of the ocean for ascertaining the
structure of the earth, as well as for discovering the deposits
and contents of the mighty deep. The historical inquirer may
confine himself to a narrower field. He needs only to dredge
our little Boston Bay to ascertain the primary elements of our
great struggle for freedom. A single tea-leaf, if it could be
plucked up from the huge mass which furnished strange food
for the fishes, at Griffin s wharf, a hundred years ago, one
fossilized tea-leaf, if it could be found, would furnish him an
ample clue to the whole story.

" Who knows how tea will mingle with salt water ? " is said
to have been the exclamation of one of the Liberty Boys, at
some stage of the discussions at the Old South. I am not aware
that the experiment of such a mixture was ever tried before, or
ever has been since ; and the result in this particular case may



THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY. 291

have been somewhat exceptional. I should hardly venture to
recommend another such trial to the British East India Com
pany, or even to the Boston Oriental Company. But certain it
is that those three hundred and forty-two chests of Bohea, or
Hyson, or Souchong, or Imperial Gunpowder, or whatever they
were, thoroughly soaked and saturated with iced salt water,
have produced a wider, a more wholesome, and a more enduring
inspiration in men and in women, wherever there was a head or
a heart to be inspired for any cause of human rights, than the
whole crop of the Celestial Empire from that day to this,
even though it were steeped in urns of silver or gold, and poured
into porcelain of Sevres or Dresden, and every cup served out
by hands as fair as those which are so kindly and gracefully
ministering it to us at this moment !

Mr. President, my time is more than up. Pardon me for a
word, and but a word more. You, Sir, have been doing a good
service of late for our city arid State, if I mistake not, as the head
of our harbor commissioners. There has been much to be done
in the way of improving and preserving the channels, and in
preventing nature and art from conspiring successfully together
to bring about what the British Parliament once tried so vainty
to effect, the shutting-up of the port of Boston. You will
accomplish, I hope and trust, all which you may attempt, and
the good wishes of us all will go with you in your work. But
there is one thing which you will never attempt, and never ac
complish, if you should attempt it. You can never obliterate
the tracks and traditions of the 16th of December, 1773. You
can never alter the current or divert the channel of history.
Your sea-walls and breakwaters may do any thing and every
thing but that. " You may break, you may shatter," no ; let
me never admit that idea, but let me paraphrase the well-
remembered lines of the charming Irish songster :

" You may narrow or widen the port, if you will,
But the scent of the tea-leaves will hang round it still ! "



292 THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY.



II.

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS AT A SPECIAL MEETING OF THE MASSACHUSETTS HISTORI
CAL SOCIETY, HELD IN THE EVENING OF THE SAME DAY, AT THE HOUSE OF
REV. ROBERT C. \VATERSTON.



WE are here, Gentlemen, at the invitation of our valued asso
ciate, Mr. Waterston, to spend a social evening in recalling the
events which have rendered this anniversary so conspicuous in
our Colonial history. Some of us have been at Faneuil Hall
this afternoon, to take a commemorative cup of tea with the
ladies of Boston, and to give brief expression to the feelings
which the place and the day could not fail to excite in the
hearts of all who were assembled there. Under this quiet
domestic roof, we are privileged to indulge in calmer reflections
on what occurred just a hundred years ago, and to contribute,
as any of us may be able, in the most informal and colloquial
manner, such historical statements or facts as may befit the sober
records of our Society, and such contemporaneous accounts and
traditions as may serve to illustrate the spirit or the conduct of
those who took part in the memorable transactions of the 16th
of December, 1T73.

At the meeting at Faneuil Hall, this afternoon, the chair, as
you all know, was assigned to a grandson of the " Josiah Quincy,
Junior," of our early Revolutionary period. We meet to-night
under the roof of a grand-daughter of the same distinguished
patriot. And I cannot refrain from giving expression, at the
outset, to what seems to me the eminent appropriateness that
the family name of the young Quincy of 1773 should be thus
distinctly associated with these observances. We cannot look
back upon the histoiy of that period without remembering how
soon and how sadly his name was to disappear from the rolls of
the living, and to be lost to every thing except the grateful and
affectionate memories of his fellow-countrymen.

Of the leading men of the Revolution whom Massachusetts is
privileged and proud to claim as her children, the larger number
lived to reap the rewards of their labors and sacrifices, in greater



THE BOSTON TEA-PARTY. 293

or less measure, after the struggle was ended and the victory
won. I will say nothing of Franklin, in this connection, as the
glories of his mature life belong to Pennsylvania. And James
Otis, it is true, the great orator of the earlier days of the
Stamp Act, that "flame of fire," as John Adams called him,
against " Writs of Assistance," had been the subject of a base
assault some years before the event we commemorate ; and had
been compelled by disability to retire from the public service,
and to await, in a condition worse than death, that merciful
stroke of fire from Heaven which at last released him to his rest.
There is said to have been a glimpse of him at Bunker Hill.
His presence there, however, was only the shadow of a name,
whose place in American history, and in American hearts, had
been already and unchangeably fixed.

But, for the others, great opportunities and great achieve
ments were still in the future. John Hancock lived to write
his name where all the world should read it to the end of time,
as President of the Congress of Independence, and the first
signer of the Declaration ; and afterwards to be the first Gov
ernor of our Commonwealth under its established constitution.
John Adams lived not only to be the Colossus of Independence
on the floor of Congress, but to be the first American Minister
to England, and afterwards Vice-President and President of the
United States. Samuel Adams, the foremost man of all, per