from the smoke and stir of cities, and long before railroads or
telegraphs had made any advances towards the annihilation or
abridgment of space, should have been released to their rest and
summoned to the skies, not only on the same day, but that day
the Fourth of July, and that Fourth of July the Fiftieth Anni
versary of that great Declaration which they had contended for
and carried through so triumphantly side by side !
What an added emphasis Jefferson would have given to his
inscription on this little desk, " Politics, as well as Religion,
has its superstitions," could he have foreseen the close even
of his own life, much more the simultaneous close of these two
lives, on that Day of days ! Oh, let me not admit the idea of
superstition ! Let me rather reverently say, as Webster said at
the time, in that magnificent Eulogy which left so little for any
one else to say as to the lives or deaths of Adams and Jefferson :
CENTENNIAL ORATION, 4 JULY, 1876. 389
" As their lives themselves were the gifts of Providence, who is
not willing to recognize in their happy termination, as well as
in their long continuance, proofs that our country and its bene
factors are objects of His care? "
And now another Fifty Years have passed away, and we are
holding our high Centennial Festival ; and still that most
striking, most impressive, most memorable coincidence in all
American history, or even in the authentic records of mankind,
is without a visible monument anywhere !
In the interesting little city of Weimar, renowned as the resort
and residence of more than one of the greatest philosophers
and poets of Germany, many a traveller must have seen and
admired the charming statues of Goethe and Schiller, standing
side by side and hand in hand, on a single pedestal, and offering,
as it were, the laurel wreath of literary priority or preeminence to
each other. Few nobler works of art, in conception or execution,
can be found on the Continent of Europe. And what could be a
worthier or juster commemoration of the marvellous coincidence
of which I have just spoken, and of the men who were the sub
jects of it, and of the Declaration with which, alike in their lives
and in their deaths, they are so peculiarly and so signally associ
ated, than just such a Monument, with the statues of Adams
and Jefferson, side by side and hand in hand, upon the same base,
pressing upon each other, in mutual acknowledgment and def
erence, the victor palm of a triumph for which they must ever
be held in common and equal honor ! It would be a new tie
between Massachusetts and Virginia. It would be a new bond
of that Union which is the safety and the glory of both. It
would be a new pledge of that restored good-will between the
North and South, which is the herald and harbinger of a Second
Century of National Independence. It would be a fit recogni
tion of the great Hand of God in our history !
At all events, it is one of the crying omissions and neglects
which reproach us all this day, that " glorious old John Adams"
is without any proportionate public monument in the State of
which he was one of the very grandest citizens and sons, and
in whose behalf he rendered such inestimable services to his
countrv. It is almost ludicrous to look around and see who
390 CENTENNIAL ORATION, 4 JULY, 1876.
has been commemorated, and he neglected ! He might be seen
standing alone, as he knew so well how to stand alone in life.
He might be seen grouped with his illustrious son, only second
to himself in his claims on the omitted posthumous honors of
his native State. Or, if the claim of noble women to such
commemorations were ever to be recognized on our soil, he
might be lovingly grouped with that incomparable wife, from
whom he was so often separated by public duties and personal
dangers, and whose familiar correspondence with him, and his
with her, furnishes a picture of fidelity and affection, and of
patriotic zeal and courage and self-sacrifice, almost without a
parallel in our Revolutionary Annals.
But before all other statues, let us have those of Adams and
Jefferson on a single block, as they stood together just a hundred
years ago to-day, as they were translated together just fifty
years ago to-day : foremost for Independence in their lives, and
in their deaths not divided ! Next, certainly, to the completion
of the National Monument to Washington, at the Capital, this
double statue of this " double star " of the Declaration calls for
the contributions of a patriotic people. It would have some
thing of special appropriateness as the first gift to that Boston
Park, which is to date from this Centennial Period.
I have felt, Mr. Mayor and Fellow Citizens, as I am sure you
all must feel, that the men who were gathered at Philadelphia
a hundred years ago to-day, familiar as their names and their
story may be, to ourselves and to all the world, had an impera
tive claim to the first and highest honors of this Centennial
Anniversary. But, having paid these passing tributes to their
memory, I hasten to turn to considerations less purely personal.
The Declaration has been adopted, and has been sent forth
in a hundred journals, and on a thousand broadsides, to every
camp and council chamber, to every town and village and ham
let and fireside, throughout the Colonies. What was it ? What
did it declare ? What was its rightful interpretation and inten
tion ? Under what circumstances was it adopted ? What did
it accomplish for ourselves and for mankind ?
A recent and powerful writer on " The Growth of the English
CENTENNIAL ORATION, 4 JULY, 1876. 391
Constitution," whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the Com
mencement of Old Cambridge University two years ago, says
most strikingly and most justly : " There are certain great polit
ical documents, each of which forms a landmark in our political
history. There is the Great Charter, The Petition of Rights,
the Bill of Rights." " But not one of them," he adds, " gave it
self out as the enactment of any thing new. All claimed to set
forth, with new strength, it might be, and with new clearness,
those rights of Englishmen, which were already old." The
same remark has more recently been incorporated into " A
Short History of the English People." " In itself," says the
writer of that admirable little volume, " the Charter was no
novelty, nor did it claim to establish any new Constitutional
principles. The Charter of Henry I. formed the basis of the
whole ; and the additions to it are, for the most part, formal
recognitions of the judicial and administrative changes intro
duced by Henry II."
So substantially, so, almost precisely, it may be said of the
Great American Charter, which was drawn up by Thomas Jef
ferson on the precious little desk which lies before me. It made
no pretensions to novelty. The men of 1776 were not in any
sense, certainly not in any seditious sense, greedy of novelties,
" avidi novarum rerum." They had claimed nothing new. They
desired nothing new. Their old original rights as Englishmen
were all that they sought to enjoy, and those they resolved to
vindicate. It was the invasion and denial of those old rights of
Englishmen, which they resisted and revolted from.
As our excellent fellow-citizen, Mr. Dana, so well said pub
licly at Lexington, last year, and as we should all have been
glad to have him in the way of repeating quietly in London,
this year, " We were not the Revolutionists. The King and
Parliament were the Revolutionists. They were the radical in
novators. We were the conservators of existing institutions."
No one has forgotten, or can ever forget, how early and how
emphatically all this was admitted by some of the grandest
statesmen and orators of England herself. It was the attempt
to subvert our rights as Englishmen, which roused Chatham to
some of his most majestic efforts. It was the attempt to sub-
392 CENTENNIAL ORATION, 4 JULY, 1876.
vert our rights as Englishmen, which kindled Burke to not a few
of his most brilliant utterances. It was the attempt to subvert
our rights as Englishmen, which inspired Barr and Conway and
Camden with appeals and arguments and phrases which will
keep their memories fresh when all else associated with them
is forgotten. The names of all three of them, as you well know,
have long been the cherished designations of American Towns.
They all perceived and understood that we were contending
for English rights, and against the violation of the great princi
ples of English liberty. Nay, not a few of them perceived and
understood that we were fighting their battles as well as our
own, and that the liberties of Englishmen upon their own soil
were virtually involved in our cause and in our contest.
There is a most notable letter of Josiah Quincy, Jr. s, written
from London at the end of 1774, a few months only before
that young patriot returned to die so sadly within sight of his
native shores, in which he tells his wife, to whom he was not
likely to write for any mere sensational effect, that " some of the
first characters for understanding, integrity, and spirit," whom
he had met in London, had used language of this sort : " This
Nation is lost. Corruption and the influence of the Crown have
led us into bondage, and a Standing Army has riveted our chains.
To America only can we look for salvation. Tis America only
can save England. Unite and persevere. You must prevail
you must triumph." Quincy was careful not to betray names,
in a letter which might be intercepted before it reached its des
tination. But we know the men with whom he had been
brought into association by Franklin and other friends, men
like Shelburne and Hartley and Pownall and Priestley and
Brand Hollis and Sir George Saville, to say nothing of Burke
and Chatham. The language was not lost upon us. We did
unite and persevere. We did prevail and triumph. And it is
hardly too much to say that we did " save England." We
saved her from herself ; saved her from being the successful
instrument of overthrowing the rights of Englishmen ; saved
her "from the poisoned chalice which would have been com
mended to her own lips ; " saved her from " the bloody
instructions which would have returned to plague the inventor."
CENTENNIAL ORATION, 4 JULY, 1876. 393
Not only was it true, as Lord Macaulay said in one of his bril
liant Essays, that " England was never so rich, so great, so for
midable to foreign princes, so absolutely mistress of the seas, as
since the alienation of her American Colonies," but it is not less
true that England came out of that contest with new and larger
views of Liberty ; with a broader and deeper sense of Avhat was
due to human rights ; and with an experience of incalculable
value to her in the management of the vast Colonial System
which remained, or was in store, for her.
A vast and gigantic Colonial System, beyond doubt, it has
proved to be ! She was just entering, a hundred years ago, on
that wonderful career of conquest in the East, which was to
compensate her, if it were a compensation, for her impend
ing losses in the West. Her gallant Cornwallis was soon to
receive the jewelled sword of Tippoo Saib at Bangalore, in ex
change for that which he was now destined to surrender to
Washington at Yorktown. It is certainly not among the least
striking coincidences of our Centennial Year, that at the very
moment when we are celebrating the event which stripped Great
Britain of thirteen Colonies and three millions of subjects,
now grown into thirty-eight States and more than forty millions of
people, she is welcoming the return of her amiable and genial
Prince from a royal progress through the wide-spread regions
of " Ormus and of Ind," bringing back, to lay at the foot of the
British throne, the homage of nine principal Provinces and a
hundred and forty-eight feudatory States, and of not less than
two hundred and forty millions of people, from Ceylon to the
Himalayas, and affording ample justification for the Queen s new
title of Empress of India ! Among all the parallelisms of modern
history, there are few more striking and impressive than this.
The American Colonies never quarrelled or cavilled about
the titles of their Sovereign. If, as has been said, " they went
to war about a preamble," it was not about the preamble of the
royal name. It was the Imperial power, the more than Im
perial pretensions and usurpations, which drove them to re
bellion. The Declaration was, in its own terms, a personal and
most stringent arraignment of the King. It could have been
nothing else. George III. was to us the sole responsible instru-
394 CENTENNIAL ORATION, 4 JULY, 1876.
ment of oppression. Parliament had, indeed, sustained him ; but
the Colonies had never admitted the authority of a Parliament
in which they had no representation. There is no passage in
Mr. Jefferson s paper more carefully or more felicitously worded,
than that in which he says of the Sovereign, that " he has com
bined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our
constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his
assent to their acts of pretended legislation" A slip of " the
masterly pen " on this point might have cost us our consistency ;
but that pen was on its guard, and this is the only allusion to
Lords or Commons. We could recognize no one but the Mon
arch. We could contend with nothing less than Royalty. We
could separate ourselves only from the Crown. English prece
dents had abundantly taught us that kings were not beyond the
reach of arraignment and indictment ; and arraignment and in
dictment were then our only means of justifying our cause to
ourselves and to the world. Yes ; harsh, severe, stinging,
scolding, I had almost said, as that long series of allega
tions and accusations may sound, and certainly does sound, as
we read it or listen to it, in cold blood, a century after the
issues are all happily settled, it was a temperate and a dignified
utterance under the circumstances of the case, and breathed
quite enough of moderation to be relished or accepted by those
who were bearing the brunt of so terrible a struggle for life and
liberty and all that was dear to them, as that which those issues
involved. Nor in all that bitter indictment is there a single
count which does not refer to, and rest upon, some violation
of the rights of Englishmen, or some violation of the rights of
humanity. We stand by the Declaration to-day, and always,
and disavow nothing of its reasoning or its rhetoric.
And, after all, Jefferson was not a whit more severe on the
King than Chatham had been on the King s Ministers six
months before, when he told them to their faces: " The whole
of your political conduct has been one continued series of
weakness, temerity, despotism, ignorance, futility, negligence,
blundering, and the most notorious servility, incapacity, and
corruption." Nor was William Pitt, the younger, much more
measured in ,his language, at a later period of our struggle,
CENTENNIAL ORATION. 4 JULY, 1876. 395
when he declared : " These Ministers will destroy the empire
they were called upon to save, before the indignation of a great
and suffering people can fall upon their heads in the punish
ment which they deserve. I affirm the war to have been a
most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and
diabolical war."
I need not say, Fellow Citizens, that we are here to indulge in
no reproaches upon Old England to-day, as we look back from
the lofty height of a Century of Independence on the course of
events which severed us from her dominions. We are by no
means in the mood to re-open the adjudications of Ghent or of
Geneva ; nor can we allow the ties of old traditions to be
seriously jarred, on such an occasion as this, by any recent fail
ures of extraditions, however vexatious or provoking. But,
certainly, resentments on either side, for any thing said or done
during our Revolutionary period, after such a lapse of time,
would dishonor the hearts which cherished them, and the
tongues which uttered them. Who wonders that George
the Third would not let such Colonies as ours go without a
struggle ? The}?" were the brightest jewels of his crown.
Who wonders that he shrunk from the responsibility of such a
dismemberment of his empire, and that his brain reeled at the
very thought of it ? It would have been a poor compliment
to us, had he not considered us worth holding at any and
every cost. We should hardly have forgiven him, had he
not desired to retain us. Nor can we altogether wonder, that
with the views of kingly prerogative which belonged to
that period, and in which he was educated, he should have
preferred the policy of coercion to that of conciliation, and
should have insisted on sending over troops to subdue us.
Our old Mother Country has had, indeed, a peculiar destiny,
and in many respects a glorious one. Not alone with her drum
beat, as Webster so grandly said, has she encircled the earth.
Not alone with her martial airs has she kept company with the
hours. She has carried civilization and Christianity wherever
she has carried her flag. She has carried her noble tongue, with
all its incomparable treasures of literature and science and reli
gion, around the globe ; and, with our aid, for she will con-
396 CENTENNIAL ORATION, 4 JULY, 1876.
fess that we are doing our full part in this line of extension,
it is fast becoming the most pervading speech of civilized man.
We thank God at this hour, and at every hour, that " Chat
ham s language is our mother tongue," and that we have an in
herited and an indisputable share in the glory of so many of the
great names by which that language has been illustrated and
adorned.
But she has done more than all this. She has planted the
great institutions and principles of civil freedom in every lati
tude where she could find a foot-hold. From her, our Revolu
tionary Fathers learned to understand and value them, and from
her they inherited the spirit to defend them. Not in vain had
her brave barons extorted Magna Charta from King John. Not
in vain had her Simon de Montfort summoned the knights and
burgesses, and laid the foundations of a Parliament and a House
of Commons. Not in vain had her noble Sir John Eliot died, as
the martyr of free speech, in the Tower. Not in vain had her
heroic Hampden resisted ship-money, and died on the battle
field. Not in vain for us, certainly, the great examples and the
great warnings of Cromwell and the Commonwealth, or those
sadder ones of Sidney and Russell, or that later and more glori
ous one still of William of Orange.
The grand lessons of her own history, forgotten, overlooked,
or resolutely disregarded, it may be, on her own side of the
Atlantic, in the days we are commemorating, were the very
inspiration of her Colonies on this side ; and under that inspira
tion they contended and conquered. And though she may
sometimes be almost tempted to take sadly upon her lips the
words of the old prophet, "I have nourished and brought up
children, and they have rebelled against me," she has long
ago learned that such a rebellion as ours was really in her own
interest, and for her own ultimate welfare ; begun, continued,
and ended, as it was, in vindication of the liberties of English
men.
I cannot forget how justly and eloquently my friend, Dr.
Ellis, a few months ago, in this same hall, gave expression to
the respect which is so widely entertained on this side of the
Atlantic for the Sovereign Lady who has now graced the British
CENTENNIAL ORATION, 4 JULY, 1876. 397
throne for nearly forty years. No passage of his admirable
Oration elicited a warmer response from the multitudes who
listened to him. How much of the growth and grandeur of
Great Britain is associated with the names of illustrious women !
Even those of us who have no fancy for female suffrage might
often be well nigh tempted to take refuge, from the incompe-
tencies and intrigues and corruptions of men, under the presi
dency of the purer and gentler sex. What would English
history be without the names of Elizabeth and Anne ! What
would it be without the name of Victoria, of whom it
has recently been written, " that, by a long course of loyal
acquiescence in the declared wishes of her people, she has
brought about what is nothing less than a great Revolution,
all the more beneficent because it has been gradual and
silent ! " Ever honored be her name, and that of her lamented
consort !
"Ever beloved and loving may her rule be ;
And when old Time shall lead her to her end,
Goodness and she fill up one monument ! "
The Declaration is adopted and promulgated ; but we may
not forget how long and how serious a reluctance there had been
to take the irrevocable step. As late as September, 1774, Wash
ington had publicly declared his belief that Independence " was
wished by no thinking man." As late as the 6th of March,
1775, in his memorable Oration in the Old South, with all the
associations of " the Boston Massacre " fresh in his heart, Warren
had declared that " Independence was not our aim." As late as
July, 1775, the letter of the Continental Congress to the Lord
Mayor and Corporation of London had said : " North America,
my Lord, wishes most ardently for a lasting connection with
Great Britain, on terms of just and equal liberty ; " and a simul
taneous humble petition to the King, signed by every member
of the Congress, reiterated the same assurance. And as late
as the 25th of August, 1775, Jefferson himself, in a letter to the
John Randolph of that day, speaking of those who " still wish
for reunion with their parent country," says most emphatically,
" I am one of those ; and would rather be in dependence on
Great Britain, properly limited, than on any nation on earth, or
398 CENTENNIAL ORATION, 4 JULY, 1876.
than on no nation." Not all the blood of Lexington, and Con
cord, and Bunker Hill, crying from the ground long before these
words were written, had extinguished the wish for reconcili
ation and reunion even in the heart of the very author of the
Declaration.
Tell me not, tell me not, that there was any thing of equivoca
tion, any thing of hypocrisy, in these and a hundred other similar
expressions which might be cited. The truest human hearts are
full of such inconsistency and hypocrisy as that. The dearest
friends, the tenderest relatives, are never more overflowing and
outpouring, nor ever more sincere, in feelings and expressions of
devotion and love, than when called to contemplate some terri
ble impending necessity of final separation and divorce. The ties
between us and Old England could not be sundered without
sadness, and sadness on both sides of the ocean. Franklin,
albeit his eyes were " unused to the melting mood," is recorded
to have wept as he left England, in view of the inevitable result
of which he was coming home to be a witness and an instrument ;
and I have heard from the poet Rogers s own lips, what many
of you may have read in his Table-Talk, how deeply he was
impressed, as a boj^, by his father s putting on a mourning suit,
when he heard of the first shedding of American blood.
Nor could it, in the nature of things, have been only their
warm and undoubted attachment to England, which made so
many of the men of 1776 reluctant to the last to cross the Ru
bicon. They saw clearly before them, they could not help
seeing, the full proportions, the tremendous odds, of the con
test into which the Colonies must be plunged by such a step.
Think you, that no apprehensions and anxieties weighed heavily
on the minds and hearts of those far-seeing men ? Think you,
that as their names were called on the day we commemorate,
beginning with Josiah Bartlett, of New Hampshire, or as, one
by one, they approached the Secretary s desk on the following
2d of August, to write their names on that now hallowed parch
ment, they did not realize the full responsibility, and the full
risk to their country and to themselves, which such a vote and
such a signature involved? They sat, indeed, with closed
doors ; and it is only from traditions or eaves-droppings, or
CENTENNIAL ORATION, 4 JULY, 1876. 399
from the casual expressions of diaries or letters, that we catch
glimpses of what was done, or gleanings of what was said. But
how full of import are some of those glimpses and gleanings !
44 Will you sign?" said Hancock to Charles Carroll, who, as
we have seen, had not been present on the 4th of July. " Most
willingly," was the reply. " There goes two millions with a
dash of the pen," says one of those standing by ; while another