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freeman-liberty, and right, and law, in the soil of his fathers!

Ye have heard of the miseries endured in the old time, under the Dane; but they were slight indeed to those which ye may expect from the Norman. The Dane was kindred to us in language and in law, and who now can tell Saxon from Dane? But yon men would rule ye in a language ye know not; by a law that claims the crown as a right of the sword, and divides the land among the hirelings of an army. We baptized the Danc, and the Church tamed his fierce soul into peace; but yon men make the Church itself their ally, and march to carnage under the banner profaned to the foulest of human wrongs!

Out-scourings of all nations, they come against you: Ye fight as brothers under the eyes of your fathers and chosen chiefs; ye fight for the women ye would save; ye fight for the children ye would guard from eternal bondage; ye fight for the altars which yon banner now darkens! Foreign priest is a tyrant as ruthless and stern as ye shall find foreign baron and king!

Let no man dream of retreat: every inch of ground that ye yield is the soil of your native land. For me, on this field I peril all. Think that mine eye is upon you, wherever ye are. If a line waver or shrink, ye shall hear in the midst the voice of your king. Hold fast to your ranks. Remember, such amongst you as fought with me against Hardrada, remember that it was not till the Norsemen lost, by rash sallies, their serried array, that our arms prevailed against them. Be warned by their fatal error; break not the form of the battle; and I tell you on the faith of a soldier,

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who never yet hath left field without victory, ye cannot be beaten.

- that

While I speak, the winds swell the sails of the Norse ships, bearing home the corpse of Hardrada. Accomplish, this day, the last triumph of England; add to these hills a new mount of the conquered dead! And when, in far times and strange lands, scald and scop shall praise the brave man for some valiant deed, wrought in some holy cause, they shall say, "He was brave as those who fought by the side of Harold, and swept from the sward of England the hosts of the haughty Norman.”

87. JUSTIFICATION OF NEW ENGLAND.

THE

HE gentleman from South Carolina taunts us with counting the cost of that war in which the liberties and honor of the country, and the interests of the North, as he asserts, were forced to go elsewhere for their defence. Will he sit down with me and count the cost now? Will he reckon up how much of treasure the State of South Carolina expended in that war, and how much the State of Massachusetts ? how much of the blood of either state was poured out on sea or land? I challenge the gentleman to the test of patriotism, which the army roll, the navy lists, and the treasury books afford.

Sir, they who revile us for our opposition to the last war have looked only to the surface of things. They little know the extremities of suffering which the people of Massachusetts bore at that period, out of attachment to the Union, their families beggared,

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their fathers and sons bleeding in camps, or pining in foreign prisons. They forget that not a field was marshalled, on this side of the mountains, in which the men of Massachusetts did not play their part as became their sires, and their "blood fetched from mettle of war proof." They battled and bled, wherever battle was fought or blood drawn.

Nor only by land. I ask the gentleman, Who fought your naval battles in the last war? Who led you on to victory after victory, on the ocean and the lakes? Whose was the triumphant prowess before which the red cross of England paled with unwonted shames? Were they not men of New England? Were these not foremost in those maritime encounters which humbled the pride and power of Great Britain? I appeal to my colleague before me from our common county of brave old Essex; I appeal to my respected colleagues from the shores of the Old Colony. there a village or a hamlet on Massachusetts Bay which did not gather its hardy seamen to man the gun-decks of your ships of war? Did they not rally to the battle, as men flock to a feast?

Was

I beseech the House to pardon me, if I may have kindled, on this subject, into something of unseemly ardor. I cannot sit tamely by, in humble acquiescent silence, when reflections, which I know to be unjust, are cast on the faith and honor of Massachusetts. Had I suffered them to pass without admonition, I should have deemed that the disembodied spirits of her departed children, from their ashes mingled with the dust of every stricken field of the Revolution, from their bones mouldering to the consecrated earth of Bunker's Hill, of Saratoga, of Mon

mouth,

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187

would start up in visible shape before me, to cry shame on me, their recreant countryman !

Sir, I have roamed through the world to find hearts nowhere warmer than hers, soldiers nowhere braver, patriots nowhere purer, wives and mothers nowhere truer, maidens nowhere lovelier, green valleys and bright rivers nowhere greener or brighter; and I will not be silent, when I hear her patriotism or her truth questioned with so much as a whisper of detraction. Living, I will defend her; dying, I would pause, in my last expiring breath, to utter a prayer of fond remembrance for my native New England!

88. ADDRESS TO THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND.

T is with a divided heart that I greet you, soldiers

IT

and gentlemen, divided between the bloody past and this buoyant present; divided between the tender and sacred memories of the dead comrades whose graves billow every battle-field from the Ohio to the ocean, and the bright,. vital, genuine happiness which fills and thrills me at the sight of these living comrades who cluster around me here to-day.

Back over the sweep of the seasons and the stretch of the years, our thoughts can but turn to those knightly gentlemen and soldiers who died that the nation might live, and whose brave hearts were the precious holocausts so freely and zealously offered, on the red altars of war, for the protection and preservation of the Republic.

While we gaze upon the radiant array of the liv

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ing, we can but think of the heroic army of the dead, who, with all their banners set, and all their battle harness on, soldier and officer, chieftain and trooper, by ranks and by regiments, by the hundred and by the thousand, are holding their long, last solemn bivouac, with the silent southern stars for their only sentinels.

Their places are vacant here; let us make unto them places in our heart of hearts. Their lips are mute, and no voice of theirs lifts itself among us today. Let our memories, then, speak for them, and our own lips syllable for them the lofty utterances they were wont to use. Let our actions, here to-day, and in every period and crisis for the future, be but the outspoken expression of the high purpose and unshaken devotion that signalized their lives, and the bold and enthusiastic vindication of that matchless cause in the defence of which they perished. So shall their dead lips speak, and their graves become the hallowed shrines of the nation.

It was during the long days of battle at Stone River that the army of the Cumberland first baptized its name in blood. Who that was there during that desperate struggle can ever forget it? We were in the midst of a population more hostile and unrelenting than that which surrounded Xenophon in his famed march from the disastrous plains of Cunaxa, or the Swedish Charles, when his hitherto invincible legions were shattered by the Muscovite at Pultowa.

Who shall ever tell the secrets of those cedar fastnesses, or unveil the slender threads upon which the fortunes of that desperate field revolved? The stern courage, the persistent resolution, the intense devo