The American Union Speaker Part 13

Anniversaries of revolutions are almost always connected with the recollections of some patriot's death,--fallen on that day, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, martyrs of devotion to their fatherland.

Almost in every country there is some proud cemetery, or some modest tombstone, adorned on such a day by a garland of evergreen,--the pious offering of patriotic tenderness. I pa.s.sed the last night in a sleepless dream; and my soul wandered on the magnetic wings of the past, home to my beloved, bleeding land. And I saw, in the dead of the night, dark veiled shapes, with the paleness of eternal grief upon their brow--but terrible in the fearless silence of that grief--gliding over the churchyards of Hungary and kneeling down to the head of the graves, and depositing the pious tribute of green and cypress upon them; and, after a short prayer, rising with clenched fists and gnashing teeth, and then stealing away tearless!

and silent as they came,--stealing away, because the bloodbounds of my country's murder lurks from every corner on that night, and on this day, and leads to prison those who dare to show a pious remembrance to the beloved. To-day, a smile on the lips of a Magyar is taken for a crime of defiance to tyranny; and a tear in his eye is equivalent to a revolt. And yet I have seen, with the eye of my home-wandering soul, thousands performing the work of patriotic piety.

And I saw more. When the pious offerers stole away, I saw the honored dead half risen from their tombs, looking to the offerings, and whispering gloomily, "Still a cypress, and still no flower of joy! Is there still the chill of winter and the gloom of night over thee, Fatherland? Are we not yet revenged?" And the sky of the east reddened suddenly, and quivered with b.l.o.o.d.y flames; and from the far, far west, a lightning flashed like a star-spangled stripe, and within its light a young eagle mounted and soared towards the quivering flames of the east; and as he drew near, upon his approaching, the flames changed into a radiant morning sun, and a voice from above was heard in answer to the question of the dead:

"Sleep yet a short while; mine is the revenge. I will make the stars of the west the sun of the east; and when ye next awake, ye will find the flower of joy upon your cold bed." And the dead took the twig of cypress, the sign of resurrection, into their bony hands, and lay down.

Such was the dream of my waking soul. And I prayed; and such was my prayer: "Father, if thou deemest me worthy, take the cup from my people, and give it in their stead to me." And there was a whisper around me like the word "Amen." Such was my dream, half foresight and half prophecy; but resolution all. However, none of those dead whom I saw, fell on the 15th of March.

They were victims of the royal perjury which betrayed the 15th of March.

The anniversary of our Revolution has not the stain of a single drop of blood.

L. Kossuth.

Lx.x.x.

THE SAME CONTINUED.

We, the elect of the nation, sat on that morning busily but quietly, in the legislative hall of old Presburg, and, without any flood of eloquence, pa.s.sed our laws in short words, that the people shall be free; the burdens of feudalism shall cease; the peasant shall become free proprietor; that equality of duties, equality of rights, shall be the fundamental law; and civil, political, social, and religious liberty shall be the common property of all the people, whatever tongue it may speak, or in whatever church pray; and that a national ministry shall execute these laws, and guard with its responsibility the chartered, ancient independence of our Fatherland.

Two days before, Austria's brave people in Vienna had broken its yoke; and summing up despots in the person of their tool, old Metternich, drove him away; and the Hapsburgs, trembling in their imperial cavern of imperial crimes, trembling, but treacherous, and lying and false, wrote with yard-long letters, the words, "Const.i.tution" and "Free Press" upon Vienna's walls; and the people in joy cheered the inveterate liars, because the people knows no falsehood.

On the 14th, I announced the tidings from Vienna to our Parliament at Presburg. The announcement was swiftly carried by the great democrat, the steam-engine, upon the billows of the Danube, down to old Buda and to young Pesth, and while we, in the House of Representatives, pa.s.sed the laws of Justice and freedom, the people of Pesth rose in peaceful but majestic manifestation, declaring that the people should be free. At this manifestation all the barriers raised by violence against the laws, fell of themselves. Not a drop of blood was shed. A man who was in prison because he had dared to write a book, was carried home in triumph through the streets. The people armed itself as a National Guard, the windows were illuminated and bon fires burnt, and when these tidings returned back to Presburg, blended with the cheers from Vienna, they warmed the chill of our House of Lords, who readily agreed to the laws we pro posed. And there was rejoicing throughout the land. For the first time for centuries the farmer awoke with the pleasant feeling that his time was now his own--for the first time went out to till his field with the consoling thought that the ninth part of his harvest will not be taken by the landlord, nor the tenth by the bishop. Both had fully resigned their feudal portion, and the air was brightened by the l.u.s.tre of freedom, and the very soil budding into a blooming paradise. Such is the memory of the 15th of March, 1848.

L. Kossuth.

Lx.x.xI.

THE SAME CONTINUED.

One year later, there was blood, but also victory, over the land; the people because free, fought like demi-G.o.ds. Seven great victories we had gained in that month of March. On this very day, the remains of the first ten thousand Russians fled over the frontiers of Transylvania, to tell at home how heavily the blow falls from free Hungarian arms. It was in that very month, that one evening I lay down in the bed, whence in the morning Windischgratz had risen; and from the battle-field I hastened to the Congress at Debreczin, to tell the Representatives of the nation "It is time to declare our national independence, because it is really achieved.

The Hapsburgs have not power to contradict it more." Nor had they.

But Russia, having experienced by the test of its first interference, that there was no power on earth caring about the most flagrant violation of the laws of nations, and seeing by the silence of Great Britain and of the United States, that she may dare to violate those laws, our heroes had to meet a fresh force of nearly two hundred thousand Russians. No power cheered our bravely-won independence by diplomatic recognition; not even the United States, though they always professed their principle to be that they recognize every de facto government. We therefore had the right to expect a speedy recognition from the United States. Our struggle rose to European height, but we were left alone to fight for the world; and we had no arms for the new battalions, gathering up in thousands with resolute hearts and empty hands.

The recognition of our independence being withheld, commercial intercourse for procuring arms abroad was impossible,--the gloomy feeling of entire forsakedness spread over our tired ranks, and prepared the field for the secret action of treachery; until the most sacrilegious violation of those common laws of nations was achieved, and. the code of "nature and of nature's G.o.d" was drowned in Hungary's blood. And I who on the 15th of March, 1848, saw the principle of full civil and religious liberty triumphing in my native land,--who, on the 15th of March, 1849, saw this freedom consolidated by victories,--one year later, on the 15th of March, 1850, was on my sorrowful way to an Asiatic prison.

L. Kossuth.

Lx.x.xII.

THE SAME CONCLUDED.

But wonderful are the ways of Divine Providence. It was again in the month of March, 1851, that the generous interposition of the United States cast the first ray of hope into the dead night of my captivity. And on the 15th of March, 1852, the fourth anniversary of our Revolution, guided by the bounty of Providence, here I stand, in the very heart of your immense Republic; no longer a captive, but free in the land of the free, not only not desponding, but firm in confidence of the future, because raised in spirits by a swelling sympathy in the home of the brave; still a poor, a homeless exile, but not without some power to do good to my country and to the cause of liberty, as my very persecution proves. Such is the history of the 15th of March, in my humble life. Who can tell what will be the character of the next 15th of March?

Nearly two thousand years ago. the first Caesar found a Brutus on the Ides or 15th of March. May be that the Ides of March, 1853, will see the last of the Caesars fall under the avenging might of a thousand-handed Brutus--the name of whom is "the people"--inexorable at last after it has been so long generous. The seat of the Caesars was first in the south, then from the south to the east, from the east to the west, and from the west to the north. That is their last abode. None was lasting yet. Will the last, and worst, prove luckier? No, it will not. While the seat of the Caesars was tossed around and thrown back to the icy north, a new world became the cradle of a new humanity, where, in spite of the Caesars the Genius of Freedom raised (let us hope) an everlasting throne. The Caesar of the north and the Genius of Freedom have not place enough upon this earth for both of them; one must yield and be crushed beneath the heels of the other. Which is it? Which shall yield? America may decide.

L. Kossuth.

Lx.x.xIII.

THE MAYFLOWER AND THE PILGRIMS.

Methinks I see it now that one solitary, adventurous vessel, the Mayflower of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future state, and bound across the unknown sea. I behold it pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks, and months pa.s.s, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for sh.o.r.e. I see them now, scantily supplied with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route; and now, driven in fury before the raging tempest, in their scarcely seaworthy vessel. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening weight, against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed at last, after a five months' pa.s.sage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth, weak and weary from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, depending on the charity of their shipmaster for a draught of beer on board, drinking nothing but water on sh.o.r.e, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile tribes.

Shut now the volume of history, and tell me, on any principle of human probability, what shall be the fate of this handful of adventurers. Tell me, man of military science, in how many months were they all swept off by the thirty savage tribes, enumerated within the early limits of New England? Tell me, politician, how long did this shadow of a colony, on which your conventions and treaties had not smiled, languish on the distant coast? Student of history, compare for me the baffled projects, the deserted settlements, the abandoned adventures of other times, and find the parallel of this. Was it the winter's storm, beating upon the houseless heads of women and children? was it hard labor and spare meals? was it disease? was it the tomahawk? was it the deep malady of blighted hope, a ruined enterprise, and a broken heart, aching in its last moments at the recollection of the loved and left, beyond the sea?--was it some, or all of these united, that hurried this forsaken company to their melancholy fate? And is it possible that neither of these causes, that not all combined, were able to blast this bud of lope? Is it possible, that from a beginning so feeble, so frail, so worthy, not so much of admiration as of pity, there has gone forth a progress so steady, a growth so wonderful, a reality so important, a promise yet to be fulfilled so glorious?

E. Everett.

Lx.x.xIV.

THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA.

After years of fruitless and heart-sick solicitation, after offering, in effect, to this monarchy and to that monarch, the gift of a hemisphere. the great discoverer touches upon a partial success. He succeeds, not in enlisting the sympathy of his countrymen at Genoa and Venice, for a brave brother-sailor,--not in giving a new direction to the spirit of maritime adventure, which had so long prevailed in Portugal,--not in stimulating the commercial thrift of Henry the Seventh, or the pious ambition of the Catholic king. His sorrowful perseverance touches the heart of a n.o.ble princess, worthy the throne which she adorned. The New World, which was just escaping the subtle kingcraft of Ferdinand, was saved to Spain by the womanly compa.s.sion of Isabella.

It is truly melancholy, however, to contemplate the wretched equipment, for which the most powerful princess of Christendom was ready to pledge her jewels. Floating castles will soon be fitted out to convey the miserable natives of Africa to the golden sh.o.r.es of America; towering galleons will be despatched to bring home the guilty treasures to Spain. But three small vessels, one of which was without a deck, and neither of them, probably, exceeding the capacity of a pilot-boat, and even these impressed into the public service, composed the expedition fitted out under royal patronage, to realize that magnificent conceptions in which the creative mind of Columbus had planted the germs of a new world.

No chapter of romance equals the interest of this expedition. The most fascinating of the works of fiction which have issued from the modern press have, to my taste, no attraction compared with the pages in which the first voyage of Columbus is described by Robertson, and still more by our own Irving and Prescott, the last two enjoying the advantage over the Scottish historian of possessing the lately discovered Journals and letters of Columbus himself. The departure from Palos, where, a few days before, he had begged a morsel of bread and a cup of water for his wayworn child,--his final farewell to the Old World at the Canaries,--his entrance upon the trade winds, which then, for the first time, filled a European sail,--the portentous variation of the needle, never before observed, the fearful course westward and westward, day after day, and night after night, over the unknown ocean, the mutinous and ill-appeased crew; at length, when hope had turned to despair in every heart but one, the tokens of land,--the cloud-banks on the western horizon,--the logs of drift-wood,--the fresh shrub, floating with its leaves and berries,--the flocks of land-birds,--the shoals of fish that inhabit shallow water, the indescribable smell of the sh.o.r.e,--the mysterious presentiment that seems ever to go before a great event, and finally, on that ever-memorable night of the 12th of October, 1492, the moving light seen by the sleepless eye of the great discoverer himself, from the deck of the Santa Maria, and in the morning the real, undoubted land, swelling up from the bosom of the deep, with its plains, and hills, and forests, and rocks, and streams, and strange, new races of men;--these are incidents in which the authentic history of the discovery of our Continent excels the specious wonders of romance, as much as gold excels tinsel, or the sun in the heavens outshines the flickering taper.

E. Everett.

Lx.x.xV.

ADAMS AND JEFFERSON.

We dismiss them not to the chambers of forgetfulness and death. What we admired, and prized, and venerated in them, can never be forgotten. I had almost said that they are now beginning to live; to live that life of unimpaired influence, of unclouded fame, of unmingled happiness, for which their talents and services were destined. Such men do not, cannot die. To be cold and breathless; to feel not and speak not; this is not the end of existence to the men who have breathed their spirits into the inst.i.tutions of their country, who have stamped their characters on the pillars of the age, who have poured their hearts' blood into the channels of the public prosperity. Tell me, ye who tread the sods of yon sacred height, is Warren dead? Can you not still see him, not pale and prostrate, the blood of his gallant heart pouring out of his ghastly wound, but moving resplendent over the field of honors with the rose of heaven upon his cheek, and the fire of liberty in his eye? Tell me, ye who make your pious pilgrimage to the shades of Vernon, is Washington indeed shut up in that cold and narrow house? That which made these men, and men like these, cannot die. The hand that traced the charter of independence is, indeed, motionless; the eloquent lips that sustained it are hushed; but the lofty spirits that conceived, resolved, and maintained it, and which alone, to such men, "make it life to live," these cannot expire;--

"These shall resist the empire of decay, When time is o'er, and worlds have pa.s.sed away; Cold in the dust the perished heart may lie, But that which warmed it once can never die."

E. Everett.

Lx.x.xVI.

THE INDIAN CHIEF TO THE WHITE SETTLER.

Think of the country for which the Indians fought! Who can blame them? As Philip looked down from his seat on Mount Hope, that glorious eminence, that

----" throne of royal state, which far Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, Or where the gorgeous East, with richest hand, Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,"--

as he looked down, and beheld the lovely scene which spread beneath, at a summer sunset, the distant hill-tops glittering as with fire, the slanting beams streaming across the waters, the broad plains, the island groups, the majestic forest,--could he be blamed, if his heart burned within him, as he beheld it all pa.s.sing, by no tardy process, from beneath his control, into the hands of the stranger?

As the river chieftains--the lords of the waterfalls and the mountains--ranged this lovely valley, can it be wondered at, if they beheld with bitterness the forest disappearing beneath the settler's axe? the fishing-place disturbed by his saw-mills? Can we not fancy the feelings with which some strong-minded savage, the chief of the Pocomtuck Indians, who should have ascended the summit of the Sugar-loaf Mountain, (rising as it does before us, at this moment, in all its loveliness and grandeur,)--in company with a friendly settler, contemplating the progress already made by the white man, and marking the gigantic strides with which he was advancing into the wilderness, should fold his arms and say "White man, there is eternal war between me and thee! I quit not the land of my fathers, but with my life. In those woods, where I bent my youthful bow; I will still hunt the deer; over yonder waters I will still glide, unrestrained, in my bark canoe. By those dashing waterfalls I will still lay up my winter's store of food; on these fertile meadows I will still plant my corn.

"Stranger, the land is mine! I understand not these paper rights. I gave not my consent, when, as thou sayest, these broad regions were purchased, for a few baubles, of my fathers. They could sell what was theirs; they could sell no more. How could my father sell that which the Great Spirit sent me into the world to live upon? They knew not what they did.

"The stranger came, a timid suppliant,--few and feeble, and asked to lie down on the red man's bear-skin, and warm himself at the red man's fire, and have a little piece of land to raise corn for his women and children; and now he is become strong, and mighty, and bold, and spreads out his parchments over the whole, and says, 'It is mine.'