ganizing edict of its convention; bid its members to reassemble, and promulgate the decided expressions of your will to remain in the path which alone can conduct you to safety, prosperity, and honor. Tell them that, compared to disunion, all other evils are light, because that brings with it an accumulation of all. Declare that you will never take the field unless the star-spangled banner of your country shall float over you; that you will not be stigmatized when dead, and dishonored and scorned while you live, as the authors of the first attack on the Constitution of your country. Its destroyers you cannot be. You may disturb its peace-you may interrupt the course of its prosperity -you may cloud its reputation for stability, but its tranquillity will be restored, its prosperity will return, and the stain upon its national character will be transferred and remain an eternal blot on the memory of those who caused the disorder.

Fellow-citizens of the United States: The threat of unhallowed disunion—the names of those once respected, by whom it is uttered-the array of military force to support it-denote the approach of a crisis in our affairs on which the continuance of our unexampled prosperity, our political existence, and perhaps that of all free governments may depend. The conjuncture demanded a free, a full, and explicit enunciation, not only of my intentions, but of my principles of action; and, as the claim was asserted of a right by a State to annul the laws of the Union, and even to secede from it at pleasure, a frank exposition of my opinions in relation to the origin and form of our government, and the construction I give to the instrument by which it was created, seemed to be proper. Having the fullest confidence in the justness of the legal and constitutional opinion of my duties, which has been expressed, I rely, with equal confidence, on your undivided support in my determination to execute the laws, to preserve the Union by all constitutional means, to arrest, if possible, by moderate but firm measures, the necessity of a recourse to force; and, if it be the will of Heaven, that the recurrence of its primeval curse on man for the shedding of a brother's blood should fall upon our land, that it be not called down by an offensive act on the part of the United States.

No

Fellow-citizens: The momentous case is before you. On your un divided support of your government depends the decision of the great question it involves, whether your sacred Union will be preserved, and the blessings it secures to us as one people shall be perpetuated. one can doubt that the unanimity with which that decision will be expressed will be such as to inspire new confidence in republican institutions, and that the prudence, the wisdom, and the courage which it will bring to their defence will transmit them unimpaired and invigo rated to our children.

May the Great Ruler of nations grant that the signal blessings with which he has favored ours may not, by the madness of party or personal ambition, be disregarded and lost; and may his wise Providence

bring those who have produced this crisis to see their folly before they feel the misery of civil strife, and inspire a returning veneration for that Union which, if we may dare to penetrate his designs, he has chosen as the only means of attaining the high destinies to which we may reasonably aspire.

In testimony whereof, I have caused the seal of the United States to be hereunto affixed, having signed the same with my hand.

Done at the City of Washington, this 10th day of December, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and thirty-two, and of the independence of the United States the fifty-seventh.

On the 6th of September, 1757, Lafayette was born. The kings of France and Britain were seated upon their thrones by virtue of the principle of hereditary succession, variously modified and blended with different forms of religious faith, and they were waging war against each other, and exhausting the blood and treasure of their people for causes in which neither of the nations had any beneficial or lawful interest.

In this war the father of. Lafayette fell in the cause of his king, but not of his country. He was an officer of an invading army, the instrument of his sovereign's wanton ambition and lust of conquest. The people of the electorate of Hanover had done no wrong to him or to his country. When his son came to an age capable of understanding the irreparable loss that he had suffered, and to reflect upon the causes of his father's fate, there was no drop of consolation mingled in the cup., from the consideration that he had died for his country. And when the youthful mind was awakened to meditation upon the rights of mankind, the principles of freedom, and theories of government, it cannot be difficult to perceive, in the illustrations of his own family records, the source of that aversion to hereditary rule, perhaps the most distinguishing feature of his political opinions, and to which he adhered through all the vicissitudes of his life.

In the same war, and at the same time, George Washington was armed, a loyal subject, in support of his king; but to him that was

also the cause of his country. His commission was not in the army of George the Second, but issued under the authority of the Colony of Virginia, the province in which he received his birth. On the borders of that province, the war in its most horrid forms was waged-not a war of mercy, and of courtesy, like that of the civilized embattled legions of Europe; but war to the knife-the war of Indian savages, terrible to man, but more terrible to the tender sex, and most terrible to helpless infancy. In defence of his country against the ravages of such a war, Washington, in the dawn of manhood, had drawn his sword, as if Providence, with deliberate purpose, had sanctified for him the practice of war, all-detestable and unhallowed as it is, that he might, in a cause, virtuous and exalted by its motive and its end, be trained and fitted in a congenial school to march in after times the leader of heroes in the war of his country's independence.

At the time of the birth of Lafayette, this war, which was to make him a fatherless child, and in which Washington was laying broad and deep, in the defence and protection of his native land, the foundations of his unrivalled renown, was but in its early stage. It was to continue five years longer, and was to close with the total extinguishment of the colonial dominion of France on the Continent of North America. The deep humiliation of France, and the triumphant ascendancy on this Continent of her rival, were the first results of this great national conflict. The complete expulsion of France from North America seemed to the superficial vision of men to fix the British power over these extensive regions on foundations immovable as the everlasting hills.

Let us pass in imagination a period of only twenty years, and alight upon the borders of the river Brandywine. Washington is Commander-in-chief of the armies of the United States of America-war is again raging in the heart of his native land—hostile armies of one and the same name, blood, and language, are arrayed for battle on the banks of the stream; and Philadelphia, where the United States are in Congress assembled, and whence their decree of independence has gone forth, is the destined prize to the conflict of the day. Who is that tall, slender youth, of foreign air and aspect, scarcely emerged from the years of boyhood, and fresh from the walls of a college; fighting, a volunteer, at the side of Washington, bleeding, unconsciously to himself, and rallying his men to secure the retreat of the scattered American ranks? It is Gilbert Motier de Lafayette-the son of the victim of Minden; and he is bleeding in the cause of North American independence and of freedom.

We pause one moment to inquire what was this cause of North American Independence, and what were the motives and inducements to the youthful stranger to devote himself, his life, and fortune, to it.

The people of the British colonies in North America, after a controversy of ten years' duration with their sovereign beyond the seas,

upon an attempt by him and his Parliament to tax them without their consent, had been constrained by necessity to declare themselves inpendent-to dissolve the tie of their allegiance to him-to renounce their right to his protection, and to assume their station among the independent civilized nations of the earth. This had been done with a deliberation and solemnity unexampled in the history of the world— done in the midst of a civil war, differing in character from any of those which for centuries before had desolated Europe. The war had arisen upon a question between the rights of the people and the powers of their government. The discussions, in the progress of the controversy, had opened to the contemplations of men the first foundations of civil society and of government. The war of independence

began by litigation upon a petty stamp on paper, and a tax of three pence a pound upon tea; but these broke up the fountains of the great deep, and the deluge ensued. Had the British Parliament the right to tax the people of the Colonies in another hemisphere, not represented in the Imperial Legislature? They affirmed they had: the people of the colonies insisted they had not. There were ten years of pleading before they came to an issue; and all the legitimate sources of power, and all the primitive elements of freedom, were scrutinized, debated, analyzed, and elucidated, before the lighting of the torch of Ate, and her cry of havoc upon letting slip the dogs of

war.

When the day of conflict came, the issue of the contest was necessarily changed. The people of the Colonies had maintained the contest on the principle of resisting the invasion of chartered rightsfirst by argument and remonstrance, and, finally, by appeal to the sword. But with the war came the necessary exercise of sovereign powers. The Declaration of Independence justified itself as the only possible remedy for insufferable wrongs. It seated itself upon the first foundations of the law of nature, and the incontestable doctrine of human rights. There was no longer any question of the constitutional powers of the British Parliament, or of violated colonial charters. Thenceforward the American nation supported its existence by war; and the British nation, by war, was contending for conquest. As, between the two parties, the single question at issue was Independence-but in the confederate existence of the North American Union, Liberty-not only their own liberty, but the vital principle of liberty to the whole race of civilized man, was involved.

It was at this stage of the conflict, and immediately after the Declaration of Independence, that it drew the attention, and called into action the moral sensibilities and the intellectual faculties of Lafayette, then in the nineteenth year of his age.

The war was revolutionary. It began by the dissolution of the British Government in the colonies; the people of which were, by that operation, left without any government whatever. They were

then at one and the same time maintaining their independent national existence by war, and forming new social compacts for their own government thenceforward. The construction of civil society; the extent and the limitations of organized power; the establishment of a system of government combining the greatest enlargement of individual liberty with the most perfect preservation of public order, were the continual occupations of every mind. The consequences of this state of things to the history of mankind, and especially of Europe, were foreseen by none. Europe saw nothing but the war; a people struggling for liberty, and against oppression; and the people in every part of Europe sympathized with the people of the American colo

nies.

With their governments it was not so. The people of the American colonies were insurgents; all governments abhor insurrection. They were revolted colonists; the great maritime powers of Europe had colonies of their own, to which the example of resistance against oppression might be contagious. The American colonies were stigmatized in all the official acts of the British Government as rebels; and rebellion to the governing part of mankind is as the sin of witchcraft. The governments of Europe, therefore, were at heart, on the side of the British Government in this war, and the people of Europe. were on the side of the American people.

Lafayette, by his position and condition in life, was one of those who, governed by the ordinary impulses which influence and control the conduct of men, would have sided in sentiment with the British or royal cause.

Lafayette was born a subject of the most absolute and most splendid monarchy of Europe; and in the highest rank of her proud and chivalrous nobility. He had been educated at a college of the University of Paris, founded by the royal munificence of Louis the Fourteenth, or Cardinal Richelieu. Left an orphan in early childhood, with the inheritance of a princely fortune, he had been married at sixteen years of age, to a daughter of the house of Noailles, the most distinguished family of the kingdom, scarcely deemed in public consideration inferior to that which wore the crown. He came into active life, at the change from boy to man, a husband and a father, in the full enjoyment of everything that avarice could covet, with a certain prospect before him of all that ambition could crave. Happy in his domestic affections, incapable, from the benignity of his nature, of envy, hatred, or revenge, a life of "ignoble ease and indolent repose" seemed to be that which nature and fortune had combined to prepare before him. To men of ordinary mould this condition would have led to a life of luxurious apathy and sensual indulgence. Such was the life into which, from the operation of the same causes, Louis the Fifteenth had sunk, with his household and court, while Lafayette was rising to manhood surrounded by the contamination of their example.