cheerless oppression, like the dreary region of an eternal winter, chilled every noble passion and fettered and paralysed every arm. And if among the oppressed millions there were found here and there one in whose bosom the last glimmer of a generous passion was not yet extinguished--one, who, from the midst of the inglorious slumberers in the deep degradation around him, would lift his voice and demand those rights which the God of nature hath bestowed in equal gift upon all His rational creatures, he was met at once by those who had at first denied and then enforced, with the stern reply, that for him and for all his race--LIBERTY and EXPATRIATION are inseparable. "Dreadful as the alternative was--fearful as was the experiment now proposed to be tried, there were hearts equal to the task--hearts which quailed not at the dangers which loomed and frowned in the distance, but calm, cool, and fixed in their purpose, prepared to meet them with the watchword--Give me Liberty or give me Death. "On the 6th day of February, in the year of Our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Twenty, the ship Elizabeth cast loose from her moorings at New York, and on the 8th day of March, of the same year, the pilgrims first beheld the land of their fathers, the cloud-capped mountains of Sierra Leone, and cast anchor in that harbour. A few days afterwards they again weighed anchor, stood to the south, and debarked upon the low and deadly island of Sherbro. On the character of those who formed her noble company, I deem it unnecessary to remark. They are sufficiently commended to our esteem, as being the first to encounter the difficulties and to face the dangers of an enterprise, which, we trust, is to wipe away from us the reproach of ages--to silence the calumny of those who abuse us, and to restore to Africa her long-lost glory. I need not detain you with a narrative of their privations and sufferings: nor will I stop to tell you--though it would be a pleasing task to do so--with what happy hearts they greeted a reinforcement of pilgrims who joined them in 1821, by the Nautilus. Passing by intermediate events, which, did the time allow, it would be interesting to notice, we hasten to that grand event--that era of our separate existence, the 25th day of April, in the year of Grace 1822, when the American flag first threw out its graceful folds to the breeze on the heights of Mesurado, and the pilgrims, relying upon the protection of Heaven and the moral grandeur of their cause, took solemn possession of the land in the name of virtue, humanity, and religion.