The capture of the _Guerrière_ by the _Constitution_ is a great landmark in our history--a second “shot heard round the world.” It was not simply the taking of a British frigate; it was a second declaration of American independence. We had so long been called spaniels and curs in the British press; we had so long submitted basely (the word is none too strong to describe our administration of the Jeffersonian period); there had become so strongly entrenched in the British and French mind that we would submit to any insult so long as our ships might sail, even at the cost of the immense toll they took of them, that our going to war was considered impossible. New England, the chief sufferer, was in a dangerous spirit which threatened secession. All this changed instantly when the news spread from town to town, from farm to farm. The Americans became another people. It revived the dormant spirit of nationality and gave a deathblow to the disunionist spirit of the period. How it permeated the soul of the country was shown in a remarkable way at the death of a lady of the Adams family in 1903. Born in 1808, she was but four years old at the time of the battle, but so vividly had the exultation of her elders been impressed upon the child’s mind, that on the day of her death, more than ninety years after, her mind reverted to but one thought, the most deeply impressed of her childhood. In tremulous tones, though otherwise apparently unconscious, she kept repeating through this last day of her life the expression of her elders in 1812: “Thank God for Hull’s victory.”[30] Nothing could show more strongly the immensity of exultation and relief. The _Constitution_ was to have other victories, was to come unscathed through the war, and was for many years to carry our flag in honor in many seas; but this victory alone should enshrine the ship in the hearts of all true Americans as an instrument which went far to preserve this Union and its government. Fortunately, through Oliver Wendell Holmes’s noble poem, she still remains, honored in her old age, a glorious memory of victory in a noble cause. * * * * *