The American Quarterly Review, No. 18, June 1831 (Vol 9)Various
History
The American Quarterly Review, No. 18, June 1831 (Vol 9)
Various
Intellectual life -- Periodicals; United States -- Intellectual life -- 19th century -- Periodicals
"Sir, let me recur to pleasing recollections--let me indulge
in refreshing remembrance of the past--let me remind you
that in early times, no states cherished greater harmony,
both of principle and feeling, than Massachusetts and South
Carolina. Would to God that harmony might again return!
Shoulder to shoulder they went through the revolution--hand
in hand they stood round the administration of Washington,
and felt his own great arm lean on them for support. Unkind
feeling, if it exist, alienation and distrust, are the
growth, unnatural to such soils, of false principles since
sown. They are weeds, the seeds of which that same great arm
never scattered.
"Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium upon
Massachusetts--she needs none. There she is--behold her, and
judge for yourselves. There is her history: the world knows
it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston,
and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill--and there they
will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in the
great struggle for independence, now lie mingled with the
soil of every state, from New England to Georgia; and there
they will lie forever. And, Sir, where American liberty
raised its first voice; and where its youth was nurtured and
sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its
manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and
disunion shall wound it--if party strife and blind ambition
shall hawk at and tear it--if folly and madness--if
uneasiness, under salutary and necessary restraint--shall
succeed to separate it from that union, by which alone its
existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the
side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked: it will
stretch forth its arm with whatever of vigour it may still
retain, over the friends who gather round it; and it will
fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments
of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin." pages
406, 407.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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