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ness of our independent and separate national existence; a feeling that we have a transcendent destiny to fulfill, which we mean to fulfill; a great work to do, which we know how to do, and are able to do; a career to run, up which we hope to ascend till we stand on the steadfast and glittering summits of the world; a feeling that we are surrounded and attended by a noble, historical group of competitors and rivals, the other nations of the earth, all of whom we hope to overtake and even to distance — such a sentiment as this exists perhaps in the character of this people. And this I do not discourage; I do not condemn. It is easy to ridicule it. But "grand, swelling sentiments" of patriotism no wise man will despise. They have their uses. They help to give a great heart to a nation; to animate it for the various conflicts of its lot; to assist it to work out for itself a more exceeding weight and to fill a larger measure of glory. But, sir, that among these useful and beautiful sentiments, predominant among them, there exists a temper of hostility towards this one particular nation, to such a degree as to amount to a habit, a trait, a national passion, to amount to a state of feeling which "is to be regretted," and which really threatens another war this I earnestly and confidently deny. I would not hear your enemy say this.

No, sir. No, sir. We are above all this. Let the Highland clansman, half naked, half civilized, half blinded by the peat smoke of his cavern, have his hereditary enemy and his hereditary enmity, and keep the keen, deep, and precious hatred, set on fire of hell, alive if he can; let the North American Indian have his, and hand it down from father to son, by heaven knows

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what symbols of alligators and rattlesnakes and war clubs smeared with vermilion and entwined with scarlet ; let such a country as Poland,1 cloven to the earth, the armed heel on the radiant forehead, her body dead, her soul incapable to die, let her "remember the wrongs of days long past"; let the lost and wandering tribes of Israel remember theirs, -the manliness and the sympathy of the world may allow or pardon this to them; but shall America, young, free, prosperous, just setting out on the highway of heaven, "decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just begins to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and joy," shall she be supposed to be polluting and corroding her noble and happy heart by moping over old stories of stamp act, and tea tax, and the firing of the Leopard upon the Chesapeake in the time of peace ? 2

No, sir. No, sir; a thousand times no! Why, I protest I thought all that had been settled. I thought two wars had settled it all. What else was so much

1 The final partition of Poland took place in 1796, shortly after the defeat of Kosciusko. In 1830-1832 the Poles revolted against their Russian oppressors, but were finally conquered. This made a great impression all over Europe, and even more so in America, where people still remembered that Kosciusko had assisted in the war of the American Revolution.

2 In 1807 the British ship Leopard fired upon the American frigate Chesapeake, after the latter refused to give up men claimed by the British to be deserters. The Chesapeake captain was forced to allow a British boarding party to remove four sailors as deserters, although all stoutly maintained that they were American citizens. This affair took place upon the high seas, forty-five miles from shore, and was one of the many instances in which the British exercised what they called the "right of search." This claim that the British had the right to search foreign vessels for deserters from the royal navy was one of the causes of the War of 1812.

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good blood shed for on so many more than classical fields of Revolutionary glory? For what was so much good blood more lately shed at Lundy's Lane,1 at Fort Erie, before and behind the lines at New Orleans,3 on the deck of the Constitution, on the deck of the Java,5 on the lakes, on the sea, but to settle exactly these "wrongs of past days"? And have we come back sulky and sullen from the very field of honor? For my country I deny it. The senator says that our people still remember these "former scenes of wrong with perhaps too deep" a sensibility; and that, as I interpret him, they nourish a "too extensive" national enmity. How so? If the feeling he attributes to them is moral, manly, creditable, how comes it to be too deep? and if it is immoral, unmanly, and unworthy, why is it charged on them at all? Is there a member of this body who would stand up in any educated, in any intelligent and right-minded circle which he respected, and avow that for his part he must acknowledge that, looking back through the glories and the atonements of two wars, his veins were full of ill blood to England,

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1 Lundy's Lane was one of the most stubbornly contested battles of the War of 1812. It is usually regarded as a drawn battle, although both sides claimed the victory.

2 Fort Erie, on the Canadian side of the Niagara River. It was captured by the Americans in 1814, but later was abandoned to the British.

At New Orleans the British general, Pakenham, with twelve thousand veterans, was disastrously defeated by five thousand Americans under Andrew Jackson. This battle was fought in 1815, after the treaty of peace had been signed, but before the news had reached America.

4 The conqueror of the Guerriere and Java and several other British ships, during the War of 1812.

5 Destroyed by the Constitution off the coast of Brazil, 1812.

that in peace he could not help being her enemy; that he could not pluck out the deep-wrought convictions and "the immortal hate" of old times? Certainly, not one. And then, sir, that which we feel would do no honor to ourselves, shall we confess for our country? Mr. President, let me say, that in my judgment this notion of a national enmity of feelings toward Great Britain belongs to the past age of our history. My younger countrymen are unconscious of it. They disavow it. That generation in whose opinions and feelings the actions and the destiny of the next age are unfolded, as the tree in the germ, do not at all comprehend your meaning, nor your fears, nor your regrets. We are born to happier feelings. We look on England as we look on France. We look on them, from our new world, not unrenowned, yet a new world still; and the blood mounts to our cheeks; our eyes swim; our voices are stifled with emulousness of so much glory; their trophies will not let us sleep; but there is not hatred at all; no hatred; all for honor, nothing for hate! We have, we can have, no barbarian memory of wrongs, for which brave men have made the last expiation to the brave.

1 From Milton's "Paradise Lost," Book I, line 107.

THE SPIRIT OF AMERICAN FREEDOM1

CASSIUS M. CLAY

(1846)

I MAY be an enthusiast, but I cannot give utterance to the conception of my own mind. When I look upon the special development of European civilization; when I contemplate the growing freedom of the cities, and the middle class which has sprung up between the pretenders to divine rule on the one hand, and the abject serf on the other; when I consider the Reformation and the invention of the press, and see, on the southern shore of the continent, an humble individual, amidst untold difficulties and repeated defeats, pursuing the mysterious suggestions which the mighty deep poured unceasingly upon his troubled spirit, till at last, with great and irrepressible energy of soul, he discovered that there lay in the far western ocean a continent open for the infusion of those elementary principles of liberty which were dwarfed in European soil - I conceive that the hand of destiny was there!

When I see the immigration of the Pilgrims from the chalky shores of England, in the night fleeing from their native home, so dramatically and ably pictured by Mr. Webster in his celebrated oration, when father, mother, brother, sister, lover, were all lost by those melancholy wanderers, "stifling," in the language of one who is immortal in the conception, "the mighty hunger of the heart," and landing, amidst cold and pov

1 From an address on "Constitutional Equal Liberty," delivered in New York, 1846.

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