Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence | Page 9

be proud to wear, must seek some other field than that
of battle as the theatre of his exploits.
We have not yet numbered twenty-six years since he who is the oldest
colonist amongst us was the inhabitant--not the citizen--of a country,
and that, too, the country of his birth, where the prevailing sentiment is,
that he and his race are incapacitated by an inherent defect in their
mental constitution, to enjoy that greatest of all blessings, and to
exercise that greatest of all rights, bestowed by a beneficent God upon
his rational creatures, namely, the government of themselves by
themselves. Acting upon this opinion, an opinion as false as it is
foul--acting upon this opinion, as upon a self-evident proposition, those
who held it proceeded with a fiendish consistency to deny the rights of
citizens to those whom they had declared incapable of performing the
duties of citizens. It is not necessary, and therefore I will not disgust
you with the hideous picture of that state of things which followed
upon the prevalence of this blasphemous theory. The bare mention that
such an opinion prevailed would be sufficient to call up in the mind,
even of those who had never witnessed its operation, images of the
most sickening and revolting character. Under the iron reign of this
crushing sentiment, most of us who are assembled here to-day drew our
first breath, and sighed away the years of our youth. No hope cheered
us; no noble object looming in the dim and distant future kindled our
ambition. Oppression--cold, cheerless oppression, like the dreary
region of eternal winter,--chilled every noble passion and fettered and
paralyzed 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 inglorious slumberers in the deep degradation around him, would lift
up 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."
Passing by intermediate events, which, did the time allow, it would be
interesting to notice, we hasten to the grand event--the era of our
separate existence, when the American flag first flung 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.
It would discover an unpardonable apathy were we to pass on without
pausing a moment to reflect upon the emotions which heaved the
bosoms of the pilgrims, when they stood for the first time where we
now stand. What a prospect spread out before them! They stood in the
midst of an ancient wilderness, rank and compacted with the growth of
a thousand years, unthinned and unreclaimed by a single stroke of the
woodman's axe. Few and far between might be found inconsiderable
openings, where the ignorant native erected his rude habitation, or
savage as his patrimonial wilderness, celebrated his bloody rites, and
presented his votive gifts to demons. The rainy season--that terrible
ordeal of foreign constitutions--was about setting in; the lurid lightning
shot its fiery bolts into the forest around them, the thunder muttered its
angry tones over their head, and the frail tenements, the best which
their circumstances could afford, to shield them from a scorching sun
by day and drenching rains at night, had not yet been completed. To
suppose that at this time, when all things above and around them
seemed to combine their influence against them; to suppose they did
not perceive the full danger and magnitude of the enterprise they had
embarked in, would be to suppose, not that they were heroes, but that
they had lost the sensibility of men. True courage is equally remote
from blind recklessness and unmanning timidity; and true heroism does
not consist in insensibility to danger. He is a hero who calmly meets,
and fearlessly grapples with the dangers which duty and honor forbid
him to decline. The pilgrims rose to a full perception of all the
circumstances of their condition. But when they looked back to that

country from which they had come, and remembered