appalled at her legions; do we shrink back at her vengeance? No, fellow-citizens, no! we have faced those legions, braved and triumphed over that vengeance. Powerful as she is, old in arms and in discipline, upon the plains of America has she once learned that her ranks can be subdued and her high ensign fall. Not in a boastful, but in a temper to encourage, would we speak it, British valor has yielded to the equal, spontaneous valor, but the more indignant fire which freedom and a just cause could impart, when opposed to the hired forces of an unjust king. And is there less to inspire now? Let a few short reflections determine.

While I abstain from any enumeration of the other encroachments of Great Britain upon us as an independent nation, through their successive accumulations until they have ended in making the whole trade of our country in substance and in terms colonial, suffering it to exist, and to exist only, where it subserves her own absorbing avarice, or what she calls her retaliating vengeance, I must nevertheless solicit your indulgence to pause with me, for a little while, upon a single wrong.

The seizure of the persons of American citizens under the name and the pretexts of impressment, by the naval officers of Great Britain, is an outrage of that kind which makes it difficult to speak of it in terms of appropriate description; for this, among other reasons, that the offence itself is new. It is probable that the most careful researches into history, where indeed of almost every form of rapine between men and between nations is to be found the melancholy record, will yet afford no example of the systematic perpetration of an offence of a similar nature, perpetrated, too, under a claim of right. To take a just and no other than a serious illustration, the only parallel to it is to be found in the African slave trade; and if an eminent statesman of England once spoke of the latter, as the greatest practical evil that had ever afflicted mankind, we

may be allowed to denominate the former the greatest practical offence that has ever been offered to a civilized and independent state. With the American government it has been a question of no party or of no day. At every period of its administration, the odious practice has been constantly protested against, and its discontinuance been demanded under every form of pacific remonstrance. With all our statesmen, while engaged in exercising the public authorities of the nation, it has been deemed, if not otherwise to have been abrogated, legitimate cause of war. The only imaginable difference among any of them, has been, as to the time when it would be proper to use this imperious resort; as if the time was not always at hand for a nation to redeem such a stain upon its vitals, and as if an encroachment of this nature does not become the more difficult to beat back with each year, and with each instance, in which it is permitted. But it best accorded with the genius of our government, with its love of peace, and perhaps with what was due to peace, to attempt at first its pacific removal. General Washington, when at the head of the government, is known to have viewed it with the sensibility that such an indignity could not fail to arouse in his bosom, and had he lived until this day to see it not only unredress. ed and unmitigated, but increased, amidst all the amicable efforts on our part for its cessation, there is the strongest reason for supposing that his just estimate of the nation's welfare, that his lofty and gallant spirit, would have stood forth, had it been but the single grievance, the manly advocate for its extirpation by the sword. But if our submission to it so long has incurred a just reproach, happily it is in some measure assuaged in the reflection that our forbearance -will serve to put us more completely in the right at this eventful period.

That our enemy has invariably refused to accede to such terms as were answerable to the indispensable expectations of our own government, as the organ of a

sovereign people, upon this head, is a point susceptible of entire proof. Avoiding other particulars, it will be sufficient to introduce a single one. It is a fact, which the archives of our public departments will show, that in order to take from Great Britain the remnant of her own excuses for seizing our men under the pretext, at all times disallowable, of invading the sanctuary of our ships in search of her own, it was proposed to her, that the United States would forbear to receive her seamen on board of their vessels, provided she, in her turn, would abstain from receiving our men on board of hers. This would wholly have destroyed the insulting claim, set up by her, to break in with armed men upon our vessels while peaceably sailing on the ocean under color of forcibly taking her own mariners; for, the regulation, if adopted, would have given the previous assurance that her own were not there to be found. But this proposal, it is also a fact, she declined. As rapacious of men, as greedy of riches and grasping at dominion, she neglected to avail herself of a regulation that would curtail her in this new species of plunder; this plunder in the flesh and blood of freemen, of which she has afforded the first example, in all time, to the eyes of an insulted world. But it forcibly marks the devouring ambition of her naval spirit; and that if public law is ridiculed, justice scoffed at, sovereignty prostrated, and humanity made to shudder and to groan; still, her ships must have men.

Under a mere personal view of this outrage, and considering it on the footing of a moral sin, it is strictly like the African slave trade. Like that it breaks up families and causes hearts to bleed. Like that it tears the son from the father, the father from the son. Like that it makes orphans and widows, takes the brother from the sister, seizes up the young man in the health of his days and blasts his hopes forever. It is worse than the slavery of the African, for the African is only made to work under the lash of a task-master, whereas the citizen of the United States, thus enslaved, receives 32

VOL, V.

also the lash on the slightest lapses from a rigorous discipline, and is moreover exposed to the bitter fate of fighting against those towards whom he has no hostility, perhaps his own countrymen, it may be, his own immediate kindred. This is not exaggeration, fellowcitizens, it is reality and fact.

But, say the British, we want not your men; we want only our own. Prove that they are yours and we will surrender them up. Baser outrage! insolent indignity! that a free born American must be made to prove his nativity to those who have previously violated his liberty, else he is to be held forever as a slave! That before a British tribunal, a British boarding officer, a free born American must be made to seal up the vouchers of his lineage, to exhibit the records of his baptism and his birth, to establish the identity that binds him to his parents, to his blood, to his native land, by setting forth in odious detail his size, his age, the shape of his frame, whether his hair is long or cropt, his marks, like an ox or a horse of the manger; that all this must be done as the condition of his escape from the galling thraldom of a British ship! Can we hear it, can we think of it, with any other than indignant feelings at our tarnished name and nation? And suppose through this degrading process his deliverance to be effected, where is he to seek redress for the intermediate wrong? The unauthorized seizure and detention of any piece of property, a mere trespass upon goods, will always lay the foundation for some, often the heaviest retribution, in every well regulated society. But to whom, or where, shall our imprisoned citizen, when the privilege of shaking off his fetters has at last been accorded to him, turn for his redress? where look to reimburse the stripes, perhaps the wounds he has received; his worn spirit, his long inward agonies? No, the public code of nations recognizes not the penalty, for to the modern rapaciousness of Britain it was reserved to add to the dark catalogue of human sufferings this flagitious crime.

But why be told that, even on such proofs, our citizens will be released from their captivity? We have long and sorely experienced the impracticable nature of this boon which, in the imagined relaxation of her deep injustice, she would affect to hold out. Go to the office of the department of state, within sight of where we are assembled, and there see the piles of certificates and documents, of affidavits, records and seals, anxiously drawn out and folded up, to show why Americans should not be held as slaves, and see how they rest, and will forever rest, in hopeless neglect upon the shelves! Some defect in form, some impossibility of filling up all the crevices which British exaction insists upon being closed; the uncertainty, if, after all, they will ever reach their point of destination, the climate or the sea where the hopes of gain or the lust of conquest are impelling, through constant changes, their ships; the probability that the miserable individual, to whom they are intended as the harbinger of liberation from his shackles, may have been translated from the first scene of his incarceration to another, from a seventyfour to a sixtyfour, from a sixtyfour to a frigate, and thus through rapid, if not designed mutations, a practice which is known to exist; these are obvious causes of discouragement, by making the issue at all times doubtful, most frequently hopeless. And this Great Britain cannot but know. She does know it, and, with deliberate mockery, in the composure with which bloated power can coff at submissive and humble suffering, has she continued to increase and protract our humiliation as well as our suffering, by renewals of the visionary offer.

Again it is said, that our citizens resemble their men, look like them in their persons, speak the same language, that discriminations are difficult or impracticable, and therefore it is they are unavoidably seized. Most insulting excuse! And will they impeach that God who equally made us both, who forms our features, moulds our statures and stamps us with a