Liberty Tree

“ Living in almost unrestrained freedom, far away from the sea-board and its varieties, the agitations wrought throughout the colonies by the Stamp Act and kindred measures, scarcely elicited a thought from the quiet people of this region; but when, month after month, intelligence arrived that chains were forging to fetter their free spirits, they were aroused, and all through the region between the Alatamaha and Savannah Rivers, and especially in the vicinity of Augusta, the Tree of Liberty budded and blossomed, green, vigorous, and beautiful as the native magnolia. ”

“ The tree of liberty is less flourishing to-day than it was fifty or a hundred years ago; its leaves are not so green, and it is not so much the object of universal admiration and affection. But its roots are deep down in the soil; and it supplies a need of mankind too fundamental, feeds an aspiration too closely linked with all that elevates and enriches human nature, to permit of its being permanently neglected or allowed to fall into decay. ”

“ Speaking of the tree of Liberty, which had grown so splendidly in the United States, {43} Haliburton makes an American say to Sam: 'The mobs have broken in and torn down the fences, and snapped off the branches, and scattered all the leaves about, and it looks no better than a gallows tree.' Let the people attend to business, build their railways, develop their water-powers, their farms, and their forests, secure under the fostering care of the select few. ”

“ Crowds gathered around the tree all day, and at night the effigies were cut down and carried in a great procession through the streets, while the people cried out, "Liberty and prosperity forever! No stamps! No taxation without our consent!" Four months after that, the people made Andrew Oliver go under Liberty Tree and publicly read his resignation. This famous elm of liberty was cut down in 1775 by the British soldiers, exactly ten years to the month after the Sons of Liberty had decorated its branches with the pictures of Andrew Oliver and Lord Bute. ”

“ Each green leaf in its aged crest tells of those noble patriots, whose memory of the glorious lives of self- sacrifice shall forever remain, verdant in the hearts of a liberty-loving people. This glorious tree, with its few broken limbs and scanty foliage, wears signs of many a wintry combat and summer winds surprise attacks "as heroes their scars," unbending still through all those years of toil and strife. Perhaps a few more years and this venerable tree shall yield to some wintry blast; its present site to be marked by a monument of bronze or marble. ”

“ They sit in the shadow of the tree of liberty and boast of its protecting boughs, but must not aspire to partake of the fruit thereof. The undershrubbery purchases shade and protection at too dear a price when it sacrifices therefor the opportunity of the glorious sunlight of heaven. ”

“ Nothing but what is of home growth, in constitutions at least, can succeed there. It is difficult enough to make the tree of liberty prosper even where it is indigenous in the earth; but who ever heard of a transplanted tree of liberty thriving in the soil to which it was transferred? ”

“ How Ipswich, Massachusetts, Won This Inscription for Its Town Seal
by
J. H. Burnham
Someone has truly said that every tree in the forest has, under ground, roots which are equal in body to all of its branches above ground. If this is correct, perhaps it can be said with equal truth that the great tree of American Liberty possesses, buried in the remote and distant past, as many roots and rootlets as its beautiful structure of branches exhibits to our admiring gaze. ”

“ I believe, for one, that you cannot tear up ancient rootages and safely plant the tree of liberty in soil which is not native to it. ”

“ Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develope itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing. ”

“ In Burgundy and the southern towns the tree of liberty was planted, that is to say, a mast surmounted by a red cap. ”

“ But the fact that the redwood, restricted on the map to such a limited territory, is the most important timber tree on the Coast, is a blot upon our vaunted Democracy, which has allowed the cunning of a few small minds to defeat the best interests of the whole people and rob them of forest treasure which might yield its benefits continuously, if properly managed. Government purchase of all sequoia-bearing land, followed by rational methods of harvesting the mature lumber and conserving the young growth, is the ideal solution of the problem. ”

“ To talk about the greatness and beauty of a fine oak or maple or tulip, to call attention to its shade value, and to appeal to the cupidity of the ground owner by estimating how much less his property will [Pg 38] be worth when the trees are gone or have been mishandled, will aid to create the necessary public sentiment. And to provide wise laws, as may be often done with proper attention, is the plain duty and the high privilege of the tree-loving citizen. The trees are defenseless, and they are often unreplaceable; if you love them protect them as you would your children. ”

“ But, as sure as ever there's a Power that makes the grass appear,
Our land shall be green with Liberty, the blade-time shall be here.
Be patient, O be patient! go and watch the wheat-ears grow,
So imperceptibly that ye can mark nor change nor throe:
Day after day, day after day till the ear is fully grown;
And then again day after day, till the ripened field is brown.
Be patient, O be patient! though yet our hopes are green,
The harvest-field of Freedom shall be crowned with the sunny sheen. ”

“ Thus could be included the sublime scenery on the headwaters of these rivers and perhaps nine-tenths of all the big trees in existence. All private claims within these bounds should be gradually extinguished by purchase by the Government. The big tree, leaving all its higher uses out of the count, is a tree of life to the dwellers of the plain dependent on irrigation, a never-failing spring, sending living waters to the lowland. For every grove cut down a stream is dried up. Therefore all California is crying, “Save the trees of the fountains.” ”

“ FOREST-TREES. Return to Table of Contents
In contemplating the length of life of one of the reverend and hoary elders of the forest, we are apt to forget that it is not to be measured by the standard of man or of the higher animals; for it is really not the measure of an individual existence, but, as it were, of the duration of an empire or a nation. A tree is a populous community, presided over by an oligarchy, of which the flowers are the aristocracy, and the leaves the working-classes. ”

“ Certain trees of species which have an economic value are classed as reserved. These may not be cut on public forest land except under license. Teak, most valuable of all trees, is placed on a lonely eminence, its extraction being safeguarded by stringent rules. Wherever it is found, growing teak is the property of the State, and may not be cut down without permission. But, except in the case of teak and of trees in reserved forests, much liberty is allowed to the people to use forest produce, even of reserved kinds, for domestic purposes. ”

“ Where an efficient forest guard is provided, as experience in European countries and some American States has demonstrated, these disastrous visitations are no longer dreaded. To look on a universal removal of our Nation's tree-wealth as the only remedy, is like the old proposition to drive rats from the granary by burning the barn. ”

“ It is not surprising that people living amid such exposures of life and property, and seeing so manifestly as they do that these are attributable to the absence of trees, should bestir themselves in seeking the appropriate remedy, that they should organize, as they have done, forestry associations, appoint arbor-days, and engage the aid of the State itself in offering bounties for tree-planting, and in exempting forest plantations for a time from taxation. ”

“ This is not an original state of sin, but a state of repression in which it is held in a world that is full of so many things beside apple-trees. I may till my orchard ever so well, manipulate the trees ever so promptly, yet if the plantation then is allowed to run to neglect the processes of depreciation gain the mastery; the struggle for existence is restored.
To keep one's apple-tree in the pink of perfection is as joyful an enterprise as to do anything else well. It is only the well-conditioned tree that yields its glorious harvest year by year. ”

“ The pasture land is free, and is held in common by unwritten and unrecorded titles by those who occupy it with their flocks and herds. The forests have also been free until recently, and anyone who chose to do so was at liberty to cut whatever timber he needed for his own use without payment, but the police exercised a supervisory authority to prevent the wholesale destruction of the trees for commercial purposes. ”

“ But natural liberty—the power of one to do whatever he sees fit to do, subject only to the laws of nature—may have an existence, as by a man placed alone on a mountain, in a desert, or, like Selkirk, on an island in the ocean, for then, there are none his rights to dispute. ”

“ Not the constitution, but free land and an abundance of natural resources open to a fit people, made the democratic type of society in America for three centuries while it occupied its empire.
To-day we are looking with a shock upon a changed world. The national problem is no longer how to cut and burn away the vast screen of the dense and daunting forest; it is how to save and wisely use the remaining timber. It is no longer how to get the great spaces of fertile prairie land in humid zones out of the hands of the government into the hands of the pioneer ”

“ Young America always cuts down all his trees as a first step toward civilization; then, after an interregnum, when all the kings of the forest have been laid low, he sets out small saplings in whitewashed tree-boxes, and watches and tends them with fervor. ”

“ Had I my way, I would mark out a circle of a hundred miles in diameter, and throw around it the protecting aegis of the constitution. I would make it a forest forever. It should be a misdemeanor to chop down a tree, and a felony to clear an acre within its boundaries. The old woods should stand here always as God made them, growing on until the earthworm ate away their roots, and the strong winds hurled them to the ground, and new woods should be permitted to supply the place of the old so long as the earth remained. ”

“ In the old pioneer days the American had but one thought about a tree, and that was to cut it down; and the mental attitude of the Nation toward the forests was largely conditioned upon the fact that the life work of the earlier generations of our people had been of necessity to hew down the forests, for they had to make clearings on which to live; and it was not until half a century of our national life had passed that any considerable body of American citizens began to live under conditions where the tree ceased to be something to be cleared off the earth. ”

“ Give the trees plenty of room; don’t plant ’em too thick if you want to get all the good out of ’em.” As if he saw a question in my eye, he went on: “We do a forest-tree business exclusively; these shade-trees, and walnuts, hickories, chestnuts, and all kinds. It’s a big trade, getting to be, and growing all the time. Folks have begun to find out what fools they were to destroy the forests, and the children want to buy back what the fathers threw away.” ”

“ I have seen two hundred, and they have tended to nothing because the revolutionists were in too great a haste. You talk of chopping down giant trees. This tree is not an oak but one of those immense redwoods of the far western American forests which I have seen. If they were felled, a horseman starting from the base to avoid the high-up branches would be overtaken and smashed. ”

“ The building was very spacious; but its wings were a little too long, and the small garden in front almost entirely destitute of trees,—a fault from which no public, and hardly any private, mansion in the United States, can be said to be entirely exempted.
The Americans have, indeed, a singular aversion to trees and shrubs of every description: their highest idea of perfection in a landscape being an extended plain sown with grass. They consider trees as a mark of barbarism, and are, in their zeal for civilization, extirpating them wherever they find them. ”

“ Here every thing is necessary; nothing is redundant. In the words of a great philosopher, who was an accurate observer of nature, ‘Where the necessity is obviated, the remedy, by consequence, is withdrawn.’ If these facts and reasonings be correctly stated, the only rational theory of the removal of large trees consists, in prospectively maintaining the same harmony between the existing provisions of the tree, and the exigencies of its new situation, as had previously subsisted between its relative properties and the circumstances of its former site. ”

“ He then claimed Free Soil as a distinctive Whig doctrine, and in a speech at Abingdon, he now said: "The gentlemen who have joined this new party, from among the Whigs, pretend that they are greater lovers of liberty and greater haters of slavery than those they leave behind them. ”

“ Why don't you farmers get together, appoint a committee to cut down every tree remaining, then make it a State-prison offence ever to set out another? Why, father, you cut nearly all the trees from your lot a few years ago and sold the wood. ”

“ What more absurd disposition of our timber land could have been made than the laws under which it has passed to private hands? The Homestead and Preemption acts, framed for prairies, requiring the settler to live on and cultivate the soil, have been extended to our forests, and to comply with their terms, thousands of men have withdrawn from vocations by which they were increasing the wealth of the Nation, and with blankets and provisions strapped on their backs and axe and compass in hand have worked their weary way through the pathless forests to vacant Government lands, on which they filed. ”