Tree of Liberty

“ 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. ”

“ Where millions with millions agree,
She brought in her hand as a pledge of her love,
And the plant she named Liberty Tree.
The celestial exotic struck deep in the ground,
Like a native it flourished and bore ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Time will bring every amelioration and refinement, most gratifying to rational man, and the humblest flower freely plucked under the shelter of the Tree of Liberty, is more to be desired than all the trappings of royalty ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the men and women who lived through those days, who one morning had gaily danced around the Tree of Liberty and then during the next three months had been chased like rats through the sewers of their own city, could not possibly take such a detached view of those problems of civic upheaval. ”

“ Here then is the charter of Liberty to man as a divine gift. Nothing can be more comprehensive than it is. Nothing is excepted—, nothing forbidden. No tree stands in this intellectual garden, a garden whose limits are the limits of the universe, whose tempting fruit has an interdict of exile and death thrown around it ”

“ Here you shall see the seed sown which is to shoot up into a goodly tree, bearing as its fruits that liberty, civilization, and knowledge in which we rejoice to-day. Long centuries of toil and struggle will elapse before it is deep-rooted in the soil; the weeds of error and wrong will threaten to choke it ”

“ 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. ”

“ Again to the battle, Achaians!
Our hearts bid the tyrants defiance;
Our land, the first garden of Liberty’s tree—
It has been, and shall yet be the land of the free:
For the cross of our faith is replanted,
The pale dying crescent is daunted,
And we march that the foot-prints of Mahomet’s slaves
May be washed out in blood from our forefathers’ graves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It waves where lonely sentries tread; It makes the land as ocean free, And plants an empire on the sea! Then hail the banner of the free, The starry Flower of Liberty! Thy sacred leaves, fair Freedom's flower, Shall ever float on dome and tower, To all their heavenly colors true, In blackening frost or crimson dew,— And God love us as we love thee, Thrice holy Flower of Liberty! Then hail the banner of the free, The starry Flower of Liberty! ”

“ There is but one use for law, but one excuse for government—the preservation of liberty—to give to each man his own, to secure to the farmer what he produces from the soil, the mechanic what he invents and makes, to the artist what he creates, to the thinker the right to express his thoughts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The herbaceous border is the democratic section of a garden. The autocrat of the Dutch and the Formal gardens is not allowed to carry out any of his foul designs of clipping or curtailing the freedom of Flora in this province. There should be no reminiscences of the tyrant stake which in far-distant days of autocracy was a barrier to the freedom of growth, nor should the aristocracy of the hot-house or even the cool greenhouse obtrude its educated bloom among the lovers of liberty. They must be allowed to do as they damplease, which is a good step beyond the ordinary doing as they please. ”

“ Thus it is that in the progress of time the inestimable principles of civil liberty will be enjoyed by millions yet unborn and the great benefits of our system of government be extended to now distant and uninhabited regions. In view of the vast wilderness yet to be reclaimed, we may well invite the lover of freedom of every land to take up his abode among us and assist us in the great work of advancing the standard of civilization and giving a wider spread to the arts and refinements of cultivated life. ”

“ It was not the will of God that the new state should be formed of these materials; that such men should be the fathers of a progeny, born on the American soil, who were one day to assert American liberty by their eloquence, and defend it by their valor. ”

“ The condition of the people and the country could scarcely have been worse had we had Kings and Parliaments, instead of Presidents and Congresses. A tree, let it be called by whatever name, is known by the fruit it bears. If we are to judge the political tree in this country in this way, shall we not be forced to say that we have gathered thorns from grapes and thistles from figs? In purity in the administration of justice, our Government can stand no comparison with that of England. ”

“ The nobleness of the prospect, the craggy rocks, and rugged hills, contrasted finely with the excellent cultivation of the valleys, and the universal thrift and industry of the inhabitants. Where freedom nerves the arm, it is in vain that rocks and hills of granite, oppose the labors of the cultivator. Industrious liberty teaches him the art to extract comfort, competence, and wealth from a soil the most unwilling and ungrateful. ”

“ When your venerated Sire, with burning zeal, proclaimed independence now, independence forever; when, with heroic and inflexible resolution, he signed his name to the great charter of our liberty, the place on which you now stand was a barren and unproductive forest. Now,
"As the swollen column of ascending smoke,"
so swells her grandeur. From a thousand chimneys are emitted the living evidences of her prosperity. The flaming fire, the busy hammer, the revolving roller, all give daily, hourly proof of her rapid advancement. ”

“ Upon the loftiest mountain hears its cone
Whispering with father Woden in the air,
Learning the law it taketh to the ground.
Thus by that law that each tree be itself,
This forest hath become a stalwart state,
A nation governed by one law, a vast
Green kingdom of ten thousand happy trees
With father Woden monarch in the boughs.
The law of selfhood is the law of trees;
Who says the law of sameness governs man? ”

“ These two sections of independent thinkers brought the vigorous plant to America—the Puritans to New England, the Huguenots to the Carolinas. The Covenanters of Scotland, and other dissenting communities, watered it during the reigns of the Charleses and the bigot James II.; and when the tactics of British oppression had changed from religious persecution to commercial and political tyranny, it had grown a sturdy tree, firmly rooted in a genial soil, and overshadowing a prosperous people with its beautiful foliage. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The limits and sphere for such a government to exercise its power in, was found to properly extend to all matters in which the common interests of the public are concerned as against assumed individual interests, which would in reality be to the “greatest good of the greatest number.”
An exemplification of the natural working of a government founded and administered according to strictest governmental justice may be seen in the growth and in the maintenance of the life of the tree, which may be made to represent the tree of humanity. The tree is a complete community within itself ”

“ 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. ”

“ I, as a Protestant, have often had to regret that we purchased our freedom of conscience, our individual liberty, at entirely too high a price. In order to make room for a small, mean little plant of personal life we destroyed a whole garden of fancy, and hewed down a virgin forest of esthetic ideas. ”

“ The new republic may make the philosophical declaration, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all trees were evolved equal and endowed with the dignity of creative evolution." But if in the silence that follows we overhear the poor nurse or the peasant mother telling fairy-tales to the children, she will always be saying, "And in the seventh garden beyond the seventh gate was the tree with the golden apples", or "They sailed and sailed till they came to an island, and in the island was a meadow, and in the meadow the tree of life." ”

“ 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. ”

“ We find ourselves in the peaceful possession of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate. We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ — Among the Natural Rights of the Colonists are these First. a Right to Life; Secondly to Liberty; thirdly to Property; together with the Right to support and defend them in the best manner they can - Those are evident Branches of, rather than deductions from the Duty of Self Preservation, commonly called the first Law of Nature -
All Men have a Right to remain in a State of Nature as long as they please: And in case of intollerable Oppression, Civil or Religious, to leave the Society they belong to, and enter into another. ”