War of independence

“ If we postpone independence, do we mean to carry on, or to give up, the war? Do we mean to submit, and consent that we shall be ground to powder, and our country and its rights trodden down in the dust? ”

“ The logical outcome of such a situation is preparation for a war of independence by the vanquished, countered by military occupation, rigid suppression, and exploitation by the victors in the previous struggle.
War is taken for granted as an instrument of policy. It is employed by civilized nations and empires as a means of expansion. Wars of independence and restitution follow conquest, dismemberment and annexation. Civilized nations and empires prepare for war and wage war as a normal aspect of civilized life. ”

“ When the party in rebellion occupy and hold in a hostile manner a certain portion of territory, have declared their independence, have cast off their allegiance, have organized armies, have commenced hostilities [p667] against their former sovereign, the world acknowledges them as belligerents, and the contest a war. They claim to be in arms to establish their liberty and independence, in order to become a sovereign State, while the sovereign party treats them as insurgents and rebels who owe allegiance, and who should be punished with death for their treason. ”

“ The English civil wars in the time of Charles I.,—the war of Independence, waged between England and America,—and the wars attendant upon the French Revolution,—were in essence, combats between the principles of Liberty and Tyranny. Such wars, like storms in the atmosphere—though violent at the time—are, in their effects, purifying and beneficial. ”

“ We must fight it through. And if the war must go on, why put off longer the declaration of independence? That measure will strengthen us It will give us character abroad. The nations will then treat with us, which they never can do while we acknowledge ourselves subjects, in arms against our sovereign. Nay, I maintain that England herself will sooner treat for peace with us on the footing of independence, than consent, by repealing her acts, to acknowledge that her whole conduct toward us has been a course of injustice and oppression. ”

“ Those who look upon the history of our war of independence as an unqualified history of generous sacrifices, take a false view of the subject. Base and ignoble passions manifested themselves by the side of the noblest passions. Some men were always true, as some were always false. We had but one Arnold, but we had many lesser villains, who played the spy on both sides, sometimes fought on both sides, and grew rich by speculating upon the necessities of their country. Our national history, like the early history of Rome, has suffered greatly from apocryphal heroism. ”

“ MR. PRESIDENT,—At the close of a bloody Rebellion, instigated by hostility to the sacred principles of the Declaration of Independence, and inaugurated in the name of State Rights, it becomes us now to do our best that these sacred principles shall not again be called in question, and that State Rights shall not again disturb the national repose. One terrible war is more than enough; and since, after struggle, peril, and sacrifice, where every household has been a sufferer, we are at last victorious, it is not too much to insist on all possible safeguards for the future. ”

“ But the seeds of separation were sown, and the ball of empire rolled westward with such astonishing rapidity that the pious mind is naturally excited to acknowledge a superintending Providence, that led to the period of independence, even before America was conscious of her maturity. Precipitated into a war dreadful even in contemplation, humanity recoiled at the idea of civil feuds and their concomitant evils. ”

“ The North was mad and blind; it would not let us govern ourselves; and so the War came: and now it must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks, and his children seize his musket and fight our battle, unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for Slavery. We are fighting for INDEPENDENCE ”

“ To achieve the conquest of their independence, they had to go through a war with a powerful enemy, and the construction of a central government in the place of the distant power whose yoke they threw off: but in their local institutions, and those which regarded the daily affairs of life, they had no revolution to make. ”

“ But, earnest as has been our wish for peace and great as have been our sacrifices and sufferings during the war, the determination of this people has with each succeeding month become more unalterably fixed to endure any sufferings and continue any sacrifices, however prolonged, until their right to self-government and the sovereignty and independence of these States shall have been triumphantly vindicated and firmly established. ”

“ But whatever may have inspired the enemy with these more violent purposes, the public councils of a nation more able to maintain than it was to require its independence, and with a devotion to it rendered more ardently by the experience of its blessings, can never deliberate but on the means most effectual for defeating the extravagant views or unwarrantable passions with which alone the war can now be pursued against us. ”

“ We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends. ”

“ The king, thus encouraged, too arrogant and pig-headed to listen to the few sensible patriots in his realm, took the best possible means—brute force—to alienate the colonists, to compel them to rebel and fight to the death or for independence, ‘a war,’ says an English historian, not American, ‘most disgraceful to a civilized nation. ”

“ By the Declaration of Independence, dreaded by the foes an for a time doubtfully viewed by many of the friends of America, everything stood on a new and more respectable footing, both with regard to the operations of war or negotiations with foreign powers. ”

“ But we are fighting the fight which is the fight of all freemen everywhere—against the wantonness of military power, against the spirit that tears up treaties and makes peaceful agreement between nations impossible—against a cruelty and barbarism in war which brings our civilisation to shame. We have a right to your sympathy—you who are the heirs of Washington and Lincoln, the trustees of liberty in the New World as we, with France, are in the Old. ”

“ for if ever there was a holy war, it was that which saved our liberties and gave us independence. ”

“ Perhaps, while yet the civil war should rage with doubtful issue, while exhausted and bleeding at every pore, that sanguinary alliance of despots, combined to crush the liberties of man, would send its armies to our shores. Under what standard would we rally to preserve our liberty? There would be no Union—without it there would be no strength; and those who, united, could defy the world in arms, divided would be weak and powerless. ”

“ What will it avail us, if we can preserve our independence as a nation, nay if we can even raise our country to the highest pitch of national glory, provided we at the time lose our own liberties? If France is at this time subjected at home, to the military despotism which is said to reign there ”

“ He remembered, too, that the object of the war, equally with peace and freedom, was the maintenance of one government and the perpetuation of one Union. Not only must hostilities cease, but dissension, suspicion, and estrangement be eradicated. ”

“ The rebels themselves fed the credulity of their deluded victims with the promise of a peaceful separation, or, at the worst, of a short and triumphant contest, to be speedily followed by a career of boundless prosperity, expansion, greatness, and glory. And, on our part, when we came at length to understand that war was inevitable, we were scarcely less sanguine in our anticipation of easy victory and of the instant restoration of that noble Government, which the domestic enemy, with the most wicked ambition, sought to overthrow and utterly destroy. ”

“ The voice of history tells us—the bloodstained fields of our sister republics of America proclaim, that disunion would be the signal for WAR—a war of conquest, in which the weak would fall before the power of the strong; and upon the ruins of this now happy Union might arise the darkest despotism that ever crushed the liberties of mankind, for it would be established and could only be maintained by the bayonet. ”

“ And now, when War has for nearly three years menaced the life of the Nation, bathed the Land in blood, and filled two hundred thousand graves with our slain sons, these men of the Loyal States still cling to the falling fortunes of the relentless and unappeasable Enemy of their Country and its democratic institutions; they mourn, and will not be comforted, over the expiring System, in the Border Slave-States; and, in tones of indignation or of anguish, they utter lamentations over the Proclamation of Emancipation, and the policy that is bringing Rebel States back again radiant with Freedom. ”

“ Sooner or later we must enter the conflict; and the sooner the better. For it's our war. It's the war of every country that loves liberty and justice. Up to this moment the Allies have been fighting for the freedom of the world, your freedom and mine, my friends, as well as their own. It is high time the Government at Washington, impelled by the patriotic ardor of our thinking citizens, declared the enemies of England and France to be our enemies, and joined hands with those heroic countries to stamp out forever the teutonic menace to liberty and civilization. ”

“ No! let the despot’s hireling band,
Who feel not honor—know not faith,
Who war not for their native land,
Fly trembling from a dreaded death.
Our lives are to our country pledged,
Until her last red field is won;
For “liberty or death” is waged
The war where fights her faithful son.
Then plant that flag-staff in the earth,
And round it rally, every son
[Pg 201] Who loves the State that gave him birth,
Till her proud sovereignty be won.
What though our limbs be weak with toil,
What though we bear full many a scar;
Huzza! here’s to our native soil,
We re-enlist, and for the war! ”

“ In this state of extreme danger, we have no alternative left, but an abject submission to the will of those overbearing tyrants, or a total separation from the crown and government of Great Britain, uniting and exerting the strength of all America for defence, and forming alliances with foreign powers for commerce and aid in war. ”

“ We have indeed defended them; and we will risque every thing, do every thing, and suffer every thing in their defence. To support our laws, and our liberties established by our laws, we have prepared, ordered, and levied war: But is this traiterously, or against the King? ”

“ On the western front there were two deeper principles in conflict, those of autocracy and democracy, the question whether one man and a sinister, hidden group of plotting militarists could drag the whole world into war and crush its liberties and its laws beneath the iron heel of despotism, or whether man as man should stand erect in his God-given right of freedom and work out his own destiny in friendly brotherhood. ”

“ It needed but one act more to encircle us with the thunders of war—to plunge the nation into an almost fathomless ocean of civil hatred and revenge, and leave upon the pages of history the unhappy record of many an ensanguined field. ”

“ To resist attacks on their rights or their liberties is with them an instinct. Whether this war shall last one, or three, or five years, is a problem they leave to be solved by the enemy alone; it will last till the enemy shall have withdrawn from their borders — till their political rights, their altars, and their homes are freed from invasion. ”

“ If you had a Government desirous of concluding a peace [Pg 311] different from that desired by the majority of the population, if you had a Government seeking to prolong the war for purposes of conquest, one might understand a conflict between the Government and the country. But since the Government desires precisely the same as the majority of the people—that is to say, the speedy settlement of an honourable peace without annexationist aims—then it is madness to attack that Government from behind, to interfere with its freedom of action and hamper its movements. ”

“ When one nation has a world-wide Empire embracing a fifth of the globe, founded on principles of absolute liberty for all whom it contains, and when another, built up by the force of circumstances on a basis of military despotism, also aspires to a different sort of world-power, and challenges the first nation, whose principles it abhors as much as its own are abhorred—in these circumstances it is hopeless to talk of reconciliation till one or the other is down. ”

“ And is it to that ministry, is it to those agents of the executive power, that you would entrust the conduct of the war? Is it thus you would abandon the safety of the country to those who wish to destroy you?
"The thing which you have most cause to fear, is war. War is the greatest scourge which can, in our present circumstances, menace liberty! For it is in no wise a war kindled by the enmity of peoples. It is a war concerted by the enemies of our Revolution. ”

“ This brilliant victory greatly enriched and strengthened the new empire of freedom, and at the same time nearly ruined the nations who commenced the war. They sued for peace, and finally obtained it on condition of perfect submission to the will of the conquerors. This gave them new and liberal laws and institutions, broke off the fetters of their old masters, and utterly forbade the use of arms or the art of war. These brilliant and highly commendable measures soon opened the eyes of millions more, and won them to the cause of liberty and truth. ”