Historical voices

Or, if America is lost, is it manly to sob over it like a child for its rattle, and invite the laughter of the world by declarations of disgrace?

Are they become so unqualified to debate on independence, that they have lost all idea of it themselves, and are calling to the rocks and mountains of America to cover their insignificance?

Will they, who long since threatened to bring us to their feet, bow themselves to ours, and own that without us they are not a nation?

Will they tell to the world, and that from their first minister of state, that America is their all in all; that it is by her importance only that they can live, and breathe, and have a being?

Is the case so strangely altered, that those who once thought we could not live without them, are now brought to declare that they cannot exist without us?

Was America, then, the giant of the empire, and England only her dwarf in waiting!

Alas! are those people who call themselves Englishmen, of so little internal consequence, that when America is gone, or shuts her eyes upon them, their sun is set, they can shine no more, but grope about in obscurity, and contract into…

But the expression, if true, is the greatest confession of disgrace that could be made, and furnishes America with the highest notions of sovereign independent importance.

It is the only way out of an expensive and ruinous war, which has no object, and without which acknowledgment there can be no peace.

There is scarcely a village but brings to life some melancholy thought, and reminds us of what we have suffered, and of those we have lost by the inhumanity of Britain.

We walk over the dead whom we loved, in every part of America, and remember by whom they fell.

We can look round and see the remains of burnt and destroyed houses, once the fair fruit of hard industry, and now the striking monuments of British brutality.

The most wanton destruction has been committed in our sight; the most insolent barbarity has been acted on our feelings.

We are a people who think not as you think; and what is equally true, you cannot feel as we feel.

But the sin of England has struck the heart of America, and nature has not left in our power to say we can forgive.

It is a phoenix that can expire but once, and from whose ashes there is no resurrection.

There are cases in which it is as impossible to restore character to life, as it is to recover the dead.

The guilt of a government is the crime of a whole country; and the nation that can, though but for a moment, think and act as England has done, can never afterwards be believed or trusted.

Their ideas of right and wrong are worn away in the constant habitude of repeated infamy, till, like men practised in execution, they feel not the value of another's life.

But if your attachment to the guilty is stronger than to the innocent, you invent a crime that must destroy your character, and if the cause of your king needs to be so supported, for ever cease, sir, to torture our remembrance with the…

It is the man and not the apology that is demanded.

If you have no regard to us, at least spare the blood which it is your duty to save.

We can have no idea of your honor, or your justice, in any future transaction, of what nature it may be, while you shelter within your lines an outrageous murderer, and sacrifice in his stead an officer of your own.

Here the crime is fixed; and is one of those extraordinary cases which can neither be denied nor palliated, and to which the custom of war does not apply; for it never could be supposed that such a brutal outrage would ever be committed.