In and Around Yellowstone Park
A Marvel of Magnificence
Climbing Pike's Peak by Rail
Hieroglyphic Memoirs of Past Ages
A Fin de Siecle Pleasure Steamer
Whaleback Steamer on the Lakes
Two Views of Mount Tacoma
A Restful Southern Home
MY NATIVE LAND.
CHAPTER I.
OUR NATION'S BIRTH.
The Story of Liberty Bell--Impartial Opinions on the Revolutionary War--The Shot that was Heard Around the World--The First Committee of Safety--A Defeat which Equaled a Victory--Washington's Earnestness--To Congress on Horseback--The First 4th of July Celebration.
It was not until April 19th, 1775, that the shot was fired which was "heard around the world." But the struggle for American Independence was really started nearly a quarter of a century earlier, when on the afternoon of August 27th, 1753, Liberty Bell was rung to call together the Assembly of the Province of Pennsylvania.
In the old days of town meetings, training days, town schools and Puritans, bells took a more prominent part in public affairs than they do to-day. It was usual to call the people together for purposes of deliberation by means of a village or town bell, and of these bells the one to which we refer was the most important and interesting. Liberty Bell is well named. It was ordered in the year 1751, and it was delivered a year later. Shortly afterwards, it cracked, and had to be recast, but in June, 1753, it was finally hung in the Pennsylvania State House at Philadelphia. It has never been removed from the building except on two occasions. The first of these was in 1777, when it was taken to Allentown for safety, and the second in 1885, when it was exhibited at New Orleans.
This bell, which sounded the death-blow to tyranny and oppression, was first rung to call together the Assembly, which immediately resolved to insist upon certain rights which had been denied the colonists by the British Crown. Eighteen months later, it was again rung to announce the meeting at which the rights of the colonists were sternly defined and insisted upon. In 1765, it convened the meeting of the Assembly at which it was resolved to be represented at the Congress of the Colonies in New York, and a month later it was muffled and tolled when the "Royal Charlotte" arrived, bearing the much hated stamps, whose landing was not permitted. Again it rang muffled, when the Stamp Act went into operation, and when the people publicly burned stamp papers. In 1768, the Liberty Bell called a meeting of the men of Philadelphia, who protested once again against the oppression of government without representation. In 1771, it called the Assembly together to petition the King of England for the repeal of the duty on tea, and two years later it summoned together the largest crowd ever seen in Philadelphia up to that date. At that meeting it was resolved that the ship "Polly," loaded with tea, should not be allowed to land.
In 1774, the bell was muffled and tolled on the closing of the Port of Boston, and in the following year it convened the memorable meeting following the battle of Lexington. On this occasion 8,000 people assembled in the State House yard and unanimously agreed to associate for the purpose of defending, with arms, their lives, liberty and property against all attempts to deprive them of them. In June, 1776, Liberty Bell announced the submission to Congress of the draft of the Declaration of Independence, and on July 4th of the same year, the same bell announced the signing of the Declaration. On July 8th of the same year, the bell was tolled vigorously for the great proclamation of America's Independence. The tolling was suspended while the Declaration was read, and was once more rung when that immortal document had been thus formally promulgated.
In April, 1783, Liberty Bell rang the proclamation of Peace, and on July 4th, 1826, it ushered in the year of Jubilee.
The last tolling of the bell was in July, 1835, when, while slowly tolling, and without any apparent reason, the bell, which had played such an important part in the War of Independence, and in the securing of liberty for the people of this great country, parted through its side, making a large rent, which can still be clearly seen. It was as though the bell realized that its great task was accomplished, and that it could leave to other and younger bells, the minor duties which remained to be performed.
This is not a history of the United States, but is rather a description of some of the most interesting and remarkable features to be found in various parts of it. It is difficult, however, to describe scenes and buildings without at least brief historical reference, and as we present an excellent illustration of the apartment in which the Declaration of Independence was signed, we are compelled to make a brief reference to the circumstances and events which preceded that most important event in the world's history.
As we have seen, the conflict between the home country and the colonies commenced long before there was any actual outbreak. As Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson so graphically expresses it, the surrender of Canada to England by France in 1763 suddenly opened men's eyes to the fact that British America had become a country so large as to make England seem ridiculously small. Even the cool-headed Dr. Franklin, writing that same year to Mary Stevenson in London, spoke of England as "that stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one's shoes dry." A far-seeing French statesman of the period looked at the matter in the same way. Choiseul, the Prime Minister who ceded Canada, claimed afterwards that he had done it in order to destroy the British nation by creating for it a rival. This assertion was not made till ten years later, and may very likely have been an afterthought, but it was destined to be confirmed by the facts.
We have now to deal with the outbreak of a contest which was, according to the greatest of the English statesmen of the period, "a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and diabolical war." No American writer ever employed to describe it a combination of adjectives so vigorous as those brought together by the elder Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham. The rights for which Americans fought seemed to him to be the common rights of Englishmen, and many Englishmen thought the same.
On the other hand, we are now able to do justice to those American Loyalists who honestly believed that the attempt at independence was a mad one, and who sacrificed all they had rather than rebel against their King. Massachusettensis, the well-known Tory pamphleteer, wrote that the annals of the world had not been deformed with a single instance of so unnatural, so causeless, so wanton, so wicked a rebellion.
These strong epithets used on both sides show how strangely opinions were divided as to the rebellion and its causes. Some of the first statesmen of England defended the colonists, and some of the best known men in the colonies defended England.
The City of Boston at this time had a population of about seventeen thousand, as compared with some half a million to-day. In its garrison there were three thousand British troops, and the laws of Parliament were enforced rigidly. The city suffered temporary commercial death in consequence, and there were the most vigorous efforts made to prevent an open outbreak of hostilities. In January, 1775, a conflict was barely averted at Marshfield, and