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Updated: June 15, 2025
A brother of the President of the College, in his Fourth-of-July oration delivered at New Haven four months after the inauguration of Jefferson and Burr, announced to the students and citizens, that "the great object" of those gentlemen and their adherents was "to destroy every trace of civilization in the world, and to force mankind back into a savage state."
To some of the speakers the crowd listened respectfully, at others they hooted. An old man with a grey beard told a long rambling story of a Fourth-of-July celebration of his boyhood. When voices interrupted he protested and shook his fist in the air, pale with indignation. "Oh, sit down, old daddy," shouted Freedom Smith and a murmur of applause greeted this sensible suggestion.
Webster's Fourth-of-July orations, of which he delivered five in eleven years, that first made him known to the people of New Hampshire. At that period the two political parties could not unite in the celebration of the day, and accordingly the orations of Mr. Webster had much in them that could be agreeable only to Federalists.
But the telegram read hastily in the hall, and considered at leisure while I took a late breakfast at my favorite table in the long, stately, oak-panelled dining-room, high above the diminished roar of Fifth Avenue the telegram carried me out to Eastridge, that self-complacent overgrown village among the New York hills, where people still lived in villas with rubber-plants in the front windows, and had dinner in the middle of the day, and attended church sociables, and listened to Fourth-of-July orations.
A good story is told of General Roger Weightman, when Mayor of the city, who sent by mistake an invitation to Sir Charles Vaughan to attend a Fourth-of-July dinner, at which speeches were invariably made abusive of the British and their Vandalism in the recent war.
Everett quotes a few sentences from his Fourth-of-July oration of 1806, when he was twenty-four, which shows an amazing advance upon the effort of his eighteenth year, quoted above: "Nothing is plainer than this: if we will have commerce, we must protect it. This country is commercial as well as agricultural. Indissoluble bonds connect him who ploughs the land with him who ploughs the sea.
Who can compute the amount of mischief that Fourier has done, and those well-meaning but inexperienced dreamers who have followed after him? A Fourth-of-July firecracker once consumed the half of a large city.
I can comprehend the pleasure to be got out of the hydraulic engine; but what can be the fascination of a whip, when one has nothing to flagellate but the calves of his own legs, I could never understand. Yet a small riding-whip is the most popular article with the miscellaneous New-Englander at all great gatherings, cattle-shows and Fourth-of-July celebrations.
No Fourth-of-July orator would in our day rant like the lawyer, and no clergyman would use such language as that of the Reverend Moses Welch. The clergy have been pretty well republicanized within that last two or three generations, and are not likely to provoke quarrels by assertion of their special dignities or privileges.
But now, after twenty years, my wife turns up that old diary in the garret this spring while house-cleaning. Fred had it and an old Fourth-of-July cannon put away in an ancient valise, as a boy will treasure up useless things. Under the head of October 12th, I find this entry: "At anchor in Yukon river, weather fair, recent heavy rains; set out packing and filed main-rod brasses of both engines.
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