Every movement of the patriotic leaders was spied upon and betrayed everywhere the army moved there were men of the very countryside it occupied to be kept close watch against. Men of substance at the ports of trade were almost all against the Revolution and where men of means and principle led, base men who played for their own interest were sure to follow. Men whose names all the colonies knew held off and would take no part in armed resistance to the ancient crown whose immemorial sovereignty kept a great empire together. There were men enough and to spare who would not speak them at all who deemed the whole thing madness and deep folly, and even black treason. A new heart was in everything! And yet what differences of opinion there were, and how hot and emphatic every turn of the war made them among men who really spoke their minds and dissembled nothing! It was but six months since the Congress had ventured its Declaration of Independence, and the brave words of that defiance halted on many lips that read them. It was easy then to believe that General Washington could hold his own against any adversary in that terrible game of war. The Revolution had had its turning point.
Speech we. the revolution free#
As we pushed forward to the heights at Morristown we drew in the British hues behind us, and New Jersey was free of the redcoats again. It was but a few short weeks since the men of the Jersey towns and farms had seen us driven south across the river like fugitives now we came back an army again, the Hessians who had but the other day harried and despoiled that countryside beaten and scattered before us, and they knew not whether to believe their eyes or not. How much it meant a third time to cross the river, and wait here in the town for the regiments Sir William Howe should send against us! How sharp and clear the night was when we gave Cornwallis the slip and took the silent, frosty road to Allentown and Princeton! Those eighteen miles between bedtime and morning are not easily forgot, nor that sharp brush with the redcoats at Princeton: the moving fight upon the sloping hillside, the cannon planted in the streets, the gray old building where the last rally was made,-and then the road to Brunswick, Cornwallis at our heels! How the face of things was changed in those brief days! There had been despair till then. And then the anxious days that followed the recrossing of the icy river before even we had rested the troop of surly prisoners to be cared for and sent forward to Philadelphia the enemy all the while to be thought of, and the way to use our advantage. We remember the chill, and the ardor too, of that gray morning when we came upon the startled outposts of the town, the driving sleet beating at our backs the cries and hurrying of men in the street, the confused muster at our front, the sweeping fire of our guns and the rush of our men, Sullivan coming up by the road from the river, Washington at the north, where the road to Princeton is the showy Hessian colonel shot from his horse amidst his bewildered men the surrender the unceasing storm. The battle of Trenton is as real to us as the battle of San Juan hill. Our memories make no effort to recall the time. Old colony days, and those sudden days of revolution when debate turned to action and heady winds as if of destiny blew with mighty breath the long continent through, were our own days, the days of our childhood and our headstrong youth.
It is from its memories of days old and new that it gets its sense of identity, takes its spirit of action, assures itself of its power and its capacity, and knows its place in the world. Its past it feels to have been but the prelude and earnest of its present. If it were, who amongst us would care for its memory and distant, ghostly voice? It is the distinguishing mark, nay the very principle of life in a nation alive and quick in every fibre, as ours is, that all its days are great days,-are to its thought single and of a piece. We do not think or speak of the War for Independence as if we were aged men who, amidst alien scenes of change, comfort themselves with talk of great things done in days long gone by, the like of which they may never hope to see again.
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