Quebec had failed; partial collisions had taken place wherever there were royal forces throughout the country, but nothing decisive was brought about, and a feverish excitement pervaded the continent. Congress was still conducting the war without a constitutional existence, and all eyes and hearts were turned to the army and to Washington. Men at a safe distance, and with nothing at stake, are prone to judge severely the conduct of those who are at the post of responsibility and danger. Washington himself felt the delicacy and the hazards of his position; the importance of sustaining the expectations of the country; the necessity of decisive results. But his army was without discipline or experience, save a few veterans of the seven years' war, without adequate supplies of any kind, composed of men who had left their homes at a moment's warning and were impatient to return; weakened by camp diseases and the small-pox, with a stock of powder so scanty that stratagem was resorted to by the commander to conceal the deficiency even from his officers. Thus the summer and the autumn wore away, and every week increased the public impatience and added to the embarrassments of Washington. His private letters at this time are filled with the most touching remarks on his distressed condition. In a letter to Colonel Reed, of the fourteenth of January, 1776, he says: "The reflection on my situation and that of this army produces many an unhappy hour when all around me are wrapped in sleep. Few people know the predicament we are in on a thousand accounts; fewer still will believe, if any disaster happens to these lines, from what cause it flows. I have often thought how much happier I should have been, if, instead of accepting the command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket on my shoulder and entered the ranks; or, if I could have justified the measure to posterity and my own conscience, had retired to the back country and lived in a wigwam."

At length, however, the re-enlistment of the army was completed; advanced lines were thrown up; ordnance captured at Ticonderoga had been transported by Knox with prodigious effort across the country; ammunition had been taken by Manly in his prize ships: shells were furnished from the royal arsenal at New York. It was Washington's wish to cross the ice at Boston, to carry the town by assault, and destroy the royal army. The ice, however, did not make till the middle of February, and it was decided, by a council of war, that the town could not be assaulted with success.

It was then resolved to repeat, on a grander scale, with full preparation and ample means, the hasty operation which had brought on the battle of Bunker Hill the preceding summer. It was determined first to occupy the heights of Dorchester, and, as soon as an impregnable position was secured there, to establish batteries on Nook Hill and the other rising grounds nearest Boston. The fleet in the harbor was within range of the heights; the town was commanded from the hills

below. The occupation of these points would of necessity compel the enemy to take the risk of a decisive action, or to evacuate the

town.

Washington, though preferring bolder measures, yielded to the decision of his council, and threw his whole soul into the work. A plan for a grand combined movement was matured. The heights of Dorchester were to be occupied on the night of the fourth of March, in order that the anticipated battle might be fought on the anniversary of the ever-memorable fifth of March, 1770. As soon as the conflict was engaged on the heights, Putnam was to cross from Cambridge with a body of four thousand men, land in two divisions in Boston, and, forcing his way through the town, burst open the fortifications on the neck, and thus admit a division of the American army from Roxbury. To distract and occupy the attention of the enemy, the town was severely bombarded from Somerville, East Cambridge, and Roxbury, during the nights of the second, third, and fourth of March.

I am told by professional men that these dispositions evince consummate military skill, and are among the facts which show that Washington, too often compelled by his situation to pursue the Fabian policy, possessed a talent for military combinations that entitles him to a place beside the greatest captains of the last century.

The fourth of March, the day so long and anxiously expected, at length arrives. The troops are put in motion in the evening from the American lines at Roxbury and Dorchester. An advanced guard of eight hundred men precedes; the carts with intrenching tools came next, with the main body, twelve hundred strong, under General Thomas; the whole followed by a train of three hundred wagons loaded with fascines, gabions, and bundles of hay. They crossed Dorchester neck without being perceived, and reached their destination in two divisions, one for each of the heights. Bundles of hay were placed on the side of the causeway, at the most exposed parts, as a protection in case the enemy should discover and attempt to interrupt the movement. Under this shelter parties from the American army passed several times during the night, without being perceived, though it was bright moonlight. This was 'owing, no doubt, to the cannonade and bombardment of the town from the opposite quarter, by which also the whole surrounding country was thrown into a state of painful expectation and alarm. The operations were conducted by Gridley, an experienced engineer of the old French war. He was aided by Colonel Putnam, in laying out and executing the works, which, before morning, though incomplete, were adequate against grapeshot and musketry.

Washington was present on the heights. In the strictness of military duty, the presence of the Commander-in-Chief of the army was not required on the ground on such an occasion; but the operation

Accom

was too important to be trusted entirely to subordinates. panied by Mr. James Bowdoin, then a young man of twenty-two, afterwards your respected fellow citizen and the representative of Dorchester in the Convention of Massachusetts, which adopted the Constitution of the United States, Washington, whose headquarters were at Cambridge, repaired, on this eventful night, to Dorchester Heights. He has left no record descriptive of the scene or of his thoughts and emotions at what he must have regarded, at that time, as the most eventful hour of his life, and a most critical moment of the war' "The moon shining in its full lustre" (they are the words of Washington). revealed every object through the clear, cold air of early March, with that spectral distinctness with which things present themselves to the straining eye at a great juncture. All immediately around him intense movement, but carried on in death-like silence; nothing heard but the incessant tread of busy feet and the dull sound of the mattock upon the soil, frozen so deep as to make it necessary to place reliance on the fascines and gabions. Beneath him, the slumbering batteries of the castle; the roadstead and harbor filled with the vessels of the royal fleet, motionless, except as they swung around at their moorings with the turn of the midnight tide; the beleaguered city, occupied by a powerful army and a considerable non-combatant population, startled into unnatural vigilance by the incessant and destructive cannonade, but yet unobservant of the great operations in progress so near them; the surrounding country, dotted with a hundred rural settlements roused from the deep sleep of a New England village by the unwonted tumult and glare.

It has been stated in one or two well-authenticated cases of persons restored after drowning, where life has been temporarily extinguished in the full glow of health, with the faculties unimpaired by disease and in perfect action, that, in the last few minutes of conscious existence, the whole series of the events of the entire life comes rushing back to the mind, distinctly but with inconceivable rapidity; that the whole life is lived over again in a moment. Such a narrative, by a person of high official position in a foreign country, and perfect credibility, I have read. We may well suppose that at this most critical moment of Washington's life, a similar concentration of thought would take place, and that the events of his past existence as they had prepared him for it, his training while yet a boy in the wilderness, his escape from drowning and the rifle of the savage on his perilous mission to Venango, the shower of iron hail through which he rode unharmed on Braddock's field, would now crowd through his memory; that much more also the past life of his country, the early stages of the great conflict now brought to its crisis, and still more solemnly the possibilities of the future for himself and for America, would press upon him; the ruin of the patriotic cause if he failed at the outset; the triumphant consolidation of the revolution if he prevailed; with higher

visions of the powerful family of rising states, their auspicious growth and prosperous fortunes, hovering like a dream of angels in the remoter prospect;-all this, attended with the immense desire of honest fame (for we cannot think even. Washington's mind too noble to possess the last infirmity"), the intense inward glow of manly heroism about to act its great part on a sublime theatre,-the softness of the man chastening the severity of the chieftain, and deeply touched at the sufferings and bereavements about to be caused by the conflict of the morrow; the still tender emotions that breathed their sanctity over all the rest; the thought of the faithful and beloved wife who had followed him from Mount Vernon, and of the aged mother whose heart was aching in her Virginia home for glad tidings of "George, who was always a good boy,"-all these pictures, visions, feelings, pangs-too vast for words, too deep for tears, but swelling, no doubt, in one unuttered prayer to Heaven-we may well imagine to have filled the soul of Washington at that decisive hour, as he stood upon the heights of Dorchester, with the holy stars for his camp-fire, and the deep folding shadows of the night, looped by the hand of God to the four quarters of the sky, for the curtains of his tent.

The morning of the fifth of March dawned, and the enemy beheld with astonishment, looming through a heavy mist, the operations of the night. Gen. Howe wrote to the minister that they must have been the work of at least twelve thousand men. In the account given by one of his officers, and adopted in the Annual Register, it is said that the expedition with which these works were thrown up, with their sudden and unexpected appearance, "recalled to the mind those wonderful stories of enchantment and invisible agency, which are so frequent in the eastern romances."

General Howe, like a gallant commander, immediately determined on the perilous attempt to dislodge the Americans before their entrenchments should be rendered impregnable. A powerful detachment, led by Lord Percy, dropped down to the castle in the afternoon, to rendezvous there, and thence cross over to Dorchester point, and storm the heights. A heavy gale ("a dreadful storm" it is called, in the British accounts) scattered the barges, and prevented the embarkation of the troops. This delay gave the Americans time to perfect their works; barrels filled with earth were placed around the heights, an abattis of trees disposed around the foot of the hills, reinforcements of two thousand men ordered to the support of General Thomas, and every preparation made for a decisive conflict.

It was soon understood that the royal commander, not deeming it safe to take the risk of an engagement, had determined to evacuate Boston. To prevent the destruction of the town, Washington was willing that they should leave it unmolested. Finding, however, after some days, that no apparent movement was made for this purpose, he determined without further delay to occupy Nook Hill and the

other elevations fronting and commanding the town. This produced the desired effect, and General Howe was at length compelled to acknowledge the inability of a powerful land and naval force, under veteran leaders, to maintain themselves against untried levies whom they were accustomed to regard with contempt, led by officers from whom they affected to withhold even the usual titles of military command. He was obliged to acquiesce in an engagement with the Selectmen of Boston, tacitly sanctioned by " Mr. Washington," that his army, should be allowed to embark without being fired upon, on condition! that they would not burn the town.

Thus, on the seventeenth of March, 1776, an effective force of many thousand men evacuated the town, and with a powerful fleet and a numerous train of transports, sailed for Halifax. Putnam, with an

attachment of the American army, took possession of Boston. The beloved commander himself made his entry into the town the following day, and the first great act of the drama of the Revolution was brought to a triumphant close, on that old Dorchester Neck which, before the foundation of Boston, our fathers selected as a place for settlement.

This event diffused joy throughout the Union, and contributed materially to prepare the public mind for that momentous political measure, of which we this day commemorate the seventy-ninth anniversary. That civil government, however human infirmities mingle in its organization, is, in its ultimate principles, a Divine ordinance, will be doubted by no one who believes in an overruling Providence. That every people has a right to interpret for itself the will of Providence, in reference to the form of government best suited to its condition, subject to no external human responsibility, is equally certain, and is he doctrine which lies at the basis of the Declaration of Independence. But what makes a people,-what constitutes this august community, to which we give that name; how many persons-how few; bound to each other by what antecedent ties of physical descent, of common language, of local proximity, of previous political connection? This is a great question, to which no answer, that I know, has yet been given; to which, in general terms, perhaps, none can be given. Physiologists have not yet found the seat of animal life,-far less of the rational intellect or spiritual essence of the individual man. Who can wonder that it should be still farther beyond our ability to define the mysterious laws which-out of the physical instincts of our nature, the inexplicable attractions of kindred and tongue, the persuasion of reason, the social sympathies, the accidents as we call them of birth, the wanderings of nations in the dark deeds of the past, the confederacies of peace, the ravages of war, employed by the all-fashioning hand of time, which moulds everything human according to the eternal types in the Divine mind-work out, in the lapse of centuries, with more than Promethean skill, that wondrous creation which we call A People! A. P.-5.