Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[348] that America belongs to Americans. That generation learned it thoroughly; the second inherited it as a prejudice; we, the third, have our bones and blood made of it. When thought passes through purpose into character, it becomes the unchangeable basis of national life. That Revolutionary lesson need never be learned again, and will never die out. Let a British fleet, with admirals of the blue and red, cover our Atlantic coast, and in ten days Massachusetts and Carolina will stand shoulder to shoulder; the only rivalry, who shall die nearest the foe. [Loud applause, with cries of “Good.” ]

That principle is all our Revolution directly taught us. Massachusetts was hide-bound in the aristocracy of classes for years after. The bar and the orthodox pulpit were our House of Lords. A Baptist clergyman was little better than a negro. The five points of Massachusetts decency were, to trace your lineage to the Mayflower, graduate at Harvard College, be a good lawyer or a member of an orthodox church,--either would answer [laughter],--pay your debts, and frighten your child to sleep by saying “Thomas Jefferson.” Our theological aristocracy went down before the stalwart blows of Baptist, Unitarian, and Freethinker,--before Channing and Abner Kneeland. Virginia slaveholders, making theoretical democracy their passion, conquered the Federal Government, and emancipated the working-classes of New England. Bitter was the cup to honest Federalism and the Essex Junto. Today, Massachusetts only holds to the lips of Carolina a beaker of the same beverage I know no man who has analyzed this passage in our history so well as Richard Hildreth. The last thirty years have been the flowering out of this lesson. The Democratic principle, crumbling classes into men, has been working down from pulpits and judges' seats, through shop-boards and shoe-benches, to Irish hodmen, and reached the negro at last. The long