It is dreadful that nations must learn war; but since they must, it is a mercy to be taught it seasonably and thoroughly. It had been appointed by the Infinite Disposer, that the liberties, the independence of the States of America should depend on the manner in which we should fight for them; and who can imagine what the issue of the awful experiment would have been, had they never before seen the gleam of an enemy’s bayonets, or heard the beat of his drum? I hold it to have been a great thing, in the first place, that we had among us, at that awful moment when the public mind was meditating the question of submission to the teatax, or resistance by arms, and at the more awful moment of the first appeal to arms,—that we had some among us who personally knew what war was. Washington, Putnam, Stark, Gates, Prescott, Montgomery, were soldiers already. So were hundreds of others of humbler rank, but not yet forgotten by the people whom they helped to save, who mustered to the camp of our first revolutionary armies. These all had tasted a soldier’s life. They had seen fire, they had felt the thrilling sensations, the quickened flow of blood to and from the heart, the mingled apprehension and hope, the hot haste, the burning thirst, the feverish rapture of battle, which he who. has not felt is unconscious of one half of the capacities and energies of his nature, which he who has felt, I am told, never forgets. They had slept in the woods on the withered leaves or the snow, and awoke to breakfast upon birch bark and the tender tops of willow trees. They had kept guard on the outposts on many a stormy night, knowing perfectly that the thicket half a pistol-shot off, was full of French and Indian riflemen. I say it was something that we had such men among us. They helped discipline our raw first levies. They knew what an army is, and what it needs, and how to provide for it. They could take that young volunteer of sixteen by the hand, sent by an Ipswich mother, who, after looking upon her son equipped for battle from which he might not return, Spartan-like, bid him go and behave like a man—and many, many such shouldered a musket for Lexington and Bunker Hill—and assure him, from their own personal knowledge, that after the first fire he never would know fear again, even that of the last onset. But the long and peculiar wars 21
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