the true miracle was the character of the people who made the Revolution; and I have thought that an attempt to unfold some of the great traits of that character, and to point out the manner in which the events of the preceding Colonial Age contributed to form and impress those traits, imperfect as it must be, would be entirely applicable to this occasion. The leading feature, then, in the character of the American people in the age of the Revolution was what Burke called in Parliament their “fierce spirit of liberty.” “It is stronger in them,” said he, “than in any other people on the earth.” “I am convinced,” said our youthful and glorious Warren,— in a letter to Quincy, little more than six months before he fell on the heights of Charlestown,—“I am convinced that the true spirit of liberty was never so universally diffused through all ranks and orders of men on the face of the earth, as it now is through all North America. It is the united voice of America to preserve their freedom or lose their lives in defence of it.” Whoever overlooks, whoever underestimates this trait in the character of that generation of our fathers,—whoever has not carefully followed it upwards to its remote and deep springs, may wonder at, but never can comprehend, the “Miracle of the Revolution.” Whence, then, did they derive it? Let us return to the history of the Colonists before they came, and after they came, for the answer; and for distinctness and brevity let us confine ourselves to the Northern Colonists, our immediate ancestors. The people of New England, at the beginning of the Revolutionary War, to describe them in a word, were the Puritans of Old England as they existed in that country in the first half of the seventeenth century; but changed,— somewhat improved, let me say,-—by the various influences which acted upon them here for a hundred and fifty years after they came over. The original stock was the Puritan character of the age of Elizabeth, of James I., and of Charles I. It was transplanted to another soil; another sun shone on it; other winds fanned and shook it; the seasons of another heaven for a century and a half circled round it; and there it stood at length, the joint product of the old and the new, deep- 5
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