irst tree felled in Northern New
Hampshire; women of the neighborhood, who had heard the midnight yell
of savages; and, above all, their own lion-hearted father, who had
warred with Frenchmen, Indians, wild nature, British troops, and
French ideas. "O," wrote Daniel once, "I shall never hear such
story-telling again!" It was not in the cold pages of Hildreth, nor in
the brief summaries of school-books, that this imaginative,
sympathetic youth had learned that part of the political history of
the United States--from 1787 to 1800--which will ever be its most
interesting portion. He learned it at town-meetings, in the
newspapers, at his father's house, among his neighbors, on election
days; he learned it as an intelligent youth, with a passionately loyal
father and mother, learned the history of the late war, and is now
learning the agonizing history of "reconstruction." This oration is
the warm and modest expression of all that the receptive and
unsceptical student had imbibed and felt during the years of his
formation, who saw before him a large company of Revolutionary
soldiers and a great multitude of Federalist partisans. He saluted the
audience as "Countrymen, brethren, and fathers." The oration was
chiefly a rapid, exulting review of the history of the young Republic,
with an occasional pomposity, and a few expressions caught from the
party discussions of the day. It is amusing to hear this young
Federalist of 1800 speak of Napoleon Bonaparte as "the gasconading
pilgrim of Egypt," and the government of France as the "supercilious,
five-headed Directory," and the President of the United States as "the
firm, the wise, the inflexible Adams, who with steady hand draws the
disguising veil from the intrigues of foreign enemies and the plots of
domestic foes." It is amusing to read, as the utterance of Daniel
Webster, that "Columbia is now seated in the forum of nations, and the
empires of the world are amazed at the bright effulgence of her
glory." But it is interesting to observe, also, that at eighteen, not
less fervently than at forty-eight, he felt the importance of the
message with which he was charged to the American people,--the
necessity of the Union, and the value of the Constitution as the
uniting bond. The following passage has, perhaps, more in it of the
Webster of 1830 than any other in the oration. The reader will notice
the similarity between one part of it and the famous passage in the
Bunker Hill oration,