was
sculptured (by forms unseen, and in characters then invisible to mortal
eye), the predestined and prophetic history of the one confederated
people of the North American Union.

They had been the settlers of thirteen separate and distinct English
colonies, along the margin of the shore of the North American Continent;
contiguously situated, but chartered by adventurers of characters
variously diversified, including sectarians, religious and political, of
all the classes which for the two preceding centuries had agitated
and divided the people of the British islands--and with them were
intermingled the descendants of Hollanders, Swedes, Germans, and French
fugitives from the persecution of the revoker of the Edict of Nantes.

In the bosoms of this people, thus heterogeneously composed, there was
burning, kindled at different furnaces, but all furnaces of affliction,
one clear, steady flame of liberty. Bold and daring enterprise, stubborn
endurance of privation, unflinching intrepidity in facing danger,
and inflexible adherence to conscientious principle, had steeled to
energetic and unyielding hardihood the characters of the primitive
settlers of all these colonies. Since that time two or three generations
of men had passed away, but they had increased and multiplied with
unexampled rapidity; and the land itself had been the recent theatre of
a ferocious and bloody seven years' war between the two most powerful
and most civilized nations of Europe contending for the possession of
this continent.

Of that strife the victorious combatant had been Britain. She had
conquered the provinces of France. She had expelled her rival totally
from the continent, over which, bounding herself by the Mississippi, she
was thenceforth to hold divided empire only with Spain. She had acquired
undisputed control over the Indian tribes still tenanting the forests
unexplored by the European man. She had established an uncontested
monopoly of the commerce of all her colonies. But forgetting all the
warnings of preceding ages--forgetting the lessons written in the blood
of her own children, through centuries of departed time--she undertook
to tax the people of the colonies without their consent.

Resistance, instantaneous, unconcerted, sympathetic, inflexible
resistance, like an electric shock, startled and roused the people of
all the English colonies on this continent.

This was the first signal of the North American Union. The struggl