THE GROTON HEIGHTS LESSON. (From Address delivered September 6, 1879.) Two facts, illustrated to the eye, must be held as characteristic of the State of Connecticut in its relation to the War of Inde pendence. The first is, that bloodiest and most atrocious deed of all the war, which is commemorated by the lofty obelisk beside us. The other is, that this should be the only battlemonument within the State, and the State itself without battlefields of later date than the war with the Pequot savages, if we except the skirmish at Danbury, in 1777, and the invasion of New Haven, in 1779. These instances are the only ones in the history of two hundred years in which an armed force of an enemy remained over-night upon her soil. In Connecticut there never was a revolutionary war! She entered the struggle for independence complete, with her governor, and council, and the whole machinery of the colonial government. In other colonies there was more or less revolution. We, in Connecticut, fought, not for the achieving of new liberties, but for the defence of the old.. ... As early as 1778, Governor Trumbull wrote to the Tory Tryon, "The barbarous inhumanity which has marked the prosecution of the war on your part, the insolence which displays itself on every petty advantage, and the cruelties exercised on those whom the fortune of war has thrown into your hands, are inseparable bars to the very idea of any peace with Great Britain on any other conditions than the most perfect and absolute independence." At length it seemed that History had completed her dramatic preparations, and that the curtain was ready to rise upon such a scene of slaughter. Arnold, once the most brilliant officer in the Continental service, was a traitor in disgrace, fleeing from the sight of honorable and patriotic men and loathed by those who had bought him and were ready to use him on the base business, unworthy of the name of war, to which they had now resolved to stoop. Only a brief rehearsal of his part, by the burning of Richmond and the devastation of other parts of Virginia, and Arnold was ready, one year from the date of his treason, to disembark, in the bright daylight of the morning of September 6, 1781, with his band of foreign incendiaries and assassins, take his stand on the tomb of the Winthrops, and direct the destruction of the town and the slaughter of his fellow-citizens and neighbors. There is a curious superficial resemblance to be observed between the battle of Groton Heights and the battle of Bunker Hill. In each case there was the storming of a hill-top fort by a vastly superior force of regular troops, against a scanty garrison of untrained militia. In each case the successful storm was accompanied by burning the neighboring town. In each case the military event is commemorated by a granite obelisk, and the memory of it is cherished proudly as more precious than the memory of many victories. Even as the brave fighting of the farmers of Bunker Hill committed the people to the commencement of the war, so the more heroic suffering and dying of the martyrs of Groton Heights made it thenceforth impossible to think of compromises and concessions, which the British government had been offering to the American people on condition of their renewed allegiance. After the death of Ledyard and his neighbors there could be no end of the war but in victory. The victory was not far away, indeed, for the glory of Yorktown was nigh at hand. But there was need, nevertheless, for the horror of Groton Heights. The blood of all these martyrs was not spilled in vain! . . . O fellow-citizens of Connecticut, and especially men of Groton, children of these martyred heroes, be proud of the stock from which you are descended-proud, with that worthy and honest pride which shall lead you to emulate the virtues of the race from which you are sprung! You do well to build your schoolhouse in the shadow of this lofty obelisk, and to let this arena of the bloody struggle be trodden, year by year, in the happy sports of boys and girls. But think what a shame it would be before the world if the children of such ancestors should prove recreant to their glorious name! Think what a legacy of glory and ennobling responsibility has come down to you, to be kept and handed down, unimpaired and enhanced, to your children after you! "Guard well your trust,— The faith that dared the sea, Their garnered dust." LEONARD WOOLSEY BACON. * THE YORKTOWN MONUMENT BEGUN. (Extract from Centennial Address, October 18, 1881.) YES, it is mine, and somewhat peculiarly mine, perhaps, notwithstanding the presence of the official representatives of my native State, to bear the greetings of Plymouth Rock to Jamestown; of Bunker Hill to Yorktown; of Boston, recovered from the British forces in '76, to Mount Vernon, the home in life and death of her illustrious Deliverer; and there is no office within the gift of Congresses, Presidents, or People, which I could discharge more cordially and fervently. . . . Our earliest and our latest acknowledgments are due this day to France for the inestimable services which gave us the crowning victory of the 19th of October, 1781. It matters not for us to speculate now whether American independence might not have been ultimately achieved without her aid. We all know that, God willing, such a consummation was certain in the end, as to-morrow's sunrise, and that no earthly potentates or powers, single or conjoined, could have carried us back into a permanent condition of colonial dependence and subjugation. Nor need we be curious to inquire into any special inducements which France may have had to intervene thus nobly in our behalf. Nearly two years before the treaties of Franklin were negotiated and signed, the young Lafayette, then but nineteen years of age, a captain of French dragoons, stationed at Metz, at a dinner given by the commandant of the garrison to the Duke of Gloucester, a brother of George III., happened to hear the tidings of our Declaration of Independence, which had reached the duke that very day from London. It formed the subject of animated and excited conversation, in which the enthusiastic young soldier took part, and before he had left the table an inextinguishable spark had been struck and kindled in his breast, and his whole heart was on fire in the cause of American liberty. Regardless of the remonstrances of his friends, of the ministry, and of the king himself, in spite of every discouragement and obstacle, he soon tears himself away from a young and lovely wife, leaps on board a vessel which he had provided for himself, braves the perils of a voyage across the Atlantic, then swarming with cruisers, reaches Philadelphia by way of Charleston, South Carolina, and so wins at once the regard and confidence of the Continental Congress by his avowed desire to risk his life in our service, at his own expense, without pay or allowance of any sort, that, on the 31st of July, 1777, before he was yet quite twenty years of age, he was commissioned a major-general in the army of the United States. It is hardly too much to say that from that dinner at Metz, and that 31st of July, in Philadelphia, may be dated the train of influences and events which culminated four years afterwards in the surrender of Cornwallis to the allied forces of America and France. Presented to our great Virginian commander-inchief a few days only after his commission was voted by Congress, an intimacy, a friendship, an affection grew up between them almost at sight. Invited to become a member of his military family, and treated with the tenderness of a son, Lafayette is henceforth to be not only the beloved and trusted associate of Washington, but a living tie between his native and his almost adopted country. Returning to France in January, 1779, after eighteen months of brave and valuable service here, during which he had been wounded at Brandywine, had exhibited signal gallantry and skill at Monmouth, and had received the thanks of Congress for important services in Rhode Island, he was now in the way of appealing personally to the French ministry to send an army and fleet to our assistance. He did appeal; and the zeal and force of his arguments at length prevailed. The young marquis, to whom alone the decision of the king was received, hastens back with eager joy to announce the glad tidings to Washington, and to arrange with him for the reception and employment of the auxiliary forces. Accordingly, on the 10th of July, 1780, a squadron of the ships of war brings Rochambeau with six thousand French troops into the harbor of Newport, with instructions "to act under Washington, and live with the American officers as their brethren," and the American officers are forthwith desired by Washington, in General Orders,-"to wear white and black cockades as a symbol of affection for their allies." Nearly a full year, however, was to elapse before the rich fruits of that alliance were to be developed,-a year of the greatest discouragement and gloom for the American cause. The war on our side seemed languishing. As late as the 9th of April, 1781, Washington wrote to Colonel John Laurens, who had gone on a special mission to Paris, "If France delays a timely and powerful aid in the critical juncture of our affairs, it will avail us nothing should she attempt it hereafter. We are at this hour suspended in the balance. In a word, we are at the end of our tether, and now or never our deliverance must come." God's holy name be praised, deliverance was to come, and did come, now! On the 3d of September, 1781, the united armies reached Philadelphia, where, Congress being in session, the French army "paid it the honors which the king had ordered us to pay," as we are told in the journal of the gallant Count William de Deux Ponts. . . . On the 19th of October the articles were signed by which the garrisons of York and Gloucester, together with all the officers and seamen of the British ships in the Chesapeake, "surrender themselves prisoners of war to the combined forces of America and France." ... ROBERT CHARLES WINTHROP. THE YORKTOWN LESSON. (Closing passage from Centennial Address, October 18, 1881.) FELLOW-CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES,— Citizens of the old Thirteen of the Revolution, and citizens of the new Twenty-five, whose stars are now glittering with no inferior lustre in our glorious galaxy,-yes, and Citizens of the still other States which I dare not attempt to number, but which are destined at no distant period to be evolved from our imperial Texas and Territories,-I hail you all as brothers today, and call upon you all, as you advance in successive generations, to stand fast in the faith of the fathers, and to uphold and maintain unimpaired the matchless institutions which are now ours! "You are the advanced guard of the human race; you have the future of the world," said Madame de Staël to a distinguished American, recalling with pride what France had done for us at Yorktown. Let us lift ourselves to a full sense |