piety, of justice, of honor, of benevolence, with which from his
earliest infancy he had hitherto walked through life, in the
presence of all his brethren; a spear, studded with the self-evident
truths of the Declaration of Independence; a sword, the same with
which he had led the armies of his country through the war of
freedom to the summit of the triumphal arch of independence; a
corslet and cuishes of long experience and habitual intercourse in
peace and war with the world of mankind, his contemporaries of the
human race, in all their stages of civilization; and, last of all,
the Constitution of the United States, a shield, embossed by
heavenly hands with the future history of his country.

Yes, gentlemen, on that shield the Constitution of the United States
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