In the war of the American Revolution, three-fourths of the battles were gained by the British. They not only took the city of Charleston, but every other seaport, and almost every town in America. They marched through South Carolina, precisely as Sherman is doing now; they drove Marion and Sumter into the swamps; they marched into North Carolina, compelling our forefathers to fly to the Virginia woods, and then returned to Wilmington. They had every colony down; "gobbled up" Richmond and Petersburg; galloped through Charlottesville, and chased Jefferson to Carter's mountain. They held New York and other Northern cities; scattered the American armies like chaff, and considered the rebellion as crushed a hundred times. They had the most powerful empire of the world at their back; they had the aid of armed tories in every county; they excited the blacks to insurrection, and let loose the scalping-knife of the Indian upon the rebels.--With all our troubles, we have so far escaped the most terrible woe of the Revolution — neighbors fighting each other, and the Indian war-whoop rousing helpless families from their slumbers and devoting women and children to the most cruel and horrible death. With all this, the Revolutionary rebels had a currency of eight hundred for one, and were overrun with extortioners and speculators, as well as negroes and Indians.
Moreover, there was at the head of the British kingdom a man from whom they could expect no possibility of compassion. Their lives and property might have been saved by submission, but submission George the Third was determined to have. It is no exaggeration to say that he was the most obstinate man that lived in that age. Mr. Lincoln has a pretty good idea of putting down his foot firmly, but Mr. Lincoln has no such foot as George the Third. A man of amiable disposition in private, exemplary in his domestic habits, his obstinacy in all that related to his kingly office, amounted to a mental disease. And of all his deep-rooted resolutions, that to keep America in subjection is said to have been his strongest propensity; during the contest, his whole soul was full of what he termed the "preservation of the empire." Rather than quit his hold over the provinces, or do what he called "submitting to be trampled on by his enemies," he threatened to abdicate. --This was the kind of antagonist our ancestors had to struggle with. Not much hope of deliverance from Indians, tories, negroes and redcoats while that old gentleman lived. And yet our forefathers had the faith to believe that the right would, in the end, prevail, and plucked the flowers of hope from the very jaws of despair. What is there in our condition as gloomy, as terrible, as protracted, as the long and dreary wilderness through which they marched to freedom and independence?
