BRECKINRIDGE COUNTY.



Colonies must unite all their forces, or the battle was lost.
Thirteen Colonies had taken root. The colonists had be-
come acclimated in the highest and broadest sense of that
word. They had become countrymen of each other in the
holy sense of that ennobling thought: sons of a common
land, brothers sprung from a common womb, joint heirs of
a common heritage. That heritage was not only of hill and
dale, of mountain fastness and outreaching prairie, of the
rushing river and the shore on which crawled the creeping
ocean tide, but was of the chartered rights and the tradi-
tional liberties of English colonists and the inalienable free-
dom of men. All that belonged to men as men, all that
was the birthright of Englishmen, and all the added rights
of American colonists, formed part of this common weal.
The fierce foes of the forests-nay, the forests themselves-
were enough to appal any but the stoutest heart. The con-
tests with the French had added to the dangers of the long
probationary struggle.
  And it was indeed a sad fate which brought these weak
thirteen Colonies face to face with that dread alternative'-
submission to civil and political serfdom, or the unknown
contingencies of such a struggle. Our fathers were clear-
sighted and wise, as well as brave and free. They saw the
immense dangers of success, as well as the great evils of a
most possible defeat. They realized the immense difficulties
that success would bring, and the sad consequences which
defeat would entail. It was in no blind, haphazard passion,
no thoughtless, dare-devil recklessness, that our Revolution-
ary sires met these appalling duties.
  They knew that if the Colonies secured independence from
English domination, the dangers and difficulties to be met
and surmounted were of the very gravest and most alarming
nature, and were of every possible kind-physical, political,
financial. The entire population of thet thirteen Colonies
was less than three million, scattered from the frozen edge
of Canada to where the magnolia fins the night with fra-



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