Browse archives: 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | 1997 | 1996 | 1995

Published on 07/07/1999 All articles from this issue

Our patriotic forefathers

printer friendly version

By Mary Cristy

A View from the Hills

Among our American patriots I find Scotsman John Paul Jones, Captain of the Bon Homme Richard, enjoined in battle with a fleet of British merchant ships off the coast of England on September 23, l779.

With his ship battered, burning, his dead and wounded lying all about him, Jones was called to surrender by British Captain Pearson of the Serapis, whose ship had absorbed broadsides, from the Americans. Jones' defiant, "I have not yet begun to fight!" would echo in the hearts of generations to come. In the end, it was the British who struck their colors and Jones who was lauded in an epic poem.

The hero sank into impoverished middle age in cheap Paris lodgings. By l790, Gouverneur Morris, America's Minister to France, would comment "Paul Jones calls on me. He has nothing to say, but is so kind as to bestow on me all the hours which hang so heavy on his hands."

The neglected hero expired at age 45 of pneumonia, but his glory is written in the stars.

A happier fate was granted patriot-statesman-lawyer-orator Patrick Henry who became one of the one hundred largest property owners in Virginia.

In l799, Henry died at his Red Hill, Charlotte County estate too soon to take office as a Federalist at Virginia House, a post for which George Washington had urged him to stand.

Thirty-five years earlier, the young Patrick Henry stood boldly in Virginia House to oppose King George's Stamp Act. Henry's blazing oration drew citizens from miles around, and twenty-two-year-old Tom Jefferson was one who elbowed to the doorway of Virginia's House of Burgesses to listen.

To cries of "treason" hurled at him by the timid, Henry snapped, "If this be treason, make the most of it!"

Henry had many fine moments, but none more definitive than his fiery speech in Richmond, Virginia's St. John's church. On that warm 23rd of March, Henry delivered an impassioned plea for rebellion. He stood tall and proud. His voice rang out the open windows as he stretched his arms up and shouted, "I know not what course others may take, but as for me...give me liberty, or

give me death."

Awed silence! Then, a call to arms, and a resolve to create a militia in every county. "Liberty or death" echoed through the colonies, and would ring through the ages.

Patriot Nathan Hale's most memorable words were his last before the British dispatched him in what has been called "a most unfeeling manner, and by as great a savage as ever disgraced humanity." He was refused a clergyman and was even denied the solace of a Bible. Letters to his mother and sister were destroyed so that "the rebels shouldn't know they had a man in their army who could die with such firmness."

Hale had spied on the British for intelligence George Washington needed to gauge the enemy's strength. The man who risked everything for his country out of duty and love faced his executioners and lamented, "I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country."

There were others, like silversmith Paul Revere, whose midnight ride "to spread the alarm, through every Middlesex village and farm," to alert the populace in l775 when the British were coming, was immortalized in a poem by Longfellow that every child learned in grade school.

And then there was Benjamin Franklin, whose rather ugly little verse "How To Be Remembered," lives on.

"If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing."

Our founders were an eloquent lot, sufficiently endowed to combine memorable words and deeds in defense of their precious liberty.

July seems an appropriate month to remember and reflect upon them.