A BIT OF HISTORY
©
SARAH BECKER
July 4th:
Why We Celebrate
In 1837 Michigan was admitted as a free state, the Union’s 26th state. Texas, a slave-holding republic was denied annexation. The Panic of 1837 began: banks failed, a depression followed, and the price of cotton plummeted. Lawyer Abraham Lincoln was admitted to the Illinois Bar, Martin Van Buren [D-NY] became the 8th U.S. President, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated his Hymn: Sung at the July 4th Completion of the Concord, Massachusetts, Monument. The Monument immortalizes Paul Revere’s midnight ride, the settlers April 19, 1775, resistance to oncoming British forces. The fighting covered 16 miles and included 4,000+ colonials: 1,700 British regulars. Concord, a Puritan settlement established in 1635, was the first Massachusetts community to protest Parliament’s March 31, 1774, Coercive Acts. Independence Day, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary: “July 4, celebrated in the United States to commemorate the adoption in 1776 of the Declaration of Independence.” “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them…. [W]hen a long train of abuses and 8 July 2022
Edward Stabler
Ralph Waldo Emerson
usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security….” Independent, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary: “Not governed by a foreign power.” “By the rude bridge that arched the flood,/ Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,/ Here once the embattled farmers stood,/ And fired the shot heard round the world,” Emerson’s Hymn begins. “The foe long since in silence slept;/ Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept/ Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream,/ We set to-day a votive stone;/
Volodymyr Zelensky
That memory may their deed redeem,/ When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit, that made those heroes dare/ To die, and leave their children free,/ Bid Time and Nature gently spare/ The shaft we raise to them and thee.” Poet, essayist, and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803, the fourth child of William, a Unitarian minister, and Ruth Emerson. He spent his early life in Boston and entered Harvard College in 1817. Ten years later Emerson, a student of theology was spiritually adrift. Quaker minister and Alexandria apothecary Edward Stabler consoled Emerson when they coincidentally conversed aboard a north-bound steamboat. Emerson, 34 years Stabler’s junior, remembered him as a God-taught teacher. “It was said of Jesus that
‘he taught as one having authority,’” Emerson noted. “There are a few people in every age, I suppose, who teach thus. [Edward] Stabler, the [Hicksite] Quaker, whom I saw on board the boat in the Delaware Bay, was one.” Stabler died four years after their 1827 encounter. At his death, in 1831, the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of [Quaker] Friends remembered Stabler as: “Endowed by nature with a clear, comprehensive, and discriminating mind…one [whose ministerial] object was, to impress the minds of his hearers with the importance of examining things for themselves…[to distinguish] between good and evil…[to believe] that the one always blesses, and the other as uniformly torments….” “I refer now to…the scattered company who have ministered to my highest wants,” Emerson recalled on May 19, 1836. “Edward Stabler, Peter Hunt…A.B. Alcott, even [Achille] Murat has a claim,—a strange class, plain & wise…They are the argument for the spiritual world for their spirit is it.” “The reason why the world lacks unity—lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself,” Emerson wrote. Waldo believed “in the strength of nature and
A BIT OF HISTORY > PAGE 9
Old Town Crier
