Our New
Calamities Being Shared Equally By All, Will Become Lighter; Our
Mutual Affection For Each Other, Will In This
Great transmutation
become the strongest link of our new society, will afford us every
joy we can receive on a
Foreign soil, and preserve us in unity, as
the gravity and coherency of matter prevents the world from
dissolution. Blame me not, it would be cruel in you, it would beside
be entirely useless; for when you receive this we shall be on the
wing. When we think all hopes are gone, must we, like poor
pusillanimous wretches, despair and die? No; I perceive before me a
few resources, though through many dangers, which I will explain to
you hereafter. It is not, believe me, a disappointed ambition which
leads me to take this step, it is the bitterness of my situation, it
is the impossibility of knowing what better measure to adopt: my
education fitted me for nothing more than the most simple
occupations of life; I am but a feller of trees, a cultivator of
land, the most honourable title an American can have. I have no
exploits, no discoveries, no inventions to boast of; I have cleared
about 370 acres of land, some for the plough, some for the scythe;
and this has occupied many years of my life. I have never possessed,
or wish to possess anything more than what could be earned or
produced by the united industry of my family. I wanted nothing more
than to live at home independent and tranquil, and to teach my
children how to provide the means of a future ample subsistence,
founded on labour, like that of their father, This is the career of
life I have pursued, and that which I had marked out for them and
for which they seemed to be so well calculated by their
inclinations, and by their constitutions. But now these pleasing
expectations are gone, we must abandon the accumulated industry of
nineteen years, we must fly we hardly know whither, through the most
impervious paths, and become members of a new and strange community.
Oh, virtue! is this all the reward thou hast to confer on thy
votaries? Either thou art only a chimera, or thou art a timid
useless being; soon affrighted, when ambition, thy great adversary,
dictates, when war re-echoes the dreadful sounds, and poor helpless
individuals are mowed down by its cruel reapers like useless grass.
I have at all times generously relieved what few distressed people I
have met with; I have encouraged the industrious; my house has
always been opened to travellers; I have not lost a month in illness
since I have been a man; I have caused upwards of an hundred and
twenty families to remove hither. Many of them I have led by the
hand in the days of their first trial; distant as I am from any
places of worship or school of education, I have been the pastor of
my family, and the teacher of many of my neighbours.
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