John L. Sibley, "The Washington
Elm" in The American Magazine of Useful & Entertaining
Knowledge (1837), Volume 3, p. 432.
THE WASHINGTON ELM
The Washington Elm stands in the westerly corner of the large
common near Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts;
and is probably one of the trees that belonged to the native
forest. Amid the changes which have taken place in the world,
and particularly in America and New England, it has stood
like a watchman; and if it could speak, it would be an interesting
chronicler of events. The early settlers of this country had
hardly finished their rude loghouses before they proposed
to make the village in which it stands the metropolis of the
country; and but a few years elapsed before they laid the
foundation of Harvard University so near it that it may almost
be shaded by its branches. Not far from it was the spot where
the public town meetings were held; and also the tree under
which the Indian council fires were lighted, more than two
hundred years ago. When the drum was used in Cambridge, instead
of the bell, to summon the congregation to the place of worship,
or to give warning of a savage enemy, the sound floated throughout
its trailing limbs; and when the officers of the college discharged
the duty of inflicting corporal punishment on young men with
their own hands, who knows but their lugubrious lamentations
may have mingled with the breezes that disturbed its foliage?
Of how many college sports and tricks might it tell; such
deeds, too, as no one who had not been educated in the halls
of Old Harvard would ever have dreamed of? Among the graver
subjects of which it might make report are the lessons of
truth and piety which fell from the lips of Whitfield, when
he stood in its shad a moved a vast multitude by his eloquence.
And subsequently, it seems, it has been heralding war and
liberty; for the revolutionary soldiers who stood shoulder
to shoulder,--blessings be on their head,--tell us that when
Washington arrived at Cambridge, he drew his sword as commander-in-chief
of the American army, for the first time, beneath its boughs,
and resolved within himself that it should never be sheated
till the liberties of his country were established. Glorious
old tree, that hast stood in sight of the smoke of Lexington
and Bunker's Hill battles, and weathered the storms of many
generations,--worthy of reverence. Though, in the spirit of
modern improvement, guideboards may be nailed to thy trunk,
thou pointest to the past and to the future. All around are
scattered memorials of what has been. Generations of men have
died and been buried, and soldiers of the revolution sleep
near thee. Thou lookest down upon monuments in the churchyard,
robbed of their leaden armorial bearings that they might be
converted into musket balls in the day of our national poverty
and struggle; and the old spikes still fastened into the beams
of Massachusetts Hall tell of suspended hammocks where the
weary soldier took his rest. Across the river, where one Blackstone
lived, and where Governor Winthrop took up his residence,
because he found a good spring of water there, the forest
has been cut away, the Indian wigwam has disappeared, and
a city grown up, containing more than 80,000 inhabitants,
whose sails whiten every sea, whose merchants are princes,
and whose traffickers are thy honorable of the earth. May
no unkind hand mar the last tree of the native forest. Though
it may have stood century after century, like a sentinel on
duty, defying the lightning and the storm, still let it stand,
and interesting and sacred memorial of the past and the present,
and continue to be associated, for many years to come, with
the history of our country. And let the illustrious name which
it bears, and which it derives from one of the most important
events in the life of the Father of his country, preserve
it to remind the coming generations of his invaluable services
and labors.
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