The New Hampshire Gazette

At the anniversary celebration of the 4th inst. Samuel Haines, Esq. prefaced the reading of the Declaration of Independence with the following appropriate observations:

Fellow Citizens,

Before the oration is pronounced, your attention is invited to the reading of the Declaration of Independence—that sacred charter of the rights of man, which the magnanimous sages of the revolution, three and thirty years ago, this day, ventured to usher into the world, amid the angry thunders of British vengeance.

This was a new and momentous period in the history of civilized nations: It was an occasion, that called for the most intrepid fortitude, and the sublimest energies of human nature:—It was the awful and solemn crisis, which was to decide, for centuries, the fate of injured America.—Death or victory were the eventful pivots of concealed destiny; and none but the inflexible and heaven-guided heirs of republican freedom dar'd commence the adventurous experiment!—As liberty or slavery was the only alternative involved in the sovereign decree and valiant determination of the colonial Congress, death and the soldier's grave in the field of honor, were preferred to an eternal existence in a world of this butary bondage.

The deliberate and righteous manifesto, which makes this day forever memorable in the splendid annals of American glory, was announced to anxious millions by that veteran band of republican philanthropists, whose achievements their grateful children annually so much delight to enumerate and applaud;—It spread its animating and patriotick influence, with electric celerity, throughout an oppressed continent, and bade the celestial genius of liberty, "ride in the whirlwind" of Columbia's fate and "direct" the maddening "storm of war."

We, therefore, who are reposing under the fragrant laurels of the revolution, are again called by the voice of reciprocal joy and gratitude to eulogize this glorious event, and once more recite the cause of it to the rising generation.

In looking back through the medium of imagination to the eventful 4th of July 1776, we behold the venerable and immortal fathers of American Independence commencing the arduous work of abolishing that system of British tyranny and oppression, whose insufferable accumulation and pressure called aloud for immediate retaliation and resistance. We view them defying, with the native intrepidity of injured and insulted freemen, every obstacle to the emancipation of their country, and laying, amidst the greatest dangers, the broad, and we hope, the imperishable foundations of our magnificent Republic. And as an eternal testimony of the justice of their cause and rectitude of their intentions, after expressing their reliance, for the success of their momentous undertaking, on the aid and approbation of omniscient Jehovah, the American Congress proclaimed to the universe, in the solemn language of this sacred Instrument, the numerous and just causes, which then impelled them to take up arms against the parent empire; and then pronounced, with a divine energy, the British colonies in America "free, sovereign and independent States," resolving, before they sheathed the sword, to establish the freedom of their country or gloriously perish in the conflict.