The Gazette

Monday, June 11, 1798.

Citizens of the United States.

POLITICS.

If ever there was a time when union was necessary to the preservation [of liberty], it now exists. Menaced with subjugation by the dawn of aggrandizement, and whose arrogance in this instance is unparalleled in history, it behoves you as Americans to rally round that standard which you erected, and which with your blood you must maintain. The only hopes of your enemies are in divisions and dissensions among yourselves, which they encourage, think they have already excited, and which they are by all possible means endeavouring to foment: But your ardor in the cause of the independence of your country, will, I am confident, soon undeceive them, & convince them that although you can be grateful for benefactions, and remember services while you suppose them to proceed from pure and disinterested motives; yet when you are satisfied that those very services were levelled at your own independence, by wresting you from the arms of Britain, merely to bring you within those of your pretended benefactors; you will not be lulled into a fatal delusion. but rise with the spirit of '76; and if you must be slaves, make at least one united struggle to be free. Suffer not to be said, the sons of America deserve not to be free, for they are incapable of maintaining their independence: but rather let it be said, in so little estimation do Americans hold their blood, when put in competition with their freedom, that rather than suffer the smallest portion of it to be sacrificed they would most cheerfully consent to the effusion of every drop in the defence of their country.

Form yourselves, fellow citizens, into a firm, a determined phalanx, steadfastly resolving to crush any thing like opposition to those measures which alone can secure to you those invaluable rights which, if firm and united, you can never be deprived of, but which France is by all possible means endeavoring to undermine. Not only unite in this grand cause, but on all public occasions effectually proclaim your unanimity, and hold up to detestation those characters who even wish to impair it. By this means you will convince France that her hope of destroying [America] by disuniting you, is perfectly fallacious, and that neither she, nor any other nation upon earth, need ever, for one moment, entertain the idea, that to divide the Americans upon the great and glorious cause of their freedom and independence, is even within the verge of remotest possibility.

BRUTUS.