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History of Orange County
Towns of Goshen, Hamptonburgh and Chester
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Address of Gen. Hathorn on laying the Corner Stone of the Monument.
At the end of three and forty years, we have assembled to perform the sad rites of sepulture to the bones of our countrymen and kindred. But these alone are not sufficient: policy has united with the gratitude of nations in erecting some memorial of the virtues of those, who died in defending their country. Monuments to the brave are mementoes to their descendents: the honors they record are stars to the patriot in the path of glory.
Beneath the mausoleum whose foundation we now lay, repose all that was earthly of patriots and heroes. This honor has been long their due, but circumstances, which it is unnecessary for me to recount, have prevented an earlier display of the gratitude of their country. Having commanded on that melancholy occasion, which bereft the nation of so many of its brightest ornaments-having been the companion of their sufferings in a pathless desert, and a witness of their valor against a savage foe of superior numbers, I approach the duty assigned me with mingled feelings of sadness and pleasure.
May this monument endure with the liberties of our country: when they perish, this land will be no longer worthy to bold within its bosom the consecrated bones of its heroes.
Address of Dr. Wilson.
Forty-three years ago this day and at this very hour of the day, the brave men, whose bones are enclosed in these coffins, were not only hazarding, but sacrificing their lives for the protection of their wives, their children, their homes, and their country. You have before you, fellow citizens, the remains of some of those heroes, whose blood paid the price of our freedom and independence; for they fell in battle at that period, when this nation, through perils the most tremendous, was struggling into existence-at a time when an old and gigantic monarchy in the true spirit of despotic power, was putting forth all her energies, to hold us in a state of vassalage and destroy forever the cause of liberty, at the moment of its dawn on the New World. But I do not now recount the deeds of valor, nor the counsels of wisdom, which were made the means of procuring for our country all the blessings, which she now enjoys in such profusion. On this topic a thousand tongues were eloquent, on the late anniversary of our Independence.- Nor do I now call your attention to the benign providential administration of “the Prince of the kings of the earth,” whose arm wrought for us deliverance; though an ample theme, that well deserves to occupy more of the public attention, and to awaken more gratitude, in the celebration of our great national festival.
There is one feature of the policy of our enemy, in managing her most unjust and unnatural warfare against us, which merits special notice, as immediately connected with the disastrous event over which we are called to mourn-I mean her more than inhuman employment of the tomahawk and scalping knife of the savages to butcher our peaceful citizens-a policy which stains forever the pride of British glory. In ancient times when war was waged against any nation, hoary age, women and children were equally the objects of its destructive fury with the warrior in the field of battle. This cruel feature of war has been softened, or rather obliterated, by the progress of civilization; and by the common consent of civilized nations, the soldier in arms only is the object of attack, while the unarmed citizen of every class remains unmolested--a law of nations which divests war of more than half its horrors. But this amelioration in the laws of war has not reached the savages of our wilderness who spare no age nor sex-all are the subjects of their indiscriminate butchery. Their tomahawk sinks into the head of the sacking child, while reeking with the blood of the mother. Such was the warfare to which the British cabinet allied itself, “shaking hands with the savage scalping knife and tomahawk.” Notwithstanding the loud remonstrance of its most enlightened statesmen, the parliament of Great Britain employed the savage hordes to murder in cold blood, the unoffending women and children of our western frontiers. All that the most sanguinary tyrant could have desired, did the savage allies of our enemy perpetrate. The blood of murdered thousands yet cries for vengeance upon the British throne. Who can imagine, much less recount, the terrors and sufferings of our western people, while the Indian tomahawk, was raised over theft heads, or bathed in their blood? Yet, I see the pillars of smoke ascend from their burning cottages, along our western border from the plains of Kentucky to the Mountains of Minisink-the flames of their houses glaring on the darkness of midnight, and hear the screams of women and children, awaked from their slumbers by the blaze of their dwellings, and the warhoop of the savage. Ye all this was more than realized.
One chieftan was distinguished above all others in this murderous carnage-I mean Col. Joseph Brandt. His father was a German and his mother a Mohawk Indian."* He was, at an early age, placed in Dartmouth college, where he received many kind attentions, and possessing no ordinary powers, acquired a good education; and thus he was dandled on the knees, and sucked the breast of that country, whose sons and daughters, he was by British cruelty, commissioned to massacre. Early in the Revolutionary war, he received from George III, a colonel's commission, appointing him to the command of the six nations, in the northern and western parts of New York. It is he who is styled by Campbell, in a note to his “Gertrude of Wyoming,” “The monster Brandt,” and who was a leader in the dreadful massacre, which desolate, the blooming fields of fair Wyoming in the autumn of 1778. The ferocity of his savage nature was not tamed by education-in him, the blood of the barbarian extinguished every spark of civilization, that might have been kindled in his constitution. He was more cunning than the fox, and fiercer than the tiger.
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*Those American soldiers who saw Brandt in the time of the Revolutionary war, think he was not a half blood. But Gordon, Marshall and Campbell all represent him as such; and he was certainly recognized after the peace, as a relative, by the descendents of Sir William Jonson, in Schenectady.