Sign up to receive email notices of recent acquisitions.
Government Corrupted by Vice, and Recovered by Righteousness. : A sermon preached before the honorable Congress of the colony of the Massachusetts-Bay in New England, assembled at Watertown, on Wednesday the 31st day of May, 1775. Being the anniversary fixed by charter for the election of counselors.
Watertown [Mass.]: Printed and sold by Benjamin Edes, 1775. 16mo, disbound from sammelband, lacking half-title. [3]–29 pp. CONDITION: Good, old stab holes and remnant of sammelband binding at spine. An election sermon preached by Samuel Langdon, Congregational minister and president of Harvard College, before the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts on May 31, 1775, shortly after the Battles of Lexington and Concord. Following the battles, the Congress relocated from Concord to Watertown, just outside Boston, where they remained from April to July that year. Langdon was an ardent patriot and his sermon is filled with fiery rhetoric against British tyranny and taxation. He mentions Lexington and Concord, noting that the British fired first and had occupied Boston. He likewise addresses the dissolution of the previous form of civil government under the Massachusetts colonial charter and the British Parliament, and praises the means by which the American people have preserved order in the midst of chaos: "...they have so universally adopted the method of managing the important matters necessary to preserve among them a free government, by corresponding committees and congresses, consisting of the wisest and most disinterested patriots of America, chosen by the unbiased suffrages of the people assembled for that purpose. So general agreement, thro' so many provinces of so large a country, in one mode of self preservation, is unexampled in any history: and the effect has exceeded our most sanguine expectations." A resonant Revolutionary War era sermon, delivered in the wake of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. REFERENCES: Evans 14145.
Item #7635
Sold