that on the night preceding the day of which you now commemorate the
fiftieth anniversary--on the night preceding that thirtieth of
April, 1789, when from the balcony of your city hall the chancellor
of the State of New York administered to George Washington the
solemn oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the
United States, and to the best of his ability to preserve, protect,
and defend the Constitution of the United States--that in the
visions of the night the guardian angel of the Father of our country
had appeared before him, in the venerated form of his mother, and,
to cheer and encourage him in the performance of the momentous and
solemn duties that he was about to assume, had delivered to him a
suit of celestial armor--a helmet, consisting of the principles of
piety, of justice, of honor, of benevolence, with which from his
earliest infancy he had hitherto walked through life, in the
presence of all his brethren; a spear, studded with the self-evident
truths of the Declaration of Independence; a sword, the same with
which he had led the armies of his country through the war of
freedom to the summit of the triumphal arch of independence; a
corslet and cuishes of long experience and habitual intercourse in
peace and war with the world of mankind, his contemporaries of the
human race, in all their stages of civilization; and, last of all,
the Constitution of the United States, a shield, embossed by
heavenly hands with the future history of his country.

Yes, gentlemen, on that shield the Constitution of the United States
was sculptured (by forms unseen, and in characters then invisible to
mortal eye), the predestined and prophetic history of the one
confederated people of the North American Union.

They had been the settlers of thirteen separate and distinct English