506 ULMTJS AMERICANA. 
tians, tne same as if a man's body was to be divided into two parts. Taking 
up the parchment, he then presented it to the sachem who wore the horn in his 
chaplet, and desired him and the other sachems to preserve it carefully for three 
generations, that their children might know what had passed between them, 
when they were no longer living to repeat it. It is to be regretted that the 
speeches of the Indians on this memorable day, have not come down to us. It 
is only known that they solemnly pledged themselves, according to the manner 
of their country, to live in love with William Penn and his children as long as 
the sun and moon should endure. Thus ended this famous treaty of which 
more has been said in the way of praise, than of any other ever transmitted to 
posterity." To this may be added the concise eulogium of Voltaire, who pro- 
nounced it to be " the only treaty which was ratified without an oath, and the 
only one wjjich was never broken." 
The tree, under which the foregoing transaction took place, was long regarded 
by the Pennsylvanians with universal veneration. During the war of indepen- 
dence, General Simcoe, who commanded a British force at Kensington, when his 
soldiers were cutting down all the trees around them for fuel, placed a centinel 
under Penn's elm, to guard it from injury. In 1810, this tree was blown down 
in a gale of wind, when, on counting the annular rings, it proved to be two hun- 
dred and eighty-three years of age, having been one hundred and fifty-five years 
old at the time the treaty was signed. Shortly after this accident occurred, a 
large portion of the tree was conveyed to the seat of the representative of the Penn 
family, at Stoke, near Windsor, in England, where, it is said, it still remains in 
a state of complete preservation. 
LIBERTY TREES. 
(1 
" When people first thought of making Liberty a goddess," says Dr. Smith, 
and consecrating trees to her, we cannot say ; but, about the time when the 
troubles between the American colonies and the mother country commenced, there 
appears to have been laid, in England, an unpopular excise upon cider, and the 
sufferers under the act assembled near Honiton, in Devonshire, and appropriated 
an apple-tree as an altar at which they might sacrifice the image of the minister 
with whom the act originated. It was in imitation of this exhibition, that, we 
suppose, our revolutionary Liberty. Trees took their rise. The most famous 
were the ones at Boston, Providence, Newport and New York. It fell to the 
native elm to be selected for this purpose in America. That which was set apart 
in Boston, was a wide-spreading and beautiful tree, which stood in front of the 
house that now makes the corner of Essex and Washington streets,* opposite 
Boylston market. ***** Several other large elms grew in the vicinity, 
and our aged inhabitants remember the place by the name of the neighbourhood 
of the elm-trees. It was on the 14th of August, 1765, that this tree was devoted 
to the ' Sons of Liberty,' to expose on it the effigies of the men who had rendered 
themselves odious by their agency in procuring or favouring the passage of the 
Stamp Act ; and, on the 11th of September following, they fixed a copper plate, 
two feet and a half, by three feet and a half in dimensions upon it, bearing the 
inscription, in gold letters, the tree of liberty, Aug. 14, 1765. Ever after, most 
of the popular meetings of the 'Sons of Liberty' were held in the square round 
this tree. ***** The British made it an object of ridicule. The soldiers 
made poor Ditson, whom they tarred and feathered, parade in front of this tree, 
before they would let him go, and one of the greatest exploits during the siege 
was the felling of this famous eye-sore. This was effected about the last week 
* It was remarked by La Fayette, at the time he visited Boston, in 1824, that " The world should never 
forget the spot where once stood the Liberty Tree, so famous in your annals." 
