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An Oration Delivered Before The Republicans Of Portland, July The Fourth 1817, Ashure Ware

Maine Bicentennial

Fifty-three years before the Fourth of July was established as a national holiday by the United States Congress, Judge Ashur Ware expressed before a political gathering in Portland, Maine, that the holiday was "the only day marked in our callendar as a national festival, and this not by the authority of the government, but by the voluntary act of a free people..."

Ware states: "The minions of despotism, the pimps and parasites and panders of kings are always ready to decry liberty; and recent events in Europe have quickened the general feeling of hostility to every form of freedom into …