Mosaics of Grecian History Part 52

Goaded to desperation, rather than disheartened by their reverses and the remorseless cruelties of the Turks, the Greeks struggled bravely on, and during the year 1823 the results of the contest were generally in their favor. They often proved themselves worthy sons of those who fell

"In bleak Thermopylae's strait,"

or on the plains of Marathon. Their patriotic determination to be free, or die in the attempt, is happily reflected in the following lines by the poet CAMPBELL, whose heart beat in sympathy with their efforts for liberty.

Song of the Greeks.

Again to the battle, Achaians!

Our hearts bid the tyrants defiance!

Our land--the first garden of Liberty's tree-- It hath been, and shall yet be, the land of the free; For the Cross of our faith is replanted, The pale, dying crescent is daunted, And we march that the footprints of Mahomet's slaves May be washed out in blood from our forefathers' graves.

Their spirits are hovering o'er us, And the sword shall to glory restore us.

Ah! what though no succor advances, Nor Christendom's chivalrous lances Are stretched in our aid? Be the combat our own!

And we'll perish or conquer more proudly alone!

For we've sworn by our country's a.s.saulters, By the virgins they've dragged from our altars, By our ma.s.sacred patriots, our children in chains, By our heroes of old, and their blood in our veins, That, living, we shall be victorious, Or that, dying, our deaths shall be glorious!

A breath of submission we breathe not: The sword that we've drawn we will sheathe not; Its scabbard is left where our martyrs are laid, And the vengeance of ages has whetted its blade.

Earth may hide, waves ingulf, fire consume us; But they shall not to slavery doom us.

If they rule, it shall be o'er our ashes and graves: But we've smote them already with fire on the waves, And new triumphs on land are before us-- To the charge!--Heaven's banner is o'er us.

This day shall ye blush for its story, Or brighten your lives with its glory.

Our women--oh say, shall they shriek in despair, Or embrace us from conquest, with wreaths in their hair?

Accursed may his memory blacken, If a coward there be who would slacken Till we've trampled the turban, and shown ourselves worth Being sprung from, and named for, the G.o.dlike of earth.

Strike home! and the world shall revere us As heroes descended from heroes.

Old Greece lightens up with emotion!

Her inlands, her isles of the ocean, Fanes rebuilt, and fair towns, shall with jubilee ring, And the Nine shall new hallow their Helicon's spring.

Our hearths shall be kindled in gladness, That were cold and extinguished in sadness; While our maidens shall dance, with their white waving arms, Singing joy to the brave that delivered their charms, When the blood of yon Mussulman cravens Shall have crimsoned the beaks of our ravens!

AMERICAN SYMPATHY WITH GREECE.

The progress of events in 1822 and 1823 made friends for the Greeks wherever free principles were cherished; and from England and America large contributions of money, clothing, and provisions, were forwarded to relieve the sufferings inflicted by the wanton cruelties of the Turks. It was the United States, however, as the first American Minister to Greece, MR. TUCKERMAN, says, that first responded, "in the words of President Monroe, Webster, Clay, Everett, Dwight, and hosts of other lights," to the appeal of the Greek senate at Kalamata, made in 1821. When Congress a.s.sembled in December, 1823, President Monroe made the revolution in Greece the subject of a paragraph in his annual message, in which he expressed the hope of success to the Greeks and disaster to the Turks; and Mr. Webster subsequently introduced a resolution in the House of Representatives providing for the appointment of an agent or commissioner to Greece. These were the first official expressions favorable to the struggling country uttered by any government; and in speaking to his resolution in January, 1824, Mr. Webster began his remarks as follows:

"An occasion which calls the attention to a spot so distinguished, so connected with interesting recollections, as Greece, may naturally create something of warmth and enthusiasm. In a grave political discussion, however, it is necessary that those feelings should be chastened. I shall endeavor properly to repress them, although it is impossible that they should be altogether extinguished. We must, indeed, fly beyond the civilized world; we must pa.s.s the dominion of law and the boundaries of knowledge; we must, more especially, withdraw ourselves from this place, and the scenes and objects which here surround us, if we would separate ourselves entirely from the influence of all those memorials of herself which ancient Greece has transmitted for the admiration and the benefit of mankind. This free form of government, this popular a.s.sembly--the common council for the common good--where have we contemplated its earliest models?

This practice of free debate and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind, and that popular eloquence which, if it were now here, on a subject like this, would move the stones of the Capitol--whose was the language in which all these were first exhibited? Even the edifice in which we a.s.semble, these proportioned columns, this ornamented architecture, all remind us that Greece has existed, and that we, like the rest of mankind, are greatly her debtors.

"But I have not introduced this motion in the vain hope of discharging anything of this acc.u.mulated debt of centuries. I have not acted upon the expectation that we who have inherited this obligation from our ancestors should now attempt to pay it to those who may seem to have inherited from their ancestors a right to receive payment. My object is nearer and more immediate.

I wish to take occasion of the struggle of an interesting and gallant people in the cause of liberty and Christianity, to draw the attention of the House to the circ.u.mstances which have accompanied that struggle, and to the principles which appear to have governed the conduct of the great states of Europe in regard to it, and to the effects and consequences of these principles upon the independence of nations, and especially upon the inst.i.tutions of free governments. What I have to say of Greece, therefore, concerns the modern, not the ancient--the living, and not the dead. It regards her, not as she exists in history, triumphant over time, and tyranny, and ignorance, but as she now is, contending against fearful odds for being, and for the common privileges of human nature."

In an argument of some length Mr. Webster forcibly condemns the then existing policy of the European Powers, who, holding that all changes in legislation and administration "ought to proceed from kings alone," were therefore "wholly inexorable to the sufferings of the Greeks, and entirely hostile to their success."

He demands that the protest of this government shall be made against this policy, both as it is laid down in principle and as it is applied in practice; and he closes his address with the following references to the determination of the Greeks and the sympathy their struggle should receive:

"Constantinople and the northern provinces have sent forth thousands of troops; they have been defeated. Tripoli, and Algiers, and Egypt have contributed their marine contingents; they have not kept the ocean. Hordes of Tartars have crossed the Bosphorus; they have died where the Persians died. The powerful monarchies in the neighborhood have denounced the Greek cause, and admonished the Greeks to abandon it and submit to their fate. They have answered that, although two hundred thousand of their countrymen have offered up their lives, there yet remain lives to offer; and that it is the determination of all--'yes, of ALL'--to persevere until they shall have established their liberty, or until the power of their oppressors shall have relieved them from the burden of existence. It may now be asked, perhaps, whether the expression of our own sympathy, and that of the country, may do them good?

I hope it may. It may give them courage and spirit; it may a.s.sure them of public regard, teach them that they are not wholly forgotten by the civilized world, and inspire them with constancy in the pursuit of their great end. At any rate, it appears to me that the measure which I have proposed is due to our own character, and called for by our own duty. When we have discharged that duty we may leave the rest to the disposition of Providence.

I am not of those who would, in the hour of utmost peril, withhold such encouragement as might be properly and lawfully given, and, when the crisis should be past, overwhelm the rescued sufferer with kindness and caresses. The Greeks address the civilized world with a pathos not easy to be resisted. They invoke our favor by more moving considerations than can well belong to the condition of any other people. They stretch out their arms to the Christian communities of the earth, beseeching them, by a generous recollection of their ancestors, by the consideration of their desolated and ruined cities and villages, by their wives and children sold into an accursed slavery, by their blood, which they seem willing to pour out like water, by the common faith and in the name which unites all Christians, that they would extend to them at least some token of compa.s.sionate regard."

THE SORTIE AT MISSOLONGHI.

One of the noted exploits of the Greeks in 1823, and one that has been commemorated in many ways, occurred at Missolon'ghi, the capital of Acarnania and aetolia, while that town was besieged by a Turkish army; and the name of Marco Boz-zar'is, the commander of the garrison, has ever since been cla.s.sed with that of Leonidas and other heroes of ancient Greece who fell in the moment of victory. In his Crescent and the Cross; or, Romance and Realities of Eastern Travel, the English author WARBURTON thus tells the story of the well-known deed that saved Missolonghi to the Greeks and hastened the delivery of their country:

"When Missolonghi was beleaguered by the Turkish forces, Marco Bozzaris commanded a garrison of about twelve hundred men, who had barely fortifications enough to form breastworks. Intelligence reached him that an Egyptian army was about to form a junction with the formidable besieging host. A parade was ordered of the garrison, 'faint and few, but fearless still.' Bozzaris told them of the destruction that impended over Missolonghi, proposed a sortie, and announced that it should consist only of volunteers.

Volunteers! The whole garrison stepped forward as one man, and demanded the post of honor and of death. 'I will only take the Thermopylae number,' said their leader; and he selected the three hundred from his true and trusty Suliotes. In the dead of night this devoted band marched out in six divisions, which were placed, in profound silence, around the Turkish camp. Their orders were simply, 'When you hear my bugle blow seek me in the pasha's tent.'

"Marco Bozzaris, disguised as an Albanian bearing dispatches to the pasha from the Egyptian army, pa.s.sed unquestioned through the Turkish camp, and was only arrested by the sentinels around the pasha's tent, who informed him that he must wait till morning.

Then wildly through the stillness of the night that bugle blew; faithfully it was echoed from without; and the war-cry of the avenging Greek broke upon the Moslem's ear. From every side that terrible storm seemed to break at once; shrieks of agony and terror swelled the tumult. The Turks fled in all directions, and the Grecian leader was soon surrounded by his comrades. Struck to the ground by a musket-ball, he had himself raised on the shoulders of two Greeks; and, thus supported, he pressed on the flying enemy. Another bullet pierced his brain in the hour of his triumph, and he was borne dead from the field of his glory."

But Missolonghi was saved, and under Constantine and Noto Bozzaris, brothers of the dead hero, it withstood repeated a.s.saults of the Turks, until, in 1826, after having been besieged for over a year by a very large naval and military force, it was finally taken. Those left of the small garrison who were able to fight, placing the women in the center, sallied forth at midnight of the 22d of April, and cut their way through the Turkish camp; while those who were too feeble to attempt an escape a.s.sembled in a large mill that was used as a powder-magazine, and blew themselves and many of the incoming Turks to atoms.

Some fifteen years after the death of Marco Bozzaris, the American traveller and author, Mr. John L. Stephens, visited Greece, and, at Missolonghi, was presented to Constantine Bozzaris and the widow and children of his deceased brother. In the account which the author gives of this interview, in his Incidents of Travel in Greece, he describes Constantine Bozzaris, then a colonel in the service of King Otho, as a man of about fifty years of age, of middle height and spare build, who, immediately after the formal introduction, expressed his grat.i.tude as a Greek for the services rendered his country by America; and added, "with sparkling eye and flushed cheek, that when the Greek revolutionary flag sailed into the port of Napoli di Romania, among hundreds of vessels of all nations, an American captain was the first to recognize and salute it." Mr. Stephens thus describes the widow of the Greek hero: "She was under forty, tall and stately in person, and habited in deep black. She looked the widow of a hero; as one worthy of those Grecian mothers who gave their hair for bow-strings and their girdles for sword-belts, and, while their heartstrings were cracking, sent their husbands to fight and perish for their country. Perhaps it was she who led Marco Bozzaris from the wild guerilla warfare in which he had pa.s.sed his early life, and fired him with the high and holy ambition of freeing his country. I am certain that no man could look her in the face without finding his wavering purposes fixed, and without treading more firmly in the path of high and honorable ambition."

Mr. Stephens closes the account of his interview with the widow and family as follows: "At parting I told them that the name of Marco Bozzaris was as familiar in America as that of a hero of our own Revolution, and that it had been hallowed by the inspiration of an American poet. I added that, if it would not be unacceptable, on my return to my native country I would send the tribute referred to, as an evidence of the feeling existing in America toward the memory of Marco Bozzaris." The promised tribute was the following Beautiful and stirring poem by FITZ-GREENE HALLECK:

Marco Bozzaris.

At midnight, in his guarded tent, The Turk was dreaming of the hour When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent, Should tremble at his power: In dreams, through camp and court, he bore The trophies of a conqueror; In dreams his song of triumph heard; Then wore his monarch's signet-ring; Then pressed that monarch's throne--a king; As wild his thoughts, and gay of wing, As Eden's garden-bird.

At midnight, in the forest shades, Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band, True as the steel of their tried blades, Heroes in heart and hand.

There had the Persian's thousands stood, There had the glad earth drunk their blood On old Plataea's day; And now there breathed that haunted air The sons of sires who conquered there, With arm to strike, and soul to dare, As quick, as far as they.

An hour pa.s.sed on--the Turk awoke; That bright dream was his last; He woke to hear his sentries shriek "To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!"

He woke, to die 'mid flame and smoke, And shout, and groan, and sabre-stroke, And death-shots falling thick and fast As lightnings from the mountain-cloud, And heard, with voice as trumpet loud, Bozzaris cheer his band: "Strike! till the last armed foe expires; Strike! for your altars and your fires; Strike! for the green graves of your sires, G.o.d, and your native land!"

They fought like brave men, long and well; They piled that ground with Moslem slain; They conquered; but Bozzaris fell, Bleeding at every vein.

His few surviving comrades saw His smile when rang their proud hurrah, And the red field was won, Then saw in death his eyelids close, Calmly as to a night's repose-- Like flowers at set of sun.

Come to the bridal chamber, Death!

Come to the mother, when she feels, For the first time, her first-born's breath; Come when the blessed seals That close the pestilence are broke, And crowded cities wail its stroke; Come in consumption's ghastly form, The earthquake shock, the ocean storm; Come when the heart beats high and warm With banquet song, and dance, and wine; And thou art terrible: the tear, The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier, And all we know, or dream, or fear Of agony, are thine.

But to the hero, when his sword Has won the battle for the free, Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word, And in its hollow tones are heard Thanks of millions yet to be.

Come, when his task of fame is wrought; Come, with her laurel-leaf, blood-bought; Come, in her crowning hour--and then Thy sunken eye's unearthly light To him is welcome as the sight Of sky and stars to prisoned men; Thy grasp is welcome as the hand Of brother in a foreign land; Thy summons welcome as the cry That told the Indian isles were nigh To the world-seeking Genoese, When the land-wind, from woods of palm, And orange-groves, and fields of balm, Blew o'er the Haytien seas.

Bozzaris! with the storied brave Greece nurtured in her glory's time, Rest thee--there is no prouder grave, Even in her own proud clime.

She wore no funeral weeds for thee, Nor bade the dark hea.r.s.e wave its plume, Like torn branch from death's leafless tree, In sorrow's pomp and pageantry, The heartless luxury of the tomb; But she remembers thee as one Long loved, and for a season gone: For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed, Her marble wrought, her music breathed; For thee she rings the birthday bells; Of thee her babes' first lisping tells; For thine her evening prayer is said At palace couch and cottage bed; Her soldier, closing with the foe, Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow; His plighted maiden, when she fears For him, the joy of her young years, Thinks of thy fate and checks her tears.

And she, the mother of thy boys, Though in her eye and faded cheek Is read the grief she will not speak, The memory of her buried joys, And even she who gave thee birth, Will, by their pilgrim-circled hearth, Talk of thy doom without a sigh: For thou art Freedom's now, and Fame's-- One of the few, the immortal names That were not born to die!

About the time of the exploit of Bozzaris, Lord Byron arrived in Greece, to take an active part in aid of Greek independence, and proceeded to Missolonghi in January, 1824. No warmer friend of the Greeks than Byron ever lived; but while he sympathized with, and was anxious to aid in every way possible, those who, in his own words, "suffered all the moral and physical ills that could afflict humanity," it was evidently his honest belief that the only salvation for Greece lay in her becoming a British dependency. In his notes to Childe Harold, penned before the revolution broke out, but while all Greece was ablaze with the desire for liberty, he wrote as follows: "The Greeks will never be independent; they will never be sovereigns, as heretofore, and G.o.d forbid they ever should! but they may be subjects without being slaves. Our colonies are not independent, but they are free and industrious, and such may Greece be hereafter." These words show that he considered Greece incapable of self-government, should she ever regain her liberty; and he therefore deprecated a return to her ancient sovereignty. That this was his view, and that he subsequently designed to give it effect in his own person, we are a.s.sured from the well-founded belief, derived from his own declarations, that when he joined the Greek cause he had a mind to place himself at its head, hoping and perhaps believing that he might become King of h.e.l.las, under the protection of Great Britain. But whatever his plans may have been, they were cut short by his death, at Missolonghi, on the 19th of April following his arrival there.

INTERFERENCE OF THE GREAT POWERS.

In the campaign of 1824, while the Greeks lost Candia and the strongly fortified rocky isle of Ip'sara, a Turkish fleet was repulsed off Samos, and a large Egyptian fleet, sent to attack the Morea, was frustrated in all its designs. The campaign of 1825, however, was opened by the landing, in the Morea, of a large Egyptian army, under Ibrahim Pasha, son of the Viceroy of Egypt. Navar'no soon fell into his power; and at the time of the fall of Missolonghi, in the following year, be was in possession of most of southern Greece, and many of the islands of the Archipelago. The foundation of an Egyptian military and slave-holding state now seemed to be laid in Europe; and this danger, combined with the n.o.ble defence and sufferings at Missolonghi and elsewhere, attracted the serious attention of the European governments and people; numerous philanthropic societies were formed to aid the Greeks, and finally three of the great European powers were moved to interfere in their behalf.

On the 6th of July, 1827, a treaty was concluded at London between England, Russia, and France, stipulating that the Greeks should govern themselves, but that they should pay tribute to the Porte.

To enforce this treaty a combined English, French, and Russian squadron sailed to the Grecian Archipelago; but the Turkish Sultan haughtily rejected the intervention of the three powers, and the troops of Ibrahim Pasha continued their devastations in the Morea. On the 20th of October the allied squadron, under the command of the English admiral, Edward Codrington, entered the harbor of Navarino, where the Turkish-Egyptian fleet lay at anchor; and a sanguinary naval battle followed, in which the allies nearly destroyed the fleet of the enemy. Although this action was spoken of by the British government as an "untoward event," Admiral Codrington was rewarded both by England and Russia; and the poet CAMPBELL, in the following lines on the battle, naturally praises him for planning and striking this decisive blow for Grecian liberty: