Summary

The speaker begins with a declaration that the colonial Americans settled America before feeling a sense of belonging to the country. They occupied America for more than a hundred years before becoming its people. They claimed the land in colonies like Massachusetts and Virginia, whose existence predates the founding of the United States, but were still English subjects living under colonial rule. Their hearts remained "unpossessed" by devotion to the country they had settled, "Possessed" instead by an empire that had let them go (6-7).

Withholding an unknown “something” made them “weak” (8), until they understood they were withholding themselves by remaining British, rather than giving themselves over to the American land they lived in. They then saved themselves by surrendering their allegiance to the British, giving themselves wholly to their new country by fighting for it in the American Revolutionary War. More of that...