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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78469 ***
+
+
+
+
+ A HISTORY OF
+ THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
+
+ BY
+ WOODROW WILSON, PH.D., LITT.D., LL.D.
+
+ IN FIVE VOLUMES
+
+ VOL. II.
+ Colonies and Nation
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE WASHINGTON]
+
+
+
+
+ A HISTORY OF
+ THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
+
+ BY
+ WOODROW WILSON, PH.D., LITT.D., LL.D.
+ PRESIDENT OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
+
+ ILLUSTRATED WITH PORTRAITS, MAPS,
+ PLANS, FACSIMILES, RARE PRINTS,
+ CONTEMPORARY VIEWS, ETC.
+
+ IN FIVE VOLUMES
+
+ VOL. II.
+
+ [Illustration]
+
+ NEW YORK AND LONDON
+ HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+ MCMVII
+
+ Copyright, 1901, 1902, by WOODROW WILSON.
+
+ Copyright, 1901, 1902, by HARPER & BROTHERS.
+
+ _All rights reserved._
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+ CHAPTER PAGE
+
+ I. COMMON UNDERTAKINGS 1
+
+ II. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS 98
+
+ III. THE APPROACH OF REVOLUTION 172
+
+ IV. THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE 223
+
+ APPENDIX 331
+
+
+
+
+NOTES ON ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+
+ PAGE
+
+ GEORGE WASHINGTON _Frontispiece._
+
+ PLAN OF CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, ABOUT 1732.—From
+ plate 12 of Henry Popple’s _Map of the British Empire
+ in America_. London, 1733 3
+
+ NEW ORLEANS IN 1719.—Redrawn from an old print 5
+
+ SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN.—Redrawn from an old print 7
+
+ AN EARLY VIEW OF QUEBEC.—Redrawn from a view published
+ at London in 1760 12
+
+ COUR DU BOIS, XVII. CENTURY.—From a drawing by Frederic
+ Remington 14
+
+ AN ENGLISH FLEET ABOUT 1732.—From plate 11 of Henry Popple’s
+ _Map of the British Empire in America_ 16
+
+ MOALE’S SKETCH OF BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, IN 1752.—Drawn from
+ the original in the Maryland Historical Society 19
+
+ CHARLESTON, FROM THE HARBOR, 1742.—Redrawn from an old print 22
+
+ LORD BELLOMONT.—From an old engraving 25
+
+ WILLIAM AND MARY COLLEGE BEFORE THE FIRE, 1723.—Redrawn from
+ an old print 27
+
+ JOHN CHURCHILL, DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH.—From an engraving by R.
+ Cooper in the Emmet Collection, New York Public Library
+ (Lenox Building) 29
+
+ PRINCE EUGENE.—From an old engraving 31
+
+ FRENCH HUGUENOT CHURCH, NEW YORK, 1704.—Redrawn from an old
+ print 32
+
+ OLD SWEDES CHURCH, WILMINGTON, DELAWARE.—From a drawing by
+ Howard Pyle 34
+
+ NEW YORK SLAVE MARKET ABOUT 1730.—Redrawn from an old print 36
+
+ BROAD STREET, NEW YORK, IN 1740.—Redrawn from an old print 37
+
+ OLD STATE HOUSE AT ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND.—Redrawn from an old
+ lithograph by Weber 39
+
+ NEW YORK, FROM THE HARBOR, ABOUT 1725.—Redrawn from an old
+ print 41
+
+ ALEXANDER SPOTSWOOD.—Redrawn from the frontispiece in the
+ _Official Letters of Alexander Spotswood_, published by
+ the Virginia Historical Society 42
+
+ BRENTON CHURCH, WHERE GOVERNOR SPOTSWOOD WORSHIPPED.—From
+ Lossing’s _Field-Book of the Revolution_ 43
+
+ GOVERNOR SPOTSWOOD’S EXPEDITION TO THE BLUE RIDGE.—From a
+ painting by F. Luis Mora 45
+
+ COLONEL RHETT AND THE PIRATE STEDE BONNET.—From a painting
+ by Howard Pyle 46
+
+ PORTRAIT OF THE PIRATE EDWARD THATCH (OR TEACH).—From Capt.
+ Charles Johnson’s _General History of the Highwaymen_ [etc.].
+ London, 1736. In the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 48
+
+ SIR ROBERT WALPOLE.—From an old engraving 50
+
+ MAP OF THE COAST SETTLEMENTS, 1742.—From an old English map 53
+
+ POHICK CHURCH, VIRGINIA, WHERE WASHINGTON WORSHIPPED.—From
+ a sketch by Benson J. Lossing in 1850 55
+
+ TITLE-PAGE OF THE PROCEEDINGS AGAINST THE NEGROES.—Title-page
+ of the original edition of Daniel Horsmanden’s _Journal_ of
+ the so-called “Negro Plot” of 1741. From an original in the
+ New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 57
+
+ OSWEGO IN 1750.—Redrawn and _extended_ from a folded view in
+ William Smith’s _History of the Province of New York_.
+ London, 1757 60
+
+ JAMES OGLETHORPE.—From an old engraving 63
+
+ OGLETHORPE’S ORDER FOR SUPPLIES.—From Winsor’s _America_ 65
+
+ SAVANNAH IN 1734.—From an original engraving in the New
+ York Public Library (Lenox Building) 66
+
+ ALEXANDER HAMILTON.—From the bust by Palmer in
+ possession of the Honorable Nicholas Fish, of New
+ York _Facing p._ 66
+
+ JOHN WESLEY.—From an old engraving 68
+
+ OGLETHORPE’S EXPEDITION AGAINST ST. AUGUSTINE.—From a
+ painting by F. Luis Mora 69
+
+ GEORGE WHITEFIELD.—From an old engraving 70
+
+ THE ACTION AT CARTAGENA.—From Green’s _History of the
+ English People_ 72
+
+ WILLIAM PEPPERRELL.—Sir William Pepperrell. The original
+ painting is in the Essex Institute, at Salem, Mass.;
+ the artist’s name is not known 74
+
+ FACSIMILE OF THE NEW YORK WEEKLY _JOURNAL_.—First page
+ of the second number of John Peter Zenger’s newspaper,
+ from an original in the New York Public Library (Lenox
+ Building) 78
+
+ ROBERT DINWIDDIE.—After a phototype by F. Gutekunst which
+ forms the frontispiece to vol. ii. of the _Dinwiddie
+ Papers_, published by the Virginia Historical Society 80
+
+ MERCHANTS’ EXCHANGE, NEW YORK, 1752-1799.—From
+ _Reminiscences of an Old New-Yorker_. Emmet: New
+ York Public Library (Lenox Building) 83
+
+ THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM ON THE MORNING OF THE BATTLE.—From
+ a painting by Frederic Remington 86
+
+ MAP OF BRADDOCK’S DEFEAT.—Redrawn from plate 6 of Winthrop
+ Sargent’s _History of Braddock’s Expedition_, published
+ by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania 88
+
+ WILLIAM PITT.—From an old engraving 91
+
+ SIGNATURE OF JAMES ABERCROMBIE 92
+
+ THE CAPITULATION OF LOUISBOURG.—From a painting by Howard Pyle 93
+
+ JEFFREY AMHERST.—From an old engraving 94
+
+ JAMES WOLFE.—From a mezzotint by Richard Houston in the Emmet
+ Collection, No. 3217, New York Public Library (Lenox
+ Building) 95
+
+ WILLIAM BYRD.—From Wilson’s _Washington_ 101
+
+ PLAN OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK, 1767.—From Janvier’s _Old New
+ York_, p. 48 103
+
+ EDMUND BURKE.—From an engraving after the painting by Romney 106
+
+ VIEW OF THE BUILDINGS BELONGING TO HARVARD COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
+ NEW ENGLAND, 1726.—Partial reproduction of the earliest
+ print of Harvard College. What is believed to be the
+ only extant copy of this old engraving is owned by the
+ Massachusetts Historical Society 109
+
+ NASSAU HALL, PRINCETON COLLEGE, 1760.—Redrawn from an old
+ print 111
+
+ KING’S COLLEGE NEW YORK, 1758.—Redrawn from an old print 112
+
+ BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.—From the portrait by Duplessis in
+ the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass. _Facing p._ 112
+
+ THE BIRTHPLACE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, MILK STREET,
+ BOSTON.—Redrawn from an old print 113
+
+ BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.—From an old engraving 115
+
+ A PAGE OF “POOR RICHARD’S” ALMANAC.—From an original of
+ this almanac for 1767, in the New York Public Library
+ (Lenox Building) 117
+
+ BENJAMIN FRANKLIN IN A COLONIAL DRAWING ROOM.—From a
+ painting by H. C. Christy 119
+
+ MRS. BENEDICT ARNOLD AND CHILD.—From the portrait by Sir
+ Thomas Lawrence, in the Historical Society of
+ Pennsylvania 121
+
+ FRANKLIN’S OLD BOOK-SHOP, NEXT TO CHRIST’S CHURCH,
+ PHILADELPHIA.—Redrawn from an old print 123
+
+ GEORGE GRENVILLE.—From an old print 125
+
+ BOUNDARY MONUMENT ON THE ST. CROIX.—From a lithograph by
+ L. Haghe after a sketch by Joseph Bouchette, made in
+ July, 1817, and included in his _British Dominions in
+ North America_. London, 1832 127
+
+ PONTIAC, CHIEF OF THE OTTAWAS.—Redrawn from an old print 129
+
+ HENRY BOUQUET.—From a process-plate in New York Public
+ Library (Lenox Building) 131
+
+ BOUQUET’S REDOUBT AT PITTSBURG.—Redrawn from an old print 132
+
+ PATRICK HENRY.—From an old engraving 133
+
+ SIGNATURE OF ISAAC BARRÉ 134
+
+ FACSIMILE OF POSTER PLACED ON THE DOORS OF PUBLIC
+ BUILDINGS.—From Lamb’s _History of New York_ 135
+
+ JOHN DICKINSON.—From an old engraving 137
+
+ THOMAS HUTCHINSON.—From the painting attributed to Copley,
+ in the Massachusetts Historical Society 138
+
+ THOMAS HUTCHINSON’S MANSION, BOSTON.—Redrawn from an old
+ print 139
+
+ TABLE OF STAMP CHARGES ON PAPER.—From an original of this
+ broadside, in the Emmet Collection, No. 1802, in the
+ New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 141
+
+ LORD ROCKINGHAM.—From an engraving after a painting by Wilson 142
+
+ JAMES OTIS.—Redrawn from an old print 144
+
+ STAMPS FORCED ON THE COLONIES.—From a photograph of an old
+ document 145
+
+ OLD CAPITOL AT WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA.—From a painting by
+ Howard Pyle 147
+
+ GEORGE WYTHE.—From a painting by Weir, after Trumbull, in
+ Independence Hall, Philadelphia 149
+
+ GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1772.—From a portrait painted in 1772,
+ by C. W. Peale, now owned by General George Washington
+ Custis Lee, of Lexington, Virginia 155
+
+ LANDING TROOPS AT BOSTON, 1768.—From a heliotype in
+ Winsor’s _Boston_, after the engraving by Paul Revere 157
+
+ LIST OF NAMES OF THOSE WHO WOULD NOT CONFORM.—This is a
+ page from the _North American Almanack_ for 1770
+ , published at Boston by Edes and Gill 159
+
+ HAND-BILL OF TRUE SONS OF LIBERTY.—From Winsor’s _America_.
+ The Massachusetts Historical Society possesses a copy
+ of the original broadside 162
+
+ THE BOSTON MASSACRE.—From a painting by F. Luis Mora 163
+
+ AFTER THE MASSACRE. SAMUEL ADAMS DEMANDING OF GOVERNOR
+ HUTCHINSON THE INSTANT WITHDRAWAL OF BRITISH TROOPS.—From
+ a painting by Howard Pyle 165
+
+ INTERIOR OF COUNCIL CHAMBER, OLD STATE HOUSE, BOSTON.—From
+ a photograph 166
+
+ PROTEST AGAINST THE LANDING OF TEA.—Facsimile of a Boston
+ broadside, from Winsor’s _America_. An original is in
+ the Massachusetts Historical Society 167
+
+ ENTRY JOHN ADAMS’S DIARY.—From Winsor’s _Boston_ 168
+
+ CALL FOR MEETING TO PROTEST AGAINST THE LANDING OF TEA.—A
+ Philadelphia poster, from Winsor’s _America_. There is
+ an original in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania 168
+
+ THE BOSTON TEA PARTY.—From a painting by Howard Pyle 169
+
+ BOYCOTTING POSTER.—From the original hand-bill in the
+ Massachusetts Historical Society 173
+
+ CIRCULAR OF THE BOSTON COMMITTEE OF CORRESPONDENCE.—From
+ the original in the Boston Public Library 175
+
+ GEORGE III.—From an engraving by Benoit 177
+
+ GEORGE MASON.—From a painting by Herbert Walsh, in
+ Independence Hall, Philadelphia 179
+
+ SEAL OF DUNMORE.—Redrawn from an impression of the seal 181
+
+ EARL OF DUNMORE.—Redrawn from an old print 182
+
+ THE ATTACK ON THE GASPEE.—From a painting by Howard Pyle 184
+
+ LORD NORTH.—From the engraving by Mote, after Dance 186
+
+ TITLE-PAGE OF HUTCHINSON’S HISTORY.—From an original in
+ the New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 188
+
+ GENERAL GAGE.—Redrawn from an old print 190
+
+ STOVE IN THE HOUSE OF THE BURGESSES, VIRGINIA.—From a
+ photograph of the original in the State Library of
+ Virginia 191
+
+ JOHN ADAMS.—From the portrait by Gilbert Stuart, in
+ Harvard University _Facing p._ 192
+
+ ROGER SHERMAN.—Redrawn from an old print 195
+
+ JOSEPH GALLOWAY.—Redrawn from an old print 197
+
+ JOHN DICKINSON.—From an engraving after a drawing by
+ Du Simitier 198
+
+ PEYTON RANDOLPH.—From an engraving after a painting by
+ C. W. Peale 200
+
+ WASHINGTON STOPPING AT AN INN ON HIS WAY TO CAMBRIDGE.—From
+ a painting by F. Luis Mora 203
+
+ THE LIBERTY SONG.—From _The Writings of John Dickinson_,
+ edited by Paul Leicester Ford, published by the
+ Historical Society of Pennsylvania 205
+
+ SIGNATURE OF JOSEPH HAWLEY 210
+
+ THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AS IT APPEARED IN 1741.—From a
+ drawing by Gavelot 214
+
+ PAGE FROM THE DIARY OF JOSIAH QUINCY, JR.—From Winsor’s
+ _America_. The original diary, kept while he was in
+ London in 1774, is preserved in the Massachusetts
+ Historical Society 216
+
+ PROCLAMATION OF THE KING FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF THE
+ REBELLION.—From an original of this broadside in
+ the Emmet Collection, No. 1496, in the New York
+ Public Library (Lenox Building) 218
+
+ GAGE’S ORDER PERMITTING INHABITANTS TO LEAVE BOSTON.—From
+ Winsor’s _Boston_. The handwriting is that of James
+ Bowdoin 220
+
+ NOTICE TO MILITIA.—From an original in the Massachusetts
+ Historical Society 224
+
+ AN ACCOUNT OF THE CONCORD FIGHT.—From Winsor’s _America_.
+ The original is in the Arthur Lee Papers, preserved at
+ Harvard College Library 225
+
+ SIGNATURE OF ETHAN ALLEN 226
+
+ RUINS OF FORT TICONDEROGA.—Redrawn from an old print 227
+
+ WATCHING THE FIGHT AT BUNKER HILL.—From a painting by
+ Howard Pyle 228
+
+ FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, NO. 1. (LOOKING TOWARDS DORCHESTER
+ HEIGHTS.)—From Winsor’s _America_ 230
+
+ FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, NO. 2. (LOOKING TOWARDS
+ ROXBURY.)—From Winsor’s _America_ 231
+
+ ORDER OF COMMITTEE OF SAFETY.—From Winsor’s _America_ 232
+
+ BOSTON AND BUNKER HILL, FROM A PRINT PUBLISHED IN
+ 1781.—Redrawn from a plan in _An Impartial History
+ of the War in America_ 234
+
+ RICHARD MONTGOMERY.—From an old engraving 238
+
+ BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AS A POLITICIAN.—From a painting by
+ Stephen Elmer 240
+
+ R. H. LEE’S RESOLUTION FOR INDEPENDENCE.—From McMaster’s
+ _School History of the United States_ 241
+
+ STATE HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA, 1778.—From a photograph of
+ the original drawing 242
+
+ SIGNATURE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON 243
+
+ JEFFERSON’S ORIGINAL DRAFT OF THE DECLARATION OF
+ INDEPENDENCE.—This facsimile of Jefferson’s
+ original rough draft, with interlineations by
+ Adams and Franklin, is from an artotype by Edward
+ Bierstadt, made from the original in the
+ Department of State, Washington, D. C. 244, 245, 246, 247
+
+ REAR VIEW OF INDEPENDENCE HALL.—From a photograph 248
+
+ THE PRESIDENT’S CHAIR IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL
+ CONVENTION.—From a photograph 249
+
+ MAP OF SULLIVAN’S ISLAND.—Redrawn from a plan in Johnson’s
+ _Traditions and Reminiscences of the American Revolution
+ in the South_. Charleston, S. C., 1851 250
+
+ WLLLIAM MOULTRIE.—From an old engraving 251
+
+ SIR WILLIAM HOWE.—From an old engraving 253
+
+ HOWE’S PROCLAMATION PREPARATORY TO LEAVING BOSTON.—From
+ the original in the Massachusetts Historical Society 255
+
+ EVACUATION OF BROOKLYN HEIGHTS.—From a painting by F.
+ Luis Mora 257
+
+ CIRCULAR OF PHILADELPHIA COUNCIL OF SAFETY.—From the
+ original in the Historical Society of Pennsylvania 259
+
+ OPERATIONS AROUND TRENTON AND PRINCETON. NUMBERS 76
+ REPRESENT THE CAMPS OF GENERAL CORNWALLIS AND 77
+ THAT OF GENERAL KNYPHAUSEN ON THE 23D OF JUNE,
+ 1777.—Redrawn from a sketch map by a Hessian officer 261
+
+ HESSIAN BOOT.—From a photograph 263
+
+ LETTER CONCERNING BRITISH OUTRAGES.—From the original in
+ the Historical Society of Pennsylvania 265
+
+ RECRUITING POSTER.—From Smith’s _American Historical and
+ Literary Curiosities_ 267
+
+ JOHN BURGOYNE.—From an old engraving 269
+
+ ARTHUR ST. CLAIR.—From an engraving after the portrait by
+ C. W. Peale 271
+
+ SAMUEL ADAMS.—From the portrait by Copley in the Museum
+ of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass. _Facing p._ 272
+
+ BENJAMIN LINCOLN.—From the portrait in the Massachusetts
+ Historical Society 273
+
+ SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON.—From a mezzotint by Spooner in the
+ Emmet Collection, No. 36, New York Public Library
+ (Lenox Building) 274
+
+ SIR JOHN JOHNSON.—From an engraving by Bartolozzi 275
+
+ JOSEPH BRANT.—From an engraving after the original
+ painting by G. Romney 276
+
+ PETER GANSEVOORT.—From Lossing’s _Field-Book of the
+ Revolution._ 277
+
+ FACSIMILE OF CLOSING PARAGRAPHS OF BURGOYNE’S
+ SURRENDER.—From the original in the New York
+ Historical Society 279
+
+ SCENE OF THE BATTLE OF THE BRANDYWINE.—From an old
+ engraving in the Emmet Collection, New York Public
+ Library (Lenox Building) 281
+
+ WASHINGTON’S PROCLAMATION.—From the original in the
+ Historical Society of Pennsylvania 283
+
+ BARON DE STEUBEN.—From an old engraving 285
+
+ FACSIMILE OF PLAY BILL.—From Smith’s _American Historical
+ and Literary Curiosities_ 287
+
+ CHARLES LEE.—From a mezzotint after the painting by
+ Thomlinson, in Emmet Collection, No. 1902, New York
+ Public Library (Lenox Building) 289
+
+ REDUCED FACSIMILE OF INSTRUCTIONS FROM CONGRESS TO
+ PRIVATEERS.—From Maclay’s _History of American
+ Privateers_ 291
+
+ CONTINENTAL LOTTERY BOOK.—From a photograph 292
+
+ REDUCED FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST AND LAST PARTS OF PATRICK
+ HENRY’S LETTER OF INSTRUCTIONS TO GEORGE ROGERS CLARK.—From
+ the _Conquest of the Northwest_, by William E. English 294
+
+ GEORGE ROGERS CLARK.—From a portrait by Jarvis in the
+ Wisconsin Historical Society 295
+
+ GEORGE CLARK’S FINAL SUMMONS TO COLONEL HAMILTON TO
+ SURRENDER.—From Winsor’s _America_ 297
+
+ CHARLES JAMES FOX.—From an engraving after the portrait
+ by Opie 299
+
+ JOHN SULLIVAN.—From a mezzotint by Will 301
+
+ CASIMIR PULASKI.—From an engraving by Hall, in Emmet
+ Collection, No. 3852, New York Public Library (Lenox
+ Building) 302
+
+ JOHN PAUL JONES.—From a painting by C. W. Peale, in
+ Independence Hall, Philadelphia 304
+
+ THE FIGHT BETWEEN BON HOMME RICHARD AND SERAPIS.—From
+ a painting by Howard Pyle 305
+
+ WASHINGTON AND ROCHAMBEAU IN THE TRENCHES AT YORKTOWN.—From
+ a painting by Howard Pyle 307
+
+ HORATIO GATES.—From an engraving by C. Tiebout, after the
+ painting by Gilbert Stuart, Emmet Collection, New York
+ Public Library (Lenox Building) 309
+
+ BENEDICT ARNOLD’S OATH OF ALLEGIANCE 310
+
+ BENEDICT ARNOLD.—From a mezzotint in the Emmet Collection,
+ No. 1877, New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 311
+
+ JOHN ANDRÉ.—From an engraving in the New York Public
+ Library (Lenox Building) 312
+
+ MAJOR ANDRÉ’S WATCH.—From a photograph 313
+
+ BENEDICT ARNOLD’S PASS TO MAJOR ANDRÉ.—From Lossing’s
+ _Field-Book of the Revolution_ 314
+
+ MAJOR ANDRÉ’S POCKET-BOOK.—From a photograph 315
+
+ VIRGINIA COLONIAL CURRENCY.—From a photograph 316
+
+ LORD CORNWALLIS.—From an old print 317
+
+ WILLIAM WASHINGTON.—From an engraving after a portrait by
+ C. W. Peale 318
+
+ BANASTRE TARLETON.—From a mezzotint in the Emmet Collection,
+ New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 319
+
+ FRANCIS MARION.—From an engraving in the Emmet Collection,
+ New York Public Library (Lenox Building) 320
+
+ DANIEL MORGAN.—From a miniature in Yale College Library,
+ New Haven 321
+
+ COUNT ROCHAMBEAU.—From an old engraving 322
+
+ NATHANAEL GREENE.—From the original portrait in possession
+ of Mrs. William Benton Greene, Princeton, N. J. 323
+
+ FACSIMILE OF THE LAST ARTICLE OF CAPITULATION AT
+ YORKTOWN.—From a facsimile in Smith’s _American
+ Historical and Literary Curiosities_ 324
+
+ PAROLE OF CORNWALLIS.—From the original in the Library of
+ the University of Virginia 325
+
+ ORDER PERMITTING THE ILLUMINATION OF PHILADELPHIA.—From
+ Smith’s _American Historical and Literary Curiosities_.
+ Second series. New York 326
+
+ NELSON HOUSE. CORNWALLIS’S HEADQUARTERS, YORKTOWN.—From
+ a sketch by Benson J. Lossing in 1850 327
+
+ EVOLUTION OF THE AMERICAN FLAG.—Compiled from Preble’s
+ _History of the Flag of the United States_. Boston, 1880 328
+
+ LIST OF MAPS
+
+ ENGLISH COLONIES, 1700 _Facing p._ 80
+
+ NORTH AMERICA, 1750. SHOWING CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF
+ EXPLORATION _Facing p._ 176
+
+ ENGLISH COLONIES, 1763-1775 _Facing p._ 320
+
+ _The Appendix in this volume is taken by permission from Mr. Howard
+ W. Preston’s_ Documents Illustrative of American History.
+
+
+
+
+A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+COMMON UNDERTAKINGS
+
+
+There had been some noteworthy passages in the reports which Colonel
+Francis Nicholson sent to the government at home when he was first
+governor of Virginia (1690); for he studied his duties in those days
+with wide-open eyes, and had sometimes written of what he saw with a
+very statesmanlike breadth and insight. It was very noteworthy, among
+other things, that he had urged a defensive confederation of the colonies
+against the French and Indians, under the leadership of Virginia, the
+most loyal of the colonies. He had made it his business to find out
+what means of defence and what effective military force there were in
+the other colonies, particularly in those at the north, conferring with
+their authorities with regard to these matters in person when he could
+not get the information he wished by deputy. The King and his ministers
+in England saw very clearly, when they read his careful despatches, that
+they could not wisely act upon such suggestions yet; but they knew that
+what Colonel Nicholson thus openly and definitely advised was what must
+occur to the mind of every thoughtful and observant man who was given
+a post of authority and guidance in the colonies, whether he thought
+it wise to advise action in the matter or not. It was evident, indeed,
+even to some who were not deemed thoughtful at all. Even the heedless,
+negligent Lord Culpeper, little as he really cared for the government he
+had been set to conduct, had suggested eight years ago that all questions
+of war and peace in the colonies should be submitted for final decision
+to the governor and council of Virginia, where it might be expected that
+the King’s interests would be loyally looked after and safeguarded.
+
+[Illustration: PLAN OF CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA, 1732]
+
+No doubt the colonies would have objected to and resisted such an
+arrangement with a very hot resentment, and no one in authority in
+London dreamed for a moment of taking either Lord Culpeper’s or Colonel
+Nicholson’s advice in the matter; but it was none the less obvious that
+the King and his officers must contrive some way, if they could, by
+which they might use the colonies as a single power against the French
+in America, if England was indeed to make and keep an empire there.
+If King James, who leaned upon France as an ally and prayed for the
+dominion of the Church of Rome, had seen this, it was not likely that
+William of Orange, who was the arch-enemy of France and the champion
+of Protestantism against Rome, would overlook it. He was no sooner on
+the throne than England was plunged into a long eight years’ war with
+the French. And so it happened that the colonies seemed to reap little
+advantage from the “glorious revolution” which had put out a tyrant
+and brought in a constitutional King. William of Orange, it presently
+appeared, meant to unite groups of colonies under the authority of a
+single royal governor, particularly at the north, where the French
+power lay, as James before him had done; giving to the governors of
+the principal colonies the right to command the military forces of the
+colonies about them even if he gave them no other large gift of power.
+He did more than James had done. Being a statesman and knowing the value
+of systematic administration, he did systematically what James had done
+loosely and without consistent plan. The Board of Trade and Plantations,
+which he organized to oversee and direct the government of the colonies,
+did more to keep their affairs under the eye and hand of the King than
+any group of James’s ministers had been able to do. The great Dutch King
+was determined to wield England and her possessions as a single imperial
+power in the game of politics he was playing in Europe.
+
+The French power, which he chiefly feared, had really grown very
+menacing in America; was growing more so every year; and must very soon
+indeed be faced and overcome, if the English were not to be shut in
+to a narrow seaboard, or ousted altogether. It was not a question of
+numbers. It was a question of territorial aggrandizement, rather, and
+strategic advantage. Probably there were not more than twelve thousand
+Frenchmen, all told, in America when William became King (1689); whereas
+his own subjects swarmed there full two hundred thousand strong, and
+were multiplying by the tens of thousands from decade to decade. But
+the French were building military posts at every strategic point as
+they went, while the English were building nothing but rural homes and
+open villages. With the French it did not seem a matter of settlement;
+it seemed a matter of conquest, rather, and of military occupation.
+They were guarding trade routes and making sure of points of advantage.
+The English way was the more wholesome and the more vital. A hardy,
+self-dependent, crowding people like the English in Massachusetts and
+Virginia, and the Dutch in New York, took root wherever they went, spread
+into real communities, and were not likely to be got rid of when once
+their number had run into the thousands. Their independence, too, and
+their capable way of managing their own affairs without asking or wanting
+or getting any assistance from government, made them as hard to handle as
+if they had been themselves an established continental power. But the
+French had an advantage, nevertheless, which was not to be despised. They
+moved as they were ordered to move by an active and watchful government
+which was in the thick of critical happenings where policies were made,
+and which meant to cramp the English, if it could not actually get rid of
+them. They extended and organized the military power of France as they
+went; and they were steadily girdling the English about with a chain
+of posts and settlements which bade fair to keep all the northern and
+western regions of the great continent for the King of France, from the
+mouth of the St. Lawrence round about, two thousand miles, to the outlets
+of the Mississippi at the Gulf.
+
+[Illustration: NEW ORLEANS IN 1719]
+
+Their movement along the great rivers and the lakes had been very slow
+at first; but it had quickened from generation to generation, and was
+now rapid enough to fix the attention of any man who could hear news and
+had his eyes abroad upon what was happening about him. Jacques Cartier
+had explored the noble river St. Lawrence for his royal master of France
+a long century and a half ago, in the far year 1535, fifty years before
+the English so much as attempted a settlement. But it was not until 1608,
+the year after Jamestown was begun, that Samuel de Champlain established
+the first permanent French settlement, at Quebec, and there were still
+but two hundred lonely settlers there when nearly thirty years more had
+gone by (1636). It was the quick growth and systematic explorations of
+the latter part of the century that made the English uneasy. The twelve
+thousand Frenchmen who were busy at the work of occupation when William
+of Orange became King had not confined themselves to the settlements
+long ago made in the Bay of Fundy and at Montreal, Quebec, and Tadousac,
+where the great river of the north broadened to the sea. They had carried
+their boats across from the upper waters of the Ottawa to the open
+reaches of Lake Huron; had penetrated thence to Lake Michigan, and even
+to the farthest shores of Lake Superior, establishing forts and trading
+posts as they advanced. They had crossed from Green Bay in Lake Michigan
+to the waters of the Wisconsin River, and had passed by that easy way
+into the Mississippi itself. That stout-hearted pioneer Père Marquette
+had descended the Father of Waters past the Ohio to the outlet of the
+Arkansas (1673); and Robert La Salle had followed him and gone all the
+long way to the spreading mouths of the vast river and the gates of
+the Gulf (1682), not by way of the Wisconsin, but by crossing from the
+southern end of Lake Michigan to the stream of the Illinois, and passing
+by that way to the Mississippi.
+
+[Illustration: SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN]
+
+And so the lakes and the western rivers and the Mississippi itself saw
+the French; and French posts sprang up upon their shores to mark the
+sovereignty of the King of France. Frenchmen easily enough learned the
+ways of the wilderness and became the familiars of the Indians in their
+camps and wigwams; and they showed themselves of every kind,—some rough
+and lawless rovers, only too glad to throw off the restraints of the
+orderly life to which they had been bred and live as they pleased in
+the deep, secluded forests, trading without license, seeking adventure,
+finding a way for the civilization which was to follow them, but
+themselves anxious to escape it; others regular traders, who kept their
+hold upon the settlements behind them and submitted when they were
+obliged to official exactions at Montreal; some intrepid priests, who
+preached salvation and the dominion of France among the dusky tribes,
+and lived or died with a like fortitude and devotion, never willingly
+quitting their sacred task or letting go their hold upon the hearts
+of the savage men they had come to enlighten and subdue; some hardy
+captains with little companies of drilled men-at-arms from the fields of
+France:—at the front indomitable explorers, far in the rear timid farmers
+clearing spaces in the silent woodland for their scanty crops, and little
+towns slowly growing within their walls where the river broadened to the
+sea.
+
+This stealthy power which crept so steadily southward and westward at the
+back of the English settlements upon the coast was held at arm’s-length
+throughout that quiet age of beginnings, not by the English, but by a
+power within the forests, the power of the great confederated Iroquois
+tribes, who made good their mastery between the Hudson and the lakes: the
+Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks. They were stronger,
+fiercer, more constant and indomitable, more capable every way, than
+the tribes amidst whom the French moved; and Champlain had unwittingly
+made them the enemies of the French forever. Long, long ago, in the year
+1609, which white men had forgotten, he had done what the Iroquois never
+forgot or forgave. He had come with their sworn foes, the Algonquins,
+to the shores of that lake by the sources of the Hudson which the
+palefaces ever afterwards called by his name, and had there used the
+dread fire-arms of the white men, of which they had never heard before,
+to work the utter ruin of the Mohawks in battle. They were always and
+everywhere ready after that fatal day to be any man’s ally, whether Dutch
+or English, against the hated French; and the French found it necessary
+to keep at the back of the broad forests which stretched from the eastern
+Lakes to the Hudson and the Delaware, the wide empire of these dusky
+foes, astute, implacable. They skirted the domains of the Iroquois when
+they were prudent, and passed inland by the lakes and the valley of the
+Mississippi.
+
+But, though they kept their distance, they advanced their power. The
+colonists in New England had been uneasy because of their unwelcome
+neighborhood from the first. Once and again there had been actual
+collisions and a petty warfare. But until William of Orange made England
+a party to the great war of the Protestant powers against Louis XIV. few
+men had seen what the struggle between French and English held in store
+for America. The English colonies had grown back not a little way from
+the sea, steadily pushed farther and farther into the thick-set forests
+which lay upon the broad valleys and rising slopes of the interior by
+mere increase of people and drift of enterprise. Before the seventeenth
+century was out adventurous English traders had crossed the Alleghenies,
+had launched their canoes upon the waters of the Ohio, and were fixing
+their huts here and there within the vast wilderness as men do who mean
+to stay. Colonel Dongan, the Duke’s governor in New York (1683), like
+many another officer whose duties made him alert to watch the humors and
+keep the friendship of the Iroquois, the masters of the northern border,
+had been quick to see how “inconvenient to the English” it was to have
+French settlements “running all along from our lakes by the back of
+Virginia and Carolina to the Bay of Mexico.” There was keen rivalry in
+trade, and had been these many years, between the men of the English and
+Dutch colonies and the men of the French for the profitable trade in furs
+which had its heart at the north; and it was already possible for those
+who knew the forest commerce to reason right shrewdly of the future,
+knowing, as they did, that the English gave better goods and dealt more
+fairly for the furs than the French, and that many of the very Frenchmen
+who ranged the forests in search of gain themselves preferred to send
+what they had to Albany for sale. But, except for a few lonely villages
+in far-away Maine, there was nowhere any close contact between French
+and English in America. Few, except traders and thoughtful governors and
+border villagers, who feared the tribes whom the French incited to attack
+and massacre, knew what France did or was planning.
+
+King William’s War (1689-1697), with its eight years of conscious peril,
+set new thoughts astir. It made America part of the stage upon which
+the great European conflict between French and English was to be fought
+out; and immediately a sort of continental air began to blow through
+colonial affairs. Colonial interests began to seem less local, more like
+interests held in common, and the colonies began to think of themselves
+as part of an empire. They had no great part in the war, it is true.
+Hale Sir William Phips, that frank seaman adventurer, led an expedition
+against Acadia in 1690, took Port Royal, and stripped the province of
+all that could be brought away; but that had hardly had the dignity of
+formal war. He had chiefly relished the private gain got out of it as a
+pleasant reminder of that day of fortune when he had found the Spanish
+treasure-ship sunk upon a reef in far Hispaniola. His second expedition,
+made the same year against Quebec, no doubt smacked more of the regular
+business, for he undertook it as an accredited officer of the crown;
+but when it failed it is likely he thought more of the private moneys
+subscribed and lost upon it than of the defeat of the royal arms. There
+was here the irritation, rather than the zest, of great matters, and
+the colonial leaders were not becoming European statesmen of a sudden.
+Their local affairs were still of more concern to them than the policies
+of European courts. Nevertheless the war made a beginning of common
+undertakings. The colonies were a little drawn together, a little put in
+mind of matters larger than their own.
+
+[Illustration: AN EARLY VIEW OF QUEBEC]
+
+New York felt herself no less concerned than Massachusetts and Maine in
+the contest with the French, with its inevitable accompaniment of trouble
+with the Indians; and Jacob Leisler, plebeian and self-constituted
+governor though he was, had made bold to take the initiative in forming
+plans for the war. Count Louis de Frontenac had been made governor of
+New France the very year William established himself as king in England
+(1689), and had come instructed, as every Englishman in America presently
+heard rumor say, to attack the English settlements at their very
+heart,—at New York itself. It was this rumor that had made Leisler hasten
+to seize the government in King William’s name, seeing King James’s
+governor hesitate, and hearing it cried in the streets that the French
+were in the very Bay. He had thought it not impossible that James’s
+officers might prove traitors and friends of King Louis in that last
+moment of their power. And then, when the government was in his hands,
+this people’s governor called a conference of the colonies to determine
+what should be done for the common defence. Massachusetts, Plymouth, and
+Connecticut responded, and sent agents to the conference (1690), the
+first of its kind since America was settled. It was agreed to attempt
+the conquest of New France. Sir William Phips should lead an expedition
+by sea against Quebec; and another force should go by land out of
+Connecticut and New York to attack Montreal, the only other stronghold,
+taking their Iroquois allies with them. But the land expedition was every
+way unfortunate, and got no farther than Lake Champlain. Frontenac was
+able to devote all his strength to the defence of Quebec; and Sir William
+Phips came back whipped and empty-handed. The first effort at a common
+undertaking had utterly miscarried.
+
+But that was not the end of the war. Its fires burned hot in the forests.
+Frontenac prosecuted the ugly business to the end as he had begun it. He
+had begun, not by sending a fleet to New York, for he had none to send,
+but by sending his Indian allies to a sudden attack and savage massacre
+at Schenectady, where sixty persons, men and women, old and young, saw
+swift and fearful death (1689); and year by year the same hideous acts
+of barbarous war were repeated,—not always upon the far-away border,
+but sometimes at the very heart of the teeming colony,—once (1697) at
+Haverhill, not thirty-five miles out of Boston itself. Such a war was not
+likely to be forgot in the northern colonies, at any rate, and in New
+York. Its memories were bitten into the hearts of the colonists there as
+with the searings of a hot iron; and they knew that the French must be
+overcome before there could be any lasting peace, or room enough made for
+English growth in the forests.
+
+They would rather have turned their thoughts to other things. There were
+home matters of deep moment which they were uneasy to settle. But these
+larger matters, of England’s place and power in the world, dominated them
+whether they would or no. King William’s War was but the forerunner of
+many more, of the same meaning and portent. Wars vexed and disciplined
+them for half a century, and their separate interests had often to stand
+neglected for years together in order that their common interests and the
+interests of English empire in America might be guarded.
+
+[Illustration: COURIER DU BOIS, XVII. CENTURY]
+
+And yet those who were thoughtful did not lose sight of the great, though
+subtle, gain which came with the vexing losses of war, to offset them.
+They had not failed to notice and to take to heart what had happened in
+England when William and Mary were brought to the throne. They were none
+the less Englishmen for being out of England, and what Parliament did
+for English liberty deeply concerned them. Parliament, as all the world
+knew, had done a great deal during those critical days in which it had
+consummated the “glorious revolution” by which the Stuarts were once
+for all put from the seat of sovereignty. It had reasserted the ancient
+rights named in Magna Charta; it had done away with the King’s arrogated
+right to tax; it had destroyed his alleged right to set laws aside, or
+alter them in any way; it had reduced him from being master and had made
+him a constitutional king, subject to his people’s will, spoken through
+their legal representatives in Parliament. The new King, too, had shown
+himself willing to extend these principles to America. In the charters
+which he granted or renewed, and in the instructions which he gave to
+the governors whom he commissioned, he did not begrudge an explicit
+acknowledgment of the right of the colonies to control their own taxation
+and the expenditures of their own colonial establishments.
+
+War embarrassed trade. It made hostile territory of the French West
+Indies, whence New England skippers fetched molasses for the makers of
+rum at home; and that was no small matter, for the shrewd New England
+traders were already beginning to learn how much rum would pay for,
+whether among the Indians of the forest country, among the savages of
+the African slave coast, or among their own neighbors at home, where all
+deemed strong drink a capital solace and defence against the asperities
+of a hard life. But it needed only a little circumspection, it turned
+out, to keep even that trade, notwithstanding the thing was a trifle
+difficult and hazardous. There was little cause for men who kept their
+wits about them to fear the law on the long, unfrequented coasts of the
+New World; and there was trade with the French without scruple whether
+war held or ceased. Buccaneers and pirates abounded in the southern seas,
+and legitimate traders knew as well as they did how confiscation and
+capture were to be avoided.
+
+[Illustration: AN ENGLISH FLEET IN 1732]
+
+The main lines of trade ran, after all, straight to the mother country,
+and were protected when there was need by English fleets. Both the laws
+of Parliament and their own interest bound the trade of the colonies to
+England. The Navigation Act of 1660, in force now these forty years,
+forbade all trade with the colonies except in English bottoms; forbade
+also the shipment of their tobacco and wool anywhither but to England
+itself; and an act of 1663 forbade the importation of anything at all
+except out of England, which, it was then once for all determined, must
+be the _entrepôt_ and place of staple for all foreign trade. It was
+determined that, if there were to be middlemen’s profits, the middlemen
+should be English, and that the carrying trade of England and her
+colonies should be English, not Dutch. It was the Dutch against whom the
+acts were aimed. Dutch ships cost less in the building than ships built
+in England; the Dutch merchantmen could afford to charge lower rates of
+freight than English skippers; and the statesmen of King Charles, deeming
+Holland their chief competitor upon the seas and in the markets of the
+world, meant to cut the rivalry short by statute, so far as the English
+realm was concerned.
+
+Fortunately the interests of the colonists themselves wore easily enough
+the harness of the acts. For a while it went very hard in Virginia, it
+is true, to pay English freight rates on every shipment of tobacco, the
+colony’s chief staple, and to sell only through English middlemen, to the
+exclusion of the accommodating Dutch and all competition. Trade touched
+nothing greater than the tobacco crop. Virginia supplied in that alone
+a full half of all the exports of the colonies. Her planters sharply
+resented “that severe act of Parliament which excludes us from having
+any commerce with any nation in Europe but our own”; for it seemed to
+put upon them a special burden. “We cannot add to our plantation any
+commodity that grows out of it, as olive trees, cotton, or vines,”
+complained Sir William Berkeley very bluntly to the government in 1671.
+“Besides this, we cannot procure any skilful men for one now hopeful
+commodity, silk: for it is not lawful for us to carry a pipe stave or
+a barrel of corn to any place in Europe out of the King’s dominions.
+If this were for his Majesty’s service or the good of his subjects, we
+should not repine, whatever our sufferings are for it; but on my soul,
+it is the contrary for both.” But the thing was eased for them at last
+when they began to see how their interest really lay. They had almost
+a monopoly of the English market, for Spanish tobacco was kept out by
+high duties, the planting of tobacco in England, begun on no mean
+scale in the west midland counties in the days of the Protectorate, was
+prohibited by law, and a rebate of duties on all tobacco re-exported
+to the continent quickened the trade with the northern countries of
+Europe, the chief market in any case for the Virginian leaf. Grumbling
+and evasion disappeared in good time, and Virginia accommodated herself
+with reasonable grace to what was, after all, no ruinous or unprofitable
+arrangement.
+
+New England, where traders most abounded, found little in the acts that
+she need complain of or seek to escape from. No New England commodity had
+its route and market prescribed as Virginian tobacco had; New England
+ships were “English” bottoms no less than ships built in England itself;
+they could be built as cheaply as the Dutch, and the long coast of the
+continent was clear for their skippers. If laws grew inconvenient,
+there were unwatched harbors enough in which to lade and unlade without
+clearance papers. English capital quickened trade as well as supplied
+shipping for the ocean carriage, and the King’s navy made coast and sea
+safe. If it was irritating to be tied to the leading-strings of statutes,
+it was at least an agreeable thing that they should usually pull in the
+direction merchants would in any case have taken. Though all products
+of foreign countries had to be brought through the English markets and
+the hands of English middlemen, the duties charged upon them upon their
+entrance into England were remitted upon their reshipment to America, and
+they were often to be had more cheaply in the colonies than in London.
+
+[Illustration: MOALE’S SKETCH OF BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, IN 1752]
+
+In 1699, when the war was over, Parliament laid a new restriction upon
+the colonies, forbidding them to manufacture their own wool for export,
+even for export from colony to colony. Good housewives were not to be
+prevented from weaving their own wool into cloth for the use of their own
+households; village weavers were not to be forbidden their neighborhood
+trade; but the woollen weavers of England supplied more than half of all
+the exports to the colonies, and had no mind to let woollen manufacture
+spring up in America if Parliament could be induced to prohibit it. It
+made no great practical difference to the colonies, though it bred a
+bitter thought here and there. Manufactures were not likely to spring up
+in America. “No man who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient
+by his labor to subsist his family in plenty,” said Mr. Franklin long
+afterwards, “is poor enough to be a manufacturer and work for a master.
+Hence, while there is land enough in America for our people, there can be
+no manufactures to any amount or value.” But the woollen manufacturers in
+England meant to take no chances in the matter; and the colonists did no
+more than grumble upon occasion at the restraints of a law which they
+had no serious thought of breaking.
+
+It was not breaches of the Acts of Navigation and the acts concerning
+woollen manufacture that the ministers found it necessary to turn their
+heed to when the war ended, but, rather, the open piracies of the
+southern seas. By the treaty of Ryswick, which brought peace (1697),
+France, England, Holland, and Spain, the high contracting parties,
+solemnly bound themselves to make common cause against buccaneering.
+Spain and England had been mutually bound since 1670 to abolish it.
+Buccaneering abounded most on the coasts of America. The lawless business
+had begun long ago. Spain had provoked it. She had taken possession of
+all Central and South America and of the islands of the West Indies,
+and had bidden all other nations stand off and touch nothing, while her
+fleets every year for generations together came home heavy with treasure.
+She had denied them the right of trade; she had forbidden their seamen
+so much as to get stores for their own use anywhere within the waters of
+Spanish America. She treated every ship as an intruder which she found
+in the southern seas, and the penalties she inflicted for intrusion upon
+her guarded coasts went the length of instant drowning or hangings at the
+yard-arm. It was a day when there was no law at sea. Every prudent man
+supplied his ship with arms, and was his own escort; and since Spain was
+the common bully, she became the common enemy. English and French and
+Dutch seamen were not likely very long to suffer themselves to be refused
+what they needed at her ports; and after getting what they needed, they
+went on to take whatever they wanted. They were intruders, anyway, for
+whatever purpose they came, and they might as well, as a witty Frenchman
+among them said, “repay themselves beforehand” for the losses they would
+suffer should Spanish cruisers find and take them.
+
+The spirit of adventure and of gain grew on them mightily. At first
+they contented themselves with an illicit trade at the unguarded ports
+of quiet, half-deserted islands like Hispaniola, where they could get
+hides and tallow, smoked beef and salted pork, in exchange for goods
+smuggled in from Europe. But they did not long stop at that. The exciting
+risks and notable profits of the business made it grow like a story of
+adventure. The ranks of the lawless traders filled more and more with
+every sort of reckless adventurer and every sort of unquiet spirit who
+found the ordinary world stale and longed for a change of luck, as well
+as with hosts of common thieves and natural outlaws. Such men, finding
+themselves inevitably consorting, felt their comradeship, helped one
+another when they could, and made a common cause of robbing Spain,
+calling themselves “Brethren of the Coast.” They took possession, as
+their numbers increased, of the little twin islands of St. Christopher
+and Nevis for rendezvous and headquarters, and fortified distant Tortuga
+for a stronghold; and their power grew apace through all the seventeenth
+century, until no Spanish ship was safe on the seas though she carried
+the flag of an admiral, and great towns had either to buy them off or
+submit to be sacked at their pleasure. They mustered formidable fleets
+and counted their desperate seamen by the thousands.
+
+[Illustration: CHARLESTON, FROM THE HARBOR, 1742]
+
+They were most numerous, most powerful, most to be feared at the
+very time the English colony was begun at Charleston (1670). All the
+English sea-coast at the south, indeed, was theirs in a sense. They were
+regulars, not outlaws, when France or Holland or England was at war with
+Spain, for the great governments did not scruple to give them letters of
+marque when they needed their assistance at sea. English buccaneers had
+helped Sir William Penn take Jamaica for Cromwell in 1655. And when there
+was no war, the silent, unwatched harbors of the long American sea-coast
+were their favorite places of refuge and repair. New Providence,
+England’s best anchorage and most convenient port of rendezvous in
+the Bahamas, became their chief place of welcome and recruiting. The
+coming of settlers did not disconcert them. It pleased them, rather.
+The settlers did not molest them,—had secret reasons, as they knew, to
+be glad to see them. There were the English navigation laws, as well
+as the Spanish, to be evaded, and the goods they brought to the closed
+markets were very cheap and very welcome,—and no questions were asked.
+They were abundantly welcome, too, to the goods they bought. For thirty
+years their broad pieces of gold and their Spanish silver were almost
+the only currency the Carolinas could get hold of. Governors winked at
+their coming and going,—even allowed them to sell their Spanish prizes in
+English ports. Charleston, too, and the open bays of Albemarle Sound were
+not more open to them than New York and Philadelphia and Providence, and
+even now and again the ports of Massachusetts. They got no small part of
+their recruits from among the lawless and shiftless men who came out of
+England or Virginia to the Carolinas for a new venture in a new country
+where law was young.
+
+Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont, came out in 1698 to be Governor
+General of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire,
+specially instructed to stamp out the piracy of the coasts; but he found
+it no light task. His predecessor in the government of New York, Benjamin
+Fletcher, had loved the Brethren of the Coast very dearly: they had made
+it to his interest to like them; and the merchants of New York, as of
+the other seaport towns, were noticeably slow to see the iniquity of
+the proscribed business. Lord Bellomont bitterly complained that the
+authorities of Rhode Island openly gave notorious pirates countenance and
+assistance. Mr. Edward Randolph, whose business it was to look after the
+King’s revenues, declared in his anger that North Carolina was peopled
+by nobody but smugglers, runaway servants, and pirates. South Carolina,
+fortunately, had seen the folly of harboring the outlaws by the time
+Lord Bellomont set about his suppression in the north. Not only had her
+population by that time been recruited and steadied by the coming in of
+increasing numbers of law-abiding and thrifty colonists to whom piracy
+was abhorrent, but she had begun also to produce great crops of rice
+for whose exportation she could hardly get ships enough, and had found
+that her whilom friends the freebooters did not scruple to intercept
+her cargoes on their way to the profitable markets of Holland, Germany,
+Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal. She presently began, therefore, to use a
+great pair of gallows, set up very conspicuously on “Execution Dock” at
+Charleston, for the diligent hanging of pirates. But the coast to the
+northward still showed them hospitality, and Lord Bellomont made little
+headway at New York,—except that he brought the notorious Captain Kidd to
+justice. William Kidd, a Scotsman, had made New York his home, and had
+won there the reputation of an honest and capable man and an excellent
+ship captain; but when he was given an armed vessel strongly manned, and
+the King’s commission to destroy the pirates of the coast, the temptation
+of power was too great for him. He incontinently turned pirate himself,
+and it fell to Lord Bellomont to send him to England to be hanged.
+
+[Illustration: LORD BELLOMONT]
+
+The interval of peace during which English governors in America could
+give their thoughts to the suppression of piracy proved all too short.
+“Queen Anne’s War” followed close upon the heels of King William’s,
+and the French and Indians became once again more threatening than the
+buccaneers. Nevertheless some important affairs of peace were settled
+before the storm of war broke again. For one thing, Mr. Penn was able
+once more to put in order the government of Pennsylvania. For two years
+(1692-1694) he had been deprived of his province, because, as every
+one knew, he had been on very cordial terms of friendship with James
+Stuart, the discredited King, and it was charged that he had taken
+part in intrigues against the new sovereign. But it was easy for him
+to prove, when the matter was dispassionately looked into, that he had
+done nothing dishonorable or disloyal, and his province was restored to
+him. In 1699 he found time to return to America and reform in person
+the administration of the colony. Bitter jealousies and sharp factional
+differences had sprung up there while affairs were in confusion after the
+coming in of William and Mary, and the two years Mr. Penn spent in their
+correction (1699-1701) were none too long for the work he had to do.
+He did it, however, in his characteristic healing fashion, by granting
+privileges, more liberal and democratic than ever, in a new charter.
+One chief difficulty lay in the fact that the lower counties by the
+Delaware chafed because of their enforced union with the newer counties
+of Pennsylvania; and Mr. Penn consented to an arrangement by which they
+should within three years, if they still wished it, have a separate
+assembly of their own, and the right to act for themselves in all matters
+of local government. Self-government, indeed, was almost always his
+provident cure for discontent. He left both Pennsylvania and the Delaware
+counties free to choose their own courts,—and Philadelphia free to select
+her own officers as an independently incorporated city. Had he been
+able to give his colony governors as wise and temperate as himself, new
+troubles might have been avoided as successfully as old troubles had been
+healed.
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM AND MARY COLLEGE BEFORE THE FIRE, 1723]
+
+While Mr. Penn lingered in America the rights of the proprietors of
+West Jersey, his own first province, passed finally to the crown. In
+1702 all proprietary rights, alike in East and in West Jersey, were
+formally surrendered to the crown, and New Jersey, once more a single,
+undivided province, became directly subject to the King’s government.
+For a generation, indeed, as it turned out, she was to have no separate
+governor of her own. A separate commission issued from the crown to
+the governor of New York to be also governor of New Jersey, upon each
+appointment in the greater province. But New Jersey kept her own
+government, nevertheless, and her own way of life. She suffered no merger
+into the larger province, her neighbor, whose governor happened to
+preside over her affairs.
+
+Many things changed and many things gave promise of change in the
+colonies as Mr. Penn looked on. In 1700 Virginia had her population
+enriched by the coming of seven hundred French Huguenots, under the
+leadership of the Marquis de la Muce,—some of them Waldenses who had
+moved, in exile, through Switzerland, Alsace, the Low Countries, and
+England ere they found their final home of settlement in Virginia,—all
+of them refugees because of the terror that had been in France for all
+Protestants since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). That same
+year, 1700, Williamsburg, the new village capital of the “Old Dominion,”
+grew very gay with company come in from all the river counties, from
+neighboring colonies, too, and even from far-off New England, to see the
+first class graduated from the infant college of William and Mary. The
+next year (1701) Connecticut, teeming more and more with a thrifty people
+with its own independent interests and resources, and finding Harvard
+College at Cambridge too far away for the convenience of those of her
+own youth who wished such training as ministers and professional men in
+general needed, set up a college of her own,—the college which half a
+generation later she called Yale, because of Mr. Elihu Yale’s gift of
+eight hundred pounds in books and money.
+
+Then King William died (1702,—Mary, his queen and consort, being dead
+these eight years), and Anne became queen. It was a year of climax in
+the public affairs of Europe. In 1701, Louis XIV. had put his grandson,
+Philip of Anjou, on the throne of Spain, in direct violation of his
+treaty obligations to England, and to the manifest upsetting of the
+balance of power in Europe, openly rejoicing that there were no longer
+any Pyrenees, but only a single, undivided Bourbon power from Flanders
+to the Straits of Gibraltar; and had defied England, despite his promises
+made at Ryswick, by declaring James’s son the rightful heir to the
+English throne. Instantly England, Holland, and Austria drew together in
+grand alliance against the French aggression, and for eleven years Italy,
+Germany, and the Netherlands rang with the War of the Spanish Succession.
+The storm had already broken when Anne became queen.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN CHURCHILL, DUKE OF MARLBOROUGH]
+
+England signalized the war by giving a great general to the world. It was
+the day of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, of whose genius soldiers
+gossiped to their neighbors and their children for half a century after
+the great struggle was over. The English took Gibraltar (1704). Prince
+Eugene of Savoy helped great Marlborough to the famous victory of
+Blenheim (1705),—and Virginians were not likely to forget that it was
+Colonel Parke, of Virginia, who took the news of that field to the Queen.
+Marlborough won at Ramillies and Eugene at Turin (1706). The two great
+captains triumphed together at Oudenarde (1708) and at Malplaquet (1709).
+The crowns of France and Spain were separated, and France was lightened
+of her overwhelming weight in the balance of power.
+
+[Illustration: PRINCE EUGENE]
+
+But for the colonies in America it was only “Queen Anne’s War,” full
+of anxiety, suffering, and disappointment,—massacres on the border,
+expeditions to the north blundered and mismanaged, money and lives spent
+with little to show for the sacrifice. The ministers at home had made no
+preparation in America for the renewal of hostilities. There had been
+warnings enough, and appeals of deep urgency, sent out of the colonies.
+Every observant man of affairs there saw what must come. But warnings
+and appeals had not been heeded. Lord Bellomont, that self-respecting
+gentleman and watchful governor, had told the ministers at home very
+plainly that there ought to be a line of frontier posts at the north,
+with soldiers for colonists, and that simply to pursue the Indians once
+and again to the depths of the forests was as useless “as to pursue birds
+that are on the wing.” An English prisoner in the hands of the French
+had sent word what he heard they meant to do for the extension of their
+boundaries and their power. The deputy governor of Pennsylvania had
+proposed a colonial militia to be kept at the frontier. Certain private
+gentlemen of the northern settlements had begged for a common governor
+“of worth and honor,” and for some system of common defence. Mr. Penn,
+looking on near at hand, had advised that the colonists be drawn together
+in intercourse and interest by a common coinage, a common rule of
+citizenship, a common system of justice, and by duties on foreign timber
+which would in some degree offset the burdens of the Navigation Acts,—as
+well as by common organization and action against the French and against
+the pirates of the coast. But nothing had been done.
+
+[Illustration: FRENCH HUGUENOT CHURCH, NEW YORK, 1704]
+
+Even the little that had been gained in King William’s War had now to
+be gained all over again. Sir William Phips had taken Port Royal very
+handily at the outset of that war (1690), and Acadia with it, and there
+had been no difficulty in holding the conquered province until the war
+ended; but the treaty of Ryswick had handed back to the French everything
+the English had taken, the statesmen of England hardly heeding America at
+all in the terms they agreed to,—and so a beginning was once more to be
+made.
+
+The war began, as every one knew it must, with forays on the border:
+the Indians were the first afoot, and were more to be feared than the
+French. The first movement of the English was made at the south, where,
+before the first year (1702) of the war was out, the Carolinians struck
+at the power of Spain in Florida. They sent a little force against St.
+Augustine, and easily swept the town itself, but stood daunted before
+the walls of the castle, lacking cannon to reduce it, and came hastily
+away at sight of two Spanish ships standing into the harbor, leaving
+their very stores and ammunition behind them in their panic. They had
+saddled the colony with a debt of six thousand pounds and gained nothing.
+But they at least kept their own borders safe against the Indians and
+their own little capital at Charleston safe against reprisals by the
+Spaniards. The Apalachees, who served the Spaniards on the border, they
+swept from their forest country in 1703, and made their border quiet by
+fire and sword, driving hundreds of the tribesmen they did not kill to
+new seats beyond the Savannah. Three years went by before they were in
+their turn attacked by a force out of Florida. Upon a day in August,
+1706, while the little capital lay stricken with yellow fever, a fleet of
+five French vessels appeared off the bar at their harbor mouth, bringing
+Spanish troops from Havana and St. Augustine. There was a quick rally to
+meet them. Colonial militia went to face their landing parties; gallant
+Colonel Rhett manned a little flotilla to check them on the water; and
+they were driven off, leaving two hundred and thirty prisoners and a
+captured ship behind them. The southern coast could take care of itself.
+
+[Illustration: OLD SWEDES CHURCH, WILMINGTON, DELAWARE]
+
+Nothing had been done meanwhile in the north. The first year of the war
+(1702) had seen Boston robbed of three hundred of her inhabitants by the
+scourge of small-pox, and New York stricken with a fatal fever brought
+out of the West Indies from which no man could rally. That dismal year
+lingered for many a day in the memory of the men of the middle colonies
+as “the time of the great sickness.” The northernmost border had been
+harried from Wells to Casco by the French Indians (1703); Deerfield,
+far away in the wilderness by the Connecticut, had been fearfully dealt
+with at dead of night, in the mid-winter of 1704, by a combined force of
+French and Indians; in 1705 the French in Acadia had brought temporary
+ruin upon the English trading posts in Newfoundland; and a French
+privateer had insolently come in open day into the Bay at New York, as if
+to show the English there how defenceless their great harbor was, with
+all the coast about it (1705). And yet there had been no counterstroke
+by the English,—except that Colonel Church, of Massachusetts, had spent
+the summer of 1704 in destroying as he could the smaller and less
+defended French and Indian villages upon the coasts which lay about the
+Penobscot and the Bay of Fundy. In 1707 a serious attempt was made to
+take Port Royal. Colonel March took a thousand men against the place, in
+twenty-three transports, convoyed by a man-of-war, and regularly laid
+siege to it; but lacked knowledge of the business he had undertaken and
+failed utterly.
+
+[Illustration: NEW YORK SLAVE MARKET ABOUT 1730]
+
+Another three years went by before anything was accomplished; and the
+French filled them in, as before, with raids and massacres. Again
+Haverhill was surprised, sacked, and burned (1708). The English were
+driven from the Bahama islands. An expedition elaborately prepared in
+England to be sent against the French in America was countermanded
+(1709), because a sudden need arose to use it at home. Everything
+attempted seemed to miscarry as of course. And then at last fortune
+turned a trifle kind. Colonel Francis Nicholson, governor of Virginia
+till 1705, had gone to England when he saw things stand hopelessly
+still in America, and, being a man steadfast and hard to put by, was at
+last able, in 1710, to obtain and bring assistance in person from over
+sea. He had recommended, while yet he was governor of Virginia, it was
+recalled, that the colonies be united under a single viceroy and defended
+by a standing army for which they should themselves be made to pay. The
+ministers at home had been too prudent to take that advice; but they
+listened now to his appeal for a force to be sent to America. By the 24th
+of September, 1710, he lay off Port Royal with a fleet of thirty-five
+sail, besides hospital and store ships, with four regiments of New
+England militia aboard his transports and a detachment of marines. On
+the 1st of October he opened the fire of three batteries within a hundred
+yards of the little fort that guarded the place, and within twenty-four
+hours he had brought it to its capitulation, as Sir William Phips had
+done twenty years before. Acadia was once more a conquered province of
+England. Colonel Nicholson renamed its port Annapolis Royal, in honor of
+the Queen whom he served. The name of the province itself the English
+changed to Nova Scotia.
+
+[Illustration: BROAD STREET, NEW YORK, IN 1740]
+
+Two years more, and the war was practically over; but no victories had
+been added to that lonely achievement at Port Royal. Colonel Nicholson
+went from his triumph in Acadia back to England again, to solicit a
+yet stronger force to be taken against Quebec, and once more got what
+he wanted. In midsummer of 1711 Sir Hovenden Walker arrived at Boston
+with a great fleet of transports and men-of-war, bringing Colonel Hill
+and seven of Marlborough’s veteran regiments to join the troops of New
+England in a decisive onset upon the stronghold of New France. Colonel
+Nicholson was to lead the colonial levies through the forests to Quebec;
+Sir Hovenden Walker was to ascend the St. Lawrence and strike from the
+river. But neither force reached Quebec. The admiral blundered in the
+fogs which beset him at the mouth of the great stream, lost eight ships
+and almost a thousand men, and then put about in dismay and steered
+straightway for England, to have his flag-ship blow up under him at
+Spithead. Colonel Nicholson heard very promptly of the admiral’s ignoble
+failure, and did not make his march. The next year, 1712, the merchants
+of Quebec subscribed a fund to complete the fortifications of their
+rock-built city, and even women volunteered to work upon them, that they
+might be finished ere the English came again. But the English did not
+come. That very summer brought a truce; and in March, 1713, the war ended
+with the peace of Utrecht. The treaty gave England Hudson’s Bay, Acadia,
+Newfoundland, and the little island of St. Christopher alongside Nevis in
+the Lesser Antilles.
+
+“Queen Anne’s War” was over; but there was not yet settled peace in
+the south. While the war lasted North Carolina had had to master, in
+blood and terror, the fierce Iroquois tribe of the Tuscaroras, who
+mustered twelve hundred warriors in the forests which lay nearest the
+settlements. And when the war was over South Carolina had to conquer a
+whole confederacy of tribes whom the Spaniards had stirred up to attack
+her. The Tuscaroras had seemed friends through all the first years of the
+English settlement on their coast; but the steady, ominous advance of
+the English, encroaching mile by mile upon their hunting grounds, had at
+last maddened them to commit a sudden and awful treachery. In September,
+1711, they fell with all their natural fury upon the nearer settlements,
+and for three days swept them with an almost continuous carnage. The next
+year the awful butchery was repeated. Both times the settlements found
+themselves too weak to make effective resistance; both times aid was sent
+from South Carolina, by forced marches through the long forests; and
+finally, in March, 1713, the month of the peace of Utrecht, an end was
+made. The Tuscaroras were attacked and overcome in their last stronghold.
+The remnant that was left migrated northward to join their Iroquois
+kinsmen in New York,—and Carolina was quit of them forever.
+
+[Illustration: OLD STATE HOUSE AT ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND]
+
+The strong tribes which held sway in the forests of South Carolina,—the
+Yamassees, Creeks, Catawbas, and Cherokees,—were no kinsmen of these
+alien Iroquois out of the north, and had willingly lent their aid to
+the English to destroy them. But, the war over, the Spaniards busied
+themselves to win these tribes also to a conspiracy against the
+English settlements, and succeeded only too well. They joined in a
+great confederacy, and put their seven or eight thousand braves on the
+war-path to destroy the English. For almost a whole year (April, 1715,
+to February, 1716) they kept to their savage work unsubdued, until full
+four hundred whites had lost their lives at their hands. Then the final
+reckoning came for them also, and the shattered remnants of their tribes
+sought new homes for themselves as they could. The savages had all but
+accomplished their design against the settlements. The awful work of
+destroying them left the Carolinas upon the verge of utter exhaustion,
+drained of blood and money, almost without crops of food to subsist upon,
+quite without means to bear the heavy charges of government in a time of
+war and sore disorder. There were some among the disheartened settlers
+who thought of abandoning their homes there altogether and seeking a
+place where peace might be had at a less terrible cost. But there was
+peace at least, and the danger of absolute destruction had passed.
+
+New York had had her own fright while the war lasted. A house blazed in
+the night (1712), and certain negroes who had gathered about it killed
+some of those who came to extinguish the flames. It was rumored that
+there had been a plot among the negroes to put the whole of the town
+to the torch; an investigation was made, amidst a general panic which
+rendered calm inquiry into such a matter impossible; and nineteen blacks
+were executed.
+
+But in most of the colonies domestic affairs had gone quietly enough,
+the slow war disturbing them very little. Connecticut found leisure of
+thought enough, in 1708, to collect a synod at Saybrook and formulate a
+carefully considered constitution for her churches, which her legislature
+the same year adopted. In 1707 New York witnessed a notable trial which
+established the freedom of dissenting pulpits. Lord Cornbury, the
+profligate governor of the province, tried to silence the Rev. Francis
+Mackemie, a Presbyterian minister,—pretending that the English laws of
+worship and doctrine were in force in New York; but a jury made short
+work of acquitting him. Massachusetts endured Joseph Dudley as governor
+throughout the war (1702-1715), checking him very pertinaciously at
+times when he needed the assistance of her General Court, but no longer
+refusing to live with reasonable patience under governors not of her own
+choosing.
+
+[Illustration: NEW YORK, FROM THE HARBOR, ABOUT 1725]
+
+[Illustration: ALEXANDER SPOTSWOOD]
+
+Fortunately for the Carolinas, a very notable man had become governor of
+Virginia ere the Tuscaroras took the war-path. There were tribes at the
+border,—Nottoways, Meherrins, and even a detached group of the Tuscaroras
+themselves,—who would have joined in the savage conspiracy against the
+whites had not Colonel Spotswood been governor in Virginia and shown
+himself capable of holding them quiet with a steady hand of authority,—a
+word of conciliation and a hint of force. Alexander Spotswood was no
+ordinary man. He added to a gentle breeding a manly bearing such as
+Virginians loved, and the administrative gifts which so many likable
+governors had lacked. His government was conducted with clear-eyed
+enterprise and steady capacity. It added to his consequence that he had
+borne the Queen’s commission in the forces of the great Marlborough on
+the field of Blenheim, and came to his duty in Virginia (1710) bearing
+a wound received on that famous field. His blood he took from Scotland,
+where the distinguished annals of his family might be read in many a
+public record; and a Scottish energy entered with him into the government
+of Virginia,—as well as a Scottish candor and directness in speech,—to
+the great irritation presently of James Blair, as aggressive a Scotsman
+as he, and more astute and masterful.
+
+[Illustration: BRENTON CHURCH, WHERE GOVERNOR SPOTSWOOD WORSHIPPED]
+
+It was Colonel Spotswood who, in 1716, gathered a company of gentlemen
+about him for a long ride of discovery into the Alleghanies. They put
+their horses through the very heart of the long wilderness, and won their
+way despite all obstacles to a far summit of the Blue Ridge, whence,
+first among all their countrymen, they looked forth to the westward
+upon the vast slopes which fell away to the Ohio and the great basin of
+the Mississippi. Colonel Spotswood, standing there the leader of the
+little group, knew that it was this way the English must come to make
+conquest of the continent. He urged his government at home to stretch
+a chain of defensive posts beyond the mountains from the lakes to the
+Mississippi, to keep the French from those inner valleys which awaited
+the coming of the white man; but he did not pause in the work he could
+do himself because the advice went unheeded. He kept the Indians still;
+he found excellent lands for a thrifty colony of Germans, and himself
+began the manufacture of iron in the colony, setting up the first iron
+furnace in America. The debts of the colony were most of them discharged,
+and a good trade in corn, lumber, and salt provisions sprang up with
+the West Indies. He rebuilt the college, recently destroyed by fire,
+and established a school for Indian children. He improved as he could
+the currency of the colony. His works were the quiet works of peace and
+development,—except for his vigorous suppression of the pirates of the
+coast,—and his administration might have outrun the year 1722, which saw
+him removed, had he been a touch less haughty, overbearing, unused to
+conciliating or pleasing those whose service he desired. He made enemies,
+and was at last ousted by them.
+
+[Illustration: GOVERNOR SPOTSWOOD’S EXPEDITION TO THE BLUE RIDGE]
+
+[Illustration: COLONEL RHETT AND THE PIRATE STEDE BONNET]
+
+Some of the best qualities of the soldier and administrator came out
+in him in the long struggle to put the pirates down once and for all.
+Queen Anne’s War had turned pirates into privateers and given pause to
+the stern business for a little, but it began again in desperate earnest
+when the war was over and peace concluded at Utrecht. It was officially
+reported by the secretary of Pennsylvania in 1717 that there were still
+fifteen hundred pirates on the coasts, making their headquarters at the
+Cape Fear and at New Providence in the Bahamas, and sweeping the sea as
+they dared from Brazil to Newfoundland. But the day of their reckoning
+was near at hand. South Carolina had cleared her own coasts for a little
+at the beginning of the century, but the robbers swarmed at her inlets
+again when the Indian massacres had weakened and distracted her, and
+the end of the war with France set many a roving privateersman free to
+return to piracy. The crisis and turning-point came in the year 1718.
+That year an English fleet crossed the sea, took New Providence, purged
+the Bahamas of piracy, and made henceforth a stronghold there for law and
+order. That same year Stede Bonnet, of Barbadoes, a man who had but the
+other day held a major’s commission in her Majesty’s service, honored and
+of easy fortune, but now turned pirate, as if for pastime, was caught
+at the mouth of the Cape Fear by armed ships under redoubtable Colonel
+Rhett, who had driven the French out of Charleston harbor thirteen years
+ago, and was taken and hanged on Charleston dock, all his crew having
+gone before him to the ceremony. “This humour of going a-pyrating,” it
+was said, “proceeded from a disorder in his mind, which had been but too
+visible in him some time before this wicked undertaking; and which is
+said to have been occasioned by some discomforts he found in a married
+state”; but the law saw nothing of that in what he had done. While Bonnet
+awaited his condemnation, Edward Thatch, the famous “Blackbeard,” whom
+all the coast dreaded, went a like just way to death, trapped within
+Ocracoke Inlet by two stout craft sent against him out of Virginia by
+Colonel Spotswood. And so, step by step, the purging went on. South
+Carolina had as capable a governor as Virginia in Robert Johnson; and
+the work done by these and like men upon the coasts, and by the English
+ships in the West Indies, presently wiped piracy out. By 1730 there was
+no longer anything for ships to fear on those coasts save the Navigation
+Acts and stress of sea weather.
+
+[Illustration: PORTRAIT OF THE PIRATE EDWARD THATCH]
+
+It was a long coast, and it took a long time to carry law and order into
+every bay and inlet. But every year brought increase of strength to
+the colonies, and with increase of strength power to rule their coasts
+as they chose. Queen Anne’s War over, quiet peace descended upon the
+colonies for almost an entire generation (1712-1740). Except for a flurry
+of Indian warfare now and again upon the borders, or here and there some
+petty plot or sudden brawl, quiet reigned, and peaceful progress. Anne,
+the queen, died the year after peace was signed (1714); and the next year
+Louis XIV. followed her, the great king who had so profoundly stirred
+the politics of Europe. An old generation had passed away, and new men
+and new measures seemed now to change the whole face of affairs. The
+first George took the throne, a German, not an English prince, his heart
+in Hannover; and presently the affairs of England fell into the hands
+of Sir Robert Walpole. Sir Robert kept his power for twenty-one years
+(1721-1742), and conducted the government with the shrewd, hard-headed
+sense and administrative capacity of a steady country squire,—as if
+governing were a sort of business, demanding, like other businesses,
+peace and an assured and equable order in affairs. It was a time of
+growth and recuperation, with much to do, but little to record.
+
+[Illustration: SIR ROBERT WALPOLE]
+
+The colonies, while it lasted, underwent in many things a slow
+transformation. Their population grew in numbers not only, but also
+in variety. By the end of the war there were probably close upon half
+a million people within their borders, counting slave with free; and
+with the return of peace there came a quickened increase. New England
+slowly lost its old ways of separate action as a self-constituted
+confederacy; and Massachusetts, with her new system of royal governors
+and a franchise broadened beyond the lines of her churches, by degrees
+lost her leadership. She was losing her old temper of Puritan thought.
+It was impossible to keep her population any longer of the single strain
+of which it had been made up at the first. New elements were steadily
+added; and new elements brought new ways of life and new beliefs. She was
+less and less governed by her pulpits; turned more and more to trade for
+sustenance; welcomed new-comers with less and less scrutiny of their ways
+of thinking; grew less suspicious of change, and more like her neighbors
+in her zest for progress.
+
+Scots-Irish began to make their appearance in the colony, some of them
+going to New Hampshire, some remaining in Boston; and they were given a
+right willing welcome. The war had brought sore burdens of expense and
+debt upon the people, and these Scots-Irish knew the profitable craft
+of linen-making which the Boston people were glad to learn, and use to
+clothe themselves; for poverty, they declared, “is coming upon us as an
+armed man.” These new immigrants brought with them also the potato, not
+before used in New England, and very acceptable as an addition to the
+colony’s bill of fare. Small vessels now began to venture out from Cape
+Cod and Nantucket, moreover, in pursuit of the whales that came to the
+northern coasts, and it was not long before that daring occupation began
+to give promise of wealth and of the building up of a great industry.
+Population began slowly to spread from the coasts into the forests
+which lay at the west between the Connecticut and the Hudson. In 1730 a
+Presbyterian church was opened in Boston,—almost as unmistakable a sign
+of change as King’s Chapel itself had been with its service after the
+order of the Church of England.
+
+The middle colonies and the far south saw greater changes than these.
+South Carolina seemed likely to become as various in her make-up as
+were New York and Pennsylvania with their mixture of races and creeds.
+Scots-Irish early settled within her borders also; she had already her
+full share of Huguenot blood; and there followed, as the new century
+advanced through the lengthened years of peace, companies of Swiss
+immigrants, and Germans from the Palatinate. Charleston, however, seemed
+English enough, and showed a color of aristocracy in her life which no
+one could fail to note who visited her. Back from the point where the
+rivers met, where the fortifications stood, and the docks to which the
+ships came, there ran a fine road northward which Governor Archdale, that
+good Quaker, had twenty years ago declared more beautiful and pleasant
+than any prince in Europe could find to take the air upon when he drove
+abroad. From it on either side stretched noble avenues of live oaks,
+their strong lines softened by the long drapery of the gray moss,—avenues
+which led to the broad verandas of country residences standing in
+cool and shadowy groves of other stately trees. In summer the odor of
+jasmine filled the air; and even in winter the winds were soft. It was
+here that the ruling men of the colony lived, the masters of the nearer
+plantations,—men bred and cultured after the manner of the Old World. The
+simpler people, who made the colony various with their differing bloods,
+lived inland, in the remoter parishes, or near other harbors above or
+below Charleston’s port. It was on the nearer plantations round about
+Charleston that negro slaves most abounded; and there were more negroes
+by several thousand in the colony than white folk. Out of the 16,750
+inhabitants of the colony in 1715, 10,500 were slaves. But the whites
+were numerous enough to give their governors a taste of their quality.
+
+[Illustration: MAP OF THE COAST SETTLEMENTS, 1742]
+
+There were well-developed political parties in South Carolina, for all
+she was so small; and astute and able men to lead them, like Colonel
+Rhett, now soldier, now sailor, now statesman, and Mr. Nicholas Trott,
+now on one side and again on the other in the matter of self-government
+as against the authority of the proprietors or the crown, but always in
+a position to make his influence felt. The province practically passed
+from the proprietors to the crown in 1719, because the people’s party
+determined to be rid of their authority, and ousted their governor,
+exasperated that in their time of need, their homes burned about
+their ears by the savages, their coasts ravaged by freebooters, they
+should have been helped not a whit, but left to shift desperately for
+themselves. In 1729 the proprietors formally surrendered their rights.
+Colonel Francis Nicholson acted as provisional governor while the change
+was being effected (1719-1725), having been meantime governor of Acadia,
+which he had taken for the crown. In 1720 he was knighted; and he
+seems to have acted as soberly in this post in Carolina as he had acted
+in Virginia. He was truculent and whimsical in the north; but in the
+south his temper seemed eased and his judgment steadied. The change of
+government in South Carolina was really an earnest of the fact that the
+people’s representatives had won a just and reasonable ascendency in the
+affairs of the colony; and Sir Francis did not seriously cross them, but
+served them rather, in the execution of their purposes.
+
+[Illustration: POHICK CHURCH, VIRGINIA, WHERE WASHINGTON WORSHIPPED]
+
+Every colony had its own movements of party. Everywhere the crown
+desired the colonial assemblies to provide a permanent establishment for
+the governor, the judges, and the other officers who held the King’s
+commission,—fixed salaries, and a recognized authority to carry out
+instructions; but everywhere the people’s representatives persistently
+refused to grant either salaries or any additional authority which they
+could not control in the interest of their own rights from session to
+session. They would vote salaries for only a short period, generally a
+year at a time; and they steadily denied the right of the crown to extend
+or vary the jurisdiction of the courts without their assent. Sometimes a
+governor like Mr. Clarke, of New York, long a resident in his colony and
+acquainted with its temper and its ways of thought, got what he wanted
+by making generous concessions in matters under his own control; and the
+judges, whatever their acknowledged jurisdiction, were likely to yield
+to the royal wishes with some servility: for they were appointed at the
+King’s pleasure, and not for the term of their good behavior, as in
+England. But power turned, after all, upon what the people’s legislature
+did or consented to do, and the colonists commonly spoke their minds with
+fearless freedom.
+
+In New York the right to speak their minds had been tested and
+established in a case which every colony promptly learned of. In 1734
+and 1735 one John Peter Ziegler, a printer, was brought to trial for
+the printing of various libellous attacks on the governor and the
+administration of the colony,—attacks which were declared to be highly
+“derogatory to the character of his Majesty’s government,” and to have
+a tendency “to raise seditions and tumults in the province”; but he was
+acquitted. The libel was admitted, but the jury deemed it the right
+of every one to say whatever he thought to be true of the colony’s
+government; and men everywhere noted the verdict.
+
+[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF THE PROCEEDINGS AGAINST THE NEGROES]
+
+A second negro plot startled New York in 1741, showing itself, as
+before, in sudden incendiary fires. It was thought that the slaves had
+been incited to destroy the town; and there was an uneasy suspicion
+that these disturbing occurrences were in some way connected with the
+slave insurrections in the south. Uprisings of the slaves had recently
+occurred in the West Indies. South Carolina had suffered such an outbreak
+a little more than two years before. In 1738 armed insurgent negroes
+had begun there, in a quiet parish, the execution of a terrible plot of
+murder and burning which it had taken very prompt and summary action to
+check and defeat. Such risings were specially ominous where the slaves
+so outnumbered the whites; and it was known in South Carolina whence
+the uneasiness of the negroes came. At the south of the province lay
+the Spanish colonies in Florida. Negroes who could manage to run away
+from their masters and cross the southern border were made very welcome
+there; they were set free, and encouraged in every hostile purpose that
+promised to rob the English settlements of their ease and peace. Bands of
+Yamassees wandered there, too, eager to avenge themselves as they could
+for the woful defeat and expulsion they had suffered at the hands of the
+Carolinians, and ready to make common cause with the negroes. When bands
+of negroes, hundreds strong, began their sudden work of burning, plunder,
+and murder where the quiet Stono runs to the sea no one doubted whence
+the impulse came. And though a single rising was easily enough put down,
+who could be certain that that was the end of the ominous business? No
+wonder governors at Charleston interested themselves to increase the
+number of white settlers and make their power of self-defence sure.
+
+Such things, however, serious as they were, did not check the steady
+growth of the colonies. It was not yet questions of self-government or
+of the preservation of their peace that dominated their affairs; and
+only those who observed how far-away frontiers were being advanced and
+two great nations being brought together for a reckoning face to face
+saw what was the next, the very near, crisis in store for the English
+in America. Through all that time of peace a notable drama was in fact
+preparing. Slowly, but very surely, English and French were drawing
+nearer and nearer within the continent,—not only in the north, but
+throughout all the length of the great Mississippi. Step by step the
+French had descended the river from their posts on the lakes; and while
+peace reigned they had established posts at its mouth and begun to make
+their way northward from the Gulf. So long ago as 1699 they had built a
+stockade at Biloxi; in 1700 they had taken possession of Mobile Bay; by
+1716 they had established posts at Toulouse (Alabama) and at Natchez.
+In 1718 they began to build at New Orleans. In 1719 they captured and
+destroyed the Spanish post at Pensacola. By 1722 there were five thousand
+Frenchmen by the lower stretches of the great river; and their trading
+boats were learning all the shallows and currents of the mighty waterway
+from end to end. Meantime, in the north, they advanced their power to
+Lake Champlain, and began the construction of a fort at Crown Point
+(1721). That same year, 1721, French and English built ominously near
+each other on Lake Ontario, the English at Oswego, the French at Niagara
+among the Senecas. In 1716, the very year Governor Spotswood rode through
+the western forests of Virginia to a summit of the Blue Ridge, the French
+had found a short way to the Ohio by following the Miami and the Wabash
+down their widening streams. It was while they thus edged their way
+towards the eastern mountains and drew their routes closer and closer to
+their rivals on the coast that that adventurous, indomitable people, the
+Scots-Irish, came pouring of a sudden into the English colonies, and very
+promptly made it their business to pass the mountains and take possession
+of the lands which lay beyond them, as if they would deliberately go to
+meet the French by the Ohio.
+
+[Illustration: OSWEGO IN 1750]
+
+For several years after the first quarter of the new century had run
+out immigrants from the north of Ireland came crowding in, twelve
+thousand strong by the year. In 1729 quite five thousand of them entered
+Pennsylvania alone: and they pressed without hesitation and as if by
+preference to the interior. From Pennsylvania they passed along the
+broad, inviting valleys southward into the western parts of Virginia.
+By 1730 a straggling movement of settlers had begun to show itself even
+upon the distant lands of Kentucky. Still farther south traders from the
+Carolinas went constantly back and forth between the Indian tribes of
+the country by the Mississippi and the English settlements at the coast.
+Nine thousand redskin warriors lay there in the forests. Some traded
+with the French at the river, some with the English at the coast. They
+might become foes or allies, might turn to the one side or the other, as
+passion or interest led them.
+
+In 1739 the French at the north put an armed sloop on Champlain. The same
+year the English built a fortified post at Niagara. Everywhere the two
+peoples were converging, and were becoming more and more conscious of
+what their approach to one another meant. So long ago as 1720 orders had
+come from France bidding the French commanders on the St. Lawrence occupy
+the valley of the Ohio before the English should get a foothold there.
+The places where the rivals were to meet it was now easy to see, and
+every frontiersman saw them very plainly. The two races could not possess
+the continent together. They must first fight for the nearer waterways of
+the West, and after that for whatever lay next at hand.
+
+It was no small matter, with threat of such things in the air, that
+the English chose that day of preparation for the planting of a new
+colony, and planted it in the south between Carolina and the Florida
+settlements,—a barrier and a menace both to French and Spaniard. It
+was James Oglethorpe, a soldier, who planned the new undertaking;
+and he planned it like a soldier,—and yet like a man of heart and
+elevated purpose, too, for he was a philanthropist and a lover of every
+serviceable duty, as well as a soldier. He came of that good stock of
+country gentlemen which has in every generation helped so sturdily to
+carry forward the work of England, in the field, in Parliament, in
+administrative office. He had gone with a commission into the English
+army in the late war a mere lad of fourteen (1710); and, finding himself
+still unskilled in arms when England made peace at Utrecht, he had chosen
+to stay for six years longer, a volunteer, with the forces of Prince
+Eugene in the East. At twenty-two he had come back to England (1718), to
+take upon himself the responsibilities which had fallen to him by reason
+of the death of his elder brothers; and in 1722 he had entered the House
+of Commons, eager as ever to learn his duty and do it. He kept always a
+sort of knightly quality, and the power to plan and hope and push forward
+that belongs to youth. He was a Tory, and believed that the Stuarts
+should have the throne from which they had been thrust before he was
+born; but that did not make him disloyal. He was an ardent reformer; but
+that did not make him visionary, for he was also trained in affairs. His
+clear-cut features, frank eye, erect and slender figure bespoke him every
+inch the high-bred gentleman and the decisive man of action.
+
+[Illustration: JAMES OGLETHORPE]
+
+In Parliament he had been made one of a committee to inspect prisons; and
+he had been keenly touched by the miserable plight of the many honest
+men who, through mere misfortune, were there languishing in hopeless
+imprisonment for debt. He bethought himself of the possibility of giving
+such men a new chance of life and the recovery of fortune in America; and
+the thought grew into a plan for a new colony. He knew how the southern
+coast lay vacant between Charleston and the Spaniards at St. Augustine.
+There were good lands there, no doubt; and his soldier’s eye showed him,
+by a mere glance at a map, how fine a point of vantage it might be made
+if fortified against the alien power in Florida. And so he made his
+plans. It should be a military colony, a colony of fortified posts;
+and honest men who had fallen upon poverty or misfortune at home should
+have a chance, if they would work, to profit by the undertaking, though
+he should take them from debtors’ prisons. Both King and Parliament
+listened very willingly to what he proposed. The King signed a charter,
+giving the undertaking into the hands of trustees, who were in effect to
+be proprietors (June, 1732); and Parliament voted ten thousand pounds
+as its subscription to the enterprise; while men of as liberal a spirit
+as Oglethorpe’s associated themselves with him to carry the humane plan
+out, giving money, counsel, and service without so much as an expectation
+of gain to themselves, or any material return for their outlay. Men had
+ceased by that time to dream that colonization would make those rich
+who fathered it and paid its first bills. By the end of October, 1732,
+the first shipload of settlers was off for America, Oglethorpe himself
+at their head; and by February, 1733, they were already busy building
+their first settlement on Yamacraw Bluff, within the broad stream of the
+Savannah.
+
+The colony had in its charter been christened Georgia, in honor of the
+King, who had so cordially approved of its foundation; the settlement at
+Yamacraw, Oglethorpe called by the name of the river itself, Savannah.
+His colonists were no mere company of released debtors and shiftless
+ne’er-do-wells. Men had long ago learned the folly of that mistake,
+and Oglethorpe was too much a man of the world to repeat the failures
+of others. Every emigrant had been subjected to a thorough examination
+regarding his antecedents, his honesty, his character for energy and good
+behavior, and had been brought because he had been deemed fit. Italians
+skilled in silk culture were introduced into the colony. Sober German
+Protestants came from Moravia and from Salzburg, by Tyrol, and were given
+their separate places of settlement,—as quiet, frugal, industrious,
+pious folk as the first pilgrims at Plymouth. Clansmen from the Scottish
+Highlands came, and were set at the extreme south, as an outpost to
+meet the Spaniard. Some of the Carolina settlers who would have liked
+themselves to have the Highlanders for neighbors tried to dissuade them
+from going to the spot selected for their settlement. They told them
+that the Spaniards were so near at hand that they could shoot them from
+the windows of the houses that stood within the fort. “Why, then, we
+shall beat them out of their fort, and shall have houses ready built to
+live in!” cried the men in kilts, very cheerily, and went on to their
+settlement.
+
+[Illustration: OGLETHORPE’S ORDER FOR SUPPLIES]
+
+[Illustration: SAVANNAH IN 1754]
+
+Fortunately it was seven years before the war with Spain came which every
+one had known from the first to be inevitable; and by that time the
+little colony was ready enough. Georgia’s territory stretched upon the
+coast from the Savannah to the Altamaha, and from the coast ran back,
+west and northwest, to the sources of those rivers; from their sources
+due westward “to the South Seas.” Savannah was thus planted at the very
+borders of South Carolina. New settlers were placed, as they came, some
+in Savannah, many by the upper reaches of the river. The Highlanders had
+their post of danger and honor upon the Altamaha; and before war came new
+settlers, additional arms and stores, and serviceable fortifications had
+been placed at St. Simon’s Island at the mouth of the Altamaha. Every
+settlement was in some sort a fortified military post. The first settlers
+had been drilled in arms by sergeants of the Royal Guards in London every
+day between the time of their assembling and the time of their departure.
+Arms and ammunition were as abundant almost as agricultural tools and
+food stores in the cargoes carried out. Negro slavery was forbidden
+in the colony, because it was no small part of Oglethorpe’s purpose in
+founding it to thrust a solid wedge of free settlers between Carolina
+and the country to the south, and close the border to fugitive slaves.
+Neither could any liquor be brought in. It was designed that the life of
+the settlements should be touched with something of the rigor of military
+discipline; and so long as Oglethorpe himself was at hand laws were
+respected and obeyed, rigid and unacceptable though they were; for he was
+a born ruler of men.
+
+[Illustration: ALEXANDER HAMILTON]
+
+He had not chosen very wisely, however, when he brought Charles and John
+Wesley out as his spiritual advisers and the pastors of his colony. They
+were men as inapt at yielding and as strenuous at prosecuting their
+own way of action as he, and promoted diversity of opinion quite as
+successfully as piety. They stayed but three or four uneasy years in
+America, and then returned to do their great work of setting up a new
+dissenting church in England. George Whitefield followed them (1738)
+in their missionary labors, and for a little while preached acceptably
+enough in the quiet colony; but he, too, was very soon back in England
+again. The very year Oglethorpe brought Charles Wesley to Georgia (1734)
+a great wave of religious feeling swept over New England again,—not
+sober, self-contained, deep-currented, like the steady fervor of the
+old days, but passionate, full of deep excitement, agitated, too like
+a frenzy. Enthusiasts who saw it rise and run its course were wont to
+speak of it afterwards as “the Great Awakening,” but the graver sort were
+deeply disturbed by it. It did not spend its force till quite fifteen
+years had come and gone. Mr. Whitefield returned to America in 1739, to
+add to it the impulse of his impassioned preaching, and went once more to
+Georgia also. Again and again he came upon the same errand, stirring many
+a colony with his singular eloquence; but Georgia was busy with other
+things, and heeded him less than the rest.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN WESLEY]
+
+[Illustration: OGLETHORPE’S EXPEDITION AGAINST ST. AUGUSTINE]
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE WHITEFIELD]
+
+When the inevitable war came with Spain, in 1739,—inevitable because of
+trade rivalries in the West Indies and in South America, and because of
+political rivalry at the borders of Florida,—Oglethorpe was almost the
+first to strike. Admiral Vernon had been despatched in midsummer, 1739,
+before the declaration of war, to destroy the Spanish settlements and
+distress Spanish commerce in the West Indies; and had promptly taken
+Porto Bello in November, scarcely a month after war had been formally
+declared. Oglethorpe struck next, at St. Augustine. It was this he had
+looked forward to in founding his colony. In May, 1740, he moved to the
+attack with a mixed army of redskins and provincial militia numbering a
+little more than two thousand men,—supported at sea by a little fleet
+of six vessels of war under Sir Yelverton Peyton. But there had been
+too much delay in getting the motley force together. The Spaniards
+had procured reinforcements from Havana; the English ships found it
+impracticable to get near enough to the Spanish works to use their guns
+with effect; Oglethorpe had no proper siege pieces; and the attack
+utterly failed. It had its effect, nevertheless. For two years the
+Spaniards held nervously off, carefully on the defensive; and when they
+did in their turn attack, Oglethorpe beat them handsomely off, and more
+than wiped out the disrepute of his miscarriage at St. Augustine. In June
+1742, there came to St. Simon’s Island a Spanish fleet of fifty-one sail,
+nearly five thousand troops aboard, and Oglethorpe beat them off with six
+hundred and fifty men,—working his little forts like a master, and his
+single guard-schooner and few paltry armed sloops as if they were a navy.
+Such a deliverance, cried Mr. Whitefield, could not be paralleled save
+out of Old Testament history.
+
+Meanwhile Vernon and Wentworth had met with overwhelming disaster at
+Cartagena. With a great fleet of ships of the line and a land force of
+nine thousand men, they had made their assault upon it in March, 1741;
+but because Wentworth bungled everything he did with his troops the
+attack miserably failed. He was caught by the deadly wet season of the
+tropics; disease reduced his army to a wretched handful; and thousands
+of lives were thrown away in his dismal disgrace. Both New England and
+Virginia had sent troops to take their part with that doomed army; and
+the colonies knew, in great bitterness, how few came home again. The
+war had its issues for them, they knew, as well as for the governments
+across the water. It meant one more reckoning with the Spaniard and the
+Frenchman, their rivals for the mastery of America. And in 1745 New
+England had a triumph of her own, more gratifying even than Oglethorpe’s
+astonishing achievement at St. Simon’s Island.
+
+[Illustration: THE ACTION AT CARTAGENA]
+
+Only for a few months had England dealt with Spain alone upon a private
+quarrel. In 1740 the male line of the great Austrian house of Hapsburg
+had run out: Maria Theresa took the throne; rival claimants disputed her
+right to the succession; and all Europe was presently plunged into the
+“War of the Austrian Succession” (1740-1748). “King George’s War” they
+called it in the colonies, when France and England became embroiled; but
+the name did not make it doubtful what interests, or what ambitions, were
+involved; and New England struck her own blow at the power of France. A
+force of about four thousand men, levied in Massachusetts, New Hampshire,
+and Connecticut, moved in the spring of 1745 against the French port of
+Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. Commodore Warren, the English naval
+commander in the West Indies, furnished ships for their convoy, and
+himself supported them in the siege; and by the 16th of June the place
+had been taken. For twenty-five years the French had been slowly building
+its fortifications, covering with them an area two and a half miles in
+circumference. They had made them, they supposed, impregnable. But the
+English had struck quickly, without warning, and with a skill and ardor
+which made them wellnigh irresistible; and their triumph was complete.
+Provincial troops had taken the most formidable fortress in America.
+William Pepperrell, the gallant gentleman who had led the New Englanders,
+got a baronetcy for his victory. Warren was made an admiral.
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM PEPPERRELL]
+
+The next year an attack was planned against the French at Crown Point
+on Champlain, but nothing came of it. The war almost stood still
+thenceforth, so far as the colonies were concerned, till peace was signed
+at Aix-la-Chapelle in October, 1748. That peace brought great chagrin to
+New England. By its terms Louisbourg and all conquests everywhere were
+restored. The whole work was to do over again, as after King William’s
+War and the restoration of Port Royal, which Sir William Phips had
+been at such pains to take. The peace stood, however, little longer
+than that which had separated King William’s War from the War of the
+Spanish Succession. Seven years, and France and England had once more
+grappled,—this time for a final settlement. All the seven years through
+the coming on of war was plainly to be seen by those who knew where to
+look for the signs of the times. The French and English in that brief
+interval were not merely to approach; they were to meet in the western
+valleys, and the first spark of a war that was to embroil all Europe was
+presently to flash out in the still forests beyond the far Alleghanies.
+
+It was on the borders of Virginia this time that the first act of the
+drama was to be cast. The French determined both to shorten and to
+close their lines of occupation and defence from the St. Lawrence to
+the Mississippi and the Gulf. They knew that they could do this only by
+taking possession of the valley of the Ohio; and the plan was no sooner
+formed than it was attempted. And yet to do this was to come closer
+than ever to the English and to act under their very eyes. A few German
+families had made their way far to the westward in Pennsylvania, and
+hundreds of the indomitable Scots-Irish had been crowding in there for
+now quite twenty years, passing on, many of them, to the beautiful valley
+of the Shenandoah below, and pressing everywhere closer and closer to the
+passes which led down but a little way beyond into the valleys of the
+Alleghany, the Monongahela, and the Ohio. These men, at the frontiers of
+Pennsylvania and Virginia, were sure to observe what was going forward
+in front of them, and to understand what they saw. Traders crossed those
+mountains now by the score from the English settlements,—three hundred
+in a year, it was said. They knew the waters that ran to the Ohio quite
+as well as any Frenchman did. Their canoes had followed the turnings
+of the broad Ohio itself, and had found it a highway to the spreading
+Mississippi, where French boats floated slowly down from the country of
+the Illinois, carrying their cargoes of meat, grain, tobacco, tallow,
+hides, lead, and oil to the settlements on the Gulf. In 1748, the year
+of the last peace, certain leading gentlemen in Virginia had organized
+an Ohio Land Company,—among the rest Mr. Augustus Washington, who had
+served with Vernon and Wentworth at Cartagena and had lost his health
+in the fatal service. He had named his estate by the Potomac, his
+home of retirement, Mount Vernon, as his tribute of admiration to the
+gallant sailor he had learned to love during those fiery days in the
+South. In 1750 the English government had granted to the Company six
+hundred thousand acres of land on the coveted river. Virginian officials
+themselves had not scrupled meanwhile also to issue grants and titles
+to land beyond the mountains. The English claim to the Ohio country was
+unhesitating and comprehensive.
+
+The English had seized French traders there as unlicensed intruders,
+and the French in their turn had seized and expelled Englishmen who
+trafficked there. French and English matched their wits very shrewdly to
+get and keep the too fickle friendship of the Indians, and so make sure
+of their trade and their peace with them; and the Indians got what they
+could from them both. It was a sharp game for a great advantage, and the
+governments of the two peoples could not long refrain from taking a hand
+in it.
+
+The French authorities, it turned out, were, as usual, the first to act.
+In 1752 the Marquis Duquesne became governor of Canada, an energetic
+soldier in his prime; and it was he who took the first decisive step. In
+the spring of 1753 he despatched a force to Presque Isle, on the southern
+shore of Lake Erie, built a log fort there, and thence cut a portage for
+his boats southward a little way through the forest to a creek (French
+Creek the English called it afterwards) whose waters, when at flood,
+would carry his boats to the Alleghany, and by that open stream to the
+Ohio. It was the short and straight way from the St. Lawrence to the
+Mississippi and the Gulf. At the creek’s head he placed another log fort
+(Le Bœuf), and upon the Alleghany a rude outpost.
+
+The same year that saw the Marquis Duquesne made governor of Canada
+saw Robert Dinwiddie come out as governor of Virginia, and no one was
+likelier than he to mark and comprehend the situation on the border. Mr.
+Dinwiddie had been bred in a counting house, for he was the son of a
+well-to-do merchant of Glasgow; but business had long since become for
+him a matter of government. He had gone in his prime to be collector
+of customs in Bermuda; and after serving in that post for eleven years
+he had been made surveyor general of customs in the southern ports of
+America,—a post in which he served most acceptably for another ten years.
+For twenty years he had shown singular zeal and capacity in difficult,
+and, for many men, demoralizing, matters of administration. He had lived
+in Virginia when surveyor general of customs. During the two years which
+immediately preceded his appointment to the governorship of the Old
+Dominion he had engaged in business on his own account in London, and
+had become by purchase one of the twenty stockholders of the Ohio Land
+Company. He came to his new office, therefore, acquainted in more than
+one way with the leading men of the colony,—especially with Mr. Augustine
+Washington, now the Ohio Company’s president, and the little group of
+influential gentlemen,—Lees, Fairfaxes, and the rest,—often to be found
+gathered at Mount Vernon. He came, therefore, with his eyes on the
+western lands where the company and his government were alike bound to
+see to it that the French were checked.
+
+[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF THE NEW YORK WEEKLY _JOURNAL_]
+
+He saw Duquesne’s movement, consequently, at its very outset, warned the
+government at home, and was promptly instructed to require the French
+“peaceably to depart,” and if they would not go for the warning, “to
+drive them off by force of arms.” He chose as his messenger to carry the
+summons Mr. George Washington, half-brother to Mr. Augustine Washington,
+of Mount Vernon. George Washington was only a lad of twenty-one; but he
+had hardened already to the work of a man. He had received no schooling
+in England such as Augustine had had, but had gone from the simple
+schools and tutors of the Virginian country-side to serve as a surveyor
+for Lord Fairfax in the rough country of the Shenandoah,—whither Fairfax,
+heir of the old Culpeper grants, had come to seek a life away from courts
+in the picturesque wilderness of America. Augustine Washington died the
+very year Mr. Dinwiddie became governor, though he was but thirty-four;
+and he had left George, lad though he was, to administer his estate
+and serve in his stead as commander of the militia of eleven counties.
+Governor Dinwiddie knew whom he was choosing when he sent this drilled
+and experienced youngster, already a frontiersman, to bid the French
+leave the Ohio.
+
+[Illustration: ROBERT DINWIDDIE]
+
+The message was carried in the dead of winter to the grave and courteous
+soldier who commanded at Fort Le Bœuf; and Washington tried the endurance
+even of the veteran frontiersman who accompanied him by the forced
+marches he made thither and back again through the dense and frosted
+woods, across frozen streams, and through the pathless, storm-beaten
+tangles of deep forests, where there was hardly so much as the track of
+a bison for their horses to walk in. He reported that the French had
+received him very graciously; but had claimed the Ohio as their own, had
+made no pretence that they would abandon it because the English bade
+them, and clearly meant to establish themselves where they were. Juniors
+among their officers had told him so very plainly as he sat with them
+after dinner in a house which they had seized from an English trader.
+
+[Illustration: ENGLISH COLONIES, 1700.
+
+BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]
+
+He was back at Williamsburg with his report by the middle of January,
+1754; and the next month a small body of frontiersmen was hurried forward
+to make a clearing at the forks of the Ohio and begin the construction
+of fortifications there ere spring came, and the French. The French
+came, nevertheless, all too soon. By the 17th of April their canoes
+swarmed there, bearing five hundred men and field ordnance, and the forty
+Englishmen who held the rude, unfinished defences of the place had no
+choice but to retire or be blown into the water. The French knew the
+importance of the place as a key to the western lands, and they meant
+to have it, though they should take it by an open act of war. Their
+force there numbered fourteen hundred before summer came. They built a
+veritable fort, of the rough frontier pattern, but strong enough, as it
+seemed, to make the post secure, and waited to see what the English would
+do.
+
+Dinwiddie had acted with good Scots capacity, as efficiently and as
+promptly as he could with the power he had. He was obliged to deal with
+a colonial assembly,—the French governors were not; and the Virginian
+burgesses thought of domestic matters when Dinwiddie’s thought was at
+the frontier. While Washington was deep in the forests, bearing his
+message, they quarrelled with the governor about the new fees which were
+charged since his coming for grants of the public land; and they refused
+him money because he would not yield in the matter. But when they knew
+how things actually stood in the West, and saw that the governor would
+levy troops for the exigency whether they acted with him or not, and pay
+for them out of his own pocket if necessary, they voted supplies.
+
+There was no highway of open rivers for the Virginians, as for the
+French, by which they could descend to the forks of the Ohio; and
+Virginia had no troops ready as the French had. Raw levies of volunteers
+had first to be got together; and when they had been hastily gathered,
+clothed, and a little drilled, the first use to which it was necessary to
+put them was to cut a rough, mountainous road for themselves through the
+untouched forests which lay thick upon the towering Blue Ridge. It was
+painfully slow work, wrought at for week after week, and the French were
+safely intrenched at their fort “Duquesne” before the tired Virginian
+recruits had crossed the crest of the mountains. By midsummer they were
+ready to strike and drive the English back.
+
+[Illustration: MERCHANTS’ EXCHANGE, NEW YORK, 1752-1799]
+
+Blood had been spilled between the rivals ere that. Washington was in
+command of the little force which had cut its way through the forest,
+and he did not understand that he had been sent into the West this time
+merely to bear a message. When, therefore, one day in May (28 May, 1754)
+he found a party of French lurking at his front in a thicketed glade, he
+did not hesitate to lead an attacking party of forty against them. The
+young commander of the French scouts was killed in the sharp encounter,
+and his thirty men were made prisoners. Men on both sides of the sea
+knew, when they heard that news, that war had begun. Young Washington had
+forced the hands of the statesmen in London and Paris, and all Europe
+presently took fire from the flame he had kindled. In July, Washington
+was obliged to retire. He had only three hundred and fifty men, all told,
+at the rudely intrenched camp which he had constructed in the open glade
+of “Great Meadows” as the best place to await reinforcements; and in July
+the French were upon him with a force of seven hundred. All day he fought
+(3 July, 1754), and in a drenching rain, the French firing from the
+edges of the woods, his own men in their shallow, flooded trenches in
+the open; but by night he knew he must give way. The French offered him
+an honorable capitulation, and the next day let him go untouched, men and
+arms, with such stores as he could carry.
+
+It was a bad beginning at winning the West from the French; and all the
+worse because it showed how weak the English were at such work. The
+danger was not Virginia’s alone; it touched all the English in America;
+but the colonies could not co-operate, and, when they acted at all, acted
+sluggishly, as if war would wait for both parties to get ready. The
+assemblies of Pennsylvania and New York declared very coldly that they
+did not see what right the English crown had to the valley of the Ohio.
+Maryland had been about to raise a force, but had not yet done so when
+the fatal day at Great Meadows came. Two “independent companies” in the
+King’s pay had been ordered from New York, and a like company from South
+Carolina; and North Carolina had sent forward three hundred and fifty
+men; but only the single company from South Carolina had reached Great
+Meadows, where Washington was, before the French were upon him.
+
+Dinwiddie and every other governor who heeded or wrote of the business
+told the ministers in England that they must act, and send the King’s
+own troops; and happily the ministers saw at last the importance of what
+should be won or lost in America. Troops were sent. For Europe it was the
+beginning of the Seven Years’ War (1755-1763), which was to see the great
+Frederick of Prussia prove his mastery in the field; which was to spread
+from Europe to Asia and to Africa; which was to wrest from the French for
+England both India and America. But for the colonists in America it was
+only “the French and Indian War.” Their own continent was the seat of
+their thoughts.
+
+The beginnings the home government made were small and weak enough; but
+it did at least act, and it was likely that, should it keep long enough
+at the business, it would at last learn and do all that was necessary to
+make good its mastery against a weaker rival. By the 20th of February,
+1755, transports were in the Chesapeake, bringing two regiments of the
+King’s regulars, to be sent against Duquesne. The French, too, were
+astir. Early in the spring eighteen French ships of war sailed for
+Canada, carrying six battalions and a new governor; and though the
+English put an equal fleet to sea to intercept them, the Frenchmen got
+into the St. Lawrence with a loss of but two of their ships, which
+had strayed from the fleet and been found by the English befogged and
+bewildered off the American coast. The scene was set for war both north
+and south.
+
+[Illustration: THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM ON THE MORNING OF THE BATTLE]
+
+Major General Edward Braddock commanded the regiments sent to Virginia,
+and was commissioned to be commander-in-chief in America. He therefore
+called the principal colonial governors to a conference at Alexandria,
+his headquarters. By the middle of April five had come: Robert
+Dinwiddie, of course, the governor of Virginia; Robert Hunter Morris,
+whose thankless task it was to get war votes out of the Pennsylvanian
+assembly of Quakers and lethargic German farmers; Horatio Sharpe, the
+brave and energetic gentleman who was governor of Maryland; James
+DeLancey, the people’s governor, of New York; and William Shirley,
+governor of Massachusetts, past sixty, but as strenuous as Dinwiddie,
+and eager for the field though he had been bred a lawyer,—every inch
+“a gentleman and politician,” it was said. It was he who had done most
+to organize and expedite the attack on Louisbourg which had succeeded
+so handsomely ten years ago (1745). He would at any rate not fail for
+lack of self-confidence. The conference planned an attack on Niagara,
+to be led by Shirley himself, to cut the French off from Duquesne; an
+attack on Crown Point, to be led by Colonel William Johnson, of New
+York, whom the Mohawks would follow, to break the hold of the French on
+Champlain; an attack upon Beauséjour, in Acadia, under the leadership
+of Lieutenant-Colonel Monckton, of the King’s regulars; and a movement,
+under the command of General Braddock himself straight through the
+forests against Duquesne, by the way Washington had cut to Great Meadows.
+
+It would have been much better had General Braddock chosen a route
+farther to the north, where the Pennsylvanian farmers of the frontier
+had begun to make roads and open the forests for the plough; but it made
+little difference, after all, which way he went: his temper and his
+training doomed him to fail. He lacked neither courage nor capacity,
+but he sadly lacked discretion. He meant to make his campaign in the
+wilderness by the rules of war he had learned in Europe, where the
+forests were cleared away and no subtile savages could dog or ambush an
+army; and he would take no advice from provincials. Few but Washington
+cared to volunteer advice, for the commander-in-chief was “a very
+Iroquois in disposition.” He took two thousand men into the wilderness,
+with artillery trains and baggage: fourteen hundred regulars, nearly five
+hundred Virginians, horse and foot, two independent companies from New
+York, and sailors from the transports to rig tackle to get his stores
+and field-pieces out of difficulties in the rough road. Washington went
+with the confident commander, by special invitation, to act as one of
+his aides, and was the only provincial officer whose advice was given so
+much as consideration during all the weary weeks in which the little army
+widened and levelled its way with axe and spade through the dense woods.
+And then the fatal day came which filled all the colonies with dismay.
+
+[Illustration: MAP OF BRADDOCK’S DEFEAT]
+
+The French commander at Duquesne had no such force as Braddock was
+bringing against him. He expected to be obliged to retire. But on the 9th
+of July the English general, with his advance force of twelve hundred
+men, forded the shallow Monongahela but eight miles from Duquesne, and
+striking into the trail which led to the fort, walked into an ambush. A
+thousand men,—Indians, chiefly, and Canadian provincials,—poured a deadly
+fire upon him from the thick cover of the woods on either hand. He would
+not open his order and meet the attack in forest fashion, as Washington
+begged him to do, but kept his men formed and crowded in the open spaces
+of the road, to be almost annihilated, and driven back, a mere remnant,
+in utter rout. It was shameful, pitiful. Washington and his Virginian
+rangers could with difficulty keep the rear when the rout came, and bring
+the stricken commander off, to die in the retreat. Dinwiddie could not
+persuade the officers left in command even to stay upon the Virginian
+frontier to keep the border settlements safe against the savages. It
+was Washington’s impossible task for the rest of the war to guard three
+hundred and fifty miles of frontier with a handful of half-fed provincial
+militia, where the little huts and tiny settlements of the Scots-Irish
+immigrants lay scattered far and wide among the foothills and valleys of
+the spreading mountain country, open everywhere to the swift and secret
+onset of the pitiless redskins.
+
+Braddock’s papers, abandoned in the panic of the rout, fell into the
+hands of the French, and made known to them all the English plans. They
+were warned what to do, and did it as promptly as possible. Shirley
+gave up the attempt to take Niagara before reaching the lake. Johnson,
+assisted by Lyman, of Connecticut, met the French under Dieskau at
+Lake George, and drove them back (September 8, 1755),—the commander
+and part of the force the French had so hastily despatched to America
+in the spring,—and Dieskau himself fell into their hands; but they did
+not follow up their success or shake the hold of the French upon the
+line of lakes and streams which ran from the heart of New York, like a
+highway, to the valley of the St. Lawrence. The attack upon Beauséjour
+alone accomplished what was planned. A force of two thousand New England
+provincials, under Colonel Monckton and Colonel John Winslow, found the
+half-finished fortifications of the French on Beauséjour hill in their
+hands almost before their siege was fairly placed; and Acadia was more
+than ever secure.
+
+There followed nearly three years of unbroken failure and defeat. In 1756
+the Marquis Montcalm succeeded Dieskau as commander in Canada, and the
+very year of his coming took and destroyed the English forts at Oswego.
+That same year the Earl of Loudon came over to take charge of the war for
+the English; but he did nothing effective. The government at home sent
+reinforcements, but nothing was done with them that counted for success.
+“I dread to hear from America,” exclaimed Pitt. In 1757 Loudon withdrew
+the best of his forces to the north, to make an attack on Louisbourg.
+Montcalm took advantage of the movement to capture Fort William Henry,
+the advanced post of the English on Lake George; and Loudon failed in his
+designs against Louisbourg. Even the stout and wily English frontiersmen
+of the northern border found themselves for a little while overmatched.
+In March, 1758, Robert Rogers, the doughty New Hampshire ranger whose
+successful exploits of daring all the northern border knew, was beaten by
+a scouting party from Ticonderoga, and barely came off with his life. The
+pouring in of troops, even of regulars from over sea, seemed to count
+for nothing. General James Abercrombie led an army of fifteen thousand
+men, six thousand of them regulars, against Ticonderoga, where Montcalm
+had less than four thousand; blundered at every critical point of the
+attack; lost two thousand men; and retired almost as if in flight (July,
+1758).
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM PITT]
+
+[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF JAMES ABERCROMBIE]
+
+[Illustration: THE CAPITULATION OF LOUISBOURG]
+
+But that was the end of failure. The year 1757 had seen the great Pitt
+come into control of affairs in England, and no more incompetent men
+were chosen to command in America. Pitt had been mistaken in regard to
+Abercrombie, whom he had retained; but he made no more mistakes of that
+kind, and a war of failure was transformed into a war of victories, quick
+and decisive. Two more years, and the French no longer had possessions
+in America that any nation need covet. Pitt saw to it that the forces,
+as well as the talents, used were adequate. In July, 1758, a powerful
+fleet under Admiral Boscawen, and twelve thousand troops under General
+Jeffrey Amherst, whom Pitt had specially chosen for the command, invested
+and took Louisbourg. In August, Colonel John Bradstreet, with three
+thousand of Abercrombie’s men, drove the French from Fort Frontenac at
+Oswego. In November the French abandoned Fort Duquesne, upon the approach
+of a force under General Forbes and Colonel Washington. In June, 1759,
+Johnson captured the French fort at Niagara and cut the route to the
+Ohio,—where Fort Duquesne gave place to Fort Pitt. At midsummer General
+Amherst, after his thorough fashion, led eleven thousand men against
+Ticonderoga, and had the satisfaction of seeing the French retire before
+him. He cleared Lake George and captured and strengthened Crown Point
+upon Champlain. The French needed all their power in the north, for Pitt
+had sent Wolfe against Quebec. They had concentrated quite fourteen
+thousand men in and about the towering city ere Wolfe came with scarcely
+nine thousand (June 21, 1759), and their fortifications stood everywhere
+ready to defend the place. For close upon three months the English
+struck at their strength in vain, first here and then there, in their
+busy efforts to find a spot where to get a foothold against the massive
+stronghold,—Montcalm holding all the while within his defences to tire
+them out; until at last, upon a night in September which all the world
+remembers, Wolfe made his way by a path which lay within a deep ravine
+upward to the heights of Abraham, and there lost his life and won Canada
+for England (September 13, 1759).
+
+[Illustration: JEFFREY AMHERST]
+
+[Illustration: JAMES WOLFE]
+
+After that the rest of the task was simple enough. The next year Montreal
+was yielded up, all Canada passed into the hands of the English, and the
+war was practically over. There were yet three more years to wait before
+formal peace should be concluded, because the nations of Europe did not
+decide their affairs by the issue of battles and sieges in America; but
+for the English colonies the great struggle was ended. By the formal
+peace, signed in 1763, at Paris, England gained Canada, Nova Scotia, Cape
+Breton Island, and all the islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the river
+and harbor of Mobile, and all the disputed lands of the continent, north
+and south, between the eastern mountain ranges and mid-stream of the
+Mississippi, except New Orleans,—besides the free navigation of the great
+river. From Spain she got Florida. France had the year before (1762)
+ceded to Spain her province of “Louisiana,” the great region beyond the
+Mississippi, whose extent and boundaries no man could tell. She was
+utterly stripped of her American possessions, and the English might look
+forward to a new age in their colonies.
+
+ The general _authorities_ for the condition of the country and
+ the movement of affairs during this period are the well known
+ histories of Bancroft, Hildreth, and Bryant; the third volume
+ of J. A. Doyle’s _English Colonies in America_; the third
+ volume of J. G. Palfrey’s _Compendious History of New England_;
+ W. B. Weeden’s _Economic and Social History of New England_;
+ Mr. Barrett Wendell’s _Cotton Mather_; Mr. Eben G. Scott’s
+ _Development of Constitutional Liberty in the English Colonies
+ of America_; C. W. Baird’s _Huguenot Emigration to America_;
+ James Russell Lowell’s _New England Two Centuries Ago_, in
+ his _Among My Books_; Mr. Brooks Adams’s _Emancipation
+ of Massachusetts_; Madame Knight’s _Journal_ (1704); John
+ Fontaine’s _Diary_, in the _Memoirs of a Huguenot Family_; and
+ Benjamin Franklin’s _Autobiography_.
+
+ A more particular account of many of the transactions that
+ fell within the period may be found in Justin Winsor’s _New
+ England, 1689-1763_, in the fifth volume of Winsor’s _Narrative
+ and Critical History of America_; Berthold Fernow’s _Middle
+ Colonies_, Justin Winsor’s _Maryland and Virginia_, and William
+ J. Rivers’s _The Carolinas_, in the same volume of Winsor;
+ Charles C. Smith’s _The Wars on the Seaboard: Acadia and Cape
+ Breton_, and Justin Winsor’s _Struggle for the Great Valleys of
+ North America_, in the same volume of Winsor.
+
+ The chief _authorities_ for the settlement and early history
+ of _Georgia_ are Bancroft, Hildreth, and Bryant; Charles
+ C. Jones’s _History of Georgia_ and _English Colonization
+ of Georgia_ in the fifth volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and
+ Critical History of America_; W. E. H. Lecky’s _History
+ of England in the Eighteenth Century_; Alexander Hewatt’s
+ _Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies
+ of South Carolina and Georgia_, in Carroll’s _Historical
+ Collections of South Carolina_; the first and second volumes of
+ Peter Force’s _Tracts and Other Papers relating to the Colonies
+ in North America_; and the _Colonial Acts_ of Georgia.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE PARTING OF THE WAYS
+
+
+No one who marked how the English colonies had grown, and how the French
+had lagged in the effectual settlement and mastery of the regions they
+had taken, could wonder that in the final struggle for supremacy the
+English had won and the French lost everything there was to fight for.
+The French had been as long on the continent as the English, and yet they
+did not have one-tenth the strength of the English, either in population
+or in wealth, when this war came. There were fifty-five thousand white
+colonists in Canada, all told; and only twenty-five thousand more in all
+the thin line of posts and hamlets which stretched from the St. Lawrence
+through the long valley of the Mississippi to the Gulf,—eighty thousand
+in all. In the English settlements there were more than a million
+colonists (1,160,000), not scattered in separated posts set far apart in
+the forested wilderness, but clustered thick in towns and villages, or
+in neighborly plantations, where the forest had been cleared away, roads
+made, and trade and peace established. The English had been seeking,
+not conquest, but comfort and wealth in busy centres and populous
+country-sides, where their life now ran as strong and as calm, almost, as
+if they were still in the old lands of England itself. The French, on
+the contrary, were placed where their government wished them to be; could
+hardly be said to have formed independent communities at all; and were
+glad if they could so much as eke out a decent subsistence from the soil,
+or from food brought by ship from France over sea. The English spread
+very slowly, considering how fast they came, and kept in some sort a
+solid mass; but the result was that they thoroughly possessed the country
+as they went, and made homes, working out a life of their own. The French
+merely built frontier posts, the while, on the lakes and rivers, as they
+were bidden or guided or exhorted by their governors; took up such land
+as was assigned them by royal order; did their daily stint of work, and
+expected nothing better. They were, moreover, painfully, perilously
+isolated. Ships could come from England to any part of the English coasts
+of America in five weeks, whereas it was a good six months’ journey from
+France to the frontier posts upon the lakes or by the far-away western
+rivers. The St. Lawrence was closed for nearly half the year by ice;
+and it was a weary task to get any boat up the stream of the endless
+Mississippi against its slow tide of waters and through the puzzling,
+shifting channels of its winding course.
+
+The Marquis Duquesne had called the Iroquois to a council in 1754, ere
+he left his governorship, and had commended his sovereign’s government
+to them because of this very difference between French and English. “Are
+you ignorant,” he said, “of the difference between the King of England
+and the King of France? Go, see the forts that our King has established,
+and you will see that you can still hunt under their very walls. They
+have been placed for your advantage in places which you frequent. The
+English, on the contrary, are no sooner in possession of a place than
+the game is driven away. The forest falls before them as they advance,
+and the soil is laid bare so that you can scarce find the wherewithal
+to erect a shelter for the night.” Perhaps Duquesne, being a soldier
+and no statesman, did not realize all that this difference meant. The
+French posts, with the forests close about them, were not self-supporting
+communities such as everywhere filled the English dominion. Their
+governors were soldiers, their inhabitants a garrison, the few settlers
+near at hand traders, not husbandmen, or at best mere tenants of the
+crown of France. No doubt it was easier for the savages to approach and
+trade with them; but it would turn out to be infinitely harder for the
+French to keep them. Their occupants had struck no deep rootage into the
+soil they were seated upon, as the English had.
+
+Englishmen themselves had noted, with some solicitude, how slow their
+own progress was away from the sea-coast. It was not until 1725 that
+settlers in Massachusetts had ventured to go so far away from the Bay
+as the Berkshire Hills. “Our country has now been inhabited more than
+one hundred and thirty years,” exclaimed Colonel Byrd, of Virginia, in
+1729, “and still we hardly know anything of the Appalachian Mountains,
+that are nowhere above two hundred and fifty miles from the sea. Whereas
+the French, who are later comers, have ranged from Quebec southward as
+far as the mouth of the Mississippi, in the Bay of Mexico, and to the
+west almost as far as California, which is either way above two thousand
+miles.” But Colonel Byrd was thinking of discovery, not of settlement;
+the search for minerals and the natural wealth of the forests, not the
+search for places to which to extend permanent homes and government. The
+difference arose out of the fundamental unlikeness of French and English,
+both in life and in government.
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM BYRD]
+
+The statesmen of both France and England accepted the same theory about
+the use colonies should be put to,—the doctrine and practice everywhere
+accepted in their day. Colonies were to be used to enrich the countries
+which possessed them. They should send their characteristic native
+products to the country which had established them, and for the most
+part to her alone, and should take her manufactures in exchange; trade
+nowhere else to her disadvantage; and do and make nothing which could
+bring them into competition with her merchants and manufacturers. But
+England applied this theory in one way, France in another. It was
+provoking enough to the English colonists in America to have, in many a
+petty matter, to evade the exacting Navigation Acts, which restricted
+their trade and obliged them to buy manufactured goods at prices fixed
+by the English merchants. It a little cramped and irritated them that
+they were forbidden to manufacture now this and now that, though the
+material lay at their very doors, because English manufacturers wished
+their competition shut out. Restriction was added to restriction. In
+1706, naval stores and rice, which the Carolinas were learning to produce
+to their increasing profit, were added to the list of products which
+must be sent to England only; and in 1722 copper and furs. In 1732 the
+manufacture of beaver hats was forbidden, and in 1750 the maintenance
+of iron furnaces or slit mills. But there was always an effort made at
+reciprocal advantage. Though the colonies were forbidden to manufacture
+their iron ores, their bar and pig iron was admitted into England free of
+duty, and Swedish iron, which might have undersold it, was held off by a
+heavy tariff, to the manifest advantage of Maryland and Virginia. Though
+the rice of the Carolinas for a time got admission to market only through
+the English middlemen, their naval stores were exported under a heavy
+bounty; and in 1730, when the restriction laid on the rice trade pinched
+too shrewdly, it was removed with regard to Portugal, the chief European
+market open to it. Parliament had generally an eye to building up the
+trade of the colonies as well as to controlling it.
+
+[Illustration: Plan of the CITY OF NEW YORK 1767.]
+
+The home government, moreover, though it diligently imposed restrictions,
+was by no means as diligent in enforcing them. An ill-advised statute of
+1733 laid prohibitory duties on the importation of sugar, molasses, and
+rum out of the French West Indies, in the hope that the sales of sugar
+and molasses in the islands owned by England might be increased. To
+enforce the act would have been to hazard the utter commercial ruin of
+New England. Out of the cheap molasses of the French islands she made the
+rum which was a chief source of her wealth,—the rum with which she bought
+slaves for Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and paid her balances
+to the English merchants. But no serious attempt was made to enforce it.
+Customs officers and merchants agreed in ignoring it, and officers of the
+crown shut their eyes to the trade which it forbade. Smuggling upon that
+long coast was a simple matter, and even at the chief ports only a little
+circumspection was needed about cargoes out of the Indies.
+
+Moreover, the men who governed in England contented themselves with
+general restrictions and did not go on to manage the very lives of the
+colonists in the colonies themselves. That was what the French did. They
+built their colonies up by royal order; sent emigrants out as they sent
+troops, at the King’s expense and by the King’s direction; could get only
+men to go, therefore, for the most part, and very few women or families.
+For the English there was nothing of the sort, after the first. Rich men
+or great mercantile companies might help emigrants with money or supplies
+or free gifts of land in order to fill up the colonies which the crown
+had given them the right to establish and govern; but only those went
+out who volunteered. Emigrants went, moreover, in families, after the
+first years were passed and the colonies fairly started, if not at the
+very outset of the enterprise,—in associated groups, congregations, and
+small volunteer communities. When they reached the appointed place of
+settlement they were left to shift for themselves, as they had expected,
+exactly as they would have been at home; and they insisted upon having
+the same rights and freedom they would have had there. They were making
+homes, without assistance or favor, and for their own use and benefit.
+
+It was inevitable in the circumstances that their colonial governments
+should be like themselves, home-made and free from control in the
+management of what chiefly concerned their own lives. They were just
+as hard to supervise and regulate when the settlements were small as
+when they grew large and populous,—a little harder, indeed, because the
+colonists were the more anxious then about how the new life they were
+beginning was to go, and the less sure of their power or influence to
+resist the efforts of the crown to manage and interfere with them. By
+the time the French war came there was no mistaking the fact that the
+English colonies had grown to be miniature states, proud, hard-fibred,
+independent in temper, practised in affairs. They had, as Edmund Burke
+said, “formed within themselves, either by royal instruction or royal
+charter, assemblies so exceedingly resembling a parliament, in all their
+forms, functions, and powers, that it was impossible they should not
+imbibe some opinion of a similar authority.” At first, no doubt, their
+assemblies had been intended to be little more than the managing bodies
+of corporations. “But nothing in progression can rest on its original
+plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an
+infant. Therefore, as the colonies prospered and increased to a numerous
+and mighty people, spreading over a very great tract of the globe, it
+was natural that they should attribute to assemblies so respectable in
+their formal constitution some part of the dignity of the great nations
+which they represented.” They “made acts of all sorts and in all cases
+whatsoever. They levied money upon regular grants to the crown, following
+all the rules and principles of a parliament, to which they approached
+every day more and more nearly.” And Burke saw how inevitable, as well as
+how natural, the whole growth had been. “Things could not be otherwise,”
+he said; “English colonies must be had on these terms, or not had at all.”
+
+[Illustration: EDMUND BURKE]
+
+They had used their governments for their own purposes, and rather like
+independent states than like dependent communities. In every colony the
+chief point of conflict between governor and assembly, whether in the
+proprietary or in the crown colonies, had always been connected with the
+subject of salaries. Again and again governors had been instructed to
+insist upon an adequate income, charged permanently upon some regular
+source of public revenue; but again and again, as often as made, their
+demand had been refused. They could get only annual grants, which kept
+all officers of the crown dependent upon the people’s assemblies for
+maintenance while in office. There had long been signs that the ministers
+of the King and the proprietors at home were tired of the contest, and
+meant, for the mere sake of peace, to let the colonial assemblies alone,
+to rule, as Parliament ruled, by keeping control of the moneys spent upon
+their own governments.
+
+There was, too, more and more money in the colonies as the years went by.
+New England, where, except in the rich valley of the Connecticut, the
+soil yielded little beyond the bare necessaries of life, led the rest
+of the colonies in the variety of her industries. Though parliamentary
+statutes forbade the making of woollen goods or hats or steel for export,
+the colonists were free to make anything they might need for use or
+sale within a single colony or in their own homes; and the thrifty New
+England farmers and villagers made most of their own furniture, tools,
+and household utensils, while their women or the village weavers wove the
+linen and woollen stuffs of which their clothes were made. They lived
+upon their own resources as no other colonists did. And their trade kept
+six hundred vessels busy plying to and fro to English and foreign ports.
+Almost every sea-coast hamlet was a port and maintained its little fleet.
+A thousand vessels, big and little, went every year to the fisheries,
+or up and down the coasts carrying the trade between colony and colony.
+A great many of these vessels the colonists had built themselves, out
+of the splendid timber which stood almost everywhere at hand in their
+forests; and every one knew who knew anything at all about New England
+that her seamen were as daring, shrewd, and hardy as those bred in past
+generations in the Devonshire ports of old England. Their boats flocked
+by the hundreds every year to the misty, perilous banks of Newfoundland,
+where the cod were to be caught. They beat up and down the long seas in
+search of the whale all the way from “the frozen recesses of Hudson’s
+Bay and Davis’s Straits” to the coasts of Africa and Brazil, far in the
+south. “Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France,
+nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise,” exclaimed
+Burke, “ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the
+extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people,—a people who
+are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the
+bone, of manhood.”
+
+Massachusetts had been known, while peace held and men breathed freely,
+between Queen Anne’s and King George’s wars, to complete one hundred and
+fifty ships in a single year, every town upon the coast and even little
+villages far within the rivers launching vessels from busy shipyards.
+Ship building became New England’s chief industry; and in 1724 the master
+builders of the Thames prayed Parliament for protection against the
+competition of the colonies. The annual catch of whale and cod by the
+New Englanders was worth two hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling;
+and, besides fish and fish-oil, they shipped their fine timber, and not
+a little hay and grain even, across the sea or to the other colonies.
+Everywhere in America the forests yielded splendid timber, as his
+Majesty’s ministers well knew: for they sent into the northern forests of
+pine and had the tallest, straightest trees there marked with the royal
+arms, as a notice that they were reserved to be used as masts for his
+Majesty’s war-ships,—as if the King had a right to take what he would.
+
+[Illustration: VIEW OF THE BUILDINGS BELONGING TO HARVARD COLLEGE,
+CAMBRIDGE, NEW ENGLAND, 1726]
+
+“New England improved much faster than Virginia,” Colonel Byrd admitted;
+and yet Virginia had her own rich trade, of which tobacco was the chief
+staple; and all the colonies busied themselves as they could, and
+visibly grew richer year by year. The middle colonies were scarcely less
+industrious than those of the bleaker north, and prospered even more
+readily with their kindlier climate and their richer soil. Pennsylvania,
+with her two hundred and twenty thousand colonists, with her thrifty
+mixture of Germans, Quakers, Scots, and Scots-Irishmen, needed a fleet
+of four hundred sail to carry each season’s spare produce from the docks
+at Philadelphia; and New York had her separate fleet of close upon two
+hundred sail.
+
+England depended upon the colonies for much of the naval stores, of
+the potash, and of the pearlash which she needed every year. Mines of
+iron and of copper had been opened both in the middle colonies and in
+the south. The colonists made their own brick for building, and their
+own paper and glass, as well as their own coarse stuffs for clothing,
+and many of their own hats of beaverskin. Substantial houses and fine,
+sightly streets sprang up in the towns which stood at the chief seaports;
+and in the country spacious country seats, solidly built, roomy, full of
+the simpler comforts of gentlefolk. The ships which took hides and fish
+and provisions to the West Indies brought sugar and molasses and wine and
+many a delicacy back upon their return, and the colonists ate and drank
+and bore themselves like other well-to-do citizens the world over. They
+were eager always to know what the London fashions were; there was as
+much etiquette to be observed upon quiet plantations in Virginia as in
+English drawing rooms. It was, indeed, touched with a certain beauty of
+its own, because of the provincial simplicity and frank neighborliness
+which went along with it; but it was grave and punctilious, and intended
+to be like London manners. There was as much formality and gayety “in the
+season” at Williamsburg, Virginia’s village capital, as in Philadelphia,
+the biggest, wealthiest, most stately town in the colonies.
+
+[Illustration: NASSAU HALL, PRINCETON COLLEGE, 1760]
+
+[Illustration: KING’S COLLEGE, NEW YORK, 1758]
+
+There were many ways in which the colonies finished and filled out
+their lives which showed that they regarded themselves as in a sense
+independent communities and meant to provide for themselves everything
+they needed for their life alone on a separate continent. They had no
+thought of actually breaking away from their allegiance to the home
+government over sea; but no man could possibly overlook the three
+thousand miles of water that stretched between England and America. At
+that immense distance they were obliged in great measure to look out for
+themselves and contrive their own ways of sustenance and development,
+and their own way of culture. Before the French war began, two more
+colleges, in addition to Harvard in Massachusetts and William and Mary
+in Virginia, had been established to provide the higher sort of training
+for youths who were to enter the learned professions. Besides Yale, the
+College of New Jersey had been founded. At first set up in 1746 as a
+collegiate school, at Elizabethtown, it was in 1756 given a permanent
+home and built up into a notable training place for youth at Princeton.
+In 1754, the year Washington attacked the French in the western forests,
+King’s College was added to the growing list, in New York, by royal
+charter. Ten years later (1764), upon the very morrow of the signing of
+peace, certain public-spirited men of the Baptist communion followed suit
+in Rhode Island by founding the school which was afterwards to be called
+Brown University. Here were six colleges for this new English nation at
+the west of the Atlantic. Many wealthy colonists, particularly in the
+far south, continued to send their sons to the old country to take their
+learning from the immemorial sources at Oxford and Cambridge; but more
+and more the colonies provided learning for themselves.
+
+[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN]
+
+[Illustration: THE BIRTHPLACE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, MILK STREET, BOSTON]
+
+Their growing and expanding life, moreover, developed in them the sense
+of neighborhood to one another, the consciousness of common interests,
+and the feeling that they ought in many things to coöperate. In 1754,
+while the first sharp note of war was ringing from the Alleghanies,
+a conference with the Six Nations was held at Albany, which, besides
+dealing with the redmen, and binding them once more to be friends and
+allies of the English against the French, considered nothing less than
+a plan of union for the colonies. This was the fourth time that the
+representatives of several colonies at once had come together at Albany
+to confer with the Iroquois. The first conference had taken place there
+in 1689, the year King William’s War began. Albany lay nearest the
+country of the Iroquois. It was necessary when war was afoot to make
+sure that the redskins should side with the English, and not with the
+French; and that was now for the fourth time, in 1754, more critically
+important than ever. The home government had directed that the conference
+be held, before they knew what Washington had done. It was the ministers
+in London, too, who had directed that a plan of union be considered,
+in order that the colonies might act in concert in the coming struggle
+with the French, and if possible under a single government even. Seven
+colonies were represented at the conference. Twenty-five delegates were
+there to take part in the business; and there was no difficulty about
+securing their almost unanimous assent to a plan of union. They adopted
+the plan which Mr. Benjamin Franklin, one of Pennsylvania’s delegates,
+had drawn up as he made the long journey from Philadelphia.
+
+Mr. Franklin had led a very notable life during the thirty eventful
+years which had gone by since he made his way, a mere lad, from Boston
+to Philadelphia to earn his livelihood as a journeyman printer; and how
+shrewd a knowledge he had gained of the practical affairs of the world
+anybody could see for himself who would read the homely-wise maxims he
+had been putting forth these twenty-two years in his “Poor Richard’s”
+Almanacs, begun in 1732. The plan of union he suggested at Albany was,
+that the colonies should submit to have their common interests cared
+for by a congress of delegates chosen by their several assemblies,
+and a “president-general” appointed and paid by the crown; giving to
+the congress a considerable power of actual law-making and to the
+president-general the right to veto its acts, subject to the approval of
+the ministers at home. To all the delegates at Albany except those from
+Connecticut the plan seemed suitable and excellent; but the ministers
+at home rejected it because they thought it gave too much power to the
+proposed congress, and the colonial assemblies rejected it because they
+thought it gave too much power to the president-general. Mr. Franklin
+said that the fact that neither the assemblies nor the King’s ministers
+liked the plan made him suspect that it must be, after all, an excellent
+half-way measure, the “true medium” between extremes, effecting a
+particularly fair and equal distribution of power.
+
+[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN]
+
+Then the war came, and made many things plain. The colonies did not
+coöperate. They contributed troops, watched their own frontiers as they
+could against the redskins, and freely spent both blood and money in the
+great struggle; but when it was all over, and the French dominion swept
+from the continent, it was plain that it had not been the power of the
+colonies but the power of England and the genius of the great Pitt that
+had won in the critical contest. France could send few reinforcements to
+Canada because England’s ships commanded the sea. The stout Canadians
+had had to stand out for themselves unaided, with such troops as were
+already in the colony. In 1759, the year Wolfe took Quebec, there were
+more soldiers in the English colonies threatening the St. Lawrence than
+there were men capable of bearing arms in all Canada,—and quite half of
+them were regulars, not provincials. Pitt saw to it that enough troops
+and supplies were sent to America to insure success, and that men capable
+of victory and of efficient management even in the forested wilderness
+were put in command of affairs in the field. He did not depend upon the
+colonies to do what he knew they had no plan or organization for doing,
+but set himself to redress the balance of power in Europe by decisive
+victories which should make England indisputable mistress of America. “No
+man ever entered Mr. Pitt’s closet who did not find himself braver when
+he came out than when he went in,” said a soldier who had held conference
+with him and served him; and it was his statesmanship and his use of
+English arms that had made England’s dominion complete and England’s
+colonies safe in America.
+
+[Illustration: A PAGE OF “POOR RICHARD’S” ALMANAC]
+
+[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN IN A COLONIAL DRAWING ROOM]
+
+English fleets and armies had not been sent to America, however, and
+equipped for warfare there, sustained in war season and out of it,
+without enormous expense; and that expense, which had set the colonies
+free to live without dread of danger or of confinement at any border,
+England had borne. It had been part of Mr. Franklin’s plan of union,
+proposed at Albany, that the congress of the colonies should sustain the
+armies used in their defence and pay for them by taxes levied in America;
+but that plan had been rejected, and this war for the ousting of the
+French had been fought at England’s cost,—much as the colonies had given
+of their own blood, and of their own substance for the equipment of their
+provincial levies, and much as they had suffered in all the obscure and
+painful fighting to protect their frontiers against the redskins, far
+away from set fields of battle. They had done more, indeed, than pay the
+costs which inevitably fell to them. They had “raised, paid, and clothed
+twenty-five thousand men,—a number,” if Mr. Franklin was right, “equal
+to those sent from Great Britain and far beyond their proportion. They
+went deeply in debt in doing this; and all their estates and taxes are
+mortgaged for many years to come in discharging that debt.” Parliament
+had itself acknowledged their loyal liberality and self-sacrifice,
+and had even voted them £200,000 a year for five years, when the war
+was over, by way of just reimbursement. But, though they had made
+sacrifices, they had, of course, not shared with the royal treasury
+the chief outlays of the war. Colonial governors, viewing affairs as
+representatives of the government at home, had again and again urged the
+ministers in London to tax the colonies, by act of Parliament, for means
+to pay for frontier forts, armies of defence, and all the business of
+imperial administration in America. But the ministers had hitherto known
+something of the temper of the colonists in such matters and had been
+too wise to attempt anything of the kind. Sir George Keith, who had been
+governor of Pennsylvania, had suggested to Sir Robert Walpole that he
+should raise revenue in the colonies; but that shrewd politician and man
+of affairs had flatly declined. “What,” he exclaimed, “I have old England
+against me, and do you think I will have New England likewise?” Chatham
+had held the same tone. What English armies did in America was part of
+England’s struggle for empire, for a leading station in power and riches
+in the world, and England should pay for it. The desire of the colonies
+to control their own direct taxes should be respected. English statesmen,
+so far, had seen the matter very much as observant Colonel Spotswood had
+seen it thirty odd years ago. If the ministers should direct moneys to be
+paid by act of Parliament, he said, “they would find it no easy matter to
+put such an act into execution”; and he deemed it “against the right of
+Englishmen,” besides, “to be taxed, but by their representatives,”—new
+colonist though he was, and only the other day a governor of the crown in
+Virginia, the oldest and most loyal of the colonies.
+
+[Illustration: MRS. BENEDICT ARNOLD AND CHILD]
+
+It was now more than forty years since Colonel Spotswood, in the days
+of his governorship, had ridden to the far summit of the Alleghanies and
+looked down their western slopes towards the regions where England and
+France were to meet. Since that day he had served the crown very quietly
+as postmaster general for the colonies. At last he had died (1740) when
+on the eve of sailing with Virginian troops for Cartagena, about to
+return at the very end of his days to his old calling of arms. He had
+lived thirty years in Virginia, all told, and spoke out of abundant
+knowledge when he expressed a judgment as to what the ministers would
+find it hard to do in the colonies. He knew, as every man did who had had
+anything to do with the service of the crown in America, how stubbornly
+the colonists had resisted every attempt to unite their governments
+under a single governor or any single system, and how determined they
+had been to keep their governments in their own hands, notwithstanding
+they must have seen, as everybody else saw, the manifest advantage of
+union and a common organization in the face of England’s rivals in
+America, north and south. The King’s object in seeking to consolidate
+the more northern colonies under Sir Edmund Andros, whom New England had
+so hated, was not to attack their liberties, but “to weld them into one
+strongly governed state,” such as should be able to present a firm front
+to the encroachments of the French,—a statesmanlike object, which no man
+who wished to serve the interests of English empire could reasonably
+criticise. But the colonists had not cared to regard their little
+commonwealths as pieces of an empire. They regarded them simply as their
+own homes and seats of self-government; and they feared to have them
+swallowed up in any scheme of consolidation, whatever its object. The
+French war, consequently, had been fought by the government in England,
+and not by any government in America.
+
+[Illustration: FRANKLIN’S OLD BOOK-SHOP, NEXT TO CHRIST’S CHURCH,
+PHILADELPHIA]
+
+Though a few statesmen like Walpole had had the sagacity to divine it,
+and all leaders in party counsels had instinctively feared it, very
+few public men in England understood the temper or the unchangeable
+resolution of the colonies in such matters. Pitt understood it, but now
+that the war was over he was no longer suffered to be master in affairs.
+Burke understood it, but few heeded what he said. Such men knew by
+instant sympathy that this seemingly unreasonable temper of the colonists
+in great affairs was nothing else than the common English spirit of
+liberty. The colonists were simply refusing, as all Englishmen would
+have refused, to be directly ruled in their own affairs, or directly
+taxed for any purpose whatever, by a government which they themselves
+had no part in conducting; and, whether reasonable or unreasonable, so
+long as they remained Englishmen it was useless to try to argue them out
+of that refusal. “An Englishman,” cried Burke, “is the unfittest person
+on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery”; and he knew that to
+an Englishman it would seem nothing less than slavery to be stripped of
+self-government in matters of the purse.
+
+Now that the French were driven out, it was more useless than ever to
+argue the point. The chief and most obvious reason for feeling dependent
+upon the mother country was gone. Awe of the British was gone, too.
+The provincial levies raised in the colonies had fought alongside the
+King’s troops in all the movements of the war, and had found themselves
+not a whit less undaunted under fire, not a whit less able to stand and
+fight, not a whit less needed in victory. Braddock had died loathing the
+redcoats and wishing to see none but the blue cloth of the Virginian
+volunteers. When the war began, a regular from over sea had seemed to the
+colonists an unapproachable master of arms; but the provincials knew when
+the war was over that the redcoats were no better than they were. They
+had nothing to remember with mortification except the insulting contempt
+some of the British officers had shown for them, and the inferior rank
+and consideration their own officers had been compelled to accept.
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE GRENVILLE]
+
+It was the worst possible time the home government could have chosen in
+which to change its policy of concession towards the colonies and begin
+to tax and govern them by act of Parliament; and yet that was exactly
+what the ministers determined to do. No master of affairs or of men,
+like Walpole or Pitt, was any longer in a place of guiding authority in
+London. George Grenville was prime minister: a thorough official and very
+capable man of affairs, of unquestionable integrity, and with a certain
+not unhandsome courage as of conviction in what he did, but incapable of
+understanding those who opposed or resisted him, or of winning from them
+except by an exercise of power. The late war had been no mere “French and
+Indian” affair for English statesmen. It had been part of that stupendous
+“Seven Years’ War” which had fixed Prussia in a place of power under the
+great Frederick, and had changed the whole balance of power in Europe;
+had brought India under England’s widening dominion on one side of the
+world and America on the other,—had been a vast game which the stout
+little island kingdom had played almost alone against united Europe. It
+had not been a mere American war. America had reaped the benefits of
+England’s effort to found an empire and secure it, east and west. And
+yet the colonists seemed, when this momentous war by which they had so
+profited was over, to drop into indifference towards everything that
+remained to be done to finish what had been so well begun, even though it
+remained to be done at their own very doors.
+
+France had ceded to England as a result of the war all the vast
+territory which lay upon the St. Lawrence and between the Mississippi
+and the eastern mountains, north and south. It was possible to provide
+a government for the province of Quebec and for the lands in the far
+south, in Florida and beside the mouths of the Mississippi; but between
+these lay the long regions which stretched, unsettled, along the great
+streams which ran everywhere into the Mississippi,—the Illinois country,
+the country round about the Ohio, the regions by the Cumberland,—all the
+boundless “back country” which lay directly behind the colonies at the
+west. The Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in London wished
+to keep settlers out of these lands, in order that they might be left as
+a great hunting ground for the Indians, and so remain a permanent source
+of supply for the fur skins which enriched trade between the mother
+country and her colonies. But, meanwhile, whether settlers made their
+way thither or not, it was necessary to carry England’s power among the
+Indians, and make them know that she, and not the King of France, was
+now sovereign there. This the Indians were slow to believe. They could
+not know what treaty-makers in Europe had decided: they did not believe
+that the French would leave and the English come in in their stead at the
+western forts; and it moved them hotly to think of such a change. The
+French had made them welcome at their frontier posts, and did not drive
+off the game, as Duquesne had told them, ere this fatal war began. The
+French had been willing to be comrades with them, and had dealt with them
+with a certain gracious courtesy and consideration; while the English
+treated them, when they dared, like dogs rather than like men, drove them
+far into the forests at their front as they advanced their settlements,
+bullied them, and often cheated them in trade. It was intolerable to the
+northern Indians to think of these men whom they feared and hated being
+substituted for the French, with whom they found it at least possible to
+live.
+
+[Illustration: BOUNDARY MONUMENT ON THE ST. CROIX]
+
+They were dangerous neighbors, and the danger was near and palpable. The
+war with the French was hardly over when English settlers began to pour
+across the Alleghanies from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia,—men of
+the stern and sober Scots-Irish breeding for the most part, masterful and
+imperious, and sure to make the lands they settled upon entirely their
+own. There were already tribes among the Indians in the northwest who had
+been driven out of Pennsylvania by the earlier movements of these same
+people, and who had taken with them to their new homes the distress and
+the dread of exile. It were fatal, they knew, to wait. If the English
+were ever to be driven within the barriers of the Alleghanies again, it
+must be done now, and all the tribes must rally to the desperate business.
+
+They found a leader in Pontiac, a chief of the Ottawas. A dozen powerful
+tribes heeded him when he counselled secret confederacy, and, when all
+should be ready, sudden war; and the English presently had reason to know
+how able an enemy they had to fear,—a man of deep counsel, astute and
+masterful. In June, 1763, the first blow was struck,—from end to end of
+the open border,—even the Senecas, one of the Six Nations, joining in the
+bitter work. Every frontier fort except Detroit, Niagara, and Pitt was in
+their hands at the first surprise: smoking ruins and the bodies of white
+men slain marked all the borders where the French had been. The English
+rallied, stubborn and undaunted. Three forts at least were saved. There
+were men at hand like Colonel Bouquet, the gallant officer who went to
+the relief of Fort Pitt, who knew the strategy of the forest as well as
+the redskins did, and used steadfast English, not fickle savages, in the
+fighting; and, though the work was infinitely hard and perilous and slow
+in the doing, within two years it was done. Before the year 1765 was out,
+Pontiac had been brought to book, had acknowledged himself beaten, and
+had sued for peace.
+
+[Illustration: PONTIAC, CHIEF OF THE OTTAWAS]
+
+But by that time the English ministers knew the nature of the task
+which awaited them in America. It was plain that they must strengthen
+the frontier posts and maintain a force of soldiers in the colonies,
+if English power was to be safe there, and English lives. Not fewer
+than twenty thousand men would be needed; and it would be necessary to
+organize government, civil as well as military, in a more effective
+way. It might be necessary to pay the colonial judges and even the
+colonial governors out of the general treasury of the empire, rather than
+leave them always dependent upon the uncertain grants of the colonial
+legislatures. The new plans would, taken all together, involve, it was
+reckoned, the expenditure of at least £300,000 a year. Mr. Grenville,
+now at the head of the government in England, was a lawyer and a man of
+business. “He took public business not as a duty which he was to fulfil,
+but as a pleasure he was to enjoy,” and, unfortunately, he regarded
+American affairs as ordinary matters of duty and of business. England had
+spent £60,000,000 sterling to put the French out of America; £140,000,000
+had been added to the national debt. Her own sources of revenue were
+quite run dry. Mr. Grenville and his colleagues did not know where else
+to turn for another penny, if not to America. They therefore determined
+that, since heavy additional expenditures must be undertaken for the
+proper administration and defence of the colonies, America must be made
+to supply at least a part of the money to meet them. Not all of it. It
+was the ministers’ first idea to raise only £100,000 out of the £300,000
+by taxes directly derived from the colonies: and every farthing of that,
+with twice as much more, was to be spent, of course, in America. The
+money was none of it to cross the sea. It was to remain in the colonial
+treasuries until expended for colonial administration and defence.
+
+[Illustration: HENRY BOUQUET]
+
+Some men there were in England who were far-sighted enough to see what
+this new policy would lead to; but Grenville did not, and Parliament
+did not. In March, 1764, therefore, upon the introduction of his annual
+budget, the prime minister introduced a bill, which was passed, laying
+fresh and more effective taxes on wines, sugar, and molasses imported
+into the colonies, tightening and extending the old Navigation Acts, and
+still further restraining manufactures; and at the same time announced
+that he would, the next year, propose a moderate direct tax upon the
+colonies in the form of an act requiring revenue stamps to be used on the
+principal sorts of documents employed in America in legal and mercantile
+business.
+
+[Illustration: BOUQUET’S REDOUBT AT PITTSBURG]
+
+Mr. Grenville had no desire to irritate the Americans. He thought they
+might protest; he never dreamed they would disobey. He was, no doubt,
+surprised when he learned how hot their protests were; and when his Stamp
+Act the next year became law, their anger and flat defiance must have
+seemed to him mere wanton rebellion. He introduced the Stamp Act with his
+budget of 1765. The Commons gave only a single sitting to the discussion
+of its principles; passed it almost without opposition; and by the 22d of
+March it was law. A few members protested. Colonel Barré, standing there
+in his place, square, swarthy, a soldier from the field, that staring
+wound upon his face which he had taken where Wolfe died, on the Plains of
+Abraham, told the ministers very flatly that the colonists, whom he had
+seen and fought for, owed to them neither the planting nor the nourishing
+of their colonies, had a liberty they had made for themselves, were very
+jealous of that liberty, and would vindicate it. Benjamin Franklin was
+in London to make protest for Pennsylvania; and the agents of the other
+colonies were as active as he, and as ready to promise that the colonial
+legislatures would themselves grant out of their own treasuries more than
+the Act could yield, if only they were left to do it in their own way.
+Mr. Franklin had pointed out in very plain terms how sharp a departure
+there was in such measures from the traditional dealings of the crown
+with the colonies, how loyal they had been in granting supplies when
+required, and how ill a new way of taxation would sit upon the spirits
+of the colonists. But the vote for the bill was five to one. Neither the
+ministers nor the Commons showed the least hesitation or misgiving.
+
+[Illustration: PATRICK HENRY]
+
+[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF ISAAC BARRÉ]
+
+[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF POSTER PLACED ON THE DOORS OF PUBLIC
+BUILDINGS]
+
+The Act operated in America like a spark dropped on tinder. First dismay,
+then anger, then riot and open defiance, showed what the colonists
+thought and meant to do. Their own agents in London were as little
+prepared as the ministers themselves for the sudden passion. They had
+asked for appointments for their friends as stamp distributers under the
+Act. Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia, even asked for a place for himself
+under it, so different a look did things wear in London from that which
+they wore at home in the Old Dominion. But these gentlemen learned the
+temper of America, and changed their own, soon enough. The Act was in
+no way extraordinary or oppressive in its provisions. It required of
+the colonists only what was already required in respect of business
+transactions in England: namely, that revenue stamps, of values varying
+with the character of the transaction or the amount involved, should
+be attached to all deeds, wills, policies of insurance, and clearance
+papers for ships, to legal papers of almost every kind, to all written
+contracts and most of the business papers used by merchants in their
+formal dealings, and to all periodical publications and advertisements.
+The colonies themselves had imposed such taxes; in England they had been
+used since William and Mary, and had proved eminently convenient and easy
+of collection. Governor Shirley, of Massachusetts, had himself urged that
+Parliament use them in America, American though he was. Mr. Franklin had
+taken it for granted, when he saw the Act become law, that they must be
+submitted to. But America flatly refused obedience, and, except in the
+newly conquered provinces of Nova Scotia and Canada, the stamps were not
+used.
+
+The Act was not to go into operation until the 1st of November (1765);
+but long before the first of November it was evident that it would not
+go into effect at all. It was universally condemned and made impossible
+of application. There was instant protest from the colonial assemblies
+so soon as it was known that the Act was passed; and the assembly of
+Massachusetts proposed that a congress of delegates from the several
+colonies be held in October, ere the Act went into effect, to decide what
+should be done to serve their common interest in the critical matter.
+The agitations and tumults of that eventful summer were not soon forgot.
+In August, Boston witnessed an outbreak such as she had never witnessed
+before. Mr. Andrew Oliver, who had been appointed distributer of the
+stamps there, was burned in effigy; the house in which it was thought the
+stamps were to be stored was torn down; Mr. Oliver’s residence was broken
+into and many of its furnishings were destroyed. He hastily resigned his
+obnoxious office. Mobs then plundered the house of the deputy registrar
+of the court of admiralty, destroying his private papers and the records
+and files of the court,—because the new acts of trade and taxation gave
+new powers to that court. The house of the comptroller of customs was
+sacked. Mr. Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant-governor of the colony,
+found himself obliged, on the night of the 26th, to flee for his life;
+and returned when order was restored to find his home stripped of
+everything it contained, including nine hundred pounds sterling in money,
+and manuscripts and books which he had been thirty years collecting.
+Only the walls and floors of the house remained.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN DICKINSON]
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS HUTCHINSON]
+
+[Illustration: THOMAS HUTCHINSON’S MANSION, BOSTON]
+
+There was no violence elsewhere to equal this in Boston. There was
+tumult everywhere, but in most places the mobs contented themselves with
+burning the stamp agents in effigy and frightening them into the instant
+relinquishment of their offices. Not until the autumn came, and the day
+for the application of the Act, did they show a serious temper again.
+Then New York also saw a house sacked and its furniture used to feed a
+bonfire. The people insisted upon having the stamps handed over to their
+own city officers; and when more came they seized and burned them. At
+Philadelphia many Quakers and Church of England men, and some Baptists,
+made as if they would have obeyed the Act; but the mobs saw to it that
+they should not have the chance. The stamp distributer was compelled to
+resign, and there was no one from whom stamps could be obtained. Stamp
+distributers who would not resign found it best to seek safety in flight.
+There was no one in all the colonies, north or south, who had authority
+to distribute the hated pieces of stamped paper which the ministers had
+expected would so conveniently yield them a modest revenue for their
+colonial expenses. There was a little confusion and inconvenience for
+a time. The courts hesitated to transact business without affixing the
+stamps required to their written pleadings; it seemed imprudent to
+send ships out without stamps on their clearance papers; business men
+doubted what would come of using no stamps in their transactions. But the
+hesitation did not last long. Business was presently going forward, in
+court and out, as before, and never a stamp used!
+
+It was singular and significant how immediately and how easily the
+colonies drew together to meet the common danger and express a common
+purpose. Early in October the congress which Massachusetts had asked for
+came together at New York, the delegates of nine colonies attending. It
+drew up and sent over sea a statement of the right of the colonies to
+tax and govern themselves,—as loyal to the King, but not as subject to
+Parliament,—which arrested the attention of the world. Mr. Grenville
+and his colleagues were just then, by a fortunate turn of politics at
+home, most opportunely obliged to resign, and gave place to the moderate
+Whigs who followed Lord Rockingham (July, 1765), and who thought the
+protests of the colonies not unreasonable. On the 18th of March, 1766,
+accordingly, the Stamp Act was repealed,—within a year of its enactment.
+It was at the same time declared, however, by special declaratory act,
+that Parliament had sovereign right to tax the colonies, and legislate
+for them, if it pleased. It was out of grace and good policy, the
+ministers declared, that the tax was withdrawn; a concession, not of
+right, but of good feeling; and everybody knew that it was done as
+much because the London merchants were frightened by the resolution of
+the American merchants to take no cargoes under the tax as because the
+colonies had declined to submit. But the results were none the less
+salutary. The rejoicings in America were as boisterous and as universal
+as had been the tempest of resentment.
+
+[Illustration: TABLE OF STAMP CHARGES ON PAPER]
+
+[Illustration: LORD ROCKINGHAM]
+
+But that was not the end of the matter. The Stamp Act had suddenly
+brought to light and consciousness principles and passions not likely
+to be again submerged, and which it was worth the while of statesmen
+over sea to look into very carefully. Some there were in England who
+understood them well enough. Mr. John Adams used to say, long afterwards,
+that the trouble seemed to him to have begun, not in 1765, but in 1761.
+It was in that year that all the colonies, north and south, had heard of
+what James Otis had said in the chief court of the province at Boston
+against the general warrants, the sweeping writs of assistance, for which
+the customs officers of the crown had asked, to enable them to search as
+they pleased for goods brought in from foreign parts in defiance of the
+acts of trade. The writs were not new, and Mr. Otis’s protest had not put
+a stop to their issue. It had proved of no avail to say, as he did, that
+they were an intolerable invasion of individual right, flat violations
+of principles of law which had become a part of the very constitution of
+the realm, and that even an act of Parliament could not legalize them.
+But all the colonies had noted that hot contest in the court at Boston,
+because Mr. Otis had spoken with a singular eloquence which quickened
+men’s pulses and irresistibly swung their minds into the current of his
+own thought, and because it had made them more sharply aware than before
+of what the ministers at home were doing to fix upon the colonies the
+direct power of the government over sea. These writs of assistance gave
+the officers who held them authority to search any place they pleased for
+smuggled goods, whether private residence or public store-house, with or
+without reasonable ground of suspicion, and meant that the government had
+at last seriously determined, at whatever cost, to break up the trade
+with the West Indies and the Spanish Main. Presently armed cutters were
+put on the coasts the more effectually to stop it. A vice-admiralty court
+was set up to condemn the cargoes seized, without a jury. The duties were
+to be rigorously collected and the trade broken up, for the sake of the
+sugar growers of the British West Indies and merchants in London.
+
+[Illustration: JAMES OTIS]
+
+If New England could no longer send her horses, cattle, lumber, casks,
+and fish to the French islands and the Spanish Main, and bring thence,
+in exchange for them, sugar and molasses, she must let her ships rot at
+the wharves and five thousand of her seamen go idle and starve; must
+seek elsewhere for a market for her chief products; could make no more
+rum with which to carry on her home trade in spirits or her traffic in
+slaves on the slave coast; must forego her profits at the southern ports,
+and go without the convenient bills drawn on exported Virginian tobacco
+wherewith she had been used to pay her debts to the London merchants.
+For thirty years and more it had been understood that the duties on
+that trade were not to be collected; but now, of a sudden, the law was
+to be carried out by armed vessels, writs of general search, and the
+summary proceedings of a court of admiralty. In 1764 Mr. Grenville had
+drawn the lines tighter than ever by a readjustment of duties. That
+meant ruin; and the Stamp Act was but the last touch of exasperation.
+The disposition of the ministers seemed all the more obvious because of
+the obnoxious “Quartering Act” which went along with the Stamp Act. They
+were authorized by Parliament to quarter troops in the colonies, and by
+special enactment the colonists were required to provide the troops with
+lodgings, firewood, bedding, drink, soap, and candles.
+
+[Illustration: STAMPS FORCED ON THE COLONIES]
+
+There were other causes of irritation which touched the colonists almost
+as nearly. In 1740 the Massachusetts assembly had set up a Land Bank
+authorized to issue notes based upon nothing but mortgages on land
+and personal bonds, with surety, given by those who subscribed to its
+support, and Parliament, at the solicitation of Boston men who knew
+what certain disaster such a bank would bring upon the business of the
+colony, had thrust in its hand and suppressed it. The scheme had been in
+great favor among the men of the country districts, and its suppression
+by direct act of Parliament had stirred them to a deep resentment. “The
+Act to destroy the Land Bank scheme,” John Adams declared, had “raised a
+greater ferment in the province than the Stamp Act did”; and it made the
+men who had resented it all the readier to take fire at the imposition of
+the stamp duties. The churches of the province had been deeply alarmed,
+too, by the effort of English churchmen to establish bishops in America,
+as if in preparation for a full Establishment; and the clergy were,
+almost to a man, suspicious of the government. The lumbermen of the
+forests felt the constant irritation of the crown’s claim to all their
+best sticks of timber for the royal navy, and were themselves fit fuel
+for agitation. Each class seemed to have its special reason for looking
+askance at everything that savored of control from over sea. The measures
+taken against the trade with the Indies were but the latest item in a
+growing account.
+
+Massachusetts and the greater trading ports of the south felt the
+burden of the new policy more than the rest of the country felt it; but
+thoughtful men everywhere saw what it portended that Parliament should
+thus lay its hand directly upon the colonies to tax, and in some sort
+to govern, them. Quite as many men could tell you of the “parson’s
+case,” tried in quiet Hanover Court House in rural Virginia, as could
+tell you of Mr. Otis’s speech against the writs of assistance. It meant
+that the authorities in London were thrusting their hands into the
+affairs of Virginia just as they were thrusting them into the affairs
+of Massachusetts. Parson Maury had in that case set up an Order in
+Council by the ministers at home against an act of the Virginian House
+of Burgesses determining the value of the currency in which his salary
+was to be paid, and young Patrick Henry had sprung into sudden fame by
+declaring to the court very boldly against him that the crown had no
+right to override the self-government of Virginia.
+
+[Illustration: OLD CAPITOL AT WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA]
+
+The eloquence of that famous speech carried the young advocate to the
+House of Burgesses itself; and it was he who showed the colonies how
+to speak of the Stamp Act. The burgesses were in session when the news
+of that hateful law’s enactment reached Virginia. The young member
+waited patiently for the older members of the House to show the way in
+the new crisis,—Randolph and Pendleton and Nicholas, Richard Bland and
+George Wythe,—the men who had framed so weighty a protest and warning
+and sent so strong a remonstrance over sea only last year against this
+very measure. But when he saw that they would not lead, he sprang to the
+task himself, plain, country-bred though he was, and unschooled in that
+leadership; scribbled his resolutions on the fly-leaf of an old law-book,
+and carried them with a rush of eloquence that startled and swept the
+House, and set the tone for all the country.
+
+His resolutions not only declared the right of the colonies to tax
+themselves to be exclusive, and established beyond recall; they also
+declared that Virginians were not bound to obey the Parliament when it
+acted thus against established privilege, and that any one who should
+advocate obedience was an enemy to the colony. The sober second thought
+of the burgesses cut that defiant conclusion out at last,—after Mr. Henry
+had gone home; but the resolutions had already been sent post-haste
+through the colonies in their first form, unrevised and unsoftened, and
+had touched the feeling of every one who read them like a flame of fire.
+They were the first word of revolution; and no man ever thought just the
+same again after he had read them.
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE WYTHE]
+
+It seemed a strange defiance, no doubt, to come from loyal Virginia. The
+Stamp Act was not, in fact, oppressive or unreasonable. Why should it so
+kindle the anger of the colonies that the sovereign Parliament, which
+had for many a day levied indirect charges upon them by means of the
+many acts concerning trade and manufactures, now laid a moderate direct
+tax upon them, the proceeds of which were to be spent upon their own
+protection and administration? Because, though it might be the sovereign
+legislature of the empire, Parliament was not in their view the direct
+sovereign legislature of America. No one could truly say that Parliament
+had been the sovereign power even of England before 1688, that notable
+year in which it had, by a revolution, changed the succession to the
+throne and begun the making and unmaking of governments. The colonies had
+most of them been set up before that momentous year of change, while the
+Parliament was still only a body of representatives associated with the
+crown, with the right to criticise and restrain it, but with no right
+to usurp its prerogatives; entitled to be consulted, but not licensed
+to rule. The King, not the Parliament, had chartered the colonies; and
+they conceived their assemblies to be associated with him as Parliament
+itself had been in the older days before the Revolution of 1688: to
+vote him grants, assent to taxation, and with his consent make the laws
+they were to live under. He stood, they thought, in the same relation
+to all the legislatures of his realm: to the Parliament in England and
+to the assemblies in America. It was the fundamental principle of the
+English constitution, as all agreed, that the King’s subjects should be
+associated with him in government by representation; and, since the
+Americans could not be represented in Parliament, and were, by his own
+authority, represented in local assemblies, he must deal with them, not
+through Parliament, but through those assemblies.
+
+The law of their view was not very sound or clear; but the common-sense
+of it was unassailable; and it rested upon unquestionable and
+long-standing practice, that best foundation of institutions. Their
+governments were no doubt, in law, subject to the government of Great
+Britain. Whoever ruled there had the legal right to rule in the colonies
+also, whether it were the King independent of Parliament, or the
+ministers dependent upon Parliament. The revolution of 1688 had radically
+altered the character of the whole structure, and perhaps the colonies
+could not, in strict constitutional theory, decline their logical part in
+the change. But no man in America had ever seen that revolution cross the
+seas. English statesmen might have changed their views, but the colonies
+had not changed theirs, nor the practice of their governments either.
+Their governments were from of old, and they meant to keep them intact
+and uncorrupted. They did not object to the amount or to the form of the
+tax; they objected only that they had not themselves imposed it. They
+dissented utterly from the opinion that Parliament had the right to tax
+them at all. It was that principle, and not the tax itself, which moved
+them so deeply.
+
+English statesmen claimed that the colonists were as much represented in
+Parliament as the thousands of Englishmen in England who did not have
+the right to vote for members of the Commons; and no doubt they were.
+The franchise was narrow in England, and not the whole population but
+only a few out of some classes of the people were actually represented in
+the Houses. Were not the interests represented there which America stood
+for? Perhaps so. But why govern the colonies through these remote and
+theoretical representatives when they had, and had always had, immediate
+and actual representatives of their own in their assemblies,—as ready and
+accessible an instrument of government as the House of Commons itself?
+The colonists were accustomed to actual representation, had for a century
+and more been dealt with by means of it, and were not willing now to
+reverse their history and become, instead of veritable states, merely
+detached and dependent pieces of England. This was the fire of principle
+which the Stamp Act kindled.
+
+And, once kindled, it burned with an increasing flame. Within ten years
+it had been blown to the full blaze of revolution. Mr. Grenville had
+not lost his power because he had set the colonies aflame by his hated
+Stamp Act, but merely because the King intensely disliked his tedious
+manners, and resented the dictatorial tone used by the ministers in all
+their dealings with himself. The Marquis of Rockingham and the group of
+moderate Whigs who stood with him in the new ministry of July, 1765,
+had repealed the stamp tax, not because they deemed it wrong in legal
+principle, but because it had bred resistance, had made the colonists
+resolve not to buy goods of English merchants, or even pay the debts of
+£4,000,000 sterling already incurred in their business with them,—because
+they deemed it wise to yield, and so quiet disorders over sea. Their
+power lasted only a single year. The King liked their liberal principles
+as little as he liked Grenville’s offensive manners, and in August,
+1766, dismissed them, to substitute a ministry under William Pitt, now
+made Earl of Chatham. Had Pitt retained his mastery, all might have gone
+well; but his health failed, his leadership became a mere form, real
+power fell to other men with no wide, perceiving vision like his own, and
+America was presently put once again in revolutionary mood.
+
+Pitt had said that the colonists were right when they resisted the Stamp
+Act: that Parliament could lawfully impose duties on commerce, and keep,
+if it would, an absolute monopoly of trade for the English merchants,
+because such matters were of the empire and not merely of America; but
+that the Americans were justified in resisting measures of internal
+taxation and government, their charters and accustomed liberties no doubt
+giving them in such matters constitutions of their own. Mr. Burke, whose
+genius made him the spokesman of the Rockingham Whigs, whether they would
+or no, had said very vehemently, and with that singular eloquence of his
+of which only his own words know the tone, that he cared not at all what
+legal rights might be involved; it was a question of government and of
+good-will between a king and his subjects; and he would not support any
+measure, upon whatever right it might be founded, which led to irritation
+and not to obedience. The new ministry of the Earl of Chatham acted upon
+its chief’s principles, and not upon Mr. Burke’s,—though they acted
+rashly because that consummate chief did not lead them. They proceeded
+(June, 1767), after the great earl’s illness had laid him by, to put upon
+the statute book two acts for the regulation of colonial trade and the
+government of the colonies which Charles Townshend, their Chancellor
+of the Exchequer, had drawn. The first provided for the more effectual
+enforcement of the acts of trade already in existence; the second imposed
+duties on wine, oil, lead, glass, paper, painters’ colors, and tea
+carried to the colonies, and explicitly legalized the use of the hated
+general search-warrants known as “writs of assistance.” The revenues
+raised by these duties were to be applied, as the stamp tax would have
+been had it been collected, to the support of the courts of justice and
+of the civil establishments of the several colonies, and to the expenses
+connected with their military defence. Evasions of the revenue acts were
+to be tried by the admiralty courts without juries.
+
+To the colonists this seemed simply a return to the policy of the Stamp
+Act. The tax was different, but the object was the same: to make their
+judges and their governors independent of them, and to compel them to
+pay for the maintenance of troops not of their own raising. These same
+ministers had suspended the legislative power of the New York assembly
+because it refused to make proper provision for the quartering of the
+King’s troops, as commanded by the act of 1765; and that assembly had
+felt itself obliged to yield and obey. Several companies of royal
+artillery had been sent to Boston in the autumn of 1766, and were
+quartered there at the colony’s expense by order of the governor and
+council.
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1772]
+
+The new taxes were laid upon trade, and they could not be attacked on the
+same grounds upon which the stamps had been objected to. But the trouble
+was that the new taxes, unlike the old restrictions, were to be enforced,
+evasion prevented. Mr. Townshend’s first act was to send commissioners
+to America specially charged and empowered to see to that. The ruinous
+acts of 1764 were to be carried out, and the West India trade, by which
+Boston merchants and ship owners lived, put a stop to. These were bitter
+things to endure. Some grounds must be found from which to fight
+them,—if not the arguments used against the Stamp Act, then others,
+if need be more radical. The ministers at home had set their far-away
+subjects to thinking with the eagerness and uneasiness of those who seek
+by some means to defend their liberties, and were fast making rebels of
+them.
+
+Even in the midst of the universal rejoicings over the repeal of the
+Stamp Act the temper of several of the colonial assemblies had risen at
+reading the “Declaratory Act” which accompanied the repeal, and which
+asserted the absolute legal right of Parliament “to bind the colonies
+in all cases whatsoever.” They had declared very flatly then that
+Parliament had no legal authority whatever in America except such as it
+might exercise by the consent of the colonial assemblies,—so far had
+their thought and their defiant purpose advanced within the year. There
+were conservative men in the colonies as well as radical, men who hated
+revolution and loved the just and sober ways of law; and there was as
+strong a sentiment of loyalty on one side the sea as on the other. But
+even conservative men dreaded to see Parliament undertake to break down
+the independence of America. Mr. Thomas Hutchinson, of Massachusetts,
+whose house the rioters in Boston had wantonly looted when they were mad
+against the Stamp Act, had been born and bred in the colony, and loved
+her welfare as honestly as any man; but he was lieutenant-governor,
+an officer of the crown, and would have deemed it dishonor not to
+uphold the authority he represented. Mr. Otis, on the other hand, had
+resigned his office as Advocate General under the crown to resist the
+writs of assistance. The public-spirited gentlemen who had opposed Mr.
+Henry’s fiery resolutions in the Virginian House of Burgesses did not
+fear usurpation or hate tyranny less than he; but they loved the slow
+processes of argument and protest and strictly legal opposition more than
+he did, and were patient enough to keep within bounds. They feared to
+shake an empire by pursuing a right too impetuously. Men of every temper
+and of every counsel made up the various people of the colonies, and
+there were men of equal patriotism on both sides of the rising quarrel.
+
+[Illustration: LANDING TROOPS AT BOSTON, 1768]
+
+And yet the most moderate and slow-tempered grew uneasy at Mr.
+Townshend’s measures. Mr. John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, wrote and
+published a series of letters,—_Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer_, he
+called them,—which stated as pointedly, as boldly, as earnestly as any
+man could wish, the constitutional rights of self-government which
+the colonists cherished and thought imperilled by the new acts of
+Parliament,—and yet Mr. Dickinson was as steady a loyalist as any man in
+America, as little likely to countenance rebellion, as well worth heeding
+by those who wished to compose matters by wise and moderate counsels. His
+firm-spoken protests were, in fact, read and pondered on both sides the
+water (1767), and no one could easily mistake their significance.
+
+[Illustration: LIST OF NAMES OF THOSE WHO WOULD NOT CONFORM]
+
+The action of the people gave only too grave an emphasis to what their
+more self-restrained and thoughtful leaders said. Mr. Townshend’s
+acts were as openly resisted as Mr. Grenville’s had been; and every
+art of evasion, every trick of infringement, upon occasion even open
+and forcible violation, set at naught other restrictions of trade as
+well. It was startling to see how rapidly affairs approached a crisis.
+Resistance centred, as trade itself did, at Boston. When Mr. Townshend’s
+commissioners of customs seized the sloop _Liberty_ in Boston harbor for
+evasion of the duties, rioters drove them to the fort for shelter, and
+they sent hastily to England for more troops. The Massachusetts assembly,
+under the masterful leadership of Mr. Samuel Adams, protested that the
+measures of the new ministry were in violation of colonial rights, and
+protested in terms which, though dignified and respectful enough, were
+unmistakably imperative.
+
+The leadership of Samuel Adams was itself a sign of the times. He was
+a man of the people, passionate in his assertion of rights, and likely
+to stir and increase passion in those for whom he spoke. Subtle, a born
+politician; bold, a born leader of men, in assembly or in the street,
+he was the sort of man and orator whose ascendency may mean revolution
+almost when he chooses. The assembly, at his suggestion, went beyond
+the ordinary bounds of protest and sent a circular letter to the
+other colonies, as if to invite a comparison of views and a general
+acquiescence in the course of settled opposition it had itself adopted.
+When the ministers in London demanded a withdrawal of the letter, the
+assembly of course refused, and the other colonies were more than ever
+inclined to stand by the stout Bay Colony at whose capital port the
+fight centred. The ministers, in their desperate purpose to compel
+submission, declared their intention to remove to England for trial any
+one who should be charged with treason,—under an almost forgotten statute
+passed long before Jamestown was settled or English colonies dreamed
+of in America. That roused the Virginian House of Burgesses once more.
+They declared, with a sort of quiet passion, in their session of 1769,
+that no one but their own assemblies had a right to tax the colonies;
+that they had the inalienable right to petition the government at home
+upon any matter of grievance whatever, and to petition, if they pleased,
+jointly, as a body of colonies united in right and interest; and that any
+attempt to try a colonist for crime anywhere except in the courts of his
+own colony and by known course of law was “highly derogatory of the right
+of British subjects,” and not for a moment to be deemed within the lawful
+power of the crown. There was no need this time for Mr. Henry. All men
+were now of the same opinion in Virginia, and the action was unanimous.
+
+The Virginian governor at once dissolved the Burgesses; but the members
+came together again almost immediately at a private house; and there
+Colonel Washington, whom all the English world had known since Braddock’s
+day, proposed a general agreement to import no goods at all upon which a
+tax was laid,—to see what effect it would have if the English tradesmen
+and manufacturers who looked to America for a market were starved into
+a true appreciation of the situation and of the state of opinion among
+their customers. Many of the other colonies followed suit. Trade with
+England for a few months almost stood still, and there was quick distress
+and panic among those interested over sea. They promptly demanded of
+Parliament that the new taxes be taken off and trade allowed to live
+again. The ministers yielded (April, 1770),—except with regard to the tax
+on tea. That was the least of the taxes, and the King himself positively
+commanded that it be retained, to save the principle of the bill and
+show that Parliament had not reconsidered its right to tax. The taxes
+had yielded nothing: the single tax on tea would serve to assert a right
+without the rest.
+
+[Illustration: HAND-BILL OF TRUE SONS OF LIBERTY]
+
+[Illustration: THE BOSTON MASSACRE]
+
+Meanwhile a very ominous thing had happened in Boston,—though the
+ministers had not yet heard of it when the bill passed to repeal the
+taxes. Upon an evening in March, 1770, a mob had attacked a squad of the
+King’s redcoats in King Street, pelting them with sharp pieces of ice and
+whatever else they could lay their hands on, and daring them derisively
+to fire; and the troops had fired, being hard pressed and maddened. Five
+of the mob were killed and six wounded, and a thrill of indignation and
+horror went through the excited town. The next day a great meeting in
+Faneuil Hall sent a committee to Mr. Hutchinson, the governor, to demand
+the instant withdrawal of the troops. Samuel Adams headed the committee,
+imperious and on fire; told the governor, in the council chamber where
+they met, that he spoke in the name of three thousand freemen who counted
+upon being heeded; and won his point. The troops were withdrawn to an
+island in the bay. The town had hated their “lobster backs” for all the
+year and a half they had been there, and rejoiced and was quiet when they
+withdrew.
+
+[Illustration: AFTER THE MASSACRE. SAMUEL ADAMS DEMANDING OF GOVERNOR
+HUTCHINSON THE INSTANT WITHDRAWAL OF BRITISH TROOPS]
+
+But quiet could not last long. The flame was sure somewhere to burst
+out again whenever any incident for a moment stirred excitement. In
+North Carolina there was the next year a sudden blaze of open rebellion
+against the extravagant exactions of William Tryon, the adventurer who
+was royal governor there; and only blood extinguished it (1771). In Rhode
+Island, in June, 1772, his Majesty’s armed schooner _Gaspee_ was taken
+by assault and burned, upon a spit of land where she lay aground. It had
+been her business to watch against infringements of the navigation laws
+and the vexatious acts of trade; her commander had grown exceptionally
+insolent in his work; a sloop which he chased had led him on to the spit,
+where his schooner stuck fast; and the provincials took advantage of her
+helplessness to burn her. No one could be found who would inform on those
+who had done the bold thing; the courageous chief-justice of the little
+province flatly denied the right of the English authorities to order the
+perpetrators to England for trial; and the royal commission which was
+appointed to look into the whole affair stirred all the colonies once
+more to a deep irritation. The far-away House of Burgesses in Virginia
+very promptly spoke its mind again. It invited the several colonies to
+join Virginia in forming committees of correspondence, in order that all
+might be of one mind and ready for one action against the aggressions of
+the government in England. The ministers in London had meantime resolved
+to pay the provincial judges, at any rate in Massachusetts, out of the
+English treasury, taxes or no taxes; and the Massachusetts towns had
+formed committees of correspondence of their own, as Mr. Adams bade.
+
+[Illustration: INTERIOR OF COUNCIL CHAMBER, OLD STATE HOUSE, BOSTON]
+
+[Illustration: PROTEST AGAINST THE LANDING OF TEA]
+
+[Illustration: ENTRY JOHN ADAMS’S DIARY]
+
+[Illustration: CALL FOR MEETING TO PROTEST AGAINST THE LANDING OF TEA]
+
+Such were the signs of the times when the final test came of the tax
+on tea. The East India company was in straits for money. It had to pay
+twelvepence into the royal treasury on every pound of tea it imported,
+whether it sold it in England or not; but the government there offered
+to relieve it of that tax on every pound it carried on to America,
+and exact only the threepence to be paid at the colonial ports under
+Mr. Townshend’s act: so willing were the King’s ministers to help the
+Company, and so anxious also to test the act and the submissiveness
+of the colonists. The test was soon made. The colonists had managed to
+smuggle in from Holland most of the tea they needed; and they wanted
+none, under the circumstances, from the East India ships,—even though it
+cost less, with the twelvepence tax off, than the smuggled tea obtained
+of the Dutch. The East India Company promptly sent tea-laden ships to
+Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston; and in the autumn of
+1773 they began to come in. In Boston a quiet mob, disguised as Indians,
+threw the chests overboard into the harbor. At New York and Philadelphia
+the ships were “permitted” to leave port again without landing their
+cargoes. At Charleston the tea was landed, but it was stored, not sold,
+and a public meeting saw to its secure bestowal. The experiment had
+failed. America was evidently of one mind, and had determined not to buy
+tea or anything else with a parliamentary tax on it. The colonists would
+no more submit to Mr. Townshend’s tax than to Mr. Grenville’s, whatever
+the legal difference between them might be, either in principle or in
+operation. The issue was squarely made up: the colonies would not obey
+the Parliament,—would be governed only through their own assemblies. If
+the ministers persisted, there must be revolution.
+
+[Illustration: THE BOSTON TEA PARTY]
+
+ Here the leading general _authorities_ are the histories of
+ Bancroft, Hildreth, and Bryant; but to these we now add David
+ Ramsay’s _History of the American Revolution_; the fourth
+ volume of James Grahame’s excellent _History of the Rise and
+ Progress of the United States of North America from their
+ Colonization till the Declaration of Independence_; Thomas
+ Hutchinson’s _History of Massachusetts_, one of the most
+ valuable of the contemporary authorities; John S. Barry’s
+ _History of Massachusetts_; John Fiske’s _American Revolution_;
+ Mellen Chamberlain’s _The Revolution Impending_, in the sixth
+ volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of America_;
+ the twelfth chapter of W. E. H. Lecky’s _History of England
+ in the Eighteenth Century_; Sir J. R. Seeley’s _Expansion
+ of England_; Richard Frothingham’s _Rise of the Republic of
+ the United States_; Mr. Edward Channing’s _United States of
+ America, 1765-1865_; Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge’s _Short History
+ of the English Colonies in America_; Mr. Horace E. Scudder’s
+ _Men and Manners in America One Hundred Years Ago_; Moses Coit
+ Tyler’s _Life of Patrick Henry_; Mr. Horace Gray’s important
+ discussion of Otis’s speech against the writs of assistance,
+ in the _Appendix_ to Quincy’s _Reports of Massachusetts Bay,
+ 1761-1772_; Moses Coit Tyler’s _Literary History of the
+ American Revolution_; F. B. Dexter’s _Estimates of Population_,
+ in the _Proceedings_ of the American Antiquarian Society; and
+ the _Lives_ of the leading American and English statesmen of
+ the time, notably the invaluable series of brief biographies
+ known as _The American Statesmen Series_.
+
+ Abundant _contemporary material_ may be found in the published
+ letters, papers, and speeches of American and English public
+ men of the time, especially in the pamphlets of such men as
+ James Otis, Richard Bland, Stephen Hopkins, John Adams, Samuel
+ Adams, John Dickinson, and their _confrères_; in Franklin’s
+ _Autobiography_; Andrew Burnaby’s _Travels through the Middle
+ Settlements in North America, in the Years 1759 and 1760_; Ann
+ Maury’s _Memoirs of a Huguenot Family_; and Hezekiah Niles’s
+ _Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America_.
+
+ _Lists of the authorities_ on the several colonies during these
+ years may be found in Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell
+ Hart’s very convenient and careful little _Guide to American
+ History_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE APPROACH OF REVOLUTION
+
+
+The ministers did persist, and there was revolution. Within less than
+a year from those memorable autumn days of 1773 when the East India
+Company’s ships came into port with their cargoes of tea, the colonies
+had set up a Congress at Philadelphia which looked from the first as
+if it meant to do things for which there was no law; and which did, in
+fact, within less than two years after its first assembling, cut the
+bonds of allegiance which bound America to England. The colonists did
+not themselves speak or think of it as a body set up to govern them, or
+to determine their relations with the government at home, but only as
+a body organized for consultation and guidance, a general meeting of
+their committees of correspondence. But it was significant how rapidly,
+and upon how consistent and executive a plan, the arrangements for
+“correspondence” had developed, and how naturally, almost spontaneously,
+they had come to a head in this “Congress of Committees.” There were
+men in the colonies who were as quick to act upon their instinct of
+leadership, and as apt and masterful at organization, as the English on
+the other side of the water who had checkmated Charles I.; and no doubt
+the thought of independent action, and even of aggressive resistance,
+came more readily to the minds of men of initiative in America, where
+all things were making and to be made, than in old England, where every
+rule of action seemed antique and venerable. Mr. Samuel Adams had been
+deliberately planning revolution in Massachusetts ever since 1768,
+the year the troops came to Boston to hold the town quiet while Mr.
+Townshend’s acts strangled its trade; and he had gone the straight way
+to work to bring it about. He knew very well how to cloak his purpose
+and sedulously keep it hid from all whom it might shock or dismay or
+alienate. But the means he used were none the less efficacious because
+those who acted with him could not see how far they led.
+
+[Illustration: BOYCOTTING POSTER]
+
+It was he who had stood at the front of the opposition of the
+Massachusetts assembly to the Stamp Act; he who had drafted the circular
+letter of Massachusetts to the other colonies in 1768 suggesting concert
+of action against the Townshend acts; he who had gone from the town
+meeting in Faneuil Hall to demand of Hutchinson the immediate removal of
+the troops, after the unhappy “massacre” of March, 1770; he who had led
+the town meeting which took effectual measures to prevent the landing
+of the tea from the East India Company’s ships. No man doubted that his
+hand had been in the plan to throw the tea into the harbor. It was he
+who, last of all, as the troubles thickened, had bound the other towns
+of Massachusetts to Boston in a common organization for making and
+propagating opinion by means of committees of correspondence. It was late
+in 1772 when he proposed to the town meeting in Boston that the other
+towns of the colony be invited to co-operate with it in establishing
+committees of correspondence, by means of which they could exchange
+views, and, if need were, concert action. The end of November had come
+before he could make Boston’s initiative complete in the matter; and yet
+the few scant weeks that remained of the year were not gone before more
+than eighty towns had responded.
+
+[Illustration: CIRCULAR OF THE BOSTON COMMITTEE OF CORRESPONDENCE]
+
+It turned out that he had invented a tremendously powerful engine of
+propaganda for such opinions and suggestions of action as he chose to put
+upon the wind or set afloat in his private correspondence,—as he had, no
+doubt, foreseen, with his keen appreciation of the most effectual means
+of agitation. Here was, in effect, a league of towns to watch and to
+control the course of affairs. There was nothing absolutely novel in the
+plan, except its formal completeness and its appearance of permanence,
+as if of a standing political arrangement made out of hand. In the year
+1765, which was now seven years gone by, Richard Henry Lee had taken an
+active part among his neighbors in Virginia in forming the “Westmoreland
+Association,” which drew many of the leading spirits of the great county
+of Westmoreland together in concerted resistance to the Stamp Act.
+Four years later (1769) the Burgesses of Virginia, cut short in their
+regular session as a legislature by a sudden dissolution proclaimed by
+their royal governor, met in Mr. Anthony Hay’s house in Williamsburg and
+adopted the resolutions for a general non-importation association which
+George Mason had drawn up, and which George Washington, Mr. Mason’s
+neighbor and confidant, read and moved. There followed the immediate
+organization of local associations throughout the little commonwealth
+to see to the keeping of the pledge there taken. Virginia had no
+town meetings; each colony took its measures of non-importation and
+resistance to parliamentary taxation after its own fashion; but wherever
+there were Englishmen accustomed to political action there was always
+this thought of free association and quick and organized coöperation in
+the air, which no one was surprised at any time to see acted upon and
+made an instrument of agitation.
+
+[Illustration: NORTH AMERICA 1750, SHOWING CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF
+EXPLORATION.
+
+BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE III]
+
+What made the Massachusetts committees of correspondence especially
+significant and especially telling in their effect upon affairs was
+that they were not used, like the “Westmoreland Association” or the
+non-importation associations of 1769, merely as a means of keeping
+neighbors steadfast in the observance of a simple resolution of
+passive resistance, but were employed to develop opinion and originate
+action from month to month,—dilatory, defensive, or aggressive, as
+occasion or a change of circumstances might demand. The non-importation
+associations had been powerful enough, as some men had reason to know.
+The determination not to import or use any of the things upon which
+Parliament had laid a tax to be taken of the colonies,—wine, oil, glass,
+paper, tea, or any of the rest of the list,—was not a thing all men
+had thought of or spontaneously agreed to. Certain leading gentlemen,
+like Mr. Mason and Colonel Washington, deemed it a serviceable means of
+constitutional resistance to the mistaken course of the ministry, induced
+influential members of the House of Burgesses to indorse it, and formed
+associations to put it into effect,—to see to it that no one drank wine
+or tea which had been brought in under Mr. Townshend’s taxes. There
+was here no command of law,—only a moral compulsion, the “pressure of
+opinion”; but it was no light matter to be censured and talked about by
+the leading people in your county as a person who defied the better sort
+of opinion and preferred wine and tea to the liberties of the colony.
+Associated opinion, spoken by influential men, proved a tremendous engine
+of quiet duress, and the unwilling found it prudent to conform. It was
+harder yet for the timid where active committees of correspondence
+looked into and suggested opinion. Men could give up their wine, or women
+their tea, and still keep what opinions they pleased; but committees of
+correspondence sought out opinion, provoked discussion, forced men to
+take sides or seem indifferent; more than all, saw to it that Mr. Samuel
+Adams’s opinions were duly promulgated and established by argument.
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE MASON]
+
+Men thought for themselves in Massachusetts, and Mr. Adams was too astute
+a leader to seem to force opinions upon them. He knew a better and more
+certain way. He drew Mr. Hutchinson, the governor, into controversy,
+and provoked him to unguarded heat in the expression of his views as
+to the paramount authority of Parliament and the bounden duty of the
+colonists to submit if they would not be accounted rebels. He let
+heat in the governor generate heat in those who loved the liberty of
+the colony; supplied patriots with arguments, phrases, resolutions of
+right and privilege; watchfully kept the fire alive; forced those who
+were strong openly to take sides and declare themselves, and those who
+were weak to think with their neighbors; infused agitation, disquiet,
+discontent, dissonance of opinion into the very air; and let everything
+that was being said or done run at once from town to town through the
+ever talkative committees of correspondence. He sincerely loved the
+liberty to which America had been bred; loved affairs, and wanted nothing
+for himself, except the ears of his neighbors; loved the air of strife
+and the day of debate, and the busy concert of endless agitation; was
+statesman and demagogue in one, and had now a cause which even slow and
+thoughtful men were constrained to deem just.
+
+The ministers supplied fuel enough and to spare to keep alive the fires
+he kindled; and presently the system of committees which he had devised
+for the towns of a single colony had been put into use to bring the
+several colonies themselves together. Opinion began to be made and moved
+and augmented upon a great scale. Spontaneous, no doubt, at first, at
+heart spontaneous always, it was elaborately, skilfully, persistently
+assisted, added to, made definite, vocal, universal,—now under the
+lead of men in one colony, again under the lead of those in another.
+Massachusetts, with her busy port and her noisy town meetings, drew the
+centre of the storm to herself; but the other colonies were not different
+in temper. Virginia, in particular, was as forward as Massachusetts.
+Virginia had got a new governor out of England early in 1772, John
+Murray, Earl of Dunmore, who let more than a year go by from his first
+brief meeting with the Burgesses before he summoned them again, because
+he liked their lack of submission as little as they liked his dark brow
+and masterful temper; but he suffered them to convene at last, in March,
+1773, and they forthwith gave him a taste of their quality, as little to
+his palate as he could have expected.
+
+[Illustration: SEAL OF DUNMORE]
+
+[Illustration: EARL OF DUNMORE]
+
+It was in June, 1772, while the Virginian burgesses waited for their
+tardy summons to Williamsburg that his Majesty’s revenue cutter _Gaspee_
+was deliberately boarded and burned by the Rhode Islanders. The Burgesses
+had but just assembled in the autumn when the ominous news came that a
+royal commission had been sent over to look sharply into the matter, and
+see to the arrest and deportation of all chiefly concerned. Dabney Carr,
+Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, and Thomas Jefferson, young men all,
+and radicals, members of the House, privately associated themselves for
+the concert of measures to be taken in the common cause of the colonies.
+Upon their initiative the Burgesses resolved, when the news from Rhode
+Island came, to appoint at once a permanent committee of correspondence;
+instruct it to inquire very particularly into the facts about this royal
+commission; and ask the other colonies to set up similar committees, for
+the exchange of information concerning public affairs and the maintenance
+of a common understanding and concert in action. By the end of the year
+Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and South
+Carolina had adopted the suggestion and set their committees to work.
+
+[Illustration: THE ATTACK ON THE “GASPEE”]
+
+Massachusetts, of course. This was Mr. Samuel Adams’s new machinery
+of agitation upon a larger scale. Adams himself had long cherished
+the wish that there might be such a connection established between
+the colonies. In the autumn of 1770 he had induced the Massachusetts
+assembly to appoint a committee of correspondence, to communicate with
+Mr. Arthur Lee, of Virginia, the colony’s agent in London, and with the
+Speakers of the several colonial assemblies; and though the committee
+had accomplished little or nothing, he had not been discouraged, but had
+written the next year to Mr. Lee expressing the wish that “societies”
+of “the most respectable inhabitants” might be formed in the colonies
+to maintain a correspondence with friends in England in the interest
+of colonial privilege. “This is a sudden thought,” he said, “and drops
+undigested from my pen”; but it must have seemed a natural enough
+thought to Mr. Lee, whose own vast correspondence,—with America, with
+Englishmen at home, with acquaintances on the continent,—had itself,
+unaided, made many a friend for the colonies over sea at the same time
+that it kept the leading men of the colonies informed of the opinions
+and the dangers breeding in England. But Mr. Adams’s town committees
+came first. It was left for the little group of self-constituted leaders
+in the Virginian assembly, of whom Richard Henry Lee, Mr. Arthur Lee’s
+elder brother, was one, to take the step which actually drew the colonies
+into active coöperation when the time was ripe. It was, in part, through
+the systematic correspondence set afoot by the Virginian burgesses
+that something like a common understanding had been arrived at as to
+what should be done when the tea came in; and the lawless defiance of
+the colonists in that matter brought the ministers in England to such
+a temper that there were presently new and very exciting subjects of
+correspondence between the committees, and affairs ran fast towards a
+crisis.
+
+[Illustration: LORD NORTH]
+
+Teas to the value of no less than eighteen thousand pounds sterling
+had been thrown into the harbor at Boston on that memorable night of
+the 16th of December, 1773, when “Captain Mackintosh,” the redoubtable
+leader of the South End toughs of the lively little town, was permitted
+for the nonce to lead his betters; but what aroused the ministers and
+put Parliament in a heat was not so much the loss incurred by the East
+India Company or the outcry of the merchants involved as the startling
+significance of the act, and the unpleasant evidence which every day
+came to hand that all the colonies alike were ready to resist. After
+the tea had been sent away, or stored safe against sale or present
+use, or thrown into the harbor, at Philadelphia, Charleston, New York,
+and Boston, as the leaders of the mobs or the meetings at each place
+preferred, there was an instant spread of Virginia’s method of union.
+Six more colonies hastened to appoint committees of correspondence, and
+put themselves in direct communication with the men at Boston and at
+Williamsburg who were forming opinion and planning modes of redress.
+Only Pennsylvania held off. The tea had been shut out at Philadelphia,
+as elsewhere, but the leaders of the colony were not ready yet to follow
+so fast in the paths of agitation and resistance. Members of Parliament
+hardly noticed the exception. It was Boston they thought of and chiefly
+condemned as a hot-bed of lawlessness. Not every one, it is true, was
+ready to speak quite so plainly or so intemperately as Mr. Venn. “The
+town of Boston ought to be knocked about their ears and destroyed,” he
+said. “You will never meet with proper obedience to the laws of this
+country until you have destroyed that nest of locusts.” But, though few
+were so outspoken, no doubt many found such a view very much to their
+taste, excellently suited to their temper.
+
+[Illustration: TITLE-PAGE OF HUTCHINSON’S HISTORY]
+
+At any rate, the ministers went a certain way towards acting upon it.
+In March, 1774, after communicating to the House the despatches from
+America, the leaders of the government, now under Lord North, proposed
+and carried very drastic measures. By one bill they closed the port of
+Boston, transferring its trade after the first of June to the older port
+of Salem. Since the headstrong town would not have the tea, it should
+have no trade at all. By another bill they suspended the charter of the
+colony. By a third they made provision for the quartering of troops
+within the province; and by a fourth they legalized the transfer to
+England of trials growing out of attempts to quell riots in the colony.
+News lingered on the seas in those days, waiting for the wind, and the
+critical news of what had been done in Parliament moved no faster than
+the rest. It was the 2d of June before the text of the new statutes was
+known in Boston. That same month, almost upon that very day, Thomas
+Hutchinson, the constant-minded governor whom Samuel Adams had tricked,
+hated, and beaten in the game of politics, left his perplexing post and
+took ship for England, never to return. Born and bred in Massachusetts,
+of the stock of the colony itself, he had nevertheless stood steadfastly
+to his duty as an officer of the crown, deeming Massachusetts best served
+by the law. He had suffered more than most men would have endured, but
+his sufferings had not blinded him with passion. He knew as well as
+any man the real state of affairs in the colony,—though he looked at
+them as governor, not as the people’s advocate,—and now went to England
+to make them clear to the ministers. “The prevalence of a spirit of
+opposition to government in the plantation,” he had already written them,
+“is the natural consequence of the great growth of colonies so remote
+from the parent state, and not the effect of oppression in the King or
+his servants, as the promoters of this spirit would have the world to
+believe.” It would be of good omen for the settlement of difficulties if
+he could make the ministers see that the spirit which so angered them was
+natural, and not born of mere rebellion.
+
+[Illustration: GENERAL GAGE]
+
+[Illustration: STOVE IN THE HOUSE OF BURGESSES, VIRGINIA]
+
+Mr. Hutchinson left General Gage governor in his stead,—at once governor
+and military commander. Gage was to face a season of infinite trouble,
+and, as men soon learned, did not know how to face it either with
+patience or with tact and judgment. The news of Boston’s punishment and
+of the suspension of the Massachusetts charter, of the arrangements for
+troops, and of the legal establishment of methods of trial against which
+all had protested,—and, in the case of the _Gaspee_ affair, successfully
+protested,—had an instant and most disturbing effect upon the other
+colonies, as well as upon those who were most directly affected. The
+ministers could not isolate Massachusetts. They were dealing with men
+more statesmanlike than themselves, who did not need to see their own
+liberties directly struck at to recognize danger, though it was not yet
+their danger. They had protested in the time of the Stamp Act, which
+affected them all; this time they protested even more emphatically
+against measures aimed at Massachusetts alone. What was more significant,
+they had now means at hand for taking action in common.
+
+Virginia, no doubt, seemed to the ministers in England far enough away
+from Massachusetts, but her Burgesses acted upon the first news of what
+Parliament was doing,—a month before the text of the obnoxious acts had
+reached Boston. In May, 1774, they ordered that June 1st, the day the
+Boston Port bill was to go into effect, be set apart as a day of fasting
+and prayer,—prayer that civil war might be averted and that the people
+of America might be united in a common cause. Dunmore promptly dissolved
+them for their pains; but they quietly assembled again in the long room
+of the Raleigh Tavern; issued a call thence to the other colonies for a
+general Congress; and directed that a convention, freely chosen by the
+voters of the colony as they themselves had been, should assemble there,
+in that same room of the Raleigh, on the first day of August following,
+to take final measures with regard to Virginia’s part in the common
+action hoped for in the autumn. The next evening they gave a ball in
+honor of Lady Dunmore and her daughters, in all good temper, as they had
+previously arranged to do,—as if nothing had happened, and as if to show
+how little what they had done was with them a matter of personal feeling
+or private intrigue, how much a matter of dispassionate duty. They had
+not acted singularly or alone. Rhode Island, New York, and Massachusetts
+herself had also asked for a general “Congress of Committees.” The
+Massachusetts assembly had locked its doors against the governor’s
+messenger, sent to dissolve it, until it had completed its choice of a
+committee “to meet the committees appointed by the several colonies to
+consult together upon the present state of the colonies.” It was chiefly
+because Massachusetts called that the other colonies responded, but the
+movement seemed general, almost spontaneous. Virginia and Massachusetts
+sent their real leaders, as the other colonies did; and September saw a
+notable gathering at Philadelphia,—a gathering from which conservatives
+as well as radicals hoped to see come forth some counsel of wisdom and
+accommodation.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN ADAMS]
+
+Every colony but Georgia sent delegates to the Congress. Not all who
+attended had been regularly elected by the colonial assemblies. The
+Virginian delegates had been elected by Virginia’s August convention,
+a body unknown to the law; in some of the colonies there had been no
+timely sessions of the assemblies at which a choice could be made, and
+representatives had accordingly been appointed by their committees
+of correspondence, or elected directly by the voters at the town and
+county voting places. But no one doubted any group of delegates real
+representatives,—at any rate, of the predominant political party in
+their colony. In New York and Pennsylvania the conservatives had had the
+upper hand, and had chosen men who were expected to speak for measures
+of accommodation and for obedience to law. In the other colonies, if
+only for the nonce, the more radical party had prevailed, and had sent
+representatives who were counted on to speak unequivocally for the
+liberties of the colonies, even at the hazard of uttering words and
+urging action which might seem revolutionary and defiant.
+
+It was noteworthy and significant how careful a selection had been
+made of delegates. No doubt the most notable group was the group of
+Virginians: Colonel Washington; that “masterly man,” Richard Henry Lee,
+as Mr. John Adams called him, as effective in Philadelphia as he had been
+in the House of Burgesses; Patrick Henry, whose speech was so singularly
+compounded of thought and fire; Edmund Pendleton, who had read nothing
+but law books and knew nothing but business, and yet showed such winning
+grace and convincing frankness withal in debate; Colonel Harrison,
+brusque country gentleman, without art or subterfuge, downright and
+emphatic; Mr. Bland, alert and formidable at sixty-four, with the steady
+insight of the life-long student; and Mr. Peyton Randolph, their official
+leader and spokesman, whom the Congress chose its president, a man full
+of address, and seeming to carry privilege with him as a right inherited.
+Samuel Adams and John Adams had come from Massachusetts, with Mr. Cushing
+and Mr. Paine. South Carolina had sent two members of the Stamp Act
+Congress of 1765, Mr. Christopher Gadsden and Mr. John Rutledge, with
+Mr. Edward Rutledge also, a youth of twenty-five, and plain Mr. Lynch,
+clad in homespun, as direct and sensible and above ceremony as Colonel
+Harrison. Connecticut’s chief spokesman was Roger Sherman, rough as a
+peasant without, but in counsel very like a statesman, and in all things
+a hard-headed man of affairs. New York was represented by Mr. John Jay,
+not yet thirty, but of the quick parts of the scholar and the principles
+of a man of honor. Joseph Galloway, the well-poised Speaker and leader
+of her House of Assembly, John Dickinson, the thoughtful author of the
+famous “Farmer’s Letters” of 1768, a quiet master of statement, and Mr.
+Thomas Mifflin, the well-to-do merchant, represented Pennsylvania. It
+was, take it all in all, an assembly of picked men, fit for critical
+business.
+
+[Illustration: ROGER SHERMAN]
+
+Not that there was any talk of actual revolution in the air. The seven
+weeks’ conference of the Congress disclosed a nice balance of parties,
+its members acting, for the most part, with admirable candor and
+individual independence. A good deal was said and conjectured about
+the “brace of Adamses” who led the Massachusetts delegation,—Samuel
+Adams, now past fifty-two, and settled long ago, with subtle art, to
+his life-long business, and pleasure, of popular leadership, which
+no man understood better; and John Adams, his cousin, a younger man
+by thirteen years, at once less simple and easier to read, vain and
+transparent,—transparently honest, irregularly gifted. It was said they
+were for independence, and meant to take the leadership of the Congress
+into their own hands. But it turned out differently. If they were for
+independence, they shrewdly cloaked their purpose; if they were ambitious
+to lead, they were prudent enough to forego their wish and to yield
+leadership, at any rate on the floor of the Congress, to the interesting
+men who represented Virginia, and who seemed of their own spirit in the
+affair.
+
+[Illustration: JOSEPH GALLOWAY]
+
+[Illustration: JOHN DICKINSON]
+
+There was a marked difference between what the Congress said aloud, for
+the hearing of the world, and what it did in order quietly to make its
+purpose of defeating the designs of the ministers effective. At the
+outset of its sessions it came near to yielding itself to the initiative
+and leadership of its more conservative members, headed by Joseph
+Galloway, the trusted leader of the Pennsylvanians, a stout loyalist, but
+for all that a sincere patriot and thorough-going advocate of the legal
+rights of the colonies. He proposed a memorial to the crown asking for
+a confederate government for the colonies, under a legislature of their
+own choosing, very like the government Mr. Franklin had made a plan for
+twenty years ago in the congress at Albany; and his suggestion failed of
+acceptance by only a very narrow margin when put to the vote. Even Edward
+Rutledge, of South Carolina, who spoke more hotly than most men for the
+liberties of the colonies, declared it an “almost perfect plan”; and
+the Congress, rejecting it, substituted no other. It turned, rather, to
+the writing of state papers, and a closer organization of the colonies
+for concert of action. Its committees drew up an address to the King,
+memorials to the people of Great Britain and to the people of British
+North America, their fellow-subjects, and a solemn declaration of rights,
+so earnest, so moderate in tone, reasoned and urged with so evident
+and so admirable a quiet passion of conviction, as to win the deep and
+outspoken admiration of their friends in Parliament and stir the pulses
+of liberal-minded men everywhere on both sides of the sea.
+
+So much was for the world. For themselves, they ordered a closer and
+more effective association throughout the colonies to carry out the
+policy of a rigorous non-importation and non-consumption of certain
+classes of British goods as a measure of trade against the English
+government’s policy of colonial taxation. It recommended, in terms which
+rang very imperative, that in each colony a committee should be formed
+in every town or county, according to the colony’s local administrative
+organization, which should be charged with seeing to it that every one
+within its area of oversight actually kept, and did not evade, the
+non-importation agreement; that these committees should act under the
+direction of the central committee of correspondence in each colony;
+and that the several colonial committees of correspondence should in
+their turn report to and put into effect the suggestions of the general
+Congress of Committees at Philadelphia. For the Congress, upon breaking
+up at the conclusion of its business in October, resolved to meet again
+in May of the next year, should the government in England not before that
+time accede to its prayers for a radical change of policy. Its machinery
+of surveillance was meanwhile complete. No man could escape the eyes
+of the local committees. Disregard of the non-importation policy meant
+that his name would be published, and that he would be diligently talked
+about as one who was no patriot. The Congress ordered that any colony
+which declined to enter into the new association should be regarded as
+hostile to “the liberties of this country.” Samuel Adams himself had not
+had a more complete system of surveillance or of inquisitorial pressure
+upon individual conduct and opinion at hand in his township committees
+of correspondence. In the colonies where sentiment ran warm no man could
+escape the subtle coercion.
+
+[Illustration: PEYTON RANDOLPH]
+
+Such action was the more worthy of remark because taken very quietly,
+and as if the Congress had of course the right to lead, to speak for
+the majority and command the minority in the colonies, united and acting
+like a single body politic. There was no haste, no unusual excitement,
+no fearful looking for trouble in the proceedings of this new and quite
+unexampled assembly. On the contrary, its members had minds sufficiently
+at ease to enjoy throughout all their business the entertainments and
+the attractive social ways of the busy, well-appointed, cheerful,
+gracious town, the chief city of the colonies, in which there was so
+much to interest and engage. Dinings were as frequent almost as debates,
+calls as committee meetings. Evening after evening was beguiled with
+wine and tobacco and easy wit and chat. The delegates learned to know
+and understand each other as men do who are upon terms of intimacy;
+made happy and lasting friendships among the people of the hospitable
+place; drank in impressions which broadened and bettered their thinking,
+almost as if they had actually seen the several colonies with whose
+representatives they were dealing from day to day; and went home with a
+cleared and sobered and withal hopeful vision of affairs.
+
+It was well to have their views so steadied. Events moved fast, and with
+sinister portent. Massachusetts could not be still, and quickly forced
+affairs to an issue of actual revolution. Before the Congress met again
+her leaders had irrevocably committed themselves to an open breach with
+the government; the people of the province had shown themselves ready to
+support them with extraordinary boldness; and all who meant to stand with
+the distressed and stubborn little commonwealth found themselves likewise
+inevitably committed to extreme measures. The Massachusetts men not only
+deeply resented the suspension of their charter, they denied the legal
+right of Parliament to suspend it. On the 9th of September, 1774, four
+days after the assembling of the Congress at Philadelphia, delegates
+from Boston and the other towns in Suffolk County in Massachusetts had
+met in convention and flatly declared that the acts complained of, being
+unconstitutional, ought not to be obeyed; that the new judges appointed
+under the act of suspension ought not to be regarded or suffered to
+act; that the collectors of taxes ought to be advised to retain the
+moneys collected, rather than turn them into General Gage’s treasury;
+and that, in view of the extraordinary crisis which seemed at hand, the
+people ought to be counselled to prepare for war,—not, indeed, with any
+purpose of provoking hostilities, but in order, if necessary, to resist
+aggression. They declared also for a provincial congress, to take the
+place of the legislative council of their suspended charter, and resolved
+to regard the action of the Congress at Philadelphia as law for the
+common action of the colonies.
+
+It gave these resolutions very grave significance that the Congress
+at Philadelphia unhesitatingly declared, upon their receipt, that the
+whole continent ought to support Massachusetts in her resistance to
+the unconstitutional changes in her government, and that any person
+who should accept office within the province under the new order of
+things ought to be considered a public enemy. Moreover, the Suffolk
+towns did not stand alone. Their temper, it seemed, was the temper of
+the whole colony. Other towns took action of the same kind; and before
+the Congress at Philadelphia had adjourned, Massachusetts had actually
+set up a virtually independent provincial congress. General Gage had
+summoned the regular assembly of the province to meet at Salem, the new
+capital under the parliamentary changes, on the 5th of October, but had
+withdrawn the summons as he saw signs of disaffection multiply and his
+authority dwindle to a mere shadow outside his military lines at Boston.
+The members of the assembly convened, nevertheless, and, finding no
+governor to meet them, resolved themselves into a provincial congress and
+appointed a committee of safety to act as the provisional executive of
+the colony. The old government was virtually dissolved, a revolutionary
+government substituted.
+
+[Illustration: WASHINGTON STOPPING AT AN INN ON HIS WAY TO CAMBRIDGE]
+
+The substitution involved every hazard of license and disorder. A people
+schooled and habituated to civil order and to the daily practice of
+self-government, as the people of Massachusetts had been, could not,
+indeed, suffer utter demoralization or lose wholly and of a sudden its
+sobriety and conscience in matters of public business. But it was a
+perilous thing that there was for a time no recognized law outside of
+the fortifications which General Gage had thrown across Boston Neck,
+to defend the town against possible attack from its own neighbors.
+Town meetings and irregular committees took the place of officers of
+government in every locality. The committees were often self-constituted,
+the meetings too often disorderly and irregularly summoned. Everything
+fell into the hands of those who acted first; and inasmuch as the more
+hot-headed and violent are always at such times the first to act, many
+sober men who would fain have counselled restraint and prudence and
+the maintenance so far as might be of the old order, were silenced or
+overridden. The gatherings at which concerted action was determined
+upon were too often like mere organized mobs. Men too often obtained
+ascendency for the time being who had no claim upon the confidence of
+their followers but such as came from audacity and violence of passion;
+and many things happened under their leadership which it was afterwards
+pleasant to forget. No man of consequence who would not openly and
+actively put himself upon the popular side was treated with so much as
+toleration. General Gage presently found Boston and all the narrow area
+within his lines filling up, accordingly, with a great body of refugees
+from the neighboring towns and country-sides.
+
+[Illustration: THE LIBERTY SONG
+
+The LIBERTY SONG. _In Freedom we’re born, &c._
+
+ Come join hand in hand brave Americans all,
+ And rouse your bold hearts at fair Liberty’s call.
+ No tyrannous acts shall suppress your just claim,
+ Or stain with dishonour America’s name.
+
+ _In Freedom we’re_ born _and in Freedom we’ll_ live,
+ _Our purses are ready._
+ _Steady, Friends, Steady._
+ _Not as Slaves, but as Freemen our money we’ll give._
+
+ Our worthy Forefathers—Let’s give them a cheer
+ To Climates unknown did courageously steer;
+ Thro’ Oceans, to deserts, for freedom they came,
+ And dying bequeath’d us their freedom and Fame.
+
+ _In freedom we’re_ born _&c._
+
+ Their generous bosoms all dangers despis’d,
+ So highly, so wisely, their _Birthrights_ they priz’d;
+ We’ll keep what they gave, we will piously keep,
+ Nor frustrate their toils on the land and the deep.
+
+ _In Freedom we’re_ born, _&c._
+
+ The Tree their own hands had to liberty rear’d;
+ They liv’d to behold growing strong and rever’d,
+ With transport they cry’d, “now our wishes we gain,
+ For our children shall gather the fruits of our pain.”
+
+ _In Freedom we’re_ born _&c._
+
+ Swarms of placemen and pensioners soon will appear
+ Like locusts deforming the charms of the year;
+ Suns vainly will rise, Showers vainly descend,
+ If we are to drudge for what other shall spend.
+
+ _In Freedom we’re_ born _&c._
+
+ Then join hand in hand brave Americans all,
+ By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall;
+ In so Righteous a cause let us hope to succeed,
+ For Heaven approves of each generous deed.
+
+ _In Freedom we’re_ born, _&c._
+
+ All ages shall speak with amaze and applause,
+ Of the courage we’ll shew in support of our laws;
+ To die we can bear—but to serve we disdain,
+ For shame is to Freedom more dreadful than pain.
+
+ _In Freedom we’re_ born, _&c._
+
+ This bumper & crown for our Sovereign’s health,
+ And this for Britannia’s glory and wealth;
+ That wealth and that glory immortal may be,
+ If she is but just—and if we are but Free.
+
+ _In Freedom we’re_ born _&c._]
+
+It gave those who led the agitation the greater confidence and the
+greater influence that the ministers of the churches were for the most
+part on their side. The control of Parliament had come, in the eyes of
+the New England clergy, to mean the control also of bishops and the
+supremacy of the Establishment. Now, as always before, since the very
+foundation of the colony, the independence of their little commonwealths
+seemed but another side of the independence of their churches; and none
+watched the course of government over sea more jealously than the Puritan
+pastors.
+
+Not only those who sided with the English power because of fear or
+interest,—place-holders, sycophants, merchants who hoped to get their
+trade back through favor, weak men who knew not which side to take and
+thought the side of government in the long run the safer,—but many a man
+of dignity and substance also, and many a man of scrupulous principle who
+revered the ancient English power to which he had always been obedient
+with sincere and loyal affection, left his home and sought the protection
+of Gage’s troops. The vigilance of the local committees effectually
+purged the population outside Boston, as the weeks went by, of those
+who were not ready to countenance a revolution. There was, besides,
+something very like military rule outside Boston as well as within it.
+The provincial congress met, while necessary, from month to month, upon
+its own adjournment, and, prominent among other matters of business,
+diligently devoted itself to the enrolment and organization of a numerous
+and efficient militia. Local as well as general commanders were chosen;
+there was constant drilling on village greens; fire-arms and ammunition
+were not difficult to get; and an active militia constituted a very
+effective auxiliary in the consolidation of local opinion concerning
+colonial rights and the proper means of vindicating them.
+
+It is the familiar story of revolution: the active and efficient
+concert of a comparatively small number controlling the action of
+whole communities at a moment of doubt and crisis. There was not much
+difference of opinion among thoughtful men in the colonies with regard to
+the policy which the ministers in England had recently pursued respecting
+America. It was agreed on all hands that it was unprecedented, unwise,
+and in plain derogation of what the colonists had time out of mind been
+permitted to regard as their unquestioned privileges in matters of local
+self-government. Some men engaged in trade at the colonial ports had, it
+is true, found the new policy of taxation and enforced restrictions very
+much to their own interest. The Sugar Act of 1733, which cut at the heart
+of the New England trade with the French West Indies, and which Grenville
+and Townshend had, in these last disturbing years, tried to enforce,
+had, it was said, been passed in the first instance at the suggestion
+of a Boston merchant who was interested in sugar growing in the British
+islands whence the act virtually bade the colonial importers take all
+their sugar, molasses, and rum; and no doubt there were many in all the
+American ports who would have profited handsomely by the enforcement of
+the law. But, however numerous these may have been, they were at most but
+a small minority. For a vast majority of the merchants the enforcement
+of the acts meant financial ruin. Merchants as well as farmers, too,
+were hotly against taxes put upon them in their own ports by an act
+of Parliament. They were infinitely jealous of any invasion of their
+accustomed rights of self-government under their revered and ancient
+charter. Governor Hutchinson himself, though he deemed the commands of
+Parliament law, and thought it his own bounden duty as an officer of the
+crown to execute them, declared in the frankest fashion to the ministers
+themselves that their policy was unjust and mistaken.
+
+But, while men’s sentiments concurred in a sense of wrong, their
+judgments parted company at the choice of what should be done. Men of a
+conservative and sober way of thinking; men of large fortune or business,
+who knew what they had at stake should disorders arise or law be set
+aside; men who believed that there were pacific ways of bringing the
+government to another temper and method in dealing with the colonies,
+and who passionately preferred the ways of peace to ways of violence
+and threatened revolution, arrayed themselves instinctively and at once
+against every plan that meant lawlessness and rebellion. They mustered
+very strong indeed, both in numbers and in influence. They bore, many of
+them, the oldest and most honored names of the colony in Massachusetts,
+where the storm first broke, and were men of substance and training and
+schooled integrity of life, besides. Their counsels of prudence were
+ignored, nevertheless,—as was inevitable. Opinion formed itself with
+quick and heated impulse in the brief space of those first critical
+months of irritation and excitement; and these men, though the natural
+leaders of the colony, were despised, rejected, proscribed, as men craven
+and lacking the essential spirit either of liberty or of patriotism.
+
+It was, no doubt, a time when it was necessary that something should
+be done,—as well as something said. It was intolerable to the spirit
+of most of the people, when once they were roused, to sit still under
+a suspension of their charter, a closing of their chief port, the
+appointment of judges and governors restrained by none of the accustomed
+rules of public authority among them, and tamely utter written protests
+only, carrying obedience to what seemed to them the length of sheer
+servility. It happened that there had gone along with the hateful and
+extraordinary parliamentary measures of 1774 an act extending the
+boundaries of the province of Quebec to the Ohio River and establishing
+an arbitrary form of government within the extended province. It was a
+measure long ago planned. Its passage at that time had nothing to do
+with the ministers’ quarrel with the self-governing colonies to the
+southward. But it was instantly interpreted in America as an attempt to
+limit the westward expansion of the more unmanageable colonies which,
+like Massachusetts, arrogated the right to govern themselves; and it of
+course added its quota of exasperation to the irritations of the moment.
+It seemed worse than idle to treat ministers who sent such a body of
+revolutionary statutes over sea as reasonable constitutional rulers who
+could be brought to a more lawful and moderate course by pamphlets and
+despatches and public meetings, and all the rest of the slow machinery
+of ordinary agitation. Of course, too, Samuel Adams and those who acted
+with him very carefully saw to it that agitation should not lose its
+zest or decline to the humdrum levels of ordinary excitement. They kept
+their alarm bells pealing night and day, and were vigilant that feeling
+should not subside or fall tame. And they worked upon genuine matter.
+They knew the temper of average men in the colony much better than their
+conservative opponents did, and touched it with a much truer instinct
+in their appeals. Their utterances went to the quick with most plain
+men,—and they spoke to a community of plain men. They spoke to conviction
+as well as to sentiment, and the minds they touched were thoroughly
+awakened. Their doctrine of liberty was the ancient tradition of the
+colony. The principles they urged had been urged again and again by every
+champion of the chartered liberties of the colonies, and seemed native to
+the very air.
+
+[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF JOSEPH HAWLEY]
+
+If not constitutional statesmen, they were at least the veritable
+spokesmen of all men of action, and of the real rank and file of the
+colonists about them,—as Patrick Henry was in Virginia. John Adams had
+read to Henry, while the first Congress was sitting in Philadelphia,
+Joseph Hawley’s opinion that what the ministers had done made it
+necessary to fight. “I am of that man’s opinion,” cried the high-spirited
+Virginian. That was what men said everywhere, unless imperatively held
+back from action by temperament, or interest, or an unusual, indomitable
+conviction of law-abiding duty, upon whatever exigency or provocation. It
+is not certain that there could be counted in Massachusetts so much as a
+majority for resistance in those first days of the struggle for right;
+but it is certain that those who favored extreme measures had the more
+effective spirit of initiative among them, the best concert of action,
+the more definite purpose, the surest instinct of leadership, and stood
+with true interpretative insight for the latent conviction of right which
+underlay and supported every colonial charter in America.
+
+And not only every colonial charter, but the constitution of England
+itself. The question now raised, to be once for all settled, was, in
+reality, the question of constitutional as against personal government;
+and that question had of late forced itself upon men’s thoughts in
+England no less than in America. It was the burden of every quiet as
+well as of every impassioned page in Burke’s _Thoughts on the Present
+Discontents_, published in 1770. The Parliament of 1774 did not represent
+England any more than it represented the colonies in America, either
+in purpose or principle. So ill distributed was the suffrage and the
+right of representation that great centres of population had scarcely a
+spokesman in the Commons, while little hamlets, once populous but now
+deserted, still returned members who assumed to speak for the country.
+So many voters were directly under the influence of members of the House
+of Lords, as tenants and dependants; so many members of the House of
+Lords were willing to put themselves and the seats which they controlled
+in the Commons at the service of the King, in return for honors and
+favors received or hoped for; so many elections to the Lower House were
+corruptly controlled by the court,—so full was Parliament, in short, of
+placemen and of men who counted upon the crown’s benefactions, that the
+nation seemed excluded from its own councils, and the King acted as its
+master without serious let or hinderance.
+
+The Whig party, which stood for constitutional privilege, was utterly
+disorganized. Some Whigs had followed Chatham to the end, despite his
+uncertain temper, his failing health, his perverse treatment of his
+friends; some had followed, rather, the Marquis of Rockingham, whose
+brief tenure of power, in 1766, had been but long enough to effect the
+repeal of the odious Stamp Act; but nothing could hold the divergent
+personal elements of the party together, and there was no place for a
+party of principle and independence in an unrepresentative Parliament
+packed with the “King’s friends.” Ministries rose or fell according
+to the King’s pleasure, and were Whig or Tory as he directed, without
+change of majority in the Commons. “Not only did he direct the minister”
+whom the House nominally obeyed “in all matters of foreign and domestic
+policy, but he instructed him as to the management of debates in
+Parliament, suggested what motions should be made or opposed, and how
+measures should be carried.” The Houses were his to command; and when
+Chatham was gone, no man could withstand him. Persons not of the ministry
+at all, but the private and irresponsible advisers of the King, became
+the real rulers of the country. The Duke of Grafton, who became the
+nominal head of the government in 1768, was not his own master in what he
+did or proposed; and Lord North, who succeeded him in 1770, was little
+more than the King’s mouthpiece.
+
+Thoughtful men in England saw what all this meant, and deemed the
+liberties of England as much jeoparded as the liberties of America. And
+the very men who saw to the heart of the ominous situation in England
+were, significantly enough, the men who spoke most fearlessly and
+passionately in Parliament in defence of America,—statesmen like Chatham
+and Burke, frank soldiers like Colonel Barré, political free lances like
+the reckless John Wilkes, and all the growing company of agitators in
+London and elsewhere whom the government busied itself to crush. It was
+the group gathered about Wilkes in London who formed, under Horne Tooke’s
+leadership, the famous “Society for supporting the Bill of Rights,” with
+which Samuel Adams proposed, in his letter to Arthur Lee in 1771, that
+similar societies, to be formed in the several colonies in America,
+should put themselves in active coöperation by correspondence. Those who
+attacked the prerogative in England were as roundly denounced as traitors
+as those who resisted Parliament in America. Wilkes was expelled from the
+House of Commons; the choice of the Westminster electors who had chosen
+him was arbitrarily set aside and annulled; those who protested with
+too much hardihood were thrown into prison or fined. But each arbitrary
+step taken seemed only to increase the rising sense of uneasiness in the
+country. The London mob was raised; rioting spread through the country,
+till there seemed to be chronic disorder; writers like “Junius” sprang
+up to tease the government with stinging letters which no one could
+successfully answer, because no one could match their wit or point;
+an independent press came almost suddenly into existence; and because
+there was no opinion expressed in the House of Commons worthy of being
+called the opinion of the nation, public opinion formed and asserted
+itself outside the Houses, and began to clamor uncomfortably for radical
+constitutional reforms. Mr. Wilkes was expelled the House in 1769, just
+as the trouble in America was thickening towards storm; and long before
+that trouble was over it had become plain to every man of enlightened
+principle that agitation in England and resistance in America had one and
+the same object,—the rectification of the whole spirit and method of the
+English government.
+
+[Illustration: THE HOUSE OF COMMONS]
+
+George III. had too small a mind to rule an empire, and the fifteen
+years of his personal supremacy in affairs (1768-1783) were years
+which bred a revolution in England no less inevitably than in America.
+His stubborn instinct of mastery made him dub the colonists “rebels”
+upon their first show of resistance; he deemed the repeal of the Stamp
+Act a fatal step of weak compliance, which had only “increased the
+pretensions of the Americans to absolute independence.” Chatham he
+called a “trumpet of sedition” because he praised the colonists for
+their spirited assertion of their rights. The nature of the man was not
+sinister. Neither he nor his ministers had any purpose of making “slaves”
+of the colonists. Their measures for the regulation of the colonial
+trade were incontestably conceived upon a model long ago made familiar
+in practice, and followed precedents long ago accepted in the colonies.
+Their financial measures were moderate and sensible enough in themselves,
+and were conceived in the ordinary temper of law-making. What they did
+not understand or allow for was American opinion. What the Americans,
+on their part, did not understand or allow for was the spirit in which
+Parliament had in fact acted. They did not dream with how little comment
+or reckoning upon consequences, or how absolutely without any conscious
+theory as to power or authority, such statutes as those which had
+angered them had been passed; how members of the Commons stared at Mr.
+Burke’s passionate protests and high-pitched arguments of constitutional
+privilege; how unaffectedly astonished they were at the rebellious
+outbreak which followed in the colonies. And, because they were surprised
+and had intended no tyranny, but simply the proper government of trade
+and the adequate support of administration throughout the dominions of
+the crown, as the ministers had represented these things to them, members
+of course thought the disturbances at Boston a tempest in a teapot, the
+reiterated protests of the colonial assemblies a pretty piece of much
+ado about nothing. The radical trouble was that the Parliament really
+represented nobody but the King and his “friends,” and was both ignorant
+and unreflective upon the larger matters it dealt with.
+
+[Illustration: PAGE FROM THE DIARY OF JOSIAH QUINCY]
+
+It was the more certain that the promises of accommodation and peaceful
+constitutional reform which the supporters of the government in America
+so freely and earnestly made would be falsified, and that exasperation
+would follow exasperation. The loyal partisans of the crown in the
+colonies understood as little as did the radical patriotic party the real
+attitude and disposition of the King and his ministers. The men with
+whom they were dealing over sea had not conceived and could not conceive
+the American point of view with regard to the matters in dispute.
+They did not know whereof Mr. Burke spoke when he told them that the
+colonial assemblies had been suffered to grow into a virtual independence
+of Parliament, and had become in fact, whatever lawyers might say,
+coördinated with it in every matter which concerned the internal
+administration of the colonies; and that it was now too late to ask or
+expect the colonists to accept any other view of the law than that which
+accorded with long-established fact. Mr. Burke admitted that his theory
+was not a theory for the strict lawyer: it was a theory for statesmen,
+for whom fact must often take precedence of law. But the men he addressed
+were strict legists and not statesmen. There could be no understanding
+between the two sides of the water; and the loyalists who counselled
+submission, if only for a time, to the authority of the ministers, were
+certain to be rejected among their own people. The spirit of American
+affairs was with the patriots, and would be with them more and more as
+the quarrel thickened.
+
+[Illustration: PROCLAMATION OF THE KING FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF THE
+REBELLION]
+
+It thickened fast enough, and the storm broke before men were aware how
+near it was. While winter held (1774-1775), affairs everywhere grew
+dark and uneasy, not only in Massachusetts, where Gage’s troops waited
+at Boston, but in every colony from Maine to the Gulf. Before the end
+of 1774 the Earl of Dunmore reported to the government, from Virginia,
+that every county was “arming a company of men for the avowed purpose of
+protecting their committees,” and that his own power of control was gone.
+“There is not a justice of peace in Virginia,” he declared, “that acts
+except as a committee-man”; and it gave him the graver concern to see the
+turn affairs were taking because “men of fortune and pre-eminence joined
+equally with the lowest and meanest” in the measures resorted to to rob
+him of authority.
+
+[Illustration: GAGE’S ORDER PERMITTING INHABITANTS TO LEAVE BOSTON]
+
+To the south and north of Virginia, counsels were divided. Those who
+led against the government in North Carolina had good reason to doubt
+whether they had even a bare majority of the people of their colony at
+their back. Every country-side in South Carolina, for all Charleston was
+as hot as Boston against the ministers, was full of warm, aggressive,
+outspoken supporters of the King’s prerogative. The rural districts of
+Pennsylvania, every one knew, were peopled with quiet Quakers whose very
+religion bade them offer no resistance even to oppressive power, and of
+phlegmatic Germans who cared a vast deal for peace but very little for
+noisy principles that brought mischief. Many a wealthy and fashionable
+family of Philadelphia, moreover, was much too comfortable and much
+too pleasantly connected with influential people on the other side of
+the water to relish thoughts of breach or rebellion. Virginians, it
+might have seemed, were themselves remote enough from the trouble which
+had arisen in Massachusetts to keep them in the cool air of those who
+wait and will not lead. But they were more in accord than the men of
+Massachusetts itself, and as quick to act. By the close of June, 1775,
+Charles Lee could write from Williamsburg, “Never was such vigor and
+concord heard of, not a single traitor, scarcely a silent dissentient.”
+As the men of the several counties armed themselves, as if by a common
+impulse, all turned as of course to Colonel Washington, of Fairfax, as
+their natural commander; and no one in Virginia was surprised to learn
+his response. “It is my full intention,” he said, “to devote my life and
+fortune to the cause we are engaged in.” On the 20th of March, 1775,
+the second revolutionary convention of Virginia met at Richmond, not at
+Williamsburg; and in it Mr. Henry made his individual declaration of war
+against Great Britain. Older and more prudent men protested against his
+words; but they served on the committee on the military organization of
+the colony for which his resolutions called, and Virginia was made ready.
+
+ Here our general _authorities_ are still Bancroft, Hildreth,
+ and Bryant; David Ramsay’s _History of the American
+ Revolution_; the last volume of James Grahame’s _Rise and
+ Progress of the United States of North America_; John Fiske’s
+ _American Revolution_; Thomas Hutchinson’s _History of
+ Massachusetts_; John S. Barry’s _History of Massachusetts_;
+ Richard Frothingham’s _Rise of the Republic of the United
+ States_; Justin Winsor’s _The Conflict Precipitated_, in the
+ sixth volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of
+ America_; and the twelfth chapter of W. E. H. Lecky’s _History
+ of England in the Eighteenth Century_. To these we now add
+ Frank Moore’s _Diary of the American Revolution_; George
+ Chalmers’s _Introduction to the History of the Revolt_; Timothy
+ Pitkin’s _Political and Civil History of the United States_;
+ and the fourth volume of John Richard Green’s _History of the
+ English People_. Here, also, the biographies of the chief
+ public men of the period must be the reader’s constant resource
+ for a closer view of affairs, particularly the _Lives_ of
+ such men as John and Samuel Adams, John Dickinson, Franklin,
+ Hamilton, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Jefferson, the Lees, George
+ Mason, James Otis, Timothy Pickering, and Washington.
+
+ The chief _sources_ that should be mentioned are the _Debates
+ of Parliament_; the _Annual Register_; the _Proceedings_ and
+ _Collections_ of the Historical Societies of the original
+ States; Peter Force’s _American Archives_; Jared Sparks’s
+ _Correspondence of the Revolution_; Hezekiah Niles’s
+ _Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America_; _Copy of
+ Letters sent to Great Britain by Thomas Hutchinson_, reprinted
+ in _Franklin Before the Privy Council_; P. O. Hutchinson’s
+ _Life and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson_; and the published
+ speeches, letters, and papers of the leading American and
+ English statesmen of the time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE
+
+
+Then, almost immediately, came the clash of arms. General Gage would
+not sit still and see the country round about him made ready for armed
+resistance without at least an effort to keep control of it. On the 19th
+of April he despatched eight hundred men to seize the military stores
+which the provincials had gathered at Concord, and there followed an
+instant rising of the country. Riders had sped through the country-side
+during the long night which preceded the movement of the troops, to give
+warning; and before the troops could finish their errand armed men beset
+them at almost every turn of the road, swarming by companies out of every
+hamlet and firing upon them from hedge and fence corner and village
+street as if they were outlaws running the gauntlet. The untrained
+villagers could not stand against them in the open road or upon the
+village greens, where at first they mustered, but they could make every
+way-side covert a sort of ambush, every narrow bridge a trap in which
+to catch them at a disadvantage. Their return to Boston quickened to a
+veritable rout, and they left close upon three hundred of their comrades,
+dead, wounded, or prisoners, behind them ere they reached the cover of
+their lines again. The news of their march and of the attack upon them
+had spread everywhere, and in every quarter the roads filled with the
+provincial minute men marching upon Boston. Those who had fired upon the
+troops and driven them within their lines did not go home again; those
+who came too late for the fighting stayed to see that there were no more
+sallies from the town; and the morning of the 20th disclosed a small army
+set down by the town in a sort of siege.
+
+[Illustration: NOTICE TO MILITIA]
+
+[Illustration: AN ACCOUNT OF THE CONCORD FIGHT]
+
+That same night of the 20th Lord Dunmore, in Virginia, landed a force
+of marines from an armed sloop in the river and seized the gunpowder
+stored at Williamsburg. There, too, the country rose,—under Mr. Henry
+himself as captain. They did not reach the scene soon enough to meet the
+marines,—there were no thick-set villages in that country-side to pour
+their armed men into the roads at a moment’s summons,—but they forced the
+earl, their governor, to pay for the powder he had ordered seized and
+taken off.
+
+[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF ETHAN ALLEN]
+
+The rude muster at Boston expanded into a motley yeoman army of sixteen
+thousand men within the first week of its sudden rally, and settled in
+its place to watch the town until the general Congress of the colonies
+at Philadelphia should give it countenance, and a commander. On the day
+the Congress met (May 10, 1775), Ethan Allen walked into the unguarded
+gates of the fort at Ticonderoga, at the head of a little force out of
+Vermont, and took possession of the stout place “in the name of the Great
+Jehovah and the Continental Congress,” though he held a commission from
+neither; and two days later Crown Point, near by, was taken possession
+of in the same manner. When the Congress met it found itself no longer a
+mere “Congress of Committees,” assembled for conference and protest. Its
+appeals for better government, uttered the last autumn, its arguments
+for colonial privilege, its protestations of loyalty and its prayers
+for redress, had been, one and all, not so much rejected as put by with
+contempt by the King and his ministers; and the mere movement of affairs
+was hurrying the colonies which it represented into measures which would
+presently put the whole matter of its controversy with the government at
+home beyond the stage of debate. Its uneasy members did not neglect to
+state their rights again, in papers whose moderation and temper of peace
+no candid man could overlook or deny; but they prepared for action also
+quite as carefully, like practical men who did not deceive themselves
+even in the midst of hope.
+
+[Illustration: RUINS OF FORT TICONDEROGA]
+
+Colonel Washington had come to the Congress in his provincial uniform;
+and, if no one cared to ask a man with whom it was so obviously difficult
+to be familiar why he wore such a habit there, all were free to draw
+their own conclusions. It was, no doubt, his instinctive expression
+of personal feeling in the midst of all that was happening; and his
+service in the Congress was from first to last that of a soldier. Its
+committees consulted him almost every day upon some question of military
+preparation: the protection of the frontier against the Indians, the
+organization of a continental force, the management of a commissariat,
+the gathering of munitions, proper means of equipment, feasible plans
+of fortification. While they deliberated, his own colony passed openly
+into rebellion. The 1st of June saw Virginia’s last House of Burgesses
+assemble. By the 8th of the month Dunmore had fled his capital, rather
+than see a second time the anger of a Williamsburg mob, and was a
+fugitive upon one of his Majesty’s armed vessels lying in the river. The
+colony had thenceforth no government save such as it gave itself; and its
+delegates at Philadelphia knew that there was for them no turning back.
+
+[Illustration: WATCHING THE FIGHT AT BUNKER HILL]
+
+On the 15th of June, on the motion of Mr. John Adams, the Congress
+chose Colonel Washington commander-in-chief of the American forces,
+and directed him to repair to Boston and assume command in the field.
+Two days later the British and the provincials met in a bloody and
+stubborn fight at Bunker Hill. On the 25th of May heavy reinforcements
+for General Gage had arrived from over sea which swelled the force of
+regulars in Boston to more than eight thousand men, and added three
+experienced general officers to Gage’s council: William Howe, Sir Henry
+Clinton, and John Burgoyne. The British commanders saw very well, what
+was indeed apparent enough to any soldier, that their position in Boston
+could be very effectively commanded to the north and south on either
+hand by cannon placed upon the heights of Charlestown or Dorchester,
+and determined to occupy Charlestown heights at once, the nearer and
+more threatening position. But so leisurely did they go about it that
+the provincials were beforehand in the project. The early morning light
+of the 17th of June disclosed them still at work there on trenches and
+redoubts which they had begun at midnight. The British did not stop to
+use either the guns of the fleet or any caution of indirect approach to
+dislodge them, but at once put three thousand men straight across the
+water to take the hill, whose crest the Americans were fortifying, by
+direct assault. It cost them a thousand men; and the colonials retired,
+outnumbered though they were, only because their powder gave out, not
+their pluck or steadfastness. When the thing was done, the British did
+not care to take another intrenched position from men who held their fire
+till they were within a few score yards of them and then volleyed with
+the definite and deadly aim of marksmen.
+
+[Illustration: FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, NO. 1. (LOOKING TOWARDS DORCHESTER
+HEIGHTS)]
+
+[Illustration: FROM BEACON HILL, 1775, NO. 2. (LOOKING TOWARDS ROXBURY)]
+
+[Illustration: ORDER OF COMMITTEE OF SAFETY]
+
+Colonel Washington received his formal commission on the 19th, and was
+on horseback for the journey northward by the 21st. On the 3d of July
+he assumed command at Cambridge. In choosing Washington for the command
+of the raw levies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New
+Hampshire set down in impromptu siege before Boston, Mr. John Adams and
+the other New Englanders who acted with him had meant, not only to secure
+the services of the most experienced soldier in America, but also, by
+taking a man out of the South, to give obvious proof of the union and
+co-operation of the colonies. They had chosen better than they knew. It
+was no small matter to have so noticeable a man of honor and breeding at
+the head of an army whose enemies deemed it a mere peasant mob and rowdy
+assemblage of rebels. Washington himself, with his notions of authority,
+his pride of breeding, his schooling in conduct and privilege, was far
+from pleased till he began to see below the surface, with the disorderly
+array he found of uncouth, intractable plough boys and farmers, one
+esteeming himself as good as another, with free-and-easy manners and a
+singular, half-indifferent insolence against authority or discipline.
+
+[Illustration: BOSTON AND BUNKER HILL, FROM A PRINT PUBLISHED IN 1781]
+
+“There are some fine fellows come from Virginia,” Joseph Reed, of
+Pennsylvania, had written of the Virginian delegates to the Congress at
+Philadelphia; “but they are very high. We understand they are the capital
+men of the colony.” It was good that one of the masterful group should
+ride all the public way from Philadelphia to Boston to take command of
+the army, the most conspicuous figure in the colonies, showing every
+one of the thousands who crowded to greet or see him as he passed how
+splendid a type of self-respecting gentlemen was now to be seen at the
+front of affairs, putting himself forward soberly and upon principle.
+The leaders of the revolt in Massachusetts were by no means all new men
+like John Adams or habitual agitators like Samuel Adams; many a man of
+substance and of old lineage had also identified himself with the popular
+cause. But new, unseasoned men were very numerous and very prominent
+there among those who had turned affairs upside down; a very great
+number of the best and oldest families of the colony had promptly ranged
+themselves on the side of the government; the revolution now at last on
+foot in that quarter could too easily be made to look like an affair of
+popular clamor, a mere rising of the country. It was of signal advantage
+to have high personal reputation and a strong flavor, as it were, of
+aristocratic distinction given it by this fortunate choice the Congress
+had made of a commander. It was no light matter to despise a cause which
+such men openly espoused and stood ready to fight for.
+
+The British lay still till Washington came, and gave him the rest of
+the year, and all the winter till spring returned, in which to get his
+rude army into fighting shape,—why, no one could tell, not even their
+friends and spokesmen in Parliament. The Americans swarmed busy on
+every hand. It proved infinitely difficult for them to get supplies,
+particularly arms and ammunition; but slowly, very slowly, they came in.
+General Washington was but forty-three, and had an energy which was both
+imperative and infectious. His urgent, explicit, businesslike letters
+found their way to every man of influence and to every colonial committee
+or assembly from whom aid could come. Cannon were dragged all the way
+from Ticonderoga for his use. The hardy, danger-loving seamen of the
+coasts about him took very cheerfully to privateering; intercepted supply
+ships and even transports bound for Boston; brought English merchantmen
+into port as prizes; cut ships out from under the very guns of a British
+man-of-war here and there in quiet harbors. Food and munitions intended
+for the British regiments at Boston frequently found their way to General
+Washington’s camps instead, notwithstanding Boston harbor was often full
+of armed vessels which might have swept the coasts. The commanders in
+Boston felt beset, isolated, and uneasy, and hesitated painfully what to
+do.
+
+The country at large was open to the insurgent forces, to move in as
+they pleased. In the autumn Colonel Montgomery, the gallant young
+Irish soldier who had served under Wolfe at Quebec, led a continental
+force northward through the wilderness; took the forts which guarded
+the northern approaches to Lake Champlain; and occupied Montreal,
+intercepting and taking the little garrison which left the place in boats
+to make its way down the river. Meanwhile Colonel Benedict Arnold was at
+the gates of Quebec, and Montgomery pushed forward to join him. Colonel
+Arnold had forced his way in from the coast through the thick forests
+of Maine, along the icy streams of the Kennebec and the Chaudière. The
+bitter journey had cost him quite a third of the little force with which
+Washington had sent him forth. He had but seven hundred men with whom to
+take the all but impregnable place, and Montgomery brought but a scant
+five hundred to assist him. But the two young commanders were not to be
+daunted. They loved daring, and touched all who followed them with their
+own indomitable spirit. In the black darkness of the night which preceded
+the last day of the year (December 31, 1775), amidst a blinding storm of
+snow, they threw themselves upon the defences of the place, and would
+have taken it had not Montgomery lost his life ere his men gained their
+final foothold within the walls. The Congress at Philadelphia had at
+least the satisfaction of receiving the colors of the Seventh Regiment
+of his Majesty’s regulars, taken at Fort Chambly, as a visible token of
+Montgomery’s exploits at the northern outlet of Champlain; and every
+added operation of the Americans, successful or unsuccessful, added to
+the feeling of isolation and uneasiness among the British at Boston.
+
+[Illustration: RICHARD MONTGOMERY]
+
+October 10, 1775, Sir William Howe superseded General Gage as
+commander-in-chief in the closely watched and invested town; but the
+change of commanders made little difference. Every one except the
+sailors, the foragers, the commissaries, the drill sergeants, the writing
+clerks, the colonial assemblies, the congressional and local committees,
+lay inactive till March came, 1776, and Washington was himself ready to
+take the offensive. At last he had such cannon and such tools and stores
+and wagons and teams as he had been asking and planning and waiting for
+the weary, anxious winter through. On the morning of the 5th of March
+the British saw workmen and ordnance and every sign of a strong force
+of provincials on Dorchester heights, and were as surprised as they
+had been, close upon a year before, to see men and trenches on Bunker
+Hill. Washington had done work in the night which it was already too
+late for them to undo; a storm beat the waters of the bay as the day
+wore on and made it impossible to put troops across to the attack in
+boats; Washington had all the day and another night in which to complete
+his defences; and by the morning of the 6th the British knew that the
+heights could not be taken without a risk and loss they could not afford.
+The town was rendered untenable at a stroke. With deep chagrin, Howe
+determined upon an immediate evacuation; and by the 17th he was aboard
+his ships,—eight thousand troops and more than a thousand loyalists
+who dared not stay. The stores and cannon, the ammunition, muskets,
+small-arms, gun carriages, and supplies of every kind which he found
+himself obliged to leave behind enriched Washington with an equipment
+more abundant than he could ever have hoped to see in his economical,
+ill-appointed camp at Cambridge.
+
+[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AS A POLITICIAN]
+
+The only British army in America had withdrawn to Halifax: his Majesty’s
+troops had nowhere a foothold in the colonies. But that, every one knew,
+was only the first act in a struggle which must grow vastly greater
+and more tragical before it was ended. Washington knew very well that
+there was now no drawing back. Not since the affair at Bunker Hill
+had he deemed it possible to draw back; and now this initial success
+in arms had made the friends of revolution very bold everywhere. As
+spring warmed into summer it was easy to mark the growth in the spirit
+of independence. One of the first measures of the Continental Congress,
+after coming together for its third annual session in May, 1776, was
+to urge the several colonies to provide themselves with regular and
+permanent governments as independent states, instead of continuing to
+make shift with committees of safety for executives and provisional
+“provincial congresses” for legislatures, as they had done since their
+government under the crown had fallen to pieces; and they most of them
+promptly showed a disposition to take its advice. The resolution in which
+the Congress embodied this significant counsel plainly declared “that
+the exercise of every kind of authority under the crown ought to be
+totally suppressed,” and all the powers of government exercised under
+authority from the people of the colonies,—words themselves equivalent
+to a declaration for entire separation from Great Britain. Even in the
+colonies where loyalists mustered strongest the government of the crown
+had in fact almost everywhere been openly thrown off. But by midsummer
+it was deemed best to make a formal Declaration of Independence. North
+Carolina was the first to instruct her delegates to take that final and
+irretrievable step; but most of the other colonies were ready to follow
+her lead; and on July 4th Congress adopted the impressive Declaration
+which Mr. Jefferson had drawn up in the name of its committee.
+
+[Illustration: R. H. LEE’S RESOLUTION FOR INDEPENDENCE]
+
+[Illustration: STATE HOUSE, PHILADELPHIA, 1778]
+
+Washington himself had urgently prayed that such a step be taken, and
+taken at once. It would not change, it would only acknowledge, existing
+facts; and it might a little simplify the anxious business he was
+about. He had an army which was always making and to be made, because
+the struggle had been calculated upon a short scale and the colonies
+which were contributing their half-drilled contingents to it were
+enlisting their men for only three months at a time. Sometimes the men
+would consent to re-enlist, sometimes they would not. They did as they
+pleased, of course, and would time and again take themselves off by whole
+companies at once when their three months’ term was up. Sir William Howe
+would come back, of course, with a force increased, perhaps irresistible:
+would come, Washington foresaw, not to Boston, where he could be cooped
+up and kept at bay, but to New York, to get control of the broad gateway
+of the Hudson, whose long valley had its head close to the waters of
+Lake George and Lake Champlain, and constituted an infinitely important
+strategic line drawn straight through the heart of the country, between
+New England, which was no doubt hopelessly rebellious, and the middle
+colonies, in which the crown could count its friends by the thousand. The
+Americans must meet him, apparently, with levies as raw and as hastily
+equipped as those out of which an army of siege had been improvised at
+Boston, each constituent part of which would fall to pieces and have to
+be put together again every three months.
+
+[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON]
+
+[Illustration: JEFFERSON’S ORIGINAL DRAFT OF THE DECLARATION OF
+INDEPENDENCE]
+
+The worst of it was, that the country back of New York had not been,
+could not be, purged of active loyalists as the country round about
+Boston had been by the local “committees” of one sort or another and
+by the very active and masterful young men who had banded themselves
+together as “Sons of Liberty,” seeing much rich adventure, and for the
+present little responsibility, ahead of them in those days of government
+by resolution. Washington transferred his headquarters to New York early
+in April and set about his almost hopeless task with characteristic
+energy and fertility of resource; but there were spies without number
+all about him, and every country-side was full of enemies who waited for
+General Howe’s coming to give him trouble. The formal Declaration of
+Independence which the Congress adopted in July hardened the face and
+stiffened the resolution of every man who had definitely thrown in his
+lot with the popular cause, as Washington had foreseen that it would,
+just because it made resistance avowed rebellion, and left no way of
+retreat or compromise. But it also deeply grieved and alienated many a
+man of judgment and good feeling, and made party differences within the
+colonies just so much the more bitter and irreconcilable.
+
+[Illustration: REAR VIEW OF INDEPENDENCE HALL]
+
+[Illustration: THE PRESIDENT’S CHAIR IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION]
+
+The first attempt of the British was made against Charleston in the
+south. A fleet under Sir Peter Parker came out of England with fresh
+troops commanded by the Earl of Cornwallis, was joined by transports and
+men-of-war from Halifax, bearing a force under Sir Henry Clinton, and,
+as June drew towards its close, delivered a combined attack, by land and
+sea, upon the fort on Sullivan’s Island, seeking to win its way past to
+the capture of Charleston itself. But they could not force a passage.
+Two of the ships,—one of them Sir Peter’s own flag-ship,—never came away
+again. Colonel Moultrie and Colonel Thompson beat off both the fleet
+and the troops landed from it; and the British went northward again to
+concentrate upon New York.
+
+[Illustration: MAP OF SULLIVAN’S ISLAND]
+
+On the 28th of June,—the very day of the attack at Charleston,—Howe’s
+transports began to gather in the lower bay. A few days more, and there
+were thirty thousand troops waiting to be landed. It was impossible, with
+the force Washington had, to prevent their being put ashore at their
+commander’s convenience. It was impossible to close the Narrows, to keep
+their ships from the inner bay, or even to prevent their passing up the
+river as they pleased. Washington could only wait within the exposed town
+or within his trenches on Brooklyn heights, which commanded the town
+almost as Dorchester and Charlestown heights commanded Boston.
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM MOULTRIE]
+
+For a month and more Sir William waited, his troops most of them still
+upon the ships, until he should first attempt to fulfil his mission
+of peace and accommodation. His brother, Admiral Lord Howe, joined
+him there in July. They were authorized to offer unconditional pardon,
+even now, to all who would submit. The ministers in England could not
+have chosen commissioners of peace more acceptable to the Americans
+or more likely to be heard than the Howes. Not only were they men of
+honor, showing in all that they did the straightforward candor and
+the instinctive sense of duty that came with their breeding and their
+training in arms, but they were also brothers of that gallant young
+soldier who had come over almost twenty years ago to fight the French
+with Abercrombie, to be loved by every man who became his comrade, and
+to lose his life untimely fighting forward through the forests which lay
+about Ticonderoga, a knightly and heroic figure. But they could offer
+no concessions,—only pardon for utter submission, and, for all their
+honorable persistency, could find no one in authority among the Americans
+who would make the too exacting exchange. Their offers of pardon
+alternated with the movements of their troops and their steady successes
+in arms. Lord Howe issued his first overture of peace, in the form of a
+public proclamation offering pardon, immediately upon his arrival with
+his fleet at Sandy Hook, and followed it up at once with messages to the
+Congress at Philadelphia. Sir William Howe put his troops ashore on the
+22d of August, and made ready to dislodge Washington from the heights of
+Brooklyn; but on the 23d he too, in his turn, made yet another offer of
+general pardon, by proclamation.
+
+[Illustration: SIR WILLIAM HOWE]
+
+On the 27th he drove the American forces on Long Island in on their
+defences, and rendered the heights at once practically untenable.
+Washington had but eighteen thousand half-disciplined militiamen with
+which to hold the town and all the long shores of the open bay and river,
+and had put ten thousand of them across the river to hold Long Island
+and the defences on the heights. Sir William had put twenty thousand
+men ashore for the attack on the heights; and when Washington knew that
+his advanced guard was driven in, and saw Sir William, mindful of Bunker
+Hill, bestow his troops, not for an assault, but for an investment of the
+heights, he perceived at once how easily he might be cut off and trapped
+there, armed ships lying at hand which might at any moment completely
+command the river. Immediately, and as secretly as quickly, while a
+single night held, he withdrew every man and every gun, as suddenly and
+as successfully as he had seized the heights at Dorchester.
+
+Again Sir William sent a message of conciliation to the Congress, by
+the hands of General Sullivan, his prisoner. On the 11th of September,
+before the next movement of arms, Dr. Franklin, Mr. John Adams, and Mr.
+Edward Rutledge met Lord Howe and Sir William, as commissioners from the
+Congress, to discuss possible terms of accommodation. Dr. Franklin had
+been in London until March. During the past winter he had more than once
+met Lord Howe in earnest conference about American affairs, the ministers
+wishing to find through him some way, if it were possible, of quieting
+the colonies. But the ministers had not been willing then to make the
+concessions which might have ended the trouble, and their commissioners
+were not authorized to make them now; and the conference with the
+representatives of the Congress came to nothing, as the conferences in
+London had come to nothing.
+
+[Illustration: HOWE’S PROCLAMATION PREPARATORY TO LEAVING BOSTON]
+
+Washington could no more hold Manhattan Island with the forces at his
+command than he could hold Brooklyn heights. He had no choice in the end
+but to retire. General Howe was cautious, moved slowly, and handled his
+forces with little energy or decision; Washington made stand and fought
+at every point at which there was the least promise of success. His men
+and his commanders were shamefully demoralized by their defeat on Long
+Island, but he held them together with singular tact and authority:
+repulsed the enemy at Haarlem heights (September 16th), held his own
+before them at White Plains (October 28th),—and did not feel obliged
+to abandon the island until late in November, after General Greene had
+fatally blundered by suffering three thousand of the best trained men of
+the scant continental force, with invaluable artillery, small-arms, and
+stores, to be trapped and taken at Fort Washington (November 16th).
+
+When he did at last withdraw, and leave Howe in complete control of the
+great port and its approaches, the situation was indeed alarming. He had
+been unspeakably stung and disquieted, as he withdrew mile by mile up the
+island, to see how uncertain his men were in the field,—how sometimes
+they would fight and sometimes they would not at the hot crisis of a
+critical encounter; and now things seemed to have gone utterly to pieces.
+He might at any moment be quite cut off from New England. While he still
+faced Howe on Manhattan Island, General Carleton, moving with a British
+force out of Canada, had driven Benedict Arnold up Champlain, despite
+stubborn and gallant resistance (October 11th and 13th), and on the 14th
+of October had occupied Crown Point. There he had stopped; and later news
+came that he had withdrawn. But apparently he could strike again almost
+when he pleased, and threaten all the long line of the Hudson even to
+where Howe lay at New York itself.
+
+[Illustration: EVACUATION OF BROOKLYN HEIGHTS]
+
+It was not mere defeat, however, that put the cast almost of despair upon
+affairs as Washington saw them that dismal autumn. His forces seemed
+to melt away under his very eyes. Charles Lee, his chief subordinate
+in command, too much a soldier of fortune to be a man of honor, obeyed
+or disregarded his orders at his own discretion. When once it was
+known that General Washington had been obliged to abandon the Hudson,
+consternation and defection spread everywhere. On the 30th of November,
+when his defeat seemed complete, it might be final, the Howes joined
+in a fresh proclamation of pardon, inviting all, once again, to submit
+and be forgiven; and it looked for a little as if all who dared would
+take advantage of the offer and make their peace with the enemy,—for
+Washington now moved in a region where opinion had from the first been
+sharply divided. While defection spread he was in full retreat, with
+scarcely three thousand men all told in his demoralized force,—that
+handful ill-clad and stricken with disease, and dwindling fast by
+desertion,—an overwhelming body of the enemy, under Cornwallis, at his
+very heels as he went, so that he dared hardly so much as pause for rest
+until he had put the broad shelter of the Delaware behind him. “These are
+the times that try men’s souls,” cried Thomas Paine (December, 1776);
+“the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot” were falling away. One
+after another, that very summer, the delegates of the several states had
+put their names to the Declaration of Independence; but already there
+seemed small prospect of making it good. To not a few it already began to
+seem a piece of mere bravado, to be repented of.
+
+[Illustration: CIRCULAR OF PHILADELPHIA COUNCIL OF SAFETY]
+
+The real strength and hope of the cause lay in the steadfastness and the
+undaunted initiative of the indomitable Virginian whom the Congress had
+chosen for the chief command. He proved himself a maker as well as a
+commander of armies, struck oftenest when he was deemed most defeated,
+could not by any reverse be put out of the fighting. He was now for the
+first time to give the British commanders a real taste of his quality.
+What there was to be done he did himself. The British stopped at the
+Delaware; but their lines reached Burlington, within eighteen miles of
+Philadelphia, and from Trenton, which they held in some force, extended
+through Princeton to New Brunswick and their headquarters at New York.
+Philadelphia was stricken with utter panic. Sick and ragged soldiers
+poured in from Washington’s camp, living evidences of what straits he
+was in, and had to be succored and taken care of; the country roads were
+crowded with vehicles leaving the town laden with women and children and
+household goods; the Congress itself incontinently fled the place and
+betook itself to Baltimore. Washington’s military stores were in the
+town, but he could get no proper protection for them. It was at that very
+moment, nevertheless, that he showed all the world with what skill and
+audacity he could strike. By dint of every resolute and persistent effort
+he had before Christmas brought his little force to a fighting strength
+of some six thousand. More than half of these were men enlisted only
+until the new year should open, but he moved before that.
+
+[Illustration: OPERATIONS AROUND TRENTON AND PRINCETON. NUMBERS 76
+REPRESENT THE CAMPS OF GENERAL CORNWALLIS AND 77 THAT OF GENERAL
+KNYPHAUSEN ON THE 23D OF JUNE, 1777]
+
+During the night of Christmas Day, 1776, ferried by doughty fishermen
+from far Gloucester and Marblehead,—the same hardy fellows who had
+handled his boats the night he abandoned the heights of Brooklyn,—he got
+twenty-five hundred men across the river through pitchy darkness and
+pounding ice; and in the early light and frost of the next morning he
+took Trenton, with its garrison of nine hundred Hessians, at the point of
+the bayonet. There he waited,—keeping his unwilling militiamen to their
+service past the opening of the year by dint of imperative persuasion
+and a pledge of his own private fortune for their pay,—until Cornwallis
+came down post-haste out of New York with eight thousand men. Moving only
+to change his position a little, he dared to wait until his adversary
+was encamped, at nightfall of the 2d of January, 1777, within ear-shot
+of his trenches; then slipped northward in the night, easily beat the
+British detachment posted at Princeton, as the next day dawned and had
+its morning; and could have taken or destroyed Cornwallis’s stores at
+New Brunswick had his men been adequately shod to outstrip the British
+following hard behind them. As it was, he satisfied himself with having
+completely flanked and thwarted his foe, and withdrew safe to the heights
+of Morristown. The British had hastily retired from Burlington upon the
+taking of Trenton,—so hastily that they took neither their cannon nor
+even their heavier baggage away with them. Now they deemed it unsafe
+to take post anywhere south of New Brunswick, until spring should come
+and they could see what Washington meant to do. Once again, therefore,
+the Americans controlled New Jersey; and Washington ordered all who
+had accepted General Howe’s offer of pardon either to withdraw to the
+British lines or take the oath of allegiance to the United States. Daring
+and a touch of genius had turned despair into hope. Americans did not
+soon forget that sudden triumph of arms, or that the great Frederick of
+Prussia had said that that had been the most brilliant campaign of the
+century.
+
+[Illustration: HESSIAN BOOT]
+
+A soldier’s eye could see quickly and plainly enough how the whole aspect
+of the war had been changed by those brief, sudden, unexpected strokes at
+Trenton and Princeton. Men near at hand, and looking for what a soldier
+would deem it no business of his to reckon with, saw that it had not only
+radically altered the military situation, but also the very atmosphere of
+the times for all concerned. The fighting at Trenton and Princeton had
+been of no great consequence in itself, but it had in every way put the
+war beyond its experimental stage. It had taught the British commanders
+with what sort of spirit and genius they had to deal, and how certain it
+was that their task must be carried to a finish not only by conquering
+marches and a mere occupation of the country, but by careful strategy
+and the long plans of a set campaign. Moreover, they now obviously had a
+country, and not an insurgent army merely, to conquer,—and a vast country
+at that. That surprising winter had set men’s sinews to what they had
+undertaken, on the one side as on the other.
+
+In December (1776) it had looked as if all firmness had been unnerved
+and all hope turned to foreboding by the success of the British at New
+York and in the Jerseys. Joseph Galloway, of Pennsylvania, when that
+crisis came, took advantage of the opportunity to remove within the
+British lines and cast in his lot there with those who were ready to
+stake everything upon their loyalty and the success of the British arms.
+Others followed his example,—some out of panic, but many, it seemed,
+not out of fear, but out of principle. Only the other day Mr. Galloway
+had been the chief figure in the Congress of Committees which spoke for
+the colonies; for many a long day he had been the chief figure in the
+politics of his own colony; and many of those who made submission when
+he did were of families of the first dignity and consequence. They, like
+him, had been champions of colonial rights until it came to the point of
+rebellion. They would not follow further. Their example was imitated now,
+moreover, in their act of formal submission, by some who had played the
+part of patriot more boldly and with less compunction. Mr. Samuel Tucker,
+even, who until this untoward month had been president of New Jersey’s
+revolutionary committee of safety, made his submission. It seemed hard to
+find steadfastness anywhere.
+
+[Illustration: LETTER CONCERNING BRITISH OUTRAGES]
+
+But Washington’s genius and the license of the British soldiery had
+turned the tide at last, when it seemed upon the very point of becoming
+overwhelming. The occupation of the British, brief as it had been, had
+brought upon New York and the Jerseys experiences like those of a country
+overrun by a foreign soldiery permitted almost every license of conquest.
+When the ministers in England found themselves, in 1774, face to face
+with the revolt in the colonies, they could count but 17,547 men all told
+in the King’s forces; and when it came to sudden recruiting, they could
+obtain very few enlistments. They dared not risk conscription,—English
+opinion had never tolerated that, except to meet invasion. They sent to
+America, therefore, to reinforce General Howe, not only English soldiers
+as many as they could muster, but a great force of German troops as
+well, hired by the regiment, their trained officers included, from the
+Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel and other German princes, neighbors to the
+German dominions of the House of Hannover. It was close upon a thousand
+of these “Hessians” (for the colonists knew them all by that single
+name) that Washington had taken at Trenton, but not until they and their
+comrades had had time to make every country-side from New York to the
+Delaware dread and hate them. The British commanders had suffered their
+men, whether English or foreign, to plunder houses, insult and outrage
+women, destroy fields of grain, and help themselves to what the towns
+contained almost as they pleased; and had hardened the faces of ten of
+the angry colonists against them for every one who made submission and
+sought to put himself on their side, accordingly. Their marauding parties
+made little distinction between friend and foe, so they but got what they
+wanted. Washington could thank them for doing more to check defections
+from the patriotic party than he could possibly do for himself by
+carrying out the orders of the Congress to disarm all loyalists and bring
+recusants to a sharp reckoning.
+
+[Illustration: RECRUITING POSTER
+
+_Editor’s Note._—The blurred inscription at the bottom of the poster
+reads as follows:
+
+That tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, and saturday, at Spotswood, in
+Middlesex county, attendance will be given by Lieutenant Reading, with
+his music and recruiting party of —— company in Major Shute’s Battalion
+of the 11th regiment of infantry, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel Aaron
+Ogden, for the purpose of receiving the enrollment of such youth of
+spirit as may be willing to enter into this honourable service.
+
+The Encouragement, at this time, to enlist is truly liberal and generous,
+namely, a bounty of twelve dollars, an annual and fully sufficient supply
+of good and handsome cloathing, a daily allowance of a large and ample
+ration of provisions, together with sixty dollars a year in gold and
+silver money on account of pay, the whole of which the soldier may lay up
+for himself and friends, as all articles proper for his subsistence and
+comfort are provided by law, without any expence to him.
+
+Those who may favour this recruiting party with their attendance as above
+will have an opportunity of hearing and seeing in a more particular
+manner the great advantages which these brave men will have who shall
+embrace this opportunity of spending a few happy years in viewing the
+different parts of this beautiful continent, in the honourable and truly
+respectable character of a soldier, after which he may, if he pleases,
+return home to his friends, with his pockets full of money and his head
+covered with laurels.
+
+GOD SAVE THE UNITED STATES.]
+
+And so the year 1777 dawned like a first year of settled war and
+revolution. For a little while, at the outset of the year, the Congress
+made Washington practical dictator in every affair that concerned the
+prosecution of the war. It authorized long enlistments, moreover,
+instead of the makeshift enrolments for three months which had hitherto
+kept Washington’s army always a-making and to be made, dissolving and
+reforming month by month. The Congress had, it is true, neither the
+energy nor the authority it needed. It could get little money to pay the
+troops; its agents seriously mismanaged the indispensable business of
+supplying the army with stores and clothing; and the men deserted by the
+score in disgust. Washington declared, in the summer of 1777, that he
+was losing more men by desertion than he was gaining by enlistment, do
+what he would. But these were difficulties of administration. In spite
+of all dangers and discouragements, it was evident that the continent
+was settling to its task. And the end of the year showed the struggle
+hopefully set forward another stage.
+
+The military operations of that memorable year were a striking
+illustration of the magnitude of the task the British generals were set
+to accomplish, and of their singular lack of the energy, decision, and
+despatch necessary to accomplish it. They seemed like men who dallied and
+dreamed and did not mean to succeed. They planned like men of action,
+but then tarried and bungled at the execution of their plans. It was
+their purpose that year (1777) to strike from three several directions
+along the valley of the Hudson, and break once for all the connection
+between the New England colonies and their confederates. General Burgoyne
+was to move, with eight thousand men, down Lake Champlain; Colonel St.
+Leger, with a small but sufficient force, along a converging line down
+the valley of the Mohawk, from Oswego on Ontario; and General Howe was
+to meet them from the south, moving in strength up the Hudson. More than
+thirty-three thousand men would have effectually swept the whole of that
+great central valley, north and south, when their plan was executed. But
+it was not executed. The British commanders were to learn that, for their
+armies, the interior of the country was impracticable.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN BURGOYNE]
+
+Both St. Leger and Burgoyne were baffled in that vast wilderness. It was
+simple enough for Burgoyne to descend the lakes and take once again the
+forts which guarded them. Even Ticonderoga he took without a blow struck.
+A precipitous height, which the Americans had supposed inaccessible
+by any sort of carriage, rose above the strong fortifications of the
+place beyond a narrow strip of water; the English dragged cannon to its
+summit; and General St. Clair promptly withdrew in the night, knowing his
+position to be no longer tenable. But it was another matter to penetrate
+the forests which lay about Lake George and the upper waters of the
+Hudson with militiamen out of every country-side within reach swarming
+thicker and thicker at every step the redcoats took into the depths of
+the perplexing region. A thousand men Burgoyne felt obliged to leave at
+Ticonderoga for the sake of his communications; close upon a thousand
+more he lost (August 16th) at Bennington, whither he had sent them to
+seize stores; and by the time he had reached the neighborhood of Saratoga
+with the six thousand left him, fully fourteen thousand provincials beset
+him. He had been told that the people of the country through which he was
+to pass would gladly give him aid and succor; that those quiet forests of
+Vermont and New York would even yield him, it might be, a regiment or two
+of loyalists wherewith to recruit his ranks when once his presence there
+should give the secluded settlers heart of grace to declare themselves
+openly for the King. Instead of that, he presently had a formidable force
+of provincial yeomanry out of Vermont dogging his steps under General
+Lincoln; a like levy, hurriedly drawn together out of New Hampshire and
+Massachusetts, beat and captured his best German troops at Bennington;
+the country was emptied of its people and of its cattle, was stripped
+of its forage even, as he advanced; and every step he took threatened
+to cut him off alike from his sources of supply and from his lines of
+retreat. It maddened the watchful men of those scattered homes to see
+him come with half a thousand savages at his front. It had been bad
+enough to see any invaders on that defenceless border: but the presence
+of the redskins put their homes and their lives in immediate and deadly
+peril, and they mustered as they would have mustered to meet a threat of
+massacre. Burgoyne himself would have checked his savage allies when the
+mischief had been done and it was too late; but he only provoked them to
+desert him and leave him without guides in an almost pathless wilderness,
+without appeasing the men their presence had brought swarming upon his
+flanks.
+
+[Illustration: ARTHUR ST. CLAIR]
+
+[Illustration: SAMUEL ADAMS]
+
+[Illustration: BENJAMIN LINCOLN]
+
+He pushed forward nevertheless, dogged, indomitable, determined to risk
+everything rather than fail of his rendezvous with Howe and St. Leger at
+the Hudson. And yet close upon the heels of his defeat and heavy loss at
+Bennington came news that St. Leger had already failed. Late in July, St.
+Leger had thrust his way cautiously through the forests from Oswego to
+the upper waters of the Mohawk; and there, on the 3d of August, he had
+set himself down to take Fort Stanwix, with its little garrison of six
+hundred men under Colonel Peter Gansevoort. There, if anywhere, in those
+northern forests by the Mohawk, might men who fought in the name of the
+King look to be bidden Godspeed and given efficient aid and counsel by
+the settlers of the country-side through which they moved. There William
+Johnson (Sir William since the French war) had reigned supreme for a long
+generation, his energy, subtlety, quick resource, and never failing
+power over men holding the restless Iroquois always to their loyalty to
+the English, the English always to their duty to the crown. Sir William
+had been dead these three years; but his son, Sir John, still held his
+ancient allies to their fealty and stood at the front of those who
+would not accept the revolution wrought at Boston and Williamsburg and
+Philadelphia. This war among the English sadly puzzled the red warriors
+of the forest. War between the king of the French and the king of the
+English they understood; it was a war of hostile peoples; but this war
+of the English against their chiefs? “You are two brothers,” they said,
+“of one blood.” The Mohawks deemed it some subtile treachery, as their
+great chief did, the redoubtable Joseph Brant, himself trained with the
+English boys in Mr. Wheelock’s school at Lebanon and taught to see the
+white man close at hand; and the Cayugas and Senecas followed them in
+their allegiance to the mighty sachem who “lived over the great lake,”
+their friend and ally time out of mind. The Onondagas held off, neutral.
+The Oneidas and Tuscaroras, among whom Mr. Kirkland was missionary, aided
+the patriots when they could, because he wished it, but would not take
+the war-path. There were white loyalists, too, as well as red, on that
+far frontier. Sir John Johnson was their leader. Their regiment of Royal
+Greens, together with John Butler’s Tory rangers, constituted the bulk
+of St. Leger’s motley force of seventeen hundred, red men and white.
+Scottish highlanders, stubborn Englishmen hot against the revolution,
+and restless Irishmen, for the nonce on the side of authority, filled
+their ranks.
+
+[Illustration: SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON]
+
+[Illustration: SIR JOHN JOHNSON]
+
+[Illustration: JOSEPH BRANT]
+
+[Illustration: PETER GANSEVOORT]
+
+But even there, in Sir William Johnson’s one-time kingdom, enemies of
+King and Parliament mustered stronger yet, and showed quicker concert,
+freer, more instant union than the Tories. There were Dutch there, and
+Germans and Scots-Irish, who recked nothing of the older ties that had
+bound them when it came to the question whether they should yield in
+their own affairs to masters over sea. Peter Gansevoort commanded the
+little garrison at Stanwix; Nicholas Herkimer brought eight hundred men
+to his succor. Brant and Johnson trapped the stout-hearted German in a
+deadly ambush close by Oriskany as he came; but he beat them off. While
+that heroic struggle went forward there in the close ravine the hot
+morning through (August 6, 1777), Gansevoort made sally and sacked Sir
+John’s camp. Herkimer could come no further; but there came, instead,
+rumors that Burgoyne was foiled and taken and the whole American army on
+the road to Stanwix. It was only Benedict Arnold, with twelve hundred
+Massachusetts volunteers; but the rumors they industriously sent ahead
+of them carried the panic they had planned, and when they came there was
+no army to meet. St. Leger’s men were in full flight to Oswego, the very
+Indians who had been their allies harrying them as they went, in mere
+wanton savagery and disaffection.
+
+Though he knew now that St. Leger could not come, though he knew nothing,
+and painfully conjectured a thousand things, of Sir William Howe’s
+promised movement below upon the river, Burgoyne pushed forward to the
+Hudson and crossed it (September 13, 1777), to face the Americans under
+General Gates upon the western bank. It was as safe to go forward as to
+turn back. Gates, secure within his intrenchments, would not strike; and
+he, his supplies instantly threatened behind him, could not wait. On the
+19th of September he threw four thousand men forward through the forest
+to turn, if it were possible, the flank of General Gates’s army where
+it lay so still upon Bemis’s Heights by Stillwater. But Arnold was too
+quick for him. With three thousand men Arnold met and checked him, moving
+with all the quick audacity and impetuous dash of which he had given Guy
+Carleton a taste upon Champlain and at the gates of Quebec, Daniel Morgan
+and his Virginian riflemen again at his back as they had been at far
+Quebec. His stroke having failed, Burgoyne lay still for eighteen tedious
+days, waiting once more for Sir Henry Clinton, now at last, he knew,
+actually upon the river. On the 7th of October he struck again. Clinton
+came too slowly. Burgoyne’s lines of communication by the northern lakes,
+long threatened by General Lincoln and his Vermonters, were now actually
+cut off, and it was possible to calculate just how few days’ rations
+remained to make his campaign upon. He tried an attack with picked men,
+moving quickly; but overwhelming forces met him, and the inevitable
+Arnold, coming upon the field when he was already beaten, turned his
+defeat almost into a rout. He withdrew hopelessly towards Saratoga.
+Every crossing of the river he found heavily guarded against him. No
+succor came to him, or could come, it seemed, either from the west or
+from the south; he could find no safe way out of the wilderness; without
+aid, the odds were too great against him; and on the 17th of October he
+capitulated.
+
+[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF CLOSING PARAGRAPHS OF BURGOYNE’S SURRENDER]
+
+General Howe had moved south instead of north. He fancied that it would
+bring him no small moral advantage to take Philadelphia, the “capital” of
+the insurgent confederacy; and he calculated that it ought to be easily
+possible to do so before Burgoyne would need him in the north. Early in
+June, accordingly, he attempted to cross the Jerseys; but Washington,
+striking from Morristown, threatened his flank in a way which made
+him hesitate and draw back. He returned to New York, and put eighteen
+thousand men aboard his transports, to get at Philadelphia by water
+from the south. It was the 25th of August, and Burgoyne was needing him
+sorely in the northern forests, before he had got ready for his land
+movement. He had gone all the long way round about into Chesapeake Bay,
+and had made his landing at the Head of Elk, in Maryland. Washington met
+him behind the fords of the Brandywine (September 11th), but could not
+withstand him. He could only delay him. Defeat no longer meant dismay
+for the Americans; Washington acted in force as steadily and effectively
+after defeat as after victory. It was the 27th of September before
+Sir William entered Philadelphia. He was hardly settled there before
+Washington attacked him again, at his outpost at Germantown, in the
+thick mist of the morning of the 4th of October, and would have taken
+the place had not the mist confused and misled his own troops. Meantime
+Burgoyne was trapped at Saratoga. On October 3d Sir Henry Clinton had
+begun at last the movement from New York for Burgoyne’s relief which
+ought to have been begun in midsummer,—carrying northward a strong
+fleet upon the river and an army of three thousand men. But it was too
+late. Burgoyne’s surrender was already inevitable. The net result of
+the campaign was the loss of the northern army and the occupation of
+Philadelphia. “Philadelphia has taken Howe,” laughed Dr. Franklin, in
+Paris, when they told him that Howe had taken Philadelphia.
+
+[Illustration: SCENE OF THE BATTLE OF THE BRANDYWINE]
+
+The long, slow year had been full of signs both good and bad.
+International forces were beginning to work in favor of the insurgent
+colonies. From the outset France and Spain had been willing to give them
+aid against England, their traditional rival and enemy. Since the summer
+of 1776 they had been promised French and Spanish assistance through
+Beaumarchais, acting ostensibly as the firm of “Roderigue Hortalez et
+Cie.,” but really as the secret agent of the two governments; and early
+in 1777 the fictitious firm had begun actually to despatch vessels laden
+with arms and ammunition to America. Private money also went into the
+venture, but governments were known to be behind it; and on January 5th,
+1777, Mr. Franklin had arrived in Paris to assist in bringing France
+into still closer touch with the war for independence over sea. As the
+year drew towards its close the great Frederick of Prussia had forbidden
+troops hired in the other German states to cross Prussian territory to
+serve the English in America, and so had added his good-will to the
+French and Spanish money. French, and even German and Polish officers,
+too, volunteered for service in the American armies. It was the gallant
+Polish patriot Tadeusz Kosciuszko who had shown General Gates how to
+intrench himself upon Bemis’s Heights.
+
+[Illustration: WASHINGTON’S PROCLAMATION]
+
+The winter was deeply disheartening, nevertheless, for Washington. Having
+failed in the mist at Germantown, he withdrew his army to Valley Forge,
+whence he could watch Howe at Philadelphia, and move as he moved, and yet
+himself feel safe against attack; but utter demoralization had fallen
+upon the Congress, sitting in a sort of exile at York, and his army was
+brought to such straits of privation and suffering in its exposed camp as
+he had never been obliged to see it endure before. There was plenty of
+food in the country; plenty even at the disposal of Congress and in the
+stores of its commissariat. The British had overrun very little of the
+fertile country; the crops had been abundant and laborers had not been
+lacking to gather them in,—especially there in thriving Pennsylvania.
+But the Congress had lost all vigor alike in counsel and in action.
+Men of initiative had withdrawn from it to serve their states in the
+reorganization of their several governments and in the command of forces
+in the field. Sometimes scarcely a dozen members could be got together
+to take part in its deliberations. It yielded to intrigue,—even to
+intrigue against Washington; allowed its executive committees, and most
+of all the commissary department, upon which the army depended, to fall
+into disorganization; listened to censures and bickerings rather than to
+plans of action; lost the respect of the states, upon which its authority
+depended; and left the army almost to shift for itself for sustenance.
+Fortunately it was a mild winter. Fortunately Washington was masterful
+and indomitable, and proved equal to checkmating at a single move those
+who intrigued in the Congress to displace him. Despite every bitter
+experience of that dark and anxious season, he had when spring came an
+army stronger and fitter for service than it had been when he took it
+into winter quarters. The lengthened term of service had given him at
+last an army which might be drilled, and foreign officers,—notably the
+capable Steuben,—had taught him how to drill it.
+
+[Illustration: BARON DE STEUBEN]
+
+General Howe’s winter passed easily and merrily enough in Philadelphia.
+The place was full of people of means and influence who hoped as heartily
+as Mr. Galloway did for the success of the British arms. Some of the
+leading Quakers of the town, whose influence was all for an accommodation
+of the quarrel with the mother country, had been arrested the previous
+summer (1777) and sent south by the patriot leaders; but many more were
+left who were of their mind, and General Howe met something like a
+welcome when he came in the autumn. The fashionable young women of the
+town were delighted to look their best and to use their charms to the
+utmost at all the balls and social gatherings that marked the gay winter
+of his stay, and their parents were not displeased to see them shine
+there. But for the soldiers’ coats one would have thought that peace had
+come again.
+
+But the minds of the ministers in England were not so much at ease. In
+February, 1778, Lord North introduced and pressed through Parliament
+conciliatory measures of the most radical sort, practically retracing
+every misjudged step taken with regard to the colonies since 1763; and
+commissioners of peace were sent to America with almost plenipotentiary
+powers of accommodation. But that very month a formal treaty of alliance
+was signed between France and the United States; by the time the peace
+commissioners reached Philadelphia, England had a war with France on
+her hands as well as a war with the colonies; there was no rejoicing in
+the camp at Valley Forge over the news of Lord North’s unexpected turn
+of purpose, but there was very keen rejoicing when news of the French
+alliance came. The Congress would not treat with the commissioners.
+Conciliation had come too late; for the colonies the aspect of the war
+was too hopeful.
+
+When the commissioners reached Philadelphia they found General Clinton
+about to abandon it. Sir Henry Clinton had succeeded General Howe in
+chief command in May. His orders were to evacuate Philadelphia and
+concentrate his forces once more at New York. The town was as full of
+excitement and dismay at the prospect as it had been but a little more
+than a year ago at news of the British approach. When the army began to
+move, three thousand loyalists abandoned the town with it, going with the
+stores by sea, while Sir Henry took his fifteen thousand men overland
+through the Jerseys again.
+
+[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF PLAY BILL]
+
+When he moved, Washington moved also; outstripped him; caught him at
+a disadvantage at Monmouth Court House (June 28, 1778); and would
+inevitably have beaten him most seriously had not Charles Lee again
+disobeyed him and spoiled the decisive movement of the day,—Charles Lee,
+the soldier of fortune whom the Americans had honored and trusted. He
+had disobeyed before, when Washington was retreating hard pressed from
+New York. This time he seemed to play the coward. It was not known until
+afterwards that he had played the traitor, too. Clinton got off, but
+in a sort of rout, leaving his wounded behind him. “Clinton gained no
+advantage except to reach New York with the wreck of his army,” was the
+watchful Frederick’s comment over sea. “America is probably lost for
+England.”
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES LEE]
+
+Even the seas were no longer free for the movements of the British
+fleets, now that France was America’s ally and French fleets were
+gathering under orders for the American coast. Every month the war had
+lasted the English had found their commerce and their movement of stores
+and transports more and more embarrassed by the American privateersmen.
+There were bold and experienced seamen at every port of the long coast.
+The little vessels which were so easily set up and finished by skilful
+carpenters and riggers in almost any quiet inlet were sure to be fast
+and deftly handled when they got to sea; kept clear of his Majesty’s
+fleets and of too closely guarded harbors; cruised whithersoever the wits
+of their sagacious masters took them; and had generally to be heavily
+overmatched to be beaten. They had taken more than five hundred British
+soldiers from the transports before the Congress at Philadelphia had
+uttered its Declaration of Independence. Their prizes numbered more than
+four hundred and fifty the year of Saratoga and Brandywine and the fight
+in the morning’s mist at Germantown, though there were seventy ships of
+war upon the coast. The very coasts of England herself were not safe
+against them. Mr. Franklin went to France in the autumn of 1776 with his
+pocket full of blank letters of marque, and American privateersmen from
+out the French ports caught prizes enough in English waters to keep the
+commissioners in Paris well found in money for their plans. In January,
+1778, Captain Rathburne, in the _Providence_, actually seized the fort
+in the harbor of Nassau in New Providence of the Bahamas, and took
+possession of town and shipping; and in the spring of that same year John
+Paul Jones performed the same daring feat at Whitehaven by Solway Firth
+in England itself.
+
+These privateersmen, it turned out, were more to be feared for the
+present than the fleets of France. The Count d’Estaing was, indeed,
+despatched to America with twelve ships of the line and six frigates,
+with four thousand troops aboard; and his fleet appeared off Sandy Hook
+in midsummer, 1778, while Sir Henry Clinton was still fresh from his
+fright at Monmouth. But the too cautious admiral came and went, and that
+was all. He would not attempt an attack upon the English fleet within the
+bay at New York, though it was of scarcely half his strength. His pilots
+told him his larger ships could not cross the bar. Newport was the only
+other harbor the English held; and there he allowed Lord Howe to draw him
+off. A storm separated the fleets before they could come to terms, and
+his cruise ended peaceably in Boston harbor. But it was a heavy thing
+for England to have French fleets to reckon with, and embarrassments
+thickened very ominously about her. She had absolutely no hold on
+America, it seemed, outside the lines actually occupied by her armies at
+Newport and New York; the very sea was beset, for her merchantmen; and
+France was now kindled into war against her.
+
+[Illustration: REDUCED FACSIMILE OF INSTRUCTIONS FROM CONGRESS TO
+PRIVATEERS]
+
+[Illustration: CONTINENTAL LOTTERY BOOK]
+
+And yet the Americans, too, were beset. They had not only their long
+coasts to watch and British armies to thwart and checkmate, but their
+western borders also to keep, against Tory and savage. The Iroquois
+country, in particular, and all the long valleys of the Mohawk, the
+Unadilla, and the Susquehanna, were filled with the terrors of raid and
+massacre throughout that disappointing and anxious summer of 1778. The
+stubborn loyalists of the forest country, with their temper still of the
+untamed highlands of old Scotland or of the intractable country-sides of
+old England, had been driven into exile by the uncompromising patriots,
+their neighbors, who outnumbered them. But they had not gone far. They
+had made their headquarters, the more dogged and determined of them, at
+Niagara, until this score should be settled. Sir John Johnson was still
+their leader, for all he had been so discomfited before Fort Stanwix;
+and John Butler and Walter Butler, father and son, men touched with
+the savagery of the redmen, their allies. Joseph Brant, that masterful
+spirit who was a sort of self-appointed king among the savage Mohawks,
+did not often willingly forget the precepts of that Christian creed to
+which good Mr. Wheelock had drawn him in his boyhood, and held the redmen
+back when he could from every wanton deed of blood; but the Butlers
+stopped at nothing, and white men and red made common cause against the
+border settlements. Their cruel strokes were dealt both far and near.
+Upon a day in July, 1778, never to be forgotten, twelve hundred men fell
+upon the far-away Wyoming Valley upon the Susquehanna and harried it from
+end to end until it was black and desolate. In November a like terrible
+fate fell upon peaceful Cherry Valley, close at hand. There could be no
+peace or quarter until the hands of these men were stayed.
+
+[Illustration: REDUCED FACSIMILE OF THE FIRST AND LAST PARTS OF PATRICK
+HENRY’S LETTER OF INSTRUCTIONS TO GEORGE ROGERS CLARK]
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE ROGERS CLARK]
+
+But, though very slowly, the end came. The men who mustered in the
+patriotic ranks knew the forest and were masters of its warfare. They
+had only to turn to it in earnest to prevail. There were men upon the
+border, too, who needed but a little aid and countenance to work the
+work of pioneer statesmen on the western rivers. Most conspicuous among
+these was George Rogers Clark, the young Saxon giant who, in 1777, left
+his tasks as pioneer and surveyor on the lands which lay upon the south
+of the great river Ohio in far Kentucky, Virginia’s huge western county,
+and made his way back to the tide-water country to propose to Mr. Henry,
+now governor of the revolutionized commonwealth, an expedition for the
+conquest of the “Illinois country” which lay to the north of the river.
+He was but five-and-twenty, but he had got his stalwart stature where
+men came quickly into their powers, deep in the forests, where he had
+learned woodcraft and had already shown his mettle among men. Mr. Henry
+and Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Wythe and Mr. Madison, whom he consulted,
+approved his purpose very heartily. It was a thing which must be prepared
+for very quietly, and pushed, when once begun, with secrecy and quick
+despatch; but the mustering of men and the gathering of munitions and
+supplies were incidents which made no stir in those days of familiar
+war. Clark could bring together what force he pleased at Pittsburgh,
+and excite only the expectation that a new band of armed men were about
+to set out for the frontiers of Kentucky. In May, 1778, he was ready.
+He took but one hundred and eighty picked riflemen, a modest flotilla
+of small boats, and a few light pieces of artillery, but they sufficed.
+Before the summer was out he had gained easy mastery of the little
+settlements which lay to the northward upon the Mississippi and within
+the nearer valley of the Wabash. He had an infinitely pleasing way of
+winning the friendship of men upon any border, and the Frenchmen of the
+settlements of the Illinois country relished the change he promised them,
+liked well enough the prospect of being quit of the English power. There
+were few Englishmen to deal with.
+
+When winter came Colonel Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, came
+south into the forest with a motley force of five hundred men, mixed
+of regulars, Tories, and Indians, such as St. Leger had taken against
+Stanwix, and occupied Vincennes again, upon the Wabash; but Clark struck
+once more, sending his boats up the river and bringing his picked force
+straight across the frozen forests from Kaskaskia by the Mississippi; and
+by the end of February, 1779, Colonel Hamilton and all his levy were his
+prisoners. The Illinois country was added to Virginia, and the grant of
+her ancient charter, “up into the land, west and northwest,” seemed made
+good again by the daring of her frontiersmen. He could have taken Detroit
+itself, Clark declared, with but a few hundred men. While he cleared the
+northern rivers of the British arms a force like his own descended the
+Mississippi, seized Natchez, and cleared the southern reaches of the
+great stream.
+
+[Illustration: GEORGE CLARK’S FINAL SUMMONS TO COLONEL HAMILTON TO
+SURRENDER]
+
+That winter had witnessed a sharp shifting of the scene of the war in
+the east. The British commanders there had turned away from General
+Washington and the too closely guarded reaches of the Hudson to try
+for better fortune in the far south. In December, 1778, Clinton sent
+thirty-five hundred men from New York to the southern coasts by sea, and
+on the 29th Savannah was taken, with comparative ease, there being but a
+scant six hundred to defend it. The town once taken, it proved an easy
+matter, at that great remove from the centre of the American strength,
+to overrun the country back of it during the early weeks of 1779. But
+after that came delay again, and inaction, as of those who wait and doubt
+what next to do. The new year saw nothing else decisive done on either
+side. In April Spain made common cause with France against England;
+but Washington waited in vain the year through to see the fighting
+transferred to America. A few strategic movements about New York, where
+Clinton lay; a few raids by the British; a few sharp encounters that
+were not battles, and the year was over. The British made sallies here
+and there, to pillage and burn, to keep the country in awe and bring off
+whatever they could lay hands upon, striking sometimes along the coast as
+far as Connecticut and even the Chesapeake at the south; but armed bands
+were quick to muster to oppose and harass them wherever they went, and
+it was never safe for them to linger. Clinton thrust his lines out upon
+the river and fortified Stony Point; but Anthony Wayne stormed the place
+of a sudden, with twelve hundred men, and took it, with unshotted guns
+at the point of the bayonet before dawn on the morning of the 15th of
+July, and brought more than five hundred prisoners away with him, having
+come with that quick fury of reckless attack which made men call him Mad
+Anthony, and having as quickly withdrawn again. Harry Lee stormed Paulus
+Hook in like fashion, and the British were nowhere very easy within their
+lines. But, for the rest, there was little to break the monotony of
+waiting for news of the war at England’s door, where the fleets of the
+allies threatened her. Privateersmen were as busy as ever, and as much
+to be feared, almost, as the French cruisers themselves; but the formal
+operations of the war seemed vaguely postponed. Without the co-operation
+of a naval force it was impossible for Washington to do anything against
+Sir Henry at New York.
+
+[Illustration: CHARLES JAMES FOX]
+
+While he waited, therefore, he despatched General Sullivan with five
+thousand men into the forest country of the Mohawk and the Susquehanna
+to make an end of the cruel mischief wrought upon defenceless homes by
+the bitter Tories and their red allies. The little army, sent forward in
+divisions, swept through the country it was bidden clear like men who
+searched stream and valley upon a journey of discovery; converged to
+meet their hunted foes, but fifteen hundred strong, where they lay at
+bay within a bend of the Chemung,—the full rally of the forest country,
+British regulars, Tory rangers, Indian braves, Johnson, the Butlers,
+Joseph Brant, every leader they acknowledged, united to direct them,—and
+overwhelmed them; ravaged the seats of Seneca and Cayuga far and near,
+till neither village nor any growing thing that they could find upon
+which men could subsist was left this side the Genesee; stopped short
+only of the final thing they had been bidden attempt, the capture of the
+stronghold at Niagara itself.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN SULLIVAN]
+
+That was a summer’s reckoning which redmen far and near were not likely
+to forget. In April a little army of frontiersmen under Colonel Evan
+Shelby, that stout pioneer out of Maryland who brought hot Welsh blood to
+the task, swept suddenly along the northward reaches of the Tennessee and
+harried the country of the Chickamaugas, among whom Tories and British
+alike had been stirring war. In August, Colonel Brodhead, ordered to
+co-operate with General Sullivan, had taken six hundred men from his post
+at Fort Pitt, whence Clark had made his exit into the west, and had
+destroyed the Indian settlements by the Alleghany and upon French Creek,
+the old routes of the French from the lakes to the Ohio. Such work was
+never finished. The Indians were for a little dislodged, disconcerted,
+and put to sad straits to live; but they were not conquered. The terror
+bred a deeper thirst for vengeance among them, and a short respite of
+peace was sure to be followed when a new year came in with fresh flashes
+of war on the border, as lurid and ominous as ever. The danger was
+lessened, nevertheless. The final conquest of the Indian country was at
+least begun. The backwoodsmen were within sight of ultimate mastery when
+once peace should bring settlers crowding westward again.
+
+[Illustration: CASIMIR PULASKI]
+
+The fighting at sea that memorable year of doubt was of a like
+import,—full of daring and stubborn courage, planned and carried through
+with singular initiative and genius, quick with adventure, bright
+with every individual achievement, but of necessity without permanent
+consequence. Late in July, 1779, Captain Paul Jones had sailed from a
+port of France in command of a little squadron, half American, half
+French, with which the energy of Mr. Franklin had supplied him. His
+flag-ship, the _Bon Homme Richard_, was a worn-out French East Indiaman,
+fitted with forty guns, many of which were unserviceable; his French
+consorts were light craft, lightly armed; only one ship of the squadron
+was fully fit for the adventures he promised himself, having come fresh
+from the stocks in America, and she was intrusted to the command of a
+French captain who obeyed orders or not, as he pleased. But Jones was
+a man to work with what he had, and made even that improvised fleet
+suffice. With it he cruised the whole length of the western coast of
+Ireland and circled Scotland. Off Flamborough Head he fell in with the
+_Serapis_, 44, and the _Countess of Scarborough_, 20, the convoy of a
+fleet of merchantmen, and himself took the larger ship almost unassisted
+in a desperate fight after sunset, in the first watch of the night of the
+23d of September. Neither ship survived the encounter forty-eight hours,
+so completely had they shot each other to pieces, and no man who followed
+the sea was likely to forget what he heard of that close grapple in the
+gathering night in the North Sea. “If I fall in with him again, I will
+make a lord of him,” Jones exclaimed, when he heard that the King had
+knighted Captain Pearson, of the _Serapis_, for the gallant fight.
+
+[Illustration: JOHN PAUL JONES]
+
+[Illustration: THE FIGHT BETWEEN BON HOMME RICHARD AND SERAPIS]
+
+For a little, in the autumn, it looked as if the naval aid for which
+General Washington waited had come at last. The Count d’Estaing was in
+the West Indies with a strong fleet, from an encounter with which the
+English commander in those waters had drawn off to port again to refit.
+The count was willing, while his hands were free, to co-operate in an
+attack upon the southern coast at Savannah. A portion of Washington’s
+army was sent south to join General Lincoln in South Carolina for the
+attempt. Count d’Estaing put six thousand troops aboard his fleet, and
+by the 16th of September was within the harbor. But he did not strike
+quickly or boldly enough, took the slow way of siege to reduce the
+place, suffered the English commander to make good both the rally of
+his scattered force and the fortification of his position, and had done
+nothing when it was high time for him to be back in the Indies to guard
+the possessions of his own king against the English. A last assault
+(October 9th) failed and he withdrew.
+
+The next year a like disappointment was added. In midsummer a French
+fleet arrived upon the northern coast, but it proved impossible to use
+it. On the 10th of July a French squadron put in at Newport and landed a
+force of six thousand men under the Comte de Rochambeau; but a powerful
+British fleet presently blockaded the port, and Rochambeau could not
+prudently withdraw while the fleet was threatened. He had been ordered to
+put himself at General Washington’s disposal; but he could not do so till
+the blockade was raised. Meanwhile not only Georgia but the entire South
+seemed lost and given over to British control. In the spring, Clinton had
+concentrated all his forces once more at New York; and then, leaving that
+all-important place strong enough to keep Washington where he was, he
+had himself taken eight thousand men by sea to Charleston. Two thousand
+more troops, already in the South, joined him there, and by the 12th of
+May (1780) he had taken not only the place itself, but General Lincoln
+and three thousand men besides. South Carolina teemed with loyalists.
+Partisan bands, some serving one side, some the other, swept and harried
+the region from end to end. Wherever the British moved in force, they
+moved as they pleased, and were masters of the country. In June General
+Clinton deemed it already safe to take half his force back to New York,
+and Cornwallis was left to complete the work of subjugation.
+
+[Illustration: WASHINGTON AND ROCHAMBEAU IN THE TRENCHES AT YORKTOWN]
+
+That same month the Congress conferred the chief command in the South
+upon General Horatio Gates, who had been in command of the army to which
+Burgoyne had surrendered at Saratoga,—the army which Schuyler had made
+ready and which Morgan and Arnold had victoriously handled. Intriguers
+had sought, while Washington lay at Valley Forge, to substitute Gates for
+the commander-in-chief; now he was to show how happy a circumstance it
+was that that selfish intrigue had failed. He met Cornwallis at Camden,
+in South Carolina, his own force three thousand men, Cornwallis’s but two
+thousand, and was utterly, even shamefully, defeated (August 16, 1780).
+“We look on America as at our feet,” said Horace Walpole, complacently,
+when the news had made its way over sea.
+
+[Illustration: HORATIO GATES]
+
+And certainly it seemed as if that dark year brought nothing but disaster
+upon the Americans. It was now more evident than ever that they had
+no government worthy of the name. The Congress had no more authority
+now than it had had in 1774, when it was admitted to be nothing but a
+“Congress of the Committees of Correspondence”; and it was not now made
+up, as it had then been, of the first characters in America, the men
+of the greatest force and initiative in the patriotic party. It could
+advise, but it could not command; and the states, making their own
+expenditures, which seemed heavy enough, maintaining their own militia,
+guarding their own interests in the war, following their own leaders,
+often with open selfishness and indifference to the common cause, paid
+less and less heed to what it asked them to do. It could not raise money
+by taxation; it could raise very little by loan, having no legal power to
+make good its promises of repayment. Beaumarchais found to his heavy cost
+that it was next to impossible to recover the private moneys advanced
+through “Roderigue Hortalez et Cie.” The troops upon whom Washington and
+his generals depended were paid in “continental” paper money, which, by
+1780, had grown so worthless that a bushel of wheat could scarcely be
+had for a month’s pay. Wholesale desertion began. Enlisted men by the
+score quit the demoralized camps. It was reckoned that as many as a full
+hundred a month went over to the enemy, if only to get food and shelter
+and clothing. Those who remained in the depleted ranks took what they
+needed from the farms about them, and grew sullen and mutinous. Promises
+of money and supplies proved as fruitless as promises of reinforcements
+from France.
+
+[Illustration: BENEDICT ARNOLD’S OATH OF ALLEGIANCE]
+
+[Illustration: BENEDICT ARNOLD]
+
+[Illustration: JOHN ANDRÉ]
+
+Even deliberate treason was added. Benedict Arnold, whom every soldier
+in the continental ranks deemed a hero because of the gallant things he
+had done at Quebec and Saratoga, and whom Washington had specially loved
+and trusted, entered into correspondence with the enemy, and plotted to
+give West Point and the posts dependent upon it into the hands of the
+British. Congress had been deeply unjust to him, promoting his juniors
+and inferiors and passing him over; a thousand slights had cut him;
+a thousand subtle forces of discouragement and of social temptation
+had been at work upon him, and he had yielded,—to pique, to bitter
+disappointment, to the disorders of a mind unstable, irritable, without
+nobility. His treason was discovered in time to be foiled, but the
+heart-breaking fact of it cut Washington to the quick, like a last and
+wellnigh fatal stroke of bitter dismay. Who could be trusted now? and
+where was strength to be got wherewith to carry the languishing work to a
+worthy finish?
+
+[Illustration: MAJOR ANDRÉ’S WATCH]
+
+It was the worst of all the bad signs of the times that no government
+could be agreed upon that would give the young states a real union,
+or assure them of harmony and co-operation in the exercise of the
+independence for which they were struggling. Definitive articles of
+confederation had been suggested as of course at the time the Declaration
+of Independence was adopted; and the next year (November 15, 1777) the
+Congress had adopted the plan which Mr. Dickinson had drawn up and which
+its committee had reported July 12, 1776. But the states did not all
+accept it, and without unanimous adoption it could not go into operation.
+All except Delaware and Maryland accepted it before the close of 1778,
+and Delaware added her ratification in 1779; but Maryland still held
+out,—waiting until the great states, like Virginia, should forego some
+part of their too great preponderance and advantage in the prospective
+partnership by transferring their claims to the great northwestern
+territories to the proposed government of the confederation; and her
+statesmanlike scruples still kept the country without a government
+throughout that all but hopeless year 1780.
+
+[Illustration: BENEDICT ARNOLD’S PASS TO MAJOR ANDRÉ]
+
+But the autumn showed a sudden turning of the tide. Cornwallis had
+ventured too far from his base of operations on the southern coast.
+He had gone deep into the country of the Carolinas, north of him, and
+was being beset almost as Burgoyne had been when he sought to cross
+the forests which lay about the upper waters of the Hudson. Gates had
+been promptly superseded after his disgraceful discomfiture and rout
+at Camden, and the most capable officers the long war had bred were
+now set to accomplish the task of forcing Cornwallis to a checkmate:
+Nathanael Greene, whose quality Washington had seen abundantly tested
+at Trenton and Princeton, at the Brandywine, at Germantown, and at
+Monmouth; the dashing Henry Lee, whom nature and the hard school of war
+had made a master of cavalry; the veteran and systematic Steuben; Morgan,
+who had won with Arnold in the fighting about Saratoga, and had kept
+his name unstained; and William Washington, a distant kinsman of the
+commander-in-chief, whom English soldiers were to remember with Lee as a
+master of light horsemen. The wide forests were full, too, of partisan
+bands, under leaders whom the British had found good reason to dread.
+
+[Illustration: MAJOR ANDRÉ’S POCKET-BOOK]
+
+[Illustration: VIRGINIA COLONIAL CURRENCY]
+
+The conquest of the back country of the Carolinas was always doing and to
+be done. The scattered settlements and lonely plantations were, indeed,
+full of men who cared little for the quarrel with the mother country
+and held to their old allegiance as of course, giving to the King’s
+troops ready aid and welcome; and there were men there, as everywhere,
+who loved pillage and all lawless adventure, upon whom the stronger army
+could always count to go in its ranks upon an errand of subjugation; but
+there were also men who took their spirit and their principles from the
+new days that had come since the passage of the Stamp Act, and, though
+they were driven from their homes and left to shift for themselves for
+mere subsistence when the King’s forces were afield, they came back
+again when the King’s men were gone, and played the part, albeit without
+Indian allies, that the ousted Tories played in the forest country of New
+York. The English commanders at Savannah and Charleston had hit at last,
+nevertheless, upon effective means of holding, not their seaports merely,
+but the country itself. The forces they sent into the interior were made
+up, for the most part, of men recruited in America, and were under the
+command of officers fitted by school and temperament for their irregular
+duty of keeping a whole country-side in fearful discipline of submission.
+Many a formidable band of “Whigs” took the field against them, but were
+without a base of supplies, moved among men who spied upon them, and were
+no match in the long run for Tarleton and Ferguson,—Tarleton with his
+reckless, sudden onset and savage thoroughness of conquest, and Ferguson
+with his subtile gifts at once of mastery and of quiet judgment that
+made him capable of succeeding either as a soldier who compelled or as
+a gentleman who won men to go his way and do his will. South Carolina
+seemed once and again to lie almost quiet under these men.
+
+[Illustration: LORD CORNWALLIS]
+
+[Illustration: WILLIAM WASHINGTON]
+
+[Illustration: BANASTRE TARLETON]
+
+[Illustration: FRANCIS MARION]
+
+But Ferguson, for all he had the gifts of a soldier statesman, had gone
+too far. He had carried his persuasion of arms to the very foothills
+of the western mountains, and had sent his threats forward into the
+western country that lay beyond the passes of the mountains, where hardy
+frontiersmen of whom he knew almost nothing had so far kept their homes
+against the redmen without thought of turning to the east. His threats
+had angered and aroused them. They had put their riflemen from the back
+country of Carolina and Virginia into the saddle hundreds strong, had
+pushed league upon league through the passes of the mountains, from the
+far-off waters of the Holston, and had surrounded and utterly overwhelmed
+him at King’s Mountain (October 7, 1780). There he lost a thousand men
+and his own life. “A numerous army appeared on the frontier,” reported
+Lord Rawdon, “drawn from Nolachucky and other settlements beyond the
+mountains, whose very names had been unknown to us.” The hold of the
+British upon the inland settlements was of a sudden loosened, and
+Cornwallis had reason to know at once what a difference that made to him.
+
+[Illustration: ENGLISH COLONIES, 1763-1775.
+
+BORMAY & CO., N. Y.]
+
+[Illustration: DANIEL MORGAN]
+
+[Illustration: COUNT ROCHAMBEAU]
+
+[Illustration: NATHANAEL GREENE]
+
+[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF THE LAST ARTICLE OF CAPITULATION AT YORKTOWN]
+
+[Illustration: PAROLE OF CORNWALLIS]
+
+Early in December came General Greene to take the place of Gates, and
+new difficulties faced the English commander. Greene kept no single
+force afield, to be met and checkmated, but sent one part of his little
+army towards the coast to cut Cornwallis’s communications, and another
+southward against the inland posts and settlements where scattered
+garrisons lay between the commander-in-chief and his base at Charleston
+in the south. With the first detachment went Francis Marion, a man as
+formidable in strategy and sudden action as Ferguson, and the men who had
+attached themselves to him as if to a modern Robin Hood. With the second
+went Daniel Morgan, a man made after the fashion of the redoubtable
+frontiersmen who had brought Ferguson his day of doom at King’s Mountain.
+Tarleton was sent after Morgan with eleven hundred men, found him at
+the Cowpens (January 17, 1781), just within the border upon which King’s
+Mountain lay, and came back a fugitive, with only two hundred and seventy
+men. Greene drew his forces together again, and at Guilford Court
+House Cornwallis beat him, outnumbered though he was (March 15th). But
+to beat Greene, it seemed, was of no more avail than to beat General
+Washington. The country was no safer, the communications of the army were
+as seriously threatened, the defeated army was as steady and as well in
+hand after the battle as before; and the English withdrew to Wilmington,
+on the coast.
+
+[Illustration: ORDER PERMITTING THE ILLUMINATION OF PHILADELPHIA]
+
+[Illustration: NELSON HOUSE, CORNWALLIS’S HEADQUARTERS, YORKTOWN]
+
+It seemed a hazardous thing to take an army thence southward again, with
+supplies, through the forests where Greene moved; news came that General
+Arnold was in Virginia with a considerable body of Clinton’s troops from
+New York, to anticipate what the southern commander had planned to do
+for the conquest of the Old Dominion when the Carolinas should have been
+“pacified” from end to end; and Cornwallis determined to move northward
+instead of southward, and join Arnold in Virginia. Greene moved a little
+way in his track, and then turned southward again against the garrisons
+of the inland posts. Lord Rawdon beat him at Hobkirk’s Hill (April 25th)
+and held him off at Eutaw Springs (September 8th); but both times the
+English withdrew to save their communications; and, though the work was
+slow in the doing, before winter came again they were shut within the
+fortifications of Charleston and the country-sides were once more in
+American possession, to be purged of loyalist bands at leisure.
+
+[Illustration: EVOLUTION OF THE AMERICAN FLAG]
+
+In Virginia, Lord Cornwallis moved for a little while freely and safely
+enough; but only for a little while. Baron Steuben had been busy, winter
+and spring, raising recruits there for an army of defence; General
+Washington hurried the Marquis de Lafayette southward with twelve
+hundred light infantry from his own command; and by midsummer, 1781,
+Lafayette was at the British front with a force strong enough to make it
+prudent that Cornwallis should concentrate his strength and once more
+make sure of his base of supplies at the coast. His watchful opponents
+out-manœuvred him, caught his forces once and again in detail, and made
+his outposts unsafe. By the first week in August he had withdrawn to the
+sea and had taken post behind intrenchments at Yorktown, something more
+than seven thousand strong.
+
+There, upon the peninsula which he deemed his safest coign of vantage,
+he was trapped and taken. At last the French were at hand. The Comte de
+Grasse, with twenty-eight ships of the line, six frigates, and twenty
+thousand men, was in the West Indies. Washington had begged him to come
+at once either to New York or to the Chesapeake. In August he sent word
+that he would come to the Chesapeake. Thereupon Washington once again
+moved with the sudden directness he had shown at Trenton and Princeton.
+Rochambeau was free now to lend him aid. With four thousand Frenchmen
+and two thousand of his own continentals, Washington marched all the
+long four hundred miles straightway to the York River, in Virginia.
+There he found Cornwallis, as he had hoped and expected, already penned
+between Grasse’s fleet in the bay and Lafayette’s trenches across the
+peninsula. His six thousand men, added to Lafayette’s five thousand and
+the three thousand put ashore from the fleet, made short work enough of
+the siege, drawn closer and closer about the British; and by the 19th of
+October (1781) they accepted the inevitable and surrendered. The gallant
+Cornwallis himself could not withhold an expression of his admiration for
+the quick, consummate execution of the plans which had undone him, and
+avowed it with manly frankness to Washington. “But, after all,” he cried,
+“your Excellency’s achievements in New Jersey were such that nothing
+could surpass them.” He liked the mastery by which he had been outplayed
+and taken.
+
+ Here our general _authorities_ are the same as for the period
+ covered by the last chapter. But to these we now add Edward
+ J. Lowell’s _The United States of America, 1775-1782_, in the
+ seventh volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History
+ of America_; John Jay’s _Peace Negotiations, 1782-1783_, in
+ the same volume of Winsor; G. W. Greene’s _Historical View
+ of the American Revolution_; the second volume of W. B.
+ Weeden’s _Economic and Social History of New England_; P. O.
+ Hutchinson’s _Life and Letters of Thomas Revolution_; Lorenzo
+ Sabine’s _Biographical Sketches of Adherents to the British
+ Crown_; George E. Ellis’s _The Loyalists and their Fortunes_,
+ in the seventh volume of Winsor; Edward E. Hale’s _Franklin
+ in France_; George Ticknor Curtis’s _Constitutional History
+ of the United States_; and William H. Trescot’s _Diplomacy of
+ the American Revolution_. Abundant references to authorities
+ on the several campaigns of the revolutionary war may be found
+ in Albert B. Hart and Edward Channing’s _Guide to American
+ History_, an invaluable manual.
+
+ The _sources_ for the period may be found in the contemporary
+ pamphlets, speeches, and letters published at the time
+ and since, among which may be mentioned, as of unusual
+ individuality, Thomas Paine’s celebrated pamphlet entitled
+ _Common Sense_, the writings of Joseph Galloway, some of which
+ are reproduced in Stedman and Hutchinson’s _Library of American
+ Literature_, and St. John de Crevecœur’s _Letters from an
+ American Farmer_. Here again we rely, too, on the _Journals of
+ Congress_ and the _Secret Journals of Congress_; the _Debates
+ of Parliament_; Peter Force’s _American Archives_; Hezekiah
+ Niles’s _Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America_;
+ _The Annual Register_; Jared Sparks’s _Correspondence of the
+ American Revolution_ and _Diplomatic Correspondence of the
+ American Revolution_; Francis Wharton’s _The Revolutionary
+ Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States_; Thomas
+ Anburey’s _Travels through the Interior Parts of America
+ (1776-1781)_; the Marquis de Chastellux’s _Travels in North
+ America in the Years 1780, 1781, and 1782_; and the _Memoirs_
+ and _Collections_ of the Historical Societies of the several
+ original states.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+
+ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION OF THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES
+
+ Betweene the plantations vnder the Gouernment of the
+ Massachusetts, the Plantacons vnder the Gouernment of New
+ Plymouth, the Plantacons vnder the Gouernment of Connectacutt,
+ and the Gouernment of New Haven with the Plantacons in
+ combinacon therewith
+
+WHEREAS wee all came into these parts of America with one and the same
+end and ayme, namely, to advaunce the kingdome of our Lord Jesus Christ,
+and to enjoy the liberties of the Gospell in puritie with peace. And
+whereas in our settleinge (by a wise Providence of God) we are further
+dispersed vpon the Sea Coasts and Riuers then was at first intended, so
+that we cannot according to our desire, with convenience communicate in
+one Gouernment and Jurisdiccon. And whereas we live encompassed with
+people of seuerall Nations and strang languages which heareafter may
+proue injurious to vs or our posteritie. And forasmuch as the Natives
+have formerly committed sondry insolences and outrages vpon seueral
+Plantacons of the English and have of late combined themselues against
+vs. And seing by reason of those sad Distraccons in England, which
+they have heard of, and by which they know we are hindred from that
+humble way of seekinge advise or reapeing those comfortable fruits of
+protection which at other tymes we might well expecte. Wee therefore
+doe conceiue it our bounden Dutye without delay to enter into a present
+consotiation amongst our selues for mutual help and strength in all
+our future concernements: That as in Nation and Religion, so in other
+Respects we bee and continue one according to the tenor and true meaninge
+of the ensuing Articles: Wherefore it is fully agreed and concluded by
+and betweene the parties or Jurisdiccons aboue named, and they joyntly
+and seuerally doe by these presents agreed and concluded that they all
+bee, and henceforth bee called by the Name of the United Colonies of
+New-England.
+
+II. The said United Colonies, for themselues and their posterities, do
+joyntly and seuerally, hereby enter into a firme and perpetuall league
+of friendship and amytie, for offence and defence, mutuall advise and
+succour, vpon all just occations, both for preserueing and propagateing
+the truth and liberties of the Gospel, and for their owne mutuall safety
+and wellfare.
+
+III. It is futher agreed That the Plantacons which at present are or
+hereafter shalbe settled within the limmetts of the Massachusetts, shalbe
+forever vnder the Massachusetts, and shall have peculiar Jurisdiccon
+among themselues in all cases as an entire Body, and that Plymouth,
+Connecktacutt, and New Haven shall eich of them haue like peculier
+Jurisdiccon and Gouernment within their limmetts and in referrence to the
+Plantacons which already are settled or shall hereafter be erected or
+shall settle within their limmetts respectiuely; prouided that no other
+Jurisdiccon shall hereafter be taken in as a distinct head or member
+of this Confederacon, nor shall any other Plantacon or Jurisdiccon in
+present being and not already in combynacon or vnder the Jurisdiccon of
+any of these Confederats be received by any of them, nor shall any two
+of the Confederats joyne in one Jurisdiccon without consent of the rest,
+which consent to be interpreted as is expressed in the sixth Article
+ensuinge.
+
+IV. It is by these Confederats agreed that the charge of all just
+warrs, whether offensiue or defensiue, upon what part or member of this
+Confederaccon soever they fall, shall both in men and provisions, and
+all other Disbursements, be borne by all the parts of this Confederacon,
+in different proporcons according to their different abilitie, in manner
+following, namely, that the Commissioners for eich Jurisdiccon from
+tyme to tyme, as there shalbe occation, bring a true account and number
+of all the males in every Plantacon, or any way belonging to, or under
+their seuerall Jurisdiccons, of what quality or condicion soeuer they
+bee, from sixteene yeares old to threescore, being Inhabitants there. And
+That according to the different numbers which from tyme to tyme shalbe
+found in eich Jurisdiccon, upon a true and just account, the service of
+men and all charges of the warr be borne by the Poll: Eich Jurisdiccon,
+or Plantacon, being left to their owne just course and custome of rating
+themselues and people according to their different estates, with due
+respects to their qualites and exemptions among themselues, though the
+Confederacon take no notice of any such priviledg: And that according
+to their differrent charge of eich Jurisdiccon and Plantacon, the whole
+advantage of the warr (if it please God to bless their Endeavours)
+whether it be in lands, goods or persons, shall be proportionably deuided
+among the said Confederats.
+
+V. It is further agreed That if any of these Jurisdiccons, or any
+Plantacons vnder it, or in any combynacon with them be envaded by any
+enemie whomsoeuer, vpon notice and request of any three majestrats of
+that Jurisdiccon so invaded, the rest of the Confederates, without
+any further meeting or expostulacon, shall forthwith send ayde to
+the Confederate in danger, but in different proporcons; namely, the
+Massachusetts an hundred men sufficiently armed and provided for such
+a service and jorney, and eich of the rest fourty-fiue so armed and
+provided, or any lesse number, if lesse be required, according to this
+proporcon. But if such Confederate in danger may be supplyed by their
+next Confederate, not exceeding the number hereby agreed, they may
+craue help there, and seeke no further for the present. The charge to
+be borne as in this Article is exprest: And, at the returne, to be
+victualled and supplyed with poder and shott for their journey (if there
+be neede) by that Jurisdiccon which employed or sent for them: But none
+of the Jurisdiccons to exceed these numbers till by a meeting of the
+Commissioners for this Confederacon a greater ayd appeare necessary.
+And this proporcon to continue, till upon knowledge of greater numbers
+in eich Jurisdiccon which shalbe brought to the next meeting some other
+proporcon be ordered. But in any such case of sending men for present ayd
+whether before or after such order or alteracon, it is agreed that at the
+meeting of the Commissioners for this Confederacon, the cause of such
+warr or invasion be duly considered: And if it appeare that the fault
+lay in the parties so invaded, that then that Jurisdiccon or Plantacon
+make just Satisfaccon, both to the Invaders whom they have injured, and
+beare all the charges of the warr themselves without requireing any
+allowance from the rest of the Confederats towards the same. And further,
+that if any Jurisdiccon see any danger of any Invasion approaching, and
+there be tyme for a meeting, that in such case three majestrats of that
+Jurisdiccon may summon a meeting at such convenyent place as themselues
+shall think meete, to consider and provide against the threatned danger,
+Provided when they are met they may remoue to what place they please,
+Onely whilst any of these foure Confederats have but three majestrats in
+their Jurisdiccon, their request or summons from any two of them shalbe
+accounted of equall force with the three mentoned in both the clauses of
+this Article, till there be an increase of majestrats there.
+
+VI. It is also agreed that for the mannaging and concluding of all
+affairs proper and concerneing the whole Confederacon, two Commissioners
+shalbe chosen by and out of eich of these foure Jurisdiccons, namely,
+two for the Mattachusetts, two for Plymouth, two for Connectacutt and
+two for New Haven; being all in Church fellowship with us, which shall
+bring full power from their seuerall generall Courts respectively to
+heare, examine, weigh and determine all affaires of our warr or peace,
+leagues, ayds, charges and numbers of men for warr, divission of spoyles
+and whatsoever is gotten by conquest, receiueing of more Confederats for
+plantacons into combinacon with any of the Confederates, and all thinges
+of like nature which are the proper concomitants or consequence of such
+a confederacon, for amytie, offence and defence, not intermeddleing with
+the gouernment of any of the Jurisdiccons which by the third Article is
+preserued entirely to themselves. But if these eight Commissioners, when
+they meete, shall not all agree, yet it is concluded that any six of the
+eight agreeing shall have power to settle and determine the business in
+question: But if six do not agree, that then such proposicons with their
+reasons, so farr as they have beene debated, be sent and referred to the
+foure generall Courts, vizt. the Mattachusetts, Plymouth, Connectacutt,
+and New Haven: And if at all the said Generall Courts the businesse so
+referred be concluded, then to bee prosecuted by the Confederates and all
+their members. It is further agreed that these eight Commissioners shall
+meete once every yeare, besides extraordinary meetings (according to the
+fift Article) to consider, treate and conclude of all affaires belonging
+to this Confederacon, which meeting shall ever be the first Thursday in
+September. And that the next meeting after the date of these presents,
+which shalbe accounted the second meeting, shalbe at Bostone in the
+Massachusetts, the third at Hartford, the fourth at New Haven, the fift
+at Plymouth, the sixt and seaventh at Bostone. And then Hartford, New
+Haven and Plymouth, and so in course successiuely, if in the meane tyme
+some middle place be not found out and agreed on which may be commodious
+for all the jurisdiccons.
+
+VII. It is further agreed that at eich meeting of these eight
+Commissioners, whether ordinary or extraordinary, they, or six of them
+agreeing, as before, may choose their President out of themselues, whose
+office and worke shalbe to take care and direct for order and a comely
+carrying on of all proceedings in the present meeting. But he shalbe
+invested with no such power or respect as by which he shall hinder the
+propounding or progresse of any businesse, or any way cast the Scales,
+otherwise then in the precedent Article is agreed.
+
+VIII. It is also agreed that the Commissioners for this Confederacon
+hereafter at their meetings, whether ordinary or extraordinary, as they
+may have commission or opertunitie, do endeavoure to frame and establish
+agreements and orders in generall cases of a civill nature wherein all
+the plantacons are interested for preserving peace among themselves,
+and preventing as much as may bee all occations of warr or difference
+with others, as about the free and speedy passage of Justice in every
+Jurisdiccon, to all the Confederats equally as their owne, receiving
+those that remoue from one plantacon to another without due certefycats;
+how all the Jurisdiccons may carry it towards the Indians, that they
+neither grow insolent nor be injured without due satisfaccion, lest warr
+break in vpon the Confederates through such miscarryage. It is also
+agreed that if any servant runn away from his master into any other of
+these confederated Jurisdiccons, That in such Case, vpon the Certyficate
+of one Majistrate in the Jurisdiccon out of which the said servant fled,
+or upon other due proofe, the said servant shalbe deliuered either to
+his Master or any other that pursues and brings such Certificate or
+proofe. And that vpon the escape of any prisoner whatsoever or fugitiue
+for any criminal cause, whether breaking prison or getting from the
+officer or otherwise escaping, upon the certificate of two Majistrats of
+the Jurisdiccon out of which the escape is made that he was a prisoner
+or such an offender at the tyme of the escape. The Majestrates or some
+of them of that Jurisdiccon where for the present the said prisoner or
+fugitive abideth shall forthwith graunt such a warrant as the case will
+beare for the apprehending of any such person, and the delivery of him
+into the hands of the officer or other person that pursues him. And if
+there be help required for the safe returneing of any such offender, then
+it shalbe graunted to him that craves the same, he paying the charges
+thereof.
+
+IX. And for that the justest warrs may be of dangerous consequence,
+espetially to the smaler plantacons in these vnited Colonies, It is
+agreed that neither the Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connectacutt nor
+New-Haven, nor any of the members of any of them shall at any tyme
+hereafter begin, undertake, or engage themselues or this Confederacon,
+or any part thereof in any warr whatsoever (sudden exegents with the
+necessary consequents thereof excepted, which are also to be moderated
+as much as the case will permit) without the consent and agreement of
+the forenamed eight Commissioners, or at least six of them, as in the
+sixt Article is provided: And that no charge be required of any of the
+Confederats in case of a defensiue warr till the said Commissioners haue
+mett and approued the justice of the warr, and have agreed vpon the sum
+of money to be levyed, which sum is then to be payd by the severall
+Confederates in proporcon according to the fourth Article.
+
+X. That in extraordinary occations when meetings are summoned by three
+Majistrats of any Jurisdiccon, or two as in the fift Article, If any
+of the Commissioners come not, due warneing being given or sent, It is
+agreed that foure of the Commissioners shall have power to direct a warr
+which cannot be delayed and to send for due proporcons of men out of eich
+Jurisdiccon, as well as six might doe if all mett; but not less than six
+shall determine the justice of the warr or allow the demanude of bills of
+charges or cause any levies to be made for the same.
+
+XI. It is further agreed that if any of the Confederates shall hereafter
+break any of these present Articles, or be any other wayes injurious to
+any one of thother Jurisdiccons, such breach of Agreement, or injurie,
+shalbe duly considered and ordered by the Commissioners for thother
+Jurisdiccons, that both peace and this present Confederacon may be
+entirely preserued without violation.
+
+XII. Lastly, this perpetuall Confederacon and the several Articles and
+Agreements thereof being read and seriously considered, both by the
+Generall Court for the Massachusetts, and by the Commissioners for
+Plymouth, Connectacutt and New Haven, were fully allowed and confirmed
+by three of the forenamed Confederates, namely, the Massachusetts,
+Connectacutt and New-Haven, Onely the Commissioners for Plymouth, having
+no Commission to conclude, desired respite till they might advise with
+their Generall Court, wherevpon it was agreed and concluded by the said
+court of the Massachusetts, and the Commissioners for the other two
+Confederates, That if Plymouth Consent, then the whole treaty as it
+stands in these present articles is and shall continue firme and stable
+without alteracon: But if Plymouth come not in, yet the other three
+Confederates doe by these presents confirme the whole Confederacon and
+all the Articles thereof, onely, in September next, when the second
+meeting of the Commissioners is to be at Bostone, new consideracon may
+be taken of the sixt Article, which concernes number of Commissioners
+for meeting and concluding the affaires of this Confederacon to the
+satisfaccon of the court of the Massachusetts, and the Commissioners for
+thother two Confederates, but the rest to stand vnquestioned.
+
+In testymony whereof, the Generall Court of the Massachusetts by their
+Secretary, and the Commissioners for Connectacutt and New-Haven haue
+subscribed these presente articles, this xixth of the third month,
+commonly called May, Anno Domini, 1643.
+
+At a Meeting of the Commissioners for the Confederacon, held at Boston,
+the Seaventh of September. It appeareing that the Generall Court of New
+Plymouth, and the severall Towneships thereof have read, considered and
+approoued these articles of Confederacon, as appeareth by Comission from
+their Generall Court beareing Date the xxixth of August, 1643, to Mr.
+Edward Winslowe and Mr. Will Collyer, to ratifye and confirme the same
+on their behalf, wee therefore, the Comissioners for the Mattachusetts,
+Conecktacutt and New Haven, doe also for our seuerall Gouernments,
+subscribe vnto them.
+
+ JOHN WINTHROP, Governor of Massachusetts,
+ THO. DUDLEY,
+ THEOPH. EATON,
+ GEO. FENWICK,
+ EDWA. HOPKINS,
+ THOMAS GREGSON.
+
+
+PENN’S PLAN OF UNION—1697.
+
+MR. PENN’S PLAN FOR A UNION OF THE COLONIES IN AMERICA.
+
+A Briefe and Plaine Scheam how the English Colonies in the North parts of
+America, viz.: Boston, Connecticut, Road Island, New York, New Jerseys,
+Pensilvania, Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina may be made more usefull
+to the Crowne, and one another’s peace and safty with an universall
+concurrence.
+
+1st. That the severall Colonies before mentioned do meet once a year,
+and oftener if need be, during the war, and at least once in two years
+in times of peace, by their stated and appointed Deputies, to debate
+and resolve of such measures as are most adviseable for their better
+understanding, and the public tranquility and safety.
+
+2d. That in order to it two persons well qualified for sence, sobriety
+and substance be appointed by each Province, as their Representatives
+or Deputies, which in the whole make the Congress to consist of twenty
+persons.
+
+3d. That the King’s Commissioner for that purpose specially appointed
+shall have the chaire and preside in the said Congresse.
+
+4th. That they shall meet as near as conveniently may be to the most
+centrall Colony for use of the Deputies.
+
+5th. Since that may in all probability, be New York both because it is
+near the Center of the Colonies and for that it is a Frontier and in the
+King’s nomination, the Govr. of that Colony may therefore also be the
+King’s High Commissioner during the Session after the manner of Scotland.
+
+6th. That their business shall be to hear and adjust all matters of
+Complaint or difference between Province and Province. As, 1st, where
+persons quit their own Province and goe to another, that they may avoid
+their just debts, tho they be able to pay them, 2nd, where offenders
+fly Justice, or Justice cannot well be had upon such offenders in the
+Provinces that entertaine them, 3dly, to prevent or cure injuries in
+point of Commerce, 4th, to consider of ways and means to support the
+union and safety of these Provinces against the publick enemies. In which
+Congresse the Quotas of men and charges will be much easier, and more
+equally sett, then it is possible for any establishment made here to do;
+for the Provinces, knowing their own condition and one another’s, can
+debate that matter with more freedome and satisfaction and better adjust
+and ballance their affairs in all respects for their common safty.
+
+7ly. That in times of war the King’s High Commissioner shall be generall
+or chief Commander of the severall Quotas upon service against a common
+enemy as he shall be advised, for the good and benefit of the whole.
+
+
+FRANKLIN’S PLAN OF UNION—1754.
+
+Plan of a proposed Union of the several Colonies of Massachusetts-Bay,
+New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New-York, New-Jersey,
+Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina for
+their mutual Defence and Security, and for the extending the British
+Settlements in North America.
+
+That humble application be made for an act of Parliament of Great
+Britain, by virtue of which one general government may be formed in
+America, including all the said Colonies, within and under which
+government each Colony may retain its present constitution, except in
+the particulars wherein a change may be directed by the said act, as
+hereafter follows.
+
+
+PRESIDENT-GENERAL AND GRAND COUNCIL.
+
+That the said general government be administered by a President-General,
+to be appointed and supported by the crown; and a Grand Council to be
+chosen by the representatives of the people of the several Colonies met
+in their respective assemblies.
+
+ It was thought that it would be best the President-General
+ should be supported as well as appointed by the crown, that
+ so all disputes between him and the Grand-Council concerning
+ his salary might be prevented; as such disputes have been
+ frequently of mischievous consequence in particular Colonies,
+ especially in time of public danger. The quit-rents of crown
+ lands in America might in a short time be sufficient for this
+ purpose. The choice of members for the Grand-Council is placed
+ in the House of Representatives of each government, in order to
+ give the people a share in this new general government, as the
+ crown has its share by the appointment of the President-General.
+
+ But it being proposed by the gentlemen of the Council of New
+ York, and some other counsellors among the commissioners, to
+ alter the plan in this particular, and to give the governors
+ and councils of the several Provinces a share in the choice
+ of the Grand-Council, or at least a power of approving and
+ confirming, or of disallowing, the choice made by the House
+ of Representatives, it was said,—“That the government or
+ constitution, proposed to be formed by the plan, consists of
+ two branches: a President-General appointed by the crown,
+ and a Council chosen by the people, or by the people’s
+ representatives, which is the same thing.
+
+ “That, by a subsequent article, the council chosen by
+ the people can effect nothing without the consent of the
+ President-General appointed by the crown; the crown possesses,
+ therefore, full one half of the power of this constitution.
+
+ “That in the British constitution, the crown is supposed to
+ possess but one third, the Lords having their share.
+
+ “That the constitution seemed rather more favorable for the
+ crown.
+
+ “That it is essential to English liberty that the subject
+ should not be taxed but by his own consent, or the consent of
+ his elected representatives.
+
+ “That taxes to be laid and levied by this proposed constitution
+ will be proposed and agreed to by the representatives of the
+ people, if the plan in this particular be preserved.
+
+ “But if the proposed alteration should take place, it seemed as
+ if matters may be so managed, as that the crown shall finally
+ have the appointment, not only of the President-General, but
+ of a majority of the Grand-Council; for seven out of eleven
+ governors and councils are appointed by the crown.
+
+ “And so the people in all the Colonies would in effect be taxed
+ by their governors.
+
+ “It was therefore apprehended, that such alterations of the
+ plan would give great dissatisfaction, and that the Colonies
+ could not be easy under such a power in governors, and such an
+ infringement of what they take to be English liberty.
+
+ “Besides, the giving a share in the choice of the Grand
+ Council would not be equal with respect to all the Colonies,
+ as their constitutions differ. In some, both governor and
+ council are appointed by the crown. In others, they are both
+ appointed by the proprietors. In some, the people have a
+ share in the choice of the council; in others, both government
+ and council are wholly chosen by the people. But the House
+ of Representatives is everywhere chosen by the people; and,
+ therefore, placing the right of choosing the Grand Council in
+ the representatives is equal with respect to all.
+
+ “That the Grand Council is intended to represent all the
+ several Houses of Representatives of the Colonies, as a House
+ of Representatives doth the several towns or counties of a
+ Colony. Could all the people of a Colony be consulted and
+ unite in public measures, a House of Representatives would be
+ needless, and could all the Assemblies consult and unite in
+ general measures, the Grand Council would be unnecessary.
+
+ “That a House of Commons or the House of Representatives, and
+ the Grand Council are alike in their nature and intention.
+ And, as it would seem improper that the King or House of Lords
+ should have a power of disallowing or appointing Members of the
+ House of Commons; so, likewise, that a governor and council
+ appointed by the crown should have a power of disallowing
+ or appointing members of the Grand Council, who, in this
+ constitution, are to be the representatives of the people.
+
+ “If the governor and councils therefore were to have a share in
+ the choice of any that are to conduct this general government,
+ it should seem more proper that they should choose the
+ President-General. But this being an office of great trust and
+ importance to the nation, it was thought better to be filled by
+ the immediate appointment of the crown.
+
+ “The power proposed to be given by the plan to the Grand
+ Council is only a concentration of the powers of the several
+ assemblies in certain points for the general welfare; as the
+ power of the President-General is of the several governors in
+ the same point.
+
+ “And as the choice therefore of the Grand Council, by the
+ representatives of the people, neither gives the people any new
+ powers, nor diminishes the power of the crown, it was thought
+ and hoped the crown would not disapprove of it.”
+
+ Upon the whole, the commissioners were of opinion, that the
+ choice was most properly placed in the representatives of the
+ people.
+
+
+ELECTION OF MEMBERS.
+
+That within ____ months after the passing such act, the House of
+Representatives that happens to be sitting within that time, or that
+shall be especially for that purpose convened, may and shall choose
+members for the Grand Council, in the following proportion, that is to
+say,
+
+ Massachusetts Bay 7
+ New Hampshire 2
+ Connecticut 5
+ Rhode Island 2
+ New York 4
+ New Jersey 3
+ Pennsylvania 6
+ Maryland 4
+ Virginia 7
+ North Carolina 4
+ South Carolina 4
+ --
+ 48
+
+ It was thought, that if the least Colony was allowed two, and
+ the others in proportion, the number would be very great,
+ and the expense heavy; and that less than two would not be
+ convenient, as, a single person being by any accident prevented
+ appearing at the meeting, the Colony he ought appear for would
+ not be represented. That, as the choice was not immediately
+ popular, they would be generally men of good abilities for
+ business, and men of reputation for integrity, and that
+ forty-eight such men might be a number sufficient. But, though
+ it was thought reasonable that each Colony should have a share
+ in the representative body in some degree according to the
+ proportion it contributed to the general treasury, yet the
+ proportion of wealth or power of the Colonies is not to be
+ judged by the proportion here fixed: because it was at first
+ agreed, that the greatest Colony should not have more than
+ seven members, nor the least less than two; and the setting
+ these proportions between these two extremes was not nicely
+ attended to, as it would find itself, after the first election,
+ from the sum brought into the treasury by a subsequent article.
+
+
+PLACE OF FIRST MEETING.
+
+—Who shall meet for the first time at the city of Philadelphia in
+Pennsylvania, being called by the President-General as soon as
+conveniently may be after his appointment.
+
+ Philadelphia was named as being nearer the centre of the
+ Colonies, where the commissioners would be well and cheaply
+ accommodated. The high roads, through the whole extent, are for
+ the most part very good, in which forty or fifty miles a day
+ may very well be, and frequently are, travelled. Great part
+ of the way may likewise be gone by water. In summer time, the
+ passages are frequently performed in a week from Charleston to
+ Philadelphia and New York, and from Rhode Island to New York
+ through the Sound, in two or three days, and from New York to
+ Philadelphia, by water and land, in two days, by stage boats,
+ and street carriages that set out every other day. The journey
+ from Charleston to Philadelphia may likewise be facilitated by
+ boats running up Chesapeake Bay three hundred miles. But if
+ the whole journey be performed on horseback, the most distant
+ members, viz., the two from New Hampshire and from South
+ Carolina, may probably render themselves at Philadelphia in
+ fifteen or twenty days; the majority may be there in much less
+ time.
+
+
+NEW ELECTION.
+
+That there shall be a new election of the members of the Grand Council
+every three years; and, on the death or resignation of any member, his
+place should be supplied by a new choice at the next sitting of the
+Assembly of the Colony he represented.
+
+ Some Colonies have annual assemblies, some continue during
+ a governor’s pleasure; three years was thought a reasonable
+ medium as affording a new member time to improve himself in the
+ business, and to act after such improvement, and yet giving
+ opportunities, frequently enough, to change him if he has
+ misbehaved.
+
+
+PROPORTION OF MEMBERS AFTER THE FIRST THREE YEARS.
+
+That after the first three years, when the proportion of money arising
+out of each Colony to the general treasury can be known, the number of
+members to be chosen for each Colony shall, from time to time, in all
+ensuing elections, be regulated by that proportion, yet so as that the
+number to be chosen by any one Province be not more than seven, nor less
+than two.
+
+ By a subsequent article, it is proposed that the General
+ Council shall lay and levy such general duties as to them may
+ appear most equal and least burdensome, etc. Suppose, for
+ instance, they lay a small duty or excise on some commodity
+ imported into or made in the Colonies, and pretty generally
+ and equally used in all of them, as rum, perhaps, or wine; the
+ yearly produce of this duty or excise, if fairly collected,
+ would be in some Colonies greater, in others less, as the
+ Colonies are greater or smaller. When the collector’s accounts
+ are brought in, the proportions will appear; and from them it
+ is proposed to regulate the proportion of the representatives
+ to be chosen at the next general election, within the limits,
+ however, of seven and two. These numbers may therefore vary
+ in the course of years, as the Colonies may in the growth and
+ increase of people. And thus the quota of tax from each Colony
+ would naturally vary with its circumstances, thereby preventing
+ all disputes and dissatisfaction about the just proportions
+ due from each, which might otherwise produce pernicious
+ consequences, and destroy the harmony and good agreement that
+ ought to subsist between the several parts of the Union.
+
+
+MEETINGS OF THE GRAND COUNCIL AND CALL.
+
+That the Grand Council shall meet once in every year, and oftener if
+occasion require, at such time and place as they shall adjourn to at the
+last preceding meeting, or as they shall be called to meet at by the
+President-General on any emergency; he having first obtained in writing
+the consent of seven of the members to such call, and sent due and timely
+notice to the whole.
+
+ It was thought, in establishing and governing new Colonies
+ or settlements, or regulating Indian trade, Indian treaties,
+ etc., there would, every year, sufficient business arise to
+ require at least one meeting, and at such meeting many things
+ might be suggested for the benefit of all the Colonies. This
+ annual meeting may either be at a time and place certain, to
+ be fixed by the President-General and Grand Council at their
+ first meeting; or left at liberty, to be at such time and place
+ as they shall adjourn to, or be called to meet at, by the
+ President-General.
+
+ In time of war, it seems convenient that the meeting should be
+ in that colony which is nearest the seat of action.
+
+ The power of calling them on any emergency seemed necessary to
+ be vested in the President-General; but, that such power might
+ not be wantonly used to harass the members, and oblige them to
+ make frequent long journeys to little purpose, the consent of
+ seven at least to such call was supposed a convenient guard.
+
+
+CONTINUANCE.
+
+That the Grand Council have power to choose their speaker; and shall
+neither be dissolved, prorogued, nor continued sitting longer than six
+weeks at one time, without their own consent or the special command of
+the crown.
+
+ The speaker should be presented for approbation; it being
+ convenient, to prevent misunderstandings and disgusts, that the
+ mouth of the Council should be a person agreeable, if possible,
+ to the Council and President-General.
+
+ Governors have sometimes wantonly exercised the power of
+ proroguing or continuing the sessions of assemblies, merely
+ to harass the members and compel a compliance; and sometimes
+ dissolve them on slight disgusts. This it was feared might be
+ done by the President-General, if not provided against; and
+ the inconvenience and hardship would be greater in the general
+ government than in particular Colonies, in proportion to the
+ distance the members must be from home during sittings, and the
+ long journeys some of them must necessarily take.
+
+
+MEMBER’S ALLOWANCE.
+
+That the members of the Grand Council shall be allowed for their service
+ten shillings per diem, during their session and journey to and from the
+place of meeting; twenty miles to be reckoned a day’s journey.
+
+ It was thought proper to allow some wages, lest the expense
+ might deter some suitable persons from the service; and not
+ to allow too great wages, lest unsuitable persons should be
+ tempted to cabal for the employment, for the sake of gain.
+ Twenty miles were set down as a day’s journey, to allow for
+ accidental hindrances on the road, and the greater expenses of
+ travelling than residing at the place of meeting.
+
+
+ASSENT OF PRESIDENT-GENERAL AND HIS DUTY.
+
+That the assent of the President-General be requisite to all acts of the
+Grand Council, and that it be his office and duty to cause them to be
+carried into execution.
+
+ The assent of the President-General to all acts of the Grand
+ Council was made necessary in order to give the crown its due
+ share of influence in this government, and connect it with that
+ of Great Britain. The President-General, besides one half of
+ the legislative power, hath in his hands the whole executive
+ power.
+
+
+POWER OF PRESIDENT-GENERAL AND GRAND COUNCIL, TREATIES OF PEACE AND WAR.
+
+That the President-General, with the advice of the Grand Council, hold or
+direct all Indian treaties, in which the general interest of the Colonies
+may be concerned, and make peace or declare war with Indian nations.
+
+ The power of making peace or war with Indian nations is at
+ present supposed to be in every Colony, and is expressly
+ granted to some by charter, so that no new power is hereby
+ intended to be granted to the Colonies. But as, in consequence
+ of this power, one Colony might make peace with a nation that
+ another was justly engaged in war with; or make war on slight
+ occasion without the concurrence or approbation of neighboring
+ Colonies, greatly endangered by it; or make particular treaties
+ of neutrality in case of a general war, to their own private
+ advantage in trade, by supplying the common enemy, of all which
+ there have been instances, it was thought better to have all
+ treaties of a general nature under a general direction, that so
+ the good of the whole may be consulted and provided for.
+
+
+INDIAN TRADE.
+
+That they make such laws as they judge necessary for regulating all
+Indian trade.
+
+ Many quarrels and wars have arisen between the colonies and
+ Indian nations, through the bad conduct of traders, who cheat
+ the Indians after making them drunk, etc., to the great expense
+ of the colonies, both in blood and treasure. Particular
+ colonies are so interested in the trade, as not to be willing
+ to admit such a regulation as might be best for the whole; and
+ therefore it was thought best under a general direction.
+
+
+INDIAN PURCHASES.
+
+That they make all purchases from Indians, for the crown, of lands not
+now within the bounds of particular colonies, or that shall not be within
+their bounds when some of them are reduced to more convenient dimensions.
+
+ Purchases from the Indians, made by private persons, have
+ been attended with many inconveniences. They have frequently
+ interfered and occasioned uncertainty of titles, many disputes
+ and expensive lawsuits, and hindered the settlement of the land
+ so disputed. Then the Indians have been cheated by such private
+ purchases, and discontent and wars have been the consequence.
+ These would be prevented by public fair purchases.
+
+ Several of the Colony charters in America extend their bounds
+ to the South Sea, which may perhaps be three or four thousand
+ miles in length to one or two hundred miles in breadth. It
+ is supposed they must in time be reduced to dimensions more
+ convenient for the common purposes of government.
+
+ Very little of the land in these grants is yet purchased of the
+ Indians.
+
+ It is much cheaper to purchase of them, than to take and
+ maintain the possession by force; for they are generally very
+ reasonable in their demands for land; and the expense of
+ guarding a large frontier against their incursions is vastly
+ great; because all must be guarded, and always guarded, as we
+ know not where or when to expect them.
+
+
+NEW SETTLEMENTS.
+
+That they make new settlements on such purchases by granting lands in
+the King’s name, reserving a quit-rent to the crown for the use of the
+general treasury.
+
+ It is supposed better that there should be one purchaser than
+ many; and that the crown should be that purchaser, or the Union
+ in the name of the crown. By this means the bargains may be
+ more easily made, the price not enhanced by numerous bidders,
+ future disputes about private Indian purchases, and monopolies
+ of vast tracts to particular persons (which are prejudicial to
+ the settlement and peopling of the country), prevented; and,
+ the land being again granted in small tracts to the settlers,
+ the quit-rents reserved may in time become a fund for support
+ of government, for defence of the country, ease of taxes, etc.
+
+ Strong forts on the Lakes, the Ohio, etc., may, at the same
+ time they secure our present frontiers, serve to defend new
+ colonies settled under their protection; and such colonies
+ would also mutually defend and support such forts, and better
+ secure the friendship of the far Indians.
+
+ A particular colony has scarce strength enough to exert itself
+ by new settlements, at so great a distance from the old; but
+ the joint force of the Union might suddenly establish a new
+ colony or two in those parts, or extend an old colony to
+ particular passes, greatly to the security of our present
+ frontiers, increase of trade and people, breaking off the
+ French communication between Canada and Louisiana, and speedy
+ settlement of the intermediate lands.
+
+ The power of settling new colonies is therefore thought a
+ valuable part of the plan, and what cannot so well be executed
+ by two unions as by one.
+
+
+LAWS TO GOVERN THEM.
+
+That they make laws for regulating and governing such new settlements,
+till the crown shall think fit to form them into particular governments.
+
+ The making of laws suitable for the new colonies, it was
+ thought, would be properly vested in the president-general
+ and grand council; under whose protection they must at first
+ necessarily be, and who would be well acquainted with their
+ circumstances, as having settled them. When they are become
+ sufficiently populous, they may by the crown be formed into
+ complete and distinct governments.
+
+ The appointment of a sub-president by the crown, to take place
+ in case of the death or absence of the president-general,
+ would perhaps be an improvement of the plan; and if all the
+ governors of particular provinces were to be formed into a
+ standing council of state, for the advice and assistance of the
+ president-general, it might be another considerable improvement.
+
+
+RAISE SOLDIERS, AND EQUIP VESSELS, ETC.
+
+That they raise and pay soldiers and build forts for the defence of any
+of the colonies, and equip vessels of force to guard the coasts and
+protect the trade on the ocean, lakes, or great rivers; but they shall
+not impress men in any colony, without the consent of the legislature.
+
+ It was thought, that quotas of men, to be raised and paid by
+ the several colonies, and joined for any public service, could
+ not always be got together with the necessary expedition.
+ For instance, suppose one thousand men should be wanted in
+ New Hampshire on any emergency. To fetch them by fifties
+ and hundreds out of every colony, as far as South Carolina,
+ would be inconvenient, the transportation chargeable, and the
+ occasion perhaps passed before they could be assembled; and
+ therefore it would be best to raise them (by offering bounty
+ money and pay) near the place where they would be wanted, to be
+ discharged again when the service should be over.
+
+ Particular colonies are at present backward to build forts
+ at their own expense, which they say will be equally useful
+ to their neighboring colonies, who refuse to join, on a
+ presumption that such forts will be built and kept up, though
+ they contribute nothing. This unjust conduct weakens the whole;
+ but, the forts being for the good of the whole, it was thought
+ best they should be built and maintained by the whole, out of
+ the common treasury.
+
+ In the time of war, small vessels of force are sometimes
+ necessary in the colonies to scour the coasts of small
+ privateers. These being provided by the Union will be an
+ advantage in turn to the colonies which are situated on the
+ sea, and whose frontiers on the land-side, being covered by
+ other colonies, reap but little immediate benefit from the
+ advanced forts.
+
+
+POWER TO MAKE LAWS, LAY DUTIES, ETC.
+
+That for these purposes they have power to make laws and lay and levy
+such general duties, imposts or taxes, as to them shall appear most
+equal and just (considering the ability and other circumstances of the
+inhabitants in the several colonies), and such as may be collected with
+the least inconvenience to the people; rather discouraging luxury, than
+loading industry with unnecessary burdens.
+
+ The laws which the president-general and grand council are
+ empowered to make are such only as shall be necessary for
+ the government of the settlements; the raising, regulating,
+ and paying soldiers for the general service; the regulating
+ of Indian trade; and laying and collecting the general
+ duties and taxes. They should also have a power to restrain
+ the exportation of provisions to the enemy from any of the
+ colonies, on particular occasions, in time of war. But it is
+ not intended that they may interfere with the constitution or
+ government of the particular colonies, who are to be left to
+ their own laws, and to lay, levy and apply their own taxes as
+ before.
+
+
+GENERAL TREASURER AND PARTICULAR TREASURER.
+
+That they may appoint a General Treasurer, and Particular Treasurer in
+government when necessary; and, from time to time, may order the sums in
+the treasuries of each government into the general treasury, or draw on
+them for special payments, as they find most convenient.
+
+ The treasurers here meant are only for the general funds and
+ not for the particular funds of each colony, which remain in
+ the hands of their own treasurers at their own disposal.
+
+
+MONEY, HOW TO ISSUE.
+
+Yet no money to issue but by joint orders of the President-General and
+Grand Council, except where sums have been appointed to particular
+purposes, and the President-General is previously empowered by an act to
+draw such sums.
+
+ To prevent misapplication of the money, or even application
+ that might be dissatisfactory to the crown or the people, it
+ was thought necessary to join the president-general and grand
+ council in all issues of money.
+
+
+ACCOUNTS.
+
+That the general accounts shall be yearly settled and reported to the
+several Assemblies.
+
+ By communicating the accounts yearly to each Assembly, they
+ will be satisfied of the prudent and honest conduct of their
+ representatives in the grand council.
+
+
+QUORUM.
+
+That a quorum of the Grand Council, empowered to act with the
+President-General, do consist of twenty-five members; among whom there
+shall be one or more from a majority of the Colonies.
+
+ The quorum seems large, but it was thought it would not be
+ satisfactory to the colonies in general, to have matters of
+ importance to the whole transacted by a smaller number, or even
+ by this number of twenty-five, unless there were among them one
+ at least from a majority of the colonies, because otherwise,
+ the whole quorum being made up of members from three or four
+ colonies at one end of the union, something might be done
+ that would not be equal with respect to the rest, and thence
+ dissatisfaction and discords might rise to the prejudice of the
+ whole.
+
+
+LAWS TO BE TRANSMITTED.
+
+That the laws made by them for the purposes aforesaid shall not be
+repugnant, but, as near as may be, agreeable to the laws of England, and
+shall be transmitted to the King in Council for approbation, as soon as
+may be after their passing; and if not disapproved within three years
+after presentation, to remain in force.
+
+ This was thought necessary for the satisfaction of the crown,
+ to preserve the connection of the parts of the British empire
+ with the whole, of the members with the head, and to induce
+ greater care and circumspection in making of the laws, that
+ they be good in themselves and for the general benefit.
+
+
+DEATH OF THE PRESIDENT-GENERAL.
+
+That, in case of the death of the President-General, the Speaker of the
+Grand Council for the time being shall succeed, and be vested with the
+same powers and authorities, to continue till the King’s pleasure be
+known.
+
+ It might be better, perhaps, as was said before, if the crown
+ appointed a vice-president, to take place on the death or
+ absence of the president-general; for so we should be more sure
+ of a suitable person at the head of the colonies. On the death
+ or absence of both, the speaker to take place (or rather the
+ eldest King’s governor) till his Majesty’s pleasure be known.
+
+
+OFFICERS, HOW APPOINTED.
+
+That all military commission officers, whether for land or sea service,
+to act under this general constitution, shall be nominated by the
+President-General; but the approbation of the Grand Council is to
+be obtained, before they receive their commissions. And all civil
+officers are to be nominated by the Grand Council, and to receive the
+President-General’s approbation before they officiate.
+
+ It was thought it might be very prejudicial to the service, to
+ have officers appointed unknown to the people or unacceptable,
+ the generality of Americans serving willingly under officers
+ they know; and not caring to engage in the service under
+ strangers, or such as are often appointed by governors through
+ favor or interest. The service here meant, is not the stated,
+ settled service in standing troops; but any sudden and short
+ service, either for defence of our colonies, or invading the
+ enemy’s country (such as the expedition to Cape Breton in the
+ last war; in which many substantial farmers and tradesmen
+ engaged as common soldiers, under officers of their own
+ country, for whom they had an esteem and affection; who would
+ not have engaged in a standing army, or under officers from
+ England). It was therefore thought best to give the Council the
+ power of approving the officers, which the people will look on
+ as a great security of their being good men. And without some
+ such provision as this, it was thought the expense of engaging
+ men in the service on any emergency would be much greater,
+ and the number who could be induced to engage much less; and
+ that therefore it would be most for the King’s service and the
+ general benefit of the nation, that the prerogative should
+ relax a little in this particular throughout all the colonies
+ in America; as it had already done much more in the charters
+ of some particular colonies, viz.: Connecticut and Rhode Island.
+
+ The civil officers will be chiefly treasurers and collectors of
+ taxes; and the suitable persons are most likely to be known by
+ the council.
+
+
+VACANCIES, HOW SUPPLIED.
+
+But, in case of vacancy by death or removal of any officer civil or
+military, under this constitution, the Governor of the province in
+which such vacancy happens, may appoint, till the pleasure of the
+President-General and Grand Council can be known.
+
+ The vacancies were thought best supplied by the governors in
+ each province, till a new appointment can be regularly made;
+ otherwise the service might suffer before the meeting of the
+ president-general and grand council.
+
+
+EACH COLONY MAY DEFEND ITSELF IN EMERGENCY, ETC.
+
+That the particular military as well as civil establishments in
+each colony remain in their present state, the general constitution
+notwithstanding; and that on sudden emergencies any colony may defend
+itself, and lay the accounts of expense thence arising before the
+president-general and general council, who may allow and order payment of
+the same, as far as they judge such accounts just and reasonable.
+
+ Otherwise the union of the whole would weaken the parts,
+ contrary to the design of the union. The accounts are to be
+ judged of by the president-general and grand council, and
+ allowed if found reasonable. This was thought necessary to
+ encourage colonies to defend themselves, as the expense would
+ be light when borne by the whole; and also to check imprudent
+ and lavish expense in such defences.
+
+
+ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION—1777.
+
+To all to whom these Presents shall come, we the undersigned Delegates of
+the States affixed to our Names, send greeting.
+
+WHEREAS the Delegates of the United States of America in Congress
+assembled did on the fifteenth day of November in the Year of our
+Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Seventyseven, and in the Second
+Year of the Independence of America agree to certain articles of
+Confederation and perpetual Union between the States of Newhampshire,
+Massachusetts-bay, Rhode-island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut,
+New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia,
+North-Carolina, South-Carolina and Georgia in the Words following, viz.
+
+Articles of Confederation and perpetual Union between the States of
+Newhampshire, Massachusetts-bay, Rhode-island and Providence Plantations,
+Connecticut, New-York, New-Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland,
+Virginia, North-Carolina, South-Carolina and Georgia.
+
+ARTICLE I. The stile of this confederacy shall be “The United States of
+America.”
+
+ARTICLE II. Each State retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence,
+and every power, jurisdiction and right, which is not by this
+confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress
+assembled.
+
+ARTICLE III. The said States hereby severally enter into a firm league
+of friendship with each other, for their common defence, the security of
+their liberties, and their mutual and general welfare, binding themselves
+to assist each other, against all force offered to, or attacks made upon
+them, or any of them, on account of religion, sovereignty, trade, or any
+other pretence whatever.
+
+ARTICLE IV. The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and
+intercourse among the people of the different States in this Union,
+the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds and
+fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and
+immunities of free citizens in the several States; and the people of each
+State shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other State,
+and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce, subject
+to the same duties, impositions and restrictions as the inhabitants
+thereof respectively, provided that such restrictions shall not extend
+so far as to prevent the removal of property imported into any State, to
+any other State of which the owner is an inhabitant; provided also that
+no imposition, duties or restriction shall be laid by any State, on the
+property of the United States, or either of them.
+
+If any person guilty of, or charged with treason, felony, or other high
+misdemeanor in any State, shall flee from justice, and be found in any
+of the United States, he shall upon demand of the Governor or Executive
+power, of the State from which he fled, be delivered up and removed to
+the State having jurisdiction of his offence.
+
+Full faith and credit shall be given in each of these States to the
+records, acts and judicial proceedings of the courts and magistrates of
+every other State.
+
+ARTICLE V. For the more convenient management of the general interests of
+the United States, delegates shall be annually appointed in such manner
+as the legislature of each State shall direct, to meet in Congress on the
+first Monday in November, in every year, with a power reserved to each
+State, to recall its delegates, or any of them, at any time within the
+year, and to send others in their stead, for the remainder of the year.
+
+No State shall be represented in Congress by less than two, nor by more
+than seven members; and no person shall be capable of being a delegate
+for more than three years in any term of six years; nor shall any person,
+being a delegate, be capable of holding any office under the United
+States, for which he, or another for his benefit receives any salary,
+fees or emolument of any kind.
+
+Each State shall maintain its own delegates in a meeting of the States,
+and while they act as members of the committee of the States.
+
+In determining questions in the United States, in Congress assembled,
+each State shall have one vote.
+
+Freedom of speech and debate in Congress shall not be impeached or
+questioned in any court, or place out of Congress, and the members
+of Congress shall be protected in their persons from arrests and
+imprisonments, during the time of their going to and from, and attendance
+on Congress, except for treason, felony, or breach of the peace.
+
+ARTICLE VI. No State without the consent of the United States in Congress
+assembled, shall send any embassy to, or receive any embassy from, or
+enter into any conference, agreement, alliance or treaty with any king,
+prince or state; nor shall any person holding any office of profit or
+trust under the United States, or any of them, accept of any present,
+emolument, office or title of any kind whatever from any king, prince or
+foreign state; nor shall the United States in Congress assembled, or any
+of them, grant any title of nobility.
+
+No two or more States shall enter into any treaty, confederation or
+alliance whatever between them, without the consent of the United States
+in Congress assembled, specifying accurately the purposes for which the
+same is to be entered into, and how long it shall continue.
+
+No State shall lay any imposts or duties, which may interfere with any
+stipulations in treaties, entered into by the United States in Congress
+assembled, with any king, prince or state, in pursuance of any treaties
+already proposed by Congress, to the courts of France and Spain.
+
+No vessels of war shall be kept up in time of peace by any State, except
+such number only, as shall be deemed necessary by the United States in
+Congress assembled, for the defence of such State, or its trade; nor
+shall any body of forces be kept up by any State, in time of peace,
+except such number only, as in the judgment of the United States, in
+Congress assembled, shall be deemed requisite to garrison the forts
+necessary for the defence of such State; but every State shall always
+keep up a well regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed and
+accoutred, and shall provide and constantly have ready for use, in public
+stores, a due number of field-pieces and tents, and a proper quantity of
+arms, ammunition and camp equipage.
+
+No State shall engage in any war without the consent of the United States
+in Congress assembled, unless such State be actually invaded by enemies,
+or shall have received certain advice of a resolution being formed
+by some nation of Indians to invade such State, and the danger is so
+imminent as not to admit of a delay, till the United States in Congress
+assembled can be consulted: nor shall any State grant commissions to any
+ships or vessels of war, nor letters of marque or reprisal, except it be
+after a declaration of war by the United States in Congress assembled,
+and then only against the kingdom or state and the subjects thereof,
+against which war has been so declared, and under such regulations
+as shall be established by the United States in Congress assembled,
+unless such State be infested by pirates, in which case vessels of war
+may be fitted out for that occasion, and kept so long as the danger
+shall continue, or until the United States in Congress assembled shall
+determine otherwise.
+
+ARTICLE VII. When land forces are raised by any State for the common
+defence, all officers of or under the rank of colonel, shall be
+appointed by the Legislature of each State respectively by whom such
+forces shall be raised, or in such manner as such State shall direct,
+and all vacancies shall be filled up by the State which first made the
+appointment.
+
+ARTICLE VIII. All charges of war, and all other expenses that shall be
+incurred for the common defence or general welfare, and allowed by the
+United States in Congress assembled, shall be defrayed out of a common
+treasury, which shall be supplied by the several States, in proportion
+to the value of all land within each State, granted to or surveyed for
+any person, as such land and the buildings and improvements thereon shall
+be estimated according to such mode as the United States in Congress
+assembled, shall from time to time direct and appoint.
+
+The taxes for paying that proportion shall be laid and levied by the
+authority and direction of the Legislatures of the several States within
+the time agreed upon by the United States in Congress assembled.
+
+ARTICLE IX. The United States in Congress assembled, shall have the sole
+and exclusive right and power of determining on peace and war, except
+in the cases mentioned in the sixth article—of sending and receiving
+ambassadors—entering into treaties and alliances, provided that no
+treaty of commerce shall be made whereby the legislative power of the
+respective States shall be restrained from imposing such imposts and
+duties on foreigners, as their own people are subjected to, or from
+prohibiting the exportation or importation of any species of goods or
+commodities whatsoever—of establishing rules for deciding in all cases,
+what captures on land or water shall be legal, and in what manner prizes
+taken by land or naval forces in the service of the United States shall
+be divided or appropriated—of granting letters of marque and reprisal in
+times of peace—appointing courts for the trial of piracies and felonies
+committed on the high seas and establishing courts for receiving and
+determining finally appeals in all cases of captures, provided that no
+member of Congress shall be appointed a judge of any of the said courts.
+
+The United States in Congress assembled shall also be the last resort on
+appeal in all disputes and differences now subsisting or that hereafter
+may arise between two or more States concerning boundary, jurisdiction
+or any other cause whatever; which authority shall always be exercised
+in the manner following. Whenever the legislative or executive authority
+or lawful agent of any State in controversy with another shall present
+a petition to Congress, stating the matter in question and praying for
+a hearing, notice thereof shall be given by order of Congress to the
+legislative or executive authority of the other State in controversy, and
+a day assigned for the appearance of the parties by their lawful agents,
+who shall then be directed to appoint by joint consent, commissioners or
+judges to constitute a court for hearing and determining the matter in
+question: but if they cannot agree, Congress shall name three persons
+out of each of the United States, and from the list of such persons each
+party shall alternately strike out one, the petitioners beginning, until
+the number shall be reduced to thirteen; and from that number not less
+than seven, nor more than nine names as Congress shall direct, shall in
+the presence of Congress be drawn out by lot, and the persons whose names
+shall be so drawn or any five of them, shall be commissioners or judges,
+to hear and finally determine the controversy, so always as a major part
+of the judges who shall hear the cause shall agree in the determination:
+and if either party shall neglect to attend at the day appointed, without
+showing reasons, which Congress shall judge sufficient, or being present
+shall refuse to strike, the Congress shall proceed to nominate three
+persons out of each State, and the Secretary of Congress shall strike in
+behalf of such party absent or refusing; and the judgment and sentence
+of the court to be appointed, in the manner before prescribed, shall be
+final and conclusive; and if any of the parties shall refuse to submit
+to the authority of such court, or to appear or defend their claim or
+cause, the court shall nevertheless proceed to pronounce sentence, or
+judgment, which shall in like manner be final and decisive, the judgment
+or sentence and other proceedings being in either case transmitted to
+Congress, and lodged among the acts of Congress for the security of the
+parties concerned: provided that every commissioner, before he sits in
+judgment, shall take an oath to be administered by one of the judges
+of the supreme or superior court of the State where the cause shall be
+tried, “well and truly to hear and determine the matter in question,
+according to the best of his judgment, without favour, affection or hope
+of reward:” provided also that no State shall be deprived of territory
+for the benefit of the United States.
+
+All controversies concerning the private right of soil claimed under
+different grants of two or more States, whose jurisdiction as they may
+respect such lands, and the States which passed such grants are adjusted,
+the said grants or either of them being at the same time claimed to have
+originated antecedent to such settlement of jurisdiction, shall on the
+petition of either party to the Congress of the United States, be finally
+determined as near as may be in the same manner as is before prescribed
+for deciding disputes respecting territorial jurisdiction between
+different States.
+
+The United States in Congress assembled shall also have the sole
+and exclusive right and power of regulating the alloy and value of
+coin struck by their own authority, or by that of the respective
+States—fixing the standard of weights and measures throughout the United
+States—regulating the trade and managing all affairs with the Indians,
+not members of any of the States, provided that the legislative right of
+any State within its own limits be not infringed or violated—establishing
+and regulating post-offices from one State to another, throughout all
+the United States, and exacting such postage on the papers passing
+thro’ the same as may be requisite to defray the expenses of the said
+office—appointing all officers of the land forces, in the service of
+the United States, excepting regimental officers—appointing all the
+officers of the naval forces, and commissioning all officers whatever
+in the service of the United States—making rules for the government
+and regulation of the said land and naval forces, and directing their
+operations.
+
+The United States in Congress assembled shall have authority to appoint
+a committee, to sit in the recess of Congress, to be denominated “a
+Committee of the States,” and to consist of one delegate from each
+State; and to appoint such other committees and civil officers as may be
+necessary for managing the general affairs of the United States under
+their direction—to appoint one of their number to preside, provided that
+no person be allowed to serve in the office of president more than one
+year in any term of three years; to ascertain the necessary sums of money
+to be raised for the service of the United States, and to appropriate
+and apply the same for defraying the public expenses—to borrow money,
+or emit bills on the credit of the United States, transmitting every
+half year to the respective States an account of the sums of money so
+borrowed or emitted,—to build and equip a navy—to agree upon the number
+of land forces, and to make requisitions from each State for its quota,
+in proportion to the number of white inhabitants in such State; which
+requisition shall be binding, and thereupon the Legislature of each State
+shall appoint the regimental officers, raise the men and cloath, arm and
+equip them in a soldier like manner, at the expense of the United States;
+and the officers and men so cloathed, armed and equipped shall march to
+the place appointed, and within the time agreed on by the United States
+in Congress assembled: but if the United States in Congress assembled
+shall, on consideration of circumstances judge proper that any State
+should not raise men, or should raise a smaller number than its quota,
+and that any other State should raise a greater number of men than the
+quota thereof, such extra number shall be raised, officered, cloathed,
+armed and equipped in the same manner as the quota of such State, unless
+the legislature of such State shall judge that such extra number cannot
+be safely spared out of the same, in which case they shall raise,
+officer, cloath, arm and equip as many of such extra number as they judge
+can be safely spared. And the officers and men so cloathed, armed and
+equipped, shall march to the place appointed, and within the time agreed
+on by the United States in Congress assembled.
+
+The United States in Congress assembled shall never engage in a war, nor
+grant letters of marque and reprisal in time of peace, nor enter into any
+treaties or alliances, nor coin money, nor regulate the value thereof,
+nor ascertain the sums and expenses necessary for the defence and welfare
+of the United States, or any of them, nor emit bills, nor borrow money on
+the credit of the United States, nor appropriate money, nor agree upon
+the number of vessels of war, to be built or purchased, or the number of
+land or sea forces to be raised, nor appoint a commander-in-chief of the
+army or navy, unless nine States assent to the same: nor shall a question
+on any other point, except for adjourning from day to day be determined,
+unless by the votes of a majority of the United States in Congress
+assembled.
+
+The Congress of the United States shall have power to adjourn to any
+time within the year, and to any place within the United States, so that
+no period of adjournment be for a longer duration than the space of six
+months, and shall publish the journal of their proceedings monthly,
+except such parts thereof relating to treaties, alliances or military
+operations, as in their judgment require secresy; and the yeas and nays
+of the delegates of each State on any question shall be entered on the
+journal, when it is desired by any delegate; and the delegates of a
+State, or any of them, at his or their request shall be furnished with a
+transcript of the said journal, except such parts as are above excepted,
+to lay before the Legislatures of the several States.
+
+ARTICLE X. The committee of the States, or any nine of them, shall be
+authorized to execute, in the recess of Congress, such of the powers
+of Congress as the United States in Congress assembled, by the consent
+of nine States, shall from time to time think expedient to vest them
+with; provided that no power be delegated to the said committee, for the
+exercise of which, by the articles of confederation, the voice of nine
+States in the Congress of the United States assembled is requisite.
+
+ARTICLE XI. Canada acceding to this confederation, and joining in the
+measures of the United States, shall be admitted into, and entitled to
+all the advantages of this Union: but no other colony shall be admitted
+into the same, unless such admission be agreed to by nine States.
+
+ARTICLE XII. All bills of credit emitted, monies borrowed and debts
+contracted by, or under the authority of Congress, before the assembling
+of the United States, in pursuance of the present confederation, shall be
+deemed and considered as a charge against the United States, for payment
+and satisfaction whereof the said United States, and the public faith are
+hereby solemnly pledged.
+
+ARTICLE XIII. Every State shall abide by the determinations of the
+United States in Congress assembled, on all questions which by
+this confederation are submitted to them. And the articles of this
+confederation shall be inviolably observed by every State, and the Union
+shall be perpetual; nor shall any alteration at any time hereafter be
+made in any of them; unless such alteration be agreed to in a Congress
+of the United States, and be afterwards confirmed by the Legislatures of
+every State.
+
+And whereas it has pleased the Great Governor of the world to incline
+the hearts of the Legislatures we respectively represent in Congress,
+to approve of, and to authorize us to ratify the said articles of
+confederation and perpetual union. Know ye that we the undersigned
+delegates, by virtue of the power and authority to us given for that
+purpose, do by these presents, in the name and in behalf of our
+respective constituents, fully and entirely ratify and confirm each and
+every of the said articles of confederation and perpetual union, and all
+and singular the matters and things therein contained: and we do further
+solemnly plight and engage the faith of our respective constituents,
+that they shall abide by the determinations of the United States in
+Congress assembled, on all questions, which by the said confederation
+are submitted to them. And that the articles thereof shall be inviolably
+observed by the States we re[s]pectively represent, and that the Union
+shall be perpetual.
+
+In witness whereof we have hereunto set our hands in Congress. Done at
+Philadelphia in the State of Pennsylvania the ninth day of July in the
+year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-eight, and in the
+third year of the independence of America.
+
+On the part & behalf of the State of New Hampshire.
+
+ JOSIAH BARTLETT,
+ JOHN WENTWORTH, Junr.,
+ August 8th, 1778.
+
+On the part and behalf of the State of Massachusetts Bay.
+
+ JOHN HANCOCK,
+ SAMUEL ADAMS,
+ ELBRIDGE GERRY,
+ FRANCIS DANA,
+ JAMES LOVELL,
+ SAMUEL HOLTEN.
+
+On the part and behalf of the State of Rhode Island and Providence
+Plantations.
+
+ WILLIAM ELLERY,
+ HENRY MARCHANT,
+ JOHN COLLINS.
+
+On the part and behalf of the State of Connecticut.
+
+ ROGER SHERMAN,
+ SAMUEL HUNTINGTON,
+ OLIVER WOLCOTT,
+ TITUS HOSMER,
+ ANDREW ADAMS.
+
+On the part and behalf of the State of New York.
+
+ JAS. DUANE,
+ FRA. LEWIS,
+ WM. DUER,
+ GOUV. MORRIS.
+
+On the part and in behalf of the State of New Jersey, Novr. 26, 1778.
+
+ JNO. WITHERSPOON,
+ NATH. SCUDDER.
+
+On the part and behalf of the State of Pennsylvania.
+
+ ROBT. MORRIS,
+ DANIEL ROBERDEAU,
+ JONA. BAYARD SMITH,
+ WILLIAM CLINGAN,
+ JOSEPH REED, 22d July, 1778.
+
+On the part & behalf of the State of Delaware.
+
+ THO. M’KEAN, Feby. 12, 1779.
+ JOHN DICKINSON, May 5th, 1779.
+ NICHOLAS VAN DYKE.
+
+On the part and behalf of the State of Maryland.
+
+ JOHN HANSON, March 1, 1781.
+ DANIEL CARROLL, Mar. 1, 1781.
+
+On the part and behalf of the State of Virginia.
+
+ RICHARD HENRY LEE,
+ JOHN BANISTER,
+ THOMAS ADAMS,
+ JNO. HARVIE,
+ FRANCIS LIGHTFOOT LEE.
+
+On the part and behalf of the State of No. Carolina.
+
+ JOHN PENN, July 21, 1778.
+ CORNS. HARNETT,
+ JNO. WILLIAMS.
+
+On the part and behalf of the State of South Carolina.
+
+ HENRY LAURENS,
+ WILLIAM HENRY DRAYTON,
+ THOS. HEYWARD, Junr.
+ JNO. MATHEWS,
+ RICHD. HUTSON.
+
+On the part and behalf of the State of Georgia.
+
+ JNO. WALTON, 24th July, 1778.
+ EDWD. TELFAIR,
+ EDWD. LANGWORTHY.
+
+
+END OF VOL. II.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78469 ***
generated by cgit v1.2.3 (git 2.25.1) at 2026-05-16 21:50:17 +0000