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Title: A history of the American people, Vol. 2 [of 5]
Colonies and nation
Author: Woodrow Wilson
Release date: April 16, 2026 [eBook #78469]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1901
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78469
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, VOL. 2 [OF 5] ***
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.
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