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.