CHAPTER II

THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

No one who marked how the English colonies had grown, and how the French

had lagged in the effectual settlement and mastery of the regions they

had taken, could wonder that in the final struggle for supremacy the

English had won and the French lost everything there was to fight for.

The French had been as long on the continent as the English, and yet they

did not have one-tenth the strength of the English, either in population

or in wealth, when this war came. There were fifty-five thousand white

colonists in Canada, all told; and only twenty-five thousand more in all

the thin line of posts and hamlets which stretched from the St. Lawrence

through the long valley of the Mississippi to the Gulf,—eighty thousand

in all. In the English settlements there were more than a million

colonists (1,160,000), not scattered in separated posts set far apart in

the forested wilderness, but clustered thick in towns and villages, or

in neighborly plantations, where the forest had been cleared away, roads

made, and trade and peace established. The English had been seeking,

not conquest, but comfort and wealth in busy centres and populous

country-sides, where their life now ran as strong and as calm, almost, as

if they were still in the old lands of England itself. The French, on

the contrary, were placed where their government wished them to be; could

hardly be said to have formed independent communities at all; and were

glad if they could so much as eke out a decent subsistence from the soil,

or from food brought by ship from France over sea. The English spread

very slowly, considering how fast they came, and kept in some sort a

solid mass; but the result was that they thoroughly possessed the country

as they went, and made homes, working out a life of their own. The French

merely built frontier posts, the while, on the lakes and rivers, as they

were bidden or guided or exhorted by their governors; took up such land

as was assigned them by royal order; did their daily stint of work, and

expected nothing better. They were, moreover, painfully, perilously

isolated. Ships could come from England to any part of the English coasts

of America in five weeks, whereas it was a good six months’ journey from

France to the frontier posts upon the lakes or by the far-away western

rivers. The St. Lawrence was closed for nearly half the year by ice;

and it was a weary task to get any boat up the stream of the endless

Mississippi against its slow tide of waters and through the puzzling,

shifting channels of its winding course.

The Marquis Duquesne had called the Iroquois to a council in 1754, ere

he left his governorship, and had commended his sovereign’s government

to them because of this very difference between French and English. “Are

you ignorant,” he said, “of the difference between the King of England

and the King of France? Go, see the forts that our King has established,

and you will see that you can still hunt under their very walls. They

have been placed for your advantage in places which you frequent. The

English, on the contrary, are no sooner in possession of a place than

the game is driven away. The forest falls before them as they advance,

and the soil is laid bare so that you can scarce find the wherewithal

to erect a shelter for the night.” Perhaps Duquesne, being a soldier

and no statesman, did not realize all that this difference meant. The

French posts, with the forests close about them, were not self-supporting

communities such as everywhere filled the English dominion. Their

governors were soldiers, their inhabitants a garrison, the few settlers

near at hand traders, not husbandmen, or at best mere tenants of the

crown of France. No doubt it was easier for the savages to approach and

trade with them; but it would turn out to be infinitely harder for the

French to keep them. Their occupants had struck no deep rootage into the

soil they were seated upon, as the English had.

Englishmen themselves had noted, with some solicitude, how slow their

own progress was away from the sea-coast. It was not until 1725 that

settlers in Massachusetts had ventured to go so far away from the Bay

as the Berkshire Hills. “Our country has now been inhabited more than

one hundred and thirty years,” exclaimed Colonel Byrd, of Virginia, in

1729, “and still we hardly know anything of the Appalachian Mountains,

that are nowhere above two hundred and fifty miles from the sea. Whereas

the French, who are later comers, have ranged from Quebec southward as

far as the mouth of the Mississippi, in the Bay of Mexico, and to the

west almost as far as California, which is either way above two thousand

miles.” But Colonel Byrd was thinking of discovery, not of settlement;

the search for minerals and the natural wealth of the forests, not the

search for places to which to extend permanent homes and government. The

difference arose out of the fundamental unlikeness of French and English,

both in life and in government.

[Illustration: WILLIAM BYRD]

The statesmen of both France and England accepted the same theory about

the use colonies should be put to,—the doctrine and practice everywhere

accepted in their day. Colonies were to be used to enrich the countries

which possessed them. They should send their characteristic native

products to the country which had established them, and for the most

part to her alone, and should take her manufactures in exchange; trade

nowhere else to her disadvantage; and do and make nothing which could

bring them into competition with her merchants and manufacturers. But

England applied this theory in one way, France in another. It was

provoking enough to the English colonists in America to have, in many a

petty matter, to evade the exacting Navigation Acts, which restricted

their trade and obliged them to buy manufactured goods at prices fixed

by the English merchants. It a little cramped and irritated them that

they were forbidden to manufacture now this and now that, though the

material lay at their very doors, because English manufacturers wished

their competition shut out. Restriction was added to restriction. In

1706, naval stores and rice, which the Carolinas were learning to produce

to their increasing profit, were added to the list of products which

must be sent to England only; and in 1722 copper and furs. In 1732 the

manufacture of beaver hats was forbidden, and in 1750 the maintenance

of iron furnaces or slit mills. But there was always an effort made at

reciprocal advantage. Though the colonies were forbidden to manufacture

their iron ores, their bar and pig iron was admitted into England free of

duty, and Swedish iron, which might have undersold it, was held off by a

heavy tariff, to the manifest advantage of Maryland and Virginia. Though

the rice of the Carolinas for a time got admission to market only through

the English middlemen, their naval stores were exported under a heavy

bounty; and in 1730, when the restriction laid on the rice trade pinched

too shrewdly, it was removed with regard to Portugal, the chief European

market open to it. Parliament had generally an eye to building up the

trade of the colonies as well as to controlling it.

[Illustration: Plan of the CITY OF NEW YORK 1767.]

The home government, moreover, though it diligently imposed restrictions,

was by no means as diligent in enforcing them. An ill-advised statute of

1733 laid prohibitory duties on the importation of sugar, molasses, and

rum out of the French West Indies, in the hope that the sales of sugar

and molasses in the islands owned by England might be increased. To

enforce the act would have been to hazard the utter commercial ruin of

New England. Out of the cheap molasses of the French islands she made the

rum which was a chief source of her wealth,—the rum with which she bought

slaves for Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and paid her balances

to the English merchants. But no serious attempt was made to enforce it.

Customs officers and merchants agreed in ignoring it, and officers of the

crown shut their eyes to the trade which it forbade. Smuggling upon that

long coast was a simple matter, and even at the chief ports only a little

circumspection was needed about cargoes out of the Indies.

Moreover, the men who governed in England contented themselves with

general restrictions and did not go on to manage the very lives of the

colonists in the colonies themselves. That was what the French did. They

built their colonies up by royal order; sent emigrants out as they sent

troops, at the King’s expense and by the King’s direction; could get only

men to go, therefore, for the most part, and very few women or families.

For the English there was nothing of the sort, after the first. Rich men

or great mercantile companies might help emigrants with money or supplies

or free gifts of land in order to fill up the colonies which the crown

had given them the right to establish and govern; but only those went

out who volunteered. Emigrants went, moreover, in families, after the

first years were passed and the colonies fairly started, if not at the

very outset of the enterprise,—in associated groups, congregations, and

small volunteer communities. When they reached the appointed place of

settlement they were left to shift for themselves, as they had expected,

exactly as they would have been at home; and they insisted upon having

the same rights and freedom they would have had there. They were making

homes, without assistance or favor, and for their own use and benefit.

It was inevitable in the circumstances that their colonial governments

should be like themselves, home-made and free from control in the

management of what chiefly concerned their own lives. They were just

as hard to supervise and regulate when the settlements were small as

when they grew large and populous,—a little harder, indeed, because the

colonists were the more anxious then about how the new life they were

beginning was to go, and the less sure of their power or influence to

resist the efforts of the crown to manage and interfere with them. By

the time the French war came there was no mistaking the fact that the

English colonies had grown to be miniature states, proud, hard-fibred,

independent in temper, practised in affairs. They had, as Edmund Burke

said, “formed within themselves, either by royal instruction or royal

charter, assemblies so exceedingly resembling a parliament, in all their

forms, functions, and powers, that it was impossible they should not

imbibe some opinion of a similar authority.” At first, no doubt, their

assemblies had been intended to be little more than the managing bodies

of corporations. “But nothing in progression can rest on its original

plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an

infant. Therefore, as the colonies prospered and increased to a numerous

and mighty people, spreading over a very great tract of the globe, it

was natural that they should attribute to assemblies so respectable in

their formal constitution some part of the dignity of the great nations

which they represented.” They “made acts of all sorts and in all cases

whatsoever. They levied money upon regular grants to the crown, following

all the rules and principles of a parliament, to which they approached

every day more and more nearly.” And Burke saw how inevitable, as well as

how natural, the whole growth had been. “Things could not be otherwise,”

he said; “English colonies must be had on these terms, or not had at all.”

[Illustration: EDMUND BURKE]

They had used their governments for their own purposes, and rather like

independent states than like dependent communities. In every colony the

chief point of conflict between governor and assembly, whether in the

proprietary or in the crown colonies, had always been connected with the

subject of salaries. Again and again governors had been instructed to

insist upon an adequate income, charged permanently upon some regular

source of public revenue; but again and again, as often as made, their

demand had been refused. They could get only annual grants, which kept

all officers of the crown dependent upon the people’s assemblies for

maintenance while in office. There had long been signs that the ministers

of the King and the proprietors at home were tired of the contest, and

meant, for the mere sake of peace, to let the colonial assemblies alone,

to rule, as Parliament ruled, by keeping control of the moneys spent upon

their own governments.

There was, too, more and more money in the colonies as the years went by.

New England, where, except in the rich valley of the Connecticut, the

soil yielded little beyond the bare necessaries of life, led the rest

of the colonies in the variety of her industries. Though parliamentary

statutes forbade the making of woollen goods or hats or steel for export,

the colonists were free to make anything they might need for use or

sale within a single colony or in their own homes; and the thrifty New

England farmers and villagers made most of their own furniture, tools,

and household utensils, while their women or the village weavers wove the

linen and woollen stuffs of which their clothes were made. They lived

upon their own resources as no other colonists did. And their trade kept

six hundred vessels busy plying to and fro to English and foreign ports.

Almost every sea-coast hamlet was a port and maintained its little fleet.

A thousand vessels, big and little, went every year to the fisheries,

or up and down the coasts carrying the trade between colony and colony.

A great many of these vessels the colonists had built themselves, out

of the splendid timber which stood almost everywhere at hand in their

forests; and every one knew who knew anything at all about New England

that her seamen were as daring, shrewd, and hardy as those bred in past

generations in the Devonshire ports of old England. Their boats flocked

by the hundreds every year to the misty, perilous banks of Newfoundland,

where the cod were to be caught. They beat up and down the long seas in

search of the whale all the way from “the frozen recesses of Hudson’s

Bay and Davis’s Straits” to the coasts of Africa and Brazil, far in the

south. “Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France,

nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise,” exclaimed

Burke, “ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the

extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people,—a people who

are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the

bone, of manhood.”

Massachusetts had been known, while peace held and men breathed freely,

between Queen Anne’s and King George’s wars, to complete one hundred and

fifty ships in a single year, every town upon the coast and even little

villages far within the rivers launching vessels from busy shipyards.

Ship building became New England’s chief industry; and in 1724 the master

builders of the Thames prayed Parliament for protection against the

competition of the colonies. The annual catch of whale and cod by the

New Englanders was worth two hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling;

and, besides fish and fish-oil, they shipped their fine timber, and not

a little hay and grain even, across the sea or to the other colonies.

Everywhere in America the forests yielded splendid timber, as his

Majesty’s ministers well knew: for they sent into the northern forests of

pine and had the tallest, straightest trees there marked with the royal

arms, as a notice that they were reserved to be used as masts for his

Majesty’s war-ships,—as if the King had a right to take what he would.

[Illustration: VIEW OF THE BUILDINGS BELONGING TO HARVARD COLLEGE,

CAMBRIDGE, NEW ENGLAND, 1726]

“New England improved much faster than Virginia,” Colonel Byrd admitted;

and yet Virginia had her own rich trade, of which tobacco was the chief

staple; and all the colonies busied themselves as they could, and

visibly grew richer year by year. The middle colonies were scarcely less

industrious than those of the bleaker north, and prospered even more

readily with their kindlier climate and their richer soil. Pennsylvania,

with her two hundred and twenty thousand colonists, with her thrifty

mixture of Germans, Quakers, Scots, and Scots-Irishmen, needed a fleet

of four hundred sail to carry each season’s spare produce from the docks

at Philadelphia; and New York had her separate fleet of close upon two

hundred sail.

England depended upon the colonies for much of the naval stores, of

the potash, and of the pearlash which she needed every year. Mines of

iron and of copper had been opened both in the middle colonies and in

the south. The colonists made their own brick for building, and their

own paper and glass, as well as their own coarse stuffs for clothing,

and many of their own hats of beaverskin. Substantial houses and fine,

sightly streets sprang up in the towns which stood at the chief seaports;

and in the country spacious country seats, solidly built, roomy, full of

the simpler comforts of gentlefolk. The ships which took hides and fish

and provisions to the West Indies brought sugar and molasses and wine and

many a delicacy back upon their return, and the colonists ate and drank

and bore themselves like other well-to-do citizens the world over. They

were eager always to know what the London fashions were; there was as

much etiquette to be observed upon quiet plantations in Virginia as in

English drawing rooms. It was, indeed, touched with a certain beauty of

its own, because of the provincial simplicity and frank neighborliness

which went along with it; but it was grave and punctilious, and intended

to be like London manners. There was as much formality and gayety “in the

season” at Williamsburg, Virginia’s village capital, as in Philadelphia,

the biggest, wealthiest, most stately town in the colonies.

[Illustration: NASSAU HALL, PRINCETON COLLEGE, 1760]

[Illustration: KING’S COLLEGE, NEW YORK, 1758]

There were many ways in which the colonies finished and filled out

their lives which showed that they regarded themselves as in a sense

independent communities and meant to provide for themselves everything

they needed for their life alone on a separate continent. They had no

thought of actually breaking away from their allegiance to the home

government over sea; but no man could possibly overlook the three

thousand miles of water that stretched between England and America. At

that immense distance they were obliged in great measure to look out for

themselves and contrive their own ways of sustenance and development,

and their own way of culture. Before the French war began, two more

colleges, in addition to Harvard in Massachusetts and William and Mary

in Virginia, had been established to provide the higher sort of training

for youths who were to enter the learned professions. Besides Yale, the

College of New Jersey had been founded. At first set up in 1746 as a

collegiate school, at Elizabethtown, it was in 1756 given a permanent

home and built up into a notable training place for youth at Princeton.

In 1754, the year Washington attacked the French in the western forests,

King’s College was added to the growing list, in New York, by royal

charter. Ten years later (1764), upon the very morrow of the signing of

peace, certain public-spirited men of the Baptist communion followed suit

in Rhode Island by founding the school which was afterwards to be called

Brown University. Here were six colleges for this new English nation at

the west of the Atlantic. Many wealthy colonists, particularly in the

far south, continued to send their sons to the old country to take their

learning from the immemorial sources at Oxford and Cambridge; but more

and more the colonies provided learning for themselves.

[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN]

[Illustration: THE BIRTHPLACE OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, MILK STREET, BOSTON]

Their growing and expanding life, moreover, developed in them the sense

of neighborhood to one another, the consciousness of common interests,

and the feeling that they ought in many things to coöperate. In 1754,

while the first sharp note of war was ringing from the Alleghanies,

a conference with the Six Nations was held at Albany, which, besides

dealing with the redmen, and binding them once more to be friends and

allies of the English against the French, considered nothing less than

a plan of union for the colonies. This was the fourth time that the

representatives of several colonies at once had come together at Albany

to confer with the Iroquois. The first conference had taken place there

in 1689, the year King William’s War began. Albany lay nearest the

country of the Iroquois. It was necessary when war was afoot to make

sure that the redskins should side with the English, and not with the

French; and that was now for the fourth time, in 1754, more critically

important than ever. The home government had directed that the conference

be held, before they knew what Washington had done. It was the ministers

in London, too, who had directed that a plan of union be considered,

in order that the colonies might act in concert in the coming struggle

with the French, and if possible under a single government even. Seven

colonies were represented at the conference. Twenty-five delegates were

there to take part in the business; and there was no difficulty about

securing their almost unanimous assent to a plan of union. They adopted

the plan which Mr. Benjamin Franklin, one of Pennsylvania’s delegates,

had drawn up as he made the long journey from Philadelphia.

Mr. Franklin had led a very notable life during the thirty eventful

years which had gone by since he made his way, a mere lad, from Boston

to Philadelphia to earn his livelihood as a journeyman printer; and how

shrewd a knowledge he had gained of the practical affairs of the world

anybody could see for himself who would read the homely-wise maxims he

had been putting forth these twenty-two years in his “Poor Richard’s”

Almanacs, begun in 1732. The plan of union he suggested at Albany was,

that the colonies should submit to have their common interests cared

for by a congress of delegates chosen by their several assemblies,

and a “president-general” appointed and paid by the crown; giving to

the congress a considerable power of actual law-making and to the

president-general the right to veto its acts, subject to the approval of

the ministers at home. To all the delegates at Albany except those from

Connecticut the plan seemed suitable and excellent; but the ministers

at home rejected it because they thought it gave too much power to the

proposed congress, and the colonial assemblies rejected it because they

thought it gave too much power to the president-general. Mr. Franklin

said that the fact that neither the assemblies nor the King’s ministers

liked the plan made him suspect that it must be, after all, an excellent

half-way measure, the “true medium” between extremes, effecting a

particularly fair and equal distribution of power.

[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN]

Then the war came, and made many things plain. The colonies did not

coöperate. They contributed troops, watched their own frontiers as they

could against the redskins, and freely spent both blood and money in the

great struggle; but when it was all over, and the French dominion swept

from the continent, it was plain that it had not been the power of the

colonies but the power of England and the genius of the great Pitt that

had won in the critical contest. France could send few reinforcements to

Canada because England’s ships commanded the sea. The stout Canadians

had had to stand out for themselves unaided, with such troops as were

already in the colony. In 1759, the year Wolfe took Quebec, there were

more soldiers in the English colonies threatening the St. Lawrence than

there were men capable of bearing arms in all Canada,—and quite half of

them were regulars, not provincials. Pitt saw to it that enough troops

and supplies were sent to America to insure success, and that men capable

of victory and of efficient management even in the forested wilderness

were put in command of affairs in the field. He did not depend upon the

colonies to do what he knew they had no plan or organization for doing,

but set himself to redress the balance of power in Europe by decisive

victories which should make England indisputable mistress of America. “No

man ever entered Mr. Pitt’s closet who did not find himself braver when

he came out than when he went in,” said a soldier who had held conference

with him and served him; and it was his statesmanship and his use of

English arms that had made England’s dominion complete and England’s

colonies safe in America.

[Illustration: A PAGE OF “POOR RICHARD’S” ALMANAC]

[Illustration: BENJAMIN FRANKLIN IN A COLONIAL DRAWING ROOM]

English fleets and armies had not been sent to America, however, and

equipped for warfare there, sustained in war season and out of it,

without enormous expense; and that expense, which had set the colonies

free to live without dread of danger or of confinement at any border,

England had borne. It had been part of Mr. Franklin’s plan of union,

proposed at Albany, that the congress of the colonies should sustain the

armies used in their defence and pay for them by taxes levied in America;

but that plan had been rejected, and this war for the ousting of the

French had been fought at England’s cost,—much as the colonies had given

of their own blood, and of their own substance for the equipment of their

provincial levies, and much as they had suffered in all the obscure and

painful fighting to protect their frontiers against the redskins, far

away from set fields of battle. They had done more, indeed, than pay the

costs which inevitably fell to them. They had “raised, paid, and clothed

twenty-five thousand men,—a number,” if Mr. Franklin was right, “equal

to those sent from Great Britain and far beyond their proportion. They

went deeply in debt in doing this; and all their estates and taxes are

mortgaged for many years to come in discharging that debt.” Parliament

had itself acknowledged their loyal liberality and self-sacrifice,

and had even voted them £200,000 a year for five years, when the war

was over, by way of just reimbursement. But, though they had made

sacrifices, they had, of course, not shared with the royal treasury

the chief outlays of the war. Colonial governors, viewing affairs as

representatives of the government at home, had again and again urged the

ministers in London to tax the colonies, by act of Parliament, for means

to pay for frontier forts, armies of defence, and all the business of

imperial administration in America. But the ministers had hitherto known

something of the temper of the colonists in such matters and had been

too wise to attempt anything of the kind. Sir George Keith, who had been

governor of Pennsylvania, had suggested to Sir Robert Walpole that he

should raise revenue in the colonies; but that shrewd politician and man

of affairs had flatly declined. “What,” he exclaimed, “I have old England

against me, and do you think I will have New England likewise?” Chatham

had held the same tone. What English armies did in America was part of

England’s struggle for empire, for a leading station in power and riches

in the world, and England should pay for it. The desire of the colonies

to control their own direct taxes should be respected. English statesmen,

so far, had seen the matter very much as observant Colonel Spotswood had

seen it thirty odd years ago. If the ministers should direct moneys to be

paid by act of Parliament, he said, “they would find it no easy matter to

put such an act into execution”; and he deemed it “against the right of

Englishmen,” besides, “to be taxed, but by their representatives,”—new

colonist though he was, and only the other day a governor of the crown in

Virginia, the oldest and most loyal of the colonies.

[Illustration: MRS. BENEDICT ARNOLD AND CHILD]

It was now more than forty years since Colonel Spotswood, in the days

of his governorship, had ridden to the far summit of the Alleghanies and

looked down their western slopes towards the regions where England and

France were to meet. Since that day he had served the crown very quietly

as postmaster general for the colonies. At last he had died (1740) when

on the eve of sailing with Virginian troops for Cartagena, about to

return at the very end of his days to his old calling of arms. He had

lived thirty years in Virginia, all told, and spoke out of abundant

knowledge when he expressed a judgment as to what the ministers would

find it hard to do in the colonies. He knew, as every man did who had had

anything to do with the service of the crown in America, how stubbornly

the colonists had resisted every attempt to unite their governments

under a single governor or any single system, and how determined they

had been to keep their governments in their own hands, notwithstanding

they must have seen, as everybody else saw, the manifest advantage of

union and a common organization in the face of England’s rivals in

America, north and south. The King’s object in seeking to consolidate

the more northern colonies under Sir Edmund Andros, whom New England had

so hated, was not to attack their liberties, but “to weld them into one

strongly governed state,” such as should be able to present a firm front

to the encroachments of the French,—a statesmanlike object, which no man

who wished to serve the interests of English empire could reasonably

criticise. But the colonists had not cared to regard their little

commonwealths as pieces of an empire. They regarded them simply as their

own homes and seats of self-government; and they feared to have them

swallowed up in any scheme of consolidation, whatever its object. The

French war, consequently, had been fought by the government in England,

and not by any government in America.

[Illustration: FRANKLIN’S OLD BOOK-SHOP, NEXT TO CHRIST’S CHURCH,

PHILADELPHIA]

Though a few statesmen like Walpole had had the sagacity to divine it,

and all leaders in party counsels had instinctively feared it, very

few public men in England understood the temper or the unchangeable

resolution of the colonies in such matters. Pitt understood it, but now

that the war was over he was no longer suffered to be master in affairs.

Burke understood it, but few heeded what he said. Such men knew by

instant sympathy that this seemingly unreasonable temper of the colonists

in great affairs was nothing else than the common English spirit of

liberty. The colonists were simply refusing, as all Englishmen would

have refused, to be directly ruled in their own affairs, or directly

taxed for any purpose whatever, by a government which they themselves

had no part in conducting; and, whether reasonable or unreasonable, so

long as they remained Englishmen it was useless to try to argue them out

of that refusal. “An Englishman,” cried Burke, “is the unfittest person

on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery”; and he knew that to

an Englishman it would seem nothing less than slavery to be stripped of

self-government in matters of the purse.

Now that the French were driven out, it was more useless than ever to

argue the point. The chief and most obvious reason for feeling dependent

upon the mother country was gone. Awe of the British was gone, too.

The provincial levies raised in the colonies had fought alongside the

King’s troops in all the movements of the war, and had found themselves

not a whit less undaunted under fire, not a whit less able to stand and

fight, not a whit less needed in victory. Braddock had died loathing the

redcoats and wishing to see none but the blue cloth of the Virginian

volunteers. When the war began, a regular from over sea had seemed to the

colonists an unapproachable master of arms; but the provincials knew when

the war was over that the redcoats were no better than they were. They

had nothing to remember with mortification except the insulting contempt

some of the British officers had shown for them, and the inferior rank

and consideration their own officers had been compelled to accept.

[Illustration: GEORGE GRENVILLE]

It was the worst possible time the home government could have chosen in

which to change its policy of concession towards the colonies and begin

to tax and govern them by act of Parliament; and yet that was exactly

what the ministers determined to do. No master of affairs or of men,

like Walpole or Pitt, was any longer in a place of guiding authority in

London. George Grenville was prime minister: a thorough official and very

capable man of affairs, of unquestionable integrity, and with a certain

not unhandsome courage as of conviction in what he did, but incapable of

understanding those who opposed or resisted him, or of winning from them

except by an exercise of power. The late war had been no mere “French and

Indian” affair for English statesmen. It had been part of that stupendous

“Seven Years’ War” which had fixed Prussia in a place of power under the

great Frederick, and had changed the whole balance of power in Europe;

had brought India under England’s widening dominion on one side of the

world and America on the other,—had been a vast game which the stout

little island kingdom had played almost alone against united Europe. It

had not been a mere American war. America had reaped the benefits of

England’s effort to found an empire and secure it, east and west. And

yet the colonists seemed, when this momentous war by which they had so

profited was over, to drop into indifference towards everything that

remained to be done to finish what had been so well begun, even though it

remained to be done at their own very doors.

France had ceded to England as a result of the war all the vast

territory which lay upon the St. Lawrence and between the Mississippi

and the eastern mountains, north and south. It was possible to provide

a government for the province of Quebec and for the lands in the far

south, in Florida and beside the mouths of the Mississippi; but between

these lay the long regions which stretched, unsettled, along the great

streams which ran everywhere into the Mississippi,—the Illinois country,

the country round about the Ohio, the regions by the Cumberland,—all the

boundless “back country” which lay directly behind the colonies at the

west. The Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in London wished

to keep settlers out of these lands, in order that they might be left as

a great hunting ground for the Indians, and so remain a permanent source

of supply for the fur skins which enriched trade between the mother

country and her colonies. But, meanwhile, whether settlers made their

way thither or not, it was necessary to carry England’s power among the

Indians, and make them know that she, and not the King of France, was

now sovereign there. This the Indians were slow to believe. They could

not know what treaty-makers in Europe had decided: they did not believe

that the French would leave and the English come in in their stead at the

western forts; and it moved them hotly to think of such a change. The

French had made them welcome at their frontier posts, and did not drive

off the game, as Duquesne had told them, ere this fatal war began. The

French had been willing to be comrades with them, and had dealt with them

with a certain gracious courtesy and consideration; while the English

treated them, when they dared, like dogs rather than like men, drove them

far into the forests at their front as they advanced their settlements,

bullied them, and often cheated them in trade. It was intolerable to the

northern Indians to think of these men whom they feared and hated being

substituted for the French, with whom they found it at least possible to

live.

[Illustration: BOUNDARY MONUMENT ON THE ST. CROIX]

They were dangerous neighbors, and the danger was near and palpable. The

war with the French was hardly over when English settlers began to pour

across the Alleghanies from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia,—men of

the stern and sober Scots-Irish breeding for the most part, masterful and

imperious, and sure to make the lands they settled upon entirely their

own. There were already tribes among the Indians in the northwest who had

been driven out of Pennsylvania by the earlier movements of these same

people, and who had taken with them to their new homes the distress and

the dread of exile. It were fatal, they knew, to wait. If the English

were ever to be driven within the barriers of the Alleghanies again, it

must be done now, and all the tribes must rally to the desperate business.

They found a leader in Pontiac, a chief of the Ottawas. A dozen powerful

tribes heeded him when he counselled secret confederacy, and, when all

should be ready, sudden war; and the English presently had reason to know

how able an enemy they had to fear,—a man of deep counsel, astute and

masterful. In June, 1763, the first blow was struck,—from end to end of

the open border,—even the Senecas, one of the Six Nations, joining in the

bitter work. Every frontier fort except Detroit, Niagara, and Pitt was in

their hands at the first surprise: smoking ruins and the bodies of white

men slain marked all the borders where the French had been. The English

rallied, stubborn and undaunted. Three forts at least were saved. There

were men at hand like Colonel Bouquet, the gallant officer who went to

the relief of Fort Pitt, who knew the strategy of the forest as well as

the redskins did, and used steadfast English, not fickle savages, in the

fighting; and, though the work was infinitely hard and perilous and slow

in the doing, within two years it was done. Before the year 1765 was out,

Pontiac had been brought to book, had acknowledged himself beaten, and

had sued for peace.

[Illustration: PONTIAC, CHIEF OF THE OTTAWAS]

But by that time the English ministers knew the nature of the task

which awaited them in America. It was plain that they must strengthen

the frontier posts and maintain a force of soldiers in the colonies,

if English power was to be safe there, and English lives. Not fewer

than twenty thousand men would be needed; and it would be necessary to

organize government, civil as well as military, in a more effective

way. It might be necessary to pay the colonial judges and even the

colonial governors out of the general treasury of the empire, rather than

leave them always dependent upon the uncertain grants of the colonial

legislatures. The new plans would, taken all together, involve, it was

reckoned, the expenditure of at least £300,000 a year. Mr. Grenville,

now at the head of the government in England, was a lawyer and a man of

business. “He took public business not as a duty which he was to fulfil,

but as a pleasure he was to enjoy,” and, unfortunately, he regarded

American affairs as ordinary matters of duty and of business. England had

spent £60,000,000 sterling to put the French out of America; £140,000,000

had been added to the national debt. Her own sources of revenue were

quite run dry. Mr. Grenville and his colleagues did not know where else

to turn for another penny, if not to America. They therefore determined

that, since heavy additional expenditures must be undertaken for the

proper administration and defence of the colonies, America must be made

to supply at least a part of the money to meet them. Not all of it. It

was the ministers’ first idea to raise only £100,000 out of the £300,000

by taxes directly derived from the colonies: and every farthing of that,

with twice as much more, was to be spent, of course, in America. The

money was none of it to cross the sea. It was to remain in the colonial

treasuries until expended for colonial administration and defence.

[Illustration: HENRY BOUQUET]

Some men there were in England who were far-sighted enough to see what

this new policy would lead to; but Grenville did not, and Parliament

did not. In March, 1764, therefore, upon the introduction of his annual

budget, the prime minister introduced a bill, which was passed, laying

fresh and more effective taxes on wines, sugar, and molasses imported

into the colonies, tightening and extending the old Navigation Acts, and

still further restraining manufactures; and at the same time announced

that he would, the next year, propose a moderate direct tax upon the

colonies in the form of an act requiring revenue stamps to be used on the

principal sorts of documents employed in America in legal and mercantile

business.

[Illustration: BOUQUET’S REDOUBT AT PITTSBURG]

Mr. Grenville had no desire to irritate the Americans. He thought they

might protest; he never dreamed they would disobey. He was, no doubt,

surprised when he learned how hot their protests were; and when his Stamp

Act the next year became law, their anger and flat defiance must have

seemed to him mere wanton rebellion. He introduced the Stamp Act with his

budget of 1765. The Commons gave only a single sitting to the discussion

of its principles; passed it almost without opposition; and by the 22d of

March it was law. A few members protested. Colonel Barré, standing there

in his place, square, swarthy, a soldier from the field, that staring

wound upon his face which he had taken where Wolfe died, on the Plains of

Abraham, told the ministers very flatly that the colonists, whom he had

seen and fought for, owed to them neither the planting nor the nourishing

of their colonies, had a liberty they had made for themselves, were very

jealous of that liberty, and would vindicate it. Benjamin Franklin was

in London to make protest for Pennsylvania; and the agents of the other

colonies were as active as he, and as ready to promise that the colonial

legislatures would themselves grant out of their own treasuries more than

the Act could yield, if only they were left to do it in their own way.

Mr. Franklin had pointed out in very plain terms how sharp a departure

there was in such measures from the traditional dealings of the crown

with the colonies, how loyal they had been in granting supplies when

required, and how ill a new way of taxation would sit upon the spirits

of the colonists. But the vote for the bill was five to one. Neither the

ministers nor the Commons showed the least hesitation or misgiving.

[Illustration: PATRICK HENRY]

[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF ISAAC BARRÉ]

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF POSTER PLACED ON THE DOORS OF PUBLIC

BUILDINGS]

The Act operated in America like a spark dropped on tinder. First dismay,

then anger, then riot and open defiance, showed what the colonists

thought and meant to do. Their own agents in London were as little

prepared as the ministers themselves for the sudden passion. They had

asked for appointments for their friends as stamp distributers under the

Act. Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia, even asked for a place for himself

under it, so different a look did things wear in London from that which

they wore at home in the Old Dominion. But these gentlemen learned the

temper of America, and changed their own, soon enough. The Act was in

no way extraordinary or oppressive in its provisions. It required of

the colonists only what was already required in respect of business

transactions in England: namely, that revenue stamps, of values varying

with the character of the transaction or the amount involved, should

be attached to all deeds, wills, policies of insurance, and clearance

papers for ships, to legal papers of almost every kind, to all written

contracts and most of the business papers used by merchants in their

formal dealings, and to all periodical publications and advertisements.

The colonies themselves had imposed such taxes; in England they had been

used since William and Mary, and had proved eminently convenient and easy

of collection. Governor Shirley, of Massachusetts, had himself urged that

Parliament use them in America, American though he was. Mr. Franklin had

taken it for granted, when he saw the Act become law, that they must be

submitted to. But America flatly refused obedience, and, except in the

newly conquered provinces of Nova Scotia and Canada, the stamps were not

used.

The Act was not to go into operation until the 1st of November (1765);

but long before the first of November it was evident that it would not

go into effect at all. It was universally condemned and made impossible

of application. There was instant protest from the colonial assemblies

so soon as it was known that the Act was passed; and the assembly of

Massachusetts proposed that a congress of delegates from the several

colonies be held in October, ere the Act went into effect, to decide what

should be done to serve their common interest in the critical matter.

The agitations and tumults of that eventful summer were not soon forgot.

In August, Boston witnessed an outbreak such as she had never witnessed

before. Mr. Andrew Oliver, who had been appointed distributer of the

stamps there, was burned in effigy; the house in which it was thought the

stamps were to be stored was torn down; Mr. Oliver’s residence was broken

into and many of its furnishings were destroyed. He hastily resigned his

obnoxious office. Mobs then plundered the house of the deputy registrar

of the court of admiralty, destroying his private papers and the records

and files of the court,—because the new acts of trade and taxation gave

new powers to that court. The house of the comptroller of customs was

sacked. Mr. Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant-governor of the colony,

found himself obliged, on the night of the 26th, to flee for his life;

and returned when order was restored to find his home stripped of

everything it contained, including nine hundred pounds sterling in money,

and manuscripts and books which he had been thirty years collecting.

Only the walls and floors of the house remained.

[Illustration: JOHN DICKINSON]

[Illustration: THOMAS HUTCHINSON]

[Illustration: THOMAS HUTCHINSON’S MANSION, BOSTON]

There was no violence elsewhere to equal this in Boston. There was

tumult everywhere, but in most places the mobs contented themselves with

burning the stamp agents in effigy and frightening them into the instant

relinquishment of their offices. Not until the autumn came, and the day

for the application of the Act, did they show a serious temper again.

Then New York also saw a house sacked and its furniture used to feed a

bonfire. The people insisted upon having the stamps handed over to their

own city officers; and when more came they seized and burned them. At

Philadelphia many Quakers and Church of England men, and some Baptists,

made as if they would have obeyed the Act; but the mobs saw to it that

they should not have the chance. The stamp distributer was compelled to

resign, and there was no one from whom stamps could be obtained. Stamp

distributers who would not resign found it best to seek safety in flight.

There was no one in all the colonies, north or south, who had authority

to distribute the hated pieces of stamped paper which the ministers had

expected would so conveniently yield them a modest revenue for their

colonial expenses. There was a little confusion and inconvenience for

a time. The courts hesitated to transact business without affixing the

stamps required to their written pleadings; it seemed imprudent to

send ships out without stamps on their clearance papers; business men

doubted what would come of using no stamps in their transactions. But the

hesitation did not last long. Business was presently going forward, in

court and out, as before, and never a stamp used!

It was singular and significant how immediately and how easily the

colonies drew together to meet the common danger and express a common

purpose. Early in October the congress which Massachusetts had asked for

came together at New York, the delegates of nine colonies attending. It

drew up and sent over sea a statement of the right of the colonies to

tax and govern themselves,—as loyal to the King, but not as subject to

Parliament,—which arrested the attention of the world. Mr. Grenville

and his colleagues were just then, by a fortunate turn of politics at

home, most opportunely obliged to resign, and gave place to the moderate

Whigs who followed Lord Rockingham (July, 1765), and who thought the

protests of the colonies not unreasonable. On the 18th of March, 1766,

accordingly, the Stamp Act was repealed,—within a year of its enactment.

It was at the same time declared, however, by special declaratory act,

that Parliament had sovereign right to tax the colonies, and legislate

for them, if it pleased. It was out of grace and good policy, the

ministers declared, that the tax was withdrawn; a concession, not of

right, but of good feeling; and everybody knew that it was done as

much because the London merchants were frightened by the resolution of

the American merchants to take no cargoes under the tax as because the

colonies had declined to submit. But the results were none the less

salutary. The rejoicings in America were as boisterous and as universal

as had been the tempest of resentment.

[Illustration: TABLE OF STAMP CHARGES ON PAPER]

[Illustration: LORD ROCKINGHAM]

But that was not the end of the matter. The Stamp Act had suddenly

brought to light and consciousness principles and passions not likely

to be again submerged, and which it was worth the while of statesmen

over sea to look into very carefully. Some there were in England who

understood them well enough. Mr. John Adams used to say, long afterwards,

that the trouble seemed to him to have begun, not in 1765, but in 1761.

It was in that year that all the colonies, north and south, had heard of

what James Otis had said in the chief court of the province at Boston

against the general warrants, the sweeping writs of assistance, for which

the customs officers of the crown had asked, to enable them to search as

they pleased for goods brought in from foreign parts in defiance of the

acts of trade. The writs were not new, and Mr. Otis’s protest had not put

a stop to their issue. It had proved of no avail to say, as he did, that

they were an intolerable invasion of individual right, flat violations

of principles of law which had become a part of the very constitution of

the realm, and that even an act of Parliament could not legalize them.

But all the colonies had noted that hot contest in the court at Boston,

because Mr. Otis had spoken with a singular eloquence which quickened

men’s pulses and irresistibly swung their minds into the current of his

own thought, and because it had made them more sharply aware than before

of what the ministers at home were doing to fix upon the colonies the

direct power of the government over sea. These writs of assistance gave

the officers who held them authority to search any place they pleased for

smuggled goods, whether private residence or public store-house, with or

without reasonable ground of suspicion, and meant that the government had

at last seriously determined, at whatever cost, to break up the trade

with the West Indies and the Spanish Main. Presently armed cutters were

put on the coasts the more effectually to stop it. A vice-admiralty court

was set up to condemn the cargoes seized, without a jury. The duties were

to be rigorously collected and the trade broken up, for the sake of the

sugar growers of the British West Indies and merchants in London.

[Illustration: JAMES OTIS]

If New England could no longer send her horses, cattle, lumber, casks,

and fish to the French islands and the Spanish Main, and bring thence,

in exchange for them, sugar and molasses, she must let her ships rot at

the wharves and five thousand of her seamen go idle and starve; must

seek elsewhere for a market for her chief products; could make no more

rum with which to carry on her home trade in spirits or her traffic in

slaves on the slave coast; must forego her profits at the southern ports,

and go without the convenient bills drawn on exported Virginian tobacco

wherewith she had been used to pay her debts to the London merchants.

For thirty years and more it had been understood that the duties on

that trade were not to be collected; but now, of a sudden, the law was

to be carried out by armed vessels, writs of general search, and the

summary proceedings of a court of admiralty. In 1764 Mr. Grenville had

drawn the lines tighter than ever by a readjustment of duties. That

meant ruin; and the Stamp Act was but the last touch of exasperation.

The disposition of the ministers seemed all the more obvious because of

the obnoxious “Quartering Act” which went along with the Stamp Act. They

were authorized by Parliament to quarter troops in the colonies, and by

special enactment the colonists were required to provide the troops with

lodgings, firewood, bedding, drink, soap, and candles.

[Illustration: STAMPS FORCED ON THE COLONIES]

There were other causes of irritation which touched the colonists almost

as nearly. In 1740 the Massachusetts assembly had set up a Land Bank

authorized to issue notes based upon nothing but mortgages on land

and personal bonds, with surety, given by those who subscribed to its

support, and Parliament, at the solicitation of Boston men who knew

what certain disaster such a bank would bring upon the business of the

colony, had thrust in its hand and suppressed it. The scheme had been in

great favor among the men of the country districts, and its suppression

by direct act of Parliament had stirred them to a deep resentment. “The

Act to destroy the Land Bank scheme,” John Adams declared, had “raised a

greater ferment in the province than the Stamp Act did”; and it made the

men who had resented it all the readier to take fire at the imposition of

the stamp duties. The churches of the province had been deeply alarmed,

too, by the effort of English churchmen to establish bishops in America,

as if in preparation for a full Establishment; and the clergy were,

almost to a man, suspicious of the government. The lumbermen of the

forests felt the constant irritation of the crown’s claim to all their

best sticks of timber for the royal navy, and were themselves fit fuel

for agitation. Each class seemed to have its special reason for looking

askance at everything that savored of control from over sea. The measures

taken against the trade with the Indies were but the latest item in a

growing account.

Massachusetts and the greater trading ports of the south felt the

burden of the new policy more than the rest of the country felt it; but

thoughtful men everywhere saw what it portended that Parliament should

thus lay its hand directly upon the colonies to tax, and in some sort

to govern, them. Quite as many men could tell you of the “parson’s

case,” tried in quiet Hanover Court House in rural Virginia, as could

tell you of Mr. Otis’s speech against the writs of assistance. It meant

that the authorities in London were thrusting their hands into the

affairs of Virginia just as they were thrusting them into the affairs

of Massachusetts. Parson Maury had in that case set up an Order in

Council by the ministers at home against an act of the Virginian House

of Burgesses determining the value of the currency in which his salary

was to be paid, and young Patrick Henry had sprung into sudden fame by

declaring to the court very boldly against him that the crown had no

right to override the self-government of Virginia.

[Illustration: OLD CAPITOL AT WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA]

The eloquence of that famous speech carried the young advocate to the

House of Burgesses itself; and it was he who showed the colonies how

to speak of the Stamp Act. The burgesses were in session when the news

of that hateful law’s enactment reached Virginia. The young member

waited patiently for the older members of the House to show the way in

the new crisis,—Randolph and Pendleton and Nicholas, Richard Bland and

George Wythe,—the men who had framed so weighty a protest and warning

and sent so strong a remonstrance over sea only last year against this

very measure. But when he saw that they would not lead, he sprang to the

task himself, plain, country-bred though he was, and unschooled in that

leadership; scribbled his resolutions on the fly-leaf of an old law-book,

and carried them with a rush of eloquence that startled and swept the

House, and set the tone for all the country.

His resolutions not only declared the right of the colonies to tax

themselves to be exclusive, and established beyond recall; they also

declared that Virginians were not bound to obey the Parliament when it

acted thus against established privilege, and that any one who should

advocate obedience was an enemy to the colony. The sober second thought

of the burgesses cut that defiant conclusion out at last,—after Mr. Henry

had gone home; but the resolutions had already been sent post-haste

through the colonies in their first form, unrevised and unsoftened, and

had touched the feeling of every one who read them like a flame of fire.

They were the first word of revolution; and no man ever thought just the

same again after he had read them.

[Illustration: GEORGE WYTHE]

It seemed a strange defiance, no doubt, to come from loyal Virginia. The

Stamp Act was not, in fact, oppressive or unreasonable. Why should it so

kindle the anger of the colonies that the sovereign Parliament, which

had for many a day levied indirect charges upon them by means of the

many acts concerning trade and manufactures, now laid a moderate direct

tax upon them, the proceeds of which were to be spent upon their own

protection and administration? Because, though it might be the sovereign

legislature of the empire, Parliament was not in their view the direct

sovereign legislature of America. No one could truly say that Parliament

had been the sovereign power even of England before 1688, that notable

year in which it had, by a revolution, changed the succession to the

throne and begun the making and unmaking of governments. The colonies had

most of them been set up before that momentous year of change, while the

Parliament was still only a body of representatives associated with the

crown, with the right to criticise and restrain it, but with no right

to usurp its prerogatives; entitled to be consulted, but not licensed

to rule. The King, not the Parliament, had chartered the colonies; and

they conceived their assemblies to be associated with him as Parliament

itself had been in the older days before the Revolution of 1688: to

vote him grants, assent to taxation, and with his consent make the laws

they were to live under. He stood, they thought, in the same relation

to all the legislatures of his realm: to the Parliament in England and

to the assemblies in America. It was the fundamental principle of the

English constitution, as all agreed, that the King’s subjects should be

associated with him in government by representation; and, since the

Americans could not be represented in Parliament, and were, by his own

authority, represented in local assemblies, he must deal with them, not

through Parliament, but through those assemblies.

The law of their view was not very sound or clear; but the common-sense

of it was unassailable; and it rested upon unquestionable and

long-standing practice, that best foundation of institutions. Their

governments were no doubt, in law, subject to the government of Great

Britain. Whoever ruled there had the legal right to rule in the colonies

also, whether it were the King independent of Parliament, or the

ministers dependent upon Parliament. The revolution of 1688 had radically

altered the character of the whole structure, and perhaps the colonies

could not, in strict constitutional theory, decline their logical part in

the change. But no man in America had ever seen that revolution cross the

seas. English statesmen might have changed their views, but the colonies

had not changed theirs, nor the practice of their governments either.

Their governments were from of old, and they meant to keep them intact

and uncorrupted. They did not object to the amount or to the form of the

tax; they objected only that they had not themselves imposed it. They

dissented utterly from the opinion that Parliament had the right to tax

them at all. It was that principle, and not the tax itself, which moved

them so deeply.

English statesmen claimed that the colonists were as much represented in

Parliament as the thousands of Englishmen in England who did not have

the right to vote for members of the Commons; and no doubt they were.

The franchise was narrow in England, and not the whole population but

only a few out of some classes of the people were actually represented in

the Houses. Were not the interests represented there which America stood

for? Perhaps so. But why govern the colonies through these remote and

theoretical representatives when they had, and had always had, immediate

and actual representatives of their own in their assemblies,—as ready and

accessible an instrument of government as the House of Commons itself?

The colonists were accustomed to actual representation, had for a century

and more been dealt with by means of it, and were not willing now to

reverse their history and become, instead of veritable states, merely

detached and dependent pieces of England. This was the fire of principle

which the Stamp Act kindled.

And, once kindled, it burned with an increasing flame. Within ten years

it had been blown to the full blaze of revolution. Mr. Grenville had

not lost his power because he had set the colonies aflame by his hated

Stamp Act, but merely because the King intensely disliked his tedious

manners, and resented the dictatorial tone used by the ministers in all

their dealings with himself. The Marquis of Rockingham and the group of

moderate Whigs who stood with him in the new ministry of July, 1765,

had repealed the stamp tax, not because they deemed it wrong in legal

principle, but because it had bred resistance, had made the colonists

resolve not to buy goods of English merchants, or even pay the debts of

£4,000,000 sterling already incurred in their business with them,—because

they deemed it wise to yield, and so quiet disorders over sea. Their

power lasted only a single year. The King liked their liberal principles

as little as he liked Grenville’s offensive manners, and in August,

1766, dismissed them, to substitute a ministry under William Pitt, now

made Earl of Chatham. Had Pitt retained his mastery, all might have gone

well; but his health failed, his leadership became a mere form, real

power fell to other men with no wide, perceiving vision like his own, and

America was presently put once again in revolutionary mood.

Pitt had said that the colonists were right when they resisted the Stamp

Act: that Parliament could lawfully impose duties on commerce, and keep,

if it would, an absolute monopoly of trade for the English merchants,

because such matters were of the empire and not merely of America; but

that the Americans were justified in resisting measures of internal

taxation and government, their charters and accustomed liberties no doubt

giving them in such matters constitutions of their own. Mr. Burke, whose

genius made him the spokesman of the Rockingham Whigs, whether they would

or no, had said very vehemently, and with that singular eloquence of his

of which only his own words know the tone, that he cared not at all what

legal rights might be involved; it was a question of government and of

good-will between a king and his subjects; and he would not support any

measure, upon whatever right it might be founded, which led to irritation

and not to obedience. The new ministry of the Earl of Chatham acted upon

its chief’s principles, and not upon Mr. Burke’s,—though they acted

rashly because that consummate chief did not lead them. They proceeded

(June, 1767), after the great earl’s illness had laid him by, to put upon

the statute book two acts for the regulation of colonial trade and the

government of the colonies which Charles Townshend, their Chancellor

of the Exchequer, had drawn. The first provided for the more effectual

enforcement of the acts of trade already in existence; the second imposed

duties on wine, oil, lead, glass, paper, painters’ colors, and tea

carried to the colonies, and explicitly legalized the use of the hated

general search-warrants known as “writs of assistance.” The revenues

raised by these duties were to be applied, as the stamp tax would have

been had it been collected, to the support of the courts of justice and

of the civil establishments of the several colonies, and to the expenses

connected with their military defence. Evasions of the revenue acts were

to be tried by the admiralty courts without juries.

To the colonists this seemed simply a return to the policy of the Stamp

Act. The tax was different, but the object was the same: to make their

judges and their governors independent of them, and to compel them to

pay for the maintenance of troops not of their own raising. These same

ministers had suspended the legislative power of the New York assembly

because it refused to make proper provision for the quartering of the

King’s troops, as commanded by the act of 1765; and that assembly had

felt itself obliged to yield and obey. Several companies of royal

artillery had been sent to Boston in the autumn of 1766, and were

quartered there at the colony’s expense by order of the governor and

council.

[Illustration: GEORGE WASHINGTON, 1772]

The new taxes were laid upon trade, and they could not be attacked on the

same grounds upon which the stamps had been objected to. But the trouble

was that the new taxes, unlike the old restrictions, were to be enforced,

evasion prevented. Mr. Townshend’s first act was to send commissioners

to America specially charged and empowered to see to that. The ruinous

acts of 1764 were to be carried out, and the West India trade, by which

Boston merchants and ship owners lived, put a stop to. These were bitter

things to endure. Some grounds must be found from which to fight

them,—if not the arguments used against the Stamp Act, then others,

if need be more radical. The ministers at home had set their far-away

subjects to thinking with the eagerness and uneasiness of those who seek

by some means to defend their liberties, and were fast making rebels of

them.

Even in the midst of the universal rejoicings over the repeal of the

Stamp Act the temper of several of the colonial assemblies had risen at

reading the “Declaratory Act” which accompanied the repeal, and which

asserted the absolute legal right of Parliament “to bind the colonies

in all cases whatsoever.” They had declared very flatly then that

Parliament had no legal authority whatever in America except such as it

might exercise by the consent of the colonial assemblies,—so far had

their thought and their defiant purpose advanced within the year. There

were conservative men in the colonies as well as radical, men who hated

revolution and loved the just and sober ways of law; and there was as

strong a sentiment of loyalty on one side the sea as on the other. But

even conservative men dreaded to see Parliament undertake to break down

the independence of America. Mr. Thomas Hutchinson, of Massachusetts,

whose house the rioters in Boston had wantonly looted when they were mad

against the Stamp Act, had been born and bred in the colony, and loved

her welfare as honestly as any man; but he was lieutenant-governor,

an officer of the crown, and would have deemed it dishonor not to

uphold the authority he represented. Mr. Otis, on the other hand, had

resigned his office as Advocate General under the crown to resist the

writs of assistance. The public-spirited gentlemen who had opposed Mr.

Henry’s fiery resolutions in the Virginian House of Burgesses did not

fear usurpation or hate tyranny less than he; but they loved the slow

processes of argument and protest and strictly legal opposition more than

he did, and were patient enough to keep within bounds. They feared to

shake an empire by pursuing a right too impetuously. Men of every temper

and of every counsel made up the various people of the colonies, and

there were men of equal patriotism on both sides of the rising quarrel.

[Illustration: LANDING TROOPS AT BOSTON, 1768]

And yet the most moderate and slow-tempered grew uneasy at Mr.

Townshend’s measures. Mr. John Dickinson, of Pennsylvania, wrote and

published a series of letters,—_Letters of a Pennsylvania Farmer_, he

called them,—which stated as pointedly, as boldly, as earnestly as any

man could wish, the constitutional rights of self-government which

the colonists cherished and thought imperilled by the new acts of

Parliament,—and yet Mr. Dickinson was as steady a loyalist as any man in

America, as little likely to countenance rebellion, as well worth heeding

by those who wished to compose matters by wise and moderate counsels. His

firm-spoken protests were, in fact, read and pondered on both sides the

water (1767), and no one could easily mistake their significance.

[Illustration: LIST OF NAMES OF THOSE WHO WOULD NOT CONFORM]

The action of the people gave only too grave an emphasis to what their

more self-restrained and thoughtful leaders said. Mr. Townshend’s

acts were as openly resisted as Mr. Grenville’s had been; and every

art of evasion, every trick of infringement, upon occasion even open

and forcible violation, set at naught other restrictions of trade as

well. It was startling to see how rapidly affairs approached a crisis.

Resistance centred, as trade itself did, at Boston. When Mr. Townshend’s

commissioners of customs seized the sloop _Liberty_ in Boston harbor for

evasion of the duties, rioters drove them to the fort for shelter, and

they sent hastily to England for more troops. The Massachusetts assembly,

under the masterful leadership of Mr. Samuel Adams, protested that the

measures of the new ministry were in violation of colonial rights, and

protested in terms which, though dignified and respectful enough, were

unmistakably imperative.

The leadership of Samuel Adams was itself a sign of the times. He was

a man of the people, passionate in his assertion of rights, and likely

to stir and increase passion in those for whom he spoke. Subtle, a born

politician; bold, a born leader of men, in assembly or in the street,

he was the sort of man and orator whose ascendency may mean revolution

almost when he chooses. The assembly, at his suggestion, went beyond

the ordinary bounds of protest and sent a circular letter to the

other colonies, as if to invite a comparison of views and a general

acquiescence in the course of settled opposition it had itself adopted.

When the ministers in London demanded a withdrawal of the letter, the

assembly of course refused, and the other colonies were more than ever

inclined to stand by the stout Bay Colony at whose capital port the

fight centred. The ministers, in their desperate purpose to compel

submission, declared their intention to remove to England for trial any

one who should be charged with treason,—under an almost forgotten statute

passed long before Jamestown was settled or English colonies dreamed

of in America. That roused the Virginian House of Burgesses once more.

They declared, with a sort of quiet passion, in their session of 1769,

that no one but their own assemblies had a right to tax the colonies;

that they had the inalienable right to petition the government at home

upon any matter of grievance whatever, and to petition, if they pleased,

jointly, as a body of colonies united in right and interest; and that any

attempt to try a colonist for crime anywhere except in the courts of his

own colony and by known course of law was “highly derogatory of the right

of British subjects,” and not for a moment to be deemed within the lawful

power of the crown. There was no need this time for Mr. Henry. All men

were now of the same opinion in Virginia, and the action was unanimous.

The Virginian governor at once dissolved the Burgesses; but the members

came together again almost immediately at a private house; and there

Colonel Washington, whom all the English world had known since Braddock’s

day, proposed a general agreement to import no goods at all upon which a

tax was laid,—to see what effect it would have if the English tradesmen

and manufacturers who looked to America for a market were starved into

a true appreciation of the situation and of the state of opinion among

their customers. Many of the other colonies followed suit. Trade with

England for a few months almost stood still, and there was quick distress

and panic among those interested over sea. They promptly demanded of

Parliament that the new taxes be taken off and trade allowed to live

again. The ministers yielded (April, 1770),—except with regard to the tax

on tea. That was the least of the taxes, and the King himself positively

commanded that it be retained, to save the principle of the bill and

show that Parliament had not reconsidered its right to tax. The taxes

had yielded nothing: the single tax on tea would serve to assert a right

without the rest.

[Illustration: HAND-BILL OF TRUE SONS OF LIBERTY]

[Illustration: THE BOSTON MASSACRE]

Meanwhile a very ominous thing had happened in Boston,—though the

ministers had not yet heard of it when the bill passed to repeal the

taxes. Upon an evening in March, 1770, a mob had attacked a squad of the

King’s redcoats in King Street, pelting them with sharp pieces of ice and

whatever else they could lay their hands on, and daring them derisively

to fire; and the troops had fired, being hard pressed and maddened. Five

of the mob were killed and six wounded, and a thrill of indignation and

horror went through the excited town. The next day a great meeting in

Faneuil Hall sent a committee to Mr. Hutchinson, the governor, to demand

the instant withdrawal of the troops. Samuel Adams headed the committee,

imperious and on fire; told the governor, in the council chamber where

they met, that he spoke in the name of three thousand freemen who counted

upon being heeded; and won his point. The troops were withdrawn to an

island in the bay. The town had hated their “lobster backs” for all the

year and a half they had been there, and rejoiced and was quiet when they

withdrew.

[Illustration: AFTER THE MASSACRE. SAMUEL ADAMS DEMANDING OF GOVERNOR

HUTCHINSON THE INSTANT WITHDRAWAL OF BRITISH TROOPS]

But quiet could not last long. The flame was sure somewhere to burst

out again whenever any incident for a moment stirred excitement. In

North Carolina there was the next year a sudden blaze of open rebellion

against the extravagant exactions of William Tryon, the adventurer who

was royal governor there; and only blood extinguished it (1771). In Rhode

Island, in June, 1772, his Majesty’s armed schooner _Gaspee_ was taken

by assault and burned, upon a spit of land where she lay aground. It had

been her business to watch against infringements of the navigation laws

and the vexatious acts of trade; her commander had grown exceptionally

insolent in his work; a sloop which he chased had led him on to the spit,

where his schooner stuck fast; and the provincials took advantage of her

helplessness to burn her. No one could be found who would inform on those

who had done the bold thing; the courageous chief-justice of the little

province flatly denied the right of the English authorities to order the

perpetrators to England for trial; and the royal commission which was

appointed to look into the whole affair stirred all the colonies once

more to a deep irritation. The far-away House of Burgesses in Virginia

very promptly spoke its mind again. It invited the several colonies to

join Virginia in forming committees of correspondence, in order that all

might be of one mind and ready for one action against the aggressions of

the government in England. The ministers in London had meantime resolved

to pay the provincial judges, at any rate in Massachusetts, out of the

English treasury, taxes or no taxes; and the Massachusetts towns had

formed committees of correspondence of their own, as Mr. Adams bade.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF COUNCIL CHAMBER, OLD STATE HOUSE, BOSTON]

[Illustration: PROTEST AGAINST THE LANDING OF TEA]

[Illustration: ENTRY JOHN ADAMS’S DIARY]

[Illustration: CALL FOR MEETING TO PROTEST AGAINST THE LANDING OF TEA]

Such were the signs of the times when the final test came of the tax

on tea. The East India company was in straits for money. It had to pay

twelvepence into the royal treasury on every pound of tea it imported,

whether it sold it in England or not; but the government there offered

to relieve it of that tax on every pound it carried on to America,

and exact only the threepence to be paid at the colonial ports under

Mr. Townshend’s act: so willing were the King’s ministers to help the

Company, and so anxious also to test the act and the submissiveness

of the colonists. The test was soon made. The colonists had managed to

smuggle in from Holland most of the tea they needed; and they wanted

none, under the circumstances, from the East India ships,—even though it

cost less, with the twelvepence tax off, than the smuggled tea obtained

of the Dutch. The East India Company promptly sent tea-laden ships to

Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston; and in the autumn of

1773 they began to come in. In Boston a quiet mob, disguised as Indians,

threw the chests overboard into the harbor. At New York and Philadelphia

the ships were “permitted” to leave port again without landing their

cargoes. At Charleston the tea was landed, but it was stored, not sold,

and a public meeting saw to its secure bestowal. The experiment had

failed. America was evidently of one mind, and had determined not to buy

tea or anything else with a parliamentary tax on it. The colonists would

no more submit to Mr. Townshend’s tax than to Mr. Grenville’s, whatever

the legal difference between them might be, either in principle or in

operation. The issue was squarely made up: the colonies would not obey

the Parliament,—would be governed only through their own assemblies. If

the ministers persisted, there must be revolution.

[Illustration: THE BOSTON TEA PARTY]

Here the leading general _authorities_ are the histories of

Bancroft, Hildreth, and Bryant; but to these we now add David

Ramsay’s _History of the American Revolution_; the fourth

volume of James Grahame’s excellent _History of the Rise and

Progress of the United States of North America from their

Colonization till the Declaration of Independence_; Thomas

Hutchinson’s _History of Massachusetts_, one of the most

valuable of the contemporary authorities; John S. Barry’s

_History of Massachusetts_; John Fiske’s _American Revolution_;

Mellen Chamberlain’s _The Revolution Impending_, in the sixth

volume of Winsor’s _Narrative and Critical History of America_;

the twelfth chapter of W. E. H. Lecky’s _History of England

in the Eighteenth Century_; Sir J. R. Seeley’s _Expansion

of England_; Richard Frothingham’s _Rise of the Republic of

the United States_; Mr. Edward Channing’s _United States of

America, 1765-1865_; Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge’s _Short History

of the English Colonies in America_; Mr. Horace E. Scudder’s

_Men and Manners in America One Hundred Years Ago_; Moses Coit

Tyler’s _Life of Patrick Henry_; Mr. Horace Gray’s important

discussion of Otis’s speech against the writs of assistance,

in the _Appendix_ to Quincy’s _Reports of Massachusetts Bay,

1761-1772_; Moses Coit Tyler’s _Literary History of the

American Revolution_; F. B. Dexter’s _Estimates of Population_,

in the _Proceedings_ of the American Antiquarian Society; and

the _Lives_ of the leading American and English statesmen of

the time, notably the invaluable series of brief biographies

known as _The American Statesmen Series_.

Abundant _contemporary material_ may be found in the published

letters, papers, and speeches of American and English public

men of the time, especially in the pamphlets of such men as

James Otis, Richard Bland, Stephen Hopkins, John Adams, Samuel

Adams, John Dickinson, and their _confrères_; in Franklin’s

_Autobiography_; Andrew Burnaby’s _Travels through the Middle

Settlements in North America, in the Years 1759 and 1760_; Ann

Maury’s _Memoirs of a Huguenot Family_; and Hezekiah Niles’s

_Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America_.

_Lists of the authorities_ on the several colonies during these

years may be found in Edward Channing and Albert Bushnell

Hart’s very convenient and careful little _Guide to American

History_.