AT THE ANCIENT PLACE OF TREATIES.
THE OLD FRENCH WAR, or the War of the Austrian Succession, was foolishly
begun in Germany, and foolishly ended in Europe, Asia, and America. The
peace which came without honour settled nothing as regarded the
questions at issue in America. In reality this treaty guaranteed another
American war. Louisburg was again handed over to the French in exchange
for Madras. All prisoners in the three continents were to be released
without ransom, and a return of all conquered territory and property was
agreed to. The balance of power now rested level on its fulcrum, ready
for some fly’s weight to tilt it and cause the scale-pans to bounce.
In what part of the world first? With unspeakable disgust the raw troops
and scarred veterans, and the people generally of the colonies, received
the news. Not a few thought it was time to think of not only fighting
their own battles, but of making their own treaties. The continental or
American spirit, already a spark, was fanned almost to a flame.
Meanwhile, in home politics, New York was steadily advancing in the
pathway that was to merge into the highway of national independence. To
a New England writer, accustomed to the unbridled laudation of his own
State and ancestry as those who led the Teutonic-American colonies in
the struggle for liberty, the doings in the New York Assembly may seem
“teapot-tempest politics.” To those less prejudiced, it is a noble
chapter in the story of freedom, when they see an ultra-Tory British
governor fast relegated to a position of impotence, though backed by the
able Tory, Cadwallader Colden, while the people’s will is manifested in
persistent limitation of the royal prerogative.
This was the state of affairs in May, 1750, when, on the death of Philip
Livingston, Col. William Johnson was appointed to a seat in the
governor’s Executive Council. The Livingstones were sturdy men of
Scottish descent, descended from a Presbyterian minister who had been
banished for non-conformity. Like so many of the founders of America,
the Pilgrim Fathers and most of the chief settlers of Connecticut,
Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and
Georgia, he reinforced his democratic ideas by some years’ residence in
the Dutch Republic, living gladly under the red, white, and blue flag of
the United States of Holland. The Livingstones in America married into
families of Dutch descent, and thereby were still further imbued with
Republican ideas. Robert and Philip had been secretaries of Indian
affairs, and had thus gained great favour and influence over the
Iroquois. Of their descendants, one was a signer of the Declaration of
Independence, and others were officers in the Revolutionary army, while
others are even yet adorning the annals of freedom, progress, and order.
Clinton was, no doubt, very glad to have, in place of a Livingstone, one
who was so loyally devoted to the Crown, and so good a personal friend
as Johnson near him, Johnson, however, was not sworn in and seated until
1751.
The state of affairs was growing worse and worse, and Clinton the
foolish had attempted to stay the tide of democracy by having no
Assembly called for two years. When, however, it met on Sept. 4, 1750,
Johnson’s bills for six hundred and eighty-six pounds, for provisions
sent to Oswego, were cheerfully paid; but the vote was so made that the
governor’s claims were, as he thought, invaded. However, for good
reasons, and fearing the loss of trade, he submitted. Could Johnson’s
invaluable services have been acknowledged without also making
recognition of Clinton’s pretensions, the Assembly would have been more
liberal. The remarks and strictures of the biographer and eulogist of
Johnson about the Dutch traders of Albany, and “the love of gain so
characteristic of that nation” (_sic_) seem strange when the same love
of gain was, and is, equally characteristic of Englishman, Yankee,
Scotsman, Huguenot, and Quaker. No one will justify the members of the
New York Colonial Assembly in all their acts, especially those which
were clearly contemptible; but we cannot see that Johnson, Clinton, or
the English loved either lucre or liquor any less than the Albany
Dutchmen. Indeed, it was the well-founded suspicion that Clinton was
using his office largely to recoup his broken fortunes that made the
representatives resist him at every point. Johnson, however, finding
that the Assembly and the governor could never be reconciled, and that
his first bill of two thousand pounds would be likely, under existing
circumstances, to remain unpaid, resigned his office of Superintendent
of Indian Affairs. To his Iroquois friends he announced this step by
sending wampum belts to all the chief fortified towns of the
Confederacy.
Neither war nor peace had settled the question of the boundary lines
between the French and English possessions in America. The French
claimed the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys by right of prior discovery by
La Salle and others. The English based their ownership on occupation by
the Iroquois or their vassals, and because the Five Nations were allies
of Great Britain. Both parties now began anew to occupy the land. The
race was westward through the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi. The
starting-points were from tidewater Virginia and from Montreal. Not on
parallel lines, but toward the apex of a triangle, and straight toward
collision, the movement began. The Ohio Company was formed with a grant
of six hundred thousand acres by the English Government, chiefly to
speculators in Virginia. George Washington was one of the first to be
smitten with the fever of speculation, and to the end of his days he
made investments in the Western lands as eagerly as many do now in
Western farm mortgages.
La Gallissonière instructed Celoron de Bienville, one of the four famous
brothers of a remarkable family, to occupy definitely the Ohio Valley in
the name of Louis XIV., King of France. Like a sower going forth to sow,
Bienville went in a canoe with a sack full of leaden plates, depositing
one in the soil at the mouth of every important tributary, so as to
publish to the world that from the source of the Ohio to its mouth, the
country watered by it belonged to France. Up to 1891 several of these
plates have been dug up,—coming thus to resurrection like faint
memories of vanished dreams.
While thus the lines of empire were once more drawn between Celt and
Teuton, the same masters again held the key to the situation,—the
Iroquois. To win these over to French alliance or vassalage, all the
arts of peace were now to be employed by the ablest intellects employing
the strongest forces of religion, education, diplomacy, cunning, and
material gifts. France with her compact military and religious system in
America was a unity. Soldier, priest, and semi-feudal tenant were parts
of one machine moved by one head. With the unity of a phalanx and the
constrictive power of a dragon, she expected to crush to atoms, or at
least coop up between mountains and sea, the English colonies. The
heterogeneous collection of people from north continental and insular
Europe, of many languages and forms of religion, dwelling between the
Merrimac and the Everglades, were held together only by the one tie of
allegiance to the British Crown.
Francis Picquet, priest, soldier, and statesman, saw the necessity of
securing the loyalty of the Six Nations; and receiving the French
Governor’s assent, established himself at La Presentation, on the St.
Lawrence River, between Oswego and Montreal, a fort and a chapel.
Ostensibly his mission was the conversion of the Iroquois. No more
strategic point could have been selected. Whether for peace, war, trade,
voyaging, or education and general influence, the site was supremely
appropriate. When Johnson heard of the man called, according to which
side of the border his name was spoken, “Apostle of the Iroquois” or
“Jesuit of the West,” he was alarmed, especially when he learned that
this lively hornet, Joncaire, was busy in fomenting trouble among the
tribes in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. Before long, this
Jean Cœur had succeeded in reviving between the Iroquois and western
tribes and the Catawbas an old feud. Very soon Clinton received word
from Gov. James Glenn, of South Carolina, that the Senecas were on the
war-path and murdering the Catawbas. In this action the Senecas were
repeating one of the numerous southern raids to which their grandfathers
had been addicted, and one of which Col. John Washington, ancestor of
George, assisted to repel. At Johnson’s suggestion, Clinton now invited
all the tribes composing the Confederacy or in alliance with the
Iroquois to meet at the ancient place of treaties,—the ground on which
now stands the new Capitol at Albany,—while Clinton himself called upon
the governors of all the colonies to form a plan of union for uniting
the tribes and resisting French aggression. On the 28th of June, 1751,
the tribes met in Albany, again to renew the covenant first confirmed by
Arendt Van Curler. There were present delegates from Connecticut,
Massachusetts, and South Carolina, and Indians from the Great Lakes,
besides six Catawba chiefs and representatives of the Six Nations.
The first point made by the Iroquois was that Colonel Johnson should be
reappointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs. They begged leave to try
to influence him by sending a string of wampum to him at Mount Johnson.
They despatched a swift footman to his house. A man is a finer animal
than a horse, and, in the long run, swifter and more enduring. They
chose two human soles rather than four horse’s hoofs for their
messenger. Johnson met the wampum-bearer at Schenectady; but when at
Albany, despite the eloquence of Clinton and the Indians, he firmly
declined serving again while his salary depended upon the Assembly. He
now took the oath of office and his seat in the governor’s Council. He
retained this dignity while he lived.
The great council formally opened on the 6th of July, 1751. Besides the
usual eloquence there was much singing, with ceremonial dances and
enjoyment of that aboriginal custom and product,—the pipe and tobacco.
The sucking and actual whiffing of the calumet, the metaphorical burying
of the hatchet and planting of the tree of peace, signified that war was
over between the Southern and Northern Indians. The confederates living
above the not yet made Mason’s and Dixon’s line clasped hands across the
bloody chasm with the Southerners, and peace again reigned from Pilgrim
Land to the Salzburger Germans in Ogelthorpe’s country. The “late
unpleasantness” was past. After the usual drinking of fire-water and
distribution of presents, the council adjourned, and the Indians went
home.
While the Pennsylvania traders were establishing posts on the Ohio,
under British authority, the French were also busy. Early in September,
from a French deserter, Johnson learned the startling news that a great
fleet of canoes manned by twelve hundred Frenchmen and two hundred
Adirondack Indians, had passed Oswego, bound for the Ohio. News also
arrived by a Cayuga chief that at Cadaracqui a large French man-of-war
was being built for the reduction of Oswego. This fort was then in
command of Lieutenant Lindsay, founder of the Scottish settlement at
Cherry Valley.
Johnson was in New York attending to his duties as a member of the
Council, when the harassing news was received. In addition to the
anxiety this caused him, he was selected by Clinton to do what proved to
be a disagreeable task to himself, and in the eyes of the people’s
representative a repulsive one. Indeed it seemed to them to be doing the
governor’s dirty work. When the House sent to the Council an act for
paying several demands upon the colony, it pleased Clinton and the
Council to demand vouchers, and Johnson was sent to the Assembly to
request them. The offended and angry representatives of the people
declared that the demand was extraordinary and unprecedented, and
declined to consider the request until the first of May. The Council,
angry in turn, sent Johnson back with a bill of their own
originating,—in clear violation of right precedent and propriety,
“applying the sum of five hundred pounds for the management of Indian
affairs and for repairing the garrison at Oswego.”
As might be expected, this bill was not allowed even a second reading,
but a motion was at once passed “that it was the great essential and
undoubted right of the representatives of the people of this colony to
begin all bills from raising and disbursing of money,” and that the bill
of the Council should be rejected. In an address to the governor it was
intimated that the one thousand pounds recently voted for entertaining
the Indians at the council at Albany had been used for other purposes
than the public good. After four days of foolish resistance, the
governor, knowing he was unable to make headway when so clearly in the
wrong, passed all the bills. Then, gratifying a personal spite at the
expense of the public, he dissolved the Assembly.
All this was what those who think the story of American liberty was
fought out chiefly in New England would call the “teapot-tempest
politics of the New York Assembly.” Yet here was the great principle
upon which republican government is founded, and for which Holland
revolted against Spain, and the American colonies against England; “our
great example,” as Franklin declared, being the Dutch republic.
The Dutch had, centuries before, beyond the dikes of Holland, developed
and fought for the doctrine of “no taxation without consent;” and
Clinton, Colden, and their coadjutors were clearly in the wrong.
Further, the representatives were right in hinting that Clinton and his
flatterers were too anxious to improve their own fortunes, and to make
the people pay for their needless junketings enjoyed in the name of
public service. Those who read the local history of the Hudson and
Mohawk Valleys know how burdensome to the people was the silly and
costly pageantry of royal governors on their travels.
Johnson, probably with his eyes needfully opened, on reaching his home
after the dissolution of the Assembly, found the outlook for the
ultimate occupation of the mid-continent by the English rather gloomy.
The French held the frontier of New York on its three strategic
lines,—Crown Point, La Presentation, and Niagara. They were now
planning to plant a mission, which should mean a fort and a church, at
Onondaga Lake, near which had perhaps been—if we so interpret the
inscription on the Pompey stone—a Spanish settlement once destroyed by
the Senecas. Even if the stone, inscribed with the symbols and
chronology of Christendom, were that of a captive, it is a mournful but
interesting relic.
When Johnson heard the news, the Jesuits had already succeeded in
winning the consent of the chiefs even at this ancient hearth of the
Iroquois Confederacy. Such a move must be checkmated at once. Despite
the raw and inclement weather of late autumn, and his desire for rest
and reading, Johnson determined on a journey with its attendant
exposure. He set out at once for Onondaga. Summoning the chief men, he
asked them, as a proof of their many professions of friendship, to give
and deed to him the land and water around Onondaga Lake, to the extent
of two miles in every direction from the shores, for which he promised a
handsome present. Unable to resist their friend, the sachems signed the
deed made out by Johnson, who handed over money amounting to three
hundred and fifty pounds, and left for home. Writing to Governor
Clinton, he offered the land to the Government of New York at the price
he had paid. Thus were the designs of the French again foiled.
With the country at peace, and himself released from the responsibility
of Indian affairs, Johnson began to indulge himself more and more in
literary pursuits, the development of the Mohawk Valley, the moral and
intellectual improvement of the Indians, and the social advantage of the
white settlers. He had already a pretty large collection of books from
London in his mansion, but he sent an order, August 20, 1752, to a
London stationer for the “Gentlemen’s Magazine,” the “Monthly Review,”
the latest pamphlets, and “the newspapers regularly, and stitched up.”
He persuaded many of the Mohawks to send their children to the school at
Stockbridge, Mass., founded by John Sergeant in 1741, and served after
his death by America’s greatest intellect, Jonathan Edwards. His uncle,
the admiral, had already given seven hundred pounds to the support of
this school. Johnson’s correspondence was with the Hon. Joseph Dwight,
once Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, who had
married Mr. Sergeant’s widow, and was deeply interested in Indian
education.
In 1753 Rev. Gideon Hawley, who had taught the children of the Mohawks,
Oneidas, and Tuscaroras at Stockbridge, was sent from Boston to
establish a mission school on the Susquehanna River, west of Albany.
Visiting Mount Johnson, the young missionary was received by the host in
person at the gate. He spent a night enjoying the hospitality, and left
with Johnson’s hearty godspeed. Hawley was able to pursue his work
quietly until the breaking out of the war in 1756. After serving as
chaplain to Col. Richard Gridley’s regiment, he spent from 1757 to 1807,
nearly a half-century of his long and useful life, among the Indians at
Mashpee, Mass.
Johnson was also in warm sympathy with the efforts of Dr. Eleazar
Wheelock, who since 1743, when he began with Samson Occum, a Mohegan
Indian, had been steadily instructing Indian youths at Lebanon, Conn.
“Moor’s Indian Charity School,” as then called, was set upon a good
financial basis when in 1776 Occum and Rev. Nathaniel Whitten crossed
the ocean, and in England obtained an endowment of ten thousand pounds;
William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, being president of the Board of
Trustees. At this school, among the twenty or more Indian boys, Joseph
Brant, sent by Johnson, was educated under Dr. Wheelock. Later the
Wheelock school was transferred to Hanover, N. H., and named after Lord
Dartmouth. On the college seal only, the Indian lads are still seen
coming up to this school instead of attending Hampton in Virginia, or
Carlisle in Pennsylvania. However, ancient history and tradition, after
long abeyance, were revived when, in 1887, a full-blooded Sioux Indian,
Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, was graduated from Dartmouth’s classic
halls.
Various other attempts were made by Johnson, especially during the last
decade of his life, to interest the British authorities in Church and
State in the spiritual improvement of the Indians. The evidences of his
good intentions and generous purposes are seen in his correspondence.
Interesting as they are, however, they bore little fruit, owing to the
outbreak of the Revolution which divided both the red and the white
tribes. The baronet built a church for the Canajoharie Indians, and
supported religious teachers for a while at his own expense. In 1767,
being a man above his sect, he would have had the Indian school, which
grew into Dartmouth College, removed, and established in the Mohawk
Valley. Sectarian influence and ecclesiastical jealousies at Albany
prevented his plan from being carried out. The Valley was thus without a
college, until Union, founded and endowed almost entirely by the
Dutchmen of Schenectady, was established in 1786, free from sectarian
control, as its name implies. Under Eliphalet Nott’s presidency of
sixty-two years, its fame became national, and within its walls have
been educated some of the most useful members of the aboriginal race
called, by accident, Indians.
Admiral Warren died in Dublin, July 29, 1752, of fever; and Johnson
received the news shortly before setting out to attend the Executive
Council in New York, which met in October.
Fortunately for the Commonwealth, Governor Clinton had taken other
advice than that so liberally furnished in the past by the particular
member so obnoxious to the Assembly; and his opening message was
commendably brief, being merely a salutation, which was as briefly and
courteously returned. Now that the Tory firebrand was “out of politics”
for a while, peace once more reigned. An era of good feeling set in, and
harmony was the rule until Clinton’s administration ended. A new Board
of Indian Commissioners was chosen, by a compromise between the governor
and his little parliament. Plans for paying the colonial debt, for
strengthening the frontier, and for establishing a college were all
carried out.
Oswego was the watch-house on the frontier. In the early spring of 1753
the advance guard of a French army left Montreal to take possession of
the Ohio Valley. Descried alike by Iroquois hunters at the rapids of the
St. Lawrence and by the officers at Oswego, the news was communicated to
Johnson by foot-runners with wampum and by horseback-riders with
letters. Thirty canoes with five hundred Indians under Marin were
leading the six thousand Frenchmen determined to hold the domain from
Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico.
Whether troubled the more by the encroachments of the warlike French, or
by the English land-speculators and enterprising farmers who were now
clearing forests and settling on their old hunting-grounds, the Indians
could scarcely tell. Dissatisfied at having lost officially their friend
Johnson, disliking the commissioners, seeing what they considered as
their property, the Ohio, invaded by the French, while the New York
Government seemed to be inert or asleep, they sent a delegation to lay
their complaints before the governor and Council in New York. There they
roundly abused the whole government, and threatened to break the
covenant chain. As matter of fact, the trouble concerning land patents
arose out of transactions settled before Clinton’s time, which could not
at once be remedied in curt Indian fashion. All legal land alienations
in New York were, after the custom originating in Holland, and thence
borrowed by the American colonists and made a national procedure in all
the United States, duly registered; and into these examination must be
made. Both house and governor, however, agreed in choosing Johnson as
the man for the critical hour, and requested him to meet the tribes at
the ancient council-fire at Onondaga. Johnson, hearing that the Iroquois
had broken faith and again attacked the Catawbas in the Carolinas,
hastened matters by summoning one tribe, the Mohawks, to meet him at his
own home.
Again the stone house by the Mohawk became the seat of an Indian
council, and was enveloped in clouds of tobacco smoke. Johnson,
compelling them to drink the cup mingled with upbraiding and kindness,
while bountifully filling their stomachs from his larder, sent them away
in good humour, and most of them burning with loyalty. Besides thus
manifesting his singular power over the Mohawk savages, he met the
representatives of the United Confederacy at Onondaga, September 9. The
result of the ceremonies, the eloquence, the smoke, and the eating was
that the confederates, though sorely puzzled to know what to do between
the French and the English, promised loyalty to the brethren of Corlaer.
They would, however, say nothing satisfactory concerning the Catawbas,
some of whose scalps, and living members reserved for torture, even then
adorned their villages.
Governor Clinton had grown weary of the constant battle which he was,
probably with the stolid ignorance of many men of his time and class,
fighting against the increasing power of popular liberty. He saw it was
vain to resist the spirit which the Dutch, Scots, and French Huguenots
had brought into New York with them, or inherited from their sires, and
he longed for a rest and a sinecure post in England. He liked neither
the New York people nor the climate. When therefore his successor, Sir
Danvers Osborne, arrived on Sunday, October 7, Clinton hailed the day as
one of the happiest of his life. He shortly after sailed for home, to
spend the remainder of his years in a post for which he was better
fitted,—the governorship of Greenwich Hospital. He died in 1761,
fourteen years before the breaking out of the war which his own actions
had strongly tended to precipitate. His son, Sir Henry, led the British
regulars and mercenaries who were bluffed in North Carolina, driven off
at Fort Moultrie, and finally won victory at Long Island. He failed to
relieve Burgoyne, fought the drawn battle at Monmouth, captured
Charleston, dickered with Arnold, left Cornwallis in the lurch, and
returning baffled to England, shed much ink in defending himself against
his critics. Another family of Clintons shed high lustre on the American
name and the Empire State. One added another river parallel to the
Mohawk, flowing past Johnson’s old home, and joining the waters of the
Great Lakes to those of the Hudson and the Atlantic, making the city of
New York the metropolis of the continent.
Sir Danvers Osborne’s career in America was a short tragedy in three
acts. It lasted five days. He came to be ground as powder between the
upper millstone of royal prerogative and the nether disk of popular
rights. He came from an aristocratic and monarchical country, whose
government believed that it was the source of power to the people, to
colonists whose fathers had been educated mostly under a republic, where
it was taught that the people were, under God, the originators of power.
Charged with instructions much more stringent than those given to his
predecessor, he was confronted in the town-hall by the city corporation,
whose spokesman’s opening sentence was that “they would not brook any
infringement of their liberties, civil or religious.” On meeting his
Council for the first time, he was informed that any attempt to enforce
the strict orders given him and to insist upon an indefinite support,
would be permanently resisted. That night the unfortunate servant of the
king took his own life. He committed suicide by hanging himself on his
own garden wall.
De Lancey, the chief-justice, was now called to the difficult post of
governor, and to the personally delicate task of serving King George and
his former associates, whom he had so diligently prodded against
Clinton, Colden, and Johnson. This was especially difficult, when the
Assembly found, in the instructions to Sir Danvers Osborne, how
diligently the late governor and his advisers had slandered and
misrepresented them to the British Government. The good results of a
change in the executive were, however, at once visible, and the Assembly
promptly voted money for the defence of the frontier, for the governor’s
salary, for his arrears of pay as chief-justice, for Indian presents,
for his voyage to Albany, and indeed, for everything reasonable. They
added a complaint against Clinton, and a defence of their conduct to the
Crown and Lords of Trade, which De Lancey sent to London.
The clouds of war which had gathered in the Ohio Valley now broke, and
M. Contrecœur occupied Fort Du Quesne. George Washington began his
career on the soil of the State of Pennsylvania, in which his longest
marches, deepest humiliations, fiercest battles, and most lasting civil
triumphs were won; and on the 4th of July, 1754, honourably surrendered
Fort Necessity. The French drum-beat was now heard from Quebec to
Louisiana. The English were banished behind the Alleghanies, and their
flag from the Ohio Valley.
It was now vitally necessary that the colonies should form a closer
union for defence against French aggression and the inroads of hostile
savages. The Iroquois tribes had been able to unite themselves in a
stable form of federalism. Why could not the thirteen colonies become
confederate, and act with unity of purpose? Besides so great an example
on the soil before them, there was the New England Confederation of
1643, which had been made chiefly by men trained in a federal republic.
Both the Plymouth men and many of the leaders of New England had lived
in the United States of Holland, and under the red, white, and blue
flag. There they had seen in actual operation what strength is derived
from union. _Concordia res parvæ crescunt_ (“By concord little things
become grand”), was the motto of the Union of Utrecht, familiar to all;
but in New York the republican motto _Een-dracht maakt Macht_ (“Union
makes strength”) needed no translation, for its language was the daily
speech of a majority of the people.
It seemed now, at least, eminently proper that the Congress of Colonies
should be in the state settled first by people from a republic, and at
Albany, the ancient place of treaties, and at the spot in English
America where red and white delegates from the north, east, west, and
south can even now assemble without climbing or tunnelling the
Appalachian chain of mountains.
By direction of the Lords of Trade, the governments of all the colonies
were invited to meet at Albany, so that a solemn treaty could be at one
time made with all the Indian tribes, by all the colonies, in the name
of the king.
For treaty-making with the Iroquois, the most powerful of all the Indian
tribes, there was only one place,—Albany. Dinwiddie, of Virginia,
vainly wanted it at Winchester, Va., while Shirley, of Massachusetts,
jealous of New York, and a genuine politician, wished to keep himself
before the voters, and to come after the elections were over. His party
was more than his province or the country. As the Indians had already,
according to orders from England, been notified, the New York Assembly
declined to postpone time or place.
In Albany the streets were cleaned and repaired by order of the City
Council, and the delegates were given a public dinner at the municipal
expense. The Congress met in the City Hall on the 19th of June, 1754,
twenty-five delegates from nine colonies being present; and whether in
personal or in representative dignity formed the most august assembly
which up to this time had ever been held in the Western World. The
colonies were named in the minutes according to their situation from
north to south. All were represented, except New Jersey, the Carolinas,
and Georgia.
The business proper began when Johnson read a paper, which was the
official report of the Board of Commissioners on Indian Affairs, in
which the political situation was exposed. In it propositions were made
to build forts in the Onondaga and Seneca countries, with a missionary
in each place; to forbid the sale of rum, and to expel and keep the
Frenchmen out of the Indian castles. The speech, prepared as the voice
of the Congress, was delivered June 28 to the Indians who were present,
and who had to be urged by the governor to attend. After various
conferences and much speech-making on either side, including an address
by Abraham, a scorching philippic by King Hendrick,—both Mohawk sachems
and brothers,—and the distribution of gifts, the Indians went home
apparently satisfied. To the edification of delegates from some of the
colonies, where Indians were deemed incapable of understanding truth and
honour, they found that Governor De Lancey and Colonel Johnson treated
them as honest men who understood the nature of covenants. Whereas the
laws of Joshua and Moses had been elsewhere applied only too freely to
Indian politics by the elect of Jehovah, the New York authorities really
believed that the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule had a place in
Indian politics.
Other questions of vital interest to the colonies were discussed. On the
fifth day of the session of the Congress, while waiting for the Indians
to assemble, a motion was made and carried unanimously that “a union of
all the colonies” was absolutely necessary for their security and
defence. A committee of six was appointed to prepare plans of union, and
from the ninth day until the end of the session this important matter
was under debate. On the 9th of July the Congress voted “That there be a
union of his Majesty’s several governments on the continent, so that
their councils, treasure, and strength may be employed in due proportion
against their common enemy.” On the 10th of July the plan was adopted,
and ordered to be sent to London for the royal consideration.
How far this Albany plan of union, which looked to a Great Council of
forty-eight members meeting at Philadelphia under a President-general,
resembled or foreshadowed the National Constitution of 1787, we need not
here discuss. Certain it is, that though the exact plan proposed was
rejected, both by the colonies and by Great Britain, the spirit of the
movement lived on. Between the year 1754 and that of 1776 was only the
space of the life of a young man. Between the “Congress”—the word in
this sense was a new coinage, dating from the meeting of colonial
delegates in Albany, after the burning of Schenectady in 1690—in the
State House at Albany and the one in Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia,
the time was even less. Certain it is that the assembly of
representatives of the colonies at Albany in 1690 was the first occasion
of the popular use of the word “Congress” as now used, and usually
written with a capital, while that in 1748 made it a word of general
acceptance in the English language. Before that time and meeting it had
other significations not so august; but while these have fallen away,
the other and chief signification in English remains. Further, from this
time forth the “Continental”—that is, the American as distinct from the
British, the independent as discriminated from the transatlantic—idea
grew. In common speech, the continental man was he who was more and more
interested in what all the colonies did in union, and less in what the
king’s ministers were pleased to dictate. More and more after the Albany
Congress Wycliffe’s idea prevailed,—that even King George’s “dominion
was founded in grace” and not on prerogative. More and more the legend
on the coins, “Georgius Rex Dei Gratia,” faded into the nature of a
fairy tale, while the idea grew that the governments derive their
authority from the consent of the governed. To those wedded to the idea
that religion can live only when buttressed by politics, that a church
owes its life to the state, this increase of democratic doctrines was
horrible heresy, portending frightful immorality and floods of vice. A
State without a King, a Church without politically appointed rulers and
the support of public taxation, a coin without the divine name stamped
on it, were, in the eyes of the servants of monarchy, as so many
expressions of atheism. Not so thought the one member of the Albany
Congress who lived to sign the Declaration of Independence and the
National Constitution of 1787,—Benjamin Franklin, who incarnated the
state founded politically by Penn; nor the Quaker, Stephen Hopkins, of
Rhode Island, who lived to put his sign-manual to Jefferson’s immortal
document, July 4, 1776.