ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
_Your trade is the mother and nurse of your seamen; your seamen are
the life of your fleet; your fleet is the security of your trade,
and both together are the wealth, strength, and glory of Britain._
LORD HAVERSHAM.
I
The decay of the old Puritanism in Massachusetts, so distressing to
Cotton Mather, was but a faint reflection of the change which had come
over England since the return of Charles II to Whitehall. With the fall
of the Puritan régime moral earnestness and high emotional tension,
regarded as contrary to nature and reason, gave way to a rationalizing
habit of mind, to seriousness tempered with well-bred common sense or
spiced with a pinch of cynical indifference. Religion fell to be a
conventional conformity. Theologians, wanting vital faith in God, were
content to balance the probabilities of his existence. Amusement became
the avocation of a leisure class, and the average man was intent like
Samuel Pepys to put money in his purse, in order to indulge himself "a
little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age to do
it." From Milton and the Earl of Clarendon to William Pitt, England was
no country of lost causes and impossible enthusiasms. It was a pragmatic
age, in which the scientific discoveries of Newton are the highest
intellectual achievement, and the conclusion of Pope that "everything
that is is best" gives the quality of poetic insight.
In this age the direction of English affairs fell to men well suited to
the national temper. The first Charles suffered martyrdom for his faith;
the second, determined never again to go on his travels, set the
standard of public morality by selling himself to France, and with a
smile professing the belief that honor in man and virtue in woman were
but devices to raise the price of capitulation. And so he often found
it; for he was himself served by men who, having renounced their Puritan
principles for place and power, were prepared to forswear the Stuarts in
order to follow the rising star of William of Orange. William was an
able statesman, indeed, but his interest was in the grand alliance; he
"borrowed England on his way to Versailles," and governed it in the
interest of the Dutch Coalition. Queen Anne and the first Georges
reigned but did not govern; and in the early eighteenth century power
fell to men of supple intelligence and complacent conviction--to
Marlborough and little Sidney Godolphin, to Harley and St. John and
Sunderland, and at last to Robert Walpole, the very personification of
the shrewd curiosity, the easy-going morals, the material ambitions of
his generation.
Little wonder if in such an age colonies were regarded as providentially
designed to promote the trade's increase. The recall of the
Massachusetts charter was but one of many circumstances which reveal
the rise in England of renewed interest in the plantations. Faith in
colonial ventures had never, indeed, quite disappeared, nor had the
early Stuarts ever been wholly indifferent to their American
possessions. But the fate of the Virginia Company had cooled the ardor
of moneyed men, and the Civil War, focusing attention for a generation
upon fundamental questions of morals and politics, absorbed the energies
of government and nation. With the establishment of the Protectorate
imperial interests again claimed attention. Cromwell, calling the
merchants to counsel, inaugurated a vigorous policy of maritime and
colonial expansion. The Dutch war and the conquest of Jamaica recalled
to men's minds the triumphs of Elizabeth; and those who gathered round
Charles II--bankrupt nobles, pushing merchants, and able
statesmen--turned to the business of trade and colonies with an
enthusiasm unknown since the days of Gilbert and Raleigh.
Yet it was an enthusiasm well tempered to practical ends, purged of
resplendent visions and vague idealisms. The plantations, regarded as
incidents in the life of commerce, were thought to be important when
they were found to be prosperous. In 1661 the king was assured that his
American possessions were "beginning to grow into Commodities of great
value and Esteeme, and though some of them continue in tobacco yet upon
the Returne hither it smells well, and paies more Custome to his
Majestie than the East Indies four times ouer." It was a statement of
which the new king was not likely to miss the significance. Determined
to preserve the prerogative without offending the nation, Charles was
never indifferent to the material welfare of England; the expansion of
trade would increase his own revenue, while the vigilance which
preserves liberty he thought likely to be relaxed among a prosperous and
well-fed people. To commercial and colonial expansion the merry monarch
therefore gave his best attention. If he yawned over dull reports in
council, he listened to them with ready intelligence, and was prepared
to encourage every reasonable project for the extension of the empire.
For new colonial ventures opportunity was not lacking. Widely separated
settlements along the American coast were cut in twain by New Netherland
and flanked on either side by the possessions of France and Spain. To
forestall rivals in occupying all the territory claimed by England, and
to exploit intelligently its commercial resources, seemed at once a
public duty and a private opportunity. And no region was thought more
important, either in a commercial or a military way, than the Cape Fear
and Charles River valleys. So at least reasoned the Earl of Clarendon,
Ashley Cooper, and Sir John Colleton; to them, associated with five
others, was accordingly issued in 1663, and again in 1665, a proprietary
grant to the Carolinas. The patentees, upon whom the charter conferred
the usual right to establish and govern colonies, expected that the
surplus population of Barbados and the Bahamas, where capital and
slavery were driving out white laborers and small farmers, would readily
migrate to the Charles River, and there engage in the cultivation of
commodities--such as silk, currants, raisins, wax, almonds, olives, and
oil--which, being raised neither in England nor in any English
plantation, would serve to redress the balance of trade and doubtless
net a handsome profit to those with faith to venture the first costs of
settlement. With the English market assured, a thriving trade and a
prosperous colony seemed the certain result.
In these expectations the patentees were disappointed. Dissenters
already settled in the region of Albemarle Sound were little disposed to
submit to restrictions which they had left Virginia to avoid. In 1665
and 1666 some discontented Barbadians, making an essay to settle on the
coast farther south, found the country less inviting than they had been
led to expect, and returned to Barbados as the lesser evil. The terms on
which the proprietors granted land, liberal enough but frequently
changed; restrictions laid on trade almost before there was anything to
exchange; the doctrinaire Fundamental Constitutions which John Locke,
fresh from the perusal of Harrington, wrote out in the quiet of his
study for governing little frontier communities the like of which he had
never seen,--all had little effect but to irritate those who were
already on the ground and discourage others from going there. In 1667,
there were no inhabitants in Carolina south of Albemarle Sound; in 1672
scarcely more than four hundred. Not silk and almonds but provisions
were raised; for it was necessary "to provide in the first place for the
belly" before endeavoring to redress the balance of England's commerce.
As late as 1675 the proprietors complained that an expenditure of
£10,000 had returned them nothing but the "charge of 5 or 600 people who
expect to live on us." An exaggeration, doubtless; but in truth the
Carolinas never profited the proprietors anything, never drew off much
of the surplus population of Barbados, nor supplied England with olives
or capers. North Carolina raised tobacco, which was carried by New
England traders to Virginia or the Northern colonies. The inhabitants of
the Southern province, reinforced by French Huguenots and English
dissenters, exported provisions to the West Indies. Yet South Carolina,
disappointing to the proprietors, was destined in the next century, when
rice became its staple product, to serve in an almost ideal way the
purpose for which it had been founded.
The Carolina charter had scarcely been issued before the Dutch were
ousted from the valley of the Hudson. It was an old grievance that the
Hollanders, under many obligations to England, should have presumed to
occupy territory already granted by James I to the Plymouth Company. And
now, wedged in between the New England and the Southern colonies,
holding the first harbor on the continent and well situated to share
with France in exploiting the fur trade, the grievance had become
intolerable. But the offense of all was the complacence with which the
merchants of New Amsterdam ignored the English Trade Acts. Reconciled at
last to the strange perversity of Virginia in raising tobacco, the
English Government had made the best of a bad bargain by laying a
prohibition upon its cultivation in England; yet with this result: an
English industry had been suppressed by law only that the Dutch, who
still contested England's right to share in the spice and slave trade,
might carry Virginia tobacco to European ports, smuggle European
commodities into the English settlements, and so diminish the profits of
British merchants and annually deprive the royal exchequer of £10,000 of
customs revenue. When the Dutch war was imminent in 1664, an English
fleet, therefore, took possession of Now Amsterdam in order to secure to
England the commercial value of the tobacco colonies. Before the
conquest was effected the king conferred upon his brother, the Duke of
York, a proprietary feudal grant of all the territory lying between the
Connecticut and Delaware Rivers.
At the time of the conquest the colony of New Netherland was occupied by
Dutch farmers and traders on western Long Island and on both sides of
the Hudson as far north as the Mohawk River; central Long Island was
inhabited in part by New Englanders; the eastern end entirely so. To
establish English authority in the province, harmonizing at once the
interests of the Catholic Duke of York, the Dutch Protestants, and the
New England Puritans, was a difficult task, but it was accomplished with
much skill by Colonel Nicolls, who was the first English governor.
Religious toleration was granted; land titles were confirmed; and a body
of laws, known as the Duke's Laws, based upon Dutch custom and New
England statutes, was prepared by the governor and with some murmuring
accepted by the inhabitants. In 1683 Governor Dongan, yielding to
popular demand, established a legislative body consisting of the
governor's council and a house of eighteen deputies elected by the
freeholders, and the freemen of the corporations of Albany and New York.
With the accession of James as King of England, the province temporarily
lost its popular assembly; in 1688 it was annexed to New England under
the jurisdiction of Andros; and after the Revolution it was distracted
for many years by political quarrels growing out of the Leisler
Rebellion. Yet none of these events interfered with the economic
development of the colony. In 1674 the population was about 7000.
Natural increase, together with immigrants from England and New England,
Huguenot exiles from France, and refugees which the armies of Louis XIV
drove out of the Palatinate, swelled the number to about 25,000 in 1700.
Dutch merchants at Albany did a thriving business in furs; and in 1695
New York City, with a population of 5000, was already the center of an
active trade, mainly West Indian, by no means wholly legal, in
provisions and sugar.
The conquest of New Amsterdam was scarcely completed before the Duke of
York, by "lease and re-lease," and for the sum of ten shillings,
conveyed to his friends, Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, the
territory between the Hudson and the Delaware Rivers, afterwards known
as New Jersey. Dutch settlers already occupied the west shore of New
York Harbor; and there were Swedes as well as Dutch on the lower
Delaware. Favorable concessions offered by the proprietors soon
attracted New Englanders from Long Island and Connecticut, who located
in the region of Monmouth and Middletown. The proprietors nevertheless
found more vexation than profit in their venture; and in 1673 Lord
Berkeley sold his rights to two Friends, John Fenwick and Edward
Byllinge, who were intent upon founding a refuge for the Quakers in
America. Many Quakers soon settled in West Jersey along the Delaware,
and upon the death of Carteret the proprietary rights to East Jersey
were purchased by William Penn and other Friends who had succeeded to
the rights of Fenwick and Byllinge. A mixed population and conflicting
claims made the history of the first Quaker colony a turbulent one. In
1688 both Jerseys were annexed to New York; and in 1702, the proprietors
having surrendered all their rights, the two colonies became the single
royal province of New Jersey.
Of those who were interested in securing a refuge for the Quakers, the
most active was William Penn, who had suffered ridicule and persecution
for his faith, and who now desired a clearer field than the Jerseys
offered for his political and religious experiments. In 1681 he
therefore procured from the king a proprietary grant of the territory
lying west of the Delaware from "twelve miles north of New Castle Town
unto the three and fortieth degree of Northern Latitude." The land
within these vague limits was thought to be "wholly Indian," and the
purposes of Penn did not run counter to the colonial policy of the
Government. Optimism or ignorance disposed the Lords of Trade to believe
that Pennsylvania could as readily as the Carolinas be devoted to the
cultivation of "oyle, dates, figgs, almons, raisins, and currans." To
the political hobbies of Penn the Government was indifferent, while the
intractable Quakers were classed with jailbirds and political offenders
as people who were more useful to England in the plantations than at
home. The proprietor's "Account of the Province of Pennsylvania,"
translated into Dutch, German, and French, promising religious and
political liberty, and offering land on easy terms to rich and poor
alike, attracted good colonists in large numbers. Within ten years there
were 10,000 people, mostly Quakers, in Pennsylvania and the Delaware
counties. Political wrangling, somewhat difficult to understand and
scarcely worth unraveling, distracted the colony of brotherly love for
many years; but from the beginning the province prospered. The settlers
were as thrifty as New England Puritans, and they had better soil and a
more hospitable climate. Provisions were soon raised for export; and in
1700, according to Robert Quarry, the Quakers of Pennsylvania had
"improved tillage to that degree that they have made bread, flower, and
Beer a drugg in all the markets of the West Indies."
II
As early as 1656 London merchants were inquiring "whether it would not
be a prudentiall thing to draw all the Islands, Colonies, and Dominions
of America under one and the same management here." Enterprising
capitalists who had ventured their money in Jamaica or Barbados were
content to leave the honor and profit of founding new colonies to
idealists like Penn and Shaftesbury; but they eagerly welcomed the
restored monarch after the unsettled conditions of 1659, and were
prepared, even before he landed, to tell him "how the forraigne
plantations may be made most useful to the Trade and Navigation of these
Kingdomes." Of all the busy promoters whose private interests were, by
some strange whim of Providence, in such happy accord with the nation's
welfare and the theories of economists, none was more conspicuous than
Martin Noel. He was a man of varied activities: a stockholder in the
East India Company; a farmer of the inland post office and of the
excise; a banker who made loans, and issued bills of exchange and
letters of credit. His many ships traded in the West Indies, in New
England and Virginia, and in the Mediterranean. During the wars of the
Protectorate he was himself a commissioner of prize goods, issued
letters of marque, and judged the prizes taken by his own vessels. A
center of great interest was his place at the Old Jewry; the resort of
ship captains, merchants, investors, contractors, officials of the
Government. The capital for financing one of the Jamaica expeditions was
raised there by Noel, who was rewarded by a grant of twenty thousand
acres of sugar land after the conquest of the island. He had been
intimate with Cromwell, and after the return of Charles won the
reputation of being, in all affairs of trade and plantations, "the
mainstay of the Government." It was through Martin Noel, and men of his
kind, that the old colonial system began to be shaped to serve the ends
of the moneyed and mercantile interests of England.
[Illustration: Areas settled by 1660, and between 1660 and 1700.]
Enterprising men like Noel were prosperous enough, but their extended
vision enabled them to complain intelligently of the decay of trade. In
the year 1660 exports made not more than a fourth part of the eight and
a half millions of England's foreign commerce. Money was scarce,
interest high, rents and prices low. No one doubted that the effective
remedy for these ills lay in establishing a "favorable balance of
trade." But in the path of this achievement stood the old rivals of
England--Holland, Spain, and France. Imports from France overbalanced
exports thither in the proportion of 2.6 to 1.6. Spain still worked the
rich silver veins of the Andes, and the conquest of Jamaica had opened
English eyes to the high value of her West Indian possessions. Above
all, the thrifty Dutch, intrenched in the East Indies and on the west
coast of Africa, supplied Europe with the major part of Oriental
products and denied England's right to share with them the honor and
profit of importing slaves into Spanish America. To restore the balance
of the French trade, and to contest with Holland and Spain for the
lucrative commerce of the East and the West Indies was the underlying
economic motive of the wars and diplomacy, as well as of the colonial
policy of the Restoration period; it was for this that the Royal African
and Hudson Bay Companies were organized; for this the Dutch and French
wars were waged; for this regulations were enacted for trade and
plantations. And to contemporaries the wisdom of such measures was
evident in the result: at the close of the century, although imports
remained approximately the same as in 1660, exports had reached the
unprecedented figure of seven millions sterling.
In achieving this result, the plantations were expected to play an
important part; and no one doubted that they had done so. During the
decade after the Restoration, the commerce between England and her
American possessions was about one tenth of her total foreign trade; in
1700 it was about one seventh. Imports from the colonies rose from
£500,000 to more than £1,000,000, and exports to the colonies from
£105,910 to £750,000. But the mere increase of trade was no perfect
index of the importance of the plantations; for the colonial trade built
up the merchant marine far more, in proportion to its volume, than any
other. The American voyages were long; plantation commodities bulked
large in proportion to their value; and whereas much of the commerce
between England and Europe was carried in foreign ships, colonial trade
was confined to British vessels. If, therefore, the merchant marine more
than doubled during the Restoration, that happy result was thought to be
largely due to the colonies. "The Plantacion trade is one of the
greatest nurseries of the Shipping and Seamen of this Kingdome, and one
of the greatest branches of its trade," said the customs commissioners
in 1678; "the Plantacions, New Castle trade, and the fisheries, make 3/4
of all the seamen in ye Nation."
The colonies which enlisted the enthusiasm of the commissioners were
the plantations proper. There were men, such as Charles Davenant, who
thought New England might have its uses; but the high value of Maryland
and Virginia, of Barbados and Jamaica, was obvious to all. Maryland and
Virginia, it is true, were not quite ideal colonies, since it was found
necessary, in their interest, to prohibit the raising of tobacco in
England. But the sugar islands were without reproach. England was not
now, as in the time of James I, thought to be overpopulated; and
Barbados and Jamaica found favor, not only because their products were
neither raised nor made in England, but because they could be exploited
by slave labor. It was pointed out that happily "by taking off one
useless person, for such generally go abroad [to the islands], we add
Twenty Blacks to the Labour and Manufactures of the Nation." Negroes
procured in Africa at slight cost might, indeed, be counted as
commodities of export, while the island colonies cultivated precisely
those commodities which England would otherwise have imported from
foreign countries. And the statistics of the custom-house confirmed the
theory of the pamphleteer; in 1697, seven eighths of all colonial
commerce was with the tobacco and sugar plantations, and Jamaica alone
offered a greater market than all the Northern and Middle colonies
combined.
It was thus the West Indies which statesmen had chiefly in mind when
they set about regulating trade and navigation to the end that "we may
in every part be more sellers than buyers, and thereby the Coyne and
present stocke of money be preserved and increased." Three acts of
Parliament, embodying the ideas of London merchants interested in the
tobacco and sugar plantations, formulated the principles of England's
commercial code. The famous Navigation Act of 1660 confined colonial
carrying trade wholly, and the foreign carrying trade mainly, to English
and colonial shipping, and provided that certain colonial
products--sugar, tobacco, cotton-wool, indigo, ginger, dyeing-woods; the
so-called "enumerated" commodities--could be shipped only to England or
to an English colony. In 1663 the Staple Act prohibited the importation
into the colonies of any commodities raised or made in Europe,--with the
exception of salt, of horses and provisions from Scotland and Ireland,
of wine from the Madeiras and the Azores, and of commodities not allowed
to be imported into England,--unless they were first landed in England.
In order not to discriminate against English in favor of colonial
consumers of colonial products, a third act was passed in 1673 providing
that enumerated commodities, which paid a duty when shipped directly to
England, should pay a duty when shipped from one colony to another. In
1705 rice, molasses, and naval stores were added to the list of
enumerated commodities, and in 1733 prohibitive duties, never enforced,
were laid upon rum, molasses, and sugar imported from foreign islands
into the continental colonies. The purpose of these laws, and of the
supplementary acts, of which more than half a hundred were passed
between 1689 and 1765, was to foster the industries of the empire at the
expense of foreign countries, and to develop colonial industry along
lines that did not bring it into competition with English agriculture or
manufactures.
Information gathered by the Privy Council committees, which the Stuarts
appointed to coördinate the work of managing trade and the plantations,
soon demonstrated that it was easier to make laws than it was to enforce
them. Until the end of the century, illicit trade, inseparably connected
with piracy, became increasingly flagrant in nearly every colony. West
Indian buccaneers, lineal descendants of the Elizabethan "sea dogues,"
nesting at Jamaica under English sanction until after the peace with
Spain in 1670, resorted to Charleston, New York, Providence, or Boston,
and under licenses granted by royal governors joined hands with the
colonial free-trader or East Indian "interlopers" to make the acts of
trade a byword and a reproach. New England and Dutch merchants,
"regarding neither the acts of trade nor the law of nature," carried
provisions to Canada during the French wars. Tobacco was taken to
Holland and Scotland, or smuggled from Maryland through Pennsylvania
into the Northern colonies. Bolted flour and provisions were exchanged
by New York traders in the Spanish islands for molasses and rum.
European commodities and the spices and fabrics of the Orient, secured
at trifling cost from pirates or "interlopers" in exchange for rum or
Spanish pieces of eight, were carried in small boats up the innumerable
estuaries that indent the coast from New England to Virginia. Indolent
governors were often ignorant of the law; dishonest ones, willing for
money down to wink at its violation; and even those, like Bellomont,
who were honest and energetic, found themselves without the necessary
machinery for its effective enforcement.
If the violation of the Trade Acts called loudly for a more direct
supervision of the colonies, the growing menace of Canada enforced the
same lesson. Under the imbecile Charles II, Spain was no longer, as in
Elizabethan times, the first danger. Colbert's attention to colonial
affairs, as well as Louis XIV's European ambitions, soon obscured the
commercial rivalry of England and Holland, while the accession of
William of Orange to the throne of the Stuarts, by pledging England to
twenty years of war against the House of Bourbon, revealed the startling
fact that it was New France rather than New Spain which threatened the
security of British America. English settlements had not yet passed the
Alleghany foothills before French missionaries and explorers had
penetrated by the chain of lakes to the heart of the continent. Jean
Nicolet as early as 1640, Radisson and Grosseilliers in 1660, were
canoeing down the Wisconsin River toward the Mississippi; and in 1671,
the year before Count Frontenac landed at Quebec to begin the
regeneration of Canada, Saint-Lusson, with impressive ceremony in the
presence of fourteen native tribes at Sault Ste. Marie, took possession
of the great Northwest in the name of the Grand Monarch.
It was no mere spirit of adventure, or dream of limitless empire, that
dispersed the French settlements over so wide an area. As Virginia was
founded on tobacco, so was Canada on furs; and unless the Indians on
the northern lakes could be induced to bring their furs down the St.
Lawrence, Quebec might add luster to the crown of Louis, but it could
not greatly increase the commercial strength of France. A firm alliance
with the northern tribes was therefore the first object. It was for this
that military posts were established on the waterways of the interior.
And every stockaded fort was at once a trading camp and a mission house:
merchants lured the Indian with brandy and firearms; civil officials and
men at arms impressed him with the authority of the great king; Jesuit
priests, strangely compounding true devotion and unscrupulous intrigue,
learned the native languages, and with the magic of the crucifix and the
_Te Deum_ converted the spirit-fearing savages into loyal children of
the Bishop of Rome. Canada, with its center at Quebec, and its outposts
at Michilimackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, was little more than "a musket,
a rosary, and a pack of beaver skins": not so much a colony, indeed, as
a mesh of interlacing interests cunningly designed to convert fur into
gold. And so long as the tribes of the northern lakes annually brought
their rich freightage of mink and beaver to Fort Frontenac or Montreal,
to be exchanged there for arms and brandy, beads, hatchets, bracelets,
and gay-colored fabrics, gold was not lacking--for the pockets of clever
merchant and corrupt official, if not always for the royal treasury of
France.
"The colonies of foreign nations so long settled on the sea board,"
wrote the Intendant Talon in 1671, "are trembling with fright in view of
what your Majesty has accomplished here in the last seven years." In
fact, the thrifty and unadventurous farmers along the Atlantic were as
yet only too indifferent to the importance of Canada; still less did
they foresee the New France of which La Salle was at that moment
dreaming. After a dozen years of heart-breaking discouragements, that
somber idealist finally reached the Gulf of Mexico by way of the
Mississippi. It was on the 9th of April, 1682, at the mouth of the
Father of Waters, that he proclaimed the sovereignty of Louis XIV over
"this country of Louisiana, from the mouth of the river St. Louis,
otherwise called the Ohio, as also along the river Colbert, or
Mississippi, and the rivers that discharge thereinto, from its source as
far as its mouth at the sea." To make sure the title thus announced to
the silent wilderness, a pillar bearing the arms of France was erected,
and a lead plate buried in the sand. The inscription would scarcely have
frightened away even a stray Englishman, had he chanced to see it; but
when, in December of the same year, La Salle built his wooden fort on
the rock of St. Louis, there began to emerge from the world of dreams to
the world of realities the vision of a greater New France, held together
by a chain of forts on all the inland waterways from the mouth of the
St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, and exploiting, through
friendly alliance with the native tribes, the rich fur trade of the
continent.
It was during the last decade of the Stuart régime, when the efficient
committee known as the Lords of Trade had charge of colonial affairs,
that the English Government first set seriously about the task of
checking the growing power of France and of suppressing illicit trade.
To aid the governors in enforcing the navigation laws, collectors and
comptrollers of the customs had been established in nearly every colony
by 1678; in 1688 William Dyre, responsible to the English customs
commissioners, was appointed surveyor-general and placed at the head of
the American service; and it was mainly on the ground of illegal trade
that Massachusetts was made a crown colony in 1684. The doughty Colonel
Dongan, who came out as Governor of New York in 1683, was one of the
first to see the importance of Canada; and after 1685 he was supported
by James in the attempt to divert the fur trade from Montreal to Albany
by bringing the Iroquois Indians under English control. The scheme,
which involved nothing less than the ruin of Canada, was by no means a
visionary one. The Five Nations, lying south of the chain of lakes,
could profit but little by the fur trade while it remained in French
hands. But let Albany replace Montreal as the chief market, and they
would become the indispensable middle carriers between the northern
tribes and the English. And the northern tribes were themselves not
ill-disposed to such a change. Undoubtedly the French had better manners
than the English; undoubtedly French fire-water was of excellent flavor.
But the traders whom Dongan sent to Michilimackinac proved beyond cavil
that English goods were cheap; and so long as a beaver skin was the
price of a debauch on French brandy, whereas a mink skin was sufficient
to attain the same exaltation by means of English rum, the French
control of the fur trade rested on a precarious basis. The chief
obstacle to Dongan's scheme was the division of executive authority in
the colonies, the apathy of colonial assemblies, and the lack of an
adequate military force to protect the Iroquois from the enmity of the
French. It was precisely to change these conditions, and to avoid the
very evils which soon came to pass, that James II, who had at least the
merit of an intelligent interest in the colonies, placed all New England
under the single jurisdiction of Andros in 1686, and, in 1688, united
New York and the Jerseys to New England.
The Revolution which drove James from the throne discredited his
measures, but the twenty years of war with France which the Revolution
brought in its train proved the wisdom of his policy. When Indian
massacres inspired at Quebec made a desolate waste of the New England
frontier, while Boston and New York merchants filled their pockets by
supplying the enemy with munitions of war, the inadequacy of the
colonial system for defense, as well as all the worst evils of illicit
trade, stood clearly revealed. Until 1715, the Board of Trade, which
William appointed in 1696, maintained the traditions, if it did not
exhibit all the efficiency, of the old committee of the Lords of Trade.
The Navigation Act of 1696, providing for nearly thirty officials at an
annual cost of £1605, for the first time systematically extended the
English customs service to the colonies. In the following year seven
admiralty courts, subject to the Lords of the Admiralty, were erected in
the continental colonies to try cases arising out of the violation of
the Trade Acts, while special courts for dealing with piracy were
established in 1700. But the customs and admiralty services, although
directly responsible to the English Government, could never be fully
effective unless they were vigorously supported by the colonial
Governments. It was in order to make the enforcement of the commercial
code more effective, as well as to secure better coöperation among the
colonial Governments for military defense, that the Board of Trade
repeatedly advised the recall of all the charters as a measure necessary
above all others. The advice of the Board was followed only in part. The
union of New England and New York was abandoned. Massachusetts received
a new charter; Connecticut and Rhode Island retained their old ones;
Penn's charter, annulled in 1692, was restored in 1694. But under the
charter granted to Massachusetts in 1691 the governor was appointed by
the Crown; New Jersey was made a royal province in 1702; and Maryland in
1691, although it was given back to the Baltimores in 1715. When the
Peace of Utrecht was signed in 1713, the system devised by the Board of
Trade for controlling the colonies thus lacked little of being
completely established. The English customs and admiralty services had
been fully extended to America; and while control of legislation was
left mainly in the hands of assemblies elected in each colony, executive
authority was entrusted to Crown officials in every colony except
Pennsylvania, where the governor was appointed by the proprietor, and
Rhode Island and Connecticut, where he was still elected by the people.
III
It is only by courtesy that these measures for confining the trade of
the empire may be called a colonial system; and it would have been well
if England, profiting by the experience of the French wars, had set
seriously about the task of fashioning a method of government adapted to
the political as well as the commercial needs of her New World
possessions. But it was not to be. With the accession of George I,
enthusiasm for plantation ventures declined; interest in the colonies,
undiminished, indeed, was more than ever concentrated upon their
commercial possibilities; and the constructive policy of the Stuarts
gave way, in the phrase of Burke, to one of "salutary neglect." The
neglect was, indeed, by no means complete. Information was assiduously
gathered; many new laws were passed; the number of officials greatly
increased, and governors more carefully instructed; colonial statutes,
more consistently inspected, were more often annulled. Yet it is true
that for three decades after the Peace of Utrecht no attempt was made to
transform the commercial code into a colonial system. And even the
commercial code was administered in "a gentlemanlike and easy-going
fashion: little was embitered and nothing solved."
Of many circumstances which contributed to this result, the effect of
the Revolution on English politics was fundamental. Kings who ruled by
grace of a statute, instead of by divine right, inevitably lost
administrative as well as legislative authority. Colonial policy was
therefore no longer determined, as in Stuart times, by the king in
council, but by the ministers; by ministers who might listen to the
Board of Trade, but could not take advice unless it squared with the
wishes of the Parliament that made them. When, in 1715, Secretary
Stanhope appointed George Vaughan, an owner of sawmills in New
Hampshire, to be lieutenant-governor of that province, the Board of
Trade protested; and quoted, in support of its protest, the remarks of
Bellomont about Mr. Partridge. "To set a carpenter to preserve woods,"
said Bellomont, "is like setting a wolf to guard sheep; I say, to
preserve woods, for I take it to be the chiefest part of the business of
a Lt. Governor of that province to preserve the woods for the king's
use." The protest was ignored; and for thirty years, while the Board of
Trade fell almost to the level of a joke, the colonies were managed by a
Secretary of State who was likely to be less interested in preserving
the woods for the king's use than in advancing the interests of the Whig
oligarchy which governed England.
It could not well have been otherwise. The Whig oligarchy, having driven
the Stuarts from the throne, was bound to identify the welfare of the
empire with the maintenance of the House of Hanover. Convinced that so
long as there was peace and plenty in the land Jacobite exiles would
wait in vain for the day when the body of James II, lying unburied in
the church of St. Jacques, might be restored to English soil, ministers
labored to make the nation loyal by making it comfortable. It was
therefore necessary to guard with jealousy the material interests of
the inarticulate Tory squire, who still harbored a sullen loyalty to the
Stuarts, as well as of the merchants and moneyed men whose fortunes were
bound up with the Revolution settlement. And year by year the
Parliamentary influence of the latter increased. Members of the South
Sea and East India Companies had seats in the House of Commons; and the
West India Islands, where, it was estimated in 1775, property to the
value of £14,000,000 was "owned by persons who live in England," were in
very truth represented there. William Beckford, who entered Parliament
in 1747, possessed of a great fortune acquired in Jamaica sugar
plantations, and soon to become all-powerful in "the City," was only the
most famous of those who effectively voiced the demands of colonial
landlords and London merchants. "Such men used in times past to come hat
in hand," said Newcastle; "now the second word is, 'you shall hear of it
in another place.'" In fact, although ministers bowed to the king and
spoke of His Majesty's Government, they knew well that the fortunes of
the kingdom were in the hands of the big property interests that
buttressed an unstable throne.
And these masters of England, never interested in the colonies apart
from their commercial value, were less so than ever during this Indian
summer of prosperous content. Rising prices made the era of, the first
Georges a golden age of agriculture; while the effect of the French wars
was to "exalt beyond measure the maritime and commercial supremacy of
England." The Treaty of Meuthen facilitated the importation of cloth
into Portugal and the flow of Brazilian bullion to London. Levantine
trade began to open to England after the conquest of Gibraltar and
Minorca. English merchants acquired special privileges at Cadiz by the
Treaty of Utrecht; and the _Assiento_ gave to the South Sea Company a
monopoly of importing slaves into New Spain, and enabled it to secure,
"by the ingenuity of British merchants," the greater part of the general
commerce of the Spanish colonies. In 1710, the number of vessels
clearing from English ports was 3550; it was 6614 in 1714; and during
the same period the shipping of London increased from 806 to 1550. In
1758, imports from the continental colonies into England stood at
£648,683, and from the West Indies at £1,834,036. "The colonies," said
the elder Horace Walpole, "are the source of all our riches"; for it was
the colonies, and above all the West Indies,--that subterranean channel
by which the silks and teas from Vera Cruz, and Peruvian gold from
Puerto Bello, found their way into England,--which alone "preserve the
balance of trade in our favour."
If, as sometimes happened, powerful Parliamentary interests complained
of conditions in the colonies, the Government was ready to comply with
their demands. During the Walpole régime, the private smuggler in
Spanish commerce, whether Englishman or New Englander, was suppressed in
order that the South Sea Company might enjoy a monopoly of that
profitable business. When Jamaica planters, unable to sell their sugar
in Europe or Massachusetts in competition with the French islands,
clamored for relief, the famous Molasses Act of 1733 was passed, laying
prohibitive duties upon the importation of sugar, molasses, and rum into
the continental colonies. And in 1750, at the behest of the woolen and
iron interests, rapidly growing industries in New England and
Pennsylvania were restricted in order that the English landowner and
English woolen and iron manufacturers might find in America the markets
which they were losing in Europe. But in general neither the landed nor
the industrial interests pressed the Government to meddle with the
plantations; and when no one complained, ministers of the temper of
Walpole or Newcastle were not disposed to concern themselves with the
reform of the colonial system, or to inquire too curiously into the
honesty or the efficiency with which it was administered. According to
their philosophy, it mattered little whether the Governor of Virginia
was an able man, or whether he resided in London or Jamestown; what
mattered was that Newcastle should succeed, by a judicious distribution
of offices, in maintaining a Parliamentary majority for the party which
guarded the liberties of England. It mattered little whether the
admiralty courts fell under the control of the merchants and landowners
who dominated colonial assemblies; what mattered was that the colonial
merchant and landowner should be prosperous and maintain a safe credit
balance with English merchants. And therefore let the governors be
punctiliously instructed to perform their duties strictly; but let
those be recalled who irritated the best people in the colonies by too
officiously endeavoring to carry out their instructions. So long as the
colonial planter was content and the Tory squire could not complain of
high taxes or low rents, so long as merchants of standing in London or
New York found business good, so long as the English manufacturer had
ready markets and the trading companies distributed high dividends, it
seemed folly indeed to attempt, with meticulous precision, to enforce
the Trade Acts at every unregarded point, to construct ideal governments
for communities that were every year richer than the last, or to provide
at great expense for an adequate military defense against Canada when
peace with France was the settled policy of England.
Unhappily for this policy of _quieta non movere_, peace with France came
to an end after thirty years. And if since the Peace of Utrecht the
English colonies had grown rich and populous, the French had
strengthened their hold on all the strategic points of the interior from
Quebec to New Orleans. The province of Louisiana, founded in 1699 by
D'Iberville to forestall the English in occupying the mouth of the
Mississippi, contained a population of more than ten thousand white
settlers in 1745. The governor maintained friendly relations with the
Choctaw Indians, and endeavored to alienate the Cherokees and the Creeks
from the English alliance, and so to divert the rich peltry trade of the
Southwest from Fort Moore and Charleston to New Orleans. Attached to
Louisiana for administrative purposes were the small but thriving French
settlements on the Mississippi, between the Illinois and the Ohio
Rivers, centering about Forts Chartres, Cahokia, and Kaskaskia. Between
Louisiana and Canada all the connecting waterways, save alone the upper
Ohio, were guarded by military establishments and trading posts--on
Green Bay, on the Wabash and Miami Rivers, at the southern end of Lake
Michigan, at Detroit and Niagara. By discovery and occupation, the
French claimed all the inland country; denied the right of Englishmen to
settle or trade there; were prepared to defend it by force, and, in case
of war, to release upon the unguarded English frontier from Maine to
Virginia those savage tribes, whom legend credits with many noble
virtues, but whom the colonists by bitter experience well knew to be
cruel and treacherous and bestial beyond conception.
The possession of this hinterland was now, toward the middle of the
century, become the vital issue; for the claims of France could not stay
the populous English colonies from pushing their frontier across the
mountains, or prevent skillful English traders from undermining the
loyalty of her Indian allies. There were settlements in the southern
up-country as far west as Fort Moore on the Savannah, as far as Camden
and Charlottesburg, and beyond Hillsborough. The outpost of Virginia was
at Wills Creek, within striking distance of the Ohio; the valleys of the
Blue Ridge were filling with Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch; while
German and Dutch farmers of New York occupied both sides of the Mohawk
nearly to its source. Oswego, long since established on Lake Ontario,
was abundantly justifying the ambitious scheme inaugurated sixty years
earlier by Governor Dongan; for official corruption at Montreal had not
made French goods cheaper since the days of Frontenac, and the northern
Indians yearly resorted to Oswego to trade with the English. And every
year unlicensed traders, such as Christopher Gist and William Trent, not
to mention many "more abandoned wretches," hired men on the Pennsylvania
or Virginia frontier and with goods on pack-horses crossed the
Alleghanies to traffic among the western Indians. In 1749, Céloron de
Bienville, sent by the Governor of Canada to take possession of the Ohio
Valley, found English traders at Logstown and Scioto, and in nearly
every village as far west as the Miami. This was the very year that John
Hanbury, a London merchant, and some Virginia gentlemen, among whom were
Lawrence and Augustine Washington, petitioned the Board of Trade for a
grant of five hundred thousand acres of land on the upper Ohio. And the
petition was granted, in order that the country might be more rapidly
settled, and "to cultivate the friendship and carry on a more extensive
commerce with the native Indians, and as a step towards checking the
encroachments of the French."
Those who went into the back country received little assistance from
Government, either English or colonial, in extending the frontier, and
but little in defending it. Tide-water rice or tobacco planters,
peaceful and gain-loving Quakers at Philadelphia, New York or Boston
merchants trading in the West Indies, all untouched by Indian massacre
and absorbed in local politics, begrudged money spent to protect a
half-alien people, often without their jurisdiction. The English
Government, for its part, had long observed the comfortable maxim that
if her navy policed the sea, the colonists were bound to provide their
own defense in time of peace. Money for Indian presents was regularly
sent; garrisons maintained in Nova Scotia and in the West Indies;
assistance sometimes given for forts on the exposed New York or Carolina
frontier. But the expense was slight indeed: in 1783 the total amount
appropriated for defending the continental colonies, exclusive of Nova
Scotia and not counting money for Indian presents, was £10,000; in 1743,
it was £25,000. And the war which opened in 1743 demonstrated that a
government which neglected defense in time of peace could scarcely
provide it in time of war. The New England frontier was once more
devastated by pillage and massacre; and Philip Schuyler, to the high
disgust of his Iroquois allies, was forced to abandon and burn Fort
Saratoga for lack of supplies to maintain it. Yet New England farmers
made possible the capture of Louisburg, and the colonies together raised
nearly eight thousand troops to coöperate, in the conquest of Canada,
with the fleet and army which the Duke of Newcastle promised but never
sent. Massachusetts was, indeed, generously repaid for the heavy expense
which she incurred; but two hundred and seventeen chests of Spanish
dollars and one hundred barrels of copper coin, sufficient to restore
her credit, were scarce full return for the restoration of Louisburg to
France after the war was over.
With how much ease, during the six years that followed the Peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle, might the English and colonial Governments have
prevented the worst horrors of the French and Indian War! Deprived of
her Indian allies, Canada would scarce have been a danger; and at no
time were the Indians better disposed toward the English. "All I can
say," Céloron de Bienville announced when he returned from the Ohio in
1750, "is that all the nations of these countries are very ill-disposed
toward the French, and devoted to the English." And in the next year
Père Piquet complained that Oswego "not only spoils our trade, but puts
the English into communication with a vast number of our Indians far and
near. It is true that they like French brandy better than English rum;
but they prefer English goods to ours, and can buy for two beaver skins
at Oswego a better silver bracelet than we sell at Niagara for ten."
Strongly garrisoned forts at Albany, at Oswego, and on the Ohio would
have transformed this friendly disposition into a firm alliance. But
there was little loyalty in the red man's heart for an unmilitary
people; and cheap goods, however they might win the Indian in time of
peace, made but a silken cord to hold him in time of war. "We would have
taken Crown Point, but you prevented us," said Chief Hendrick at the
conference hastily summoned at Albany to prepare for defense on the eve
of war. "Instead you burned your own fort at Saratoga and ran away from
it. You have no fortifications, no, not even in this city. The French
are men; they are fortifying everywhere. But you are all like women,
bare and open, without fortifications." Not one representative of seven
colonies had authority to reassure him. Sir William Johnson did, indeed,
negotiate a treaty of alliance with the Iroquois and the western
Indians; and the Virginia assembly, yielding at last to Governor
Dinwiddie's insistent demands, appropriated some money for maintaining
the wooden fort, well named Fort Necessity, which Colonel Washington had
built on the Ohio. But it was too late. The French built a better fort
at Duquesne; and they had scarcely defeated the Virginia colonel and
destroyed his fort before the English traders were driven from the
Indian villages, and no English flag was to be seen west of the
mountains. It was the western tribes that brought Braddock's expedition
to a disastrous end. While the Quakers at Philadelphia denounced the
iniquity of war, these quondam allies of England ravaged the frontiers
of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the northern tribes that had gladly
come to Oswego to trade in 1754, assisted Montcalm to capture and
destroy it in 1756.
Reverses in America were but part of the multiplied disasters which
befell English arms at the opening of the Seven Years' War. At the close
of the year 1756, with Hanover threatened and Minorca taken, with the
Bourbon arms victorious in India and the Bourbon fleet unchecked upon
the sea, with a million and a half of colonists seemingly helpless
before eighty thousand French in America, it was clear at last that
ministers who employed organized corruption to buttress the throne, who
rarely read the American dispatches, and were not quite sure where Nova
Scotia was, had endangered that very peace and material prosperity with
which they had been so long and so exclusively occupied. In this crisis
many plans were forthcoming, at Albany and in London, for colonial union
and imperial defense; plans doubtless excellent in themselves, but
impracticable under the circumstances. They were therefore laid aside
until the war should be over. A plan of attack, not of defense, was now
the prime necessity. In face of this necessity, the Whig oligarchy,
abdicated its high function of "muddling through" the business of
government, while "an afflicted despairing nation turned to a private
gentleman of slender fortune, wanting the parade of birth and title, as
the only saviour of England." "I know," said William Pitt, "that I can
save England, and that nobody else can."
A most galling boast for both your houses of Pelham and Yorke, but a
true one. Within three years the nation was raised from the depths of
despair to the high level of its great leader's assured and arrogant
confidence. It was not by colonial systems that Pitt brought victory,
but by organizing efficiency in place of corruption and by inspiring
many men to heroic effort. Wisdom born of sympathy and common sense soon
accomplished in America what neither the bullying of Loudoun nor the New
Englander's hatred of the French could effect. In 1756 no more than five
thousand troops were raised in all New England and New York. Governor
Pownall was haggling as usual with his assembly over a levy of two
thousand men, when there arrived in Boston Pitt's order that henceforth
colonial officers should take rank with regulars, according to the date
of their commissions. The simple order was worth more than many plans of
union. The very next morning, when the dispatch was read out, the Old
Bay assembly voted the entire seven thousand men originally asked of the
Northern colonies; and during the year 1758 nearly twenty-five thousand
provincial troops were raised for the war. With this support, the
English army and fleet, for the first time ably led and efficiently
directed, soon destroyed the power of France in Canada: Louisburg was
once more captured; Crown Point and Niagara were taken; Oswego was
rebuilt; while the French, deserted by their savage allies as soon as
the English won victories, destroyed their own fort at Duquesne; and at
last the intrepid General Wolfe, fortunately aided by a strange
combination of accidents, scaled the Heights of Quebec and defeated the
army of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham.
When the war was over and Canada no longer the menace it had been, men
without imagination, turning again to the schemes which had been laid
aside in 1756, began to devise measures for a closer supervision of the
"plantations," and for raising "a revenue in Your Majesty's dominions in
America for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and
securing the same." They were not aware that since the recall of the
Massachusetts charter the colonies had become something more than
plantations, or that there was arising on the continent of America a
people whose interests were national rather than imperial, and whose
ideals of well-being transcended the dead level of material ambitions.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For the settlement of the Southern and Middle colonies in this period,
see Channing _History of the United States_, II, chaps. II, IV; Andrews,
_Colonial Self-Government_, chaps. VI-VII, IX, XI. The best discussion
of the reasons for a revival of interest in the colonies during the
Restoration, and of the establishment and practical application of a
system of colonial administration and control, is Beer's _The Old
Colonial System_, Part I, 2 vols. See particularly, I, chaps, I-IV. For
this subject, see also, Channing, II, chaps. I, VIII; Andrews, _Colonial
Self-Government_, chaps. I-II; Andrews, _British Committees,
Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations_ (Johns Hopkins
Studies, 1908); and Andrews, _The Colonial Period_, chap. V. For the
relations between England and her colonies in the first half of the
eighteenth century, see Dickerson, _American Colonial Government_
(Cleveland, 1912); Andrews, _The Colonial Period_, chaps. VI, VII;
Greene, _Provincial America_, chaps. II-IV, XI; and Beer, _British
Colonial Policy_, chap. I. The importance of the West Indies in
determining the policy of Walpole is brought out by Temperley, _American
Historical Association Reports_, 1911, vol. I, p. 231. For the rise of
New France and the conflict of France and England in America, see Fiske,
_New France and New England_, chaps, I-II, IV, VIII-X; Thwaites, _France
in America_, chaps. I, IV, VI, VIII; Channing, II, chaps. V, XVIII-XIX.
The most fascinating as well as the fullest treatment of this subject is
contained in the works of Francis Parkman. His _Count Frontenac and New
France under Louis XIV; Half Century of Conflict_, 2 vols., and
_Montcalm and Wolfe_, 2 vols., make a fairly continuous history of the
subject from 1672 to 1763.