CHAPTER VI

THE WINNING OF INDEPENDENCE

_If they accept protection, do they not stipulate obedience?_

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

_The decree has gone forth, and cannot now be recalled, that a more

equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth, must be

established in America._

JOHN ADAMS.

I

As Chateaubriand said of the Revolution in France, that it was complete

before it began, so may it be said that America was free before it won

independence. The strict letter of the law counts for less in times of

emotional stress than the strong sense of prescriptive right, and formal

allegiance is in no way incompatible with a deep-seated feeling that

submission must be voluntary to be honorable. Before the outbreak of the

French war such a feeling was common throughout the colonies. The state

of mind which conditioned the formal argument for colonial rights and

drove the colonists into revolution is revealed in a sentence which

Franklin wrote in 1755: "British subjects, by removing to America,

cultivating a wilderness, extending the domain, and increasing the

wealth, commerce, and power of the mother country, at the hazard of

their lives and fortunes, ought not, and in fact do not thereby lose

their native rights." It was as much as to say that Americans were in

fact free because they ought to be free, and that they ought to be free

because they had made for themselves a new country.

The issue between England and America is therefore not to be resolved by

computing the burden of a penny tax, or by exposing the sordid motives

of British merchants and Boston smugglers, still less by coming "armed

at all points with law cases and acts of Parliament, with the

statute-book doubled down in dog's ears" to defend either the cause of

liberty or authority. The issue, shot through and through, as all great

issues are, by innumerable sordid motives and personal enmities and

private ambitions, was yet one between differing ideals of justice and

welfare; one of those issues which, touching the emotional springs of

conduct, are never composed by an appeal to reason, which formal

argument the most correct, or the most skilled dialectic, serve only to

render more irreconcilable. "In Britain," said Bernard in 1765, "the

American governments are considered as corporations empowered to make

by-laws, existing only during the pleasure of Parliament. In America

they claim to be perfect states, no otherwise dependent upon Great

Britain than by having the same king." Few Englishmen could imagine an

empire of free states; few Americans could understand a nation bound

against its will.

The policy which history associates with the name of Grenville did not

originate with him, nor yet with his royal master, George III. It was

the unhappy experience of the Austrian Succession War that enforced upon

the English Government the necessity of a stricter attention to the

colonies. Ministers who then set themselves to read the American

dispatches were amazed to find the governors everywhere without adequate

support against the assemblies, the assemblies everywhere indifferent to

imperial interests. After the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle plantation

affairs were accordingly placed under the direction of the able Halifax;

and in 1752 the governors were instructed to transmit all correspondence

"to His Majesty by one of His Majesty's principal Secretaries of State."

To remedy an untoward situation many schemes were broached, on the eve

of the Seven Years' War, designed to bring the colonies "to a sense of

their duty to the king, to awaken them to take care of their lives and

fortunes." The need of the hour was a union of the colonies for military

defense; and in 1754, on the initiative of the English Government,

representatives from seven colonies adopted a scheme drafted by Franklin

and known as the Albany Plan of Union. It was ominous for the success of

all such attempts in the future that a plan which was thought by the

ministers too weak to be effective was thought by the colonial

assemblies too strong to be safe. In any case, with hostilities already

begun, the issue could not be pressed to a conclusion when, as the Board

of Trade asserted, "a good understanding between your Majesty's

governors and the people is so absolutely necessary." Under the stress

of war, all ministerial projects for a stricter control of the colonies

were accordingly laid aside until the restoration of peace.

The war itself only proved once more how defective was England's

colonial administration. Three years of devastating Indian warfare again

demonstrated the necessity of an adequate defense of the frontier, and a

stricter control of Indian trade. A customs service which collected

annually £2000 of revenue and cost £7000 to maintain, manned by

officials who sold flags of truce to traders carrying ammunition and

supplies to the enemy, was seen to be but an expensive luxury in time of

peace and a military weakness in time of war. The assistance which Pitt,

and Pitt alone, could induce the colonists to render, however adequate,

was purchased at the price of concessions which deprived the governors

of all but nominal influence, while placing in the assemblies the

effective powers of government. And the results achieved by the Peace of

Paris but confirmed the conclusions which followed from the experience

of the war. The territory then acquired by England was imperial in

extent; and the acquisition of it had in six years raised the annual

cost of her military and naval establishment from £70,000 to £350,000.

This far-flung and diversified empire had to be organized in order to be

governed, and defended in order to be maintained. In view of the

unprecedented responsibilities thus thrust upon the little island

kingdom, it seemed that the oldest and most prosperous, the most English

and best disposed of England's colonies might well be asked to submit to

reasonable restraints in the interests of the empire, and in their own

defense to furnish a moderate assistance.

Before the war was over assiduous royal governors were offering counsel

as to the "regulation of the North American governments." If there is

to be a new establishment "upon a true English constitutional bottom,"

wrote Bernard in 1761, "it must be upon a new plan," for "there is no

system in North America fit to be made a module of." High officials in

England were not lacking who agreed with the Massachusetts governor. The

Peace of Paris was scarcely signed before Charles Townshend, First Lord

of Trade in Bute's Ministry, proposed that the authority of Parliament

should be invoked to remodel the colonial Governments upon a uniform

plan, to pass stringent laws for enforcing the Trade Acts, and by

taxation to raise a revenue in America for paying the salaries of royal

officials and for the maintenance of such British troops as might be

stationed there for the defense of the colonies. Townshend's proposals

would doubtless have been formulated into law had it not been for the

fall of Bute's Ministry in April; but the measures which were finally

carried by Grenville, if they left the colonial charters untouched, were

no less comprehensive, in respect to the purely imperial matters of

trade and defense, than those initiated by his brilliant predecessor.

Adequate and well-administered laws for advancing the trade and securing

the defense of the empire were, indeed, the primary objects of

Grenville's colonial legislation. Grenville, who was the fingers rather

than the soul of good government, could not endure the lax

administration of the customs service which in the course of years had

given the colonies, as it were, a vested interest in non-enforcement. He

accordingly set himself to correct the faults which Walpole had

condoned in the interest of the Hanoverian succession, and which

Newcastle had utilized in the service of the Whig faction. Commissioners

of the customs, long regarding their offices as sinecures and habitually

residing in England, were ordered to repair at once to their posts in

America. Additional revenue officers were appointed with more rigid

rules for the discharge of their duties. Governors were once more

instructed to give adequate support in the enforcement of the Trade

Acts. The employment of general writs, or "writs of assistance," was

authorized to facilitate the search for goods illegally entered; and

ships of war were stationed on the American coast to aid in the

suppression of smuggling.

More careful administrative supervision was but the prelude to

additional legislation. Throughout the eighteenth century, the trade of

the Northern and Middle colonies with the French and Spanish West Indies

had been one of the most extensive branches of colonial commerce. To

divert this traffic to the British sugar islands, Walpole had carried

the Molasses Act in 1733. But the Molasses Act, though many times

renewed and now in 1763 once more about to expire, had never been

enforced, and had never, therefore, either benefited the British sugar

planters or brought any revenue into the treasury. It was to secure one

or both of these advantages that Grenville procured from Parliament the

passage in 1764 of the law known as the Sugar Act; a law which reduced

the duty upon foreign molasses imported into the continental colonies

from 6_d._ to 3_d._, and imposed new duties upon coffee, pimento, white

sugar, and indigo from the Spanish and French West Indies, and upon wine

from the Madeiras and the Azores. Even such men as Bernard, Hutchinson,

and Colden believed that the new duties would destroy a trade which they

asserted was indispensable to the Northern colonies and highly

beneficial to the commerce of the empire. But the sugar planters,

powerfully represented in Parliament, demanded protection, while to

Grenville's mind the systematic violation of a law was rather an

argument against its repeal than an evidence of its impracticability.

The measure, therefore, became a law; and for its better enforcement the

jurisdiction of the admiralty courts was extended, and naval officers

were empowered to act as collectors of the customs.

Less noticed at the time, but scarcely less important in its effects

upon trade and industry, was the law passed by Parliament in the same

year for regulating colonial currency. With the rapid development of

commerce in the eighteenth century, and on account of the steady flow of

specie to London, the colonies had commonly resorted to the use of paper

money as a legal tender in the payment of local debts. Such men as

Franklin and Colden defended the practice on the ground of necessity,

and it was undoubtedly true that without the issue of new bills of

credit the colonies could not have given the military assistance

required of them for the conquest of Canada. But it was equally true

that in most colonies, except Massachusetts where the issues had been

retired in 1749, and New York where their par value had been

consistently maintained, the evils of depreciated currency had long

existed and still went unremedied. Debtors profited at the expense of

creditors, while colonial assemblies often took advantage of the

situation to pass laws enabling the American trader to avoid meeting his

just obligations to English merchants. In response to the loud

complaints of the latter, and without adequately discriminating between

the uses and the abuses of a colonial paper currency, Parliament passed

the act "to prevent paper bills of credit hereafter issued in any of his

Majesty's colonies, from being declared to be a legal tender in payment

of money, and to prevent the legal tender of such bills as are now

subsisting, from being prolonged beyond the periods limited for calling

in and sinking the same."

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Grenville had already turned to the problem

of defense, so inseparably connected with the question of Indian

relations and Western settlement. The English Government had long

recognized the necessity of securing the friendship of the Indians; and

to this end it had fostered the settlement of the interior. Indian

traders, employing methods none too scrupulous, had been encouraged to

ply their traffic beyond the mountains. Many thousands of acres of land

had been granted, to individuals and to companies of promoters, in the

belief that "nothing can more effectively tend to defeat the dangerous

designs of the French," or better enable the English "to cultivate a

friendship and carry on a more extensive commerce with the Indians

inhabiting those parts." It was a policy which all Americans could

understand. To those colonists who had fought with Washington to beat

back the tide of Indian massacre, to those who had witnessed the

destruction of Fort Duquesne, the conquest of Canada had no meaning

unless it opened the great West to free settlement. And during the

latter years of the war, thousands of families in all the old provinces

were prepared, as Franklin said, "to swarm," while many hundreds had

crossed the mountains and were already seated in the upper valleys of

the Ohio.

Yet before the war began, the Board of Trade perceived that the policy

originally advocated required serious modification. It was obvious

enough that if titles to land were granted, not only by the English

Government, but also by different colonies claiming jurisdiction over

the same territory, endless conflict and litigation would be the sure

result. And it soon appeared that the actual occupation of the interior

was after all far more likely to provoke the hostility than to win the

allegiance of the Western tribes. Overreached and defrauded in nearly

every bargain, the Indian hated the trader whose lure he could not

resist, and with the coming of the surveyor and the settler was well

aware that the pretended friendship of the English was but a thin mask

to conceal the greed of men who had no other desire than to rob him of

his land. During the latter years of the war, after the conquest of

Canada placed the allies of France under the heavy hand of Amherst and

opened the way to actual settlement, it became clear that an ominous

spirit of unrest was spreading throughout all the Northwest. It was

precisely to guard against the danger of an Indian uprising, which in

fact came to pass in the formidable conspiracy of Pontiac, that the

Board of Trade formulated as early as 1761 the policy which found

expression in the famous Proclamation of October 7, 1763. The

Proclamation announced the intention of the English Government to take

exclusive control of Indian relations and Western settlement. "For the

present," all territory west of the Alleghanies, from the new provinces

of Florida on the south to Canada on the north, was to be "reserved to

the Indians." Governors were forbidden to grant land there. Those who

had already settled within reserved territory were required to remove

forthwith; and every Indian trader was bound to give security for

observing such rules as the Imperial Government might establish. It was

the intention of the ministers, although unfortunately not so expressed

in the Proclamation, to open the reserved lands to settlement as soon as

Indian titles could be justly extinguished. In accordance with this

intention, the Government negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768,

by which the Six Nations ceded to the Crown their rights to lands south

of the Ohio; and both before and after that event it was seriously

concerned with projects for new colonies in the interior. The most

famous of these projects was that of the Vandalia Colony, for which a

royal grant was about to be executed in 1775 when the promoters were

requested to "wait ... until hostilities ... between Great Britain and

the United Colonies should cease."

Undoubtedly the Proclamation of 1763 was primarily a measure of

defense; but even if strictly enforced, which was found to be quite

impossible in fact, it could not alone have secured unbroken peace on

the frontier. Primitive in his instincts and treacherous in his nature,

the Indian harbored in his vengeful heart the rankling memory of too

many grievances, was too easily swayed by his ancient but now humiliated

French allies, to be held in check without a show of force to back the

most just and wisely administered policy. The English Government would

doubtless have been content to leave the management of defense in the

hands of the colonists had they shown a disposition to undertake it in a

systematic manner. After the Albany Plan was rejected by the assemblies,

the Board of Trade recommended a scheme by which commissioners,

appointed in each colony by the assembly and approved by the governor,

should determine the military establishment necessary in time of peace,

and apportion the expense for maintaining it among the several provinces

on the basis of wealth and population. Shirley and Franklin were

heartily in favor of such a plan. But there is no reason to think that a

single assembly could have been got to agree to it, or to any measure of

a like nature. "Everybody cries, a union is absolutely necessary," said

Franklin in amused disgust, "but when it comes to the manner and form of

the union, their weak noddles are perfectly distracted." The colonies

being thus unwilling to coöperate in the management of their own

defense, the Board of Trade could see no alternative but an

"interposition of the authority of Parliament." This alternative the

Government therefore adopted; and the permanent establishment of British

troops in America to overawe the Indians and maintain the conquest of

Canada, already proposed by Townshend, was now determined upon by

Grenville. It was the opinion of Grenville, as well as of most men in

England and of many in America, that the colonies might rightly be

expected to contribute something to the support of such troops. The

Mutiny Act, requiring the assemblies to furnish certain utensils and

provisions to soldiers in barracks, was now first extended to the

colonies; and for raising in America a portion of the general

maintenance fund, the ministry, with some reluctance on the part of

Grenville, proposed a stamp tax as the most equitable and the easiest to

be levied and collected. "I am, however, not set upon this tax," said

Grenville. "If the Americans dislike it, and prefer any other method of

raising the money themselves, I shall be content." It was soon apparent

that the Americans did dislike it; and in February, 1765, Franklin,

speaking for the colonial agents then in England, urged that the money

be raised in "the old constitutional way," by requisitions upon the

several assemblies. "Can you agree on the proportions each colony should

raise?" inquired the minister. Franklin admitted that it was impossible;

and Grenville, more concerned with what was equitable than with what was

politic, pressed forward with his measure to require the use of stamped

paper for nearly all legal documents and customs papers, for

appointments to offices carrying a salary of £20 except military and

judicial offices, for grants of franchises, for licenses to sell

liquor, for packages containing playing-cards and dice, for all

pamphlets, advertisements, hand-bills, calendars, almanacs, and

newspapers. The revenue which might be raised by this law, estimated at

£60,000, was to be paid into the exchequer, and to be expended solely

for supporting the British troops in America.

At the time there were few men either in England or in the colonies who

imagined that the Stamp Act would release forces that were destined to

disrupt the empire. It was scarcely debated in the House of Commons.

"There has been nothing of note in Parliament," wrote Horace Walpole,

"but one slight day on the American taxes." And even in America few men

supposed that it would not be executed, however much they might dislike

it. It was impossible to prevent the passage of the act, Franklin

assured his friends. "We might as well have hindered the sun's setting.

That we could not do. But since 't is down, my friend, ... let us make

as good a night as we can. We may still light candles." It was not

candles alone that were lighted, but a conflagration; a conflagration

which soon spread from the New World to the Old and burned away, as with

a renovating flame, so much that was both good and bad in that amiable

eighteenth-century society.

II

If the experience of the last French war convinced the English

Government that a stricter control of the colonies was necessary, the

conquest of Canada convinced the colonists that they could defend

themselves, and at the same time removed the only danger which had ever

made them feel the need of English protection. As early as 1711, Le

Ronde Denys warned the New Englanders that the expulsion of the French

from North America would leave England free to suppress colonial

liberties, while another French writer predicted that it would rather

enable, the colonies to "unite, shake off the yoke of the English

monarchy, and erect themselves into a democracy." The prediction was

often repeated. Between 1730 and 1763, many men, among them Montesquieu,

Peter Kalm, and Turgot, asserted that colonial dependence upon England

would not long outlast the French occupation of Canada. The opposition

to Grenville's colonial legislation, which gathered force with every

additional measure, seemed now about to confirm these predictions.

No single law of these early years would have caused its proper part of

the resistance which all of them in fact brought about. A measure of

oppression could be attributed to each of them, but the pressure of any

one was not felt by all classes or all colonies alike. The Proclamation

of 1763 was an offense chiefly to speculators in land, and to those

border communities that had fought to open free passage to the West only

to find the fertile Ohio valleys "reserved to the Indians"--the very

tribes which had brought death and desolation to the frontier. The Sugar

Act was a greater grievance to the New England distiller of rum and the

exporters of fish and lumber than it was to the rice and tobacco

planters of the South. New York merchants were seriously affected by

the Currency Act, which scarcely touched Massachusetts, and which, in

Virginia, meant money in the pockets of creditors, but bore hardly on

debtors and the speculators who bought silver at Williamsburg in

depreciated paper in order to sell it at par in Philadelphia. The famous

Stamp Act itself chiefly concerned the printers, lawyers, officeholders,

the users of the custom-house, and the litigious class that employed the

courts to enforce or resist the payment of debt.

Only when regarded as a whole was the policy of Grenville seen to spell

disaster. Each new law seemed carefully designed to increase the burdens

imposed by every other. The Sugar Act, for example, taken by itself, was

perhaps the most grievous of all. The British sugar islands, to which it

virtually restricted the West Indian trade of the Northern colonies,

offered no sufficient market for their lumber and provisions, nor could

they, like the Spanish islands, furnish the silver needed by continental

merchants to settle London balances on account of imported English

commodities. Exports to the West Indies and imports from England must,

therefore, be reduced; the one event would cripple essential colonial

industries such as the fisheries and the distilling of rum, while the

other would force the colonists to devote themselves to those very

domestic manufactures which it was the policy of the English Government

to discourage. These disadvantages, which attached to the Sugar Act

itself, were accentuated by almost every other cardinal measure of

Grenville's colonial policy. With the chief source of colonial specie

cut off, the Stamp Act increased the demand for it by £60,000; when the

need for paper money as a legal tender was more than ever felt, its

further use was shortly to be forbidden altogether; when the diminished

demand for labor, occasioned by restrictions upon the West Indian trade,

was likely to stimulate migration into the interior, the West was closed

to settlement. And the close of the French war, which had raised the

debt of the colonies to an unprecedented figure, was the moment selected

for restricting trade, remodeling the monetary system, and imposing upon

the colonies taxes for protection against a danger which no longer

threatened. Little wonder that to the colonial mind the measures of

Grenville carried all the force of an argument from design: any part,

separated from the whole, might signify nothing; the perfect correlation

of the completed scheme was evidence enough that somewhere a malignant

purpose was at work bent upon the destruction of English liberties.

Members of the House of Commons who yawned while voting the new laws

were amazed at the commotion they raised in America. In all the colonies

scarcely a man was to be found to defend any of them. Those afterwards

known as loyalists, with Hutchinson, Colden, Dulaney, and Galloway as

their most distinguished representatives, were of one accord with the

Lees, with Patrick Henry, with Dickinson, and the Adamses, in asserting

that the Stamp Act and the Sugar Act were inexpedient and unjust.

Hutchinson urged the repeal of both measures. Colden assured the Board

of Trade that the Currency Act, so far as New York was concerned, was

uncalled for and very prejudicial to colonial industry and the

manufactures of England. The three-penny duty on molasses, said Samuel

Adams, will make useless one third of the fish now caught, and so

remittances to Spain, Portugal, and other countries, "through which

money circulates into England for the purchase of her goods of all

kinds," must cease. "Unless we are allowed a paper currency," Daniel

Coxe wrote to Reed, "they need not send tax gatherers, for they can

gather nothing--never was money so very scarce as now." Governor Bernard

expressed the belief that if the proposed measures were executed "there

will soon be an end to the specie currency of Massachusetts."

Undoubtedly the general opinion of America was voiced by the Stamp Act

Congress when it affirmed that the payment of the new duties would

prove, "from the scarcity of specie, ... absolutely impracticable," and

render the colonists "unable to purchase the manufactures of Great

Britain."

But the colonists did not ground their case upon expediency alone, or

rest content with argument and protest. And the bad eminence of the

Stamp Act was due to the fact that it alone, of all the measures of

Grenville, enabled the defenders of colonial rights to shift the issue

in debate and bring deeds to the support of words. Last of all the

cardinal measures to be enacted, the Stamp Act attracted to itself the

multiplied resentments accumulated by two years of hostile legislation.

It alone could with plausible arguments be declared illegal as well as

unjust, and it was the one of all most open to easy and conspicuous

nullification in fact. The Proclamation of 1763 was, indeed, nullified

almost as effectively, but with no accompaniment of harangue, or of

burning effigies, or crowds of angry men laying violent hands upon the

law's officials. If the Stamp Act seemed the one intolerable grievance,

round which the decisive conflict raged, it was because it raised the

issue of fundamental rights, and because it could be of no effect

without its material symbols--concrete and visible bundles of stamped

papers which could be seen and handled as soon as they were landed, and

the very appearance of which was a challenge to action.

While all Americans agreed that the Stamp Act, like the Sugar Act, was

unjust, or at least inexpedient, not all affirmed that it was illegal.

Hutchinson was one of many who protested against the law, but admitted

that Parliament had not exceeded its authority in passing it. But the

colonial assemblies, and a host of busy pamphleteers who set themselves

to expose the pernicious act, agreed with Samuel Adams and Patrick

Henry, with the conciliatory John Dickinson, and the learned Dulaney,

that the colonists, possessing all the rights of native-born Englishmen,

could not legally be deprived of that fundamental right of all, the

right of being taxed only by representatives of their own choosing.

Duties laid to regulate trade, from which a revenue was sometimes

derived, were either declared not to be taxes, or else were

distinguished, as "external" taxes which Parliament was competent to

impose, from "internal" taxes which Parliament could impose only upon

those who were represented in that body. And the colonies were not

represented in Parliament; no, not even in that "virtual" sense which

might be affirmed in the case of many unfranchised English cities, such

as Manchester and Liverpool; from which it followed that the Stamp Act,

unquestionably an internal tax, was a manifest violation of colonial

rights.

The ablest arguments against the Stamp Act were those set forth by John

Dickinson, of Philadelphia, and Daniel Dulaney, of Maryland: the ablest

and the best tempered. Unfortunately, the conciliatory note was all but

lost in the chorus of angry protest and bitter denunciation that was

designed to spur the Americans on to reckless action rather than to

induce the ministers to withdraw an unwise measure. Clever lawyers

seeking political advantage, such as John Morin Scott; zealots who knew

not the meaning of compromise, such as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams;

preachers of the gospel, such as Jonathan Mayhew, who took this occasion

to denounce the doctrine of passive resistance, and with over-subtle

logic identified the defense of civil liberty with the cause of religion

and morality;--such men as these, with intention or all unwittingly

raised public opinion to that high tension from which spring

insurrection and the irresponsible action of mobs. Everywhere stamp

distributors, voluntarily or to the accompaniment of threats, resigned

their offices. Stamped papers were no sooner landed than they were

seized and destroyed, or returned to England, or transmitted for

safe-keeping to the custody of local officials pledged not to deliver

them. Often inspired and sometimes led by citizens of repute who were

"not averse to a little rioting," the mobs were recruited from the quays

and the grogshops, and once in action were difficult to control. In true

mob fashion they testified to their patriotism by parading the streets

at night, "breaking a few glass windows," and destroying the property of

men, such as Hutchinson and Colden, whose unseemly wealth or lukewarm

opinions were an offense to stalwart defenders of liberty.

The November riots disposed of the stamps but not of the Stamp Act.

Business had to go on as usual without stamps or cease altogether.

Either course would make the law of no effect; but the latter course

would be a strictly constitutional method of resistance, while the

former would involve a violation of law. Many preferred the

constitutional method. Let the courts adjourn, they said, and offices

remain vacant; let print-shops close, and ships lie in harbor: English

merchants will soon enough feel the pressure of slack business and force

ministers to another line of conduct. A good plan enough for the man of

independent fortune, for the judge whose income was assured, or the

thrifty merchant who, signing a non-importation agreement, had laid in a

stock of goods to be sold at high prices. But the wage-earner, the small

shopkeeper who was soon sold out, the printer who lived on his weekly

margin of profit, the rising lawyer whose income rose or fell with his

fees: such men were of another mind. The inactivity of the courts "will

make a large chasm in my affairs, if it should not reduce me to

distress," John Adams confides to his _Diary_ in December; and adds

naïvely that he was just on the point of winning a reputation and a

competence "when this execrable project was set on foot for my ruin as

well as that of my country." Men who saw their incomes dwindle were

easily disposed to think that the cessation of business was an admission

of the legitimacy of the law, a kind of betrayal of the cause. And it

was to counteract the influence of lukewarm conservatives, men who were

content to "turn and shift, to luff up, and bear away," that those who

regarded themselves as the only true patriots, uniting in an association

of the Sons of Liberty, set about the task of "putting business in

motion again in the usual channels without stamps."

The object of the Sons of Liberty was in part, but only in part,

attained. Newspapers were printed as usual, and certainly there was no

lack of pamphlets. Retailers did not hesitate to sell playing-cards or

dice, nor were the grogshops closed for want of stamped licenses. Yet

the courts of law were nearly everywhere closed for a time, and if the

clamor of creditors and the influence of lawyers forced them to open in

most places, in New York and Massachusetts, at least, they did little

business or none at all so long as the Stamp Act remained on the

statute-book. But it was in connection with commercial activities that

the plan of the conservatives was most effective. Non-importation

agreements, generally signed by the merchants, were the more readily

kept because the customs officials were inclined to refuse any but

stamped clearance papers, while the war vessels in the harbors

intercepted ships that attempted to sail without them. As the

conservatives had predicted, the effect was soon felt in England.

Thousands of artisans in Manchester and Leeds were thrown out of

employment. Glasgow, more dependent than other cities upon the American

market, loudly complained that its ruin was impending; and the merchants

of London, Bristol, and many other towns, asserting that American

importers were indebted to them several million pounds sterling, which

they were willing but unable to pay, petitioned Parliament to take

immediate action for their relief.

And, indeed, to ignore the situation in America was now impossible. The

law had to be withdrawn or made effective by force of arms. When the

matter came up in Parliament in January, 1766, Grenville, as leader of

the opposition, still claimed that the Stamp Act was a reasonable

measure, and one that must be maintained, more than ever now that the

colonists had insolently denied its legality, and with violence

amounting to insurrection prevented its enforcement. But the Rockingham

Whigs, whose traditions, even if somewhat obscured, marked them out as

the defenders of English liberties, were pledged to the repeal of the

unfortunate law. Lord Camden, in defense of the colonial contention,

staked his legal reputation on the assertion that Parliament had no

right to tax America. Pitt was of the same opinion. Following closely

the argument in Dulaney's pamphlet, which he held up as a masterly

performance, the Great Commoner declared that "taxation is no part of

the governing or legislating power." He was told that America had

resisted. "I rejoice that America has resisted," he cried in words that

sounded a trumpet call throughout the colonies. "Three millions of

people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit

to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of all the

rest.... America, if she fell, would fall like the strong man with his

arms around the pillars of the constitution." More convincing than the

eloquence of Pitt was the evidence offered by the merchants' petitions,

and by the shrewd and weighty replies of Franklin in his famous

examination in the House of Commons, to show that the policy of

Grenville, legal or not, was an economic blunder. The Stamp Act was

accordingly repealed, March 18, 1766; and a few weeks later, as a

further concession, the Sugar Act was modified by reducing the duty on

molasses from 3_d._ to 1_d._, and some new laws were passed intended to

remove the obstacles which made it difficult for the Northern and Middle

colonies to trade directly with England. Yet the ministers had no

intention of yielding on the main point: the theoretical right of

Parliament to bind the colonies in all matters whatever was formally

asserted in the Declaratory Act; while the reënactment of the Mutiny Law

indicated that the practical policy of establishing British troops in

America for defense was to be continued.

III

The repeal of the Stamp Act was the occasion for general rejoicing in

America. Loyal addresses were voted to the king, and statues erected to

commemorate the virtues and achievements of Pitt. Imperfectly aware of

the conditions in England that had contributed to the happy event, it

was taken by the colonists to mean that their theory of the constitution

had been accepted. The Declaratory Act was thought to be no more than a

formal concession to the dignity of government; and although the Mutiny

Act was causing trouble in New York, and merchants were petitioning for

a further modification of the Trade Laws, most men looked forward to the

speedy reëstablishment of the old-time cordial relations between the two

countries. The Sons of Liberty no longer assembled; rioting ceased; the

noise of incessant debate was stilled. "The repeal of the Stamp Act,"

John Adams wrote in November, 1766, "has hushed into silence almost

every popular clamor, and composed every wave of popular disorder into a

smooth and peaceful calm."

And no doubt most Englishmen would willingly have let the question rest.

But an unwise king, stubbornly bent on having his way; precise

administrators of the Grenville type, concerned for the loss of a

farthing due; egoists like Wedderburne, profoundly ignorant of colonial

affairs, convulsed and readily convinced by the light sarcasms with

which Soame Jenyns disposed of the pretensions of "our American

colonies": such men waited only the opportune moment for retrieving a

humiliating defeat. That moment came with the mischance that clouded the

mind of Pitt and withdrew him from the direction of a government of all

the factions. The responsibility relinquished by the Great Commoner was

assumed by Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man well

fitted to foster the spirit of discord which then reigned, to the king's

great content, in that "mosaic" ministry. In January, 1767, without the

knowledge of the Cabinet, this "director of the revels" pledged himself

in the House of Commons to find "a mode by which a revenue may be drawn

from America without offense." Since the Americans admit that external

taxes are legal, he said, let us lay an external tax. Backed by the

king, he accordingly procured from Parliament, in May of the same year,

an act laying duties on glass, red and white lead, paper, and tea. The

revenue to be derived from the law, estimated at £40,000, was to be

applied to the payment of the salaries of royal governors and of judges

in colonial courts. A second act established a board of commissioners to

be stationed in America for the better enforcement of the Trade Acts;

while a third, known as the Restraining Act, suspended the New York

Assembly until it should have made provision for the troops according to

the terms of the Mutiny Act.

The Townshend Acts revived the old controversy, not quite in the old

manner. Mobs were less in evidence than in 1765, although riots

occasioned by business depression disturbed the peace of New York in the

winter of 1770, and the presence of the troops in Boston, the very sight

of which was an offense to that civic community, resulted in the famous

"massacre" of the same year. Yet the duties were collected without much

difficulty; and although the income derived from them amounted to almost

nothing, the commissioners reorganized the customs service so

successfully that an annual revenue of £30,000 was obtained at a cost of

£13,000 to collect. Forcible resistance was, indeed, less practicable in

dealing with the Townshend Acts than in the case of the Stamp Act; but

it was also true that men of character and substance, many of whom in

1765 had not been "averse to a little rioting," now realized that mobs

and the popular mass meeting undermined at once the security of property

rights and their own long-established supremacy in colonial politics.

Desiring to protect their privileges against encroachment from the

English Government without sharing them with the unfranchised populace,

they were therefore more concerned than before to employ only

constitutional and peaceful methods of obtaining redress. To this end

they resorted to non-importation agreements, to petition and protest, so

well according with English tradition, and to the reasoned argument, of

which the most notable in this period was that series of _Farmer's

Letters_ which made the name of John Dickinson familiar in Europe and a

household word throughout the colonies.

If in point of action the defenders of colonial rights were inclined to

greater moderation, in point of constitutional theory they were now

constrained to take a more radical stand. When Franklin, in his

examination before the House of Commons in 1766, was pressed by

Townshend to say whether Americans might not as readily object to

external as to internal taxes, he shrewdly replied: "Many arguments have

lately been used here to show them that there is no difference;--at

present they do not reason so; but in time they may possibly be

convinced by these arguments." That time was now at hand. As early as

1766, Richard Bland, of Virginia, had declared that the colonies, like

Hanover, were bound to England only through the Crown. This might be

over-bold; but the old argument was inadequate to meet the present

dangers, inasmuch as the Townshend Acts, the establishment of troops in

Boston and New York, and the attempt to force Massachusetts to rescind

her resolutions of protest, all seemed more designed to restrict the

legislative independence of the colonies than to assert the right of

Parliamentary taxation. Franklin himself, to whom it scarcely occurred

in 1765 that the legality of the Stamp Act might be denied, could not

now master the Massachusetts principle of "subordination," or understand

what that distinction was which Dickinson labored to draw between the

right of taxing the colonies and the right of regulating their trade.

"The more I have thought and read on the subject," he wrote in 1768,

"the more I find ... that no middle doctrine can well be maintained, I

mean not clearly with intelligible arguments. Something might be made of

either of the extremes: that Parliament has a power to make all laws for

us, or that it has a power to make no laws for us; and I think the

arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty than those for the

former." Before the Townshend duties were repealed, the colonists were

entirely familiar with the doctrine of complete legislative

independence; and the popular cry of "no representation no taxation"

began to be replaced by the far more radical cry of "no representation

no legislation."

In support of argument and protest, the colonists once more resorted to

the practice of non-importation. The earliest agreement was signed by

Boston merchants in October, 1767. But a far more rigid association, not

to import with trifling exceptions any goods from England or Holland,

was formed in New York in August, 1768, and agreed to by the merchants

in most colonies. Better observed in New York than elsewhere, it was so

far maintained as to reduce the English importations into the Middle and

Northern colonies from £1,333,000 in 1768 to £480,000 in 1769. In

inducing the Ministry of Lord North to repeal the duties the association

played its part; but from the point of view of the conservatives it was

not without its disadvantages. The importation of goods from Holland was

forbidden in order to catch the smuggler; but the smuggler ignored the

agreement as readily as he signed it. Yet for a time the association was

no burden to the fair trader, who in anticipation had doubled his

orders, or sold "old, moth-eaten goods" at high prices. The merchants

were "great patriots," Chandler told John Adams, "while their old rags

lasted; but as soon as they were sold at enormous prices, they were for

importing." And in truth the fair trader's monopoly could not outlast

his stock, whereas the smuggler's business improved the longer the

association endured. In the spring of 1770, the New York merchants, with

their shelves empty, complaining that Boston was more active in

"resolving what it ought to do than in doing what it had resolved,"

declared that the association no longer served "any other purpose than

tying the hands of honest men, to let rogues, smugglers, and men of no

character plunder their country." Supported by a majority of the

inhabitants of the city, and undeterred by the angry protests of the

Sons of Liberty, they accordingly agreed to "a general importation of

goods from Great Britain, except teas and other articles which are or

may be taxed." Boston and Philadelphia soon followed the lead of New

York, and before the year was out the policy of absolute non-importation

had broken down.

The adoption of the modified non-importation policy was the more readily

approved by conservative patriots everywhere inasmuch as the English

Government had already made concessions on its part. It was on March 5,

the very day of the Boston massacre, that Lord North, characterizing the

law as "preposterous," moved the repeal of all the Townshend duties,

saving, for principle's sake, that on tea alone. For the second time a

crisis seemed safely passed, and cordial relations seemed once more

restored. British officers concerned in the massacre, defended by the

patriots John Adams and Josiah Quincy, were honorably acquitted in a

Massachusetts court. The New York Assembly, recently permitted to issue

bills of credit to the extent of £120,000, made annual provision for the

troops, and friendly relations between soldiers and citizens were again

resumed. Imports from England at once rose to an unprecedented figure.

Tea was procured from Holland; the 3_d._ duty well-nigh forgotten. In

England most men regarded the ten years' quarrel as finally composed.

For three years the colonies were barely once mentioned in Parliament,

and a page or two of the _Annual Register_ was thought sufficient space

to chronicle the doings of America. America also seemed content. During

these uneventful years the high enthusiasm for liberty burned low, even

in Massachusetts. "How easily the people change," laments John Adams,

"and give up their friends and their interests." And Samuel Adams

himself, implacable patriot, working as tirelessly as ever, but deserted

by Hancock and Otis and half his quondam supporters, had so far lost his

commanding influence as to inspire the sympathy of his friends and the

tolerant pity of his enemies.

It was hardly for the purpose of restoring the prestige of Samuel Adams,

though nothing could have been better designed to that end, that Lord

North, rising in the House of Commons on April 17, 1773, offered a

resolution permitting the East India Company to export teas stored in

its English warehouses free of all duties save the 3_d._ tax in America.

Many years later the Whig pamphleteer Almon asserted that the measure

was inspired by the king's desire to "try the question with America."

The statement is unsupported by contemporary evidence. Lord North said

that the measure was intended solely in the interest of the Company,

which had in fact but just been rescued from bankruptcy by the

interposition of the Government, and the resolution was passed into law

without comment and without opposition. Information obtained from

reliable American merchants determined the directors to take advantage

of the opportunity thus offered. They were assured that, although there

was strong opposition to the 3_d._ tax, "mankind are in general governed

by interest," and "the Company can afford their teas cheaper than the

Americans can smuggle them from foreigners, which puts the success of

the design beyond a doubt." Acting upon this assurance, cargoes of

assorted teas amounting to 2051 chests were sent to the four ports of

Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

But the American merchants who advised this step had fatally misjudged

the situation. The approach of the tea-ships was the signal for instant

and general opposition. Smugglers opposed the East India Company venture

because it threatened to destroy the very lucrative Holland trade; the

fair trader because it conferred a monopoly upon an English corporation,

but above all because, if the Company could sell its tea, the

non-importation agreement, that favorite conservative method of

obtaining redress, at once effective and legal, would have proved after

all a useless measure. Unless they were ready for decisive action, the

long struggle against Parliamentary taxation must end in submission.

Many conservatives were content to try non-consumption agreements; but

it was a foregone conclusion that if the tea was once landed, it would

be sold, and a great majority were in favor of destroying it or sending

it back to England. The latter method was employed in New York and

Philadelphia; but in Boston Governor Hutchinson refused to issue return

clearance papers until the cargoes were discharged. There the radicals,

with the moral support of the great body of conservative citizens,

carried the day. On December 16, 1773, undisturbed by the English ships

of war, men disguised as Mohawks, "no ordinary Mohawks, you may depend

upon it," boarded the East India Company's vessels and emptied its tea

into Boston Harbor.

Neither the Government nor the people of England were now in any mood

for further concessions. The average Briton had given little thought to

America since the repeal of the Stamp Act. He easily recalled that three

years before the ministers had good-naturedly withdrawn the major part

of the Townshend duties, and since then had rested in the confident

belief that the quarrel was happily ended. The destruction of the tea

seemed to him a gratuitous insult, for it passed his understanding that

the Americans should resent a measure which enabled them to buy their

tea cheaper than he could himself; and he was, therefore, ready to back

the Government in any measures it might take for asserting the authority

of Parliament over these excitable colonists whose whims had too long

been seriously regarded. This task the Government, now for the first

time effectively controlled by the king, was quite willing to undertake,

all the more so on account of the recent burning of the Gaspée and the

dishonorable publication of Hutchinson's letters. By overwhelming

majorities Parliament accordingly passed the coercive acts, closing

Boston Harbor to commerce until the town made compensation to the East

India Company, remodeling the Massachusetts charter in such a manner as

to give to the Crown more effective control of the executive and

administrative functions of government, making provision for quartering

troops upon the inhabitants, and providing for the trial in England of

persons indicted for capital offenses committed while aiding the

magistrates to suppress tumults or insurrection.

Drastic as these measures were, they were regarded in England as the

necessary last resort, unless the Government, hitherto so indulgent and

long-suffering, was prepared to ignore the most flagrant flouting of its

laws and to renounce all effective control of the colonies. In the

colonies, on the other hand, they were generally thought, even by

conservative patriots, to be clear evidence of a bold and unblushing

design, unapproved by the majority of Englishmen, no doubt, but harbored

in secret for many years by the king's hireling ministers, to enslave

America as a preliminary step in the destruction of English liberties.

Firm in this belief, the colonists elected their deputies to the First

Continental Congress, which was called to meet at Philadelphia on the

1st of September, 1774, in order to unite upon the most effective

measures for defending their common rights.

IV

The causes which had brought the two countries to this pass lie deeper

than the hostile designs of ministers, or the ambition of colonial

agitators bent on revolution. It has been said that the Revolution was

the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding. A misunderstanding it

was, sure enough, in one sense; but if by misunderstanding is meant lack

of information there is more truth in the famous epigram which has it

that Grenville lost the colonies because he read the American

dispatches, which none of his predecessors had done. In the decade

before the Declaration of Independence every exchange of ideas drove the

two countries farther apart, and personal contact alienated more often

than it reconciled the two peoples. It was the years of actual residence

in England that cooled Franklin's love for the mother country. "Had I

never been in the American colonies," he writes in 1772, "but was to

form my judgement of civil society from what I have lately seen, I

should never advise a nation of savages to admit of civilization."

Governor Hutchinson, one of the most aristocratic and most English of

Americans, was amazed to find himself but an alien in a far country

during the years of exile which gave him his first sight of English

society since 1742. Cultivated man of the world as he thought himself,

but Puritan still, it was with a profound sense of disillusionment that

he mingled with the "best people" of England. How pathetic are those

London letters of this unhappy exile who likes the people of Bristol

best because they remind him of Boston select-men, whose one desire is

to return home and lie buried in the land of his fathers! It is not too

fanciful to think that if Hutchinson had lived earlier in England he

might have died a patriot, whereas had Franklin seen as little of

England as his son he might have ended his days as a Loyalist. It was

"Old England" indeed that these cultivated Americans loved: the England

of Magna Carta and the Petition of Right; the England of Drake, of Pym

and Falkland, and of the Glorious Revolution; the little island kingdom

that harbored liberty and was the builder of an empire justly governed:

they thought of England in terms of her history, scarcely aware that her

best traditions were more cherished in the New World than in the Old.

Rarely, indeed, would an appeal to England's best traditions have met

with less cordial response among her rulers. For during the decade

following the Peace of Paris the vision of liberty was half obscured by

the vision of empire. Observant contemporaries noted the sudden rise of

an insular egoism following the war that in Voltaire's phrase saw

"England victorious in four parts of the world." Cowper was not alone in

complaining "that thieves at home must hang, but he that puts into his

over-gorged and bloated purse the wealth of Indian provinces, escapes";

and Horace Walpole has recorded in his incomparable letters, with a

cynical and an engaging wit which reflects the spirit of the times

better than his own sentiments, the corruption and prodigality, the

levity and low aims of that generation. With many noble exceptions, the

men who gathered round the young king, the men who "lived on their

country or died for her," who too often admired if they could not always

emulate the brutal degradation of a Sandwich or the matchless _abandon_

of the young Charles James Fox, had singularly little in common with

those American communities which the Frenchman Ségur fancied "might have

been made to order out of the imagination of Rousseau or Fénelon."

Had they known them better they would have liked them less; and in fact

ten years' "discussion of the points in controversy only served to put

farther asunder" men who reasoned from different premises and in a

different temper. Englishmen were generally content with the fact of

power registered in legal precedents; but Americans, profoundly

convinced that they deserved to be free, were ever concerned with its

moral justification. "To what purpose is it to ring everlasting changes

... on the cases of Manchester and ... Sheffield," cried James Otis. "If

these places are not represented, _they ought to be_." This _ought_ is

the fundamental premise of the entire colonial argument. "Shall we

Proteus-like perpetually change our ground, assume every moment some new

strange shape, to defend, to evade?" asks a Virginian in 1774. This was

precisely what could not be avoided. For the end determined the means.

If, therefore, the distinction between external and internal taxes was

untenable, it convinced the American, not that Parliament had a right to

tax the colonies, but only that it had no right to legislate for them.

And when Englishmen grounded the legislative rights of Parliament upon

the solid basis of positive law, the colonial patriot appealed with

solemn fervor to natural law and the abstract rights of man. Little

wonder that the more logical the American argument became the less

intelligible it appeared to most Englishmen, and what seemed at last the

very axioms of politics to the colonial radical struck the conservative

British mind as the sophistry of men bent on revolution.

If ten years' discussion convinced American patriots that they possessed

more rights than their philosophy had yet dreamed of, constant dwelling

on their condition developed a sensitiveness which registered oppression

where none had been felt before. What a profound influence had those

liberty-pole festivals so assiduously promoted by men like Samuel Adams

and Alexander MacDougall: "for they tinge the minds of the people; they

impregnate them with the sentiments of liberty; they render the people

fond of their leaders in the cause, and averse and bitter against all

opposers." In August, 1769, John Adams dined with three hundred and

fifty Sons of Liberty at Dorchester, in an open field. "This," he said,

noting the effect of the patriotic toasts and the inspiring popular

songs, "is cultivating the sensations of freedom." For a decade these

excitable Americans did, indeed, cultivate the sensations of freedom;

went out periodically, as it were, to "snuff the approach of tyranny on

every tainted breeze"; a practice which, becoming habitual, developed a

peculiar type of mind which marked a man out from his fellows. Such a

man was William Hall, Esquire, of North Carolina, at whose house Josiah

Quincy stopped; "a most sensible, polite gentleman, and, although a

Crown officer, a man replete with the sentiments of general liberty."

How useless, indeed, were arguments drawn from positive law, or the

citation of many legal precedents, to convince men _replete with

sentiments of general liberty!_

And those who so assiduously cultivated the sensations of freedom could

not easily deny themselves the martyr's crown. Like the Girondins in

France at a later day, many American patriots, such as Josiah Quincy

himself and Richard Henry Lee, have somewhat the air of loving liberty

because they had read the classics. They liked to think of themselves as

exhibiting "a resolution which would not have disgraced the Romans in

their best days"; and seem almost to welcome persecution in order to

prove that the spirit of Regulus still lived. It was no mere dispute in

the practical art of politics that engaged them, but a cosmic conflict

between the unconditioned good and the powers of darkness. "It is

impossible that vice can so triumph over virtue," writes Lee in all

soberness, "as that the slaves of Tyranny should succeed against the

brave and generous asserters of Liberty and the just rights of

Humanity." Even the common people, said Joseph Warren, "take an honest

pride in being singled out by a tyrannous administration." Knowing that

"their merits, not their crimes, make them the objects of Ministerial

vengeance," they refused to pay a penny tax with the religious fervor of

men doing battle for the welfare of the human race. Consider the dry

common sense with which Dr. Johnson disposed of the alleged Tyranny of

Great Britain: "But I say, if the rascals are so prosperous, oppression

has agreed with them, or there has been no oppression"; and contrast it

with the reverent spirit which pervades the writings of John Dickinson

or the formal protests of the Continental Congress. Reconciliation was

indeed difficult between men who could treat the matter lightly, in the

manner of Soame Jenyns, and men who, with John Adams, thought themselves

one company with that "mighty line of heroes and confessors and martyrs

who since the beginning of history have done battle for the dignity and

happiness of human nature against the leagued assailants of both."

This lyric enthusiasm for liberty, and the radical political theories

which were its most formal expression, were all the more

incomprehensible to the average Briton inasmuch as they were the result

of a conflict of interests in America quite as much as of English

legislation. "The decree has gone forth," said John Adams, "that a more

equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth, must be

established in America." Not for home rule alone was the Revolution

fought, but for the democratization of American society as well. The

quarrel with Great Britain would hardly have ended in war, had the

landed and commercial interests, those little aristocracies which had

hitherto controlled colonial politics, been free to conduct it in their

own fashion. At every stage in the controversy, the most uncompromising

opponents of Parliamentary taxation were those who felt themselves

inadequately represented in colonial assemblies. Fear of British tyranny

was most felt by those who had little influence in shaping colonial

laws. And half the bitter denunciation of corruption in England was

inspired by jealous dislike of those high-placed families in America

whose ostentatious lives and condescending manners were an offense to

the laborious poor, or to men of talent ambitious to rise from obscurity

to influence and power.

What Heaven-sent opportunity, then, was this quarrel with Britain for

all those who resented the genial complacence with which fortune's

favorites, "with vanity enough to call themselves the better sort,"

monopolized privilege in nearly every colony! The Virginia Stamp Act

Resolutions, which according to Governor Bernard of Massachusetts

sounded "an alarum bell to the disaffected," would assuredly never have

been passed by the Pendletons or the Blands, nor yet by Peyton Randolph,

who swore with an oath that he would have given £500 for a single vote

to defeat them. They were carried by the western counties under the

leadership of Patrick Henry, recently elected from the back country to

sit in sober home-spun garb with the modish aristocrats of the

tide-water. Product of the small farmer democracy beyond the "Fall

Line," uniting the implacable temper of the Calvinist with the

humanitarian sentiments of the eighteenth-century _philosophe_, he

joined hands with Jefferson and the Lees to form the radical party. It

was this party which carried Virginia into rebellion against England.

And it was this party which destroyed the domination of the little

coterie of great planters by abolishing entail, disestablishing the

Anglican Church, and proclaiming a state constitution founded, in theory

if not altogether in fact, upon the principles of liberty and equality

and the rights of man.

From the point of view of most cultivated and conservative Americans,

admirable indeed were the restrained and conciliatory arguments of John

Dickinson in support of the right of the colonies to be taxed only by

their own representatives. But how vulnerable was his position in

defending the existing government in Pennsylvania, by which the three

Quaker counties, with less than half the population of the province,

elected twenty-four of the thirty-six deputies in the assembly! "We

apprehend," so runs a petition from the German and Scotch-Irish counties

of the interior, "that as freemen and English subjects, we have an

indisputable title to the same privileges and immunities with his

Majesty's other subjects who reside in the counties of Philadelphia,

Chester, and Bucks." German Protestants and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians,

resenting Quaker domination more than they feared British tyranny, and

the mechanics and artisans and small shopkeepers of Philadelphia,

unwilling "to give up our liberties for the sake of a few smiles once a

year," made the strength of the radical and revolutionary party in

Pennsylvania. Opposed to all attempts to infringe their rights "either

here or on the other side of the Atlantic," they at last gained control

of the anti-British movement, and made use of it, employing the very

arguments which Dickinson and his kind had used in resistance to British

oppression, to overthrow the Quaker-merchant oligarchy that had so long

governed the colony in its own interests.

One day in 1772 old Governor Shirley, then living in retirement, heard

that the "Boston Seat" was responsible for the opposition to

Hutchinson's administration. When they told him who it was that made the

Boston Seat, he is said to have replied: "Mr. Cushing I knew, and Mr.

Hancock I knew, but where the devil this brace of Adamses came from I

know not." He might have been told that they had risen from obscurity to

inject into politics the acrid and self-righteous spirit of their

Puritan ancestors. It would be interesting to inquire to what issue the

quarrel with England would have been conducted had it been left to Mr.

Cushing and Mr. Hancock. Half the persistent opposition of the brace of

Adamses to British legislation was inspired by the commanding position

of a few families in Boston--the Hutchinsons and Olivers, who "will rule

and overbear in all things." As a youngster John Adams had confided to

his _Diary_: "I will not ... confine myself to a chamber for nothing.

I'll have some boon in return, exchange: fame, fortune, or something."

Laborious days had gained him little. "Thirty seven years, more than

half the life of man, are run out," he complains in 1773, "and I have my

own and my children's fortunes to make." Yet there was his boyhood

friend, Jonathan Sewall, already attorney-general, "rewarded ... with

six thousand pounds a year, for propagating as many ... slanders against

his country as ever fell from the pen of a sycophant." And the

Hutchinsons and Olivers! With what concentrated bitterness does the

young lawyer write of these men who, he is convinced, had submitted to

be ministerial tools for the aggrandizement, of their families. His

bitterness is the greater, and his conscious rectitude the more

obtrusive, because he also, the virtuous Adams, might have sat in that

gallery. For the wily Hutchinson had offered him the lucrative post of

solicitor-general--the open road to power; but he had declined it; he

could not be bought by the man "whose character and conduct have been

the cause for laying a foundation for perpetual discontent and

uneasiness between Britain and the colonies, of perpetual struggle of

one party for wealth and power at the expense of the liberties of this

country, and of perpetual contention in the other party to preserve

them." Not in England was the plot hatched, but in Boston itself; and

much brooding on his injuries and his abnegations had brought Adams to

the pass, in 1774, that he could set down the names of the three

"original conspirators."

It was this opposition of interests in America that chiefly made men

extremists on either side. Adams would have been less radical had

Hutchinson and Jonathan Sewall been more so; and perhaps Hutchinson and

Sewall might have been more loyal patriots had the brace of Adamses been

less bitter ones. Most of those who in the end became Loyalists were men

who had once been opposed to the ministerial policy, and many remained

so to the end of their lives. But with every stage in the conflict they

looked with increasing apprehension upon the growing influence of

obscure leaders who proclaimed the rights of the people. The prevalence

of mobs; the entrance of the unfranchised populace, by means of "body"

meetings and mass meetings, into the political arena; the leveling

principles and the smug self-righteousness of the patriot

politicians;--all this led many a conservative to consider whether his

interest were not more threatened by the insurgence of radicalism in

America than by the alleged oppression of British legislation. Boston is

indeed mad, Hutchinson writes in 1770. The frenzy, kept up by "two or

three of the most abandoned atheist fellows in the world, united with as

many precise enthusiast deacons, who head the rabble in all their

meetings," was not higher "when they banished my pious great-grandmother,

when they hanged the Quakers." People of "the best character and

estate ... decline attending. Town Meetings where they are

sure to be outvoted by men of the lowest orders." And even in

Philadelphia, where, according to Joseph Reed, "there have been no mobs,

the frequent appeals to the people must in time occasion a change." "We

are hastening on to desperate resolutions," he assured Dartmouth, and

"our most wise and sensible citizens dread the anarchy and confusion

that must ensue."

They were, indeed, hastening on to desperate resolutions on that 5th of

September when men from twelve colonies assembled in Carpenter's Hall to

form the First Continental Congress. A body of able men, it represented

the division as well as the unity that prevailed in America; for there

Galloway and Isaac Low, soon to become Loyalists, sat with Patrick Henry

and Samuel Adams, ready to welcome independence; of one opinion that

American rights were threatened, irreconcilably opposed in their

methods of defending them. John Adams, traveling by easy stages to

Philadelphia, had noted with some surprise how greatly the Middle

colonies feared "the levelling spirit of New England"; and he now found

in the Congress many men who would hear "no expression which looked like

an allusion to the last appeal"; men who were quite content to confine

the action of Congress to protest and negotiation, deeming a

non-intercourse measure useless if voluntary and revolutionary if

maintained by force. For two weeks the advantage seemed to lie with

these men; but on September 17, when the famous "Suffolk Resolutions"

were laid before Congress, many conservatives, unwilling to abandon a

neighboring colony however much they might regret the step it had taken,

voted with the radicals of New England and Virginia to approve the act

which virtually put Massachusetts in a state of rebellion. The final

stand of the conservatives was made eleven days later when Galloway

introduced his Plan for a British American Parliament, a serious and

practicable plan according to Lord Dartmouth, "almost a perfect plan,"

thought John Rutledge, of South Carolina, for effecting a permanent

reconciliation. But the motion, upon which "warm and long debates

ensued," was finally rejected by a majority of one colony, and late in

October the resolution itself, and all minutes concerning it, were

expunged from the records of Congress.

After the rejection of Galloway's Plan, conservatives and radicals

united to formulate the non-intercourse measures, which New England

delegates thought so essential, and those famous addresses--to the

King, to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, to the Inhabitants of the

British Colonies--which Pitt declared to be unsurpassed for ability and

moderation. Able and moderate the addresses undoubtedly were; the work

of conservative deputies, designed to conciliate conservatives in

America and win Whig support in England. But the important work of the

First Continental Congress was embodied in the "Association," through

which Congress "recommended" to the colonies the adoption of

non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation agreements to

become effective December 1, 1774, March 1 and September 10, 1775. From

previous experience it was well understood that such agreements as

these, far more drastic than any which had yet been tried, would prove

ineffective if they remained purely voluntary associations; and what

made the non-intercourse policy of the First Congress distasteful to

conservative men were the measures taken to enforce it. To this end it

was provided that there should be appointed in "every county, city, and

town" a committee of inspection "whose business it shall be to observe

the conduct of all persons touching the Association"; to publish the

names of all who violated it; to inspect the customs entries; and to

seize and dispose of all goods imported contrary to its provisions. Thus

was a voluntary agreement not to do certain things transformed into a

kind of general law to be enforced upon all alike by boycott and

confiscation of property.

The Association of the First Congress created a revolutionary government

and gave birth to the Loyalist as distinct from the conservative party.

Radicals and conservatives had differed in respect to the theoretical

basis of colonial rights and the most effective methods of securing

redress. But the authority now assumed in the name of Congress raised

the ultimate question of allegiance. Of the pamphleteers and preachers

who now denounced the Association as a revolutionary measure, Samuel

Seabury perceived the issue most clearly and stated it most effectively:

"If I must be enslaved, let it be by a King at least, and not by a

parcel of upstart, lawless committeemen." Whether to submit to the king

or to the committee--this was, indeed, the fundamental question during

those crucial months from November, 1774, to July, 1776. For extremists

on either side, the question presented no difficulty; for conservatives

like Hutchinson, who had long since lost all sympathy with prevailing

measures of resistance, or for radicals like Samuel Adams and Patrick

Henry, who pressed eagerly forward toward independence. But in 1774 the

great majority of thinking men, abhorring the notion of war or

separation from England, were yet convinced that strong protest, and

even a kind of forcible resistance, was justified in order to maintain

their just rights. These men sooner or later found themselves "between

Scylla and Charybdis ": compelled to choose what was for them the lesser

evil; to acknowledge the authority of Parliament in spite of laws which

they regarded as oppressive and unconstitutional, or to identify

themselves with the cause of Congress however ill-advised they may have

thought its action. Those men who wished to take a safe middle ground,

who wished neither to renounce their country nor to mark themselves as

rebels, could no longer hold together, and the conservative party

disappeared: perhaps one half chose sooner or later to submit to British

authority; the other half, either with deliberation or yielding

insensibly to the pressure of events, went with their country.

That a majority of conservatives refused to meet this issue until after

the battle of Lexington, and many not until the Declaration of

Independence "closed the last door of reconciliation," was largely due

to the widespread belief that if the colonies took a bold, stand the

English Government would once more back down. Upon the conduct of

radicals and conservatives alike, this persistent belief, one of those

delusions which often change the course of history, exercised, indeed, a

decisive influence. Even as high a Son of Liberty as Richard Henry Lee

would have favored more cautious measures in the First Congress had he

not been certain that "the same ship which carries home the resolutions

will bring back the redress." Inspired among radicals partly by the

feeling that so just a cause could not fail, the conviction was chiefly

grounded upon information sent home by Americans residing in England. If

Congress is unanimous, wrote Franklin in September, 1774, "you cannot

fail of carrying your point. If you divide you are lost." Josiah Quincy,

sent to England in order to get first-hand information, wrote letter

after letter to men in every part of America, assuring them that the

oppression of the colonies was an affair of corrupt ministers who were

not supported by one in twenty of the inhabitants of Great Britain.

"Corruption and the influence of the Crown hath led us into bondage," is

the common cry here. "To Americans only we look for salvation." But

yesterday a noble lord had assured him that, "this country will never

carry on a civil war against America; we cannot, but the ministry hope

to carry all by a single stroke." Certainly, he assured his friends, the

common opinion here is that "if the Americans stand out, we must come to

their terms."

Above all, therefore, America must stand out; she must be "firm and

united," waiting the day when England would come to her terms. But the

difficulty was to be firm and at the same time united; for with every

measure bolder than the last, conservative men grew timid or deserted

the cause to swell the ranks of the Loyalist party. It was precisely to

preserve the appearance of unity where none existed that the journals of

the First Congress had been falsified; for this reason alone many

conservatives had voted for the Association; and in the year 1775, after

the battle of Lexington had precipitated a state of war, radical members

of the Second Congress voted for conciliatory petitions, and

conservatives voted to take up arms against the British troops, in the

hope that if the colonists showed themselves unanimous in the profession

of loyalty, and at the same time unanimous in their determination to

resort to forcible resistance as a last resort, the English Government

would never press the matter to a conclusion.

In February, 1775, Lord North had, indeed, offered resolutions of

conciliation. The measure amazed his own followers and was greeted by

the Whigs with Homeric laughter. Offers of conciliation could scarcely

have arrived in America at a more inopportune time,--the very moment

almost when the battle of Lexington came like an alarm-bell in the night

to waken men from the dream of peace. And the resolutions themselves had

all the appearance of being a clever ruse designed to separate the

Middle colonies from New England and Virginia, in order to destroy that

very union which Americans believed to be the best hope of obtaining

real concession. Such the Whigs in England asserted them to be; and

generally so regarded in America, they were everywhere rejected with

contempt. In November, after the non-exportation agreement became

effective, when an American army was endeavoring to drive the British

troops out of Boston, Lord North declared in Parliament that whereas

former measures were intended as "civil corrections against civil

crimes," the time was now come for prosecuting war against America as

against any foreign enemy; and with the opening of the new year it was

at last becoming clear, even to the most optimistic, that the English

Government was prepared to exact submission at the point of the sword.

As the vain hope of conciliation died away, the radicals, under the able

lead of John Adams and Richard Henry Lee, pushed on to a formal

declaration of independence. This was now, indeed, the only way out for

them. The non-intercourse policy, injuring America more than it injured

England, had proved a hopeless failure. During the year 1775 imports

fell from, £2,000,000 to £213,000; and after the non-exportation

agreement became effective, business stagnation produced profound

discontent and diminished the resources necessary for carrying on war.

So drastic a self-denying ordinance could not be maintained, for "people

will feel, and will say, that Congress oppresses them more than

Parliament." Unable "to do without trade," they were "between Hawk and

Buzzard"; and on April 6, 1776, the ports of America were opened to the

world. "But no state will treat or trade with us," said Lee, "so long as

we consider ourselves subjects of Great Britain." A declaration of

independence was therefore recognized, gladly by some, with profound

regret by many more, as the only alternative to submission; for it alone

would make possible that military and commercial alliance with France

without which America could not successfully withstand the superior

power of Great Britain; and at the same time it would enable the _de

facto_ colonial Governments, with a show of legality, to suppress the

disaffected Loyalists and confiscate their property to the uses of the

cause which they had so basely betrayed.

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee, in behalf of the Virginia delegation

and in obedience to instructions from the Virginia Assembly, accordingly

moved "that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and

independent states; ... that it is expedient forthwith to take the most

effectual measures for forming foreign alliances"; and "that a plan of

confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective colonies for

their consideration." Debated at length, the final decision, already a

foregone conclusion, was deferred in deference to the wishes of the

conservative Middle colonies. It was on July 2 that the momentous

resolutions were finally carried; and two days later the Congress

published to the world that famous declaration which derived the

authority of just governments from the consent of the governed, and

grounded civil society upon the inherent and inalienable rights of man.

In the history of the Western world, the American Declaration of

Independence was an event of outstanding importance: glittering or not,

its sweeping generalities formulated those basic truths which no

criticism can seriously impair, and to which the minds of men must

always turn, so long as faith in democracy shall endure.

V

The men who with resolution and high hope pledged their lives, their

fortunes, and their sacred honor to the defense of these novel

principles, could scarcely have foreseen the emotional reaction that was

soon to follow; the profound disillusionment of those weary years when

only an occasional victory came to lift the despondency occasioned by

constant defeat: years when "the spirit of the people begins to flag, or

the approach of danger dispirits them"; when "few of the numbers who

talked so largely of death and honor" were to be found on the field of

battle; when a febrile enthusiasm for liberty and the just rights of

humanity seemed strangely transformed into the sordid spirit of the

money-changer; those years of the drawn-out war when drudgery in

obscure committee rooms was valued above declamation and the practical

sense of Robert Morris counted for more than the finished oratory of

Richard Henry Lee; the times that tried men's souls, when "the summer

soldier and the sunshine patriot ... shrinks from the service of his

country, but he that stands ... deserves the love of man and woman."

Happily for America there were many who kept the faith, who fought the

good fight, during these dark days. Yet one is apt to think that the

Declaration must have proved a vain boast of rebels but for that

Virginia colonel whom the Congress appointed, on June 17, 1775, to be

"General and Commander in Chief of the armies of the United Colonies";

that man so modest that he thought himself incompetent for the task, yet

of such heroic resolution that neither difficulties nor reverses nor

betrayals could bring him to despair; that man of rectitude, whose will

was steeled to finer temper by every defeat, and who was not to be

turned, by any failure or success, by any calumny, by gold, or by the

dream of empire, from the straight path of his purpose.

He had come, in June, 1776, fresh from the notable achievement which

drove the British army out of Boston, to defend New York against the

most formidable military and naval force ever seen in America. With a

rashness born of inexperience or the necessity of making a stand,

Washington carried his undisciplined farmers and frontier riflemen

across to Brooklyn Heights on Long Island, to meet inevitable defeat at

the hands of General Howe. A ship or two, which the slow-moving British

commander might have sent up the East River, would have prevented the

masterly retreat which saved the American army from capture. But Howe

seemed bent only upon occupying New York, which thus became, and until

the end of the war remained, the British and Loyalist headquarters. With

a deliberation that enraged the Loyalist and non-plussed his

subordinates, the general pushed the patriot army northward to White

Plains, missing there a second opportunity to win a decisive battle. But

the capture of Fort Washington on the Hudson opened the river to the

British navy, and compelled the American forces to retreat through New

Jersey, and across the Delaware River at Trenton into Pennsylvania. Half

a year had not passed since the Declaration of Independence when the

cause of America seemed already lost. "We looked upon the contest as

nearly closed," Major Thomas assured his patriot friends, "and

considered ourselves a vanquished people." The indifferent populace of

New York and New Jersey came in crowds to swear allegiance to the

victorious army. No one doubted that Howe would cross the river and take

Philadelphia. The jubilant Loyalists of the capital city awaited their

deliverance. Congress, bundling its records into a farm wagon, scrambled

away to Baltimore. And even the steadfast Washington, with his

tatterdemalion army reduced to three thousand effectives, wrote that if

new troops could not be raised without delay "the game is nearly up."

Of Villeroi, a general in the army of Louis XIV, it was said that he

had "well served the king--William." It might be said of Howe that he

shares with Washington the merit of achieving American independence. He

never quite deserted the patriot cause; and now, at this critical

moment, instead of pressing on to Philadelphia, he retired his main

army, leaving only some Hessian outposts at Trenton and Bordentown. This

arrangement enabled Washington to revive the waning enthusiasm of the

country by executing one of the most daring and brilliant strokes of the

war. Amidst the snow and sleet of a bitter December night, he ferried

his forlorn little force through the floating ice of the Delaware, and

on Christmas morning of 1776 surprised and captured Colonel Ball and one

thousand Hessians. Cornwallis, on the point of departure for England,

was hastily recalled to recover the lost ground; but he was

out-generaled and defeated, and Washington occupied Morristown Heights,

where he would indeed have been "left to scuffle for Liberty like

another Cato," had he not been, to his great amazement, allowed by the

British commander to remain unmolested there until the next spring. "All

winter," he writes, "we were at their mercy, with sometimes scarcely a

sufficient body of men to mount the ordinary guards, liable at every

moment to be dissipated, if they had only thought proper to march

against us."

If the conduct of the British general in the winter of 1777 amazed

Washington, his management of the next campaign was even more

inexplicable. The army of Burgoyne was then moving slowly southward

from Canada by way of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River. It was the

intention of the ministers that Howe should coöperate with the northern

army; and Washington supposed that the purpose of the campaign was to

effect a complete separation of New England from the more Loyalist

Middle and Southern colonies. As this was thought to be precisely the

most fatal circumstance which could come to pass, an army, far larger

than that of Washington, was gathering to check if possible the advance

of Burgoyne. But Howe neither moved north to the relief of Burgoyne, nor

sent any part of his troops until it was too late. Wasting the early

summer in fruitless maneuvers in northern Jersey, he finally carried his

army by sea to the Chesapeake Bay, where he arrived on the 21st of

August. The general had sailed three hundred miles, and had now to march

fifty miles more, in order to reach Philadelphia, which was ninety-two

miles from the point where he first embarked; and the army of

Washington, the very army which he had sailed so far and wasted so many

precious weeks to avoid, still lay across his path. At Brandywine and

Germantown he fought, and easily won, the battles which could no longer

be avoided. The way to Philadelphia was indeed open; but the fate of the

northern army was already sealed. Caught in the difficult forests of the

Hudson Valley, with supplies exhausted, unable either to retreat or to

advance, on October 17, thirteen days after Howe won the battle of

Germantown, Burgoyne lost the battle of Saratoga and surrendered his

entire army to General Gates.

The loss of Philadelphia was almost forgotten in the general rejoicing

that followed the victory of Saratoga. And the surrender of Burgoyne was

indeed a decisive event; for it inspired Americans with new resolution

and was followed by the formal alliance with France. For months Franklin

had been in France preparing the way for a treaty. The very presence of

the man on the streets of Paris was an influence in favor of the

American cause. To the Frenchmen of that day, when Voltaire and Rousseau

and Fénelon had come into their own, this sage from the primitive

forest, already famous as a scientist, this homely preacher of the

virtues of frugality, with his unconventional wisdom and his genial

tolerance, was the ideal philosopher of that state of nature which they

had in imagination set over as a shining contrast to the artificial and

corrupt society in which they lived. The enthusiasm of the nation for an

oppressed people gave support to the Government when war was once

declared, but it cannot be said that it had much influence in inducing

the king to agree to the alliance with England's rebellious colonies.

Bringing to bear all the resources which native wit and long experience

had placed at his command, Franklin had already, encumbered as he was

with unwise colleagues, procured much secret assistance. And it was

probably the intention of the French Government not to depart from this

policy; but after the surrender of Burgoyne, French agents in London

assured Vergennes that the colonies were on the point of making peace

with England, and of joining her, as the price of independence, in an

attack upon the French West Indies. Since war seemed inevitable, it was

manifestly better to have the assistance of America than her opposition.

Vergennes therefore signified to Franklin his willingness to negotiate a

treaty without delay; and there was signed under date of February 6,

1778, at Versailles, a defensive and offensive alliance between the

United States of America,--recently founded upon the revolutionary

principle of popular sovereignty, and His Most Christian Majesty, Louis

XVI, by Grace of God King of France and Navarre.[2]

In spite of the resource and tenacity of Washington and the convenient

inactivity of Howe, it is difficult to see how the Revolution could have

succeeded without the assistance which now came from France. Contrary to

expectation, French troops and even the French navy were of little

direct aid until the battle of Yorktown. But French gold financed the

war. In the winter of 1778, when Washington's heroic remnant of barefoot

soldiers lay starving at Valley Forge while Pennsylvania farmers sold

provisions to the British and Loyalists who were comfortable and merry

at Philadelphia, the Continental Congress was already a discredited and

half bankrupt Government. Confiscated Loyalist property was sold for the

benefit of the new State Governments; and Congress, unable to collect

its requisitions, was forced to rely upon ever-increasing issues of

paper money. In this very year $63,000,000 were added to the $38,000,000

already in circulation, and in 1779 the printers turned out $143,000,000

more. Laws fixing prices were without effect, and the value of paper

fell to 33 cents on the dollar in 1777, to 12 cents in 1779, and to 2

cents in 1780. When a pound of tea sold for $100, when Thomas Paine

bought woolen stockings at $300 a pair and Jefferson brandy at $125 a

quart, General Gates could with $500,000 of paper get a hundred yards of

fence built in which to guard British prisoners, but arms and munitions

of war were forthcoming only so long as drafts on Franklin were honored

by the French Government.

But if the French alliance brought assistance to the Americans, it

induced the English Government to undertake a more vigorous prosecution

of the war. The ministers had doubtless thought that the policy of

conducting the war with the olive branch and the sword in either hand

would prove successful. Certainly Howe had so interpreted his

instructions. He had fought only when it was necessary to fight; easily

accomplished everything he seriously attempted; never pressed any

advantage; had supposed that by occupying the principal cities,

affording protection to the loyal, and by moderation winning the

lukewarm, the flame of rebellion would burn low for want of fuel and in

good time quite flicker out. Too faithfully followed by half, this

policy had ended in the humiliation of Saratoga and in the added burden

of a war with France. News of Burgoyne's surrender scarcely reached

England before offers of conciliation, embracing more than every

concession the colonies had originally demanded, were hastily pushed

through Parliament and entrusted to commissioners sent to America to

negotiate peace. It was now too late. Once before, just after the battle

of Long Island, General Howe, declaring himself authorized to discuss

terms of conciliation, had induced Congress to send a committee to meet

him at Staten Island. The conference came to nothing; and the only

effect of the episode was to create a strong suspicion in the mind of

the French Minister that the Americans would abandon their Declaration

at the first convenient opportunity. It was above all necessary that the

ardor of France should not again be damped by any further dallying with

English offers. The commissioners were therefore coolly received, and

the attempt of Johnstone to bribe Washington and Reed, published by

Congress in August, 1778, only furnished new fuel to the patriot flame.

Aroused by the French alliance and the flouting of its offers of

conciliation, the English Government now set about to wage war in

earnest. General Howe had returned to England in May, 1778, to stand a

Parliamentary investigation; and when General Clinton who succeeded him

evacuated Philadelphia, and, barely escaping disaster at the battle of

Monmouth, carried his army back to New York, the olive branch was thrown

away and the war took on a new character. Ignoring the patriot army, the

British general resorted to the policy of ruthless raids against the

prosperous Northern coast communities, burning their towns and their

shipping, destroying their industries, and carrying off their

provisions. In 1779, Virginia, which since 1776 had quietly raised

tobacco, and the provisions which had so largely subsisted Washington's

army, was laid waste all along its easily accessible river highways.

Savannah was taken late in 1778, and at the close of the next year

Clinton himself commanded an expedition which in May, 1780, captured the

city of Charleston and forced General Lincoln to surrender his army of

2500 Continental troops. "We look upon America as at our feet," wrote

Horace Walpole. And in fact the occupation of Georgia and South Carolina

was regarded by the English, by the American Loyalists, and by many

patriots, as the prelude to the conquest of the entire South and the end

of the rebellion.

Little wonder if in these days of constant defeat and declining

enthusiasm Congress too often fell to the level of a wrangling body of

mediocre men. After the first years the ability that might have given it

dignity was largely employed in the army, on diplomatic missions, or in

the establishment and administration of the new State Governments. The

particularism of the time is revealed in the belief that a man's first

allegiance was to his State; to construct a constitution for

Massachusetts was thought to be a greater service than to draft the

Articles of Confederation; to be Governor of Virginia a higher honor

than to be President of Congress. The political wisdom of the decade is

therefore chiefly embodied in the first state constitutions and the

legislation of the new State Governments. The constitutions gave formal

expression to the philosophy of the Revolution, but in their detailed

arrangements followed closely the practices and traditions inherited

from the colonial period; popular sovereignty was everywhere declared,

but everywhere limited by basing the suffrage upon property, and often

half defeated by adopting an administrative mechanism in harmony with

the prevailing belief that good government springs from "power balanced

and cancelled and dispersed." The new régime was not altogether such as

Patrick Henry or Jefferson would have made it, but it marked a safe and

conservative advance toward the "establishment of a more equal liberty"

than had hitherto prevailed.

The erection of stable State Governments greatly diminished the power

and the prestige of federal authority. Insensibly the Congress and the

Continental army found themselves dependent upon thirteen sovereign

masters. The feebleness with which the war was supported sometimes

strikes one as incredible; but the amazing difficulty of maintaining an

army of ten thousand troops for the achievement of independence, in the

very colonies which had raised twenty-five thousand for the conquest of

Canada, was due less to the lack of resources, or to indifference to the

result, than to the uncertain authority of Congress, the republican fear

of military power, and the jealous provincialism which had everywhere

been greatly accentuated by the establishment of the new state

constitutions. Washington's army naturally looked with contempt upon a

Government that could not feed or clothe its own soldiers. Congress,

jealous of its authority for the very reason that it had none,

criticized the army in defeat and feared it in victory. The State

Governments, refusing to conform to the recommendations of Congress,

alternately complained of its weakness and denounced it for usurping

unwarranted power. Each State wished to maintain control of its own

troops, and was offended if, in the Continental forces, its many

military experts were not all major-generals. The very colony which gave

little support to the army when war raged in another province, cried

aloud for protection when the enemy crossed its own sacred boundaries;

and, with perhaps one eighth of its proper quota of men at the front,

with its requisitions in taxes unpaid, wished to know whether it was

because of incompetence or timidity that General Washington failed to

win victories.

After all the wonder is rather that Congress accomplished anything than

that it did so little. A Frenchman, asked what he did during the Terror,

replied that he lived. It was no small merit in the Continental Congress

that it held together and maintained even the tradition of union; a

higher merit still that in the midst of war it fashioned a federal

constitution which the thirteen States, more divided by jealousy and

their newly won authority than they were united by a common danger,

could be induced to approve. Yet this task the Congress with difficulty

got accomplished. In 1777, after months of debate, it adopted the

Articles of Confederation. Leaving political sovereignty in the several

states, they provided for a federal legislature with a very limited

authority to make laws, but no federal executive to enforce them.

Hopelessly inadequate as this constitution was to prove, the small

States, notably Maryland, refused to approve it until the larger States

ceded their Western lands to the common Government. Virginia, possessed

of the most extensive domain, held out longest, but finally renounced

her claims January 2, 1781; and in March of that year it was announced

that Maryland had ratified the Articles of Confederation, which thus

became the first constitution of the United States.

In 1779, while the States were wrangling over their Western lands, a

little band of valiant backwoodsmen won a victory which gave substance

to their claims and made their cessions something more than waste paper.

Throughout the war the frontier communities were most loyal supporters

of the Revolution. Their expert riflemen, organized in companies, of

which that of Daniel Morgan is perhaps the most famous, served in the

army of Washington, helped Gates to win the battle of Saratoga, and were

of indispensable service in driving Clinton out of North Carolina in

1780, and Cornwallis in 1781. The borderers of Pennsylvania and

Virginia, and the little settlements at Watauga and Boonesboro,

maintained a heroic defense against the Indians, who were paid by

General Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, to wage a war of

massacre and pillage on the frontier. Against intermittent Indian raids

the backwoodsmen could defend their homes; but so long as the British

held Detroit and Vincennes and the Mississippi forts, there could be no

peace in the interior, and even if the colonies won independence, it

was likely that the Alleghanies would mark the boundary of the new

State. Under these circumstances, George Rogers Clark, trapper and

expert woodsman and Indian fighter, set himself, with the confident

idealism of the frontiersman, to achieve an object which must have

seemed to most men no more than a forlorn hope. It was in 1777 that he

crossed the mountains to Virginia, secured the secret and semi-official

authorization of Patrick Henry, the Governor of the State, and raised a

company of one hundred and fifty men with which to undertake nothing

less than the destruction of British power in the great Northwest.

In May, 1778, the little band floated from Redstone down the Ohio, at

the falls built a fort which they named Louisville in honor of the

French King, and finally, on July 4, reached Kaskaskia. Guided by some

hunters who had joined them, they took the fort by stratagem. The

Indians, for the moment a greater danger than the British, were overawed

by the skill and the masterful personality of Clark; and the Creoles,

conciliated by his moderation, gladly joined in the capture of Cahokia.

Not until February, 1779, was the intrepid commander ready to march on

Vincennes. General Hamilton had recently come there with a small force,

and there he proposed to remain until spring before marching to the

recapture of Kaskaskia and the destruction of the settlements south of

the Ohio, never dreaming that men could be found to cross the "drowned

lands" of the Wabash in the inclement winter months. This fearful

challenge was what Clark and his men accepted; marching two hundred and

thirty miles over bogs and flooded lowlands; without tents, and

sometimes without food or fire; as they neared Vincennes breaking the

thin ice at every step, often neck-deep in water; yet succeeding at

last, they took the fort and sent Hamilton to Virginia a prisoner of

war. Detroit remained in British hands; but the possession of Vincennes

and the Mississippi forts probably saved the Kentucky and Tennessee

settlements from destruction, and doubtless had some influence in

disposing England to cede the Western country at the close of the war.

Yet in spite of this signal victory, in spite of the French alliance,

the darkest days of the war were yet to come. In the year 1780 the

Revolution seemed fallen from a struggle for worthy principles to the

level of mean reprisals, a contest of brigands bent on plunder and

revenge. That it had come to this pass was partly due to Clinton's

policy of detached raids; but the policy of raids was a practical one

precisely because in nearly every colony there was a large body of

active Loyalists, a larger number still who were indifferent, wishing

only to be left alone, ready to submit to whichever side might win at

last. Driven from their homes, plundered by British or patriot raiders,

they in turn organized for revenge, sought plunder where they could find

it, caring not whether they served under Loyalist or Revolutionist

banners. In South Carolina, laid waste by the light troops of Tarleton

and the partisans of Marion and Sumpter, in all the regions round New

York, in the Jerseys, on Long Island and in parts of Connecticut, even

the semblance of government and the customary routine of ordered society

disappeared. The issues that had once divided men were forgotten while

bands of Associated Loyalists and bands of Liberty Boys plundered the

inhabitants indiscriminately, hailed each other as they passed in the

night, or agreed, with the honor that prevails among thieves, to an

equitable division of the spoils.

And few victories came in this disastrous year to cheer the remnant of

tried Americans. Clinton's invasion of North Carolina was, indeed, a

failure; and at the close of 1780, after the frontier troops had

overwhelmingly defeated General Ferguson at King's Mountain, the British

were forced to evacuate that strongly revolutionary colony. But

Washington could do little more than hold with the desperation of

despair to West Point, where his army had lain helpless and almost

passive since the battle of Monmouth. Congress, barely able to hold

together, could not maintain even that "verbal energy" which had once

distinguished it. In this year as never before men served their country

with one hand and with the other filled their pockets by manipulating

the currency which had fallen to be a worthless scrip. And it was in

this year, when fidelity seemed a forgotten virtue, when men enlisted in

the army and deserted to the enemy with equal indifference, that

Benedict Arnold, entrusted at his own request with the command of West

Point, forswore his trust and wrote treason across the fair record of a

patriot's achievements. Well might Washington write, "I have almost

ceased to hope"; and Laurens, "How many men there are who in secret

say, could I have believed it would come to this!"

Yet at last a happy combination of circumstances enabled the American

and French forces, for the first time operating in complete accord,

to bring this disastrous war to a most successful conclusion. Well aware

of the importance of the Southern campaign, Washington had procured for

Greene, the ablest of his generals, command of the forces which were

gathering in North Carolina to resist the advance of Cornwallis in 1781.

Defeated at the Cowpens and checked at Guilford, the British commander

was forced to retire to Wilmington; but instead of returning to

Charleston he moved into Virginia to join Arnold, convinced that the

conquest of the Old Dominion must precede that of North Carolina. In May

and June he carried ruin to all the prosperous towns of the province;

but in July, when the American forces under Lafayette had been greatly

strengthened, it was no longer safe for the British commander to divide

his army. Acting under orders from Clinton, Cornwallis accordingly

retired to the coast and fortified the neck of land at Yorktown.

Washington had scarcely been apprised of this circumstance before he

received a letter from the Count de Grasse, commander of the French

naval forces in the West Indies, proposing joint operations in Virginia

during the summer, and promising to bring his fleet to the Chesapeake

sometime in August. The opportunity was a rare one. Abandoning the

projected attack on New York, Washington and Rochambeau joined their

forces and marched rapidly through New Jersey, entering Philadelphia the

very day that De Grasse appeared at the mouth of the bay. They had

already joined Lafayette before Admiral Graves arrived from New York

with a British fleet to rescue the British general. Had Graves been a

Rodney or a Nelson he might have given a different issue to the American

Revolution; but he was not the man to win against great odds, and after

an indecisive engagement he sailed away, leaving Cornwallis to his fate.

Hemmed in by 16,000 American and French troops, the unhappy general, who

never met Washington but to be defeated, surrendered his army of 7000,

men on the 19th of October, 1781.

"It is all over!" cried Lord North when Germaine told him of the

surrender of Cornwallis. The loss of 7000 men was not in itself an

irremediable disaster; but the effort of the king and the "King's

Friends" to establish the personal rule of the monarch had alienated the

nation, while their attempt to subjugate the colonies had embroiled

England with all Europe. In armed conflict with France, Spain, and

Holland, opposed by the "armed neutrality" of Russia, Sweden, Denmark,

the Empire, Portugal, the Two Sicilies, and the Ottoman Empire, never

had the isolation of the little island kingdom been more splendid, or

British prestige so diminished. The demand of the nation for peace could

no longer be resisted, and the Whig party came into power over the

king's will, and entered into negotiation with the enemies he had made.

The American ambassadors were instructed by Congress and bound in honor

not to make a treaty without the knowledge and consent of France. But

in spite of Franklin's protest, Jay and Adams, who suspected, not

without some show of reason but contrary to the fact, that Vergennes

would oppose the extension of the United States beyond the Alleghanies,

broke their instructions as readily as Jay broke his pipe, and without

consulting their faithful ally arranged the terms of peace with England.

Independence was acknowledged as the indispensable preliminary to

negotiation. John Adams declared that he "had no notion of cheating

anybody," and it was agreed that British creditors should "meet with no

lawful impediment to the recovery of all ... _bona fide_ debts

heretofore contracted" in the colonies. The skill of Franklin and the

resolute persistence of Jay and Adams, together with the desire of the

English Government to make a peace without delay, enabled the Americans

to gain, in every other disputed point, all they could hope for and more

than they had any reason to expect. It was conceded that they should

enjoy the customary right of fishing in Northern waters. The best effort

of England to secure a restoration of property and of the rights of

citizens to the Loyalists was unavailing, and the compensation of that

unhappy class fell to the Government whose losing cause it had

supported. But of all the provisions of this Peace of Paris, the most

important, next to the acknowledgment of independence, was the one which

gave to the new State that incomparably rich woodland and prairie

country extending from the thirty-first, degree of north latitude to

the Great Lakes, and as far west as the Mississippi River. With these as

its main provisions, the definitive treaty was signed on September 3,

1783, and ratified by Congress January 14, 1784.

Before the treaty of peace was signed, the cessation of hostilities had

been formally declared and announced to Washington's army on the 19th of

April, eight years to a day after the battle of Lexington. British

troops occupied New York until November 29, when the evacuation of the

city was finally completed, and the United States of America entered the

company of independent nations, the exhausted and half-ruined champion

of those principles of liberty and equality which were soon to transform

the European world. With the British troops there sailed away, never to

return, a great company of Loyalist exiles; part of the thousands who

renounced their heritage and their country in defense of political and

social ideals that belonged to the past. America thus lost the service

of many men of ability, of high integrity, and of genuine culture;

clergymen and scholars, landowners and merchants of substantial estate,

men learned in the law, high officials of proved experience in politics

and administration. The great achievements of history have their price;

and American independence was won only by the sacrifice of much that was

best in colonial society. Something fine and amiable in manners,

something charming in customs, much that was most excellent in the

traditions of politics and public morality disappeared with the ruin of

those who thought themselves, and who often were in fact, of "the better

sort."

[Illustration: Area of Settlement in 1774; Boundary proposed by Spain

in 1782; Boundary secured by Treaty of 1783; and Settlements West of

Alleghanies in 1783.]

Happily for America not all of the "better sort" deserted their country.

On the 4th of December, five days after the last British ship cleared

New York Harbor, a little company of officers was gathered in the Long

Room of Fraunce's Tavern. They were waiting to bid farewell to General

Washington. No sign of rejoicing greeted the entrance of the familiar

figure; and this masterful man of proved courage and inflexible will,

this self-contained soul who endured calumny in silence, who accepted

victory in even temper and defeat with high fortitude, was now strangely

moved as he looked upon his beloved companions. Lifting a glass of wine

he said simply: "With a heart full of love and gratitude I now take

leave of you, most devoutly wishing that your latter days may be as

prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and

honorable." When all had taken the general's hand and received his

embrace, they walked together through the narrow street to Whitehall

Ferry, where a barge lay waiting. As the oars struck the water

Washington stood and lifted his hat; and his comrades, returning the

salute in silence, watched the majestic figure until it disappeared from

sight. Less than two years before, in the spring of 1782, the army would

have made Washington king. He was now on his way to Annapolis, to

present himself before Congress in order to resign the high office which

eight years before he had accepted with so much diffidence, and to claim

the indulgence of retiring from the service of his country. This, as it

happened, came to pass on the 23d of December. On the day following he

rode away to his home at Mount Vernon, a private citizen of the

Republic which he had done so much to establish; a citizen of the

Republic, and of the world's heroes one of the most illustrious.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A good brief account of the Revolution is in Smith's _The Wars Between

England, and America_ (1914), chaps, I-VI; a fuller and better account

in Channing's _History of the United States_, III, chaps. I-XII; all

things considered the ablest summary is Lecky's _The American

Revolution_. An able and suggestive work is Fisher's _The Struggle for

American Independence_, 2 vols. 1908. Sir George Otto Trevelyan, with

wide information, strong Whig sympathies, and great charm of style, has

written the most fascinating work on the subject. _The American

Revolution_, 4 vols. 1905. The best study of British measures which

precipitated the struggle is Beer's _British Colonial Policy,

1754-1765_. 1907. For bibliography and summary of contemporary

literature, Tyler's _Literary History of the American Revolution._

Selections from newspapers and contemporary documents are in Moore's

_Diary of the American Revolution_, 2 vols. 1860. For the Loyalists, see

Tyler, in _American Historical Review_, I; Van Tyne, _The Loyalists in

the American Revolution_. 1902. For the attitude of the clergy, and the

influence of religious and sectarian forces, see Van Tyne, in _American

Historical Review_, XIX; Cross, _The Anglican Episcopate_. 1902.

Thornton (_The Pulpit of the American Revolution._ Boston, 1860)

reprints a number of contemporary sermons by New England clergy. For the

Western settlements see Roosevelt, _Winning of the West_, 4 vols.;

Alden, _New Governments West of the Alleghanies_, in _Wisconsin

Historical Bulletin_, II; Turner, in _American Historical Review_, I;

Thwaites, _How George Rogers Clark Won the North West_. 1903. The

opposition between the interior and the coast regions, and the bearing

of this on the formation of radical and conservative parties in the

Revolution, are well brought out in Lincoln's _The Revolutionary

Movement in Pennsylvania_ (University of Pennsylvania Studies. 1901);

and Henry's _Patrick Henry_, 3 vols. 1891. The letters, journals, and

papers of leading Americans in the Revolution have been very fully

printed. The ablest of the radicals was John Adams (_Works of John

Adams_, 10 vols. 1856); Franklin became increasingly radical with the

progress of events (_Writings of Benjamin Franklin_, 10 vols. 1903-07);

Dickinson was the ablest of the conservatives who joined the Revolution,

but with great reluctance (_Writings of John Dickinson_, 3 vols. 1895);

the extreme conservative and Loyalist view is best represented by

Hutchinson (_Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson_, 2 vols. 1884). For

the period of the war perhaps the most illuminating writings of all are

the letters of Washington (_The Writings of George Washington_, 14 vols.

1889-93).

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Professor C.H. Van Tyne, of the University of Michigan, has recently

found new material in the Paris Archives, notably a Vergennes memoir of

1782 and memoirs presented by the ministers at the time of forming the

treaty, which to his mind proves conclusively that the Government would

never have formed the alliance with America had it not been convinced

that otherwise the colonies were prepared to join England in the

conquest of the French West Indies.

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

A BRIEF LIST OF BOOKS FOR THE STUDY OF COLONIAL HISTORY

1. Adams, J. _Familiar Letters of John Adams and His

Wife Abigail Adams._ Boston, 1875.

2. Andrews, C.M. _The Colonial Period._ New York,

1912.

3. Beer, G.L. _The Origins of the British Colonial System,

1578-1660._ New York, 1908.

_The Old Colonial System, 1660-1754._ Part

I. The Establishment of the System,

1660-1688. 2 vols. New York, 1912.

_British Colonial Policy, 1754-1765._

New York, 1907.

4. Bruce, P.A. _The Economic History of Virginia._ 2

vols. New York, 1896.

5. Channing, E. _History of the United States._ Vols. I-III.

New York, 1905-1912.

6. Eggleston, E. _The Beginners of America._ Philadelphia,

1897.

_The Transit of Civilization._ Philadelphia, 1901.

7. Ellis, G.E. _The Puritan Age and Rule in the Colony of

Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1685._ Boston, 1888.

8. Fisher, S.G. _The Struggle for American Independence._

2 vols. Philadelphia, 1908.

9. Fiske, J. _The Discovery of America._ 2 vols. Boston,

1893.

_The Beginnings of New England._ Boston,

1892.

_Old Virginia and Her Neighbours._ 2 vols.

Boston, 1897.

_The Dutch and Quaker Colonies._ 2 vols. Boston, 1900.

_New France and New England._ Boston, 1902.

10. Ford, P.L. _The True George Washington._ Philadelphia,

1897.

11. Franklin, B. _The Life of Benjamin Franklin Written by

Himself._ 3 vols. Philadelphia, 1881.

12. Hart, A.B. _American History Told by Contemporaries._

4 vols. New York, 1887.

13. Hart, A.B. _The American Nation._ 27 vols. New

York, 1904-1907 (first nine volumes).

14. Henry, W.W. _Patrick Henry; Life, Correspondence,

and Speeches._ 3 vols. New York, 1891.

15. Hutchinson, P.O. _Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson._

2 vols. Boston, 1884.

16. Jameson, J.F. _Original Narratives of Early American

History._ 15 vols. New York, 1906-1914. (Especially

valuable are the following: Bourne, E.G. _The Northmen,

Columbus, and Cabot_; Hosmer, J.K. _Winthrop's

Journal._ 2 vols.; Davis, W.T. _Bradford's History of

Plymouth Plantation_, Burr, G.L. _Narratives of the

Witchcraft Cases._)

17. Lecky, W.E.H. _The American Revolution._ New

York, 1912.

18. MacDonald, W. _Select Charters and Other Documents._

New York, 1906.

19. Osgood, H.L. _The American Colonies in the 17th Century._

3 vols. New York, 1904-1907.

20. Parkman, F. _Frontenac and New France._ Boston. 1877.

_Half Century of Conflict._ 2 vols. Boston. 1892.

_Montcalm and Wolfe._ 2 vols. Boston, 1891.

21. Trevelyan, G.O. _The American Revolution._ 4 vols.

New York, 1905-07.

22. Tyler, M.C. _The Literary History of the American

Revolution._ 2 vols. New York, 1897.

23. Walker, W. _History of Congregationalism in America._

New York, 1899.

24. Weeden, W.B. _The Economic and Social History of

New England._ 2 vols. Boston, 1890.

25. Wells, W.V. _The Life and Public Services of Samuel

Adams._ 2 vols. Boston, 1865.

26. Wendell, B. _Cotton Mather._ New York. 1891.

INDEX

Abraham, Plains of, 159.

_Account of the Province of Pennsylvania_, William Penn's, 134.

Acts of Trade. _See_ Navigation Acts.

Adams, John, social rank, 166;

influenced by English writers, 171;

religious ideas, 197;

demands a "more equal liberty," 202, 240;

on the Stamp Act, 221, 225;

defends officers concerned in the "Massacre," 230;

complains of desertion by the people, 231;

dines with the Sons of Liberty, 238;

opposition to the Hutchinsons and Olivers, 243;

in the First Continental Congress, 246;

urges a declaration of independence, 251;

negotiator of Treaty of 1783, 271.

Adams, Samuel, opposes Sugar Act, 218;

and the Stamp Act, 220;

deserted by his friends, 231;

promotes patriotic meetings, 238;

in the First Continental Congress, 245;

one of earliest to desire independence, 248.

Aden, 15.

Admiralty courts, established, 145, 146;

fall under control of assemblies, 151;

jurisdiction extended, 208.

Africa, 17, 18, 168.

_Aggawam, Cobler of_, 65.

Albany, Congress of. _See_ Congress.

Albemarle Sound, 129.

Albuquerque, 27.

Alexandria, 5.

Allyon, 32.

Almon, John, 231.

Alva, Duke of, 37.

Amboina, 27.

America, Hakluyt's account of, 47.

American Whig Society at Princeton, 194.

Amherst, Jeffrey, 210.

Amsterdam, 37.

Amusements in Massachusetts, laws against, 116.

Anabaptists, 108.

Andros, Sir Edmund, 132, 145.

Androscoggin, 175.

Anglican Church, established in Massachusetts, 122;

frontier communities opposed to, 183;

disestablished in Virginia, 241.

Anglican episcopate, fear of, 190, 196.

Annapolis, 273.

Anti-ministerial spirit in Massachusetts, 119.

Antioch, 5.

Antwerp, 6, 36, 37.

Arabia, 13.

Arianism in New England, 189.

Aristocracy, in Virginia, 72;

and colonial politics, 165;

in Massachusetts, 168;

frontier communities opposed to, 182;

the Revolution a movement in opposition to, 240.

Aristotle, 23.

Armada, defeat of the, 43.

"Armed neutrality," 270.

Arminianism in New England, 189.

Army, the Revolutionary, character of, 254, 255, 259;

supplied from Virginia, 262;

causes of weakness of, 263;

attitude toward Congress, 263, 264;

frontier troops in, 265, 268;

French troops coöperate with, 269;

willing to make Washington king, 273.

Arnold, Benedict, 268, 269.

"Art of Virtue." Franklin's idea of religion as the, 198.

Articles of Confederation, 252, 264.

Asia, relation between Europe and, 1, 7, 10-12, 16.

Assembly. _See_ Government.

_Assiento_, the, 150.

Assistants, Board of. _See_ Government, Massachusetts.

Associated Loyalists, 268.

Association of the First Continental Congress, 247;

creates the Loyalist party, 247, 248;

why conservatives voted for, 250.

_See_ Non-importation agreements.

Atlantis, 23.

Augsburg, 6.

Austin, Anne, 108.

Austrian Succession, War of the, 203.

Azores, 168.

Back country. _See_ Frontier.

Backwoodsmen. _See_ Frontier.

Bacon, Francis, 38, 197.

Bacon, Nathaniel, 76, 79, 80.

Bacon, Roger, 23.

Bagdad, 5.

Bahamas, the, 128.

Balance of trade. _See_ Trade.