large fleet left Boston and again captured Port Royal, to which the
name of Annapolis was given as a compliment to the snuffy little woman
who sat on the English throne. This success was made the basis of a
proposition to put an end to the development of the French settlements
west of the Alleghanies. It was represented to the English government
that the entire Indian population in the west was being amalgamated
with the French; the Jesuits ensnaring them on the spiritual side, and
the intermarrying system on the other. The English Secretary of State
was Bolingbroke--or Saint-John as he was then--a man of three and
thirty, brilliant, graceful, gifted, versatile; but without principle
or constancy, who never emancipated his superb intellect from his
restless and sensuous nature. After hearing what the American envoys
had to say, and thinking the matter over, Saint-John made up his mind
that it could do no harm, as a beginning, to capture Quebec; and that
being safe in English hands, the rest of the programme could be
finished at leisure. Seven regiments of Marlborough's veterans, the
best soldiers in the world at that time, a battalion of marines, and
fifteen men-of-war, were intrusted to the utterly incompetent and
preposterous Hovenden Walker, with the not less absurd Jack Hill,
brother of Mrs. Masham, as second in command. In short, the expedition
was what would now be called a "job" for the favorites and hangers-on
of the Court; the taking of the Canadian fortress was deemed so easy a
feat that even fools and Merry-Andrews could accomplish it. The
Americans had meantime made their preparations to co-operate with this
imposing armada; an army of colonists and Iroquois were at Albany,
ready for a dash on Montreal. But week after week passed away, and the
fleet, having got to Boston, seemed unable to get away from it. No
doubt Hovenden, Hill and the rest of the rabble were enjoying
themselves in the Puritan capital. The Boston of stern-visaged,
sad-garmented, scripture-quoting men and women, of unpaved streets and
mean houses, was gone; Boston in the first quarter of the Eighteenth
Century was a city--a place of gayety, fashion and almost luxury. The
scarlet coats of the British officers made the narrow but
briskly-moving streets brilliant; but even without them, the
embroidered coats, silken small clothes and clocked stockings, powdered
wigs and cocked hats of the fine gentlemen, and the wide hoops and
imposing head-dresses of the women, made a handsome show. People of
many nationalities mingled in the throng, for commerce had brought the
world in all its various forms to the home of the prayers of Winthrop
and Higginson; the royal governors maintained a fitting state, and
traveled Americans, then as now, brought back with them from Europe the
freshest ideas of modishness and style. There were folk of quality
there, personages of importance and dignity, forming an inner
aristocratic circle who conversed of London and the Court, and whose
august society it was the dear ambition of the lesser lights to ape, if
they could not join it. Democratic manners were at a discount in these
little hotbeds of amateur cockneyism; the gloomy severities of the
old-fashioned religion were put aside; there was an increasing gap
between the higher and the lower orders of the population. This
appearance was no doubt superficial; and the beau-monde is never so
numerous as its conspicuousness leads one to imagine. When the
rumblings of the Revolutionary earthquake began to make themselves
heard in earnest, the gingerbread aristocracy came tumbling down in a
hurry, and the old, invincible spirit, temporarily screened by the
waving of scented handkerchiefs, the flutter of fans, and the swish of
hoop-skirts, made itself once more manifest and dominant. But that
epoch was still far off; for the present court was paid to Hovenden and
his officers; and the British coffee-house in King Street was a noble
sight.
What bottles of wine those warriors drank, what snuff they took, what
long pipes they smoked, how they swore and ruffled, and what tales they
told of Marlborough and the wars! The British army swore frightfully in
Flanders, and in King Street, too. There, also, they read the news in
the newspapers of the day, and discussed matters of high policy and
strategy, while the civilians listened with respectful admiration. And
see how that dapper young officer seated in the window arches his
handsome eyebrows and smirks as two pretty Boston girls go by! Yes, it
is no wonder that the British fleet needed a long time to refit in
Boston harbor, before going up to annihilate those French jumping-jacks
on the banks of the St. Lawrence. "La, Captain, I hope you won't get
hurt!" says pretty Miss Betty, with her white wig and her beauty spots;
and that heroic young gentleman lifts her hand to his lips, and swears
deeply that, for a glance from her bright eyes, he would go forth and
capture Quebec single-handed.
While these dalliances were in progress, the French jumping-jacks were
putting things in order to receive their expected guests in a becoming
manner. They held a great pow-wow of representatives of Indian tribes
from all parts of the seat of the projected war, and bound them by
compacts to their assistance. Everybody, even the women, worked on the
fortifications, or on anything that might aid in the common defense.
Before the end of August, at which time the outlookers reported signs
of a fleet of near a hundred sail, flying the British flag, all was
ready for them in the French strongholds. So now let the mighty combat
begin.
But it was not to come this time: the era of William Pitt and General
Wolfe was nearly half a century distant. The latter would not be born
for sixteen years, and the former was a pap-eating babe of three.
Meanwhile the redoubtable Hovenden was snoring in bed, while his fleet
was struggling in a dense fog at night, being driven on the shoals of
the Egg Islands near the mouth of the St. Lawrence. "For the Lord's
sake, come on deck!" roars Captain Goddard, thrusting his head into the
cabin for the second time, "or we shall all be lost!" Thus adjured, the
old imbecile huddles on his dressing gown and slippers, and finds
himself, sure enough, close on a lee shore. He made shift to get his
own vessel out of harm's way, but eight others went down, and near nine
hundred men were drowned. "Impossible to go on," was the vote of the
council of war the next morning; and "It's all for the best," added
this remarkable admiral; "for had we got to Quebec, ten or twelve
thousand of us must have perished of cold and hunger; Providence took
eight hundred to save the rest!"
So back they went, with their tails between their legs, without having
had a glimpse of the citadel which they were to have captured without
an effort; and of course the army waiting at Albany for the word to
advance got news of a different color, and Montreal was as safe as
Quebec. In the west, the Foxes, having planned an attack on Detroit,
did really lay siege to it; but Du Buisson, who defended it, summoned a
swarm of Indian allies to his aid, and the Foxes found that the boot
was on the other leg; they were all either slain or carried into
slavery. Down in the Carolinas, a party of Tuscaroras attacked a
settlement of Palatines near Pamlico Sound, and wiped them out; and
some Huguenots at Bath fared little better. Disputes between the
governor and the burgesses prevented aid from Virginia; but Barnwell of
South Carolina succeeded in making terms with the enemy. A desultory
and exhausting warfare continued however, complicated with an outbreak
of yellow fever, and it was not until 1713 that the Tuscaroras were
driven finally out of the country, and were incorporated with the
Iroquois in the north. The war in Europe had by that time come also to
an end, and the treaty of Utrecht brought about an ambiguous peace for
a generation.
George I. now became king of England; because he was the son of Sophia,
granddaughter of James I., and professed the Protestant religion. He
was a Hanoverian German, and did not understand the English language;
he was stupid and disreputable, and better fitted to administer a
German bierstube than a great kingdom. But the Act of Settlement of
1701 had stipulated that if William or Anne died childless, the
Protestant issue of Sophia should succeed. That such a man should prove
an acceptable sovereign both to Great Britain and her American
colonies, showed that the individuality on the throne had become
secondary to the principles which he stood for; besides, George
profited by the easy, sagacious, good-humored leadership of that
unprincipled but common-sensible man-of-the-world, Sir Robert Walpole,
who was prime minister from 1715 to 1741, with an interval of only a
couple of years. Walpole's aim was to avoid wars and develop commerce
and manufactures; and while he lived, the colonies enjoyed immunity
from conflicts with the French and Spanish.
They were not to forget the use of arms, however; for the Indians were
inevitably encroached upon by the expanding white population, and
resented it in the usual way. In 1715 the Yemasses began a massacre on
the Carolina borders; they were driven off by Charles Craven, after the
colonists had lost four hundred men. The proprietors had given no help
in the war, and after it was over, the colony renounced allegiance to
them, and the English government supported their revolt, regarding it
in the light of an act of loyalty to George. Francis Nicholson, a
governor by profession, and of great experience in that calling, was
appointed royal governor, and made peace with the tribes; and in 1729
the crown bought out the claims of the proprietors. North Carolina,
without a revolt, enjoyed the benefits obtained by their southern
brethren. The Cherokees became a buffer against the encroachments of
the French from the west.
In the north, meanwhile, the Abenakis, in sympathy with the French,
claimed the region between the Kennebec and the St. Croix, and applied
to the French for assistance. Sebastian Rasles, a saintly Jesuit priest
and Indian missionary, had made his abode at Norridgwock on the
Kennebec; he was regarded by Massachusetts as an instigator of the
enemy. They seized his post, he escaping for the time; the Indians
burned Brunswick; but in 1723 Westbrooke with a company of hardy
provincials, who knew more of Indian warfare than the Indians
themselves, attacked an Indian fort near the present Bangor and
destroyed it; the next year Norridgwock was surprised, and Rasles
slain. He met his death with the sublime cheerfulness and courage which
were the badge of his order. French influence in northeastern
Massachusetts was at an end, and John Lovewell, before he lost his life
by an ambush of Saco Indians at Battle Brook, had made it necessary for
the Indians to sue for peace. Commerce took the place of religion as a
subjugating force, and an era of prosperity began for the northeastern
settlements.
There was no settled boundary between northern New York and the French
regions. Each party used diplomatic devices to gain advantage. Both
built trading stations on doubtful territory, which developed into
forts. Burnet of New York founded Oswego in 1727, and gained a strip of
land from the Iroquois; France built a fort on Lake Champlain in 1731.
Six years before that, they had established, by the agency of the
sagacious trader Joncaire, a not less important fort at Niagara. Upon
the whole, the French gained the better of their rivals in these
negotiations.
Louisiana, as the French possessions, or claims, south of Canada were
called, was meanwhile bidding fair to cover most of the continent west
of the Alleghanies and north of the indeterminate Spanish region which
overspread the present Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and
Mexico. No boundary lines could be run in those enormous western
expanses; and it made little practical difference whether a given claim
lay a thousand miles this way or that. But on the east it was another
matter. The French pursued their settled policy of conciliating the
Indians wherever they hoped to establish themselves; but though this
was well, it was not enough. Narrow though the English strip of
territory was, the inhabitants greatly outnumbered the French, and were
correspondingly more wealthy. Spotswood of Virginia, in 1710, was for
pushing out beyond the mountains, and Logan of Pennsylvania also called
Walpole's attention to the troubles ahead; but the prime minister would
take no action. On the other hand, the white population of Louisiana
was ridiculously small, and their trade nothing worth mentioning; but
when Anthony Crozar resigned the charter he had received for the
district, it was taken up by the famous John Law, the English
goldsmith's son, who had become chief financial adviser of the Regent
of France; and immediately the face of things underwent a change like
the magic transformations of a pantomime.
The Regent inherited from Louis XIV. a debt which there was not money
enough in all France to pay. Law had a plan to pay it by the issue of
paper. Louisiana offered itself as just the thing for purposes of
investment, and a pretext for the issue of unlimited "shares." Not to
speak of the gold and silver, there was unlimited wealth in the unknown
country, and Law assumed that it could be produced at once. Companies
were formed, and thousands of settlers rushed to the promised paradise.
But we have to do with the Mississippi Bubble only as it affected
America. The Bubble burst, but the settlers remained, and were able to
prosper, in moderation, like other settlers in a fertile country. A
great area of land was occupied. Local tribes of Indians joined in a
massacre of the colonists in 1729. They in turn were nearly
exterminated by the French forces during the next two years, but the
war aroused a new hostility among the red tribes against the French,
which redounded to the English advantage. In 1740, Bienville was more
than willing to make a peace, which left to France no more than nominal
control of the tract of country drained by the southern twelve hundred
miles of the Mississippi. The population, after all the expense and
efforts of half a century, numbered about five thousand white persons,
with upward of two thousand slaves. The horse is his who rides it. The
French had not proved themselves as good horsemen as the English. The
English colonies had at the same time a population of about half a
million; their import and export trade aggregated nearly four million
dollars; they had a wide and profitable trade; and the only thing they
could complain of was the worthless or infamous character of the
majority of the officials which the shameless corruption of the Walpole
administration sent out to govern--in other words, to prey upon--them.
But if this was the only subject of complaint, it could not be termed a
small subject. It meant the enforcement of the Navigation Acts in their
worst form, and the restriction of all manner of manufactures.
Manufactures would tend to make the colonies set up for themselves, and
therefore they must be forbidden:--such was the undisguised argument.
It was a case of the goose laying golden eggs. America had in fact
become so enormously valuable that England wanted it to become profit
and nothing else--and all the profit to be England's. They still failed
to realize that it was inhabited by human beings, and that those human
beings were of English blood. And because the northern colonies, though
the more industrious, produced things which might interfere with
British goods, therefore they were held down more than the southern
colonies, which grew only tobacco, sugar, rice and indigo, which could
in no degree interfere with the sacred shopkeepers and mill-owners of
England. An insanity of blindness and perversity seized upon the
English government, and upon most of the people; they actually were
incapable of seeing justice, or even their own best interests. It seems
strange to us now; but it was a mania, like that of witchcraft, though
it lasted thrice as many years as that did months.
The will of England in respect of the colonies became as despotic as
under the Stuarts; but though it delayed progress, it could not break
down the resistance of the assemblies; and Walpole would consent to no
suggestion looking toward enforcing it by arms. Stamp duties were
spoken of, but not enacted. The governors raged and complained, but the
assemblies held the purse-strings. Would-be tyrants like Shute of
Boston might denounce woe, and Crosby of New York bellow treason, but
they were fain to succumb. Paper money wrought huge mischief, but
nothing could prevent the growing power and wealth of the colonies,
fed, also, by the troubles in Europe. In 1727 the Irish, always friends
of liberty, began to arrive in large numbers. But what was of better
augury than all else was the birth of two men, one in Virginia, the
other in Boston. The latter was named Benjamin Franklin: the former,
George Washington.
CHAPTER ELEVENTH
QUEM JUPITER VULT PERDERE
There are times when, upon nations as upon individuals, there comes a
wave of evil tendency, which seems to them not evil, but good. Under
its influence they do and think things which afterward amaze them in
the retrospect. But such ill seasons are always balanced by the
presence and opposition of those who desire good, whether from selfish
or altruistic motives. And since good alone has a root, connecting it
with the eternal springs of life, therefore in the end it prevails, and
the movement of the race is on the whole, and in the lapse of time,
toward better conditions.
England, during the Eighteenth Century, came under the influence of a
selfish spirit which could not but lead her toward disaster, though at
the time it seemed as if it promoted only prosperity and power. She
thought she could strengthen her own life by restricting the natural
enterprise and development of her colonies: that she could subsist by
sucking human blood. She believed that by compelling the produce of
America to flow toward herself alone, and by making America the sole
recipient of her own manufactures, she must be immeasurably and
continually benefited; not perceiving that the colonies could never
reach the full limit of their productiveness unless freedom were
conceded to all the impulses of their energy, or that the greater the
number of those nations who were allowed freely to supply colonial
wants, the greater those wants would become. Moreover, selfishness is
never consistent, because it does not respect the selfishness of
others; and England, at the same time that she was maintaining her own
trade monopolies, was illicitly undermining the similar monopolies of
other nations. She promoted smuggling in the Spanish West Indies, and
made might right in all her dealings with foreign peoples. The
assiento--the treaty giving her exclusive right to supply the West
Indian islands with African slaves--was actively carried out, and the
slave-trade reached enormous proportions; it is estimated that from
three to nine millions of Africans were imported into the American and
Spanish colonies during the first half of the Eighteenth Century,
yielding a revenue for their importation alone of at least four hundred
million dollars. But the profit did not end there; for their labor on
the plantations in the southern colonies (where alone they could be
used in appreciable numbers) multiplied the production and diminished
the cost of the articles of commerce which those colonies raised. There
were individuals, almost from the beginning, who objected to slavery on
grounds of abstract morality; and others who held that a converted
African should cease to be a slave. But these opinions did not impress
the bulk of the people; and laws were passed classing negroes with
merchandise. "The trade is very beneficial to the country" was the
stereotyped reply to all humanitarian arguments. The cruelties of
transportation in small vessels were regarded as an unavoidable, if
disagreeable, necessity; it was pointed out that the masters of slaves
would be prompted by self-interest to treat them well after they were
landed; and it was obvious that negroes, after a generation of
captivity, were less remote from civilization than when fresh from
Africa.
The good to balance this ill was supplied by the American colonies.
Their resistance to English selfishness may have been in part animated
by selfishness of their own; but it none the less had justice and right
behind it. In any argument on fundamental principles, the colonists
always had the better of it. Their rights as free men and as chartered
communities were indefeasible, were always asserted, and never given
up. They did not hesitate to disregard the more unjust of England's
exactions and restrictions; it was only by such defiance that they
maintained their life. And against the importation of slaves there was
a general feeling, even among the Southern planters; because, not to
speak of other considerations, they multiplied there to an alarming
extent, and the fact that they cheapened production and lowered prices
was manifestly as unwelcome to the planters as it was favorable to
English traders.
But in order to be effective, the protest of a people--their
enlightenment, their virtue and patriotism, their courage and
philosophy, their firmness and self-reliance, their hatred of shams,
dishonesty and tyranny--must be embodied and summed up in certain
individuals among them, who may thus be recognized by the community as
their representatives in the fullest sense, and therefore as their
natural champions and leaders. America has never lacked such men,
adapted to her need; and at this period they were coming to maturity as
Franklin and Washington. They will be with us during the critical hours
of our formative history, and we shall have opportunity to measure
their characters. Meanwhile there is another good man deserving of
passing attention; not born on our soil, but meriting to be called, in
the best sense, an American. In the midst of a corrupt and self-seeking
age, he was unselfish and pure; and while many uttered pretty
sentiments of philanthropy, and devised fanciful Utopias for the
transfiguration of the human race, he went to work with his hands and
purse as well as with his heart and head, and created a home and
happiness for unhappy and unfortunate people in one of the loveliest
and most fertile spots in the western world. If he was not as wise as
Penn, he was as kind; and if his colony did not succeed precisely as he
had planned it should, at any rate it became a happy and prosperous
settlement, which would not have existed but for him. He had not fully
fathomed the truth that in order to bestow upon man the best chance for
earthly felicity, we must, after having provided him with the
environment and the means for it, let him alone to work it out in his
own way. But he had such magnanimity that when he found that his
carefully-arranged and detailed schemes were inefficient, he showed no
resentment, and did not try to enforce what had seemed to him
expedient, against the wishes of his beneficiaries; but retired amiably
and with dignity, and thus merited the purest gratitude that men may
properly accord to a man.
James Edward Oglethorpe was already five years old when the Eighteenth
Century began. He was a Londoner by birth, and had a fortune which he
did not misuse. He was a valiant soldier against the Turks; he was
present with Prince Eugene at the capitulation of Belgrade; and he sat
for more than thirty years in Parliament. He died at the age of ninety;
though there is a portrait of him extant said to have been taken when
he was one hundred and two. If long life be the reward of virtue, he
deserved to survive at least a century.
The speculative fever in England had brought about much poverty; and
debtors were lodged in jail in order, one might suppose, to prevent
them from taking any measures to liquidate their debts. Besides these
unhappy persons, there were many Protestants on the Continent who were
persecuted for their faith's sake. England compassionated these
persons, having learned by experience what persecution is; and did not
offer any objection to a scheme for improving the lot of debtors in her
own land, if any feasible one could be devised.