Waterford, a distance of more than four hundred miles, through forests
and over mountains, with rivers to cross and hostile Indians to beware
of; and it was the middle of November when he set out, with the most
inclement season of the year before him. Kit Gist, a hunter and trapper
of the Natty Bumppo order, was his guide; they laid their course
through the dense but naked forests as a mariner over a sullen sea.
Four or five attendants, including an interpreter, made up the party.
Day after day they rode, sleeping at night round a fire, with the snow
or the freezing rain falling on their blankets, and the immense silence
of the winter woods around them. On the 23d of the month they came to
the point of junction between two great rivers--the Monongahela and the
Alleghany. A wild and solitary spot it was, hardly visited till then by
white men; the land on the fork was level and broad, with mighty trees
thronging upon it; opposite were steep bluffs. The Alleghany hurried
downward at the rate a man would walk; the Monongahela loitered, deep
and glassy. Washington had acted as adjutant of a body of Virginia
troops for the past two or three years, and he examined the place with
the eyes of a soldier as well as of a surveyor. It seemed to him that a
fort and a town could be well placed there; but in the pure frosty air
of that ancient forest, untenanted save by wild beasts, there was no
foreshadowing of the grimy smoke and roar, the flaring smelting-works,
the crowded and eager population of the Pittsburgh that was to be.
Having fixed the scene in his memory, Washington rode his horse down
the river bank, and plunging into the icy current, swam across. On the
northwest shore a fire was built, where the party dried their garments,
and slept the sleep of frontiersmen.
Conducted now by the Delawares, they crossed low-lying, fertile lands
to Logstown, where they got news of a junction between French troops
from Louisiana and from Erie. Arriving in due season at Venango,
Washington found the French officer in command there very positive that
the Ohio was theirs, and that they would keep it; they admitted that
the English outnumbered them; but "they are too dilatory," said the
Frenchman, staring up with an affectation of superciliousness at the
tall, blue-eyed young Virginian. The latter thanked the testy Gaul,
with his customary grave courtesy, and continued his journey to Fort Le
Boeuf. It was a structure characteristic of the place and period; a
rude but effective redoubt of logs and clay, with the muzzles of cannon
pouting from the embrasures, and more than two hundred boats and canoes
for the trip down the river. "I shall seize every Englishman in the
valley," was the polite assurance of the commander; but, being a man of
pith himself, he knew another when he saw him, and offered Washington
the hospitalities of the post. But the serious young soldier had no
taste for hobnobbing, and returned at once to Venango, where he found
his horses unavailable, and continued southward on foot, meeting bad
weather and deep snow. He borrowed a deerskin shirt and leggins from
the tallest of the Indians, dismissed his attendants, left the Indian
trail, and struck out for the Forks by compass, with Gist as his
companion. A misguided red man, hoping for glory from the white chief's
scalp, prepared an ambush, and as Washington passed within a few paces,
pulled the trigger on him. He did not know that the destiny of half the
world hung upon his aim; but indeed the bullet was never molded that
could draw blood from Washington. The red man missed; and the next
moment Gist had him helpless, with a knife at his throat. But no: the
man who could pour out the lives of his country's enemies, and of his
own soldiers, without stint, when duty demanded it, and could hang a
gallant and gently nurtured youth as a spy, was averse from bloodshed
when only his insignificant self was concerned. Gist must sulkily put
up his knife, and the would-be assassin was suffered to depart in
peace. But in order to avoid the possible consequences of this
magnanimity, the envoy and his companion traveled without pausing for
more than sixty miles. And then, here was the Alleghany to cross again,
and no horse to help one. Swimming was out of the question, even for
the iron Washington, for the river was hurtling with jagged cakes of
ice.
A day's hacking with a little hatchet cut down trees enough--not apple
trees--to make a raft, on which they adventured; but in mid-stream
Washington's pole upset him, and he was fain to get ashore on an
island. There must they pass the night; and so cold was it, that the
next morning they were able to reach the mainland dry shod, on the ice.
What was crossing the Delaware (almost exactly twenty-three years
afterward) compared to this? Washington was destined to do much of his
work amid snow and ice; but for aught anybody could say, the poles or
the equator were all one to him.
In consequence of his report a fort was begun on the site of
Pittsburgh, and he was appointed lieutenant-colonel to take charge of
it, with a hundred and fifty men, and orders to destroy whomsoever
presumed to stay him. Two hundred square miles of fertile Ohio lands
were to be their reward. An invitation to other colonies to join in the
assertion of English ownership met with scanty response, or none at
all. The idea of a union was in the air, but it was complicated with
that old bugbear of a regular revenue to be exacted by act of
Parliament, which Shirley and the others still continued to press with
hungry zeal; while the assemblies were not less set upon making all
grants annual, with specifications as to person and object. While the
matter hung in the wind, the Virginians were exposed to superior
forces; but in the spring of 1754 Washington, with forty men, surprised
a party under Jumonville, defeated them, killed Jumonville, and took
the survivors prisoners. Washington was exposed to the thickest showers
of the bullets; they whistled to him familiarly, and "believe me," he
assured a correspondent, "there is something charming in the sound."
His life was to be sweetened by a great deal of that kind of charm.
But the French were gathering like hornets, and the Lieutenant-colonel
must needs take refuge in a stockaded post named Fort Necessity, where
his small force was besieged by seven hundred French and Indians who,
in a nine hours' attack, killed thirty of his men, but used up most of
their own ammunition. A parley resulted in Washington's marching out
with all his survivors and their baggage and retiring from the Ohio
valley. The war was begun; and it is worth noting that Washington's
command to "Fire!" on Jumonville's party was the word that began it.
But still the other colonists held off. The Six Nations began to
murmur: "The French are men," said they; "you are like women." In June,
1754, a convocation or congress of deputies from all colonies north of
the Potomac came together at Albany. Franklin was among them, with the
draught of a plan of union in his ample pocket, and dauntless and deep
thoughts in his broad mind. He was always far in advance of his time;
one of the most "modern" men of that century; but he had the final
excellence of wisdom which consists in never forcing his contemporaries
to bite off more than there was reasonable prospect of their being able
to chew. He lifted them gently up step after step of the ascent toward
the stars.
Philadelphia is a central spot (this was the gist of his proposal), so
let it be the seat of our federal government. Let us have a triennial
grand council to originate bills, allowing King George to appoint the
governor-general who may have a negative voice, and who shall choose
the military officers, as against the civil appointees of the council.
All war measures, external land purchases and organization, general
laws and taxes should be the province of the federal government, but
each colony should keep its private constitution, and money should
issue only by common consent. Once a year should the council meet, to
sit not more than six weeks, under a speaker of their own choosing.--In
the debate, the scheme was closely criticised, but the suave wielder of
the lightning gently disarmed all opponents, and won a substantial
victory--"not altogether to my mind"; but he insisted upon no counsel
of perfection. England, and some of the colonies themselves, were
somewhat uneasy after thinking it over; mutual sympathy is not created
by reason. England doubted on other grounds; a united country might be
more easy to govern than thirteen who each demanded special treatment;
but then, what if the federation decline to be governed at all?
Meanwhile, there was the federation; and Franklin, looking westward,
foresaw the Nineteenth Century.
[Illustration: Death of General Braddock]
Doubtless, however, outside pressure would be necessary to re-enforce
the somewhat lukewarm sentiment among the colonies in favor of union. A
review of their several conditions at this time would show general
prosperity and enjoyment of liberty, but great unlikenesses in manners
and customs and private prejudices. Virginia, most important of the
southern group, showed the apparent contradiction of a people with
republican ideas living after the style of aristocrats; breeding great
gentlemen like Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Patrick Henry, who
were to be leaders in the work of founding and defending the first
great democracy of the world. Maryland was a picturesque principality
under the rule of a dissolute young prince, who enjoyed a great private
revenue from his possessions, and yet interfered but little with the
individual freedom of his subjects. Pennsylvania was administering
itself on a basis of sheer civic equality, and was absorbing from
Franklin the principles of liberal thought and education. New York was
so largely tinged with Dutchmanship that it resented more than the
others the authority of alien England, and fought its royal governors
to the finish. New England was an aggregation of independent towns,
each a little democracy, full of religious and educational vigor. In
Delaware, John Woolman the tailor was denouncing slavery with all the
zeal and arguments of the Garrisons of a century later. These were
incongruous elements to be bound into a fagot; but there was a policy
being consolidated in England which would presently give them good
reason for standing together to secure rights which were more precious
than private pet traditions and peculiarities. Newcastle became head of
the English government; he appointed the absurd Duke of Cumberland,
captain-general of the English army, to the direction of American
military affairs; and he picked out an obstinate, ruffianly, stupid
martinet of a Perthshire Scotchman, sixty years old and of ruined
fortunes, to lead the English forces against the French in America.
Braddock went over armed with the new and despotic mutiny bill, and
with directions to divest all colonial army officers of their rank
while in his service. He was also to exact a revenue by royal
prerogative, and the governors were to collect a fund to be expended
for colonial military operations. This was Newcastle's notion of what
was suitable for the occasion. In the meantime Shirley, persistently
malevolent, advocated parliamentary taxation of the colonies and a
congress of royal governors; and to the arguments of Franklin against
the plan, suggested colonial representation in Parliament: which
Franklin disapproved unless all colonial disabilities be removed, and
they become in all political respects an integral portion of England.
During the discussion, the colonies themselves were resisting the royal
prerogative with embarrassing unanimity. Braddock, on landing and
finding no money ready, was exceeding wroth; but the helpless governors
told him that nothing short of an act of Parliament would suffice;
possibly not even that. Taxation was the one cry of every royal
office-holder in America. What sort of a tax should it be?--Well, a
stamp-tax seemed the easiest method: a stamp, like a mosquito, sucks
but little blood at a time, but mosquitoes in the aggregate draw a
great deal. But the stamp act was to be delayed eleven years more, and
then its authors were to receive an unpleasant surprise.
There was a strong profession of reluctance on both the French and
English side to come formally to blows; both sent large bodies of
troops to the Ohio valley, "but only for defense." Braddock was ready
to advance in April, if only he had "horses and carriages"; which by
Franklin's exertions were supplied. The bits of dialogue and comment in
which this grizzled nincompoop was an interlocutor, or of which he was
the theme, are as amusing as a page from a comedy of Shakespeare.
Braddock has been called brave; but the term is inappropriate; he could
fly into a rage when his brutal or tyrannical instincts were questioned
or thwarted, and become insensible, for a time, even to physical
danger. Ignorance, folly and self-conceit not seldom make a man seem
fearless who is a poltroon at heart. Braddock's death was a better one
than he deserved; he raged about the field like a dazed bull; fly he
could not; he was incapable of adopting any intelligent measures to
save his troops; on the contrary he kept reiterating conventional
orders in a manner that showed his wits were gone. The bullet that
dropped him did him good service; but his honor was so little sensitive
that he felt no gratitude at being thus saved the consequences of one
of the most disgraceful and willfully incurred defeats that ever befell
an English general. The English troops upon whom, according to
Braddock, "it was impossible that the savages should make any
impression," huddled together, and shot down their own officers in
their blundering volleys. In the narrow wood path they could not see
the enemy, who fired from behind trees at their leisure. Half of the
men, and sixty-three out of the eighty-six officers, were killed or
wounded. In that hell of explosions, smoke, yells and carnage,
Washington was clear-headed and alert, and passed to and fro amid the
rain of bullets as if his body were no more mortal than his soul. The
contingent of Virginia troops--the "raw American militia," as Braddock
had called them, "who have little courage or good will, from whom I
expect almost no military service, though I have employed the best
officers to drill them":--these men did almost the only fighting that
was done on the English side, but they were too few to avert the
disaster.
The expedition had set out from Turtle Creek on the Monongahela on the
ninth of July--twelve hundred men. The objective point was Fort
Duquesne, "which can hardly detain me above three or four days,"
remarked the dull curmudgeon. No scouts were thrown out: they walked
straight into the ambuscade which some two hundred French and six
hundred Indians had prepared for them. The slaughter lasted two hours;
there was no maneuvering. Thirty men of the three Virginia companies
were left alive; they stood their ground to the last, while the British
regulars "ran as sheep before hounds," leaving everything to the enemy.
Washington did whatever was possible to prevent the retreat from
becoming a blind panic. When the rout reached the camp, Dunbar, the
officer in charge there, destroyed everything, to the value of half a
million dollars, and ran with the rest. Reviewing the affair, Franklin
remarks with a demure arching of the eyebrow that it "gave us Americans
the first suspicion that our exalted ideas of the prowess of British
regular troops had not been well founded."
It was indeed an awakening for the colonists. For all their bold
resistance to oppression, they had never ceased to believe that an
English soldier was the supreme and final expression of trained and
disciplined force; and now, before their almost incredulous eyes, the
flower of the British army had been beaten, and the bloody remnant
stampeded into a shameful flight by a few hundred painted savages and
Frenchmen. They all had been watching Braddock's march; and they never
forgot the lesson of his defeat. From that time, the British regular
was to them only a "lobster-back," more likely, when it came to equal
conflict with themselves, to run away than to stand his ground.
Instead of throwing themselves into the arms of France, however, the
colonists loyally addressed themselves to helping King George out of
his scrape; and though they would not let him tax them, they hesitated
not to tax themselves.
Pennsylvania raised fifty thousand pounds, and Massachusetts sent near
eight thousand men to aid in driving the French from the northern
border. Acadia's time had come. Though the descendants of the Breton
peasants, who dated their settlement from 1604, had since the Peace of
Utrecht nominally belonged to England, yet their sentiments and mode of
life had been unaltered; Port Royal had been little changed by calling
it Annapolis, and the simple, old-fashioned Catholics loved their homes
with all the tenacity of six unbroken generations. Their feet were
familiar in the paths of a hundred and fifty quiet and industrious
years; their houses nestled in their lowly places like natural features
of the landscape; their fields and herds and the graves of their
forefathers sweetened and consecrated the land. They were a chaste,
industrious, homely, pious, but not an intellectual people; and to such
the instinct of home is far stronger than in more highly cultivated
races. They had prospered in their modest degree, and multiplied; so
that now they numbered sixteen thousand men, women and children. During
the past few years, however, they had been subjected to the
unrestrained brutality of English administration in its worst form;
they had no redress at law, their property could be taken from them
without payment or recourse; if they did not keep their tyrant's fires
burning, "the soldiers shall absolutely take their houses for fuel."
Estate-titles, records, all that could identify and guarantee their
ownership in the means and conditions of livelihood, were taken; even
their boats and their antiquated firearms were sequestrated. And orders
were actually given to the soldiers to punish any misbehavior summarily
upon the first Acadian who came to hand, whether or not he were guilty
of, or aware of, the offense, and with absolutely no concern for the
formality of arrest or trial. In all the annals of Spanish brutality,
there is nothing more disgraceful to humanity than the systematic and
enjoined treatment of these innocent Bretons by the English, even
before the consummating outrage which made the whole civilized world
stare in indignant amazement.
It is a matter for keen regret that men born on our soil should have
been even involuntarily associated with this episode. The design was
kept a secret from all until the last moment; but one could wish that
some American had then committed an act of insubordination, though at
the cost of his life, by way of indicating the detestation which all
civilized and humane minds must feel for such an act. The colonists
knew the value of liberty; they had made sacrifices for it; they had
felt the shadow of oppression; and they might see, in the treatment of
the Acadians, what would have been their fate had they yielded to the
despotic instincts of England. The best and the worst that can be said
of them is that they obeyed orders, and looked on while the iniquity
was being perpetrated.
The force of provincials and regulars landed without molestation, and
captured the feeble forts with the loss of but twenty killed. The
Acadians agreed to take the oath of fidelity, but stipulated not to be
forced to bear arms against their own countrymen. General Charles
Lawrence, the lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia, replied to their plea
that they be allowed to have their boats and guns, that it was "highly
arrogant, insidious and insulting"; and Halifax, another of the
companions in infamy, added that they wanted their boats for "carrying
provisions to the enemy"--there being no enemy nearer than Quebec. As
for the guns, "All Roman Catholics are restrained from having arms, and
are subject to penalties if arms are found in their houses."--"Not the
want of arms, but our consciences, would engage us not to revolt,"
pleaded the unhappy men.--"What excuse can you make," bellows Halifax,
"for treating this government with such indignity as to expound to them
the nature of fidelity?" The Acadians agreed to take the oath
unconditionally: "By British statute," they were thereupon informed,
"having once refused, you cannot after take the oath, but are popish
recusants." Chief-justice Belcher, a third of these British moguls,
declared they obstructed the progress of the settlement, and that all
of them should be deported from the province. Proclamation was then
made, ordering them to assemble at their respective posts; and in the
morning they obeyed, leaving their homes, to which, though they knew it
not, they were never to return. "Your lands and tenements, cattle of
all kinds, and livestock of all sorts, are forfeited to the crown,"
they were told, "and you yourselves are to be removed from this
province." They were kept prisoners, without food, till the ships
should be ready. Not only were they torn from their homes, but families
were separated, sons from their mothers, husbands from their wives,
daughters from their parents, and, as Longfellow has pictured to us,
lovers from one another. Those who tried to escape were hunted by the
soldiers like wild beasts, and "if they can find a pretext to kill
them, they will," said a British officer. They were scattered,
helpless, friendless and destitute, all up and down the Atlantic coast,
and their villages were laid waste. Lord Loudoun, British
commander-in-chief in America, on receiving a petition from some of
them written in French, was so enraged not only at their petitioning,
but that they should presume to do so in their own language, that he
had five of their leading men arrested, consigned to England, and sent
as common seamen on English men-of-war. No detail was wanting, from
first to last, to make the crime of the Acadian deportation perfect;
and only an Irishman, Edmund Burke, lifted his voice to say that the
deed was inhuman, and done "upon pretenses that, in the eye of an
honest man, are not worth a farthing." But Burke was not in Parliament
until eleven years after the Acadians were scattered.
The incident, from an external point of view, does not belong to the
history of the United States. Yet is it pertinent thereto, as showing
of what enormities the English of that age were capable. Their entire
conduct during this French war was dishonorable, and often atrocious.
Forgetting the facts of history, we often smile at the grumblings of
the Continental nations anent "Perfidious Albion" and "British gold."
But the acts committed by the English government during these years
fully justify every charge of corruption, treachery and political
profligacy that has ever been brought against them. It was a strange
age, in which a great and noble people were mysteriously hurried into
sins, follies and disgraces seemingly foreign to their character. It
was because the people had surrendered their government into alien and
shameless hands. They deserved their punishment; for it is nothing less
than a crime, having known liberty, either to deny it to others, or for
the sake of earthly advantage to consent to any compromise of it in
ourselves.
CHAPTER TWELFTH
THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM AND THE STAMP ACT