Among the best friends of our country abroad during the trials of the
Revolution was Thomas Pownall, called by one biographer “a learned
antiquary and politician,” and by another “an English statesman and
author.” Latterly he has so far dropped out of sight that there are
few who recognize in him either of these characters. He was born
1722, and died at Bath 1805. During this long period he held several
offices. As early as 1745 he became secretary to the Commissioners
for Trade and Plantations. In 1753 he crossed the ocean. In 1755, as
Commissioner for Massachusetts Bay, he had a share in the negotiations
with New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, in union with New England,
which resulted in the confederated expedition against Crown Point. He
was afterwards Governor of Massachusetts Bay, New Jersey, and South
Carolina, successively. Returning to England, he was appointed, in
1762, Comptroller-General of the army in Germany, with the military
rank of colonel. He sat in two successive Parliaments until 1780, when
he passed into private life. Hildreth gives a glimpse of his personal
character, when, admitting his frank manners and liberal politics,
he describes his habits as “rather freer than suited the New England
standard.”[518]
Pownall stands forth conspicuous for championship of our national
independence, and especially for foresight with regard to our national
future. In both these respects his writings are unique. Other
Englishmen were in favor of independence, and saw our future also; but
I doubt if any one can be named who was his equal in strenuous action,
or in minuteness of foresight. While the war was still proceeding, as
early as 1780, he openly announced, not only that independence was
inevitable, but that the new nation, “founded in Nature and built up in
truth,” would continually expand; that its population would increase
and multiply; that a civilizing activity beyond what Europe could ever
know would animate it; and that its commercial and naval power would
be found in every quarter of the globe.[519] All this he set forth at
length with argument and illustration, and he called his prophetic
words “the _stating of the simple fact_, so little understood in the
Old World.” Treated at first as “unintelligible speculation” and as
“unfashionable,” the truth he announced was “neglected where it was not
rejected, but in general rejected as inadmissible,” and the author,
according to his own language, “was called by the wise men of the
British Cabinet _a Wild Man_, unfit to be employed.”[520] But these
writings are a better title now than any office. In manner they are
diffuse and pedantic; but they hardly deserve the cold judgment of John
Adams, who in his old age said of them that “a reader who has patience
to search for good sense in an uncouth and disgusting style will find
in those writings proofs of a thinking mind.”[521]
He seems to have written a good deal. But the works which will be
remembered the longest are not even mentioned by several of his
biographers. Rose, in his Biographical Dictionary, records works by
him, entitled “Antiquities of the Provincia Romana of Gaul”; “Roman
Antiquities dug up at Bath”; “Observations on the Currents in the
Atlantic Ocean”; “Intellectual Physics”; and contributions to the
“Archæologia”: nothing more. To this list Gorton, in his Biographical
Dictionary, adds briefly, “besides many political tracts,” but without
particular reference to the works on America. This is another instance
where the stone rejected by the builders becomes the head of the corner.
At an early date Pownall comprehended the position of our country,
geographically. He saw the wonderful means of internal communication
supplied by its inland waters, and also the opportunities of external
commerce afforded by the Atlantic Ocean. On the former he dwells, in a
Memorial drawn up in 1756 for the Duke of Cumberland.[522] Nobody in
our own day, after the experience of more than a century, has portrayed
more vividly the two vast aqueous masses,--one composed of the Great
Lakes and their dependencies, and the other of the Mississippi and
its tributaries. The Great Lakes are described as “a wilderness of
waters, spreading over the country by an infinite number and variety of
branchings, bays, straits, &c.”[523] The Mississippi, with its eastern
branch, called the Ohio, is described as having, “as far as we know,
but two falls,--one at a place called by the French St. Antoine, high
up on the west or main branch”; and all its waters “run to the ocean
with a still, easy, and gentle current.”[524] The picture is completed
by exhibiting the two masses in combination:--
“The waters of each respective mass--not only the lesser
streams, but the main general body of each going through
this continent in every course and direction--have, by their
approach to each other, by their interlacing with each other,
by their communication to every quarter and in every direction,
an alliance and unity, and form one mass, a one whole.”[525]