Chapter I: Common Undertakings (1)

There had been some noteworthy passages in the reports which Colonel Francis Nicholson sent to the government at home when he was first governor of Virginia (1690); for he studied his duties in those days with wide-open eyes, and had sometimes written of what he saw with a very statesmanlike breadth and insight. It was very noteworthy, among other things, that he had urged a defensive confederation of the colonies against the French and Indians, under the leadership of Virginia, the most loyal of the colonies. He had made it his business to find out what means of defence and what effective military force there were in the other colonies, particularly in those at the north, conferring with their authorities with regard to these matters in person when he could not get the information he wished by deputy. The King and his ministers in England saw very clearly, when they read his careful despatches, that they could not wisely act upon such suggestions yet; but they knew that what Colonel Nicholson thus openly and definitely advised was what must occur to the mind of every thoughtful and observant man who was given a post of authority and guidance in the colonies, whether he thought it wise to advise action in the matter or not. It was evident, indeed, even to some who were not deemed thoughtful at all. Even the heedless, negligent Lord Culpeper, little as he really cared for the government he had been set to conduct, had suggested eight years ago that all questions of war and peace in the colonies should be submitted for final decision to the governor and council of Virginia, where it might be expected that the King’s interests would be loyally looked after and safeguarded.

No doubt the colonies would have objected to and resisted such an arrangement with a very hot resentment, and no one in authority in London dreamed for a moment of taking either Lord Culpeper’s or Colonel Nicholson’s advice in the matter; but it was none the less obvious that the King and his officers must contrive some way, if they could, by which they might use the colonies as a single power against the French in America, if England was indeed to make and keep an empire there. If King James, who leaned upon France as an ally and prayed for the dominion of the Church of Rome, had seen this, it was not likely that William of Orange, who was the arch-enemy of France and the champion of Protestantism against Rome, would overlook it. He was no sooner on the throne than England was plunged into a long eight years’ war with the French. And so it happened that the colonies seemed to reap little advantage from the “glorious revolution” which had put out a tyrant and brought in a constitutional King. William of Orange, it presently appeared, meant to unite groups of colonies under the authority of a single royal governor, particularly at the north, where the French power lay, as James before him had done; giving to the governors of the principal colonies the right to command the military forces of the colonies about them even if he gave them no other large gift of power. He did more than James had done. Being a statesman and knowing the value of systematic administration, he did systematically what James had done loosely and without consistent plan. The Board of Trade and Plantations, which he organized to oversee and direct the government of the colonies, did more to keep their affairs under the eye and hand of the King than any group of James’s ministers had been able to do. The great Dutch King was determined to wield England and her possessions as a single imperial power in the game of politics he was playing in Europe.

The French power, which he chiefly feared, had really grown very menacing in America; was growing more so every year; and must very soon indeed be faced and overcome, if the English were not to be shut in to a narrow seaboard, or ousted altogether. It was not a question of numbers. It was a question of territorial aggrandizement, rather, and strategic advantage. Probably there were not more than twelve thousand Frenchmen, all told, in America when William became King (1689); whereas his own subjects swarmed there full two hundred thousand strong, and were multiplying by the tens of thousands from decade to decade. But the French were building military posts at every strategic point as they went, while the English were building nothing but rural homes and open villages. With the French it did not seem a matter of settlement; it seemed a matter of conquest, rather, and of military occupation. They were guarding trade routes and making sure of points of advantage. The English way was the more wholesome and the more vital. A hardy, self-dependent, crowding people like the English in Massachusetts and Virginia, and the Dutch in New York, took root wherever they went, spread into real communities, and were not likely to be got rid of when once their number had run into the thousands. Their independence, too, and their capable way of managing their own affairs without asking or wanting or getting any assistance from government, made them as hard to handle as if they had been themselves an established continental power. But the French had an advantage, nevertheless, which was not to be despised. They moved as they were ordered to move by an active and watchful government which was in the thick of critical happenings where policies were made, and which meant to cramp the English, if it could not actually get rid of them. They extended and organized the military power of France as they went; and they were steadily girdling the English about with a chain of posts and settlements which bade fair to keep all the northern and western regions of the great continent for the King of France, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence round about, two thousand miles, to the outlets of the Mississippi at the Gulf.

Their movement along the great rivers and the lakes had been very slow at first; but it had quickened from generation to generation, and was now rapid enough to fix the attention of any man who could hear news and had his eyes abroad upon what was happening about him. Jacques Cartier had explored the noble river St. Lawrence for his royal master of France a long century and a half ago, in the far year 1535, fifty years before the English so much as attempted a settlement. But it was not until 1608, the year after Jamestown was begun, that Samuel de Champlain established the first permanent French settlement, at Quebec, and there were still but two hundred lonely settlers there when nearly thirty years more had gone by (1636). It was the quick growth and systematic explorations of the latter part of the century that made the English uneasy. The twelve thousand Frenchmen who were busy at the work of occupation when William of Orange became King had not confined themselves to the settlements long ago made in the Bay of Fundy and at Montreal, Quebec, and Tadousac, where the great river of the north broadened to the sea. They had carried their boats across from the upper waters of the Ottawa to the open reaches of Lake Huron; had penetrated thence to Lake Michigan, and even to the farthest shores of Lake Superior, establishing forts and trading posts as they advanced. They had crossed from Green Bay in Lake Michigan to the waters of the Wisconsin River, and had passed by that easy way into the Mississippi itself. That stout-hearted pioneer Père Marquette had descended the Father of Waters past the Ohio to the outlet of the Arkansas (1673); and Robert La Salle had followed him and gone all the long way to the spreading mouths of the vast river and the gates of the Gulf (1682), not by way of the Wisconsin, but by crossing from the southern end of Lake Michigan to the stream of the Illinois, and passing by that way to the Mississippi.

And so the lakes and the western rivers and the Mississippi itself saw the French; and French posts sprang up upon their shores to mark the sovereignty of the King of France. Frenchmen easily enough learned the ways of the wilderness and became the familiars of the Indians in their camps and wigwams; and they showed themselves of every kind,—some rough and lawless rovers, only too glad to throw off the restraints of the orderly life to which they had been bred and live as they pleased in the deep, secluded forests, trading without license, seeking adventure, finding a way for the civilization which was to follow them, but themselves anxious to escape it; others regular traders, who kept their hold upon the settlements behind them and submitted when they were obliged to official exactions at Montreal; some intrepid priests, who preached salvation and the dominion of France among the dusky tribes, and lived or died with a like fortitude and devotion, never willingly quitting their sacred task or letting go their hold upon the hearts of the savage men they had come to enlighten and subdue; some hardy captains with little companies of drilled men-at-arms from the fields of France:—at the front indomitable explorers, far in the rear timid farmers clearing spaces in the silent woodland for their scanty crops, and little towns slowly growing within their walls where the river broadened to the sea.

This stealthy power which crept so steadily southward and westward at the back of the English settlements upon the coast was held at arm’s-length throughout that quiet age of beginnings, not by the English, but by a power within the forests, the power of the great confederated Iroquois tribes, who made good their mastery between the Hudson and the lakes: the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks. They were stronger, fiercer, more constant and indomitable, more capable every way, than the tribes amidst whom the French moved; and Champlain had unwittingly made them the enemies of the French forever. Long, long ago, in the year 1609, which white men had forgotten, he had done what the Iroquois never forgot or forgave. He had come with their sworn foes, the Algonquins, to the shores of that lake by the sources of the Hudson which the palefaces ever afterwards called by his name, and had there used the dread fire-arms of the white men, of which they had never heard before, to work the utter ruin of the Mohawks in battle. They were always and everywhere ready after that fatal day to be any man’s ally, whether Dutch or English, against the hated French; and the French found it necessary to keep at the back of the broad forests which stretched from the eastern Lakes to the Hudson and the Delaware, the wide empire of these dusky foes, astute, implacable. They skirted the domains of the Iroquois when they were prudent, and passed inland by the lakes and the valley of the Mississippi.

But, though they kept their distance, they advanced their power. The colonists in New England had been uneasy because of their unwelcome neighborhood from the first. Once and again there had been actual collisions and a petty warfare. But until William of Orange made England a party to the great war of the Protestant powers against Louis XIV. few men had seen what the struggle between French and English held in store for America. The English colonies had grown back not a little way from the sea, steadily pushed farther and farther into the thick-set forests which lay upon the broad valleys and rising slopes of the interior by mere increase of people and drift of enterprise. Before the seventeenth century was out adventurous English traders had crossed the Alleghenies, had launched their canoes upon the waters of the Ohio, and were fixing their huts here and there within the vast wilderness as men do who mean to stay. Colonel Dongan, the Duke’s governor in New York (1683), like many another officer whose duties made him alert to watch the humors and keep the friendship of the Iroquois, the masters of the northern border, had been quick to see how “inconvenient to the English” it was to have French settlements “running all along from our lakes by the back of Virginia and Carolina to the Bay of Mexico.” There was keen rivalry in trade, and had been these many years, between the men of the English and Dutch colonies and the men of the French for the profitable trade in furs which had its heart at the north; and it was already possible for those who knew the forest commerce to reason right shrewdly of the future, knowing, as they did, that the English gave better goods and dealt more fairly for the furs than the French, and that many of the very Frenchmen who ranged the forests in search of gain themselves preferred to send what they had to Albany for sale. But, except for a few lonely villages in far-away Maine, there was nowhere any close contact between French and English in America. Few, except traders and thoughtful governors and border villagers, who feared the tribes whom the French incited to attack and massacre, knew what France did or was planning.

King William’s War (1689-1697), with its eight years of conscious peril, set new thoughts astir. It made America part of the stage upon which the great European conflict between French and English was to be fought out; and immediately a sort of continental air began to blow through colonial affairs. Colonial interests began to seem less local, more like interests held in common, and the colonies began to think of themselves as part of an empire. They had no great part in the war, it is true. Hale Sir William Phips, that frank seaman adventurer, led an expedition against Acadia in 1690, took Port Royal, and stripped the province of all that could be brought away; but that had hardly had the dignity of formal war. He had chiefly relished the private gain got out of it as a pleasant reminder of that day of fortune when he had found the Spanish treasure-ship sunk upon a reef in far Hispaniola. His second expedition, made the same year against Quebec, no doubt smacked more of the regular business, for he undertook it as an accredited officer of the crown; but when it failed it is likely he thought more of the private moneys subscribed and lost upon it than of the defeat of the royal arms. There was here the irritation, rather than the zest, of great matters, and the colonial leaders were not becoming European statesmen of a sudden. Their local affairs were still of more concern to them than the policies of European courts. Nevertheless the war made a beginning of common undertakings. The colonies were a little drawn together, a little put in mind of matters larger than their own.

New York felt herself no less concerned than Massachusetts and Maine in the contest with the French, with its inevitable accompaniment of trouble with the Indians; and Jacob Leisler, plebeian and self-constituted governor though he was, had made bold to take the initiative in forming plans for the war. Count Louis de Frontenac had been made governor of New France the very year William established himself as king in England (1689), and had come instructed, as every Englishman in America presently heard rumor say, to attack the English settlements at their very heart,—at New York itself. It was this rumor that had made Leisler hasten to seize the government in King William’s name, seeing King James’s governor hesitate, and hearing it cried in the streets that the French were in the very Bay. He had thought it not impossible that James’s officers might prove traitors and friends of King Louis in that last moment of their power. And then, when the government was in his hands, this people’s governor called a conference of the colonies to determine what should be done for the common defence. Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut responded, and sent agents to the conference (1690), the first of its kind since America was settled. It was agreed to attempt the conquest of New France. Sir William Phips should lead an expedition by sea against Quebec; and another force should go by land out of Connecticut and New York to attack Montreal, the only other stronghold, taking their Iroquois allies with them. But the land expedition was every way unfortunate, and got no farther than Lake Champlain. Frontenac was able to devote all his strength to the defence of Quebec; and Sir William Phips came back whipped and empty-handed. The first effort at a common undertaking had utterly miscarried.

But that was not the end of the war. Its fires burned hot in the forests. Frontenac prosecuted the ugly business to the end as he had begun it. He had begun, not by sending a fleet to New York, for he had none to send, but by sending his Indian allies to a sudden attack and savage massacre at Schenectady, where sixty persons, men and women, old and young, saw swift and fearful death (1689); and year by year the same hideous acts of barbarous war were repeated,—not always upon the far-away border, but sometimes at the very heart of the teeming colony,—once (1697) at Haverhill, not thirty-five miles out of Boston itself. Such a war was not likely to be forgot in the northern colonies, at any rate, and in New York. Its memories were bitten into the hearts of the colonists there as with the searings of a hot iron; and they knew that the French must be overcome before there could be any lasting peace, or room enough made for English growth in the forests.

They would rather have turned their thoughts to other things. There were home matters of deep moment which they were uneasy to settle. But these larger matters, of England’s place and power in the world, dominated them whether they would or no. King William’s War was but the forerunner of many more, of the same meaning and portent. Wars vexed and disciplined them for half a century, and their separate interests had often to stand neglected for years together in order that their common interests and the interests of English empire in America might be guarded.

And yet those who were thoughtful did not lose sight of the great, though subtle, gain which came with the vexing losses of war, to offset them. They had not failed to notice and to take to heart what had happened in England when William and Mary were brought to the throne. They were none the less Englishmen for being out of England, and what Parliament did for English liberty deeply concerned them. Parliament, as all the world knew, had done a great deal during those critical days in which it had consummated the “glorious revolution” by which the Stuarts were once for all put from the seat of sovereignty. It had reasserted the ancient rights named in Magna Charta; it had done away with the King’s arrogated right to tax; it had destroyed his alleged right to set laws aside, or alter them in any way; it had reduced him from being master and had made him a constitutional king, subject to his people’s will, spoken through their legal representatives in Parliament. The new King, too, had shown himself willing to extend these principles to America. In the charters which he granted or renewed, and in the instructions which he gave to the governors whom he commissioned, he did not begrudge an explicit acknowledgment of the right of the colonies to control their own taxation and the expenditures of their own colonial establishments.

War embarrassed trade. It made hostile territory of the French West Indies, whence New England skippers fetched molasses for the makers of rum at home; and that was no small matter, for the shrewd New England traders were already beginning to learn how much rum would pay for, whether among the Indians of the forest country, among the savages of the African slave coast, or among their own neighbors at home, where all deemed strong drink a capital solace and defence against the asperities of a hard life. But it needed only a little circumspection, it turned out, to keep even that trade, notwithstanding the thing was a trifle difficult and hazardous. There was little cause for men who kept their wits about them to fear the law on the long, unfrequented coasts of the New World; and there was trade with the French without scruple whether war held or ceased. Buccaneers and pirates abounded in the southern seas, and legitimate traders knew as well as they did how confiscation and capture were to be avoided.

The main lines of trade ran, after all, straight to the mother country, and were protected when there was need by English fleets. Both the laws of Parliament and their own interest bound the trade of the colonies to England. The Navigation Act of 1660, in force now these forty years, forbade all trade with the colonies except in English bottoms; forbade also the shipment of their tobacco and wool anywhither but to England itself; and an act of 1663 forbade the importation of anything at all except out of England, which, it was then once for all determined, must be the _entrepôt_ and place of staple for all foreign trade. It was determined that, if there were to be middlemen’s profits, the middlemen should be English, and that the carrying trade of England and her colonies should be English, not Dutch. It was the Dutch against whom the acts were aimed. Dutch ships cost less in the building than ships built in England; the Dutch merchantmen could afford to charge lower rates of freight than English skippers; and the statesmen of King Charles, deeming Holland their chief competitor upon the seas and in the markets of the world, meant to cut the rivalry short by statute, so far as the English realm was concerned.

Fortunately the interests of the colonists themselves wore easily enough the harness of the acts. For a while it went very hard in Virginia, it is true, to pay English freight rates on every shipment of tobacco, the colony’s chief staple, and to sell only through English middlemen, to the exclusion of the accommodating Dutch and all competition. Trade touched nothing greater than the tobacco crop. Virginia supplied in that alone a full half of all the exports of the colonies. Her planters sharply resented “that severe act of Parliament which excludes us from having any commerce with any nation in Europe but our own”; for it seemed to put upon them a special burden. “We cannot add to our plantation any commodity that grows out of it, as olive trees, cotton, or vines,” complained Sir William Berkeley very bluntly to the government in 1671. “Besides this, we cannot procure any skilful men for one now hopeful commodity, silk: for it is not lawful for us to carry a pipe stave or a barrel of corn to any place in Europe out of the King’s dominions. If this were for his Majesty’s service or the good of his subjects, we should not repine, whatever our sufferings are for it; but on my soul, it is the contrary for both.” But the thing was eased for them at last when they began to see how their interest really lay. They had almost a monopoly of the English market, for Spanish tobacco was kept out by high duties, the planting of tobacco in England, begun on no mean scale in the west midland counties in the days of the Protectorate, was prohibited by law, and a rebate of duties on all tobacco re-exported to the continent quickened the trade with the northern countries of Europe, the chief market in any case for the Virginian leaf. Grumbling and evasion disappeared in good time, and Virginia accommodated herself with reasonable grace to what was, after all, no ruinous or unprofitable arrangement.

New England, where traders most abounded, found little in the acts that she need complain of or seek to escape from. No New England commodity had its route and market prescribed as Virginian tobacco had; New England ships were “English” bottoms no less than ships built in England itself; they could be built as cheaply as the Dutch, and the long coast of the continent was clear for their skippers. If laws grew inconvenient, there were unwatched harbors enough in which to lade and unlade without clearance papers. English capital quickened trade as well as supplied shipping for the ocean carriage, and the King’s navy made coast and sea safe. If it was irritating to be tied to the leading-strings of statutes, it was at least an agreeable thing that they should usually pull in the direction merchants would in any case have taken. Though all products of foreign countries had to be brought through the English markets and the hands of English middlemen, the duties charged upon them upon their entrance into England were remitted upon their reshipment to America, and they were often to be had more cheaply in the colonies than in London.

In 1699, when the war was over, Parliament laid a new restriction upon the colonies, forbidding them to manufacture their own wool for export, even for export from colony to colony. Good housewives were not to be prevented from weaving their own wool into cloth for the use of their own households; village weavers were not to be forbidden their neighborhood trade; but the woollen weavers of England supplied more than half of all the exports to the colonies, and had no mind to let woollen manufacture spring up in America if Parliament could be induced to prohibit it. It made no great practical difference to the colonies, though it bred a bitter thought here and there. Manufactures were not likely to spring up in America. “No man who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labor to subsist his family in plenty,” said Mr. Franklin long afterwards, “is poor enough to be a manufacturer and work for a master. Hence, while there is land enough in America for our people, there can be no manufactures to any amount or value.” But the woollen manufacturers in England meant to take no chances in the matter; and the colonists did no more than grumble upon occasion at the restraints of a law which they had no serious thought of breaking.

It was not breaches of the Acts of Navigation and the acts concerning woollen manufacture that the ministers found it necessary to turn their heed to when the war ended, but, rather, the open piracies of the southern seas. By the treaty of Ryswick, which brought peace (1697), France, England, Holland, and Spain, the high contracting parties, solemnly bound themselves to make common cause against buccaneering. Spain and England had been mutually bound since 1670 to abolish it. Buccaneering abounded most on the coasts of America. The lawless business had begun long ago. Spain had provoked it. She had taken possession of all Central and South America and of the islands of the West Indies, and had bidden all other nations stand off and touch nothing, while her fleets every year for generations together came home heavy with treasure. She had denied them the right of trade; she had forbidden their seamen so much as to get stores for their own use anywhere within the waters of Spanish America. She treated every ship as an intruder which she found in the southern seas, and the penalties she inflicted for intrusion upon her guarded coasts went the length of instant drowning or hangings at the yard-arm. It was a day when there was no law at sea. Every prudent man supplied his ship with arms, and was his own escort; and since Spain was the common bully, she became the common enemy. English and French and Dutch seamen were not likely very long to suffer themselves to be refused what they needed at her ports; and after getting what they needed, they went on to take whatever they wanted. They were intruders, anyway, for whatever purpose they came, and they might as well, as a witty Frenchman among them said, “repay themselves beforehand” for the losses they would suffer should Spanish cruisers find and take them.

The spirit of adventure and of gain grew on them mightily. At first they contented themselves with an illicit trade at the unguarded ports of quiet, half-deserted islands like Hispaniola, where they could get hides and tallow, smoked beef and salted pork, in exchange for goods smuggled in from Europe. But they did not long stop at that. The exciting risks and notable profits of the business made it grow like a story of adventure. The ranks of the lawless traders filled more and more with every sort of reckless adventurer and every sort of unquiet spirit who found the ordinary world stale and longed for a change of luck, as well as with hosts of common thieves and natural outlaws. Such men, finding themselves inevitably consorting, felt their comradeship, helped one another when they could, and made a common cause of robbing Spain, calling themselves “Brethren of the Coast.” They took possession, as their numbers increased, of the little twin islands of St. Christopher and Nevis for rendezvous and headquarters, and fortified distant Tortuga for a stronghold; and their power grew apace through all the seventeenth century, until no Spanish ship was safe on the seas though she carried the flag of an admiral, and great towns had either to buy them off or submit to be sacked at their pleasure. They mustered formidable fleets and counted their desperate seamen by the thousands.

They were most numerous, most powerful, most to be feared at the very time the English colony was begun at Charleston (1670). All the English sea-coast at the south, indeed, was theirs in a sense. They were regulars, not outlaws, when France or Holland or England was at war with Spain, for the great governments did not scruple to give them letters of marque when they needed their assistance at sea. English buccaneers had helped Sir William Penn take Jamaica for Cromwell in 1655. And when there was no war, the silent, unwatched harbors of the long American sea-coast were their favorite places of refuge and repair. New Providence, England’s best anchorage and most convenient port of rendezvous in the Bahamas, became their chief place of welcome and recruiting. The coming of settlers did not disconcert them. It pleased them, rather. The settlers did not molest them,—had secret reasons, as they knew, to be glad to see them. There were the English navigation laws, as well as the Spanish, to be evaded, and the goods they brought to the closed markets were very cheap and very welcome,—and no questions were asked. They were abundantly welcome, too, to the goods they bought. For thirty years their broad pieces of gold and their Spanish silver were almost the only currency the Carolinas could get hold of. Governors winked at their coming and going,—even allowed them to sell their Spanish prizes in English ports. Charleston, too, and the open bays of Albemarle Sound were not more open to them than New York and Philadelphia and Providence, and even now and again the ports of Massachusetts. They got no small part of their recruits from among the lawless and shiftless men who came out of England or Virginia to the Carolinas for a new venture in a new country where law was young.

Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont, came out in 1698 to be Governor General of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, specially instructed to stamp out the piracy of the coasts; but he found it no light task. His predecessor in the government of New York, Benjamin Fletcher, had loved the Brethren of the Coast very dearly: they had made it to his interest to like them; and the merchants of New York, as of the other seaport towns, were noticeably slow to see the iniquity of the proscribed business. Lord Bellomont bitterly complained that the authorities of Rhode Island openly gave notorious pirates countenance and assistance. Mr. Edward Randolph, whose business it was to look after the King’s revenues, declared in his anger that North Carolina was peopled by nobody but smugglers, runaway servants, and pirates. South Carolina, fortunately, had seen the folly of harboring the outlaws by the time Lord Bellomont set about his suppression in the north. Not only had her population by that time been recruited and steadied by the coming in of increasing numbers of law-abiding and thrifty colonists to whom piracy was abhorrent, but she had begun also to produce great crops of rice for whose exportation she could hardly get ships enough, and had found that her whilom friends the freebooters did not scruple to intercept her cargoes on their way to the profitable markets of Holland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal. She presently began, therefore, to use a great pair of gallows, set up very conspicuously on “Execution Dock” at Charleston, for the diligent hanging of pirates. But the coast to the northward still showed them hospitality, and Lord Bellomont made little headway at New York,—except that he brought the notorious Captain Kidd to justice. William Kidd, a Scotsman, had made New York his home, and had won there the reputation of an honest and capable man and an excellent ship captain; but when he was given an armed vessel strongly manned, and the King’s commission to destroy the pirates of the coast, the temptation of power was too great for him. He incontinently turned pirate himself, and it fell to Lord Bellomont to send him to England to be hanged.

The interval of peace during which English governors in America could give their thoughts to the suppression of piracy proved all too short. “Queen Anne’s War” followed close upon the heels of King William’s, and the French and Indians became once again more threatening than the buccaneers. Nevertheless some important affairs of peace were settled before the storm of war broke again. For one thing, Mr. Penn was able once more to put in order the government of Pennsylvania. For two years (1692-1694) he had been deprived of his province, because, as every one knew, he had been on very cordial terms of friendship with James Stuart, the discredited King, and it was charged that he had taken part in intrigues against the new sovereign. But it was easy for him to prove, when the matter was dispassionately looked into, that he had done nothing dishonorable or disloyal, and his province was restored to him. In 1699 he found time to return to America and reform in person the administration of the colony. Bitter jealousies and sharp factional differences had sprung up there while affairs were in confusion after the coming in of William and Mary, and the two years Mr. Penn spent in their correction (1699-1701) were none too long for the work he had to do. He did it, however, in his characteristic healing fashion, by granting privileges, more liberal and democratic than ever, in a new charter. One chief difficulty lay in the fact that the lower counties by the Delaware chafed because of their enforced union with the newer counties of Pennsylvania; and Mr. Penn consented to an arrangement by which they should within three years, if they still wished it, have a separate assembly of their own, and the right to act for themselves in all matters of local government. Self-government, indeed, was almost always his provident cure for discontent. He left both Pennsylvania and the Delaware counties free to choose their own courts,—and Philadelphia free to select her own officers as an independently incorporated city. Had he been able to give his colony governors as wise and temperate as himself, new troubles might have been avoided as successfully as old troubles had been healed.

While Mr. Penn lingered in America the rights of the proprietors of West Jersey, his own first province, passed finally to the crown. In 1702 all proprietary rights, alike in East and in West Jersey, were formally surrendered to the crown, and New Jersey, once more a single, undivided province, became directly subject to the King’s government. For a generation, indeed, as it turned out, she was to have no separate governor of her own. A separate commission issued from the crown to the governor of New York to be also governor of New Jersey, upon each appointment in the greater province. But New Jersey kept her own government, nevertheless, and her own way of life. She suffered no merger into the larger province, her neighbor, whose governor happened to preside over her affairs.

Many things changed and many things gave promise of change in the colonies as Mr. Penn looked on. In 1700 Virginia had her population enriched by the coming of seven hundred French Huguenots, under the leadership of the Marquis de la Muce,—some of them Waldenses who had moved, in exile, through Switzerland, Alsace, the Low Countries, and England ere they found their final home of settlement in Virginia,—all of them refugees because of the terror that had been in France for all Protestants since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). That same year, 1700, Williamsburg, the new village capital of the “Old Dominion,” grew very gay with company come in from all the river counties, from neighboring colonies, too, and even from far-off New England, to see the first class graduated from the infant college of William and Mary. The next year (1701) Connecticut, teeming more and more with a thrifty people with its own independent interests and resources, and finding Harvard College at Cambridge too far away for the convenience of those of her own youth who wished such training as ministers and professional men in general needed, set up a college of her own,—the college which half a generation later she called Yale, because of Mr. Elihu Yale’s gift of eight hundred pounds in books and money.

Then King William died (1702,—Mary, his queen and consort, being dead these eight years), and Anne became queen. It was a year of climax in the public affairs of Europe. In 1701, Louis XIV. had put his grandson, Philip of Anjou, on the throne of Spain, in direct violation of his treaty obligations to England, and to the manifest upsetting of the balance of power in Europe, openly rejoicing that there were no longer any Pyrenees, but only a single, undivided Bourbon power from Flanders to the Straits of Gibraltar; and had defied England, despite his promises made at Ryswick, by declaring James’s son the rightful heir to the English throne. Instantly England, Holland, and Austria drew together in grand alliance against the French aggression, and for eleven years Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands rang with the War of the Spanish Succession. The storm had already broken when Anne became queen.

England signalized the war by giving a great general to the world. It was the day of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, of whose genius soldiers gossiped to their neighbors and their children for half a century after the great struggle was over. The English took Gibraltar (1704). Prince Eugene of Savoy helped great Marlborough to the famous victory of Blenheim (1705),—and Virginians were not likely to forget that it was Colonel Parke, of Virginia, who took the news of that field to the Queen. Marlborough won at Ramillies and Eugene at Turin (1706). The two great captains triumphed together at Oudenarde (1708) and at Malplaquet (1709). The crowns of France and Spain were separated, and France was lightened of her overwhelming weight in the balance of power.

But for the colonies in America it was only “Queen Anne’s War,” full of anxiety, suffering, and disappointment,—massacres on the border, expeditions to the north blundered and mismanaged, money and lives spent with little to show for the sacrifice. The ministers at home had made no preparation in America for the renewal of hostilities. There had been warnings enough, and appeals of deep urgency, sent out of the colonies. Every observant man of affairs there saw what must come. But warnings and appeals had not been heeded. Lord Bellomont, that self-respecting gentleman and watchful governor, had told the ministers at home very plainly that there ought to be a line of frontier posts at the north, with soldiers for colonists, and that simply to pursue the Indians once and again to the depths of the forests was as useless “as to pursue birds that are on the wing.” An English prisoner in the hands of the French had sent word what he heard they meant to do for the extension of their boundaries and their power. The deputy governor of Pennsylvania had proposed a colonial militia to be kept at the frontier. Certain private gentlemen of the northern settlements had begged for a common governor “of worth and honor,” and for some system of common defence. Mr. Penn, looking on near at hand, had advised that the colonists be drawn together in intercourse and interest by a common coinage, a common rule of citizenship, a common system of justice, and by duties on foreign timber which would in some degree offset the burdens of the Navigation Acts,—as well as by common organization and action against the French and against the pirates of the coast. But nothing had been done.

Even the little that had been gained in King William’s War had now to be gained all over again. Sir William Phips had taken Port Royal very handily at the outset of that war (1690), and Acadia with it, and there had been no difficulty in holding the conquered province until the war ended; but the treaty of Ryswick had handed back to the French everything the English had taken, the statesmen of England hardly heeding America at all in the terms they agreed to,—and so a beginning was once more to be made.

The war began, as every one knew it must, with forays on the border: the Indians were the first afoot, and were more to be feared than the French. The first movement of the English was made at the south, where, before the first year (1702) of the war was out, the Carolinians struck at the power of Spain in Florida. They sent a little force against St. Augustine, and easily swept the town itself, but stood daunted before the walls of the castle, lacking cannon to reduce it, and came hastily away at sight of two Spanish ships standing into the harbor, leaving their very stores and ammunition behind them in their panic. They had saddled the colony with a debt of six thousand pounds and gained nothing. But they at least kept their own borders safe against the Indians and their own little capital at Charleston safe against reprisals by the Spaniards. The Apalachees, who served the Spaniards on the border, they swept from their forest country in 1703, and made their border quiet by fire and sword, driving hundreds of the tribesmen they did not kill to new seats beyond the Savannah. Three years went by before they were in their turn attacked by a force out of Florida. Upon a day in August, 1706, while the little capital lay stricken with yellow fever, a fleet of five French vessels appeared off the bar at their harbor mouth, bringing Spanish troops from Havana and St. Augustine. There was a quick rally to meet them. Colonial militia went to face their landing parties; gallant Colonel Rhett manned a little flotilla to check them on the water; and they were driven off, leaving two hundred and thirty prisoners and a captured ship behind them. The southern coast could take care of itself.

Nothing had been done meanwhile in the north. The first year of the war (1702) had seen Boston robbed of three hundred of her inhabitants by the scourge of small-pox, and New York stricken with a fatal fever brought out of the West Indies from which no man could rally. That dismal year lingered for many a day in the memory of the men of the middle colonies as “the time of the great sickness.” The northernmost border had been harried from Wells to Casco by the French Indians (1703); Deerfield, far away in the wilderness by the Connecticut, had been fearfully dealt with at dead of night, in the mid-winter of 1704, by a combined force of French and Indians; in 1705 the French in Acadia had brought temporary ruin upon the English trading posts in Newfoundland; and a French privateer had insolently come in open day into the Bay at New York, as if to show the English there how defenceless their great harbor was, with all the coast about it (1705). And yet there had been no counterstroke by the English,—except that Colonel Church, of Massachusetts, had spent the summer of 1704 in destroying as he could the smaller and less defended French and Indian villages upon the coasts which lay about the Penobscot and the Bay of Fundy. In 1707 a serious attempt was made to take Port Royal. Colonel March took a thousand men against the place, in twenty-three transports, convoyed by a man-of-war, and regularly laid siege to it; but lacked knowledge of the business he had undertaken and failed utterly.

Another three years went by before anything was accomplished; and the French filled them in, as before, with raids and massacres. Again Haverhill was surprised, sacked, and burned (1708). The English were driven from the Bahama islands. An expedition elaborately prepared in England to be sent against the French in America was countermanded (1709), because a sudden need arose to use it at home. Everything attempted seemed to miscarry as of course. And then at last fortune turned a trifle kind. Colonel Francis Nicholson, governor of Virginia till 1705, had gone to England when he saw things stand hopelessly still in America, and, being a man steadfast and hard to put by, was at last able, in 1710, to obtain and bring assistance in person from over sea. He had recommended, while yet he was governor of Virginia, it was recalled, that the colonies be united under a single viceroy and defended by a standing army for which they should themselves be made to pay. The ministers at home had been too prudent to take that advice; but they listened now to his appeal for a force to be sent to America. By the 24th of September, 1710, he lay off Port Royal with a fleet of thirty-five sail, besides hospital and store ships, with four regiments of New England militia aboard his transports and a detachment of marines. On the 1st of October he opened the fire of three batteries within a hundred yards of the little fort that guarded the place, and within twenty-four hours he had brought it to its capitulation, as Sir William Phips had done twenty years before. Acadia was once more a conquered province of England. Colonel Nicholson renamed its port Annapolis Royal, in honor of the Queen whom he served. The name of the province itself the English changed to Nova Scotia.

Two years more, and the war was practically over; but no victories had been added to that lonely achievement at Port Royal. Colonel Nicholson went from his triumph in Acadia back to England again, to solicit a yet stronger force to be taken against Quebec, and once more got what he wanted. In midsummer of 1711 Sir Hovenden Walker arrived at Boston with a great fleet of transports and men-of-war, bringing Colonel Hill and seven of Marlborough’s veteran regiments to join the troops of New England in a decisive onset upon the stronghold of New France. Colonel Nicholson was to lead the colonial levies through the forests to Quebec; Sir Hovenden Walker was to ascend the St. Lawrence and strike from the river. But neither force reached Quebec. The admiral blundered in the fogs which beset him at the mouth of the great stream, lost eight ships and almost a thousand men, and then put about in dismay and steered straightway for England, to have his flag-ship blow up under him at Spithead. Colonel Nicholson heard very promptly of the admiral’s ignoble failure, and did not make his march. The next year, 1712, the merchants of Quebec subscribed a fund to complete the fortifications of their rock-built city, and even women volunteered to work upon them, that they might be finished ere the English came again. But the English did not come. That very summer brought a truce; and in March, 1713, the war ended with the peace of Utrecht. The treaty gave England Hudson’s Bay, Acadia, Newfoundland, and the little island of St. Christopher alongside Nevis in the Lesser Antilles.

“Queen Anne’s War” was over; but there was not yet settled peace in the south. While the war lasted North Carolina had had to master, in blood and terror, the fierce Iroquois tribe of the Tuscaroras, who mustered twelve hundred warriors in the forests which lay nearest the settlements. And when the war was over South Carolina had to conquer a whole confederacy of tribes whom the Spaniards had stirred up to attack her. The Tuscaroras had seemed friends through all the first years of the English settlement on their coast; but the steady, ominous advance of the English, encroaching mile by mile upon their hunting grounds, had at last maddened them to commit a sudden and awful treachery. In September, 1711, they fell with all their natural fury upon the nearer settlements, and for three days swept them with an almost continuous carnage. The next year the awful butchery was repeated. Both times the settlements found themselves too weak to make effective resistance; both times aid was sent from South Carolina, by forced marches through the long forests; and finally, in March, 1713, the month of the peace of Utrecht, an end was made. The Tuscaroras were attacked and overcome in their last stronghold. The remnant that was left migrated northward to join their Iroquois kinsmen in New York,—and Carolina was quit of them forever.

The strong tribes which held sway in the forests of South Carolina,—the Yamassees, Creeks, Catawbas, and Cherokees,—were no kinsmen of these alien Iroquois out of the north, and had willingly lent their aid to the English to destroy them. But, the war over, the Spaniards busied themselves to win these tribes also to a conspiracy against the English settlements, and succeeded only too well. They joined in a great confederacy, and put their seven or eight thousand braves on the war-path to destroy the English. For almost a whole year (April, 1715, to February, 1716) they kept to their savage work unsubdued, until full four hundred whites had lost their lives at their hands. Then the final reckoning came for them also, and the shattered remnants of their tribes sought new homes for themselves as they could. The savages had all but accomplished their design against the settlements. The awful work of destroying them left the Carolinas upon the verge of utter exhaustion, drained of blood and money, almost without crops of food to subsist upon, quite without means to bear the heavy charges of government in a time of war and sore disorder. There were some among the disheartened settlers who thought of abandoning their homes there altogether and seeking a place where peace might be had at a less terrible cost. But there was peace at least, and the danger of absolute destruction had passed.

New York had had her own fright while the war lasted. A house blazed in the night (1712), and certain negroes who had gathered about it killed some of those who came to extinguish the flames. It was rumored that there had been a plot among the negroes to put the whole of the town to the torch; an investigation was made, amidst a general panic which rendered calm inquiry into such a matter impossible; and nineteen blacks were executed.

But in most of the colonies domestic affairs had gone quietly enough, the slow war disturbing them very little. Connecticut found leisure of thought enough, in 1708, to collect a synod at Saybrook and formulate a carefully considered constitution for her churches, which her legislature the same year adopted. In 1707 New York witnessed a notable trial which established the freedom of dissenting pulpits. Lord Cornbury, the profligate governor of the province, tried to silence the Rev. Francis Mackemie, a Presbyterian minister,—pretending that the English laws of worship and doctrine were in force in New York; but a jury made short work of acquitting him. Massachusetts endured Joseph Dudley as governor throughout the war (1702-1715), checking him very pertinaciously at times when he needed the assistance of her General Court, but no longer refusing to live with reasonable patience under governors not of her own choosing.