Chapter II: The Parting of the Ways (1)

No one who marked how the English colonies had grown, and how the French had lagged in the effectual settlement and mastery of the regions they had taken, could wonder that in the final struggle for supremacy the English had won and the French lost everything there was to fight for. The French had been as long on the continent as the English, and yet they did not have one-tenth the strength of the English, either in population or in wealth, when this war came. There were fifty-five thousand white colonists in Canada, all told; and only twenty-five thousand more in all the thin line of posts and hamlets which stretched from the St. Lawrence through the long valley of the Mississippi to the Gulf,—eighty thousand in all. In the English settlements there were more than a million colonists (1,160,000), not scattered in separated posts set far apart in the forested wilderness, but clustered thick in towns and villages, or in neighborly plantations, where the forest had been cleared away, roads made, and trade and peace established. The English had been seeking, not conquest, but comfort and wealth in busy centres and populous country-sides, where their life now ran as strong and as calm, almost, as if they were still in the old lands of England itself. The French, on the contrary, were placed where their government wished them to be; could hardly be said to have formed independent communities at all; and were glad if they could so much as eke out a decent subsistence from the soil, or from food brought by ship from France over sea. The English spread very slowly, considering how fast they came, and kept in some sort a solid mass; but the result was that they thoroughly possessed the country as they went, and made homes, working out a life of their own. The French merely built frontier posts, the while, on the lakes and rivers, as they were bidden or guided or exhorted by their governors; took up such land as was assigned them by royal order; did their daily stint of work, and expected nothing better. They were, moreover, painfully, perilously isolated. Ships could come from England to any part of the English coasts of America in five weeks, whereas it was a good six months’ journey from France to the frontier posts upon the lakes or by the far-away western rivers. The St. Lawrence was closed for nearly half the year by ice; and it was a weary task to get any boat up the stream of the endless Mississippi against its slow tide of waters and through the puzzling, shifting channels of its winding course.

The Marquis Duquesne had called the Iroquois to a council in 1754, ere he left his governorship, and had commended his sovereign’s government to them because of this very difference between French and English. “Are you ignorant,” he said, “of the difference between the King of England and the King of France? Go, see the forts that our King has established, and you will see that you can still hunt under their very walls. They have been placed for your advantage in places which you frequent. The English, on the contrary, are no sooner in possession of a place than the game is driven away. The forest falls before them as they advance, and the soil is laid bare so that you can scarce find the wherewithal to erect a shelter for the night.” Perhaps Duquesne, being a soldier and no statesman, did not realize all that this difference meant. The French posts, with the forests close about them, were not self-supporting communities such as everywhere filled the English dominion. Their governors were soldiers, their inhabitants a garrison, the few settlers near at hand traders, not husbandmen, or at best mere tenants of the crown of France. No doubt it was easier for the savages to approach and trade with them; but it would turn out to be infinitely harder for the French to keep them. Their occupants had struck no deep rootage into the soil they were seated upon, as the English had.

Englishmen themselves had noted, with some solicitude, how slow their own progress was away from the sea-coast. It was not until 1725 that settlers in Massachusetts had ventured to go so far away from the Bay as the Berkshire Hills. “Our country has now been inhabited more than one hundred and thirty years,” exclaimed Colonel Byrd, of Virginia, in 1729, “and still we hardly know anything of the Appalachian Mountains, that are nowhere above two hundred and fifty miles from the sea. Whereas the French, who are later comers, have ranged from Quebec southward as far as the mouth of the Mississippi, in the Bay of Mexico, and to the west almost as far as California, which is either way above two thousand miles.” But Colonel Byrd was thinking of discovery, not of settlement; the search for minerals and the natural wealth of the forests, not the search for places to which to extend permanent homes and government. The difference arose out of the fundamental unlikeness of French and English, both in life and in government.

The statesmen of both France and England accepted the same theory about the use colonies should be put to,—the doctrine and practice everywhere accepted in their day. Colonies were to be used to enrich the countries which possessed them. They should send their characteristic native products to the country which had established them, and for the most part to her alone, and should take her manufactures in exchange; trade nowhere else to her disadvantage; and do and make nothing which could bring them into competition with her merchants and manufacturers. But England applied this theory in one way, France in another. It was provoking enough to the English colonists in America to have, in many a petty matter, to evade the exacting Navigation Acts, which restricted their trade and obliged them to buy manufactured goods at prices fixed by the English merchants. It a little cramped and irritated them that they were forbidden to manufacture now this and now that, though the material lay at their very doors, because English manufacturers wished their competition shut out. Restriction was added to restriction. In 1706, naval stores and rice, which the Carolinas were learning to produce to their increasing profit, were added to the list of products which must be sent to England only; and in 1722 copper and furs. In 1732 the manufacture of beaver hats was forbidden, and in 1750 the maintenance of iron furnaces or slit mills. But there was always an effort made at reciprocal advantage. Though the colonies were forbidden to manufacture their iron ores, their bar and pig iron was admitted into England free of duty, and Swedish iron, which might have undersold it, was held off by a heavy tariff, to the manifest advantage of Maryland and Virginia. Though the rice of the Carolinas for a time got admission to market only through the English middlemen, their naval stores were exported under a heavy bounty; and in 1730, when the restriction laid on the rice trade pinched too shrewdly, it was removed with regard to Portugal, the chief European market open to it. Parliament had generally an eye to building up the trade of the colonies as well as to controlling it.

The home government, moreover, though it diligently imposed restrictions, was by no means as diligent in enforcing them. An ill-advised statute of 1733 laid prohibitory duties on the importation of sugar, molasses, and rum out of the French West Indies, in the hope that the sales of sugar and molasses in the islands owned by England might be increased. To enforce the act would have been to hazard the utter commercial ruin of New England. Out of the cheap molasses of the French islands she made the rum which was a chief source of her wealth,—the rum with which she bought slaves for Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, and paid her balances to the English merchants. But no serious attempt was made to enforce it. Customs officers and merchants agreed in ignoring it, and officers of the crown shut their eyes to the trade which it forbade. Smuggling upon that long coast was a simple matter, and even at the chief ports only a little circumspection was needed about cargoes out of the Indies.

Moreover, the men who governed in England contented themselves with general restrictions and did not go on to manage the very lives of the colonists in the colonies themselves. That was what the French did. They built their colonies up by royal order; sent emigrants out as they sent troops, at the King’s expense and by the King’s direction; could get only men to go, therefore, for the most part, and very few women or families. For the English there was nothing of the sort, after the first. Rich men or great mercantile companies might help emigrants with money or supplies or free gifts of land in order to fill up the colonies which the crown had given them the right to establish and govern; but only those went out who volunteered. Emigrants went, moreover, in families, after the first years were passed and the colonies fairly started, if not at the very outset of the enterprise,—in associated groups, congregations, and small volunteer communities. When they reached the appointed place of settlement they were left to shift for themselves, as they had expected, exactly as they would have been at home; and they insisted upon having the same rights and freedom they would have had there. They were making homes, without assistance or favor, and for their own use and benefit.

It was inevitable in the circumstances that their colonial governments should be like themselves, home-made and free from control in the management of what chiefly concerned their own lives. They were just as hard to supervise and regulate when the settlements were small as when they grew large and populous,—a little harder, indeed, because the colonists were the more anxious then about how the new life they were beginning was to go, and the less sure of their power or influence to resist the efforts of the crown to manage and interfere with them. By the time the French war came there was no mistaking the fact that the English colonies had grown to be miniature states, proud, hard-fibred, independent in temper, practised in affairs. They had, as Edmund Burke said, “formed within themselves, either by royal instruction or royal charter, assemblies so exceedingly resembling a parliament, in all their forms, functions, and powers, that it was impossible they should not imbibe some opinion of a similar authority.” At first, no doubt, their assemblies had been intended to be little more than the managing bodies of corporations. “But nothing in progression can rest on its original plan. We may as well think of rocking a grown man in the cradle of an infant. Therefore, as the colonies prospered and increased to a numerous and mighty people, spreading over a very great tract of the globe, it was natural that they should attribute to assemblies so respectable in their formal constitution some part of the dignity of the great nations which they represented.” They “made acts of all sorts and in all cases whatsoever. They levied money upon regular grants to the crown, following all the rules and principles of a parliament, to which they approached every day more and more nearly.” And Burke saw how inevitable, as well as how natural, the whole growth had been. “Things could not be otherwise,” he said; “English colonies must be had on these terms, or not had at all.”

They had used their governments for their own purposes, and rather like independent states than like dependent communities. In every colony the chief point of conflict between governor and assembly, whether in the proprietary or in the crown colonies, had always been connected with the subject of salaries. Again and again governors had been instructed to insist upon an adequate income, charged permanently upon some regular source of public revenue; but again and again, as often as made, their demand had been refused. They could get only annual grants, which kept all officers of the crown dependent upon the people’s assemblies for maintenance while in office. There had long been signs that the ministers of the King and the proprietors at home were tired of the contest, and meant, for the mere sake of peace, to let the colonial assemblies alone, to rule, as Parliament ruled, by keeping control of the moneys spent upon their own governments.

There was, too, more and more money in the colonies as the years went by. New England, where, except in the rich valley of the Connecticut, the soil yielded little beyond the bare necessaries of life, led the rest of the colonies in the variety of her industries. Though parliamentary statutes forbade the making of woollen goods or hats or steel for export, the colonists were free to make anything they might need for use or sale within a single colony or in their own homes; and the thrifty New England farmers and villagers made most of their own furniture, tools, and household utensils, while their women or the village weavers wove the linen and woollen stuffs of which their clothes were made. They lived upon their own resources as no other colonists did. And their trade kept six hundred vessels busy plying to and fro to English and foreign ports. Almost every sea-coast hamlet was a port and maintained its little fleet. A thousand vessels, big and little, went every year to the fisheries, or up and down the coasts carrying the trade between colony and colony. A great many of these vessels the colonists had built themselves, out of the splendid timber which stood almost everywhere at hand in their forests; and every one knew who knew anything at all about New England that her seamen were as daring, shrewd, and hardy as those bred in past generations in the Devonshire ports of old England. Their boats flocked by the hundreds every year to the misty, perilous banks of Newfoundland, where the cod were to be caught. They beat up and down the long seas in search of the whale all the way from “the frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and Davis’s Straits” to the coasts of Africa and Brazil, far in the south. “Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise,” exclaimed Burke, “ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people,—a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone, of manhood.”

Massachusetts had been known, while peace held and men breathed freely, between Queen Anne’s and King George’s wars, to complete one hundred and fifty ships in a single year, every town upon the coast and even little villages far within the rivers launching vessels from busy shipyards. Ship building became New England’s chief industry; and in 1724 the master builders of the Thames prayed Parliament for protection against the competition of the colonies. The annual catch of whale and cod by the New Englanders was worth two hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling; and, besides fish and fish-oil, they shipped their fine timber, and not a little hay and grain even, across the sea or to the other colonies. Everywhere in America the forests yielded splendid timber, as his Majesty’s ministers well knew: for they sent into the northern forests of pine and had the tallest, straightest trees there marked with the royal arms, as a notice that they were reserved to be used as masts for his Majesty’s war-ships,—as if the King had a right to take what he would.

“New England improved much faster than Virginia,” Colonel Byrd admitted; and yet Virginia had her own rich trade, of which tobacco was the chief staple; and all the colonies busied themselves as they could, and visibly grew richer year by year. The middle colonies were scarcely less industrious than those of the bleaker north, and prospered even more readily with their kindlier climate and their richer soil. Pennsylvania, with her two hundred and twenty thousand colonists, with her thrifty mixture of Germans, Quakers, Scots, and Scots-Irishmen, needed a fleet of four hundred sail to carry each season’s spare produce from the docks at Philadelphia; and New York had her separate fleet of close upon two hundred sail.

England depended upon the colonies for much of the naval stores, of the potash, and of the pearlash which she needed every year. Mines of iron and of copper had been opened both in the middle colonies and in the south. The colonists made their own brick for building, and their own paper and glass, as well as their own coarse stuffs for clothing, and many of their own hats of beaverskin. Substantial houses and fine, sightly streets sprang up in the towns which stood at the chief seaports; and in the country spacious country seats, solidly built, roomy, full of the simpler comforts of gentlefolk. The ships which took hides and fish and provisions to the West Indies brought sugar and molasses and wine and many a delicacy back upon their return, and the colonists ate and drank and bore themselves like other well-to-do citizens the world over. They were eager always to know what the London fashions were; there was as much etiquette to be observed upon quiet plantations in Virginia as in English drawing rooms. It was, indeed, touched with a certain beauty of its own, because of the provincial simplicity and frank neighborliness which went along with it; but it was grave and punctilious, and intended to be like London manners. There was as much formality and gayety “in the season” at Williamsburg, Virginia’s village capital, as in Philadelphia, the biggest, wealthiest, most stately town in the colonies.

There were many ways in which the colonies finished and filled out their lives which showed that they regarded themselves as in a sense independent communities and meant to provide for themselves everything they needed for their life alone on a separate continent. They had no thought of actually breaking away from their allegiance to the home government over sea; but no man could possibly overlook the three thousand miles of water that stretched between England and America. At that immense distance they were obliged in great measure to look out for themselves and contrive their own ways of sustenance and development, and their own way of culture. Before the French war began, two more colleges, in addition to Harvard in Massachusetts and William and Mary in Virginia, had been established to provide the higher sort of training for youths who were to enter the learned professions. Besides Yale, the College of New Jersey had been founded. At first set up in 1746 as a collegiate school, at Elizabethtown, it was in 1756 given a permanent home and built up into a notable training place for youth at Princeton. In 1754, the year Washington attacked the French in the western forests, King’s College was added to the growing list, in New York, by royal charter. Ten years later (1764), upon the very morrow of the signing of peace, certain public-spirited men of the Baptist communion followed suit in Rhode Island by founding the school which was afterwards to be called Brown University. Here were six colleges for this new English nation at the west of the Atlantic. Many wealthy colonists, particularly in the far south, continued to send their sons to the old country to take their learning from the immemorial sources at Oxford and Cambridge; but more and more the colonies provided learning for themselves.

Their growing and expanding life, moreover, developed in them the sense of neighborhood to one another, the consciousness of common interests, and the feeling that they ought in many things to coöperate. In 1754, while the first sharp note of war was ringing from the Alleghanies, a conference with the Six Nations was held at Albany, which, besides dealing with the redmen, and binding them once more to be friends and allies of the English against the French, considered nothing less than a plan of union for the colonies. This was the fourth time that the representatives of several colonies at once had come together at Albany to confer with the Iroquois. The first conference had taken place there in 1689, the year King William’s War began. Albany lay nearest the country of the Iroquois. It was necessary when war was afoot to make sure that the redskins should side with the English, and not with the French; and that was now for the fourth time, in 1754, more critically important than ever. The home government had directed that the conference be held, before they knew what Washington had done. It was the ministers in London, too, who had directed that a plan of union be considered, in order that the colonies might act in concert in the coming struggle with the French, and if possible under a single government even. Seven colonies were represented at the conference. Twenty-five delegates were there to take part in the business; and there was no difficulty about securing their almost unanimous assent to a plan of union. They adopted the plan which Mr. Benjamin Franklin, one of Pennsylvania’s delegates, had drawn up as he made the long journey from Philadelphia.

Mr. Franklin had led a very notable life during the thirty eventful years which had gone by since he made his way, a mere lad, from Boston to Philadelphia to earn his livelihood as a journeyman printer; and how shrewd a knowledge he had gained of the practical affairs of the world anybody could see for himself who would read the homely-wise maxims he had been putting forth these twenty-two years in his “Poor Richard’s” Almanacs, begun in 1732. The plan of union he suggested at Albany was, that the colonies should submit to have their common interests cared for by a congress of delegates chosen by their several assemblies, and a “president-general” appointed and paid by the crown; giving to the congress a considerable power of actual law-making and to the president-general the right to veto its acts, subject to the approval of the ministers at home. To all the delegates at Albany except those from Connecticut the plan seemed suitable and excellent; but the ministers at home rejected it because they thought it gave too much power to the proposed congress, and the colonial assemblies rejected it because they thought it gave too much power to the president-general. Mr. Franklin said that the fact that neither the assemblies nor the King’s ministers liked the plan made him suspect that it must be, after all, an excellent half-way measure, the “true medium” between extremes, effecting a particularly fair and equal distribution of power.

Then the war came, and made many things plain. The colonies did not coöperate. They contributed troops, watched their own frontiers as they could against the redskins, and freely spent both blood and money in the great struggle; but when it was all over, and the French dominion swept from the continent, it was plain that it had not been the power of the colonies but the power of England and the genius of the great Pitt that had won in the critical contest. France could send few reinforcements to Canada because England’s ships commanded the sea. The stout Canadians had had to stand out for themselves unaided, with such troops as were already in the colony. In 1759, the year Wolfe took Quebec, there were more soldiers in the English colonies threatening the St. Lawrence than there were men capable of bearing arms in all Canada,—and quite half of them were regulars, not provincials. Pitt saw to it that enough troops and supplies were sent to America to insure success, and that men capable of victory and of efficient management even in the forested wilderness were put in command of affairs in the field. He did not depend upon the colonies to do what he knew they had no plan or organization for doing, but set himself to redress the balance of power in Europe by decisive victories which should make England indisputable mistress of America. “No man ever entered Mr. Pitt’s closet who did not find himself braver when he came out than when he went in,” said a soldier who had held conference with him and served him; and it was his statesmanship and his use of English arms that had made England’s dominion complete and England’s colonies safe in America.

English fleets and armies had not been sent to America, however, and equipped for warfare there, sustained in war season and out of it, without enormous expense; and that expense, which had set the colonies free to live without dread of danger or of confinement at any border, England had borne. It had been part of Mr. Franklin’s plan of union, proposed at Albany, that the congress of the colonies should sustain the armies used in their defence and pay for them by taxes levied in America; but that plan had been rejected, and this war for the ousting of the French had been fought at England’s cost,—much as the colonies had given of their own blood, and of their own substance for the equipment of their provincial levies, and much as they had suffered in all the obscure and painful fighting to protect their frontiers against the redskins, far away from set fields of battle. They had done more, indeed, than pay the costs which inevitably fell to them. They had “raised, paid, and clothed twenty-five thousand men,—a number,” if Mr. Franklin was right, “equal to those sent from Great Britain and far beyond their proportion. They went deeply in debt in doing this; and all their estates and taxes are mortgaged for many years to come in discharging that debt.” Parliament had itself acknowledged their loyal liberality and self-sacrifice, and had even voted them £200,000 a year for five years, when the war was over, by way of just reimbursement. But, though they had made sacrifices, they had, of course, not shared with the royal treasury the chief outlays of the war. Colonial governors, viewing affairs as representatives of the government at home, had again and again urged the ministers in London to tax the colonies, by act of Parliament, for means to pay for frontier forts, armies of defence, and all the business of imperial administration in America. But the ministers had hitherto known something of the temper of the colonists in such matters and had been too wise to attempt anything of the kind. Sir George Keith, who had been governor of Pennsylvania, had suggested to Sir Robert Walpole that he should raise revenue in the colonies; but that shrewd politician and man of affairs had flatly declined. “What,” he exclaimed, “I have old England against me, and do you think I will have New England likewise?” Chatham had held the same tone. What English armies did in America was part of England’s struggle for empire, for a leading station in power and riches in the world, and England should pay for it. The desire of the colonies to control their own direct taxes should be respected. English statesmen, so far, had seen the matter very much as observant Colonel Spotswood had seen it thirty odd years ago. If the ministers should direct moneys to be paid by act of Parliament, he said, “they would find it no easy matter to put such an act into execution”; and he deemed it “against the right of Englishmen,” besides, “to be taxed, but by their representatives,”—new colonist though he was, and only the other day a governor of the crown in Virginia, the oldest and most loyal of the colonies.

It was now more than forty years since Colonel Spotswood, in the days of his governorship, had ridden to the far summit of the Alleghanies and looked down their western slopes towards the regions where England and France were to meet. Since that day he had served the crown very quietly as postmaster general for the colonies. At last he had died (1740) when on the eve of sailing with Virginian troops for Cartagena, about to return at the very end of his days to his old calling of arms. He had lived thirty years in Virginia, all told, and spoke out of abundant knowledge when he expressed a judgment as to what the ministers would find it hard to do in the colonies. He knew, as every man did who had had anything to do with the service of the crown in America, how stubbornly the colonists had resisted every attempt to unite their governments under a single governor or any single system, and how determined they had been to keep their governments in their own hands, notwithstanding they must have seen, as everybody else saw, the manifest advantage of union and a common organization in the face of England’s rivals in America, north and south. The King’s object in seeking to consolidate the more northern colonies under Sir Edmund Andros, whom New England had so hated, was not to attack their liberties, but “to weld them into one strongly governed state,” such as should be able to present a firm front to the encroachments of the French,—a statesmanlike object, which no man who wished to serve the interests of English empire could reasonably criticise. But the colonists had not cared to regard their little commonwealths as pieces of an empire. They regarded them simply as their own homes and seats of self-government; and they feared to have them swallowed up in any scheme of consolidation, whatever its object. The French war, consequently, had been fought by the government in England, and not by any government in America.

Though a few statesmen like Walpole had had the sagacity to divine it, and all leaders in party counsels had instinctively feared it, very few public men in England understood the temper or the unchangeable resolution of the colonies in such matters. Pitt understood it, but now that the war was over he was no longer suffered to be master in affairs. Burke understood it, but few heeded what he said. Such men knew by instant sympathy that this seemingly unreasonable temper of the colonists in great affairs was nothing else than the common English spirit of liberty. The colonists were simply refusing, as all Englishmen would have refused, to be directly ruled in their own affairs, or directly taxed for any purpose whatever, by a government which they themselves had no part in conducting; and, whether reasonable or unreasonable, so long as they remained Englishmen it was useless to try to argue them out of that refusal. “An Englishman,” cried Burke, “is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery”; and he knew that to an Englishman it would seem nothing less than slavery to be stripped of self-government in matters of the purse.

Now that the French were driven out, it was more useless than ever to argue the point. The chief and most obvious reason for feeling dependent upon the mother country was gone. Awe of the British was gone, too. The provincial levies raised in the colonies had fought alongside the King’s troops in all the movements of the war, and had found themselves not a whit less undaunted under fire, not a whit less able to stand and fight, not a whit less needed in victory. Braddock had died loathing the redcoats and wishing to see none but the blue cloth of the Virginian volunteers. When the war began, a regular from over sea had seemed to the colonists an unapproachable master of arms; but the provincials knew when the war was over that the redcoats were no better than they were. They had nothing to remember with mortification except the insulting contempt some of the British officers had shown for them, and the inferior rank and consideration their own officers had been compelled to accept.

It was the worst possible time the home government could have chosen in which to change its policy of concession towards the colonies and begin to tax and govern them by act of Parliament; and yet that was exactly what the ministers determined to do. No master of affairs or of men, like Walpole or Pitt, was any longer in a place of guiding authority in London. George Grenville was prime minister: a thorough official and very capable man of affairs, of unquestionable integrity, and with a certain not unhandsome courage as of conviction in what he did, but incapable of understanding those who opposed or resisted him, or of winning from them except by an exercise of power. The late war had been no mere “French and Indian” affair for English statesmen. It had been part of that stupendous “Seven Years’ War” which had fixed Prussia in a place of power under the great Frederick, and had changed the whole balance of power in Europe; had brought India under England’s widening dominion on one side of the world and America on the other,—had been a vast game which the stout little island kingdom had played almost alone against united Europe. It had not been a mere American war. America had reaped the benefits of England’s effort to found an empire and secure it, east and west. And yet the colonists seemed, when this momentous war by which they had so profited was over, to drop into indifference towards everything that remained to be done to finish what had been so well begun, even though it remained to be done at their own very doors.

France had ceded to England as a result of the war all the vast territory which lay upon the St. Lawrence and between the Mississippi and the eastern mountains, north and south. It was possible to provide a government for the province of Quebec and for the lands in the far south, in Florida and beside the mouths of the Mississippi; but between these lay the long regions which stretched, unsettled, along the great streams which ran everywhere into the Mississippi,—the Illinois country, the country round about the Ohio, the regions by the Cumberland,—all the boundless “back country” which lay directly behind the colonies at the west. The Lords Commissioners for Trade and Plantations in London wished to keep settlers out of these lands, in order that they might be left as a great hunting ground for the Indians, and so remain a permanent source of supply for the fur skins which enriched trade between the mother country and her colonies. But, meanwhile, whether settlers made their way thither or not, it was necessary to carry England’s power among the Indians, and make them know that she, and not the King of France, was now sovereign there. This the Indians were slow to believe. They could not know what treaty-makers in Europe had decided: they did not believe that the French would leave and the English come in in their stead at the western forts; and it moved them hotly to think of such a change. The French had made them welcome at their frontier posts, and did not drive off the game, as Duquesne had told them, ere this fatal war began. The French had been willing to be comrades with them, and had dealt with them with a certain gracious courtesy and consideration; while the English treated them, when they dared, like dogs rather than like men, drove them far into the forests at their front as they advanced their settlements, bullied them, and often cheated them in trade. It was intolerable to the northern Indians to think of these men whom they feared and hated being substituted for the French, with whom they found it at least possible to live.

They were dangerous neighbors, and the danger was near and palpable. The war with the French was hardly over when English settlers began to pour across the Alleghanies from Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia,—men of the stern and sober Scots-Irish breeding for the most part, masterful and imperious, and sure to make the lands they settled upon entirely their own. There were already tribes among the Indians in the northwest who had been driven out of Pennsylvania by the earlier movements of these same people, and who had taken with them to their new homes the distress and the dread of exile. It were fatal, they knew, to wait. If the English were ever to be driven within the barriers of the Alleghanies again, it must be done now, and all the tribes must rally to the desperate business.

They found a leader in Pontiac, a chief of the Ottawas. A dozen powerful tribes heeded him when he counselled secret confederacy, and, when all should be ready, sudden war; and the English presently had reason to know how able an enemy they had to fear,—a man of deep counsel, astute and masterful. In June, 1763, the first blow was struck,—from end to end of the open border,—even the Senecas, one of the Six Nations, joining in the bitter work. Every frontier fort except Detroit, Niagara, and Pitt was in their hands at the first surprise: smoking ruins and the bodies of white men slain marked all the borders where the French had been. The English rallied, stubborn and undaunted. Three forts at least were saved. There were men at hand like Colonel Bouquet, the gallant officer who went to the relief of Fort Pitt, who knew the strategy of the forest as well as the redskins did, and used steadfast English, not fickle savages, in the fighting; and, though the work was infinitely hard and perilous and slow in the doing, within two years it was done. Before the year 1765 was out, Pontiac had been brought to book, had acknowledged himself beaten, and had sued for peace.

But by that time the English ministers knew the nature of the task which awaited them in America. It was plain that they must strengthen the frontier posts and maintain a force of soldiers in the colonies, if English power was to be safe there, and English lives. Not fewer than twenty thousand men would be needed; and it would be necessary to organize government, civil as well as military, in a more effective way. It might be necessary to pay the colonial judges and even the colonial governors out of the general treasury of the empire, rather than leave them always dependent upon the uncertain grants of the colonial legislatures. The new plans would, taken all together, involve, it was reckoned, the expenditure of at least £300,000 a year. Mr. Grenville, now at the head of the government in England, was a lawyer and a man of business. “He took public business not as a duty which he was to fulfil, but as a pleasure he was to enjoy,” and, unfortunately, he regarded American affairs as ordinary matters of duty and of business. England had spent £60,000,000 sterling to put the French out of America; £140,000,000 had been added to the national debt. Her own sources of revenue were quite run dry. Mr. Grenville and his colleagues did not know where else to turn for another penny, if not to America. They therefore determined that, since heavy additional expenditures must be undertaken for the proper administration and defence of the colonies, America must be made to supply at least a part of the money to meet them. Not all of it. It was the ministers’ first idea to raise only £100,000 out of the £300,000 by taxes directly derived from the colonies: and every farthing of that, with twice as much more, was to be spent, of course, in America. The money was none of it to cross the sea. It was to remain in the colonial treasuries until expended for colonial administration and defence.

Some men there were in England who were far-sighted enough to see what this new policy would lead to; but Grenville did not, and Parliament did not. In March, 1764, therefore, upon the introduction of his annual budget, the prime minister introduced a bill, which was passed, laying fresh and more effective taxes on wines, sugar, and molasses imported into the colonies, tightening and extending the old Navigation Acts, and still further restraining manufactures; and at the same time announced that he would, the next year, propose a moderate direct tax upon the colonies in the form of an act requiring revenue stamps to be used on the principal sorts of documents employed in America in legal and mercantile business.

Mr. Grenville had no desire to irritate the Americans. He thought they might protest; he never dreamed they would disobey. He was, no doubt, surprised when he learned how hot their protests were; and when his Stamp Act the next year became law, their anger and flat defiance must have seemed to him mere wanton rebellion. He introduced the Stamp Act with his budget of 1765. The Commons gave only a single sitting to the discussion of its principles; passed it almost without opposition; and by the 22d of March it was law. A few members protested. Colonel Barré, standing there in his place, square, swarthy, a soldier from the field, that staring wound upon his face which he had taken where Wolfe died, on the Plains of Abraham, told the ministers very flatly that the colonists, whom he had seen and fought for, owed to them neither the planting nor the nourishing of their colonies, had a liberty they had made for themselves, were very jealous of that liberty, and would vindicate it. Benjamin Franklin was in London to make protest for Pennsylvania; and the agents of the other colonies were as active as he, and as ready to promise that the colonial legislatures would themselves grant out of their own treasuries more than the Act could yield, if only they were left to do it in their own way. Mr. Franklin had pointed out in very plain terms how sharp a departure there was in such measures from the traditional dealings of the crown with the colonies, how loyal they had been in granting supplies when required, and how ill a new way of taxation would sit upon the spirits of the colonists. But the vote for the bill was five to one. Neither the ministers nor the Commons showed the least hesitation or misgiving.

The Act operated in America like a spark dropped on tinder. First dismay, then anger, then riot and open defiance, showed what the colonists thought and meant to do. Their own agents in London were as little prepared as the ministers themselves for the sudden passion. They had asked for appointments for their friends as stamp distributers under the Act. Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia, even asked for a place for himself under it, so different a look did things wear in London from that which they wore at home in the Old Dominion. But these gentlemen learned the temper of America, and changed their own, soon enough. The Act was in no way extraordinary or oppressive in its provisions. It required of the colonists only what was already required in respect of business transactions in England: namely, that revenue stamps, of values varying with the character of the transaction or the amount involved, should be attached to all deeds, wills, policies of insurance, and clearance papers for ships, to legal papers of almost every kind, to all written contracts and most of the business papers used by merchants in their formal dealings, and to all periodical publications and advertisements. The colonies themselves had imposed such taxes; in England they had been used since William and Mary, and had proved eminently convenient and easy of collection. Governor Shirley, of Massachusetts, had himself urged that Parliament use them in America, American though he was. Mr. Franklin had taken it for granted, when he saw the Act become law, that they must be submitted to. But America flatly refused obedience, and, except in the newly conquered provinces of Nova Scotia and Canada, the stamps were not used.

The Act was not to go into operation until the 1st of November (1765); but long before the first of November it was evident that it would not go into effect at all. It was universally condemned and made impossible of application. There was instant protest from the colonial assemblies so soon as it was known that the Act was passed; and the assembly of Massachusetts proposed that a congress of delegates from the several colonies be held in October, ere the Act went into effect, to decide what should be done to serve their common interest in the critical matter. The agitations and tumults of that eventful summer were not soon forgot. In August, Boston witnessed an outbreak such as she had never witnessed before. Mr. Andrew Oliver, who had been appointed distributer of the stamps there, was burned in effigy; the house in which it was thought the stamps were to be stored was torn down; Mr. Oliver’s residence was broken into and many of its furnishings were destroyed. He hastily resigned his obnoxious office. Mobs then plundered the house of the deputy registrar of the court of admiralty, destroying his private papers and the records and files of the court,—because the new acts of trade and taxation gave new powers to that court. The house of the comptroller of customs was sacked. Mr. Thomas Hutchinson, the lieutenant-governor of the colony, found himself obliged, on the night of the 26th, to flee for his life; and returned when order was restored to find his home stripped of everything it contained, including nine hundred pounds sterling in money, and manuscripts and books which he had been thirty years collecting. Only the walls and floors of the house remained.

There was no violence elsewhere to equal this in Boston. There was tumult everywhere, but in most places the mobs contented themselves with burning the stamp agents in effigy and frightening them into the instant relinquishment of their offices. Not until the autumn came, and the day for the application of the Act, did they show a serious temper again. Then New York also saw a house sacked and its furniture used to feed a bonfire. The people insisted upon having the stamps handed over to their own city officers; and when more came they seized and burned them. At Philadelphia many Quakers and Church of England men, and some Baptists, made as if they would have obeyed the Act; but the mobs saw to it that they should not have the chance. The stamp distributer was compelled to resign, and there was no one from whom stamps could be obtained. Stamp distributers who would not resign found it best to seek safety in flight. There was no one in all the colonies, north or south, who had authority to distribute the hated pieces of stamped paper which the ministers had expected would so conveniently yield them a modest revenue for their colonial expenses. There was a little confusion and inconvenience for a time. The courts hesitated to transact business without affixing the stamps required to their written pleadings; it seemed imprudent to send ships out without stamps on their clearance papers; business men doubted what would come of using no stamps in their transactions. But the hesitation did not last long. Business was presently going forward, in court and out, as before, and never a stamp used!

It was singular and significant how immediately and how easily the colonies drew together to meet the common danger and express a common purpose. Early in October the congress which Massachusetts had asked for came together at New York, the delegates of nine colonies attending. It drew up and sent over sea a statement of the right of the colonies to tax and govern themselves,—as loyal to the King, but not as subject to Parliament,—which arrested the attention of the world. Mr. Grenville and his colleagues were just then, by a fortunate turn of politics at home, most opportunely obliged to resign, and gave place to the moderate Whigs who followed Lord Rockingham (July, 1765), and who thought the protests of the colonies not unreasonable. On the 18th of March, 1766, accordingly, the Stamp Act was repealed,—within a year of its enactment. It was at the same time declared, however, by special declaratory act, that Parliament had sovereign right to tax the colonies, and legislate for them, if it pleased. It was out of grace and good policy, the ministers declared, that the tax was withdrawn; a concession, not of right, but of good feeling; and everybody knew that it was done as much because the London merchants were frightened by the resolution of the American merchants to take no cargoes under the tax as because the colonies had declined to submit. But the results were none the less salutary. The rejoicings in America were as boisterous and as universal as had been the tempest of resentment.

But that was not the end of the matter. The Stamp Act had suddenly brought to light and consciousness principles and passions not likely to be again submerged, and which it was worth the while of statesmen over sea to look into very carefully. Some there were in England who understood them well enough. Mr. John Adams used to say, long afterwards, that the trouble seemed to him to have begun, not in 1765, but in 1761. It was in that year that all the colonies, north and south, had heard of what James Otis had said in the chief court of the province at Boston against the general warrants, the sweeping writs of assistance, for which the customs officers of the crown had asked, to enable them to search as they pleased for goods brought in from foreign parts in defiance of the acts of trade. The writs were not new, and Mr. Otis’s protest had not put a stop to their issue. It had proved of no avail to say, as he did, that they were an intolerable invasion of individual right, flat violations of principles of law which had become a part of the very constitution of the realm, and that even an act of Parliament could not legalize them. But all the colonies had noted that hot contest in the court at Boston, because Mr. Otis had spoken with a singular eloquence which quickened men’s pulses and irresistibly swung their minds into the current of his own thought, and because it had made them more sharply aware than before of what the ministers at home were doing to fix upon the colonies the direct power of the government over sea. These writs of assistance gave the officers who held them authority to search any place they pleased for smuggled goods, whether private residence or public store-house, with or without reasonable ground of suspicion, and meant that the government had at last seriously determined, at whatever cost, to break up the trade with the West Indies and the Spanish Main. Presently armed cutters were put on the coasts the more effectually to stop it. A vice-admiralty court was set up to condemn the cargoes seized, without a jury. The duties were to be rigorously collected and the trade broken up, for the sake of the sugar growers of the British West Indies and merchants in London.

If New England could no longer send her horses, cattle, lumber, casks, and fish to the French islands and the Spanish Main, and bring thence, in exchange for them, sugar and molasses, she must let her ships rot at the wharves and five thousand of her seamen go idle and starve; must seek elsewhere for a market for her chief products; could make no more rum with which to carry on her home trade in spirits or her traffic in slaves on the slave coast; must forego her profits at the southern ports, and go without the convenient bills drawn on exported Virginian tobacco wherewith she had been used to pay her debts to the London merchants. For thirty years and more it had been understood that the duties on that trade were not to be collected; but now, of a sudden, the law was to be carried out by armed vessels, writs of general search, and the summary proceedings of a court of admiralty. In 1764 Mr. Grenville had drawn the lines tighter than ever by a readjustment of duties. That meant ruin; and the Stamp Act was but the last touch of exasperation. The disposition of the ministers seemed all the more obvious because of the obnoxious “Quartering Act” which went along with the Stamp Act. They were authorized by Parliament to quarter troops in the colonies, and by special enactment the colonists were required to provide the troops with lodgings, firewood, bedding, drink, soap, and candles.