Chapter XI

THE COLONIES IN THE LOWER HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

The Colonial Colts in the large, open Field of the Eighteenth
Century.—The Effects of a Sniff of French Gunpowder.—Queen Anne’s War,
1702–1713; its Cost and Results in Europe and America.—Acadia changes
its Name to Nova Scotia.—How the Colonies started a Newspaper in
1704.—Philadelphia in a Sheet in 1719; and how comfortable it was.—The
Franklin Bros. furnish Food too condensed even for Boston.—Benjamin
quits the Hub; foots it, without tiring, to New York.—How he got
through New Jersey without paying Toll.—Enters Philadelphia with Two
Loaves, and sets up an Intellectual Bakery.—Banks built on the Sands
of Credit.—Moving Accidents.—John Law’s Scheme to use the Mississippi
Valley; how it grew; what it promised, and how it performed.—A French
Pasquinade.—The Results of a Bank Panic in the Eighteenth Century.—The
Effects on the Manufacture of Children.—Number of Colonists in 1713
and 1743.—The Condition of Delaware, New Hampshire, and Vermont.—The
Training of Young America.—Yale College and its Mustard-like
Growth.—The American Learned Oak.—The Connection between Slate-Pencil
and Gum Chewing and Female Education.—What took Place between 1713 and
1743.—A Negro Plot in New York.—Negroes thrown overboard, and the
Bubbles that rose.—How large Historic Doors swing on small
Hinges.—Examples from A to W.—What happened because Maria Theresa was
a Female.—The English Georges; what Bulls they were, and made.—The
Transatlantic Bullocks; how they rushed into King George’s War in
1744, and what Mischief they did for Four Years.

The colonial colts which we left tied up to the bars of the eighteenth century could not, with their American blood, stand there for any length of time without chafing to be let into “fresh fields and pastures new.” The bars down, off they scampered, dashing up their heels and tossing their heads in the fresh air.

Scarcely, however, had they gone a stone’s throw in the great unfenced field, before they snuffed a sulphurous smell from the adjacent lot, the French settlements of Acadia. Queen Anne, the second daughter of James II., who, in 1702 had succeeded her sister Mary, which aforesaid Mary, with her husband, the Orange William, had, as we have already seen, found England too small for them and the aforementioned James, also took a fancy that France was being made too comfortable for her migratory parent, and, in order to keep him travelling, bombarded that country. This little experiment, called in the large-bore histories, Queen Anne’s War, lasted eleven years, and cost England about one sixteenth of her entire value. She obtained, however, as compensation for this outlay, these results in Europe: several fresh monuments in Westminster Abbey, a staggering back-load of debt, a crowd of one-sleeved men, many young women in becoming widow’s caps, Marlborough and wife with salaries amounting yearly to three hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars besides the snug little box at Blenheim Palace, the glorious though empty victories of Ramillies, Malplaquet, Oudenarde, and Blenheim, and that very big elephant, the rock of Gibraltar.

Of course our colts became intensely excited by the gunpowdery air, tore away into the northern French lot, and fell to kicking most lustily. The French fillies there naturally bit back and let fly their gallic-shod heels freely; but the New England ponies so worried and wounded them in the flanks and hips as to drive them clean out of the field. Port Royal was reduced and became Ann-apolis; and Acadia, battered by colonial guns to a wreck, and turning up in her distress under the name of Nova Scotia, grasped one of those long humane lines which the Marine Society, or government located at London, threw out at that time continually for distressed communities. To this sea line the blue-nosed, fish-shaped peninsula has since held with the bite of a codfish, trolled and played by the Izaak Walton of nations, until the fish shows signs of letting go the hook.

Amid the Alpine glaciers of war, however, there bloomed, as travellers find high up among the ice-fields, the graceful and tender flowers of gentler life.

The Colonies started the century with a newspaper. The Boston “News-Letter,” printed on a foolscap sheet, and issued once a week, in 1704, only twenty-eight years after the first newspaper was started, and in the very year the first editor, Roger l’Estrange, died, was the parent of that large family of children of all sizes and with such varied characters, which are now disseminated through almost every village of the land, and has acquired such a wide influence, interest, and large real estates among us. Meet it was that this prolific stock should have originated on the spot where, as is now pretty well proved, the first white men who visited our continent made their first landing within our borders, seven hundred years before. It must not, however, be supposed, that the pioneers in newspapers were Danes. From all that can now be ascertained, they were Bohemians. We may add that the “News-Letter” was never merged in the New York “Herald.” As it never issued but a single edition on any one day, and had no contemporaries at first to cull from, it did not become the New York “Express.” It is also a common mistake to suppose that it was afterwards expanded into the “North American Review,” or became by cultivation that large, flowering double monthly rose, “The Atlantic.” The “News-Letter” offered no premiums to multiply subscribers or to divide the claims of competitors; for it had no rival for fifteen years. Then Philadelphia, always emulous, got up a second sheet, a warm, gray worsted one, which wrapped up comfortably her growing youth, and displayed most acceptably her comely proportions. Two years later, in 1721, James Franklin established at Boston “The New England Courant,” the fourth American newspaper, full of audacious thinking and independent notions, some of which were furnished by his brother Benjamin, then a stripling of fifteen years. The criticisms were too strong, even for Boston; and after trying in vain for two years to nurse the place up to the wholesome diet, Benjamin left it. After a perilous journey to New York, whence he footed it across New Jersey without being policed or tolled,—for the Camden and Amboy Railroad had not yet subjected that Province to its sway,—he entered Philadelphia with two loaves of bread for himself. He soon set up a good intellectual oven of his own, and distributed, not Boston brown bread, but well-baked, healthy, family loaves, made of the best white flour to be had, to the world and—Philadelphia.

In 1740 there were eleven newspapers in America, one in each of the Colonies of New York, Virginia, and South Carolina, three in Pennsylvania, and five in Boston, which thus early began to gather Massachusetts to a head.

But these were not the only papers issued. The Bank of England had been established in 1694; and eighteen years later, paper credits were issued by South Carolina to the amount of £48,000. Massachusetts with her presses could of course print more promises, and in 1714 she beat South Carolina by £2,000. Other Colonies followed, even Rhode Island, distrusting Providence, built a paper-house on the sands of credit. The floods soon came upon all these unstable edifices, and there were many “moving accidents by flood” to the washed banks. The slight silver foundations were undermined, and the banking-houses fell, and “great was the fall thereof.” Twenty-five years after the first bank was established, few of the credits were worth over twenty cents on the promised dollar. Those of North Carolina descended to seven,—almost as low as Confederate paper in 1865.

But the scheme most American in size and promises was started in France by a Scotchman in 1716. He proposed to the French Regent and established upon the boundless trust in the untold, because not unfolded, mining wealth of the valley of the Mississippi, a company, spawning 200,000 shares of stock, aggregating at the par value one thousand millions of livres, which, on the iron strength of human faith, six millions only of silver in its own vaults, and the handsome certificates that hinted at more figures than ordinary arithmetic can compute, agreed to pay the vast public debt of France, swollen under Louis XIV. higher than a Mississippi freshet, and to distribute forty per cent annually to the stockholders. _Omne ignotum pro magnifico._ It seemed as if the steel armor of De Soto, buried in the oozy bottom of the Mississippi River, touched by John Law’s paper wand, had dissolved, and by a wonderful alchemy had been turned into liquid gold, whose exuberant floods were to make of France an auriferous Delta. The prophets of a rise were many, the real profits very few; and in four years the principal had gone where De Soto’s armor was rusting. The golden Armada of France was snagged, and dispersed beyond the reach of diver or bell. The speed with which shares, swollen from one thousand to ten thousand, were suddenly pricked and vanished, and the rapid changes in the fortunes of their holders, are well expressed by a French pasquinade of the period:—

“Lundi, j’achetais des actions;
Mardi, je gagnai des millions;
Mercredi, j’ornai mon menage;
Jeudi, je pris un equipage;
Vendredi, je m’en fis au bal;
Et Samedi, a l’hopital.”[A]

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Footnote A:

Which may be turned out of its native bed into an inferior English one
thus:—

Monday, some shares I obtained;
Tuesday, thereby millions I gained;
Wednesday, my establishment grew;
Thursday, to an equipage I flew;
Friday, at the ball I long tarried;
And Saturday to the poor-house was carried.

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MORAL.—Paper Laws are not as trustworthy as, although more shiny than, specie.

The experiments of the colonists thus early in engraved promises showed how adventurous and hopeful they had become. The unfavorable results did not indent their faith. There was always a side-pocket for American losses. In this they clapped their broken bank-bills, and John Law’s handsome certificates with the wonderful figures that had “cut so many shines,” and went on. The building of a few rice-machines, sugar-mills, or school-houses were checked for a few months; the clearing of some lots was less rapid; the purchase of a new gown for Prudence, or a new waistcoat for John Smith’s great-great-grandson, postponed; but the subscriptions to the Boston “News-Letter” did not fall off, nor the Franklin loaf diminish in weight.

There was one important branch of American industry and wealth which actually increased most during the severest periods of financial losses, the manufacturing of children. At the close of Queen Anne’s war, in 1713, the Colonies had a population of four hundred thousand,—an increase of one hundred and sixty-five thousand since the bars were let down. This population doubled during the next thirty years.

So many new boys coming forward required of course more training. A long-sighted governor of the East Indies, Elihu Yale by name, reached a hand across the seas, and placed some books and a little money at the feet of a few wise-hearted men in Connecticut, who took them up, and planted them for a few years at Saybrook. The gits thriving well, they were transplanted to New Haven. Everybody knows how these mustard shoots have grown; how their sturdy arms ever keep touching the westering borders, dropping schoolmistresses on Southern soils, ministers on Western prairies, spicy editors for city sandwiches; even their dead branches enriching the deep soils of scientific and theologic thought.

THE SCHOOLMASTER ABROAD.
(p. 201)
]

The planting of schools increased. It was always a favorite branch of American husbandry. The schoolhouse was frequently the first seedling put in. Now more carefully fenced about, it became the _quercus giganteus Americanus_,—to our plantations what the British oak is on an English estate, the glorious spike that rivets it to the wave-rocked island. Birch-trees could hardly supply the colonial demand upon them. School-girls opened the slate-quarries for chewing-pencils, and stripped the spruce-trees for gum. Knowest thou not, O reader, what a close connection there is between pencil and gum chewing and female education? If not, thou hast not been blessed with sisters between the liquid ages of fourteen and seventeen, and must hasten to study female geology, which embeds between its slaty folds the beautiful ferns and flora of knowledge. Thou must betake thyself to the nearest seminary, and observe the sudden and deep openings down through slate-lined shafts into the mines of earthly learning.

The treaty of Utrecht in 1713 closed and sealed Queen Anne’s war. There was a repose through the Colonies for thirty-one years. During this period the Colonies stretched themselves, took in new ideas, and let out the strait bandages which still swathed them. Delaware, dandled on the knee of Pennsylvania until 1708, having cut her first teeth, was set down to crow like a young cock among the blue hen’s chickens. Vermont, as we have before seen, undergoing pretty rugged nursing through her vigorous babyhood, was at last plumped upon the floor by New York, in 1724, with a smart cuff on the ears, and the ungracious and thankless advice, “Now go, if you must, and take care of yourself.” The youngster, who had found out for some time that she could not only run alone, but could even climb up to her own Saddle-Back, immediately started off, and was soon seen setting up education factories, saw-mills, meeting-houses, and nut-shellers, and running a variety of very transporting businesses between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River. It was a long time before she got her lines with New York out of tangle and settled; but as Vermonters never felt any practical difficulty in crossing lines whenever they saw pleasanter ones in better places, this uncertainty as to the exact limits of her colonial cords rather facilitated than impeded her circulation and growth. New Hampshire—well out at length from the leading-strings of Massachusetts, in 1741—toddled slowly up into hardy strength. From her whitened hills she was obliged to keep a sharp lookout northwards upon the saucy French and tricky Indians, and, in spite of all her sentries and vigilant scouts, suffered more than her share from them both. The Indians took off many of her scalps; but, notwithstanding all their sharp knives, she kept her Profile safe and unscarred, and was even Keene enough to outlive the neighboring tomahawks and the more distant and swooping night-hawks from the St. Lawrence.

New York was stunted in her growth for a short time, in 1741, by the report of a negro plot. It turned out, however, to be “a great cry and little wool.” Yet on the bare suspicion of a design to burn the city, more than thirty slaves were judicially massacred. The golden waves of commerce, however, soon closed over the momentary plunge of the sable coffins, and the delusion, like that at Salem half a century before, rippled away from the spot in widening circles until it broke upon the historic shore. Some events, insignificant at the time, grow larger as they approach the higher land of civilization; others, magnified by local passion, soon sink forever out of sight. The former are buoyed up by the life-floats of principle; the latter, unworthy of salvage, break and vanish.

Thus the contests of the colonists with the proprietors, slowly marking the advancing tide of civil freedom, are hardened on the shore line of our past history. Although they themselves were too busy in making to study the results when accomplished, their descendants, from more cultivated heights, ponder carefully the wave-tracks, as geologists mark and measure the traces of ancient sea-marks in coal-beds, overlaid to-day with the weighty accumulations of ages. On the other hand, the petty struggles in Virginia, Massachusetts, and South Carolina to establish ecclesiastical supremacy, and in other Colonies to set up sumptuary laws prescribing the number, cost, or cut of garments, although at the time tossing up great masses of foam, like foam speedily dissolved into nothingness.

Great doors swing on small hinges. The Colonies, towards the close of the first half of the century, were destined to add another example to the many notable proofs which the history of nations before them had furnished of this fact historically observed. The Macedonian Empire burst over the little excess of wine poured one day into Alexander’s cup. The chance meeting of Henry VIII. with Anna Boleyn altered the dynastic current and the religious faith of England, changed the European Atlas, and affected forever the settlement, civilization, and characters of the American Colonies. The acid temper of Tetzel precipitated into Luther’s cup, raised the Reformation into sudden effervescence. The evenly grooved disposition of William the Silent was a pivotal point around which the liberties of the Dutch Republic safely turned. An accident might have easily changed the character or shifted that individual centre, and sent the unbalanced periphery of the state into disastrous confusion or ruin. And so the accidental birth of a daughter, instead of a son, to Charles VI. of Austria, was an unfortunate windfall, which in 1744 raised a tempest of war that enveloped all Europe, and swept with fury over their Transatlantic Colonies. The entire Continent was marshalled into two hostile camps for eight years; England, France, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Holland, and nearly all the minor states, let out their best blood,—the heart’s,—or crippled the best limbs of their young and middle-aged men, spent all their available cash, and mortgaged the future; summer fields of grain were trampled out and remanured by the bone-dust of poor soldiers; Fontenoy, Bergen-op-Zoom, and other places were made, by their horrors, resorts ever since of idle tourists; and all Europe, in fact, begirt with war-fires which burnt up the accumulated wealth of generations,—and all because of that little windfall on the lot of Charles VI. Of all the multitudes maimed, butchered, or consigned to costly pension lists, only two individuals had the slightest interest in the wild carnival,—Maria Theresa, the windfall, the Pomona apple of discord, and one Charles Albert, Elector of Bavaria. France and England were of course on opposite sides, and the Colonial clocks marked Greenwich or Paris time as the master hands set them. The great iron pendulums on each side the sea swung together. The hour-hands constantly set off bells that tolled to funerals. The Colonies followed the hearses in mourning purchased by themselves. Genuine Americans already, they disdained to mention the expense, or to complain that it was beyond their means. In spite of funerals, however, and though the bells toll never so sadly, boys will grow.

The first George had come to the English throne in 1714. The second, third, and fourth of the same name successively covered it with their persons until 1830,—a century of English Georgics, full enough of bucolic stupidity and ox-like lolling down in rich clover, so far as the sovereigns were concerned, but bristling with short-horned and long-horned wars that pushed and gored in all directions. The second George, imported, like his sire, from Hanover, had been rolling in the rich English pastures for thirteen years, when the war of which we are now speaking commenced impaling so many victims,—a war which passes in our American chronicles under the name of “King George’s war,” but in European history is known as “the war of the Austrian succession.” As might be expected, after the old stiff-necked leader of the English herd commenced pushing the continental cows, the American young bulls—possessing all the red fire and knotted thews of the home stock—sprung over into the French lot, and after goring and receiving thrusts from the Gallic steers, at length, in 1745, made a dash at Louisburg in the island of Cape Breton, and ripped it out of the side of French America, leaving a sore gash that festered for six years.

It will be our duty hereafter to note the results of these wounds in mortifying French pride, and ultimately destroying the carefully nursed French colonial stock in North America.