Chapter 6

THE WINNING OF INDEPENDENCE

_If they accept protection, do they not stipulate obedience?_

SAMUEL JOHNSON.

_The decree has gone forth, and cannot now be recalled, that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth, must be established in America._

JOHN ADAMS.

I

As Chateaubriand said of the Revolution in France, that it was complete before it began, so may it be said that America was free before it won independence. The strict letter of the law counts for less in times of emotional stress than the strong sense of prescriptive right, and formal allegiance is in no way incompatible with a deep-seated feeling that submission must be voluntary to be honorable. Before the outbreak of the French war such a feeling was common throughout the colonies. The state of mind which conditioned the formal argument for colonial rights and drove the colonists into revolution is revealed in a sentence which Franklin wrote in 1755: "British subjects, by removing to America, cultivating a wilderness, extending the domain, and increasing the wealth, commerce, and power of the mother country, at the hazard of their lives and fortunes, ought not, and in fact do not thereby lose their native rights." It was as much as to say that Americans were in fact free because they ought to be free, and that they ought to be free because they had made for themselves a new country.

The issue between England and America is therefore not to be resolved by computing the burden of a penny tax, or by exposing the sordid motives of British merchants and Boston smugglers, still less by coming "armed at all points with law cases and acts of Parliament, with the statute-book doubled down in dog's ears" to defend either the cause of liberty or authority. The issue, shot through and through, as all great issues are, by innumerable sordid motives and personal enmities and private ambitions, was yet one between differing ideals of justice and welfare; one of those issues which, touching the emotional springs of conduct, are never composed by an appeal to reason, which formal argument the most correct, or the most skilled dialectic, serve only to render more irreconcilable. "In Britain," said Bernard in 1765, "the American governments are considered as corporations empowered to make by-laws, existing only during the pleasure of Parliament. In America they claim to be perfect states, no otherwise dependent upon Great Britain than by having the same king." Few Englishmen could imagine an empire of free states; few Americans could understand a nation bound against its will.

The policy which history associates with the name of Grenville did not originate with him, nor yet with his royal master, George III. It was the unhappy experience of the Austrian Succession War that enforced upon the English Government the necessity of a stricter attention to the colonies. Ministers who then set themselves to read the American dispatches were amazed to find the governors everywhere without adequate support against the assemblies, the assemblies everywhere indifferent to imperial interests. After the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle plantation affairs were accordingly placed under the direction of the able Halifax; and in 1752 the governors were instructed to transmit all correspondence "to His Majesty by one of His Majesty's principal Secretaries of State." To remedy an untoward situation many schemes were broached, on the eve of the Seven Years' War, designed to bring the colonies "to a sense of their duty to the king, to awaken them to take care of their lives and fortunes." The need of the hour was a union of the colonies for military defense; and in 1754, on the initiative of the English Government, representatives from seven colonies adopted a scheme drafted by Franklin and known as the Albany Plan of Union. It was ominous for the success of all such attempts in the future that a plan which was thought by the ministers too weak to be effective was thought by the colonial assemblies too strong to be safe. In any case, with hostilities already begun, the issue could not be pressed to a conclusion when, as the Board of Trade asserted, "a good understanding between your Majesty's governors and the people is so absolutely necessary." Under the stress of war, all ministerial projects for a stricter control of the colonies were accordingly laid aside until the restoration of peace.

The war itself only proved once more how defective was England's colonial administration. Three years of devastating Indian warfare again demonstrated the necessity of an adequate defense of the frontier, and a stricter control of Indian trade. A customs service which collected annually £2000 of revenue and cost £7000 to maintain, manned by officials who sold flags of truce to traders carrying ammunition and supplies to the enemy, was seen to be but an expensive luxury in time of peace and a military weakness in time of war. The assistance which Pitt, and Pitt alone, could induce the colonists to render, however adequate, was purchased at the price of concessions which deprived the governors of all but nominal influence, while placing in the assemblies the effective powers of government. And the results achieved by the Peace of Paris but confirmed the conclusions which followed from the experience of the war. The territory then acquired by England was imperial in extent; and the acquisition of it had in six years raised the annual cost of her military and naval establishment from £70,000 to £350,000. This far-flung and diversified empire had to be organized in order to be governed, and defended in order to be maintained. In view of the unprecedented responsibilities thus thrust upon the little island kingdom, it seemed that the oldest and most prosperous, the most English and best disposed of England's colonies might well be asked to submit to reasonable restraints in the interests of the empire, and in their own defense to furnish a moderate assistance.

Before the war was over assiduous royal governors were offering counsel as to the "regulation of the North American governments." If there is to be a new establishment "upon a true English constitutional bottom," wrote Bernard in 1761, "it must be upon a new plan," for "there is no system in North America fit to be made a module of." High officials in England were not lacking who agreed with the Massachusetts governor. The Peace of Paris was scarcely signed before Charles Townshend, First Lord of Trade in Bute's Ministry, proposed that the authority of Parliament should be invoked to remodel the colonial Governments upon a uniform plan, to pass stringent laws for enforcing the Trade Acts, and by taxation to raise a revenue in America for paying the salaries of royal officials and for the maintenance of such British troops as might be stationed there for the defense of the colonies. Townshend's proposals would doubtless have been formulated into law had it not been for the fall of Bute's Ministry in April; but the measures which were finally carried by Grenville, if they left the colonial charters untouched, were no less comprehensive, in respect to the purely imperial matters of trade and defense, than those initiated by his brilliant predecessor.

Adequate and well-administered laws for advancing the trade and securing the defense of the empire were, indeed, the primary objects of Grenville's colonial legislation. Grenville, who was the fingers rather than the soul of good government, could not endure the lax administration of the customs service which in the course of years had given the colonies, as it were, a vested interest in non-enforcement. He accordingly set himself to correct the faults which Walpole had condoned in the interest of the Hanoverian succession, and which Newcastle had utilized in the service of the Whig faction. Commissioners of the customs, long regarding their offices as sinecures and habitually residing in England, were ordered to repair at once to their posts in America. Additional revenue officers were appointed with more rigid rules for the discharge of their duties. Governors were once more instructed to give adequate support in the enforcement of the Trade Acts. The employment of general writs, or "writs of assistance," was authorized to facilitate the search for goods illegally entered; and ships of war were stationed on the American coast to aid in the suppression of smuggling.

More careful administrative supervision was but the prelude to additional legislation. Throughout the eighteenth century, the trade of the Northern and Middle colonies with the French and Spanish West Indies had been one of the most extensive branches of colonial commerce. To divert this traffic to the British sugar islands, Walpole had carried the Molasses Act in 1733. But the Molasses Act, though many times renewed and now in 1763 once more about to expire, had never been enforced, and had never, therefore, either benefited the British sugar planters or brought any revenue into the treasury. It was to secure one or both of these advantages that Grenville procured from Parliament the passage in 1764 of the law known as the Sugar Act; a law which reduced the duty upon foreign molasses imported into the continental colonies from 6_d._ to 3_d._, and imposed new duties upon coffee, pimento, white sugar, and indigo from the Spanish and French West Indies, and upon wine from the Madeiras and the Azores. Even such men as Bernard, Hutchinson, and Colden believed that the new duties would destroy a trade which they asserted was indispensable to the Northern colonies and highly beneficial to the commerce of the empire. But the sugar planters, powerfully represented in Parliament, demanded protection, while to Grenville's mind the systematic violation of a law was rather an argument against its repeal than an evidence of its impracticability. The measure, therefore, became a law; and for its better enforcement the jurisdiction of the admiralty courts was extended, and naval officers were empowered to act as collectors of the customs.

Less noticed at the time, but scarcely less important in its effects upon trade and industry, was the law passed by Parliament in the same year for regulating colonial currency. With the rapid development of commerce in the eighteenth century, and on account of the steady flow of specie to London, the colonies had commonly resorted to the use of paper money as a legal tender in the payment of local debts. Such men as Franklin and Colden defended the practice on the ground of necessity, and it was undoubtedly true that without the issue of new bills of credit the colonies could not have given the military assistance required of them for the conquest of Canada. But it was equally true that in most colonies, except Massachusetts where the issues had been retired in 1749, and New York where their par value had been consistently maintained, the evils of depreciated currency had long existed and still went unremedied. Debtors profited at the expense of creditors, while colonial assemblies often took advantage of the situation to pass laws enabling the American trader to avoid meeting his just obligations to English merchants. In response to the loud complaints of the latter, and without adequately discriminating between the uses and the abuses of a colonial paper currency, Parliament passed the act "to prevent paper bills of credit hereafter issued in any of his Majesty's colonies, from being declared to be a legal tender in payment of money, and to prevent the legal tender of such bills as are now subsisting, from being prolonged beyond the periods limited for calling in and sinking the same."

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Grenville had already turned to the problem of defense, so inseparably connected with the question of Indian relations and Western settlement. The English Government had long recognized the necessity of securing the friendship of the Indians; and to this end it had fostered the settlement of the interior. Indian traders, employing methods none too scrupulous, had been encouraged to ply their traffic beyond the mountains. Many thousands of acres of land had been granted, to individuals and to companies of promoters, in the belief that "nothing can more effectively tend to defeat the dangerous designs of the French," or better enable the English "to cultivate a friendship and carry on a more extensive commerce with the Indians inhabiting those parts." It was a policy which all Americans could understand. To those colonists who had fought with Washington to beat back the tide of Indian massacre, to those who had witnessed the destruction of Fort Duquesne, the conquest of Canada had no meaning unless it opened the great West to free settlement. And during the latter years of the war, thousands of families in all the old provinces were prepared, as Franklin said, "to swarm," while many hundreds had crossed the mountains and were already seated in the upper valleys of the Ohio.

Yet before the war began, the Board of Trade perceived that the policy originally advocated required serious modification. It was obvious enough that if titles to land were granted, not only by the English Government, but also by different colonies claiming jurisdiction over the same territory, endless conflict and litigation would be the sure result. And it soon appeared that the actual occupation of the interior was after all far more likely to provoke the hostility than to win the allegiance of the Western tribes. Overreached and defrauded in nearly every bargain, the Indian hated the trader whose lure he could not resist, and with the coming of the surveyor and the settler was well aware that the pretended friendship of the English was but a thin mask to conceal the greed of men who had no other desire than to rob him of his land. During the latter years of the war, after the conquest of Canada placed the allies of France under the heavy hand of Amherst and opened the way to actual settlement, it became clear that an ominous spirit of unrest was spreading throughout all the Northwest. It was precisely to guard against the danger of an Indian uprising, which in fact came to pass in the formidable conspiracy of Pontiac, that the Board of Trade formulated as early as 1761 the policy which found expression in the famous Proclamation of October 7, 1763. The Proclamation announced the intention of the English Government to take exclusive control of Indian relations and Western settlement. "For the present," all territory west of the Alleghanies, from the new provinces of Florida on the south to Canada on the north, was to be "reserved to the Indians." Governors were forbidden to grant land there. Those who had already settled within reserved territory were required to remove forthwith; and every Indian trader was bound to give security for observing such rules as the Imperial Government might establish. It was the intention of the ministers, although unfortunately not so expressed in the Proclamation, to open the reserved lands to settlement as soon as Indian titles could be justly extinguished. In accordance with this intention, the Government negotiated the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768, by which the Six Nations ceded to the Crown their rights to lands south of the Ohio; and both before and after that event it was seriously concerned with projects for new colonies in the interior. The most famous of these projects was that of the Vandalia Colony, for which a royal grant was about to be executed in 1775 when the promoters were requested to "wait ... until hostilities ... between Great Britain and the United Colonies should cease."

Undoubtedly the Proclamation of 1763 was primarily a measure of defense; but even if strictly enforced, which was found to be quite impossible in fact, it could not alone have secured unbroken peace on the frontier. Primitive in his instincts and treacherous in his nature, the Indian harbored in his vengeful heart the rankling memory of too many grievances, was too easily swayed by his ancient but now humiliated French allies, to be held in check without a show of force to back the most just and wisely administered policy. The English Government would doubtless have been content to leave the management of defense in the hands of the colonists had they shown a disposition to undertake it in a systematic manner. After the Albany Plan was rejected by the assemblies, the Board of Trade recommended a scheme by which commissioners, appointed in each colony by the assembly and approved by the governor, should determine the military establishment necessary in time of peace, and apportion the expense for maintaining it among the several provinces on the basis of wealth and population. Shirley and Franklin were heartily in favor of such a plan. But there is no reason to think that a single assembly could have been got to agree to it, or to any measure of a like nature. "Everybody cries, a union is absolutely necessary," said Franklin in amused disgust, "but when it comes to the manner and form of the union, their weak noddles are perfectly distracted." The colonies being thus unwilling to coöperate in the management of their own defense, the Board of Trade could see no alternative but an "interposition of the authority of Parliament." This alternative the Government therefore adopted; and the permanent establishment of British troops in America to overawe the Indians and maintain the conquest of Canada, already proposed by Townshend, was now determined upon by Grenville. It was the opinion of Grenville, as well as of most men in England and of many in America, that the colonies might rightly be expected to contribute something to the support of such troops. The Mutiny Act, requiring the assemblies to furnish certain utensils and provisions to soldiers in barracks, was now first extended to the colonies; and for raising in America a portion of the general maintenance fund, the ministry, with some reluctance on the part of Grenville, proposed a stamp tax as the most equitable and the easiest to be levied and collected. "I am, however, not set upon this tax," said Grenville. "If the Americans dislike it, and prefer any other method of raising the money themselves, I shall be content." It was soon apparent that the Americans did dislike it; and in February, 1765, Franklin, speaking for the colonial agents then in England, urged that the money be raised in "the old constitutional way," by requisitions upon the several assemblies. "Can you agree on the proportions each colony should raise?" inquired the minister. Franklin admitted that it was impossible; and Grenville, more concerned with what was equitable than with what was politic, pressed forward with his measure to require the use of stamped paper for nearly all legal documents and customs papers, for appointments to offices carrying a salary of £20 except military and judicial offices, for grants of franchises, for licenses to sell liquor, for packages containing playing-cards and dice, for all pamphlets, advertisements, hand-bills, calendars, almanacs, and newspapers. The revenue which might be raised by this law, estimated at £60,000, was to be paid into the exchequer, and to be expended solely for supporting the British troops in America.

At the time there were few men either in England or in the colonies who imagined that the Stamp Act would release forces that were destined to disrupt the empire. It was scarcely debated in the House of Commons. "There has been nothing of note in Parliament," wrote Horace Walpole, "but one slight day on the American taxes." And even in America few men supposed that it would not be executed, however much they might dislike it. It was impossible to prevent the passage of the act, Franklin assured his friends. "We might as well have hindered the sun's setting. That we could not do. But since 't is down, my friend, ... let us make as good a night as we can. We may still light candles." It was not candles alone that were lighted, but a conflagration; a conflagration which soon spread from the New World to the Old and burned away, as with a renovating flame, so much that was both good and bad in that amiable eighteenth-century society.

II

If the experience of the last French war convinced the English Government that a stricter control of the colonies was necessary, the conquest of Canada convinced the colonists that they could defend themselves, and at the same time removed the only danger which had ever made them feel the need of English protection. As early as 1711, Le Ronde Denys warned the New Englanders that the expulsion of the French from North America would leave England free to suppress colonial liberties, while another French writer predicted that it would rather enable, the colonies to "unite, shake off the yoke of the English monarchy, and erect themselves into a democracy." The prediction was often repeated. Between 1730 and 1763, many men, among them Montesquieu, Peter Kalm, and Turgot, asserted that colonial dependence upon England would not long outlast the French occupation of Canada. The opposition to Grenville's colonial legislation, which gathered force with every additional measure, seemed now about to confirm these predictions.

No single law of these early years would have caused its proper part of the resistance which all of them in fact brought about. A measure of oppression could be attributed to each of them, but the pressure of any one was not felt by all classes or all colonies alike. The Proclamation of 1763 was an offense chiefly to speculators in land, and to those border communities that had fought to open free passage to the West only to find the fertile Ohio valleys "reserved to the Indians"--the very tribes which had brought death and desolation to the frontier. The Sugar Act was a greater grievance to the New England distiller of rum and the exporters of fish and lumber than it was to the rice and tobacco planters of the South. New York merchants were seriously affected by the Currency Act, which scarcely touched Massachusetts, and which, in Virginia, meant money in the pockets of creditors, but bore hardly on debtors and the speculators who bought silver at Williamsburg in depreciated paper in order to sell it at par in Philadelphia. The famous Stamp Act itself chiefly concerned the printers, lawyers, officeholders, the users of the custom-house, and the litigious class that employed the courts to enforce or resist the payment of debt.

Only when regarded as a whole was the policy of Grenville seen to spell disaster. Each new law seemed carefully designed to increase the burdens imposed by every other. The Sugar Act, for example, taken by itself, was perhaps the most grievous of all. The British sugar islands, to which it virtually restricted the West Indian trade of the Northern colonies, offered no sufficient market for their lumber and provisions, nor could they, like the Spanish islands, furnish the silver needed by continental merchants to settle London balances on account of imported English commodities. Exports to the West Indies and imports from England must, therefore, be reduced; the one event would cripple essential colonial industries such as the fisheries and the distilling of rum, while the other would force the colonists to devote themselves to those very domestic manufactures which it was the policy of the English Government to discourage. These disadvantages, which attached to the Sugar Act itself, were accentuated by almost every other cardinal measure of Grenville's colonial policy. With the chief source of colonial specie cut off, the Stamp Act increased the demand for it by £60,000; when the need for paper money as a legal tender was more than ever felt, its further use was shortly to be forbidden altogether; when the diminished demand for labor, occasioned by restrictions upon the West Indian trade, was likely to stimulate migration into the interior, the West was closed to settlement. And the close of the French war, which had raised the debt of the colonies to an unprecedented figure, was the moment selected for restricting trade, remodeling the monetary system, and imposing upon the colonies taxes for protection against a danger which no longer threatened. Little wonder that to the colonial mind the measures of Grenville carried all the force of an argument from design: any part, separated from the whole, might signify nothing; the perfect correlation of the completed scheme was evidence enough that somewhere a malignant purpose was at work bent upon the destruction of English liberties.

Members of the House of Commons who yawned while voting the new laws were amazed at the commotion they raised in America. In all the colonies scarcely a man was to be found to defend any of them. Those afterwards known as loyalists, with Hutchinson, Colden, Dulaney, and Galloway as their most distinguished representatives, were of one accord with the Lees, with Patrick Henry, with Dickinson, and the Adamses, in asserting that the Stamp Act and the Sugar Act were inexpedient and unjust. Hutchinson urged the repeal of both measures. Colden assured the Board of Trade that the Currency Act, so far as New York was concerned, was uncalled for and very prejudicial to colonial industry and the manufactures of England. The three-penny duty on molasses, said Samuel Adams, will make useless one third of the fish now caught, and so remittances to Spain, Portugal, and other countries, "through which money circulates into England for the purchase of her goods of all kinds," must cease. "Unless we are allowed a paper currency," Daniel Coxe wrote to Reed, "they need not send tax gatherers, for they can gather nothing--never was money so very scarce as now." Governor Bernard expressed the belief that if the proposed measures were executed "there will soon be an end to the specie currency of Massachusetts." Undoubtedly the general opinion of America was voiced by the Stamp Act Congress when it affirmed that the payment of the new duties would prove, "from the scarcity of specie, ... absolutely impracticable," and render the colonists "unable to purchase the manufactures of Great Britain."

But the colonists did not ground their case upon expediency alone, or rest content with argument and protest. And the bad eminence of the Stamp Act was due to the fact that it alone, of all the measures of Grenville, enabled the defenders of colonial rights to shift the issue in debate and bring deeds to the support of words. Last of all the cardinal measures to be enacted, the Stamp Act attracted to itself the multiplied resentments accumulated by two years of hostile legislation. It alone could with plausible arguments be declared illegal as well as unjust, and it was the one of all most open to easy and conspicuous nullification in fact. The Proclamation of 1763 was, indeed, nullified almost as effectively, but with no accompaniment of harangue, or of burning effigies, or crowds of angry men laying violent hands upon the law's officials. If the Stamp Act seemed the one intolerable grievance, round which the decisive conflict raged, it was because it raised the issue of fundamental rights, and because it could be of no effect without its material symbols--concrete and visible bundles of stamped papers which could be seen and handled as soon as they were landed, and the very appearance of which was a challenge to action.

While all Americans agreed that the Stamp Act, like the Sugar Act, was unjust, or at least inexpedient, not all affirmed that it was illegal. Hutchinson was one of many who protested against the law, but admitted that Parliament had not exceeded its authority in passing it. But the colonial assemblies, and a host of busy pamphleteers who set themselves to expose the pernicious act, agreed with Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, with the conciliatory John Dickinson, and the learned Dulaney, that the colonists, possessing all the rights of native-born Englishmen, could not legally be deprived of that fundamental right of all, the right of being taxed only by representatives of their own choosing. Duties laid to regulate trade, from which a revenue was sometimes derived, were either declared not to be taxes, or else were distinguished, as "external" taxes which Parliament was competent to impose, from "internal" taxes which Parliament could impose only upon those who were represented in that body. And the colonies were not represented in Parliament; no, not even in that "virtual" sense which might be affirmed in the case of many unfranchised English cities, such as Manchester and Liverpool; from which it followed that the Stamp Act, unquestionably an internal tax, was a manifest violation of colonial rights.

The ablest arguments against the Stamp Act were those set forth by John Dickinson, of Philadelphia, and Daniel Dulaney, of Maryland: the ablest and the best tempered. Unfortunately, the conciliatory note was all but lost in the chorus of angry protest and bitter denunciation that was designed to spur the Americans on to reckless action rather than to induce the ministers to withdraw an unwise measure. Clever lawyers seeking political advantage, such as John Morin Scott; zealots who knew not the meaning of compromise, such as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams; preachers of the gospel, such as Jonathan Mayhew, who took this occasion to denounce the doctrine of passive resistance, and with over-subtle logic identified the defense of civil liberty with the cause of religion and morality;--such men as these, with intention or all unwittingly raised public opinion to that high tension from which spring insurrection and the irresponsible action of mobs. Everywhere stamp distributors, voluntarily or to the accompaniment of threats, resigned their offices. Stamped papers were no sooner landed than they were seized and destroyed, or returned to England, or transmitted for safe-keeping to the custody of local officials pledged not to deliver them. Often inspired and sometimes led by citizens of repute who were "not averse to a little rioting," the mobs were recruited from the quays and the grogshops, and once in action were difficult to control. In true mob fashion they testified to their patriotism by parading the streets at night, "breaking a few glass windows," and destroying the property of men, such as Hutchinson and Colden, whose unseemly wealth or lukewarm opinions were an offense to stalwart defenders of liberty.

The November riots disposed of the stamps but not of the Stamp Act. Business had to go on as usual without stamps or cease altogether. Either course would make the law of no effect; but the latter course would be a strictly constitutional method of resistance, while the former would involve a violation of law. Many preferred the constitutional method. Let the courts adjourn, they said, and offices remain vacant; let print-shops close, and ships lie in harbor: English merchants will soon enough feel the pressure of slack business and force ministers to another line of conduct. A good plan enough for the man of independent fortune, for the judge whose income was assured, or the thrifty merchant who, signing a non-importation agreement, had laid in a stock of goods to be sold at high prices. But the wage-earner, the small shopkeeper who was soon sold out, the printer who lived on his weekly margin of profit, the rising lawyer whose income rose or fell with his fees: such men were of another mind. The inactivity of the courts "will make a large chasm in my affairs, if it should not reduce me to distress," John Adams confides to his _Diary_ in December; and adds naïvely that he was just on the point of winning a reputation and a competence "when this execrable project was set on foot for my ruin as well as that of my country." Men who saw their incomes dwindle were easily disposed to think that the cessation of business was an admission of the legitimacy of the law, a kind of betrayal of the cause. And it was to counteract the influence of lukewarm conservatives, men who were content to "turn and shift, to luff up, and bear away," that those who regarded themselves as the only true patriots, uniting in an association of the Sons of Liberty, set about the task of "putting business in motion again in the usual channels without stamps."

The object of the Sons of Liberty was in part, but only in part, attained. Newspapers were printed as usual, and certainly there was no lack of pamphlets. Retailers did not hesitate to sell playing-cards or dice, nor were the grogshops closed for want of stamped licenses. Yet the courts of law were nearly everywhere closed for a time, and if the clamor of creditors and the influence of lawyers forced them to open in most places, in New York and Massachusetts, at least, they did little business or none at all so long as the Stamp Act remained on the statute-book. But it was in connection with commercial activities that the plan of the conservatives was most effective. Non-importation agreements, generally signed by the merchants, were the more readily kept because the customs officials were inclined to refuse any but stamped clearance papers, while the war vessels in the harbors intercepted ships that attempted to sail without them. As the conservatives had predicted, the effect was soon felt in England. Thousands of artisans in Manchester and Leeds were thrown out of employment. Glasgow, more dependent than other cities upon the American market, loudly complained that its ruin was impending; and the merchants of London, Bristol, and many other towns, asserting that American importers were indebted to them several million pounds sterling, which they were willing but unable to pay, petitioned Parliament to take immediate action for their relief.

And, indeed, to ignore the situation in America was now impossible. The law had to be withdrawn or made effective by force of arms. When the matter came up in Parliament in January, 1766, Grenville, as leader of the opposition, still claimed that the Stamp Act was a reasonable measure, and one that must be maintained, more than ever now that the colonists had insolently denied its legality, and with violence amounting to insurrection prevented its enforcement. But the Rockingham Whigs, whose traditions, even if somewhat obscured, marked them out as the defenders of English liberties, were pledged to the repeal of the unfortunate law. Lord Camden, in defense of the colonial contention, staked his legal reputation on the assertion that Parliament had no right to tax America. Pitt was of the same opinion. Following closely the argument in Dulaney's pamphlet, which he held up as a masterly performance, the Great Commoner declared that "taxation is no part of the governing or legislating power." He was told that America had resisted. "I rejoice that America has resisted," he cried in words that sounded a trumpet call throughout the colonies. "Three millions of people, so dead to all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves, would have been fit instruments to make slaves of all the rest.... America, if she fell, would fall like the strong man with his arms around the pillars of the constitution." More convincing than the eloquence of Pitt was the evidence offered by the merchants' petitions, and by the shrewd and weighty replies of Franklin in his famous examination in the House of Commons, to show that the policy of Grenville, legal or not, was an economic blunder. The Stamp Act was accordingly repealed, March 18, 1766; and a few weeks later, as a further concession, the Sugar Act was modified by reducing the duty on molasses from 3_d._ to 1_d._, and some new laws were passed intended to remove the obstacles which made it difficult for the Northern and Middle colonies to trade directly with England. Yet the ministers had no intention of yielding on the main point: the theoretical right of Parliament to bind the colonies in all matters whatever was formally asserted in the Declaratory Act; while the reënactment of the Mutiny Law indicated that the practical policy of establishing British troops in America for defense was to be continued.

III

The repeal of the Stamp Act was the occasion for general rejoicing in America. Loyal addresses were voted to the king, and statues erected to commemorate the virtues and achievements of Pitt. Imperfectly aware of the conditions in England that had contributed to the happy event, it was taken by the colonists to mean that their theory of the constitution had been accepted. The Declaratory Act was thought to be no more than a formal concession to the dignity of government; and although the Mutiny Act was causing trouble in New York, and merchants were petitioning for a further modification of the Trade Laws, most men looked forward to the speedy reëstablishment of the old-time cordial relations between the two countries. The Sons of Liberty no longer assembled; rioting ceased; the noise of incessant debate was stilled. "The repeal of the Stamp Act," John Adams wrote in November, 1766, "has hushed into silence almost every popular clamor, and composed every wave of popular disorder into a smooth and peaceful calm."

And no doubt most Englishmen would willingly have let the question rest. But an unwise king, stubbornly bent on having his way; precise administrators of the Grenville type, concerned for the loss of a farthing due; egoists like Wedderburne, profoundly ignorant of colonial affairs, convulsed and readily convinced by the light sarcasms with which Soame Jenyns disposed of the pretensions of "our American colonies": such men waited only the opportune moment for retrieving a humiliating defeat. That moment came with the mischance that clouded the mind of Pitt and withdrew him from the direction of a government of all the factions. The responsibility relinquished by the Great Commoner was assumed by Charles Townshend, Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man well fitted to foster the spirit of discord which then reigned, to the king's great content, in that "mosaic" ministry. In January, 1767, without the knowledge of the Cabinet, this "director of the revels" pledged himself in the House of Commons to find "a mode by which a revenue may be drawn from America without offense." Since the Americans admit that external taxes are legal, he said, let us lay an external tax. Backed by the king, he accordingly procured from Parliament, in May of the same year, an act laying duties on glass, red and white lead, paper, and tea. The revenue to be derived from the law, estimated at £40,000, was to be applied to the payment of the salaries of royal governors and of judges in colonial courts. A second act established a board of commissioners to be stationed in America for the better enforcement of the Trade Acts; while a third, known as the Restraining Act, suspended the New York Assembly until it should have made provision for the troops according to the terms of the Mutiny Act.

The Townshend Acts revived the old controversy, not quite in the old manner. Mobs were less in evidence than in 1765, although riots occasioned by business depression disturbed the peace of New York in the winter of 1770, and the presence of the troops in Boston, the very sight of which was an offense to that civic community, resulted in the famous "massacre" of the same year. Yet the duties were collected without much difficulty; and although the income derived from them amounted to almost nothing, the commissioners reorganized the customs service so successfully that an annual revenue of £30,000 was obtained at a cost of £13,000 to collect. Forcible resistance was, indeed, less practicable in dealing with the Townshend Acts than in the case of the Stamp Act; but it was also true that men of character and substance, many of whom in 1765 had not been "averse to a little rioting," now realized that mobs and the popular mass meeting undermined at once the security of property rights and their own long-established supremacy in colonial politics. Desiring to protect their privileges against encroachment from the English Government without sharing them with the unfranchised populace, they were therefore more concerned than before to employ only constitutional and peaceful methods of obtaining redress. To this end they resorted to non-importation agreements, to petition and protest, so well according with English tradition, and to the reasoned argument, of which the most notable in this period was that series of _Farmer's Letters_ which made the name of John Dickinson familiar in Europe and a household word throughout the colonies.

If in point of action the defenders of colonial rights were inclined to greater moderation, in point of constitutional theory they were now constrained to take a more radical stand. When Franklin, in his examination before the House of Commons in 1766, was pressed by Townshend to say whether Americans might not as readily object to external as to internal taxes, he shrewdly replied: "Many arguments have lately been used here to show them that there is no difference;--at present they do not reason so; but in time they may possibly be convinced by these arguments." That time was now at hand. As early as 1766, Richard Bland, of Virginia, had declared that the colonies, like Hanover, were bound to England only through the Crown. This might be over-bold; but the old argument was inadequate to meet the present dangers, inasmuch as the Townshend Acts, the establishment of troops in Boston and New York, and the attempt to force Massachusetts to rescind her resolutions of protest, all seemed more designed to restrict the legislative independence of the colonies than to assert the right of Parliamentary taxation. Franklin himself, to whom it scarcely occurred in 1765 that the legality of the Stamp Act might be denied, could not now master the Massachusetts principle of "subordination," or understand what that distinction was which Dickinson labored to draw between the right of taxing the colonies and the right of regulating their trade. "The more I have thought and read on the subject," he wrote in 1768, "the more I find ... that no middle doctrine can well be maintained, I mean not clearly with intelligible arguments. Something might be made of either of the extremes: that Parliament has a power to make all laws for us, or that it has a power to make no laws for us; and I think the arguments for the latter more numerous and weighty than those for the former." Before the Townshend duties were repealed, the colonists were entirely familiar with the doctrine of complete legislative independence; and the popular cry of "no representation no taxation" began to be replaced by the far more radical cry of "no representation no legislation."

In support of argument and protest, the colonists once more resorted to the practice of non-importation. The earliest agreement was signed by Boston merchants in October, 1767. But a far more rigid association, not to import with trifling exceptions any goods from England or Holland, was formed in New York in August, 1768, and agreed to by the merchants in most colonies. Better observed in New York than elsewhere, it was so far maintained as to reduce the English importations into the Middle and Northern colonies from £1,333,000 in 1768 to £480,000 in 1769. In inducing the Ministry of Lord North to repeal the duties the association played its part; but from the point of view of the conservatives it was not without its disadvantages. The importation of goods from Holland was forbidden in order to catch the smuggler; but the smuggler ignored the agreement as readily as he signed it. Yet for a time the association was no burden to the fair trader, who in anticipation had doubled his orders, or sold "old, moth-eaten goods" at high prices. The merchants were "great patriots," Chandler told John Adams, "while their old rags lasted; but as soon as they were sold at enormous prices, they were for importing." And in truth the fair trader's monopoly could not outlast his stock, whereas the smuggler's business improved the longer the association endured. In the spring of 1770, the New York merchants, with their shelves empty, complaining that Boston was more active in "resolving what it ought to do than in doing what it had resolved," declared that the association no longer served "any other purpose than tying the hands of honest men, to let rogues, smugglers, and men of no character plunder their country." Supported by a majority of the inhabitants of the city, and undeterred by the angry protests of the Sons of Liberty, they accordingly agreed to "a general importation of goods from Great Britain, except teas and other articles which are or may be taxed." Boston and Philadelphia soon followed the lead of New York, and before the year was out the policy of absolute non-importation had broken down.

The adoption of the modified non-importation policy was the more readily approved by conservative patriots everywhere inasmuch as the English Government had already made concessions on its part. It was on March 5, the very day of the Boston massacre, that Lord North, characterizing the law as "preposterous," moved the repeal of all the Townshend duties, saving, for principle's sake, that on tea alone. For the second time a crisis seemed safely passed, and cordial relations seemed once more restored. British officers concerned in the massacre, defended by the patriots John Adams and Josiah Quincy, were honorably acquitted in a Massachusetts court. The New York Assembly, recently permitted to issue bills of credit to the extent of £120,000, made annual provision for the troops, and friendly relations between soldiers and citizens were again resumed. Imports from England at once rose to an unprecedented figure. Tea was procured from Holland; the 3_d._ duty well-nigh forgotten. In England most men regarded the ten years' quarrel as finally composed. For three years the colonies were barely once mentioned in Parliament, and a page or two of the _Annual Register_ was thought sufficient space to chronicle the doings of America. America also seemed content. During these uneventful years the high enthusiasm for liberty burned low, even in Massachusetts. "How easily the people change," laments John Adams, "and give up their friends and their interests." And Samuel Adams himself, implacable patriot, working as tirelessly as ever, but deserted by Hancock and Otis and half his quondam supporters, had so far lost his commanding influence as to inspire the sympathy of his friends and the tolerant pity of his enemies.

It was hardly for the purpose of restoring the prestige of Samuel Adams, though nothing could have been better designed to that end, that Lord North, rising in the House of Commons on April 17, 1773, offered a resolution permitting the East India Company to export teas stored in its English warehouses free of all duties save the 3_d._ tax in America. Many years later the Whig pamphleteer Almon asserted that the measure was inspired by the king's desire to "try the question with America." The statement is unsupported by contemporary evidence. Lord North said that the measure was intended solely in the interest of the Company, which had in fact but just been rescued from bankruptcy by the interposition of the Government, and the resolution was passed into law without comment and without opposition. Information obtained from reliable American merchants determined the directors to take advantage of the opportunity thus offered. They were assured that, although there was strong opposition to the 3_d._ tax, "mankind are in general governed by interest," and "the Company can afford their teas cheaper than the Americans can smuggle them from foreigners, which puts the success of the design beyond a doubt." Acting upon this assurance, cargoes of assorted teas amounting to 2051 chests were sent to the four ports of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

But the American merchants who advised this step had fatally misjudged the situation. The approach of the tea-ships was the signal for instant and general opposition. Smugglers opposed the East India Company venture because it threatened to destroy the very lucrative Holland trade; the fair trader because it conferred a monopoly upon an English corporation, but above all because, if the Company could sell its tea, the non-importation agreement, that favorite conservative method of obtaining redress, at once effective and legal, would have proved after all a useless measure. Unless they were ready for decisive action, the long struggle against Parliamentary taxation must end in submission. Many conservatives were content to try non-consumption agreements; but it was a foregone conclusion that if the tea was once landed, it would be sold, and a great majority were in favor of destroying it or sending it back to England. The latter method was employed in New York and Philadelphia; but in Boston Governor Hutchinson refused to issue return clearance papers until the cargoes were discharged. There the radicals, with the moral support of the great body of conservative citizens, carried the day. On December 16, 1773, undisturbed by the English ships of war, men disguised as Mohawks, "no ordinary Mohawks, you may depend upon it," boarded the East India Company's vessels and emptied its tea into Boston Harbor.

Neither the Government nor the people of England were now in any mood for further concessions. The average Briton had given little thought to America since the repeal of the Stamp Act. He easily recalled that three years before the ministers had good-naturedly withdrawn the major part of the Townshend duties, and since then had rested in the confident belief that the quarrel was happily ended. The destruction of the tea seemed to him a gratuitous insult, for it passed his understanding that the Americans should resent a measure which enabled them to buy their tea cheaper than he could himself; and he was, therefore, ready to back the Government in any measures it might take for asserting the authority of Parliament over these excitable colonists whose whims had too long been seriously regarded. This task the Government, now for the first time effectively controlled by the king, was quite willing to undertake, all the more so on account of the recent burning of the Gaspée and the dishonorable publication of Hutchinson's letters. By overwhelming majorities Parliament accordingly passed the coercive acts, closing Boston Harbor to commerce until the town made compensation to the East India Company, remodeling the Massachusetts charter in such a manner as to give to the Crown more effective control of the executive and administrative functions of government, making provision for quartering troops upon the inhabitants, and providing for the trial in England of persons indicted for capital offenses committed while aiding the magistrates to suppress tumults or insurrection.

Drastic as these measures were, they were regarded in England as the necessary last resort, unless the Government, hitherto so indulgent and long-suffering, was prepared to ignore the most flagrant flouting of its laws and to renounce all effective control of the colonies. In the colonies, on the other hand, they were generally thought, even by conservative patriots, to be clear evidence of a bold and unblushing design, unapproved by the majority of Englishmen, no doubt, but harbored in secret for many years by the king's hireling ministers, to enslave America as a preliminary step in the destruction of English liberties. Firm in this belief, the colonists elected their deputies to the First Continental Congress, which was called to meet at Philadelphia on the 1st of September, 1774, in order to unite upon the most effective measures for defending their common rights.

IV

The causes which had brought the two countries to this pass lie deeper than the hostile designs of ministers, or the ambition of colonial agitators bent on revolution. It has been said that the Revolution was the result of an unfortunate misunderstanding. A misunderstanding it was, sure enough, in one sense; but if by misunderstanding is meant lack of information there is more truth in the famous epigram which has it that Grenville lost the colonies because he read the American dispatches, which none of his predecessors had done. In the decade before the Declaration of Independence every exchange of ideas drove the two countries farther apart, and personal contact alienated more often than it reconciled the two peoples. It was the years of actual residence in England that cooled Franklin's love for the mother country. "Had I never been in the American colonies," he writes in 1772, "but was to form my judgement of civil society from what I have lately seen, I should never advise a nation of savages to admit of civilization." Governor Hutchinson, one of the most aristocratic and most English of Americans, was amazed to find himself but an alien in a far country during the years of exile which gave him his first sight of English society since 1742. Cultivated man of the world as he thought himself, but Puritan still, it was with a profound sense of disillusionment that he mingled with the "best people" of England. How pathetic are those London letters of this unhappy exile who likes the people of Bristol best because they remind him of Boston select-men, whose one desire is to return home and lie buried in the land of his fathers! It is not too fanciful to think that if Hutchinson had lived earlier in England he might have died a patriot, whereas had Franklin seen as little of England as his son he might have ended his days as a Loyalist. It was "Old England" indeed that these cultivated Americans loved: the England of Magna Carta and the Petition of Right; the England of Drake, of Pym and Falkland, and of the Glorious Revolution; the little island kingdom that harbored liberty and was the builder of an empire justly governed: they thought of England in terms of her history, scarcely aware that her best traditions were more cherished in the New World than in the Old.

Rarely, indeed, would an appeal to England's best traditions have met with less cordial response among her rulers. For during the decade following the Peace of Paris the vision of liberty was half obscured by the vision of empire. Observant contemporaries noted the sudden rise of an insular egoism following the war that in Voltaire's phrase saw "England victorious in four parts of the world." Cowper was not alone in complaining "that thieves at home must hang, but he that puts into his over-gorged and bloated purse the wealth of Indian provinces, escapes"; and Horace Walpole has recorded in his incomparable letters, with a cynical and an engaging wit which reflects the spirit of the times better than his own sentiments, the corruption and prodigality, the levity and low aims of that generation. With many noble exceptions, the men who gathered round the young king, the men who "lived on their country or died for her," who too often admired if they could not always emulate the brutal degradation of a Sandwich or the matchless _abandon_ of the young Charles James Fox, had singularly little in common with those American communities which the Frenchman Ségur fancied "might have been made to order out of the imagination of Rousseau or Fénelon."

Had they known them better they would have liked them less; and in fact ten years' "discussion of the points in controversy only served to put farther asunder" men who reasoned from different premises and in a different temper. Englishmen were generally content with the fact of power registered in legal precedents; but Americans, profoundly convinced that they deserved to be free, were ever concerned with its moral justification. "To what purpose is it to ring everlasting changes ... on the cases of Manchester and ... Sheffield," cried James Otis. "If these places are not represented, _they ought to be_." This _ought_ is the fundamental premise of the entire colonial argument. "Shall we Proteus-like perpetually change our ground, assume every moment some new strange shape, to defend, to evade?" asks a Virginian in 1774. This was precisely what could not be avoided. For the end determined the means. If, therefore, the distinction between external and internal taxes was untenable, it convinced the American, not that Parliament had a right to tax the colonies, but only that it had no right to legislate for them. And when Englishmen grounded the legislative rights of Parliament upon the solid basis of positive law, the colonial patriot appealed with solemn fervor to natural law and the abstract rights of man. Little wonder that the more logical the American argument became the less intelligible it appeared to most Englishmen, and what seemed at last the very axioms of politics to the colonial radical struck the conservative British mind as the sophistry of men bent on revolution.

If ten years' discussion convinced American patriots that they possessed more rights than their philosophy had yet dreamed of, constant dwelling on their condition developed a sensitiveness which registered oppression where none had been felt before. What a profound influence had those liberty-pole festivals so assiduously promoted by men like Samuel Adams and Alexander MacDougall: "for they tinge the minds of the people; they impregnate them with the sentiments of liberty; they render the people fond of their leaders in the cause, and averse and bitter against all opposers." In August, 1769, John Adams dined with three hundred and fifty Sons of Liberty at Dorchester, in an open field. "This," he said, noting the effect of the patriotic toasts and the inspiring popular songs, "is cultivating the sensations of freedom." For a decade these excitable Americans did, indeed, cultivate the sensations of freedom; went out periodically, as it were, to "snuff the approach of tyranny on every tainted breeze"; a practice which, becoming habitual, developed a peculiar type of mind which marked a man out from his fellows. Such a man was William Hall, Esquire, of North Carolina, at whose house Josiah Quincy stopped; "a most sensible, polite gentleman, and, although a Crown officer, a man replete with the sentiments of general liberty." How useless, indeed, were arguments drawn from positive law, or the citation of many legal precedents, to convince men _replete with sentiments of general liberty!_

And those who so assiduously cultivated the sensations of freedom could not easily deny themselves the martyr's crown. Like the Girondins in France at a later day, many American patriots, such as Josiah Quincy himself and Richard Henry Lee, have somewhat the air of loving liberty because they had read the classics. They liked to think of themselves as exhibiting "a resolution which would not have disgraced the Romans in their best days"; and seem almost to welcome persecution in order to prove that the spirit of Regulus still lived. It was no mere dispute in the practical art of politics that engaged them, but a cosmic conflict between the unconditioned good and the powers of darkness. "It is impossible that vice can so triumph over virtue," writes Lee in all soberness, "as that the slaves of Tyranny should succeed against the brave and generous asserters of Liberty and the just rights of Humanity." Even the common people, said Joseph Warren, "take an honest pride in being singled out by a tyrannous administration." Knowing that "their merits, not their crimes, make them the objects of Ministerial vengeance," they refused to pay a penny tax with the religious fervor of men doing battle for the welfare of the human race. Consider the dry common sense with which Dr. Johnson disposed of the alleged Tyranny of Great Britain: "But I say, if the rascals are so prosperous, oppression has agreed with them, or there has been no oppression"; and contrast it with the reverent spirit which pervades the writings of John Dickinson or the formal protests of the Continental Congress. Reconciliation was indeed difficult between men who could treat the matter lightly, in the manner of Soame Jenyns, and men who, with John Adams, thought themselves one company with that "mighty line of heroes and confessors and martyrs who since the beginning of history have done battle for the dignity and happiness of human nature against the leagued assailants of both."

This lyric enthusiasm for liberty, and the radical political theories which were its most formal expression, were all the more incomprehensible to the average Briton inasmuch as they were the result of a conflict of interests in America quite as much as of English legislation. "The decree has gone forth," said John Adams, "that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth, must be established in America." Not for home rule alone was the Revolution fought, but for the democratization of American society as well. The quarrel with Great Britain would hardly have ended in war, had the landed and commercial interests, those little aristocracies which had hitherto controlled colonial politics, been free to conduct it in their own fashion. At every stage in the controversy, the most uncompromising opponents of Parliamentary taxation were those who felt themselves inadequately represented in colonial assemblies. Fear of British tyranny was most felt by those who had little influence in shaping colonial laws. And half the bitter denunciation of corruption in England was inspired by jealous dislike of those high-placed families in America whose ostentatious lives and condescending manners were an offense to the laborious poor, or to men of talent ambitious to rise from obscurity to influence and power.

What Heaven-sent opportunity, then, was this quarrel with Britain for all those who resented the genial complacence with which fortune's favorites, "with vanity enough to call themselves the better sort," monopolized privilege in nearly every colony! The Virginia Stamp Act Resolutions, which according to Governor Bernard of Massachusetts sounded "an alarum bell to the disaffected," would assuredly never have been passed by the Pendletons or the Blands, nor yet by Peyton Randolph, who swore with an oath that he would have given £500 for a single vote to defeat them. They were carried by the western counties under the leadership of Patrick Henry, recently elected from the back country to sit in sober home-spun garb with the modish aristocrats of the tide-water. Product of the small farmer democracy beyond the "Fall Line," uniting the implacable temper of the Calvinist with the humanitarian sentiments of the eighteenth-century _philosophe_, he joined hands with Jefferson and the Lees to form the radical party. It was this party which carried Virginia into rebellion against England. And it was this party which destroyed the domination of the little coterie of great planters by abolishing entail, disestablishing the Anglican Church, and proclaiming a state constitution founded, in theory if not altogether in fact, upon the principles of liberty and equality and the rights of man.

From the point of view of most cultivated and conservative Americans, admirable indeed were the restrained and conciliatory arguments of John Dickinson in support of the right of the colonies to be taxed only by their own representatives. But how vulnerable was his position in defending the existing government in Pennsylvania, by which the three Quaker counties, with less than half the population of the province, elected twenty-four of the thirty-six deputies in the assembly! "We apprehend," so runs a petition from the German and Scotch-Irish counties of the interior, "that as freemen and English subjects, we have an indisputable title to the same privileges and immunities with his Majesty's other subjects who reside in the counties of Philadelphia, Chester, and Bucks." German Protestants and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, resenting Quaker domination more than they feared British tyranny, and the mechanics and artisans and small shopkeepers of Philadelphia, unwilling "to give up our liberties for the sake of a few smiles once a year," made the strength of the radical and revolutionary party in Pennsylvania. Opposed to all attempts to infringe their rights "either here or on the other side of the Atlantic," they at last gained control of the anti-British movement, and made use of it, employing the very arguments which Dickinson and his kind had used in resistance to British oppression, to overthrow the Quaker-merchant oligarchy that had so long governed the colony in its own interests.

One day in 1772 old Governor Shirley, then living in retirement, heard that the "Boston Seat" was responsible for the opposition to Hutchinson's administration. When they told him who it was that made the Boston Seat, he is said to have replied: "Mr. Cushing I knew, and Mr. Hancock I knew, but where the devil this brace of Adamses came from I know not." He might have been told that they had risen from obscurity to inject into politics the acrid and self-righteous spirit of their Puritan ancestors. It would be interesting to inquire to what issue the quarrel with England would have been conducted had it been left to Mr. Cushing and Mr. Hancock. Half the persistent opposition of the brace of Adamses to British legislation was inspired by the commanding position of a few families in Boston--the Hutchinsons and Olivers, who "will rule and overbear in all things." As a youngster John Adams had confided to his _Diary_: "I will not ... confine myself to a chamber for nothing. I'll have some boon in return, exchange: fame, fortune, or something." Laborious days had gained him little. "Thirty seven years, more than half the life of man, are run out," he complains in 1773, "and I have my own and my children's fortunes to make." Yet there was his boyhood friend, Jonathan Sewall, already attorney-general, "rewarded ... with six thousand pounds a year, for propagating as many ... slanders against his country as ever fell from the pen of a sycophant." And the Hutchinsons and Olivers! With what concentrated bitterness does the young lawyer write of these men who, he is convinced, had submitted to be ministerial tools for the aggrandizement, of their families. His bitterness is the greater, and his conscious rectitude the more obtrusive, because he also, the virtuous Adams, might have sat in that gallery. For the wily Hutchinson had offered him the lucrative post of solicitor-general--the open road to power; but he had declined it; he could not be bought by the man "whose character and conduct have been the cause for laying a foundation for perpetual discontent and uneasiness between Britain and the colonies, of perpetual struggle of one party for wealth and power at the expense of the liberties of this country, and of perpetual contention in the other party to preserve them." Not in England was the plot hatched, but in Boston itself; and much brooding on his injuries and his abnegations had brought Adams to the pass, in 1774, that he could set down the names of the three "original conspirators."

It was this opposition of interests in America that chiefly made men extremists on either side. Adams would have been less radical had Hutchinson and Jonathan Sewall been more so; and perhaps Hutchinson and Sewall might have been more loyal patriots had the brace of Adamses been less bitter ones. Most of those who in the end became Loyalists were men who had once been opposed to the ministerial policy, and many remained so to the end of their lives. But with every stage in the conflict they looked with increasing apprehension upon the growing influence of obscure leaders who proclaimed the rights of the people. The prevalence of mobs; the entrance of the unfranchised populace, by means of "body" meetings and mass meetings, into the political arena; the leveling principles and the smug self-righteousness of the patriot politicians;--all this led many a conservative to consider whether his interest were not more threatened by the insurgence of radicalism in America than by the alleged oppression of British legislation. Boston is indeed mad, Hutchinson writes in 1770. The frenzy, kept up by "two or three of the most abandoned atheist fellows in the world, united with as many precise enthusiast deacons, who head the rabble in all their meetings," was not higher "when they banished my pious great-grandmother, when they hanged the Quakers." People of "the best character and estate ... decline attending. Town Meetings where they are sure to be outvoted by men of the lowest orders." And even in Philadelphia, where, according to Joseph Reed, "there have been no mobs, the frequent appeals to the people must in time occasion a change." "We are hastening on to desperate resolutions," he assured Dartmouth, and "our most wise and sensible citizens dread the anarchy and confusion that must ensue."

They were, indeed, hastening on to desperate resolutions on that 5th of September when men from twelve colonies assembled in Carpenter's Hall to form the First Continental Congress. A body of able men, it represented the division as well as the unity that prevailed in America; for there Galloway and Isaac Low, soon to become Loyalists, sat with Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, ready to welcome independence; of one opinion that American rights were threatened, irreconcilably opposed in their methods of defending them. John Adams, traveling by easy stages to Philadelphia, had noted with some surprise how greatly the Middle colonies feared "the levelling spirit of New England"; and he now found in the Congress many men who would hear "no expression which looked like an allusion to the last appeal"; men who were quite content to confine the action of Congress to protest and negotiation, deeming a non-intercourse measure useless if voluntary and revolutionary if maintained by force. For two weeks the advantage seemed to lie with these men; but on September 17, when the famous "Suffolk Resolutions" were laid before Congress, many conservatives, unwilling to abandon a neighboring colony however much they might regret the step it had taken, voted with the radicals of New England and Virginia to approve the act which virtually put Massachusetts in a state of rebellion. The final stand of the conservatives was made eleven days later when Galloway introduced his Plan for a British American Parliament, a serious and practicable plan according to Lord Dartmouth, "almost a perfect plan," thought John Rutledge, of South Carolina, for effecting a permanent reconciliation. But the motion, upon which "warm and long debates ensued," was finally rejected by a majority of one colony, and late in October the resolution itself, and all minutes concerning it, were expunged from the records of Congress.

After the rejection of Galloway's Plan, conservatives and radicals united to formulate the non-intercourse measures, which New England delegates thought so essential, and those famous addresses--to the King, to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies--which Pitt declared to be unsurpassed for ability and moderation. Able and moderate the addresses undoubtedly were; the work of conservative deputies, designed to conciliate conservatives in America and win Whig support in England. But the important work of the First Continental Congress was embodied in the "Association," through which Congress "recommended" to the colonies the adoption of non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation agreements to become effective December 1, 1774, March 1 and September 10, 1775. From previous experience it was well understood that such agreements as these, far more drastic than any which had yet been tried, would prove ineffective if they remained purely voluntary associations; and what made the non-intercourse policy of the First Congress distasteful to conservative men were the measures taken to enforce it. To this end it was provided that there should be appointed in "every county, city, and town" a committee of inspection "whose business it shall be to observe the conduct of all persons touching the Association"; to publish the names of all who violated it; to inspect the customs entries; and to seize and dispose of all goods imported contrary to its provisions. Thus was a voluntary agreement not to do certain things transformed into a kind of general law to be enforced upon all alike by boycott and confiscation of property.

The Association of the First Congress created a revolutionary government and gave birth to the Loyalist as distinct from the conservative party. Radicals and conservatives had differed in respect to the theoretical basis of colonial rights and the most effective methods of securing redress. But the authority now assumed in the name of Congress raised the ultimate question of allegiance. Of the pamphleteers and preachers who now denounced the Association as a revolutionary measure, Samuel Seabury perceived the issue most clearly and stated it most effectively: "If I must be enslaved, let it be by a King at least, and not by a parcel of upstart, lawless committeemen." Whether to submit to the king or to the committee--this was, indeed, the fundamental question during those crucial months from November, 1774, to July, 1776. For extremists on either side, the question presented no difficulty; for conservatives like Hutchinson, who had long since lost all sympathy with prevailing measures of resistance, or for radicals like Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, who pressed eagerly forward toward independence. But in 1774 the great majority of thinking men, abhorring the notion of war or separation from England, were yet convinced that strong protest, and even a kind of forcible resistance, was justified in order to maintain their just rights. These men sooner or later found themselves "between Scylla and Charybdis ": compelled to choose what was for them the lesser evil; to acknowledge the authority of Parliament in spite of laws which they regarded as oppressive and unconstitutional, or to identify themselves with the cause of Congress however ill-advised they may have thought its action. Those men who wished to take a safe middle ground, who wished neither to renounce their country nor to mark themselves as rebels, could no longer hold together, and the conservative party disappeared: perhaps one half chose sooner or later to submit to British authority; the other half, either with deliberation or yielding insensibly to the pressure of events, went with their country.

That a majority of conservatives refused to meet this issue until after the battle of Lexington, and many not until the Declaration of Independence "closed the last door of reconciliation," was largely due to the widespread belief that if the colonies took a bold, stand the English Government would once more back down. Upon the conduct of radicals and conservatives alike, this persistent belief, one of those delusions which often change the course of history, exercised, indeed, a decisive influence. Even as high a Son of Liberty as Richard Henry Lee would have favored more cautious measures in the First Congress had he not been certain that "the same ship which carries home the resolutions will bring back the redress." Inspired among radicals partly by the feeling that so just a cause could not fail, the conviction was chiefly grounded upon information sent home by Americans residing in England. If Congress is unanimous, wrote Franklin in September, 1774, "you cannot fail of carrying your point. If you divide you are lost." Josiah Quincy, sent to England in order to get first-hand information, wrote letter after letter to men in every part of America, assuring them that the oppression of the colonies was an affair of corrupt ministers who were not supported by one in twenty of the inhabitants of Great Britain. "Corruption and the influence of the Crown hath led us into bondage," is the common cry here. "To Americans only we look for salvation." But yesterday a noble lord had assured him that, "this country will never carry on a civil war against America; we cannot, but the ministry hope to carry all by a single stroke." Certainly, he assured his friends, the common opinion here is that "if the Americans stand out, we must come to their terms."

Above all, therefore, America must stand out; she must be "firm and united," waiting the day when England would come to her terms. But the difficulty was to be firm and at the same time united; for with every measure bolder than the last, conservative men grew timid or deserted the cause to swell the ranks of the Loyalist party. It was precisely to preserve the appearance of unity where none existed that the journals of the First Congress had been falsified; for this reason alone many conservatives had voted for the Association; and in the year 1775, after the battle of Lexington had precipitated a state of war, radical members of the Second Congress voted for conciliatory petitions, and conservatives voted to take up arms against the British troops, in the hope that if the colonists showed themselves unanimous in the profession of loyalty, and at the same time unanimous in their determination to resort to forcible resistance as a last resort, the English Government would never press the matter to a conclusion.

In February, 1775, Lord North had, indeed, offered resolutions of conciliation. The measure amazed his own followers and was greeted by the Whigs with Homeric laughter. Offers of conciliation could scarcely have arrived in America at a more inopportune time,--the very moment almost when the battle of Lexington came like an alarm-bell in the night to waken men from the dream of peace. And the resolutions themselves had all the appearance of being a clever ruse designed to separate the Middle colonies from New England and Virginia, in order to destroy that very union which Americans believed to be the best hope of obtaining real concession. Such the Whigs in England asserted them to be; and generally so regarded in America, they were everywhere rejected with contempt. In November, after the non-exportation agreement became effective, when an American army was endeavoring to drive the British troops out of Boston, Lord North declared in Parliament that whereas former measures were intended as "civil corrections against civil crimes," the time was now come for prosecuting war against America as against any foreign enemy; and with the opening of the new year it was at last becoming clear, even to the most optimistic, that the English Government was prepared to exact submission at the point of the sword.

As the vain hope of conciliation died away, the radicals, under the able lead of John Adams and Richard Henry Lee, pushed on to a formal declaration of independence. This was now, indeed, the only way out for them. The non-intercourse policy, injuring America more than it injured England, had proved a hopeless failure. During the year 1775 imports fell from, £2,000,000 to £213,000; and after the non-exportation agreement became effective, business stagnation produced profound discontent and diminished the resources necessary for carrying on war. So drastic a self-denying ordinance could not be maintained, for "people will feel, and will say, that Congress oppresses them more than Parliament." Unable "to do without trade," they were "between Hawk and Buzzard"; and on April 6, 1776, the ports of America were opened to the world. "But no state will treat or trade with us," said Lee, "so long as we consider ourselves subjects of Great Britain." A declaration of independence was therefore recognized, gladly by some, with profound regret by many more, as the only alternative to submission; for it alone would make possible that military and commercial alliance with France without which America could not successfully withstand the superior power of Great Britain; and at the same time it would enable the _de facto_ colonial Governments, with a show of legality, to suppress the disaffected Loyalists and confiscate their property to the uses of the cause which they had so basely betrayed.

On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee, in behalf of the Virginia delegation and in obedience to instructions from the Virginia Assembly, accordingly moved "that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and independent states; ... that it is expedient forthwith to take the most effectual measures for forming foreign alliances"; and "that a plan of confederation be prepared and transmitted to the respective colonies for their consideration." Debated at length, the final decision, already a foregone conclusion, was deferred in deference to the wishes of the conservative Middle colonies. It was on July 2 that the momentous resolutions were finally carried; and two days later the Congress published to the world that famous declaration which derived the authority of just governments from the consent of the governed, and grounded civil society upon the inherent and inalienable rights of man. In the history of the Western world, the American Declaration of Independence was an event of outstanding importance: glittering or not, its sweeping generalities formulated those basic truths which no criticism can seriously impair, and to which the minds of men must always turn, so long as faith in democracy shall endure.

V

The men who with resolution and high hope pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the defense of these novel principles, could scarcely have foreseen the emotional reaction that was soon to follow; the profound disillusionment of those weary years when only an occasional victory came to lift the despondency occasioned by constant defeat: years when "the spirit of the people begins to flag, or the approach of danger dispirits them"; when "few of the numbers who talked so largely of death and honor" were to be found on the field of battle; when a febrile enthusiasm for liberty and the just rights of humanity seemed strangely transformed into the sordid spirit of the money-changer; those years of the drawn-out war when drudgery in obscure committee rooms was valued above declamation and the practical sense of Robert Morris counted for more than the finished oratory of Richard Henry Lee; the times that tried men's souls, when "the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot ... shrinks from the service of his country, but he that stands ... deserves the love of man and woman." Happily for America there were many who kept the faith, who fought the good fight, during these dark days. Yet one is apt to think that the Declaration must have proved a vain boast of rebels but for that Virginia colonel whom the Congress appointed, on June 17, 1775, to be "General and Commander in Chief of the armies of the United Colonies"; that man so modest that he thought himself incompetent for the task, yet of such heroic resolution that neither difficulties nor reverses nor betrayals could bring him to despair; that man of rectitude, whose will was steeled to finer temper by every defeat, and who was not to be turned, by any failure or success, by any calumny, by gold, or by the dream of empire, from the straight path of his purpose.

He had come, in June, 1776, fresh from the notable achievement which drove the British army out of Boston, to defend New York against the most formidable military and naval force ever seen in America. With a rashness born of inexperience or the necessity of making a stand, Washington carried his undisciplined farmers and frontier riflemen across to Brooklyn Heights on Long Island, to meet inevitable defeat at the hands of General Howe. A ship or two, which the slow-moving British commander might have sent up the East River, would have prevented the masterly retreat which saved the American army from capture. But Howe seemed bent only upon occupying New York, which thus became, and until the end of the war remained, the British and Loyalist headquarters. With a deliberation that enraged the Loyalist and non-plussed his subordinates, the general pushed the patriot army northward to White Plains, missing there a second opportunity to win a decisive battle. But the capture of Fort Washington on the Hudson opened the river to the British navy, and compelled the American forces to retreat through New Jersey, and across the Delaware River at Trenton into Pennsylvania. Half a year had not passed since the Declaration of Independence when the cause of America seemed already lost. "We looked upon the contest as nearly closed," Major Thomas assured his patriot friends, "and considered ourselves a vanquished people." The indifferent populace of New York and New Jersey came in crowds to swear allegiance to the victorious army. No one doubted that Howe would cross the river and take Philadelphia. The jubilant Loyalists of the capital city awaited their deliverance. Congress, bundling its records into a farm wagon, scrambled away to Baltimore. And even the steadfast Washington, with his tatterdemalion army reduced to three thousand effectives, wrote that if new troops could not be raised without delay "the game is nearly up."

Of Villeroi, a general in the army of Louis XIV, it was said that he had "well served the king--William." It might be said of Howe that he shares with Washington the merit of achieving American independence. He never quite deserted the patriot cause; and now, at this critical moment, instead of pressing on to Philadelphia, he retired his main army, leaving only some Hessian outposts at Trenton and Bordentown. This arrangement enabled Washington to revive the waning enthusiasm of the country by executing one of the most daring and brilliant strokes of the war. Amidst the snow and sleet of a bitter December night, he ferried his forlorn little force through the floating ice of the Delaware, and on Christmas morning of 1776 surprised and captured Colonel Ball and one thousand Hessians. Cornwallis, on the point of departure for England, was hastily recalled to recover the lost ground; but he was out-generaled and defeated, and Washington occupied Morristown Heights, where he would indeed have been "left to scuffle for Liberty like another Cato," had he not been, to his great amazement, allowed by the British commander to remain unmolested there until the next spring. "All winter," he writes, "we were at their mercy, with sometimes scarcely a sufficient body of men to mount the ordinary guards, liable at every moment to be dissipated, if they had only thought proper to march against us."

If the conduct of the British general in the winter of 1777 amazed Washington, his management of the next campaign was even more inexplicable. The army of Burgoyne was then moving slowly southward from Canada by way of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River. It was the intention of the ministers that Howe should coöperate with the northern army; and Washington supposed that the purpose of the campaign was to effect a complete separation of New England from the more Loyalist Middle and Southern colonies. As this was thought to be precisely the most fatal circumstance which could come to pass, an army, far larger than that of Washington, was gathering to check if possible the advance of Burgoyne. But Howe neither moved north to the relief of Burgoyne, nor sent any part of his troops until it was too late. Wasting the early summer in fruitless maneuvers in northern Jersey, he finally carried his army by sea to the Chesapeake Bay, where he arrived on the 21st of August. The general had sailed three hundred miles, and had now to march fifty miles more, in order to reach Philadelphia, which was ninety-two miles from the point where he first embarked; and the army of Washington, the very army which he had sailed so far and wasted so many precious weeks to avoid, still lay across his path. At Brandywine and Germantown he fought, and easily won, the battles which could no longer be avoided. The way to Philadelphia was indeed open; but the fate of the northern army was already sealed. Caught in the difficult forests of the Hudson Valley, with supplies exhausted, unable either to retreat or to advance, on October 17, thirteen days after Howe won the battle of Germantown, Burgoyne lost the battle of Saratoga and surrendered his entire army to General Gates.

The loss of Philadelphia was almost forgotten in the general rejoicing that followed the victory of Saratoga. And the surrender of Burgoyne was indeed a decisive event; for it inspired Americans with new resolution and was followed by the formal alliance with France. For months Franklin had been in France preparing the way for a treaty. The very presence of the man on the streets of Paris was an influence in favor of the American cause. To the Frenchmen of that day, when Voltaire and Rousseau and Fénelon had come into their own, this sage from the primitive forest, already famous as a scientist, this homely preacher of the virtues of frugality, with his unconventional wisdom and his genial tolerance, was the ideal philosopher of that state of nature which they had in imagination set over as a shining contrast to the artificial and corrupt society in which they lived. The enthusiasm of the nation for an oppressed people gave support to the Government when war was once declared, but it cannot be said that it had much influence in inducing the king to agree to the alliance with England's rebellious colonies. Bringing to bear all the resources which native wit and long experience had placed at his command, Franklin had already, encumbered as he was with unwise colleagues, procured much secret assistance. And it was probably the intention of the French Government not to depart from this policy; but after the surrender of Burgoyne, French agents in London assured Vergennes that the colonies were on the point of making peace with England, and of joining her, as the price of independence, in an attack upon the French West Indies. Since war seemed inevitable, it was manifestly better to have the assistance of America than her opposition. Vergennes therefore signified to Franklin his willingness to negotiate a treaty without delay; and there was signed under date of February 6, 1778, at Versailles, a defensive and offensive alliance between the United States of America,--recently founded upon the revolutionary principle of popular sovereignty, and His Most Christian Majesty, Louis XVI, by Grace of God King of France and Navarre.[2]

In spite of the resource and tenacity of Washington and the convenient inactivity of Howe, it is difficult to see how the Revolution could have succeeded without the assistance which now came from France. Contrary to expectation, French troops and even the French navy were of little direct aid until the battle of Yorktown. But French gold financed the war. In the winter of 1778, when Washington's heroic remnant of barefoot soldiers lay starving at Valley Forge while Pennsylvania farmers sold provisions to the British and Loyalists who were comfortable and merry at Philadelphia, the Continental Congress was already a discredited and half bankrupt Government. Confiscated Loyalist property was sold for the benefit of the new State Governments; and Congress, unable to collect its requisitions, was forced to rely upon ever-increasing issues of paper money. In this very year $63,000,000 were added to the $38,000,000 already in circulation, and in 1779 the printers turned out $143,000,000 more. Laws fixing prices were without effect, and the value of paper fell to 33 cents on the dollar in 1777, to 12 cents in 1779, and to 2 cents in 1780. When a pound of tea sold for $100, when Thomas Paine bought woolen stockings at $300 a pair and Jefferson brandy at $125 a quart, General Gates could with $500,000 of paper get a hundred yards of fence built in which to guard British prisoners, but arms and munitions of war were forthcoming only so long as drafts on Franklin were honored by the French Government.

But if the French alliance brought assistance to the Americans, it induced the English Government to undertake a more vigorous prosecution of the war. The ministers had doubtless thought that the policy of conducting the war with the olive branch and the sword in either hand would prove successful. Certainly Howe had so interpreted his instructions. He had fought only when it was necessary to fight; easily accomplished everything he seriously attempted; never pressed any advantage; had supposed that by occupying the principal cities, affording protection to the loyal, and by moderation winning the lukewarm, the flame of rebellion would burn low for want of fuel and in good time quite flicker out. Too faithfully followed by half, this policy had ended in the humiliation of Saratoga and in the added burden of a war with France. News of Burgoyne's surrender scarcely reached England before offers of conciliation, embracing more than every concession the colonies had originally demanded, were hastily pushed through Parliament and entrusted to commissioners sent to America to negotiate peace. It was now too late. Once before, just after the battle of Long Island, General Howe, declaring himself authorized to discuss terms of conciliation, had induced Congress to send a committee to meet him at Staten Island. The conference came to nothing; and the only effect of the episode was to create a strong suspicion in the mind of the French Minister that the Americans would abandon their Declaration at the first convenient opportunity. It was above all necessary that the ardor of France should not again be damped by any further dallying with English offers. The commissioners were therefore coolly received, and the attempt of Johnstone to bribe Washington and Reed, published by Congress in August, 1778, only furnished new fuel to the patriot flame.

Aroused by the French alliance and the flouting of its offers of conciliation, the English Government now set about to wage war in earnest. General Howe had returned to England in May, 1778, to stand a Parliamentary investigation; and when General Clinton who succeeded him evacuated Philadelphia, and, barely escaping disaster at the battle of Monmouth, carried his army back to New York, the olive branch was thrown away and the war took on a new character. Ignoring the patriot army, the British general resorted to the policy of ruthless raids against the prosperous Northern coast communities, burning their towns and their shipping, destroying their industries, and carrying off their provisions. In 1779, Virginia, which since 1776 had quietly raised tobacco, and the provisions which had so largely subsisted Washington's army, was laid waste all along its easily accessible river highways. Savannah was taken late in 1778, and at the close of the next year Clinton himself commanded an expedition which in May, 1780, captured the city of Charleston and forced General Lincoln to surrender his army of 2500 Continental troops. "We look upon America as at our feet," wrote Horace Walpole. And in fact the occupation of Georgia and South Carolina was regarded by the English, by the American Loyalists, and by many patriots, as the prelude to the conquest of the entire South and the end of the rebellion.

Little wonder if in these days of constant defeat and declining enthusiasm Congress too often fell to the level of a wrangling body of mediocre men. After the first years the ability that might have given it dignity was largely employed in the army, on diplomatic missions, or in the establishment and administration of the new State Governments. The particularism of the time is revealed in the belief that a man's first allegiance was to his State; to construct a constitution for Massachusetts was thought to be a greater service than to draft the Articles of Confederation; to be Governor of Virginia a higher honor than to be President of Congress. The political wisdom of the decade is therefore chiefly embodied in the first state constitutions and the legislation of the new State Governments. The constitutions gave formal expression to the philosophy of the Revolution, but in their detailed arrangements followed closely the practices and traditions inherited from the colonial period; popular sovereignty was everywhere declared, but everywhere limited by basing the suffrage upon property, and often half defeated by adopting an administrative mechanism in harmony with the prevailing belief that good government springs from "power balanced and cancelled and dispersed." The new régime was not altogether such as Patrick Henry or Jefferson would have made it, but it marked a safe and conservative advance toward the "establishment of a more equal liberty" than had hitherto prevailed.

The erection of stable State Governments greatly diminished the power and the prestige of federal authority. Insensibly the Congress and the Continental army found themselves dependent upon thirteen sovereign masters. The feebleness with which the war was supported sometimes strikes one as incredible; but the amazing difficulty of maintaining an army of ten thousand troops for the achievement of independence, in the very colonies which had raised twenty-five thousand for the conquest of Canada, was due less to the lack of resources, or to indifference to the result, than to the uncertain authority of Congress, the republican fear of military power, and the jealous provincialism which had everywhere been greatly accentuated by the establishment of the new state constitutions. Washington's army naturally looked with contempt upon a Government that could not feed or clothe its own soldiers. Congress, jealous of its authority for the very reason that it had none, criticized the army in defeat and feared it in victory. The State Governments, refusing to conform to the recommendations of Congress, alternately complained of its weakness and denounced it for usurping unwarranted power. Each State wished to maintain control of its own troops, and was offended if, in the Continental forces, its many military experts were not all major-generals. The very colony which gave little support to the army when war raged in another province, cried aloud for protection when the enemy crossed its own sacred boundaries; and, with perhaps one eighth of its proper quota of men at the front, with its requisitions in taxes unpaid, wished to know whether it was because of incompetence or timidity that General Washington failed to win victories.

After all the wonder is rather that Congress accomplished anything than that it did so little. A Frenchman, asked what he did during the Terror, replied that he lived. It was no small merit in the Continental Congress that it held together and maintained even the tradition of union; a higher merit still that in the midst of war it fashioned a federal constitution which the thirteen States, more divided by jealousy and their newly won authority than they were united by a common danger, could be induced to approve. Yet this task the Congress with difficulty got accomplished. In 1777, after months of debate, it adopted the Articles of Confederation. Leaving political sovereignty in the several states, they provided for a federal legislature with a very limited authority to make laws, but no federal executive to enforce them. Hopelessly inadequate as this constitution was to prove, the small States, notably Maryland, refused to approve it until the larger States ceded their Western lands to the common Government. Virginia, possessed of the most extensive domain, held out longest, but finally renounced her claims January 2, 1781; and in March of that year it was announced that Maryland had ratified the Articles of Confederation, which thus became the first constitution of the United States.

In 1779, while the States were wrangling over their Western lands, a little band of valiant backwoodsmen won a victory which gave substance to their claims and made their cessions something more than waste paper. Throughout the war the frontier communities were most loyal supporters of the Revolution. Their expert riflemen, organized in companies, of which that of Daniel Morgan is perhaps the most famous, served in the army of Washington, helped Gates to win the battle of Saratoga, and were of indispensable service in driving Clinton out of North Carolina in 1780, and Cornwallis in 1781. The borderers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the little settlements at Watauga and Boonesboro, maintained a heroic defense against the Indians, who were paid by General Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, to wage a war of massacre and pillage on the frontier. Against intermittent Indian raids the backwoodsmen could defend their homes; but so long as the British held Detroit and Vincennes and the Mississippi forts, there could be no peace in the interior, and even if the colonies won independence, it was likely that the Alleghanies would mark the boundary of the new State. Under these circumstances, George Rogers Clark, trapper and expert woodsman and Indian fighter, set himself, with the confident idealism of the frontiersman, to achieve an object which must have seemed to most men no more than a forlorn hope. It was in 1777 that he crossed the mountains to Virginia, secured the secret and semi-official authorization of Patrick Henry, the Governor of the State, and raised a company of one hundred and fifty men with which to undertake nothing less than the destruction of British power in the great Northwest.

In May, 1778, the little band floated from Redstone down the Ohio, at the falls built a fort which they named Louisville in honor of the French King, and finally, on July 4, reached Kaskaskia. Guided by some hunters who had joined them, they took the fort by stratagem. The Indians, for the moment a greater danger than the British, were overawed by the skill and the masterful personality of Clark; and the Creoles, conciliated by his moderation, gladly joined in the capture of Cahokia. Not until February, 1779, was the intrepid commander ready to march on Vincennes. General Hamilton had recently come there with a small force, and there he proposed to remain until spring before marching to the recapture of Kaskaskia and the destruction of the settlements south of the Ohio, never dreaming that men could be found to cross the "drowned lands" of the Wabash in the inclement winter months. This fearful challenge was what Clark and his men accepted; marching two hundred and thirty miles over bogs and flooded lowlands; without tents, and sometimes without food or fire; as they neared Vincennes breaking the thin ice at every step, often neck-deep in water; yet succeeding at last, they took the fort and sent Hamilton to Virginia a prisoner of war. Detroit remained in British hands; but the possession of Vincennes and the Mississippi forts probably saved the Kentucky and Tennessee settlements from destruction, and doubtless had some influence in disposing England to cede the Western country at the close of the war.

Yet in spite of this signal victory, in spite of the French alliance, the darkest days of the war were yet to come. In the year 1780 the Revolution seemed fallen from a struggle for worthy principles to the level of mean reprisals, a contest of brigands bent on plunder and revenge. That it had come to this pass was partly due to Clinton's policy of detached raids; but the policy of raids was a practical one precisely because in nearly every colony there was a large body of active Loyalists, a larger number still who were indifferent, wishing only to be left alone, ready to submit to whichever side might win at last. Driven from their homes, plundered by British or patriot raiders, they in turn organized for revenge, sought plunder where they could find it, caring not whether they served under Loyalist or Revolutionist banners. In South Carolina, laid waste by the light troops of Tarleton and the partisans of Marion and Sumpter, in all the regions round New York, in the Jerseys, on Long Island and in parts of Connecticut, even the semblance of government and the customary routine of ordered society disappeared. The issues that had once divided men were forgotten while bands of Associated Loyalists and bands of Liberty Boys plundered the inhabitants indiscriminately, hailed each other as they passed in the night, or agreed, with the honor that prevails among thieves, to an equitable division of the spoils.

And few victories came in this disastrous year to cheer the remnant of tried Americans. Clinton's invasion of North Carolina was, indeed, a failure; and at the close of 1780, after the frontier troops had overwhelmingly defeated General Ferguson at King's Mountain, the British were forced to evacuate that strongly revolutionary colony. But Washington could do little more than hold with the desperation of despair to West Point, where his army had lain helpless and almost passive since the battle of Monmouth. Congress, barely able to hold together, could not maintain even that "verbal energy" which had once distinguished it. In this year as never before men served their country with one hand and with the other filled their pockets by manipulating the currency which had fallen to be a worthless scrip. And it was in this year, when fidelity seemed a forgotten virtue, when men enlisted in the army and deserted to the enemy with equal indifference, that Benedict Arnold, entrusted at his own request with the command of West Point, forswore his trust and wrote treason across the fair record of a patriot's achievements. Well might Washington write, "I have almost ceased to hope"; and Laurens, "How many men there are who in secret say, could I have believed it would come to this!"

Yet at last a happy combination of circumstances enabled the American and French forces, for the first time operating in complete accord, to bring this disastrous war to a most successful conclusion. Well aware of the importance of the Southern campaign, Washington had procured for Greene, the ablest of his generals, command of the forces which were gathering in North Carolina to resist the advance of Cornwallis in 1781. Defeated at the Cowpens and checked at Guilford, the British commander was forced to retire to Wilmington; but instead of returning to Charleston he moved into Virginia to join Arnold, convinced that the conquest of the Old Dominion must precede that of North Carolina. In May and June he carried ruin to all the prosperous towns of the province; but in July, when the American forces under Lafayette had been greatly strengthened, it was no longer safe for the British commander to divide his army. Acting under orders from Clinton, Cornwallis accordingly retired to the coast and fortified the neck of land at Yorktown. Washington had scarcely been apprised of this circumstance before he received a letter from the Count de Grasse, commander of the French naval forces in the West Indies, proposing joint operations in Virginia during the summer, and promising to bring his fleet to the Chesapeake sometime in August. The opportunity was a rare one. Abandoning the projected attack on New York, Washington and Rochambeau joined their forces and marched rapidly through New Jersey, entering Philadelphia the very day that De Grasse appeared at the mouth of the bay. They had already joined Lafayette before Admiral Graves arrived from New York with a British fleet to rescue the British general. Had Graves been a Rodney or a Nelson he might have given a different issue to the American Revolution; but he was not the man to win against great odds, and after an indecisive engagement he sailed away, leaving Cornwallis to his fate. Hemmed in by 16,000 American and French troops, the unhappy general, who never met Washington but to be defeated, surrendered his army of 7000, men on the 19th of October, 1781.

"It is all over!" cried Lord North when Germaine told him of the surrender of Cornwallis. The loss of 7000 men was not in itself an irremediable disaster; but the effort of the king and the "King's Friends" to establish the personal rule of the monarch had alienated the nation, while their attempt to subjugate the colonies had embroiled England with all Europe. In armed conflict with France, Spain, and Holland, opposed by the "armed neutrality" of Russia, Sweden, Denmark, the Empire, Portugal, the Two Sicilies, and the Ottoman Empire, never had the isolation of the little island kingdom been more splendid, or British prestige so diminished. The demand of the nation for peace could no longer be resisted, and the Whig party came into power over the king's will, and entered into negotiation with the enemies he had made. The American ambassadors were instructed by Congress and bound in honor not to make a treaty without the knowledge and consent of France. But in spite of Franklin's protest, Jay and Adams, who suspected, not without some show of reason but contrary to the fact, that Vergennes would oppose the extension of the United States beyond the Alleghanies, broke their instructions as readily as Jay broke his pipe, and without consulting their faithful ally arranged the terms of peace with England.

Independence was acknowledged as the indispensable preliminary to negotiation. John Adams declared that he "had no notion of cheating anybody," and it was agreed that British creditors should "meet with no lawful impediment to the recovery of all ... _bona fide_ debts heretofore contracted" in the colonies. The skill of Franklin and the resolute persistence of Jay and Adams, together with the desire of the English Government to make a peace without delay, enabled the Americans to gain, in every other disputed point, all they could hope for and more than they had any reason to expect. It was conceded that they should enjoy the customary right of fishing in Northern waters. The best effort of England to secure a restoration of property and of the rights of citizens to the Loyalists was unavailing, and the compensation of that unhappy class fell to the Government whose losing cause it had supported. But of all the provisions of this Peace of Paris, the most important, next to the acknowledgment of independence, was the one which gave to the new State that incomparably rich woodland and prairie country extending from the thirty-first, degree of north latitude to the Great Lakes, and as far west as the Mississippi River. With these as its main provisions, the definitive treaty was signed on September 3, 1783, and ratified by Congress January 14, 1784.

Before the treaty of peace was signed, the cessation of hostilities had been formally declared and announced to Washington's army on the 19th of April, eight years to a day after the battle of Lexington. British troops occupied New York until November 29, when the evacuation of the city was finally completed, and the United States of America entered the company of independent nations, the exhausted and half-ruined champion of those principles of liberty and equality which were soon to transform the European world. With the British troops there sailed away, never to return, a great company of Loyalist exiles; part of the thousands who renounced their heritage and their country in defense of political and social ideals that belonged to the past. America thus lost the service of many men of ability, of high integrity, and of genuine culture; clergymen and scholars, landowners and merchants of substantial estate, men learned in the law, high officials of proved experience in politics and administration. The great achievements of history have their price; and American independence was won only by the sacrifice of much that was best in colonial society. Something fine and amiable in manners, something charming in customs, much that was most excellent in the traditions of politics and public morality disappeared with the ruin of those who thought themselves, and who often were in fact, of "the better sort."

Happily for America not all of the "better sort" deserted their country. On the 4th of December, five days after the last British ship cleared New York Harbor, a little company of officers was gathered in the Long Room of Fraunce's Tavern. They were waiting to bid farewell to General Washington. No sign of rejoicing greeted the entrance of the familiar figure; and this masterful man of proved courage and inflexible will, this self-contained soul who endured calumny in silence, who accepted victory in even temper and defeat with high fortitude, was now strangely moved as he looked upon his beloved companions. Lifting a glass of wine he said simply: "With a heart full of love and gratitude I now take leave of you, most devoutly wishing that your latter days may be as prosperous and happy as your former ones have been glorious and honorable." When all had taken the general's hand and received his embrace, they walked together through the narrow street to Whitehall Ferry, where a barge lay waiting. As the oars struck the water Washington stood and lifted his hat; and his comrades, returning the salute in silence, watched the majestic figure until it disappeared from sight. Less than two years before, in the spring of 1782, the army would have made Washington king. He was now on his way to Annapolis, to present himself before Congress in order to resign the high office which eight years before he had accepted with so much diffidence, and to claim the indulgence of retiring from the service of his country. This, as it happened, came to pass on the 23d of December. On the day following he rode away to his home at Mount Vernon, a private citizen of the Republic which he had done so much to establish; a citizen of the Republic, and of the world's heroes one of the most illustrious.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A good brief account of the Revolution is in Smith's _The Wars Between England, and America_ (1914), chaps, I-VI; a fuller and better account in Channing's _History of the United States_, III, chaps. I-XII; all things considered the ablest summary is Lecky's _The American Revolution_. An able and suggestive work is Fisher's _The Struggle for American Independence_, 2 vols. 1908. Sir George Otto Trevelyan, with wide information, strong Whig sympathies, and great charm of style, has written the most fascinating work on the subject. _The American Revolution_, 4 vols. 1905. The best study of British measures which precipitated the struggle is Beer's _British Colonial Policy, 1754-1765_. 1907. For bibliography and summary of contemporary literature, Tyler's _Literary History of the American Revolution._ Selections from newspapers and contemporary documents are in Moore's _Diary of the American Revolution_, 2 vols. 1860. For the Loyalists, see Tyler, in _American Historical Review_, I; Van Tyne, _The Loyalists in the American Revolution_. 1902. For the attitude of the clergy, and the influence of religious and sectarian forces, see Van Tyne, in _American Historical Review_, XIX; Cross, _The Anglican Episcopate_. 1902. Thornton (_The Pulpit of the American Revolution._ Boston, 1860) reprints a number of contemporary sermons by New England clergy. For the Western settlements see Roosevelt, _Winning of the West_, 4 vols.; Alden, _New Governments West of the Alleghanies_, in _Wisconsin Historical Bulletin_, II; Turner, in _American Historical Review_, I; Thwaites, _How George Rogers Clark Won the North West_. 1903. The opposition between the interior and the coast regions, and the bearing of this on the formation of radical and conservative parties in the Revolution, are well brought out in Lincoln's _The Revolutionary Movement in Pennsylvania_ (University of Pennsylvania Studies. 1901); and Henry's _Patrick Henry_, 3 vols. 1891. The letters, journals, and papers of leading Americans in the Revolution have been very fully printed. The ablest of the radicals was John Adams (_Works of John Adams_, 10 vols. 1856); Franklin became increasingly radical with the progress of events (_Writings of Benjamin Franklin_, 10 vols. 1903-07); Dickinson was the ablest of the conservatives who joined the Revolution, but with great reluctance (_Writings of John Dickinson_, 3 vols. 1895); the extreme conservative and Loyalist view is best represented by Hutchinson (_Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson_, 2 vols. 1884). For the period of the war perhaps the most illuminating writings of all are the letters of Washington (_The Writings of George Washington_, 14 vols. 1889-93).

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Professor C.H. Van Tyne, of the University of Michigan, has recently found new material in the Paris Archives, notably a Vergennes memoir of 1782 and memoirs presented by the ministers at the time of forming the treaty, which to his mind proves conclusively that the Government would never have formed the alliance with America had it not been convinced that otherwise the colonies were prepared to join England in the conquest of the French West Indies.

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

A BRIEF LIST OF BOOKS FOR THE STUDY OF COLONIAL HISTORY

1. Adams, J. _Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife Abigail Adams._ Boston, 1875.

2. Andrews, C.M. _The Colonial Period._ New York, 1912.

3. Beer, G.L. _The Origins of the British Colonial System, 1578-1660._ New York, 1908. _The Old Colonial System, 1660-1754._ Part I. The Establishment of the System, 1660-1688. 2 vols. New York, 1912. _British Colonial Policy, 1754-1765._ New York, 1907.

4. Bruce, P.A. _The Economic History of Virginia._ 2 vols. New York, 1896.

5. Channing, E. _History of the United States._ Vols. I-III. New York, 1905-1912.

6. Eggleston, E. _The Beginners of America._ Philadelphia, 1897. _The Transit of Civilization._ Philadelphia, 1901.

7. Ellis, G.E. _The Puritan Age and Rule in the Colony of Massachusetts Bay, 1629-1685._ Boston, 1888.

8. Fisher, S.G. _The Struggle for American Independence._ 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1908.

9. Fiske, J. _The Discovery of America._ 2 vols. Boston, 1893. _The Beginnings of New England._ Boston, 1892. _Old Virginia and Her Neighbours._ 2 vols. Boston, 1897. _The Dutch and Quaker Colonies._ 2 vols. Boston, 1900. _New France and New England._ Boston, 1902.

10. Ford, P.L. _The True George Washington._ Philadelphia, 1897.

11. Franklin, B. _The Life of Benjamin Franklin Written by Himself._ 3 vols. Philadelphia, 1881.

12. Hart, A.B. _American History Told by Contemporaries._ 4 vols. New York, 1887.

13. Hart, A.B. _The American Nation._ 27 vols. New York, 1904-1907 (first nine volumes).

14. Henry, W.W. _Patrick Henry; Life, Correspondence, and Speeches._ 3 vols. New York, 1891.

15. Hutchinson, P.O. _Diary and Letters of Thomas Hutchinson._ 2 vols. Boston, 1884.

16. Jameson, J.F. _Original Narratives of Early American History._ 15 vols. New York, 1906-1914. (Especially valuable are the following: Bourne, E.G. _The Northmen, Columbus, and Cabot_; Hosmer, J.K. _Winthrop's Journal._ 2 vols.; Davis, W.T. _Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation_, Burr, G.L. _Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases._)

17. Lecky, W.E.H. _The American Revolution._ New York, 1912.

18. MacDonald, W. _Select Charters and Other Documents._ New York, 1906.

19. Osgood, H.L. _The American Colonies in the 17th Century._ 3 vols. New York, 1904-1907.

20. Parkman, F. _Frontenac and New France._ Boston. 1877. _Half Century of Conflict._ 2 vols. Boston. 1892. _Montcalm and Wolfe._ 2 vols. Boston, 1891.

21. Trevelyan, G.O. _The American Revolution._ 4 vols. New York, 1905-07.

22. Tyler, M.C. _The Literary History of the American Revolution._ 2 vols. New York, 1897.

23. Walker, W. _History of Congregationalism in America._ New York, 1899.

24. Weeden, W.B. _The Economic and Social History of New England._ 2 vols. Boston, 1890.

25. Wells, W.V. _The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams._ 2 vols. Boston, 1865.

26. Wendell, B. _Cotton Mather._ New York. 1891.

INDEX

Abraham, Plains of, 159.

_Account of the Province of Pennsylvania_, William Penn's, 134.

Acts of Trade. _See_ Navigation Acts.

Adams, John, social rank, 166; influenced by English writers, 171; religious ideas, 197; demands a "more equal liberty," 202, 240; on the Stamp Act, 221, 225; defends officers concerned in the "Massacre," 230; complains of desertion by the people, 231; dines with the Sons of Liberty, 238; opposition to the Hutchinsons and Olivers, 243; in the First Continental Congress, 246; urges a declaration of independence, 251; negotiator of Treaty of 1783, 271.

Adams, Samuel, opposes Sugar Act, 218; and the Stamp Act, 220; deserted by his friends, 231; promotes patriotic meetings, 238; in the First Continental Congress, 245; one of earliest to desire independence, 248.

Aden, 15.

Admiralty courts, established, 145, 146; fall under control of assemblies, 151; jurisdiction extended, 208.

Africa, 17, 18, 168.

_Aggawam, Cobler of_, 65.

Albany, Congress of. _See_ Congress.

Albemarle Sound, 129.

Albuquerque, 27.

Alexandria, 5.

Allyon, 32.

Almon, John, 231.

Alva, Duke of, 37.

Amboina, 27.

America, Hakluyt's account of, 47.

American Whig Society at Princeton, 194.

Amherst, Jeffrey, 210.

Amsterdam, 37.

Amusements in Massachusetts, laws against, 116.

Anabaptists, 108.

Andros, Sir Edmund, 132, 145.

Androscoggin, 175.

Anglican Church, established in Massachusetts, 122; frontier communities opposed to, 183; disestablished in Virginia, 241.

Anglican episcopate, fear of, 190, 196.

Annapolis, 273.

Anti-ministerial spirit in Massachusetts, 119.

Antioch, 5.

Antwerp, 6, 36, 37.

Arabia, 13.

Arianism in New England, 189.

Aristocracy, in Virginia, 72; and colonial politics, 165; in Massachusetts, 168; frontier communities opposed to, 182; the Revolution a movement in opposition to, 240.

Aristotle, 23.

Armada, defeat of the, 43.

"Armed neutrality," 270.

Arminianism in New England, 189.

Army, the Revolutionary, character of, 254, 255, 259; supplied from Virginia, 262; causes of weakness of, 263; attitude toward Congress, 263, 264; frontier troops in, 265, 268; French troops coöperate with, 269; willing to make Washington king, 273.

Arnold, Benedict, 268, 269.

"Art of Virtue." Franklin's idea of religion as the, 198.

Articles of Confederation, 252, 264.

Asia, relation between Europe and, 1, 7, 10-12, 16.

Assembly. _See_ Government.

_Assiento_, the, 150.

Assistants, Board of. _See_ Government, Massachusetts.

Associated Loyalists, 268.

Association of the First Continental Congress, 247; creates the Loyalist party, 247, 248; why conservatives voted for, 250. _See_ Non-importation agreements.

Atlantis, 23.

Augsburg, 6.

Austin, Anne, 108.

Austrian Succession, War of the, 203.

Azores, 168.

Back country. _See_ Frontier.

Backwoodsmen. _See_ Frontier.

Bacon, Francis, 38, 197.

Bacon, Nathaniel, 76, 79, 80.

Bacon, Roger, 23.

Bagdad, 5.

Bahamas, the, 128.

Balance of trade. _See_ Trade.

Balboa, 28.

Baltimore, Lord, 64-66, 146.

Banda, 27.

Barbados, 108, 128, 129, 138.

Barcelona, 6.

Barrowe, Henry, 88.

Basle, 6.

Beckford, William, 149.

Bellamy, Rev. Mr., 185.

Bellomont, Earl of, 141, 148.

Berkeley, George, 171.

Berkeley, John, Lord, 132, 133.

Berkeley, Sir William, 30, 76, 79.

Berkshires, 179.

Bernard, Gov. Francis, 203; advises remodeling colonial governments, 206; opposes Grenville's measures, 208, 218; on the Virginia Resolutions, 241.

Bible Commonwealth, ideal of a, 112 _ff._ _See_ Massachusetts Bay.

Bienville, Céloron de, 154, 156.

Bills of credit. _See_ Currency.

Blair, Rev. Samuel, 189.

Bland, Richard, 228.

Blathwayt, William, 77.

Blue Ridge Mountains, 176, 179.

Board of Trade, created, 145; system for colonial control, 146; advises recall of charters, 146; decline of influence, 148; and the establishment of a civil list, 164; prepares scheme for colonial defense, 212.

"Body of Liberties," 99.

Bokhara, 5.

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 126, 171.

Boonesboro, 265.

Bordentown, 256.

Borderers. _See_ Frontier.

Boston, 95, 109, 120, 168.

Boston Church, 102, 119, 122.

Boston "Massacre," 226, 230.

Boston Port Bill, 234.

"Boston Seat," 234.

Boston "Tea Party," 233.

Boundaries, established by the Treaty of 1783, 271.

_Bourgeois_, the, 81 _ff._

"Brace of Adamses," 243.

Braddock expedition, 157.

Bradford, William, 65, 90, 113.

Bradstreet, Governor of Massachusetts Bay, 121.

Brandywine, battle of, 257.

Brewster, William, 88.

Bristol, 223.

Browne, Robert, 87, 88, 101.

Brownists, 87 _ff._

Bruges, 6.

Buccaneers, 41, 140.

Bullion. _See_ Precious metals.

Burgesses, the Virginia House of, 75 _ff._

Burgoyne's expedition, 256, 257.

Burnaby, Richard, 161, 162.

Bute, John Stuart, Earl of, 206.

Byllinge, Edward, 133.

Byrd, the first William, 73, 76, 175; the second William, 167; the third William, 170, 176, 185.

Cabot, 39.

Cadamosto, 21.

Cadiz, 44, 150.

Cahokia, 153, 266.

Cairo, 5.

Calicut, 5.

Cam, Diego, 21.

Cambulac, 8.

Camden, settlement of, 153.

Camden, Lord, 223.

Canada. _See_ France in America.

Cape Fear, 128.

Cape Non, 18.

Cape of Good Hope, 22.

Carolinas, founding of the, 128 _ff._ _See_ North Carolina; South Carolina.

Carpenter's Hall, 245.

Carpini, 9.

Cartagena, 43.

Carteret, Sir George, 132, 133.

Cartier, Jacques, 39.

Cathay, 10.

Cavalier migration, 72.

Cavendish, 45.

Ceuta, 20.

Ceylon, 8.

Chalons, 6.

Champlain, 45.

Charlemagne, 2.

Charles I, 63, 86, 90, 91.

Charles II, 125, 127.

Charles V, 28, 34.

Charles River, 128.

Charleston, 152, 166, 232, 262.

Charlestown, 95.

Charlottesburg, 153.

Charter, of Connecticut, 106; of Massachusetts Bay, 91, 96, 106; of Virginia, 55, 58.

Chartres, Fort, 153.

Chateaubriand, epigram on the Revolution, 202.

Chatham. _See_ Pitt, William.

Cherokees. _See_ Trade, Indian.

Cherry Valley, 179.

China, 5, 16.

Chocktaws. _See_ Trade, Indian.

Christmas festivals in Massachusetts, 116.

Church, the Reformation and the Catholic, 80 _ff._

Church covenant, 96, 112, 114.

City of God, Puritan ideal of the, 84.

Civic virtue, religion identified with, 194; Revolutionary philosophy influenced by classic ideal of, 239.

Clarendon, Earl of, 128.

Clark, George Rogers, 265-67.

Class conflict in the Revolution, 240.

Classes. _See_ Social conditions.

Clergy. _See_ Massachusetts Bay.

Clinton, Sir Henry, succeeds Howe, policy of raids, 261; expedition to South Carolina, 262; driven out of North Carolina, 268; orders Cornwallis to fortify Yorktown, 269.

Cliosophic Society at Princeton, 194.

Coddington, William, 103.

Coercive Acts, 233, 234.

Colden, Cadwallader, 208, 217, 221.

Coligny's colony destroyed, 39.

Colleton, Sir John, 128.

Colonial control, English system of, established, 134, 145, 146; in the eighteenth century, 147; attitude of Walpole and Newcastle toward, 151; effect of Austrian war on, 152; frontier defense and, 154; Seven Years' War proves inadequacy of, 157; new policy of, 203; effect of Seven Years' War on, 214; opposition to Grenville's policy of, 215 _ff._; effect of tea episode on policy of, 233. _See_ Defense.

Colonial government. _See_ Government.

Colonial governors. _See_ Governors.

Colonial Manufactures Act, 151.

Colonial rights, Franklin on, 202; Bernard contrasts English and American ideas of, 203; Stamp Act raises question of, 214; the Townshend Acts and, 227; apparent settlement of dispute over, 231; revived by the Coercive Acts, 234; fundamental reasons for dispute over, 234; breach widened by every discussion of, 237; influence of classic ideals on patriot ideas of, 239; religious spirit characterizes patriot conception of, 240; class struggle in America accentuated by dispute over, 240; unfranchised classes active in the defense of, 244; effect of the Revolutionary war on the question of, 267.

Colonies, begin to be valuable, 127; important for English trade, 137; special value of the plantation type of, 138.

Colonization of America, motives leading to the, 46, 66-68, 70, 86, 89-94, 113, 118, 128, 130-34, 177; revival of interest in the, 126; effect of civil war on, 127; decline of interest in, 147.

Columbus, Bartholomew, 27.

Columbus, Christopher, 1, 2, 22-26.

Commerce. _See_ Trade.

Commercial code. _See_ Colonial control.

Commission merchants, employed by Southern planters, 167.

Commissioners, Board of, 226.

Commissioners of peace, 261.

Committees of the Association, 247.

Committees of Trade and Plantations, 140.

Communication. _See_ Intercourse.

Company of Massachusetts Bay. _See_ Massachusetts Bay.

Conciliation, conservatives hope for, 249; North's Resolutions of, 250; patriots renounce hope of, 251; renewed offer of, 261.

Concord, 175.

Congress, Albany, 156-58, 204, 212; First Continental, 234, 245, 250; Second Continental, influenced by reports from England, 250; issues paper money, 259, 260; moves to Baltimore, 255; influence declines, 262; relations with army and State Governments, 264; adopts Articles of Confederation, 264; ratifies treaty of peace, 272; receives resignation of Washington, 273.

Congress, Stamp Act, 218.

Connecticut, founded, 104; New Haven united to, 106; takes initiative in forming New England Confederation, 106, 107; frontier, settlements in, 174; "consociation" in, 190, 195.

Conquistadores, 31.

Conservative party. _See_ Party.

"Consociation" in Connecticut, 190, 195.

Constantinople, 1, 5.

Constitution. _See_ Articles of Confederation; State Governments.

Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 127.

Cornwallis, Charles, defeated by Washington, 256; in North Carolina, 269; surrenders at Yorktown, 270.

Coronado, 33.

Cortez, Hernando, 32.

Corvino, John de, 9.

Cotton, John, 90, 93, 102, 115, 120.

Council. _See_ Government.

Council of Trent, 35.

Counter-Reformation, 35.

Country gentry, 82.

Courts, effect of Stamp Act on, 221, 222.

Covenant, the Church, 96, 112, 114; Half-Way, 188, 195.

"Cowpens," 176.

Cowpens, battle of, 269.

Coxe, Daniel, 218.

Cozumel, 32.

Creeks. _See_ Trade, Indian.

Cromwell, and the colonies, 107, 127.

Crown Point, 159.

Crowns of St. Louis, the gold, 13.

Cruger, John, 167.

Crusades, the, 4.

Cuba, 25, 52.

Currency, use of paper, 208; English Government restricts paper, 209; opposition to Currency Act, 215-18; specie diminished by Sugar Act, 216; Grenville's measures increase demand for specie, 217; New York permitted to issue Bills of Credit, 230; French loans finance the war, 259; Continental Congress issues paper, 259.

Cushing, Charles, 197.

Customs, 144, 205, 207, 208, 222.

Cuzaco, 34.

D'Abreu, 27.

D'Ailly, Pierre, 23.

Dale, Sir Thomas, 60, 68.

"Dale's Laws," 60.

Damascus, 5.

Dancing, forbidden in Massachusetts, 116.

Dartmouth, Lord, approves Galloway's plan, 246.

Davenport, John, 93, 105.

Davies, Rev. Samuel, 185-87.

Davis, John, 45.

Debtor class. _See_ Social conditions.

Declaration of Independence. _See_ Independence.

Declaratory Act, 224, 225.

Defense, system of, 145, 152, 155; colonial troops raised for, 159; apathy of assemblies in matter of, 164; French wars and, 204, 205; Grenville's policy of, 209, 213; Board of Trade's scheme for, 212; conquest of Canada removes need for, 214, 215. _See_ Colonial control.

De Grasse, Count, 269, 270.

De la War, Lord, 60.

Demarcation Line, 26, 28.

Democracy. _See_ Frontier; Colonial rights.

Deputies. _See_ Government.

De Soto, 33.

Detroit, 153, 265, 266.

Diaz, Bartholomew, 22.

Diaz, Denis, 21.

Dickinson, John, 219, 220, 227, 228, 242.

Dinwiddie, Robert, 157.

_Discourse of a North West Passage_, 30.

_Discourse on Western Plantinge_, 46.

Discovery of America, 25 _ff._

Distilling, 168, 216.

Dongan, Thomas, 132, 144, 154.

Dorchester, 95, 104.

Doria, Tedisio, 18.

Drake, Sir Francis, 42-14.

"Drowned lands" of the Wabash, 266.

Ducats, first appearance of, 13.

Dudley, Thomas, 93, 120.

"Duke's Laws," 131.

Dulaney, Daniel, 217, 220, 223.

Duquesne, Fort, 157, 159.

Durham Palatinate, 64.

Durham, Town of, 175.

Dutch, the, 36; India companies of, 44, 45; threaten Connecticut, 106; driven from New Netherland, 130, 131; English rivalry with, 136.

Dyre, William, 144.

Eannes, Gil, 21.

East India Company, English, 45, 53; influence in Parliament, 149; exports tea to America, 231-33; Parliament demands compensation for, 234.

East Indies, English interest in the, 136.

Eaton, Theophilus, 105.

_Ecclesiastical Polity_,61.

Economic changes, thirteenth to sixteenth century, 48.

Eden, Richard, 45.

Edict of Restitution, 86.

Edwards, Jonathan, 85, 123, 187.

Effingham, Sir Thomas Howard of, 44.

Elizabeth, 39, 90.

Ellsworth, Oliver, 194.

Emanuel, King of Portugal, 26.

Endicott, John, 91.

English Government, attitude toward the colonies, 127, 134 _ff._,148 _ff._, 163, 169; frontier policy of, 178; new colonial policy, 203, 204; new measures for defense, 209; effect of tea episode on, 233-34; offers conciliation, 250; effect of the French alliance on, 260 _ff._ _See_ Colonial control.

Engrossers of land, 176, 179

Entail, abolished in Virginia, 241.

Enumerated commodities, 139, 140.

Eratosthenes, 17.

Escheator in Virginia, office of, 77.

Escobar, 21.

"External" taxes, 227.

"Fall Line," 176.

_Farmer's Letters_, 227.

Fenwick, John, 133.

Ferguson, General, 268.

Feudal régime, 3.

Fisher, Mary, 108.

Fisheries, 39, 122, 137, 168, 216, 271.

Five Nations. _See_ Indians, Iroquois.

Flags of truce, used by illicit traders, 205.

Flint, Rev. Mr., 120.

Florida, 32, 33.

Florin, first appearance of, 13.

Forestallers of land, 176, 179.

Fort Chartres, 153.

Fort Duquesne, 157, 159.

Fort Frontenac, 142.

Fort Moore, 152, 153.

Fort Necessity, 157.

Fort St. Louis, 143.

Fort Stanwix, Treaty of, 211.

Fort Washington, 255.

Fox, Charles James, 237.

Foxe's _Book of Martyrs_, 88.

France in America, Coligny and Cartier, 39; Champlain, 45; exploration of the Great Lakes, 141; of the Mississippi, 143; occupation of the interior waterways, 152; contest for the Ohio Valley, 154; loss of Canada, 159.

Francis I, 38, 39.

Franklin, Benjamin, 161; influenced by English writers, 170, 171; religious ideas of, 198; on colonial rights, 202; drafts Albany Plan of Union, 204; defends paper money, 208; favors Board of Trade's plan for defense, 212; opposes Stamp Act, 213; examination in House of Commons, 224, 227; becomes more radical, 228; residence in England strengthens his patriotism, 235; thinks England will yield, 249; in France, 258; protests against separate negotiations with England, 271.

Fraunce's Tavern, 273.

Freemen, 99, 132, 173.

French alliance, resolution of Congress in favor of, 252; negotiated, 258, 259; importance of, 259 _ff._

French and Indian War. _See_ Seven Years' War.

French West Indies, 151, 259.

Friends. _See_ Quakers.

Frontenac, Count, 141.

Frontenac, Fort, 142.

Frontier, in Virginia, 78, 79; in Massachusetts, 115, 116, 155; in Carolina, 129; west of the Alleghanies, 153; importance of, in the eighteenth century, 174, 182, 184; foreigners settle on the, 177; Grenville's policy for the defense of the, 209, 210, 215, 217; radicalism of the, 241; Revolution supported by the, 265, 268; Treaty of 1783 and the, 271.

Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 129.

Fur trade. _See_ Trade, Indian.

Galloway, Joseph, 217, 245, 246.

Gama, Vasco da, 1, 26.

Gates, General Horatio, 257.

Gates, Sir Thomas, 56, 59.

General writs, 207.

Geneva, 119.

Genoa, 6, 9.

"Gentle folk" in the eighteenth century, 173.

Gentlemen Adventurers, 46.

George III, 225, 270.

Georgia, occupied by the British, 262.

Germans, 153, 177, 242.

Germantown, founded, 178; battle of, 257.

Gibraltar, 6.

Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 30, 54.

Gilds, 82, 83, 87.

Gist, Christopher, 154, 181.

Glasgow, 223.

Godolphin, Sidney, 126.

Gold. _See_ Precious metals.

Gold Coast, 20.

Golden Hind, 43.

Gomez, 32.

Good Hope, Cape of, 22.

Gorges, Fernando, 56, 57, 64.

Gorton, Samuel, 65.

Gosnold, Bartholomew, 55.

Government, colonial, in the eighteenth century, 163; controlled by the "best people," 169; unequal representation in assemblies, 183; French wars strengthen assemblies, 205; plans for remodeling, 206; dispute with England opens way for democratization of, 227, 240, 247, 262; effect of the war on, 267, 268. _See_ Massachusetts, Virginia, etc.

Governors, colonial, 147, 151, 152, 207.

Grand Khan, 10.

Graves, Admiral, 270.

Great Awakening, the, 181, 186, 193.

Great Barrington, 175.

Green Bay, 153.

Greene, Nathaniel, 269.

Greenwood, John, 88.

Grenville, George, colonial policy of, 203 _ff._; opposition to the measures of, 215 _ff._; opposes repeal of Stamp Act, 223; epigram on loss of the colonies by, 235.

Grosseilliers, 141.

Guilford Court-House, battle of, 269.

Guinea, Gulf of, 20, 21.

Hakluyt, Richard, 30, 46, 56.

Half-Way Covenant, 188, 195.

Halifax, Earl of, 204.

Hall, William, 238.

Hamburg, 6.

Hamilton, Henry, 265, 266.

Hampden Court Conference, 86.

Hanbury, John, 154.

Hancock, John, 231, 243.

Hanover County, Virginia, 186.

Harley, Robert, 126.

Harrington, James, influence on Locke, 129.

Harris, Mary, at White Woman's Creek, 181.

Harrison, Nathaniel, 78.

Hartford, 104.

Harvard College, 120, 122, 123, 169.

Haversham, Lord, 125.

Hawkins, John, 41.

Haynes, John, 104.

Hayti, 25.

Head right, 68.

Hendrick, Iroquois chief, 156.

Henry, Patrick, born on frontier, 176; influenced by Samuel Davies, 193; opposes Stamp Act, 219, 220, 241; in the First Continental Congress, 245; eager for independence, 248; Governor of Virginia, authorizes the Clark expedition, 266.

Henry the Navigator, Prince, 20, 21.

Hillsborough, town of, 153.

Hinsdale, town of, 175.

Hippon, Captain, 45.

Hispaniola, 32.

Hojeda, 26.

Home rule. _See_ Colonial rights.

Honduras, Bay of, explored, 26.

Hooker, Richard, _Ecclesiastical Polity_, 61.

Hooker, Thomas, founder of Connecticut, 93, 104, 105.

Hormos (modern Ormuz), 8, 15.

Housatonic settlements, 174, 175.

Howe, Sir William, 254-57, 260, 261.

Hudson, Henry, 45.

Hudson River settlements, 131.

Huguenots, 130, 132, 177.

Hunter, Robert, 178.

Hutchinson, Anne, 101, 108, 109, 116.

Hutchinson, Thomas, 170; opposes Grenville's measures, 217; but regards them as legal, 219; property of, destroyed by mob, 221; refuses clearance to the tea ships, 233; letters published, 233; effect of exile on, 235; disliked by John Adams, 243, 244; thinks Boston has gone mad, 245.

Ilkhans of Persia, 15, 16.

Illicit trade. _See_ Trade.

Immigration. _See_ Germans; Scotch-Irish.

Imperial Defense. _See_ Defense.

Independence, predicted, 215; desired by some in 1774, 245; but not generally desired before 1776, 248, 249; Lee and Adams lead the movement for, 251; Lee introduces resolution for, 252; significance of the Declaration of, 253; acknowledged by England, 271.

India, 5, 8, 13-17, 236.

Indian presents, 155.

Indian trade. _See_ Trade, Indian.

Indians, influence on colonists, 79; threaten New England, 106; massacres inspired at Quebec, 145; Iroquois, 144, 145, 155, 157, 211; Pontiac's conspiracy, 211; employed by British in Revolution, 265.

Indigo, 166.

Industry. _See_ Trade.

"Inner Light." _See_ Quakers.

Intellectual conditions, 161, 169, 170, 175, 180 _ff._, 184 _ff._

Intercourse, with England, 169; intercolonial, 184, 190.

"Interests," political term, 166.

"Interlopers," East Indian, 140.

"Internal" taxes, 227.

Intolerable Acts, 233, 234.

_Introduction to Cosmography_, Waldseemüller's, 27.

Iron manufactures, 151.

Iroquois. _See_ Indians.

Isabella, 24.

Italian cities, 1, 5, 6, 18.

Jaffa, 5.

Jamaica, 127, 135, 138, 140, 149-50.

James I, 62, 86, 90.

James II, 145.

Jamestown, 58, 75.

Jarrett, Devereaux, 172.

Jay, John, 271.

Jefferson, Peter, 176.

Jefferson, Thomas, born on frontier, 176; opposed to tide-water aristocracy, 182; leader of radical party in Virginia, 241.

Jenghis Khan, 7.

Jenyns, Soame, 235, 240.

Jesuits, 35, 40, 142.

John of Good Memory, King of Portugal, 19.

Johnson, Samuel, 202, 239.

Johnson, Sir William, 157.

Johnstone, "Governor," 261.

Joint-stock company, rise of the, 53 _ff._

Joint-stock régime in Virginia, 58, 68.

Judges, control of, 164.

Kalm, Peter, 162, 165, 191, 215.

Kaskaskia, 153, 266.

Kentucky settlements, 267.

King George's War, 152.

"King's Friends," 270.

King's Mountain, battle of, 268.

Kublai Khan, 7, 8.

Lafayette, 269, 270.

Land, grants in Virginia, 70, 77, 167; in Massachusetts, 95; in the Carolinas, 129; in New York, 131; in the Ohio Valley, 154, 209; in Pennsylvania, 178; in Maryland, 179; importance of free land in the eighteenth century, 174 _ff._; Proclamation of 1763 restricts grants of, 211; cession of Western, 265.

Landowners, influence legislation, 183.

Laodicea, 5.

La Salle, 143.

Laud, William, 64, 91, 106.

Laurens, of South Carolina, 166, 269.

Laurentian _Portolano_, 18.

Lawyers, and the Stamp Act, 221.

Lay religious societies, 83.

Lee, Richard Henry, influence by the classics, 239; thinks England will yield, 249; introduces resolutions of independence, 251, 252; influence declines, 254.

Leeds, 223.

Legislation, character of eighteenth-century colonial, 164; representation and, 228, 229.

Leisler Rebellion, 132.

Leon, Ponce de, 32.

Le Ronde Denys, 215.

Levant, 1, 6, 11, 15, 17, 150.

"Levelling spirit of New England," feared in the Middle colonies, 246; strengthened by the Revolution, 244 _ff._

Leverett, Governor of Massachusetts, 121.

Lexington, battle of, 257.

Leyden, 89.

Liberalism in Massachusetts, 120, 122.

Liberty. _See_ Colonial rights.

Liberty Boys, 268.

Liberty Pole festivals, 238.

Lincoln, Benjamin, 262.

Locke, John, 129, 171, 172, 197.

Log College, 187, 189.

Logstown, 154.

London, 6, 37, 150, 223.

London Company, 56, 57.

Londonderry, 180.

Long Island, early settlements on, 131; battle of, 254.

Lords of Trade, Committee of the, 143, 145.

Louis XVI, 258, 259.

Louisburg, 155, 159.

Louisiana, 152.

Louisville, 266.

Low, Isaac, 245.

Loyalists. _See_ Party.

Lubec, 6.

Luther, Martin, 84, 110, 111.

Lutherans in America, 180 _ff._

Luxuries in the eighteenth century, 173.

Lyons, 6.

MacDougall, Alexander, 238.

Madeiras, 120.

Madison, James, 194.

Magalhaes. _See_ Magellan.

Magellan, 28.

Magistrates. _See_ Government.

_Magnalia_, Cotton Mather's, 123.

Maine, 57, 64, 174.

Malacca, Straits of, 5, 8, 27.

Manchester, 223.

Manufactures. _See_ Trade.

Marcos, Friar, 33.

Marion, Francis, partisan leader in South Carolina, 267.

Marlborough, Duke of, 126.

Marseilles, 6.

Martin Luther, 194.

Martyr, Peter, 34.

Maryland, proprietary grant of, 64; and English trade, 138; charter recalled and restored, 146; quit-rents in, 164; social conditions in, 166, 167; forces cession of Western lands, 265.

Mason, John, 57.

Massachusetts Bay, grant of territory, 57; charter of, 64; settlement of, 90 _ff._; government of, 96 _ff._; dissensions in, 100 _ff._; and the New England Confederation, 106; relations with the Protectorate, 107; hangs the Quakers, 108 _ff._; ideals of the founders, 112 _ff._; growth of material interests in, 120; recall of the charter, 121 _ff._; charter of 1691, 146; repaid for conquest of Louisburg, 155; troops raised in the Seven Years' War, 159; rise of Puritan democracy in, 194 _ff._; paper money retired, 208; class conflict in, 242-44.

Massacre of 1622 in Virginia, 62.

Mather, Cotton, 120, 123.

Mather, Increase, 120, 123.

Mather, Richard, 93, 120.

Mayhew, Jonathan, 220.

Mediterranean. _See_ Levant.

Mendoza, Cardinal, 23.

Mendoza, Governor of New Spain, 33.

Mennonites, 180.

Mercantile theory, 48 _ff._

Merchant marine, 125, 137.

Merchants, growing influence in Boston, 120; colonial system fashioned to suit the interests of English, 134 _ff._; trade with France during war, 145; colonial legislation influenced by, 183. _See_ Trade.

Meuthen, Treaty of, 150.

Mexico, 32, 33.

Miami, English traders on the, 154.

Michilimackinac, 142, 144.

Middle colonies, population of, 162; extension of frontier in, 175 _ff._; North's resolutions of conciliation and the, 251; "levelling spirit of New England" feared in the, 246; opposed to declaration of independence in 1776, 253.

Middleton, New Jersey, 133.

Milan, 6.

Mississippi Forts, 265, 266.

Mississippi River, discovered, 33; explored, 143; boundary of the United States, 272. _See_ France in America.

"Mohawks," 233.

Mohawk Valley settlements, 131, 153, 179.

Molasses Act, 139, 151, 207.

Moluccas, 5.

Monasteries, effect of destruction of the, 67.

_Mondo Novo_, 27, 29.

Money Bills, 164.

Mongols, 7, 15.

Monmouth, settled, 133; battle of, 261.

Monopoly, non-importation and, 229.

Montcalm, Marquis de, 159.

Montesquieu, 215.

Montezuma, 32.

Montreal, 39, 45, 142.

Moodie, Lady Deborah, 116.

Moors, Prince Henry and the, 20.

Moravians, 180, 186.

Morgan, Daniel, 265.

Morris, Robert, 254.

Morristown Heights, 256.

Mount Vernon, 274.

Mutiny Act, extended to the colonies, 214; reënacted, 224; causes trouble in New York, 225, 226, 230.

Narvaez, 33.

National state, rise of centralized, 48 _ff._

Nationality, rise of sentiment of, 184 _ff._; French wars develop, 191; Franklin the embodiment of, 199.

Native-born New Englanders, first generation of, 117.

Natural rights, 172, 237.

Naval stores, 50.

Navigation Acts, establishment of system of, 139 _ff._; Act of 1696, 145; violation of, 140, 152; how regarded on the frontier, 184; Molasses Act, 151, 207; Sugar Act, 207; modified in 1766, 224; petition for further modification, 225; Board of Commissioners to enforce, 226.

Necessity, Fort, 157.

Netherlands. _See_ Dutch.

"Neulanders," 177.

New Brunswick, 191.

"New Castle trade," 137.

Newcastle, Duke of, 149, 151, 155.

New England, named, 56; land grants in, 57; and the English colonial system, 138; united under Andros, 145; conquers Louisburg, 155; population of, 162; social conditions in, 168 _ff._; frontier in, 174; not attractive to foreigners, 178; religious division in, 189; coast towns raided, 262. _See_ Massachusetts Bay.

New England Confederation, 106.

New England Council, 57, 91.

New England theology, 190.

New Hampshire, 67, 174, 179.

New Haven, 105, 107.

New Jersey, 132, 145, 146.

"New Light," 188.

New Netherland, 45, 128, 131.

New Orleans, 152.

New Port, 103, 168.

"New Side," 188.

New Spain, 31, 150.

Newspapers, 191, 222.

Newton, Isaac, 126.

Newtown, 104.

New York, founded, 130; annexed to New England, 132, 145; control of judges in, 164; social conditions in, 167; paper money in, 208, 209; avoided by foreign settlers, 178; and the Restraining Act, 226; riots in, 226; non-importation agreement in, 229, 230; permitted to issue bills of credit, 230; and East India Company tea, 232, 233; Howe occupies the city of, 255; war conditions in, 268; projected attack on the city of, 269; evacuated by British and Loyalists, 272.

Niagara, 153, 159.

Nicolet, Jean, 141.

Nicolls, Col. Richard, 131.

Noel, Martin, 135 _ff._

Nombre de Dios, 43.

Nonconformists, 87, 88, 90.

Non-importation agreements, 221, 222, 229, 230, 246.

North, Lord, 230, 231, 250, 270.

Northampton, 188.

North Carolina, 175, 269.

Northwest, conquest of the, 265-67.

_Nova Britannia_, 67.

Nova Scotia, 122, 155.

Oderic, Friar Beatus, 9.

Ohio Valley. _See_ Frontier; Defense.

Old colonial system. _See_ Colonial control.

Oldham, John, 104.

"Old Light," 188.

"Old Side," 188.

Orient, importance of the relations of Europe and the, 1, 4-7, 13.

Oswego, 153, 154, 156, 157, 159.

Otis, James, 231, 237.

Overpopulation of England, colonization and the belief in, 67, 138.

Palatinate, 177.

Paper money. _See_ Currency.

Parliament. _See_ English Government.

Particularism, 262, 263.

Partridge, Lieutenant-Governor, 148.

Party: the Conservatives, attitude toward Stamp Act, 222; and the Townshend Acts, 227, 229, 230; and the tea episode, 232; fear the growing influence of lower classes, 240 _ff._; tend to become Loyalist, 244; in the First Congress, 245 _ff._; support Galloway's plan, 246; disappearance of the, 248 _ff._; influence in forming the new state constitutions, 263. the Loyalists, oppose Grenville's measures, 217; in the First Congress, 245; the "Association" creates the party of, 247 _ff._; growth of the, 249 _ff._; New York the headquarters of, 255; in Philadelphia, 259; property confiscated, 259; encouraged by the conquest of South Carolina, 262; take part in the war, 267, 268; ruined by the Treaty of 1783, 271; America suffers loss by the exile of, 272. the Radicals, oppose Stamp Act, 219 _ff._; organize as Sons of Liberty, 222; take advanced ground on the Townshend Acts, 227-30; active opposition to the East India Company's tea monopoly, 232, 233; aim to revolutionize colonial governments, 240 _ff._; control First Congress, 245 _ff._; establish revolutionary government, 217 _ff._; not wholly satisfied with new State Governments, 263.

Pastorius, Francis Daniel, 178.

Patent for Rhode Island, 103.

Peace of Paris, of 1763, effect on colonial policy of England, 205; of 1783, provisions of the, 270-72.

Pegalotti, 9.

Peking, 5, 8.

Penn, William, 133.

Pennsylvania, founded, 133; charter annulled and restored, 146; taxation of proprietary estates in, 164; mecca of the Germans, 177; and of the Scotch-Irish, 179; Quaker government opposed by western counties of, 242; Loyalist stronghold, 259.

Penry, John, 88.

Pepys, Samuel, 125.

Perestrello, Felipe Moñiz de, 22.

Periwigs, badge of "gentle folk," 173, 174.

Peru, conquest of, 84.

Philadelphia, growth of, 162; Germans land at, 178; First Congress meets in, 234; taken by Howe, 257; evacuated by Clinton, 261.

Philip II, 34-37.

Philippine Islands, 28.

Philip's War, 119.

Phillips, George, 98.

"Philosophers," America and the French, 199, 200.

Piedmont of Virginia, 179.

Pine Barrens, 179.

Pinzon, 26, 28.

Pioneers. _See_ Frontier.

Piquet, Père, 156.

Piracy, 40, 146.

Pitt, William, and the Seven Years' War, 158 _ff._; opposes Stamp Act, 223; admires papers of the First Congress, 247.

Pittsfield, 175.

Pizarro, Francisco, 34.

Pizarro, Hernando, 34.

Plan for a British-American Parliament, Galloway's, 246.

Plantation type of colony. _See_ Colonial control.

Plantation in Virginia, the, 70 _ff._, 74, 166.

Pliny, 13.

Plymouth colony, 57, 87, 107.

Plymouth Company, 56.

Pola, Marco, 8, 9.

Politics. _See_ Government: Party.

Pope, Alexander, 126, 170.

Population, of the colonies, 66, 161, 162; of Virginia, 69, 71; of Massachusetts Bay, 93; of Carolina, 129, 130; of New York, 132; of Pennsylvania, 134; of Louisiana, 152; of New France, 157; German and Scotch-Irish, 177.

Porto Rico, 32.

Portsmouth, 103.

Portugal, 19, 37, 150.

Post office established in the colonies, 191.

Potosi, mines of, 34.

Pownall, Governor of Massachusetts, 158.

Precious metals, European interest in Asia largely determined by the desire for, 10-14; America valuable to Spain because of, 31 _ff._; important for the national state of the sixteenth century, 49 _ff._; flow into England from Portugal and the West Indies, 150; lack of specie in frontier communities, 183; drain of specie leads to use of paper money, 208.

Presbyterians in America, 180 _ff._, 189, 190, 194.

Prices, 14, 149.

Prince, Thomas, 188.

Princeton College, 184, 190, 193 _ff._

Privateers, Elizabethan, 41 _ff._

Proclamation of 1763, 210, 215, 219.

Proprietary estates in Pennsylvania, taxation of, 164.

Proprietary feudal grant, as an instrument of colonization, 54, 55.

Protectorate, 127.

Protestant sects, in the sixteenth century, 111; on the American frontier, 185 _ff._; effect of the Great Awakening on, 188 _ff._

Protestantism; European origin of, 80 _ff._; in England, 86; a Church-State incompatible with the principles of, 110 _ff._

Providence, founding of, 103.

Provincialism in the eighteenth century, 170, 174.

Ptolemaic theory, 17.

Puritanism, origin of, 80 _ff._; conception of morals, 84; in England, 86 _ff._; in New England, 91 _ff._; and the Massachusetts State Church, 110 _ff._; decline of the rigid ideals of, 122, 125; in the eighteenth century, 168, 194.

Purse, control of the, 164.

Quakers, in Massachusetts, 108 _ff._; in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, 133, 134; indifferent to defense of the frontier, 157; control Pennsylvania in the eighteenth century, 167 _ff._; Revolution destroys political power of the, 242.

Quebec, 45, 159.

Quincy, Josiah, 230, 238, 239, 249, 250.

Quit-rents, 68, 77, 95, 164, 178.

Radicals. _See_ Party.

Radisson, 141.

Raids, Clinton's policy of, 261 _ff._

Raleigh, Sir Walter, 46, 54, 55.

Rail, Colonel, 256.

Randolph, Edward, 121.

Randolph, Peyton, 245.

Receiver-general of the customs in Virginia, 77.

Redstone, 179, 266.

Reed, Joseph, 245, 261.

Reformation. _See_ Protestantism.

Religion, transformation of, 168 _ff._; on the frontier, 175, 180, 184; politics influenced by, 193; John Adams's ideal of, 197; Franklin's idea of, 198. _See_ Puritanism.

Renaissance, 31.

Representative government. _See_ Government.

Requisitions, 213.

Restraining Act, 226.

Revolution of 1688, 145, 147.

Rhode Island, 103, 107, 146, 168.

Rice, 130, 166.

Riders, assemblies make use of, 164.

Rights. _See_ Colonial rights.

Robinson, John, 88, 90.

Robinson, Rev. William, 186.

Rochelle, capture of, 86.

Rockingham Whigs, 223.

Rolfe, John, 69.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 196.

Roxbury, 104.

Rubruquis, William de, 9.

Rum, 168, 216.

Rutledge, John, 246.

Sagadahoc, 56.

St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, 84, 86.

St. Augustine, town of, 33.

St. Brandan, Isles of, 23.

St. John, Henry, Viscount Bolingbroke, 126, 171.

St. Louis, Fort, 143.

St. Lucar, 28.

Saint-Lusson, 141.

St. Paul, 84.

Salem, 93, 100, 101.

Sandwich, Earl of, 236.

Sandys, Sir Edwin, 59, 61, 65.

San Domingo, 32.

San Juan de Ulloa, 41, 42.

Santa Maria, 25.

Sanuto, Marino, 15.

Saratoga, battle of, 257, 260.

Sault Ste. Marie, 141.

Savannah, 262.

Saybrook Platform, 188.

Schiltberger, Johan, 9, 16.

Schnell, Rev. Mr., 186, 187.

Schuyler, Philip, 155.

Sciota, 154.

Scott, John Morin, 220.

Scotch-Irish, 153, 177, 180, 242.

Scrooby, 88.

Seabury, Samuel, 248.

Senegal, 20.

Separatists, 87 _ff._

"Servants," 71, 176.

Seven Cities, the, 23, 33.

Seven Years' War, 156, 165, 191, 204, 208, 214.

Severac, Jordanus de, 9.

Sewall, Jonathan, 243, 244.

Shaftesbury. _See_ Cooper.

Shenandoah Valley, 178, 180.

Shipbuilding, 168.

Shirley, William, 212, 242.

"Simple folk" in the eighteenth century, 173.

Six Nations. _See_ Indians, Iroquois.

Slave trade, 71, 150, 166.

Slavery, in Virginia, 71; in Barbados and the Bahamas, 128; in the West Indies, 138; slave population, 162; in Rhode Island, 168; on the frontier, 176, 183.

Smith, John, 56, 58.

Smuggling. _See_ Trade, illicit.

Smyth, Sir Thomas, 59, 63, 65.

Social conditions, in England, 66, 67, 70; in Virginia, 70, 78; in New England, 95, 113, 116, 121; in the eighteenth century, 166 _ff._,172; on the frontier, 175, 180, 184.

Somers, Sir George, 56.

Sons of Liberty. _See_ Party.

"Soul Liberty," 103, 107.

South Carolina, founded, 128, 129; in the eighteenth century, 166, 175; occupied by the British, 262; laid waste by guerrilla war, 267.

Southampton, Earl of, 61.

South Sea, 30-32.

South Sea Company, 149, 150.

Spain, and England, 34-37, 40, 136.

Spanish exploration and settlement in America, 31 _ff._

Spanish Succession War, 178.

Specific appropriations, increase of assemblies' power through, 164.

Spotswood, Alexander, 164, 176.

"Squatters" in Pennsylvania, 178.

Stamp Act, passed, 213, 214; opposition to the, 216, 218, 220; legal and illegal methods of resisting, 220, 221; repeal, 223; effect of repeal, 224; resolution of frontier counties of Pennsylvania on the, 241.

Staple Act. _See_ Navigation Acts.

State Governments, 241, 259, 262.

Strahan, William, 170.

Stuart Restoration, 112, 125, 128, 134.

Suffolk Resolutions, First Congress approves the, 246.

Suffrage, 75, 96, 99, 122, 132, 165.

Sugar Act, 208, 215-18, 224.

Sumptuary legislation in Massachusetts, 116.

Swedes, on the Delaware, 132.

Synod of 1679, 119.

Syria, 13.

Tabriz, 5, 8.

Talon Intendant, 142.

Tarleton, Lieutenant-Colonel, 267.

Taxation. _See_ Colonial rights.

Tea, 226, 231-33.

Tennant, Gilbert, 187.

Tennessee settlements, 267.

Theocracy. _See_ Massachusetts Bay.

Thomas, Major, 255.

Tobacco, and the founding of Virginia, 62; influence on Virginia institutions, 69-71; official corruption in connection with the sale of, 77; yields revenue to English customs, 127; not permitted to be raised in England, 130, 131; Virginia staple in eighteenth century, 167.

Tordesillas, Treaty of, 26.

Toscanelli, 29.

Town meeting, 95, 99.

Townshend, Charles, 206, 225, 230.

Trade, colonial industry and, 120, 168, 130-34, 149, 166, 215; English colonization and, 50 _ff._, 125, 127, 129, 136, 138, 139, 147, 150, 218, 221, 222, 229; illicit, 130-32, 140, 144, 145, 160, 205; Indian, 73, 76, 140, 144, 145, 150, 152-56, 207, 208-11; Oriental, 4-6, 13-15, 19.

Trade regulation. _See_ Colonial control.

Travelers, thirteenth-century Oriental, 9-11.

Treasure. _See_ Precious metals.

Trebizond, 8.

Trent, William, 154.

Trenton, 255, 256.

Trinidad, 26.

Turgot, 215.

Turkestan, 5.

Turks, 15, 17.

Ulster, 177.

Union. _See_ Congress; Nationality.

United States, 271, 272.

Up-country. _See_ Frontier.

Utrecht, Peace of, 150.

Vaca, Cabeza de, 33.

Valley Forge, 259.

Vandalia Company, 211.

Vane, Sir Harry, 102.

Van Tyne, Claude Halsted, 259, note.

Vassalboro, 175.

Vaughan, George, 148.

Velasquez, 32.

Venice, 6.

Vera Cruz, 150.

Vergennes, 258, 259.

Vermont, 175.

Verrazano, 30, 38.

Vespucci, Americus, 27.

Villeroi, 255.

Vincennes, 265-67.

_Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches_, John Wise's, 196.

Virginia, founded, 55; royal province, 63; growth of, 67 _ff._; social and political conditions in, 73 _ff._, 166, 172; sectional conflict in, 241; instructs delegates for independence, 252; raided by British troops, 262; cedes Western lands, 265; raided by Cornwallis, 269.

"Virtual" representation, 220.

Virtue. _See_ Civic virtue.

"Vital" religion, 186 _ff._

Vivaldi, the, 18.

Voltaire, Franklin and, 199.

Voyages, Hakluyt's, 46.

Wabash River, 266.

Waldseemüller, 27.

Walpole, Horace, Lord, 150.

Walpole, Horace, Earl of Orford, 214, 236, 262.

Walpole, Robert, Earl of Orford, 151.

War of Independence, 253 _ff._

Warren, Joseph, 239.

Warwick, Earl of, 63.

Washington, Augustine, 154.

Washington, George, builds Fort Necessity, 157; and the Braddock expedition, 192; appointed commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, 254; early campaigns of the war, 254-57; thinks the "game nearly up," 255; amazed at Howe's conduct, 257; at Valley Forge, 259; effort to bribe, 261; criticism of, 264; at West Point, 268; at Yorktown, 269, 270; bids farewell to his officers, 273; army proposes to make him king, 273.

Washington, Lawrence, 154.

Watauga, 265.

Watertown, 98, 104.

Watling's Island, 25.

Wealth, colonial aristocracy based on, 166.

Wedderburne, Alexander, 225.

Wentworth, Thomas, Earl of Strafford, 91.

West. _See_ Frontier.

West Indies, trade of continental colonies with, 120, 150, 166; importance for English colonial system, 138; planters influential in Parliament, 149.

West Point, 268.

Western lands, ceded to the Federal Government, 265.

Westward movement, 104. _See_ Frontier.

Wethersfield, 104.

Whig oligarchy, attitude toward the colonies, 148 _ff._; and the Seven Years' War, 158.

Whigs, 251, 271.

Whitefield, the evangelist, 186, 188, 199.

Whitehall Ferry, 273.

White Plains, battle of, 255.

White Woman's Creek, 181.

William III, 126, 145.

Williams, Roger, 100, 103, 116.

Wills Creek, 153.

Wilmington, 269.

Wilson, John, 93, 102, 120.

Windsor, 104.

Wingfield, Edward Maria, 56.

Winthrop, John, 90, 93, 98, 102-105, 112, 115, 120.

Wisconsin River, 141.

Wise, John, 195.

Witchcraft delusion, 195.

Witherspoon, John, 194.

Wolfe, James, 159.

Woolen manufactures, 151.

Writs of assistance, 207.

Yale College, 169, 189.

Yarkand, 5.

Yeardley, Governor of Virginia, 75.

York, James, Duke of, 131.

Yorktown, surrender of Cornwallis at, 269, 270.

Yucatan, 32.

Zaiton, 8.