idle refugees in Boston, and even candid British Chap. XLI.} 1775. June 17. officers, condemned Howe's attack on the New England lines as a needless exposure of his troops to carnage. By landing at the Charlestown isthmus, they said, he should have cooped the rebels within the peninsula; or by aid of a musket proof gunboat he should have dislodged the party near the Mystic; and, even at the last, by concentrating his force at the rail fence, he might have taken Prescott in the rear. During the evening and night after the battle, the air trembled with the groans of the wounded, as they were borne over the Charles and through the streets of Boston to hospitals, where they were to waste away from the summer heat and the scarcity of proper food. The fifth regiment suffered most; the Chap. XLI.} 1775. June 17. eighteenth and the fifty ninth, which had long been very weak, were utterly ruined; and, to the end of the war, the courage of the insurgents in this battle of the people, and their skill as marksmen, never wore out of mind. The loss of officers was observed to be disproportionately great; and the gloom in the quarters of the British was deepened by the reflection, that they had fought not against an enemy, but against their fellow-subjects and kindred; not for the promotion of civil or religious freedom, but for the supremacy of one part of the empire over another. Those who, like Abercrombie, died of their wounds, wanted consolation in their last hour, for they had no hope that posterity would mark their graves or cherish their memory.

On the day of the battle, the continental congress elected its four major generals. Of these, the first, from deference to Massachusetts, was Artemas Ward. Notwithstanding his ill health, he answered: I always have been, and am still ready to devote my life in attempting to deliver my native country.

The American people with ingenuous confidence assumed that Charles Lee,—the son of an English officer, trained up from boyhood for the army,—was, as he represented himself, well versed in the science of war, familiar with active service in America, Portugal, Poland, and Turkey, and altogether a soldier of consummate ability, who had joined their cause from the purest impulses of a generous nature. In England he was better understood. From what I know of him, wrote Sir Joseph Yorke, then British minister at the Hague, he is the worst present which could be made to any army. He left the standard of his king, because he saw no Chap. XLI.} 1775. June 17. chance of being provided for at home, and, as an adventurer, sought employment in any part of the world. Venerating England all the while, and holding it wretchedness itself not to be able to herd with the class of men to which he had been accustomed from his infancy, he was continually craving intimate relations with British general officers and his old associates. He looked upon the Americans as unworthy of independence, which he never meant they should achieve, and he would have willingly become conspicuous as the instrument to lead them back to their allegiance; but he pursued no consistent plan; and whatever purpose for evil or for good rose in his mind, the eddies of his whims were sure to disturb its course. No position was too high for his conceit; yet he could not steadily pursue intrigues to supplant his superiors. He wrote with vivacity and sometimes with epigrammatic terseness, but never with warmth, for he had no fixed principles, and he loved neither man nor woman. He was subject to spleen and gloomy moods; excitable almost to madness; but without depth or persistency; in his passions, alike violent and versatile. He passed for a brave man, but he wanted presence of mind, and in sudden danger he quailed. His mobility, though sometimes mistaken for activity, only disguised his inefficiency. He was poor in council; prodigal of censure; downcast in disaster; after success, claiming honor not his own; fit only to cavil and perplex. He professed to be a freethinker, after the type of his century; but he had only learned of scoffers to deny the God of the Jews, curse the clergy, and hate orthodox dissenters. His numerous eccentricities were neither Chap. XLI.} 1775. June 17. exaggerations nor caricatures of any thing American, and in their excess disclosed a morbid mind. Having no fellow feeling with the common people, he wanted capacity to array a nation in arms; and he would have preferred a country of slaves under a lenient master, to a democratic government. His sordid soul had no passion so strong as covetousness; in affluence, he thought his income miserably scanty, and he was always seeking to escape spending money even on himself. Claiming to have passed through the higher military ranks in some of the most respect able services of Europe, and to be a major general of five years standing, he had waited upon congress with the thought of being chosen commander in chief. Before he would consent to take rank after Ward, whom he despised, he exacted a promise of indemnity on renouncing his half pay; and at the very moment of his accepting employment from a body, which was looking to France for sympathy, he assured his king of his readiness to serve against the natural hereditary enemies of England with the utmost alacrity and zeal. Ever brooding over the risk he ran, he often regretted having hazarded his all in the American cause. Such was the man who, in the probable event of Ward's early resignation, was placed next in command to Washington.

New York had been asked to propose the third major general; she had more than one citizen of superior military talent, but her provincial congress which was consulted, limited the choice to those who possessed the gifts of fortune, and selected Philip Schuyler. Montgomery hesitated, saying: His consequence in the province makes him a fit subject for Chap. XLI.} 1775. June 17. an important trust; but has he strong nerves? I could wish that point well ascertained with respect to any man so employed. Doubts existed in congress, and the vote for him was not unanimous. Born to opulence, accustomed to ease, of a generous, open, and unsuspicious nature, infirm in health, choleric and querulous, Schuyler was ill suited to control undisciplined levies of turbulent freemen; or to pierce the wiles of a crafty foe. Without peculiar fitness for the battle field, he had personal integrity, social consideration, and a rare and almost unique superiority to envy; and his patriotism was so sincere and so ardent, that he willingly used his credit, influence, and wide connections to bring out the resources of his native province. In this kind of service no one equalled him, and neither rude taunts, nor inconsiderate disregard of his rank, nor successful intrigues, could quench his hearty and unpretending zeal.

For the fourth major general, the choice fell upon Israel Putnam, of Connecticut. Wooster and Spencer, of the same colony, stood before him in age and rank; but the skirmish at Noddle's Island had been heralded as a great victory, and the ballot in his favor is recorded as unanimous. Of Massachusetts by birth, at the ripe age of thirty seven he began his career in war with the commission from Connecticut of a second lieutenant, and his service had been chiefly as a ranger. Deficient in the reflective powers, he was also unusually illiterate. His bustling manner and adventurous life had made his village tavern the resort of the patriots of his neighborhood; its keeper their military oracle; but his fame rested on deeds of personal prowess rather than on concerted action; Chap. XLI.} 1775. June. and at fifty seven he was too old to be taken from his farm and his stand to command armies, even if he had not always wanted superintending vigilance, controlling energy, and the faculty of combination.

Next to those came Horatio Gates, as adjutant general with the rank of brigadier. His experience adapted him for good service in bringing the army into order; but he was shallow in his natural endowments and in his military culture, yet restless for a higher place, for which he did not possess either the requisite genius for command, or firmness of mind.

The continent took up arms, with only one general officer, who drew to himself the trust and love of the country, with not one of the five next below him fit to succeed to his place.

On the twenty first of June, Thomas Jefferson, then thirty years of age, entered congress, preceded by a brilliant reputation as an elegant writer and a courageous and far-sighted statesman. The next day brought tidings of the Charlestown battle. At the grief for Warren's death, Patrick Henry exclaimed: I am glad of it; a breach on our affections was needed to rouse the country to action. Congress proceeded at once to the election of eight brigadiers, of whom all but one were from New England. The first was Seth Pomeroy, a gunsmith of Northampton, the warmhearted veteran of two wars, beloved by all who knew him; but he was seventy years old, and on his perceiving some distrust of his capacity, he retired from the camp before receiving his commission. The second was Richard Montgomery, of New York, seventh from Washington in rank, next to him in merit; an Irishman by birth, well informed as a Chap. XLI.} 1775. June. statesman, faultless in private life, a patriot from the heart. He was followed by David Wooster of Connecticut, an upright old man of sixty five, frugal of his means, but lavish of his life; by William Heath, of Roxbury, Massachusetts, a patriot farmer, who held high rank in the trainbands and had read books on the military art; vain, honest, and incompetent; by Joseph Spencer of Connecticut, a man past sixty, a most respectable citizen, but, from inexperience, not qualified for councils of war; by John Thomas, a physician of Kingston, Massachusetts, the best general officer of that colony; by John Sullivan, a lawyer of New Hampshire, always ready to act, but not always thoughtful of what he undertook; not free from defects and foibles; tinctured with vanity and eager to be popular; enterprising, spirited, and able. The last was Nathaniel Greene, of Rhode Island, who, after Washington, had no superior in natural resources, unless it were Montgomery.

At a farewell supper, the members of congress all rose, as they drank a health to the commander in chief of the American army; to his thanks, they listened in stillness, for the sense of the difficulties which lay before him suppressed every festal cheer.

A kind of destiny has thrown me upon this service; thus Washington announced the cutting stroke of his departure to his wife, whose miniature he always wore on his breast from the day of his marriage to his death. On the twenty third of June, a day after congress had heard the first rumors of the battle at Charlestown, he was escorted out of Philadelphia by the Massachusetts delegates and many others, with music, officers of militia, and a cavalcade of light Chap. XLI.} 1775. June. horse in uniform. I, poor creature, said John Adams, as he returned from this pride and pomp of war, I, worn out with scribbling for my bread and my liberty, low in spirits and weak in health, must leave others to wear the laurels which I have sown; others to eat the bread which I have earned. To his brother, Washington wrote confidingly: I bid adieu to every kind of domestic ease; and embark on a wide ocean, boundless in its prospect, and in which perhaps no safe harbor is to be found. He went forth not to eat the bread, still less to wear the honors of others, but to hazard his fame and life in the command of an army which had neither discipline, nor permanency, nor proper arms, nor ammunition, nor funds for its support, nor experienced officers; encouraged only by the hope that, by self-sacrifice, he might unbar the gates of light for mankind.

On Sunday, the twenty fifth, all New York was in motion. Tryon, the royal governor, who had arrived the day before, was to land from the harbor; and Washington, accompanied by Lee and Schuyler, under the escort of the Philadelphia Light Horse, was known to have reached Newark. As the colony of New York had been enjoined by the general congress to respect the king's government, the governor and the general were both entitled to be received with public honors; but the people intervened to mark the distinction. On the news that Washington was to cross the Hudson, the bells were rung, the militia paraded in their gayest trim, and at four o'clock in the afternoon the commander in chief, dressed in a uniform of blue, was received at Lispenard's by the mass of the inhabitants. Drawn in an open carriage by a pair of white Chap. XLI.} 1775. June. horses, he was escorted into the city by nine companies of infantry, while multitudes, of all ages and both sexes, bent their eyes on him from the housetops, the windows, and the streets. Night had fallen before Tryon landed. Met by a company which he himself had commissioned, and by a few of the magistrates in military costume, he was attended noiselessly to a house in Broadway, keenly suffering from disappointment. He had expected to find the royalists in the undisputed ascendant; and he saw himself left almost alone, an object of suspicion, liable at any moment to arrest. The false informers of the ministry excused themselves by the suddenness of the change of measures and sentiments; but they frankly owned that the province would fall behind none in opposition to the king and parliament. Amazed and dejected at heart, Tryon masked his designs under an air of unconcern, and overflowed with bland professions. Washington, who instantly penetrated his insincerity, and had no scruple about the propriety of seizing him, directed Schuyler to keep a watchful eye on his movements, and wrote a warning to congress; but Schuyler, lulled by words of mildness which concealed the most wary and malignant activity, soon reported confidently, that Tryon would create no trouble.

On the twenty-sixth, the provincial congress of New York, in their address to Washington, from whose abilities and virtue they were taught to expect security and peace, declared an accommodation with the mother country to be the fondest wish of each American soul, in the fullest assurance that, upon such an accommodation, he would cheerfully resign his trust, and become once more a citizen. When we Chap. XLI.} 1775. June. assumed the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen, answered Washington for himself and his colleagues; but having once drawn the sword, he postponed the thought of private life to the establishment of American liberty on the most firm and solid foundations.

On the next day the New York congress produced its plan of accommodation. It insisted on the repeal of obnoxious acts; the undisturbed exercise, by the respective colonies, of the powers of internal legislation and taxation, and the free enjoyment of the rights of conscience; it conceded to Great Britain the power to regulate the trade of the whole empire; and, on proper requisitions, promised assistance in the general defence, either from the colonies severally, or through a continental congress under a president appointed by the crown. Transmitting their demands to their delegates, they added: Use every effort for compromising this unhappy quarrel; so that, if our well-meant endeavors shall fail of effect, we may stand unreproachable by our own consciences in the last solemn appeal to the God of battles. The spirit of the colony was in harmony with the rest of the continent; but here too, as everywhere else, preparations for resistance had been deferred; no more than four barrels of powder could be found in the city.

While Washington was borne toward Cambridge on the affectionate confidence of the people, congress, which had as yet supported its commander in chief with nothing beyond a commission, was indulging a hope, by one campaign, to dispose the British government to treaty. How to find the ways and means for such a temporary resistance was their great difficulty. Chap. XLI.} 1775 June. They represented a fertile and wealthy continent; but even if commerce had not ceased, they possessed no power to lay taxes of any kind. Necessity led, therefore, to the most disastrous of all financial measures; though the country was already languishing under the depreciating paper money of the several colonies, continental bills of credit to the amount of two millions of dollars were authorized, and the twelve confederated colonies were pledged for their redemption.

A code for the government of the continental army was adopted. Two more companies of riflemen were asked of Pennsylvania, that the eight from that colony might form a battalion. The Green Mountain Boys, if they would but serve, were allowed the choice of their own officers; and as Carleton was making preparations to invade the colonies, and was instigating the Indian nations to take up the hatchet against them, Schuyler, who was directed to repair to Ticonderoga and Crown Point, received authority to take possession of St. John's, Montreal, and any other parts of Canada. To the Indians agents were sent with presents and speeches, to prevent their taking any part in the commotions. Alliances with them were forbidden, except where some emissary of the ministry should have concerted with them acts of hostility, or an offensive league.

On the sixth of July, congress set forth the causes July. and necessity of taking up arms. After recapitulating the wrongs of America, they asked in words which Edmund Burke ridiculed as the nonsense of men wholly ignorant of the state of parties in England:

Why should we enumerate our injuries in detail Chap. XLI.} 1775. July. By one statute it is declared that parliament can of right make laws to bind us in all cases whatsoever. July What is to defend us against so unlimited a power? Not a single man of those who assume it, is chosen by us; and an American revenue would lighten their own burdens in proportion as they increase ours. Lord North's proposition for conciliation they condemned as insidiously designed to divide the colonies, and leave them nothing but the indulgence of raising the prescribed tribute in their own mode. After enumerating the hostile acts at Lexington and Concord, Boston, Charlestown, and other places, the seizure of ships, the intercepting of provisions, the attempts to embody Canadians, Indians, and insurgent slaves, they closed their statement in words of their new member, Jefferson: These colonies now feel the complicated calamities of fire, sword, and famine. We are reduced to the alternative of choosing an unconditional submission to irritated ministers, or resistance by force. The latter is our choice. We have counted the cost of this contest, and find nothing so dreadful as voluntary slavery. Our cause is just, our union is perfect, our internal resources are great, and, if necessary, foreign assistance is undoubtedly attainable. Before God and the world we declare, that the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will employ for the preservation of our liberties; being, with one mind, resolved to die freemen rather than live slaves. We have not raised armies with designs of separating from Great Britain and establishing independent states. Necessity has not yet driven us into that desperate measure. We exhibit to mankind the spectacle of a people attacked Chap. XLI.} 1775. July. by unprovoked enemies, without any imputation or even suspicion of offence. In our own native land, in defence of the freedom that is our birthright, for the protection of our property against violence actually offered, we have taken up arms. We shall lay them down when hostilities shall cease on the part of the aggressors, and all danger of their being renewed shall be removed, and not before.

So firm a declaration should have been followed by assuming powers of government, opening the ports to every nation, holding the king's officers as hostages and modelling a general constitution. Such was the counsel of John Adams. Franklin also knew that there was no longer a time to negotiate or entreat. In the ashes of Charlestown, along the trenches of Bunker Hill, he saw the footsteps of a revolution that could not be turned back; and to Strahan, the go between through whom he had formerly communicated with Lord North, he wrote on the fifth of July: You are a member of parliament, and one of that majority which has doomed my country to destruction. You have begun to burn our towns, and murder our people. Look upon your hands, they are stained with the blood of your relations! You and I were long friends; you are now my enemy, and I am yours. But Franklin did not attempt to overrule the opinions or defy the scruples of his colleagues, and, after earnest debates, congress adopted the proposal of Jay to petition the king once more.

The second petition to the king was drafted by Dickinson, and in these words put forward Duane's proposal for a negotiation to be preceded by a truce: We beseech your majesty to direct some mode by Chap. XLI.} 1775. July. which the united applications of your faithful colonists to the throne, in pursuance of their common councils, may be improved into a happy and permanent reconciliation; and that, in the mean time, measures may be taken for preventing the further destruction of the lives of your majesty's subjects, and that such statutes as more immediately distress any of your majesty's colonies may be repealed.

The colonies, by refusing to treat separately and offering to treat jointly, announced their union, which thus preceded their independence. Yet as the king would not receive a document from congress, the petition was signed by the members individually Dickinson, confident of success, was proud of his work. There is but one word in it which I wish altered, said he, and that is—congress. It is the only word I wish should remain, answered Harrison, of Virginia.

Having thus owned the continuing sovereignty of the king, before whom they presented themselves as beadsmen, the United Colonies, as a nation dealing with a nation, a people speaking to a people, addressed the inhabitants of Great Britain. From English institutions they had derived the principles for which they had taken up arms, and their visions of future greatness were blended with their pride as men of English descent. They spoke, therefore, to Englishmen as to countrymen and brothers, recapitulating their griefs, and plainly setting forth that the repeal of the laws of which they complained, must go before the disbanding of their army, or the renewal of commercial intercourse.

On the same day thanks were addressed to the Chap. XLI.} 1777. July 6. lord mayor, aldermen, and livery of London, for their unsolicited sympathy. North America, it was further said, wishes most ardently for a lasting connection with Great Britain on terms of just and equal liberty; less than which generous minds will not offer, nor brave and free ones receive.

The desire for harmony was so intense, that Richard Penn, a proprietary of Pennsylvania and recently its governor, a most loyal Englishman, bound by the strongest motives of affection and interest to avert American independence, was selected to bear the second petition to the throne. He assumed the trust with alacrity, and on the twelfth of July embarked on his mission. The hope of success grew out of the readiness of the Americans, on the condition of exemption from parliamentary taxation, to bear the restraints on their trade; or, as an alternative, to purchase a freedom of trade like that of Scotland, by taxing themselves towards the payment of the national debt.

From the complacency engendered by delusive confidence, congress was recalled to the necessities of the moment by a letter from Washington.

on Monday, the third day of July, Washington rode Chap. XLII.} 1775. July. forth from his quarters at Cambridge, numerously attended, and, under an elm tree on the common, assumed command of the continental army. A favorable opinion had gone before him; but his presence was greater than his fame. Of his companions, Miffin, a brave and honest officer, though not of deep insight, charmed by his activity, spirit, and obliging behavior; the intelligence, culture, and manners of Reed engaged esteem; Lee personally excited disgust, but the general persuasion of his skill and experience in the art of war, and of his sincerity in professing a zealous attachment to the cause of mankind, won for him the confidence of Washington, and expressions of admiring gratitude from the congress in Massachusetts. Gates, who arrived within a week, gained friends by his affability, and his usefulness in a subordinate station.

From the first moment of his coming, the com- Chap. XLII.} 1775. July. mander in chief took the hearts of all about him, and of all New England; though he himself was unused to the ways of its people, whose character he never could thoroughly understand. The provincial congress at Watertown welcomed him in a cordial address. From Philadelphia, Hancock expressed the wish to serve under him; Greene and the Rhode Island officers received him with words of affectionate confidence. Now be strong and very courageous, wrote Trumbull, the governor of Connecticut; may the God of the armies of Israel give you wisdom and fortitude, cover your head in the day of battle, and danger; and convince our enemies that all their attempts to deprive these colonies of their rights and liberties are vain. To Trumbull Washington made answer: The cause of our common country calls us both to an active and dangerous duty; divine providence, which wisely orders the affairs of men, will enable us to discharge it with fidelity and success.

The camp contained a people in arms, rather than an army. No one could tell precisely its numbers, or the state of its stores. The soldiers had listed under different agreements and for periods indefinite but short. Each colony had its own rules of military government, and its own system of supplies; and the men, chiefly freeholders and sons of freeholders, held themselves bound only by a specific covenant, of which they interpreted the conditions and required the fulfilment.

Immediate orders were given for a return of the state of the army. While this was preparing, Washington visited the American posts and reconnoitred those of the enemy. From Prospect Hill he Chap. XLII.} 1775. July. took a comprehensive view of Boston and Charlestown. Of the latter town, nothing was to be seen but chimneys and rubbish. Above the ruins rose the tents of the great body of the British forces, strongly posted on Bunker Hill. Their sentries extended about one hundred and fifty yards beyond Charlestown Neck. On Breed's Hill there was a redoubt; two hundred men kept guard at Moultrie's Point; a battery was planted on Copp's Hill; three floating batteries lay in Mystic river; and a twenty-gun ship was anchored below the Charlestown ferry. The light horse and a few men were in the town of Boston; the remainder were on Roxbury Neck, where they were deeply intrenched and strongly fortified, with outposts so far advanced, that the sentries of the two armies could almost have conversed together.

Of the inhabitants of Boston six thousand seven hundred and fifty three still remained in the town, pining of sorrow; deprived of wholesome food; confined to their houses after ten o'clock in the evening; liable to be robbed without redress; ever exposed to the malice of the soldiers, and chidden for tears as proofs of disloyalty.

The number of the British army should have exceeded ten thousand men, beside the complements of ships of war and transports, and was estimated by the American council of war as likely to amount altogether to eleven thousand five hundred; yet such were the losses on the retreat from Concord, at Bunker Hill, in skirmishes, from sickness, and by desertion, that even after the arrival of all the transports, the commanding officer had never more than sixty five hundred effective rank and file. But these were Chap. XLII.} 1775. July. the choicest troops, thoroughly trained, and profusely supplied with the materials of war; and as he had the dominion of the water, he was able; as from a centre, to bend them against any one point in the straggling line of their besiegers.

Washington found the American army dispersed in a semicircle, from the west end of Dorchester to Maiden, a distance of nine miles. At Roxbury, where Thomas commanded two regiments of Connecticut and nine of Massachusetts, a strong work, planned by Knox and Waters, crowned the hill, and with the brokenness of the rocky ground, secured that pass. The main street was defended by a breastwork, in front of which sharpened and well-pointed trees, placed with the top towards Boston, prevented the approach of light horse. A breastwork also crossed the road to Dorchester. The men of Rhode Island were partly on Winter Hill, partly at Sewall's Farm, near the south bank of the Charles. The centre of the army was with Ward at Cambridge, its lines reaching from the colleges almost to the river. Putnam, with a division of four thousand men, composed of troops from Connecticut and eight Massachusetts regiments, lay intrenched on Prospect Hill, in a position which was thought to be impregnable. The New Hampshire forces were fortifying Winter Hill; assisted perhaps by a Rhode Island regiment, and certainly by Poor's Massachusetts regiment, which for want of tents had its quarters in Medford. The smaller posts and sentinels stretched beyond Maiden river. Apart, in a very thick wood, near where the Charles enters the bay, stood the wigwams of about fifty domiciliated Indians of the Stockbridge tribe. Chap. XLII.} 1775. July. They were armed with bows and arrows, as well as guns, and were accompanied by their squaws and littie ones.

The American rolls promised seventeen thousand men; but Washington never had more than fourteen thousand five hundred fit for duty. The community in arms presented a motley spectacle. In dress there was no uniformity. The companies from Rhode Island were furnished with tents, and had the appearance of regular troops; others filled the college halls, the episcopal church, and private houses; the fields were strown with lodges, which were as various as the tastes of their occupants. Some were of boards, some of sailcloth, or partly of both; others were constructed of stone and turf, or of birch and other brush. Some were thrown up in a careless hurry; others were curiously wrought with doors and windows, woven out of withes and reeds. The mothers, wives, or sisters of the soldiers were constantly coming to the camp, with supplies of clothing and household gifts. Boys and girls, too, flocked in with their parents from the country to visit their kindred, and gaze on the terrors and mysteries of war. Eloquent and accomplished chaplains kept alive the habit of daily prayer, and preached the wonted sermons on the day of the Lord. The habit of inquisitiveness and self-direction stood in the way of military discipline; the men had never learnt implicit obedience, and knew not how to set about it; between the privates and their officers there prevailed the kindly spirit and equality of life at home.

In forming a judgment on the deficiency of num bers, discipline, and stores of the army, Washington Chap XLII.} 1775. July. made allowances for a devoted province like Massachusetts, which had so long suffered from anarchy and oppression. Their spirit, said he, has exceeded their strength. In the great number of able-bodied men, active, zealous in the cause, and of unquestionable courage, he saw the materials for a good army; but, accustomed to the watchfulness of the backwoodsmen in the vicinity of wily enemies, he strongly condemned the want of subordination, and the almost stupid confidence of inexperience, which pervaded not only the privates but many of the in ferior officers. He set diligently about a reform, though it made of his life one continued round of vexation and fatigue. The great inefficiency lay with the officers. If they will but do their duty, said Hawley, there is no fear of the soldiery. Towards the incompetent, who, in the suddenness of calling together so large a body of men, had crowded themselves upward with importunate selfishness, Washington resolved to show no lenity. By a prompt and frequent use of courts martial, he made many examples, and by lending no countenance to public abuses, and by insisting on the distinction between officers and soldiers, he soon introduced the aspect of discipline. Every day, Sundays not excepted, thousands were kept at work under strict government from four till eleven in the morning, strengthening the lines, and fortifying every point which could serve the enemy as a landing place. The strong and uniform will of Washington was steadily exerted, with a quiet, noiseless, and irresistible energy. There are many things amiss in this camp, said the chaplain Emerson; yet, upon the whole, Chap. XLII.} 1775. July. God is in the midst of us.

Meantime Lee had not been many days in the camp before the British generals in Boston, who knew him well, showed a disposition to tamper with him for their own purposes. From Philadelphia he had, in June, addressed to Burgoyne, his old comrade in Portugal, a public letter condemning American taxation by parliament, and tracing the malady of the state to the corrupt influence of the crown. In an able reply, Burgoyne insisted, for himself and for Howe, that their political principles were unchanged, and invited Lee to an interview within the British lines, for the purpose of inducing such explanations as might tend in their consequences to peace, for, said he, as if with the highest authority, I know Great Britain is ready to open her arms upon the first overture of accommodation. Clutching at the office of a negotiator, Lee avoided asking advice of a council of war, and of himself requested the Massachusetts congress to depute one of their body to be a witness of what should pass. That body wisely dissuaded from the meeting, and referred him to a council of war for further advice. Thwarted in his purpose, Lee publicly declined to meet Burgoyne, but he also sent him a secret communication, in which among other things he declared upon his honor that the Americans had the certainty of being sustained by France and Spain. This clandestine correspondence proved that Lee had then no fidelity in his heart; though his treasons may as yet have been but caprices, implying momentary treachery rather than a well considered system. His secret was kept in America, but the statement found its way through the British ministry to Vergennes, Chap. XLII.} 1775. July. who pronounced it an absurdity worthy only of contempt.

All the while skirmishes continued. A party of Americans on the eighth of July drove in the British advance guard nearest Roxbury, and took several muskets. On the evening of the tenth, three hundred volunteers swept Long Island, in Boston harbor, of more than seventy sheep and fifteen head of cattle, and carried off sixteen prisoners. Two days later, just after the arrival of six crowded transports, Greaton, with one hundred and thirty six men, went again to the same island, and burnt the hay which was stacked there for the British cavalry. After a few days more, companies at Weymouth and Hingham reaped and brought off the ripe grain from Nantasket.

On the fifteenth of July, the army of Cambridge heard Langdon, the president of Harvard college, read the declaration by the continental congress for taking up arms, which they interpreted to mean that the Americans would never sheathe the sword till their grievances were redressed to their utmost wishes. On the eighteenth it was read on Prospect Hill amidst such shouts that the British on Bunker Hill put themselves in array for battle; but neither then, nor even after the arrival of their last transports, did they venture an attack or even a sally. I despair seeing a battle fought this time coming down, wrote Emerson to his wife at Concord.

In conformity to the direction of the continental congress, the people of Massachusetts, holding town meetings according to their usage and their charter, chose a house of representatives. Boston took part Chap. XLII.} 1775. July. in the elections; for the wanderers from that town were considered as bearing with them its living spirit, and the exiles, many of whom had not seen each other since they left their homes, came together at Concord. On the nineteenth the provincial congress dissolved itself forever, and the new house of representatives began the restoration of government by electing James Warren, of Plymouth, as its speaker. The following night, Vose, a major in Heath's regiment, set fire to the lighthouse in Boston harbor, bringing off a field piece, a swivel, and the lamps. The boats of a British man of war, which lay within a mile, pursued the adventurous party; but they were in whaleboats and escaped by rowing.

The continental fast was rigidly kept on the twentieth; the next day the Massachusetts government was permanently constituted. An annually elected legislature themselves elected an annual council of twenty eight, and that multitudinous body, which also had concurrent legislative power, assumed all executive authority. In a few weeks the old civil and military offices were abolished, and the seal of the commonwealth was changed into an Anglo-American, holding a drawn sword, with the motto: Ense petit placidam sub libertate quieter, With the sword he seeks placid rest under liberty. Forty thousand pounds were assessed on polls and estates, and authority was given to issue one hundred thousand more in bills of public credit, varying in amount from forty shillings to one.

Congress and committees rule every province, said the British commander in chief. He looked about for colonial sympathy and contributions of Chap. XLII.} 1775. July. men; but none wished to share his confinement. He sent officers to New York to board emigrant ships from Scotland, in the hope to enlist a few Highlanders. Growing more and more uneasy, on the twenty fourth of July, he wrote home that Boston was the most disadvantageous place for all operations, and he wished himself safely at New York.

To repair the Boston lighthouse carpenters were sent with a guard of thirty marines. On the evening of the thirtieth, Major Tupper attacked them with a party from Squantum and Dorchester, killed the lieutenant and one man, and captured all the rest of the party, fifty three in number. The Americans had but one man killed and two or three wounded. The next day in general orders, Washington praised their gallant and soldier like conduct. The country regarded with amazement what Jefferson called the adventurous genius and intrepidity of the New Englanders.

For all this, Washington, who was annoyed by shoals of selfish importuners, and had not yet become aware how bad men clamorously throng round the distributors of offices, misjudged the Massachusetts people; but the existence of the army was itself a miracle of their benevolence, and its sustenance during May, June, and July cannot be accounted for by ordinary rules. There was nothing regularly established, and yet many thousands of men were abundantly supplied. Touched by an all pervading influence, each householder esteemed himself a sort of commissary. There were no public magazines, no large dealers in provisions; but the wants of the army rung in the ears of the farmers, and from every cellar, Chap. XLII.} 1775. July. and barn yard, and field throughout Worcester and Hampshire and even Berkshire, such articles of food as could be spared were devoted to the camp, and everybody's wagons were used to forward them. But for this the forces must have dispersed; how it was done, cannot exactly be told; popular enthusiasm keeps little record of its sacrifices; only it was done, and though great waste prevailed, the troops of Massachusetts, and for a long time also those of New Hampshire, were fed by the unselfish care of the people, without so much as a barrel of flour from the continental congress. It was time for the confederated colonies to interpose.

the continental congress, acting as a promiscu- Chap. XLIII.} 1775 July. ous executive, neither formed a carefully considered system, nor felt the weight of personal responsibility. It never presented to itself a vivid picture of Washington's situation, and never went in advance to mitigate his difficulties or supply his wants; but, from the first, waited inactively for his appeals.

On the nineteenth day of July it read his first report from Cambridge, by which it appeared that the army was defective in discipline and in numbers; that officers for the regiments were in excess, while the files were not full; that the order in rank of the major generals and brigadiers had displeased the troops and the New England governments; that still another class of officers was needed, to bring method into the system of supplies; that there was the most urgent want of tents and clothing; of hospitals; of skilful engineers; of every kind of arms, especially of artillery; and above all, of powder. Washington Chap. XLIII.} 1775. July. also called to mind, that he had not as yet been furnished with any money whatever.

The next day, though it was strictly kept as the national fast, congress came together to hear from Schuyler, that still greater confusion prevailed at Ticonderoga. The northern army consisted of about twenty eight hundred men, of whom seven parts in eight were from Connecticut, most of them under Wooster; exhibiting all the defects which had shown themselves around Boston. Sentinels sleeping on their posts, disorderly equality between officers and common soldiers, a universal want of discipline provoked Schuyler to anger; but while he found fault enough with all that he saw, he had little power to govern and reform a body of men whose education and manners were uncongenial to his own.

Compelled to look at the condition of the army, congress still shrunk from every act that could endanger the acceptance of its petition to the king. Except the companies of riflemen, who were enlisted only for one year, it called into being no troops whose period of service extended beyond the time when an answer to that petition was expected. On the side of Canada, it did little more than sanction the employment of a body of five thousand men for the protection of the border and the frontier, and confirm Schuyler in his command, subject to its own former orders and the future instructions of the commander in chief. Washington, who had represented the necessity of an army of twenty two thousand men in Massachusetts, was authorized to keep up that number; but no method for obtaining troops was proposed beyond recommendations to the several gov- Chap. XLIII.} 1775. July. ernments of New England and New York; and no leave was given for permanent enlistments.

Thus far Franklin, who was constant in his attendance, had left his associates to sound their own way and shape their own policy; but he could maintain silent reserve no longer, and on the twenty first of July, the statesman who, twenty one years before, had at Albany reported a plan of union of provinces, submitted an outline for confederating the colonies in one nation. Each colony was to retain and amend its own laws and constitution according to its separate discretion, while the powers of the general government were to include all questions of war, peace, and alliance; commerce, currency, and the establishment of posts; the army, the navy, and Indian affairs; the management of all lands not yet ceded by the natives. The common treasury was to be supplied and taxes to be laid and collected by the several colonies in proportion to their numbers. Congress was to consist of one body only, whose members were to be apportioned triennially according to population, and annually chosen. One of its committees was to wield the executive power.

Every colony of Great Britain in North America, and even Ireland, which was still classed with the colonies, was invited to accede to the union. The imperfections in the new constitution which time and experience would surely reveal, were to be amended by congress with the approbation of a majority of the colonial assemblies. Unless Britain should consent to make acceptable retractions and indemnities, the confederation was to be perpetual. In the intention of Franklin, who well knew that the re- Chap. XLIII.} 1775. July. quired concessions never would be made, the plan was a declaration of independence and an effective system of a self-perpetuating republic. His scheme aimed at a real, ever enduring union, and it contained the two great elements of American political life; the domestic power of the several states, and the limited sovereignty of the central government.

The proposition of Franklin was, for the time, put aside; the future confederacy was not to number fewer members than thirteen; for news now came, that Georgia was no more the defaulting link in the American chain. On the fourth of July, it had met in provincial congress; and on the sixth had adhered to all the measures of resistance. It had also resolved neither to purchase, nor to employ, any slave imported from Africa after that day.

Lord North's proposal had already been declared inadequate; but as it was founded on joint resolves of parliament, officially recommended by Lord Dartmouth, and referred by Virginia, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, to the decision of congress, Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, and Richard Henry Lee, were constituted a committee to report on its conditions as a basis for the desired accommodation. Meantime congress remembered the friendly interposition of Jamaica, whose peculiar situation as an island of planters forbade active assistance, but whose good wishes ministered consolation. America and Ireland also came nearer to each other. In July the merchants of Dublin applauded the earl of Effingham for refusing to draw his sword against the lives and liberties of his fellow-subjects in America; in Chap. XLIII.} 1775 July. the same month congress sent to Ireland a pledgeof their unalterable sympathy, and their joy that their own trials had extorted some mitigation of its wrongs. Howe was of an Irish family; to the Irish, therefore, they expressed their amazement at finding his name in the catalogue of their enemies; and they fletched their complaint by adding: America loved his brother.

While these addresses were in progress, the British government was exerting every nerve to provide the means of reducing America; and as the aid of Indian tribes was believed to be absolutely necessary, Guy Johnson, acting independently of Carleton, was lavishing promises without bounds on the Six Nations and the savages of Northwest Canada. An Iroquois chief, who attended the conference at Montreal, consented to take home a very large black war belt, emblazoned with the device of the hatchet, but would engage himself no further; while the other savages, for whom a pipe of wine was broached, feasted on an ox that was named Bostonian, drank of his blood, and sang the war song, with loud promises of prowess when they should be called to the field.

Yet the majority of the congress, scrupulous not to outrun the convictions and sympathies of their constituents, and pleasing themselves by confiding in the speedy restoration of peace, not only made no adequate preparations for resistance, but would not even consent to relieve the state of anarchy by sanctioning the institution of governments in the several colonies. The hesitancy of so many members, especially of Dickinson, incensed John Adams, who maintained Chap. XLIII.} 1775. July. that the fifty or sixty men composing the congress, should at once form a constitution for a great empire, provide for its defence, and, in that safe attitude, await the decision of the king. His letters to New England, avowing these opinions, were intercepted; and so little were the central colonies prepared for the bold advice, they were published by the royalists as the surest way of destroying his influence, and heaping obloquy upon his name. So hard it was to rend the tie that bound America to England! The king's decision was already irrevocably taken; even while the congress was engaged in timid deliberations to manifest to the world that war and independence, if they came, would come unavoidably. The most decisive measure was the adoption of the paper, prepared by Jefferson, on Lord North's proposal for conciliation.

The American congress asked of the king a cessation of hostilities, and a settlement of the disputed questions by a concert between the crown and the collective colonies; Lord North offered, as the British ultimatum, to treat separately with each assembly for grants towards the general defence and for its own civil government, with the promise that parliament would abstain from taxing the province that should offer satisfactory terms. This proposition was pronounced unreasonable, because it implied a purchase of the forbearance of parliament at an uncertain price; invidious, as likely to divide the colonies, and leave the dissatisfied to resist alone; unnecessary, for America had ever voluntarily contributed fully, when called upon as freemen; insulting, since the demand for money was made with fleets and armies; Chap. XLIII.} 1775. July. unjust, as it asked increased contributions without renouncing as an equivalent the monopoly of trade; unwarrantable, as a wrongful intermeddling in the colonial support of civil government; unsatisfactory, since it left the obnoxious acts unrepealed; insufficient, as it did not renounce the claim of a right to alter colonial charters and laws; insincere, as coming from a minister who had declared that he would never treat with America, till he had brought her to his feet; and delusive, as it offered no option but of devastation or abject submission. On the other hand, if the king would order a truce and point out a method for treating with the colonies jointly, they would desire nothing better than a colonial constitution, to be established by a mutual agreement.

Content with this declaration, and clinging to the hope of a speedy adjustment with Britain, congress shunned energetic measures to the last. For the transmission of intelligence, Franklin was selected to organize a post office, and thus came to be known as the first postmaster general; a hospital was agreed to for the army, and Benjamin Church elected its director; the rate of pay of officers and soldiers was finally settled; but these votes added no real strength; what was really wanting was money and munitions of war. For money, a third million of dollars was ordered to be struck in paper bills. To promote their credit, some mode for redeeming them must be devised. There was no commerce, and therefore no hope of revenue from duties upon imports. Besides, congress had no power to enforce taxes of any kind. It was necessary, therefore, to charge each separate colony with the obliga- Chap. XLIII.} 1775. July. tion to provide for sinking its quota of the bills issued by the general congress. Here, at the creation of the national finances, the question arose as to the proper principle for the apportionment; whether wealth or population; and, if of population, whether slaves should be numbered as well as freemen. After a long opportunity for deliberation, it was agreed that population should constitute the distributive rule; and that all persons, including free negroes, mulattoes, and slaves, should be counted. Thus, to the correct principle of no representation, no taxation, and of representation in proportion to population, was added the injustice of taxation in proportion to representation; so that the continental revenue was to be sustained by a collective poll tax. Of four annual instalments, by which the continental notes were to be redeemed, the earliest was adjourned to the last day of November, 1779; in other words, was adjourned indefinitely. Paper money, which was never to be sunk but by the concurring action of twelve or thirteen colonies at distant periods, was virtually irredeemable, and would surely depreciate with rapidity; yet the united colonies had no other available resource, when they rose against a king who easily commanded annually twenty millions of pounds sterling in solid money.

There was no mode of obtaining munitions of war but by throwing open the ports and inviting commerce, especially with the French and Dutch colonies; yet the last act of congress, before its adjournment, was the renewal of the agreement, neither directly nor indirectly to export any merchandise or Chap. XLIII.} 1775. Aug. commodity whatever to Great Britain, Ireland, or to the British, or even to the foreign, West Indies.

On the first day of August the congress adjourned for five weeks, leaving the insurgent country without a visible government, and no representative of its unity but Washington and the army.

the duties of Washington were more various and Chap. XLIV.} 1775. Aug. burdensome than ever devolved upon a European commander. In the absence of an organized continental government, and with a most imperfect one in Massachusetts, it fell on him to take all thought for his army, from its general direction to the smallest want of his soldiers. Standing conspicuous before the world, with apparently no limiting authority at his side, he made it his rule, as a military chief, to obey most scrupulously the directions of the civil power, which, from its inchoate character, was feeble and uncertain, prompt to resolve rashly, destitute of system, economy, and consistent perseverance. In his intercourse with the neighboring colonial governments, whose good will was his main resource, he showed the same deference to their laws, the same courtesy to their magistrates; and his zeal to give effectiveness to his power, never hurried him beyond Chap. XLIV.} 1775. Aug. his self-prescribed bounds.

Congress had voted him five hundred thousand dollars, in its rapidly depreciating paper, but the persons who were to sign the bills were dilatory; and in a scene of confusion and discord, without money, without powder, without artillery, without proper arms, he was yet expected to organize victory and drive the British from Boston.

By the fourth of August the army was already formed into three grand divisions, at Roxbury, Cambridge, and Winter Hill, under the respective command of Ward, Lee, and Putnam. Each division consisted of two brigades, each brigade of about six regiments; but Washington was still unable to return the fire of the enemy, or do more than exchange a few shot by scouting parties; for when, with considerable difficulty, he obtained an accurate return of the amount of powder on hand, he found much less than half a ton; not more than enough to furnish his men with nine rounds of cartridge. The extremity of danger could not be divulged, even while he was forced to apply in every direction for relief. To Cooke, the governor of Rhode Island, he wrote on the fourth of August, for every pound of powder and lead that could possibly be spared from that colony; no quantity, however small, was beneath notice; the extremity of the case called loudly for the most strenuous exertions, and did not admit of the least delay. He invoked the enterprise of John Brown and other merchants of Providence; he sent an address to the inhabitants of Bermuda, from which island a vessel, under Orde of Philadelphia, actually brought off a hundred barrels of powder. His importunate messages were extended Chap XLIV.} 1775. Aug. even to New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania; and for his aid those colonies readily left themselves bare, till small supplies could arrive from South Carolina and Georgia.

In all his wants, Washington had no safe trust but in the spirit of the country, and that never failed him. Between the twenty fifth of July and the seventh of August, fourteen hundred riflemen, a greater number than congress had authorized, arrived in the camp. A company from Virginia had Daniel Morgan for its captain, one of the best officers of the revolution. His early life was so obscured by poverty, that no one remembered his parents or his birth-place, or if he had had sister or brother. Self-supported by his daily labor, he was yet fond of study, and selftaught, he learned by slow degrees to write well. Migrating from New Jersey, he became a wagoner in Virginia in time to witness Braddock's expedition. In 1774 he again saw something of war, having descended the Ohio with Dunmore. The danger of his country called him into action, which was his appropriate sphere. In person he was more than six feet high and well proportioned; of an imposing presence; moving with strength and grace; of a hardy constitution that defied fatigue, hunger, and cold. His open countenance was the mirror of a frank and ingenuous nature. He could glow with intensest anger, but passion never mastered his power of discernment, and his disposition was sweet and peaceful, so that he delighted in acts of kindness, never harbored malice or revenge, and made his house the home of cheerfulness and hospitality. His courage was not an idle quality; it sprung from the intense energy of his will, which Chap. XLIV.} 1775. Aug. bore him on to do his duty with an irresistible impetuosity. His faculties were only quickened by the nearness of danger, which he was sure to make the best preparations to meet. An instinctive perception of character assisted him in choosing among his companions those whom it was wise to betrust; and a reciprocal sympathy made the obedience of his soldiers an act of affectionate confidence. Wherever he was posted in the battle field, the fight was sure to be waged with fearlessness, good judgment, and massive energy. Of all the officers whom Virginia sent into the war, next to Washington, Morgan was the greatest; equal to every occasion in the camp or before an enemy, unless it were that he knew not how to be idle or to retreat. In ten days after he received his commission, he attracted to himself from the valley a company of ninety six young backwoodsmen. His first lieutenant was John Humphreys; his second, William Heth; his sergeant, Charles Porterfield. No captain ever commanded braver soldiers, or was better supported by his officers; in twenty one days they marched from Winchester in Virginia to Cambridge.

In Maryland Michael Cresap, then just thirty three years old, on receiving notice by the committee of Frederick, to raise a company, despatched a messenger beyond the Alleghanies, and at his bidding two and twenty of his old companions in arms, leaving behind them their families and their all, came swift as a roe or a young hart over the mountains. From the east side, so many volunteered that he could pick his men; and with light step and dauntless spirit they marched to the siege of Boston. Cresap moved among them as their friend and father; but he was Chap. XLIV.} 1775. Aug. not destined to take a further part in the war. Driven by desperate illness from Washington's camp, he died on his way home at New York, where he was buried with honor as a martyr. The second Maryland company was commanded by Price, whose lieutenant was Otho Holland Williams.

Of the eight companies from Pennsylvania, William Thompson was colonel. The second in command was Edward Hand, a native of Ireland, who had come over as a surgeon's mate. One of the captains was Hendricks, long remembered for his stateliness of person, his mild and beautiful countenance, and his heroic soul.

The alacrity with which these troops were raised, showed that the public mind heaved like the sea from New England to the Ohio and beyond the Blue Ridge. On the fourteenth of June congress first authorised their enlistment, and in less than sixty days twelve companies were in the camp, having come on foot from four to eight hundred miles. The men, painted in the guise of savages, were strong and of great endurance; many of them more than six feet high; they wore leggins and moccasons, and an ash-colored hunting shirt with a double cape; each one carried a rifle, a hatchet, a small axe, and a hunter's knife. They could subsist on a little parched corn and game, killed as they went along; at night, wrapped in their blankets, they willingly made a tree their canopy, the earth their bed. The rifle in their hands sent its ball with unerring precision, a distance of two or three hundred yards. Their motto was liberty or death. They were the first troops raised under the authority of the continental con- Chap. XLIV.} 1775. Aug. gress, and they formed the best corps in the camp. Accustomed to the wild independence of the backwoods, they yet gave an example of subordination, discipline and vigilance. Enlisted for a year only, many of them, both officers and men, continued in the service during the war, and distinguished themselves in almost every field. They taught the observing Frederic of Prussia to introduce into his service light bodies of sharp shooters, and their example has modified the tactics of European armies.

On the twenty ninth of July, a party of riflemen got behind the guard which the British had advanced on the side of Charlestown, and before it could be supported, killed two men and took five prisoners.

The New England men were not wanting in daring. On the ninth of August the Falcon was seen from Cape Ann in chase of two schooners bound to Salem. One of these was taken; a fair wind wafted the other into Gloucester harbor. Linzee, the captain of the Falcon, followed with his prize, and, after anchoring, sent his lieutenant and thirty six men in a whaleboat and two barges to bring under his bow the schooner that had escaped. As the bargemen, armed with muskets and swivels, boarded her at her cabin windows, men from the shore fired on them, killing three and wounding the lieutenant in the thigh. Upon this Linzee sent his prize and a cutter to cannonade the town. The broadside which followed did little injury, and the Gloucester men kept up a fight for several hours, till, with the loss of but two, they took both schooners, the cutter, the barges, and every man in them. Linzee lost thirty five men, or half his crew. The next day he warped off, carry- Chap. XLIV.} 1775. Aug. ing away no spoils except the skiff, in which the wounded lieutenant had been brought away.

Meantime Gage endeavored to terrify the Americans and cheer his own soldiers, by foretelling the coming of thousands of Russians and Hessians and Hanoverians. Performing no one act of courage during the summer, he vented his ill humor on his unhappy prisoners; throwing officers of high rank indiscriminately into a felon's jail, to languish of wounds and even to undergo amputation. Pleading for kindness and humanity as the joint rule for their treatment of prisoners, Washington remonstrated; but Gage scorned to promise reciprocity to rebels, for any barbarity shown to British prisoners menaced dreadful consequences, and further replied: Britons, ever preeminent in mercy, have overlooked the criminal in the captive; your prisoners, whose lives by the laws of the land are destined to the cord, have hitherto been treated with care and kindness; indiscriminately it is true, for I acknowledge no rank that is not derived from the king. Consulting with Lee, Washington, who knew Gage from the day when his want of presence of mind lost the battle on the Monongahela, rejoined: I shall not stoop to retort and invective. You affect, Sir, to despise all rank not derived from the same source with your own. I cannot conceive one more honorable than that which flows from the uncorrupted choice of a brave and free people, the purest source and original fountain of all power. Far from making it a plea for cruelty, a mind of true magnanimity would comprehend and respect it. Towards his supercilious adversary, Washington professed the purpose of retaliation, as he sent the Chap. XLIV.} 1775 Aug. British officers who were his prisoners into the interior; but he privately countermanded the order, and allowed them liberty on parole. The lenity was ill requited. One of them, Stanhope by name, was base enough to forfeit his honor.

The arrival of reenforcements and recruits could not inspirit Gage to venture outside of his lines. His pent up troops, impaired by skirmishes, desertions, and most of all by sickness, were disheartened by their manifestly disadvantageous situation. His own timorousness, presaging a long and bloody war, figured to itself the maritime powers of Europe taking possession of some of the provinces, and a southern governor falling a prey to negroes. He even confessed to Dartmouth, that he had fears for his own safety; that nothing could justify his risking an attack; that even to quit Boston safely would require the greatest secrecy.

Washington was all the while more closely investing the town. In the night following the twenty sixth of August, with a fatigue party of a thousand, a guard of twenty four hundred, he took possession of Ploughed Hill. On the next day, Gage began a cannonade, which, for the need of powder, could not be returned. On Monday the twenty eighth, the British were seen drawn up on Bunker Hill, and Washington, notwithstanding his want of ammunition, offered battle by marching five thousand men to Ploughed Hill and

in the colonies which were not immediately involved Chap. XLV.} 1775. in the war, the officers of the crown should have shown self-possession and forbearance. Adopting this system, William Franklin, the governor of New Jersey, was ever on the alert to soothe, divide, or confuse the patriots, professed an equal regard for the rights of the people and the royal prerogatives, continued the usual sessions of the assembly, and where the authority of his office was diminished, confined himself to complaint, remonstrance or advice. But the self-organized popular government moved side by side with that of the king; the provincial congress which assembled in May, and again by adjournment in August, directed a general association, took cognizance of those who held back, assumed the regulation of the militia, apportioned a levy of ten thousand pounds, excused the Quakers from bearing arms, though not from contributing to relieve distress; and by providing for the Chap. XLV.} 1775. yearly election of its successors, severed from the colonial legislature the appointment of future delegates to the general congress. The new provincial congress, chosen with all the forms of law by the qualified voters of each county, came together in October, and while they anxiously prayed for the re-establishment of harmony with Britain, they so far looked to the contingency of war as to offer to raise four thousand minute men, and actually to enrol two regiments for the continental service. It was on this occasion that William Alexander, commonly called the Earl of Stirling, a man of courage, intelligence, and promptitude, though a member of the royal council, entered the army as colonel of the battalion of East New Jersey. The attempt to raise money by taxation having failed, the expenses were met by a reluctant issue of thirty thousand pounds in bills of credit.

The disposition of New Jersey to languor was confirmed by Pennsylvania, where, from the first, Dickinson acted in concert with the proprietary government; and the ardent patriots, who had less command of public confidence, less influence with the religious parties, less tried ability in statesmanship, less social consideration in the city which was then the most populous and most wealthy in British America, yielded to his guidance. The first Pennsylvania convention in June, 1774, electing as its president the opulent merchant Thomas Willing, long an opponent of independence, aimed at no continuing political organization, and even referred the choice of the Pennsylvania delegates to congress to the house of representatives, in which loyalists held the majority, and Galloway exercised unrestricted sway. At the second Chap. XLV.} 1775. convention, held in January, 1775, the president, Joseph Reed, exerted all his influence, in public and in private, to defeat the intention of arming and disciplining the province; and to confine the votes as much as possible to the encouragement of manufactures and agriculture; and while with a clear eye he foresaw that the coming summer would form an epoch in history, he desired to be known to the ministry as a person who, though opposed to parliamentary taxation, had such weight and influence in the province, that the British government upon the whole might wish him to be on their side. It was noticed that Dickinson did not make his appearance in the meeting till the day before its dissolution; and then only to ward off the taunts of his enemies. The convention once more left every thing to the legislature; though a motion prevailed, empowering the committee of Philadelphia to give notice, if a provincial congress should again become necessary.

The events at Lexington and Bunker Hill did not shake the purpose of Dickinson to prevent the meeting of another convention. His wish that the province should move in unbroken array, led him even to importune his opponent Galloway, not to refuse a seat in the next continental congress; and Galloway was excused only at his own urgent request. Had Pennsylvania entrusted the direction of measures of resistance to a convention, composed of men free from religious scruples about taking up arms and unshackled by oaths of allegiance, all domestic conflict would have been evaded. But the wealth and social influence of Philadelphia deprecated a revolutionary Chap. XLV.} 1775. government, which must emanate from undetermined constituencies and exercise powers undefined; they, therefore, for a time, made common cause with the proprietary. The family of Penn had ceased to be the object of hostile animosities, and had recovered public regard; attached to the Anglican church, their episcopacy was yet of a mild form, free from intolerance and proselyting zeal; and from their interests and their position they were the most sincere friends to conciliation with Britain. Their apostacy from the Society of Friends was so far forgiven, that their policy received the support of the rigid Quakers, whose religious scruples confined them to longsuffer-ing, or peace, or at furthest, to passive resistance. To these elements of power, Dickinson, who still claimed to lead the patriot party of Pennsylvania, added his influence.

The system was wise, if nothing was intended beyond efforts for the restoration of harmony; but it did not provide for ulterior measures. The proprietary and his immediate friends had ties of loyalty which they never would break, and to defeat independence, were swayed by interested motives which would increase in strength in proportion as the necessity for independence should appear. Insincerity, therefore, marked the character of the assembly; no vigorous action proceeded spontaneously from its members. Many of them, who had long held their seats and hankered after a re-election, were led step by step to seemingly bold resolutions; the friends of the proprietary desired to keep up such an appearance as would prevent a transfer of the direction of affairs to a popular convention; the governor and the Chap. XLV.} 1775. assembly understood their relative position perfectly; he joined with them in such acts as could be justified before the king; they, by their own separate vote, adopted the measures which could not receive his official sanction. In this manner the house, in June, appointed a committee of safety, but with Dickinson at its head; and placed at its disposition thirty-five thousand pounds in bills of credit. At the adjourned session in September, the various memorials were presented from primary meetings, in the hope of quickening the energy of their representatives; but they were laid on the table. The coalition was too powerful to be overthrown in the house, but murmurs and well-founded suspicions began to prevail out of doors; Franklin saw the folly of temporizing, dispassionately expressed his opinions, and bided his time.

The provinces of Delaware and Pennsylvania were under one executive head; and were so nearly united that their inhabitants interchangeably took service in one or both. MacKean, an efficient member of the committee of Philadelphia, was the leading delegate from Delaware for the continent. The conduct of that little colony was unequivocal; its assembly unreservedly assented to the measure of keeping up an armed force, and unanimously assumed their share of the expense. Its first convention, its assembly, and its council of safety, moved together in harmony. The people of Maryland, happier than that of Pennsylvania, escaped intestine dissensions and insured unanimity, by passing overy the proprietary government, and intrusting the conduct of resistance to a series of conventions. The prudent, the slow, Chap. XLV.} 1775. the hesitating were allowed an influence; but from the first, all parties acquiesced in the principle of deriving all power from the people; and the province, however its movement was sometimes retarded, proceeded courageously in an unbroken line. In November, 1774, it adhered to the association, adopted in the general congress, and its patriotism was confirmed by the austerity of religious zeal. At an adjourned session in December, the Maryland convention, fifty five members being present from sixteen counties, resolved unanimously to resist to the utmost of their power taxation by parliament, or the enforcement of the penal acts against Massachusetts. To this end they voted with equal unanimity a well regulated militia, to be composed of all the freemen of the colony, between fifteen and sixty. They resolved also, that all former difficulties about religion or politics from henceforth should cease, and be forever buried in oblivion; and the benign aurora of the coming republic lighted the Catholic to the recovery of his rightful political equality in the land which a Catholic proprietary had set apart for religious freedom. Charles Carroll of Carrollton, who, under the British government, had not had so much as a vote at the polls, was placed unanimously on the committee of correspondence.

It was throughout the continent a subject of regret that the zeal of Dulany had grown cool. As he kept silent, the foremost man in Maryland was Samuel Chase, like Dulany a lawyer; less circumspect and less careful of appearances; but strong, downright, brave and persevering; capable of error from rashness or self-will, but not capable of faltering in the Chap. XLV.} 1775. cause which he approved. Vehement even to a fault, he did not always speak softly or shun coarse invective; but his undaunted spirit, his fierce independence of mind, his unbending energy, his scorn of semblance without substance, of servility, of plausible hypocrisy that glossed servility over, his eloquence, which sprung from his heart and expressed the vigor of his nature, his uncompromising energy, justly won for him the confidence of Maryland.

That province, like other colonies, had hoped for the recovery of American rights through the interruption of trade; but in April, 1775, a day or two before the arrival of news from Lexington, on occasion of a rumor that New York city was to be fortified and garrisoned, they gave their delegates discretion to proceed even to the last extremity, if indispensably necessary for the safety and preservation of their liberties and privileges.

The proprietary at this time had no hold on public affection from historic recollections; for he was an illegitimate infant child of the late libertine Lord Baltimore, the last of that name; and it might seem a shame to a commonwealth that its executive power should be transferable by testamentary disposition even to a bastard. Yet the party of the proprietary was strong and wary; had struck deep root into the soil of Maryland itself, and counted Dulany among its friends. The lieutenant governor, Robert Eden, had made himself acceptable and even beloved; had no power to do mischief, and made no attempt to raise the king's standard, maintaining a prudent reserve and acquiescing in what he could not prevent or alter; so that he and the proprietary party were regarded Chap. XLV.} 1775. in the strife as neutrals, not hostile to the American claims of right.

The convention which met at Annapolis on the twenty sixth of July resolved fully to sustain Massachusetts, and meet force by force. They saw no alternative but base submission or manly resistance. They therefore approved of the opposition by arms to British troops. The temporary government which was instituted, was, in its form, a universal association of the people of Maryland, one by one. Recognising the continental congress as invested with a general supervision, it managed internal affairs through a provincial council of safety, and subordinate executive committees, which were appointed in every county, parish, or hundred. It directed the enrolment of forty companies of minutemen; established a military code; authorized the emission of more than a quarter of a million of dollars, in bills varying in amount from sixteen dollars to two thirds of a dollar; and it extended the franchise to all freemen having a visible estate of forty pounds sterling, so that Protestant and Catholic might henceforward go to the polls together. The government thus instituted, was administered with regularity and lenity.

By the prudent inactivity of the governors of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, those four colonies awaited the decision of Great Britain in tranquillity; south of the Potomac, Dunmore precipitated a conflict, which the people of Virginia, educated in the love of constitutional monarchy, and disinclined to change for the sake of change, would gladly have avoided. In spite of their wishes, the retreat of the governor from Williamsburg Chap. XLV.} 1775. foreshadowed the end of the colonial system. The house endeavored not to take things out of their old channel. They revived the memory of Lord Botetourt, and asked only for an administration like his; they reposed full trust in the royal council, a thoroughly loyal body of the king's own selection; and asked only that the governor would conform to its advice. In vain; Dunmore, by a message, on Saturday the twenty fourth of July, summoned the house before him at what he called his present residence; that is, on board of a British man-of-war; unless they would come, he would not give his assent even to such of their acts as he approved. Had they appeared, the whole legislature might have found themselves kept as hostages and prisoners. There were parties in Virginia as everywhere else, more or less disinclined to a final rupture. As yet the great majority earnestly desired a continuance of their ancient constitution; but this message could not but be voted unanimously a high breach of the rights and privileges of the house; and in this manner the colonial legislature ceased to exist. In concurrence with the council, the house appropriated money for the expense of ratifying the treaty with the Indians on the Ohio, and then adjourned till the twelfth of October; but no quorum ever again assembled. In the one hundred and fifty sixth year from the institution of legislative government in Virginia, in the person of his governor, the king abdicated his legislative power in the oldest and most loyal of his colonies; henceforward Virginia, reluctantly separating herself from the tried and cherished system of constitutional monarchy, must take care of herself.

On the seventeenth of July, 1775, her people as- Chap. XLV.} 1775. sembled at Richmond in a convention, which was now, without a rival, the supreme government on her soil. Every procedure was marked by that mixture of courage and moderation which in times of revolution is the omen of success. The military preparations had nothing in view beyond defence; a proposal of volunteer companies in Williamsburg to secure the public money was discountenanced and rejected. Two regiments of regular troops in fifteen companies were called into being; sixteen regiments of minutemen were to keep themselves in readiness for actual service; for the command of the first regiment of regulars, the convention, passing over Hugh Mercer, now a resident of Virginia, elected Patrick Henry, who thus became, for a few months, in rank at least, the provincial commander-in-chief. For the relief of scrupulous consciences in the army, it was made an instruction, that dissenting clergymen might pray with the soldiers and preach to them. Delegates to serve in general congress for a year were elected; and among them once more Richard Bland. Of the same lineage with Giles Bland, who, ninety nine years before had perished as a martyr to liberty, having in his veins the blood of Powhatan and Pocahontas, trained in the college of William and Mary, and afterwards in the university of Edinburgh, he was venerable with age, public service, and a long career of vigilant, unswerving fidelity to civil liberty. Profoundly versed in the history and charters and laws of Virginia, in 1766 he had displayed the rights of the colonies with an uncompromising vigor and prophetic insight, such as Dickinson, who wrote after him, never could equal. His deep blue eyes are now Chap. XLV.} 1775. dimmed; his step has lost its certainty; he rises to decline the appointment; all eyes rest on him, and the convention hangs on his words: I am an old man, almost deprived of sight; the honorable testimony of my country's approbation shall ever animate me, as far as I am able, to support the glorious cause in which America is now engaged; but advanced age renders me incapable of an active part in the weighty concerns which must be agitated in the great council of the united colonies, and I desire that some abler person may supply my place. The convention having unanimously thanked him for his fidelity, released him from further service only on account of his years. A strong party, at the head of which were Henry, Jefferson, and Carrington, turned for his successor to George Mason, a man of yet rarer virtues, now for the first time a member of a political body. He was a patriot, who renounced ambition, making no quest of fame, never appearing in public life but from a sense of duty and for a great end. He will not refuse, said Jefferson and Henry, if ordered by his country. But he was still suffering from an overwhelming domestic grief; as he gave his reasons for his refusal, tears ran down the presiding officer's cheeks; and the convention listened to him with the sympathy of a family circle. At the same time that Mason declined, he recommended Francis Lee, who was accordingly chosen in the room of Bland, yet only by one vote over a candidate who was noted for loyalty and dread of a democratic republic.

A spirit of moderation prevailed in the election of the committee of safety for the province; Edmund Pendleton, who ever desired it might be remembered Chap. XLV.} 1775. that a redress of grievances, and not a revolution of government, was his wish, was placed at its head.

To defray the charges of the late Indian war, and to provide for her defence, Virginia, following the general example, directed an emission of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds in paper currency; the smallest bill to be for one shilling and three pence. George Mason urged the continuance of the land tax and the poll tax, which would have annually sunk fifty thousand pounds; but his opposition was vain; and taxation was suspended for a year.

Having made preparations for security, both against invasions and a servile insurrection, the members of the convention once more declared before God and the world, that they did bear faith and true allegiance to his majesty George the Third, their only lawful and rightful king; and would, so long as it might be in their power, defend him and his government, as founded on the laws and well known principles of the constitution; but that they were also determined to defend their lives and properties, and maintain their just rights and privileges, even at the extremest hazards. Rather than submit to the rights of legislating for us, assumed by the British parliament, wrote Jefferson from Monticello, I would lend my hand to sink the whole island in the ocean.

God grant conciliatory measures may take place; Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July. to Oct. there is not an hour to be lost; the state of affairs will not admit of the least delay: such was the frank to message sent to the ministry in July by the able Sir James Wright, of Georgia; and from a province in which a king's governor had little or no business, he pressed for leave to return to England and explain and enforce his advice. The people met in congress; a council of safety maintained an executive supervision; local affairs were left to parochial committees; but the crown officers were not molested, and but for sympathy with South Carolina, and rumors of attempts to excite slaves to desolate the heart of the colony, Indians to lay waste the frontier, some good appearance of authority would have been kept up. When in Savannah the chief justice refused to accept bail for a South Carolina recruiting officer, a crowd Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. broke open the gaol and set the prisoner free; and on the fifth of August he beat up for men at the door of to the chief justice himself and hard by the house of the governor. The militia officers were compelled to sign the association; and navigation was so effectually regulated, that a ship which arrived with two hundred and four slaves, was compelled to go away without landing them. In September two hundred and fifty barrels of powder were taken by the liberty people from a vessel at Tybee.

South Carolina needed more than ever a man of prudence at the head of the administration; and its new governor owed his place only to his birth. The younger son of a noble family, Lord William Campbell knew nothing of the people whom he was to govern, and he put himself under the direction of the passionate and violent among his irresponsible subordinates. The more temperate, especially Bull, the lieutenant governor, kept aloof, and had no part in his superciliousness and mistakes. The planters were disposed to loyalty from affection and every motive of interest; but he would not notice the elements for conciliation, nor listen to the advice of the considerate and best informed. The council of safety, composed of seventeen men, elected by the convention in June, proved its dislike of independence by choosing Henry Laurens for its president; but the governor wrote home, that the people of the best sense and the greatest authority, as well as the rabble, had been gradually led into the most violent measures by a set of desperate and designing men; and he planned the reduction of the province by arms.

He delayed calling an assembly, in the hope of hear- Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. ing favorable news from the Northward to moderate the frenzy with which all ranks seemed possessed; but while intercepted letters revealed the tampering of British agents with Indians, on the eighth of July news arrived from Boston of the battle of Bunker Hill. On the tenth, Campbell met his first legislature; and in his opening speech, refusing to discuss the questions that had arisen, he denied by implication the existence of grievances. I warn you, said he, of the danger you are in; the violent measures adopted cannot fail of drawing down inevitable ruin on this flourishing colony. These criminations and menaces left little hope of escaping war; the assembly lingered inactive through the summer, and asked in vain to be adjourned.

The patriot party was composed chiefly of residents in the low country; and hardly formed a majority of the inhabitants of the colony. The best educated were so unanimous, that when Campbell needed one more member of the council, to make up the quorum which required but three, he was under a necessity to appoint an Englishman who was collector of the port; for, said he, there is not another person in the province whom I can recommend, who would accept of that honor, in so low an estimation is it at present held. But in the districts of Camden and Ninety-six he was assured that thousands were animated by affection to the king. In the region from the line of the Catawba and Wateree to the Congaree and Saluda, and all the way to Georgia, embracing the part of South Carolina where there were the fewest slaves, the rude settlers had no close sympathy with the planters. Instead of raising indigo or rice, they were Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. chiefly herdsmen; below, the Protestant Episcopal church was predominant; the land above tide water thronged with various Christian sects. They had no common family recollections or ancestry, no ties by frequent intermarriages; a body of Germans who occupied Saxe Gotha on the Congaree, looked to the king as their landlord, and would not risk an ejectment from their farms; others, recently escaped from poverty in Europe, sought only subsistence and quiet in America. Still less did the two populations blend in political affinities; legislative power under the provincial government rested exclusively in the hands of men of the Church of England; delegates were elected only from the parishes, near the sea; west of Orangeburgh there had been no representation; and the occupants of the land, as a class, were too newly arrived, and too ignorant of the questions at issue, and too little trained to a participation in public life, to have fixed opinions. The planters were in constant connection with England; enough of them had been bred there to give a tone to society, and a direction to opinion; they looked down upon the boors of the interior as men of low degree, though of eminence in that new country; totally illiterate, though of common natural parts; and there were not wanting agents or partisans of the crown—Fletchall, the very active and spirited Robert Cunningham, Patrick Cunningham and others—to fill the minds of these rude husbandmen with bitterness against the gentlemen. The summer was passed in indecisive struggles for superiority; the crown had its emissaries, whom the Council of safety sent William Henry Drayton and a clergyman, William Tennent, to counteract. The Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. opposing parties prepared for war; Fort Augusta in Georgia was taken and held by the Americans; the possession of the fort at Ninety-six was disputed to Quiet was restored by a truce rather than by the submission of the royalists. It was on this occasion that Andrew Pickens was first heard of as a captain in arms; a puritan in religion; a patriot in thought and deed. On the other hand, Moses Kirkland, who had accepted a commission from the council of safety, changed sides, came down to Campbell with the assurance, that on the appearance of a British force, it would be joined by four thousand men, and was sent to the commander in chief at Boston for the purpose of discussing an expedition against the South. The inhabitants of the interior desired to be let alone; if compelled to take sides, a large body of them, probably a majority, inclined to the royal standard.

This deep and seemingly irreconcilable division was a fearful embarrassment to the patriots; the danger from the savages was more terrible; and the discovery that a large body of them stood ready to seize the hatchet and the scalping knife at the king's behest, set the community in a blaze. Stuart, the Indian agent for the Southern department, knew the Red Men too well to advise calling them down; but he loved his office, and had withdrawn from Charleston to St. Augustine, where he was open to the worst suggestions of the most reckless underlings, who yet were always clamoring at his dilatoriness and inefficiency. The quickening authority of Gage was invoked; and one of the last acts of that commander was to write to him from Boston: The people of Carolina in turning rebels to their king have lost all Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. faith; improve a correspondence with the Indians to the greatest advantage, and even when opportunity to offers, make them take arms against his majesty's enemies, and distress them all in their power; for no terms are now to be kept with them; they have brought down all the savages they could against us here, who, with their riflemen, are continually firing upon our advanced sentries; in short, no time should be lost to distress a set of people so wantonly rebellious; supply the Indians with what they want, be the expense what it will, as every exertion must now be made on the side of government. On receiving this order, in which Indians and riflemen of the backwoods were purposely confounded, Stuart promised the strictest obedience; he sent by way of Pensacola to the Lower Creeks and even to the Chickasaws; he looked with impatience for answers to his messages to the different nations. To the Upper Creeks he despatched his own brother as confidential envoy, to say publicly, that the want of trade and ammunition was entirely owing to the rebels; that, if they would attach themselves to the king's interest, they should find plenty pouring in upon them; and he was also to bribe Emistisico, the great chief of the Upper Creeks, by promising him in private the greatest honor and favor, if he would exert himself to bring the king's rebellious white subjects to reason and a sense of their duty. The same method was pursued with the Second Man of the Little Tallassees, and with the Overhill Cherokees and their assembled chiefs; to whom, as well as to the Upper Creeks, ammunition was distributed, that they might be ready to act in the execution of any concerted plan for distressing the rebels. Cam- Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. eron, the deputy agent, shrunk from the thought, saying: I pray God there may be no intention to involve the Cherokees in the dispute; for should the to Indians be prompted to take up the hatchet against the colonies, they could not be restrained from committing the most inhuman barbarities on women and children. I am averse to acts of this nature, though my duty to my sovereign exceeds all other considerations.

But the greatest danger to the planters was from the sea, and the council of safety slowly and reluctantly admitted the necessity of defending the harbor of Charleston. During the summer, ships were boarded off Savannah river, and near St. Augustine, and more than twenty thousand pounds of gunpowder were obtained. The export of rice was allowed on no other terms than that it should be exchanged for arms and ammunition, which were obtained from Hispaniola and from the French and Dutch islands. The governor was all the while urging the ministry to employ force against the three southernmost provinces; and the patriots were conscious of his importunities. A free negro man of property, charged with the intention of piloting British ships up the channel to the city, perished on the gallows, though protesting his innocence. All who refused the association were disarmed, even though they were in the service of the crown. On the thirteenth of September, just after a full discovery of the intrigues of the governor with the country people, his arrest was proposed; yet, on the opposition of Rawlins Lowndes, the motion was defeated in the general committee by a vote of twenty three against sixteen; but the council of safety order Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. ed William Moultrie, colonel of the second regiment, to take possession of Fort Johnson on James Island. Aware of the design, the governor sent a party to throw the guns and carriages from the platform; and on the fifteenth of September, having suddenly dissolved the last royal assembly ever held in South Carolina, he fled for refuge to comfortless quarters on board the small man-of-war, the Tamer. During the previous night, three companies commanded by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, Bernard Elliott, and Francis Marion, under Lieutenant Colonel Motte, dropped down with the ebb tide from Gadsden's wharf, landed on James Island and entered the fort, in which but three or four men remained. Lord William Campbell sent Innis, his secretary, in the boat of the Tamer, to demand by what authority they had taken possession of his Majesty's fort; and an officer appeared and answered: We are American troops, under Lieutenant Colonel Motte; we hold the fort by the express command of the council of safety. By whom is this message given? Without hesitation the officer replied: I am Charles Cotesworth Pinckney; and the names of Motte and Pinckney figured in the next despatches of the governor. Moultrie was desired to devise a banner; and as the uniform of the colony was blue, and the first and second regiments wore on the front of their caps a silver crescent, he gave directions for a large blue flag with a crescent in the right-hand corner. A schooner was stationed between Fort Johnson and the town, to intercept the manof-war's boats. A post was established at Haddrell's Point, and a fort on Sullivan's Island was proposed. The tents on James Island contained at least five hun- Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. dred men well armed and clad, soldier-like in theirdeportment, and strictly disciplined. They were taught not merely the use of the musket but the ex-to ercise of the great guns. The king's arsenal supplied cannon and balls. New gun carriages were soon constructed, for the mechanics, almost to a man, were hearty in the cause. Hundreds of negro laborers were brought in from the country to assist in work. None stopped to calculate expense.

The heroic courage of the Carolinians, who, from a generous sympathy with Massachusetts, went forward to meet greater danger than any other province, was scoffed at by the representatives of the king as an infatuation. Martin, of North Carolina, making himself busy with the affairs of his neighbors, wrote in midsummer: The people of South Carolina forget entirely their own weakness and are blustering treason, while Charleston, that is the head and heart of their boasted province, might be destroyed by a single frigate, and the country thereby reduced to the last distress. In charity to them and in duty to my king and country, I give it as my sincere opinion, that the rod of correction cannot be spared. A few weeks later, Lord William Campbell chimed in with him, reckoning up the many deadly perils by which they were environed; the Indians; the disaffected back country people; their own social condition, where their slaves were five to one; and the power of Britain from the sea. Before the world they offered their fortunes, the safety of their families, and their own lives in witness to their love of freedom. From Charleston harbor Campbell wrote in October: Let it not be entirely forgot, that the king has dominions in Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. this part of America. What defence can they make? Three regiments, a proper detachment of artillery, to with a couple of good frigates, some small craft, and a bomb-ketch, would do the whole business here, and go a great way to reduce Georgia and North Carolina to a sense of their duty. Charleston is the fountainhead from whence all violence flows; stop that, and the rebellion in this part of the continent will soon be at an end.

North Carolina, fourth among the thirteen colonies in importance, ranking next to Pennsylvania, was happy in the natural security of its position, and its comparative unanimity. In the low country, for the distance of a hundred miles from the sea, all classes were penetrated with the enthusiasm for liberty. Men whom the royalists revered as of the first order of people in the country, of unblemished integrity and earnest character, loyal by nature, gave thoughtful consideration to the political questions in issue, and decided irrevocably against the right of the British parliament to tax the colonies. In Brunswick county, Robert Howe, formerly captain of Fort Johnston, employed himself in training the people to arms; though Martin, the royal governor, held his military talents in light esteem. At Newbern, the capital, whose name kept in memory that its founders were emigrants from the highlands of Switzerland, volunteers openly formed themselves into independent companies. Afraid of being seized, Martin, suddenly shipping his family to New York, retreated to Fort Johnston on Cape Fear river. He had repeatedly offered to raise a battalion from the Scottish Highlanders in Carolina, and declared himself sure of the Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. allegiance of the Regulators, who were weary of insurrection and scrupulous about their oaths. Again and again he importuned to be restored to his old rank in the army as lieutenant colonel, promising the greatest consequences from such an appointment. He could not conceal that the frenzy had taken possession of all classes of men around him, and that the news of the affair at Lexington had universally wrought a great change, confirming the seditious, and bringing over to them vast numbers of the fickle, wavering, and unsteady multitude. Being absolutely alone, at the mercy of any handful of insurgents who should take the trouble to come after him, his braggart garrulity increased with his impotence; and having formerly called for three thousand stand of arms, he now wrote for fourfold that number, ten thousand at least, to be sent immediately from England, with artillery, ammunition, money, some pairs of colors, and a military commission for himself; promising, with the aid of two regiments, to force a connection with the interior, and raise not the Highlanders alone, but the people of the upper country in such overwhelming numbers, as to restore order in the two Carolinas, hold Virginia in awe, and recover every colony south of Pennsylvania.

After the termination of the seven years war, very few of the Highland regiment returned home; soldiers and officers choosing rather to accept grants of land in America for settlement. Many also of the inhabitants of North Western Scotland, especially of the clans of Macdonald and Macleod, listened to overtures from those who had obtained concessions of vast domains, and migrated to Middle Carolina; tearing themselves, with bitterest grief, from kindred whose sorrow at Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. parting admitted no consolation. Those who went first, reported favorably of the clear, sunny clime, to where every man might have land of his own; the distance and the voyage lost their terrors; and from the isles of Rasay and Skye whole neighborhoods formed parties for removal, sweetening their exile by carrying with them their costume and opinions, their old Celtic language and songs.

Distinguished above them all was Allan Macdonald of Kingsborough, and his wife Flora Macdonald, the same who in the midsummer of 1746, yielding to a womanly sympathy for distress, had rescued Prince Charles Edward from his pursuers, with a self-possession, fertility of resources, courage, and fidelity, that are never mentioned but to her honor. Compelled by poverty, they had removed to North Carolina in 1774, and made their new home in the west of Cumberland county. She was now about fifty-five, mother of many children, of middle stature, soft features, uncommonly mild and gentle manners, and elegant presence. Her husband had the graceful mien and manly looks of a gallant Highlander, aged, but still with hair jet black, a stately figure, and a countenance that expressed intelligence and steadfastness. On the third of July he came down to Fort Johnston, and concerted with Martin the raising a battalion of the good and faithful Highlanders, in which he was himself to be major, and Alexander Macleod, an officer of marines on halfpay, was to be the first captain. They were to wait the proper moment to take the field; but the design, though secretly devised, did not remain concealed; and rumor added a purpose of inviting the negroes Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. to rise.

The spirit of resistance, quickened by the tidings which came in from Bunker Hill, extended itself more to and more widely and deeply. On the waters of Albermarle Sound, over which the adventurous skiffs of the first settlers of Carolina had glided before the waters of the Chesapeake were known to Englishmen, the movement was assisted by the writings of young James Iredell, from England; by the letters and counsels of Joseph Hewes; and by the calm wisdom of Samuel Johnston of Edenton, a native of Dundee in Scotland, a man revered for his integrity, thoroughly opposed to disorder and to revolution, if revolution could be avoided without yielding to oppression. The last provincial congress had invested him contingently with power to call a new one; on the tenth of July he issued his summons to the people of North Carolina to elect their delegates. But two days later, Dartmouth wrote from the king: I hope that in North Carolina the governor may not be reduced to the disgraceful necessity of seeking protection on board the king's ships; and just then Martin slunk away from land, and took refuge on board the Cruiser. On the eighteenth a party came down, and, encouraged by the presence of John Ashe and Cornelius Harnett, set the fort on fire before his face, and within reach of the guns of the man-of-war.

As soon as the deliberations at Philadelphia would permit, Richard Caswell, a delegate to the general congress, hastened home to recommend and promote a convention, and to quicken the daring spirit of his constituents. He had with reluctance admitted the necessity of American resistance; but having once Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. chosen his part, he advocated the most resolute conduct, and even censured the Newbern committee for to allowing the governor to escape.

On Monday, the twenty-first of August, the people of North Carolina assembled at Hillsborough in a congress, composed of more than one hundred and eighty members. A spirit of moderation controlled and guided their zeal; Caswell proposed Samuel Johnston as president, and he was unanimously elected. In a vituperative, incoherent, interminable proclamation, Martin had warned the people against the convention, as tending to unnatural rebellion; that body, in reply, voted his proclamation a false and seditious libel, and ordered it to be burnt by the common hangman. They professed allegiance to the king, but in the plainest words avowed the purpose to resist parliamentary taxation to the utmost. They resolved, that the people of the province, singly and collectively, were bound by the acts of the continental and provincial congresses, because in both they were represented by persons chosen by themselves. A conference was had with the Regulators, whose religious and political scruples were thus removed. The intrigue of Martin with the Highlanders was divulged by Farquhard Campbell, and a committee, on which were many Scots, urged them, not wholly without success, to unite with the other inhabitants of America in defence of rights derived from God and the constitution. The meditated resistance involved the institution of government; a treasury, which for the time was supplied by an emission of paper money; the purchase of ammunition and arms; an embodying of a regular force of one thousand men; an organization Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. of the militia of the colony; an annual provincial congress to be elected by all freeholders; a committee of safety for each of the six districts into which the to province was divided; a provincial council, consisting of the president of the convention and two members from each of the six divisions, as the great executive power. Richard Caswell, who, for the combined powers of wisdom and action, stands out as the foremost patriot of North Carolina, efficient in building up society on its new foundation, a financier of skill and integrity, a courageous statesman and a man of capacity for war, was detained by the people in their immediate service; and John Penn, a Virginian by birth, became his successor in the general congress.

The most remarkable subject brought before the convention was Franklin's plan of a confederacy, which, on the twenty fourth of August, was introduced by William Hooper; like Franklin, a native of Boston; trained under James Otis to the profession of the law; now a resident in Wilmington, the region of politeness and hospitality, of commerce, wealth, and culture. North Carolina was always prompt to respond to the call of her sister Colonies; her convention listened with ready sympathy to the proposition, though it included a system of independence and government, and it was about to be adopted. But in the committee of the whole house, the moderating prudence of Johnston interposed; and, by his persuasion, North Carolina consented to forego the honor of being the first to declare for a permanent federal union. On Monday, the fourth of September, it was voted, but not unanimously, that a general confederation was not at present eligible; that a further Chap. XLVI.} 1775. July to Oct. confederacy ought only to he adopted in case of the last necessity, and then only after consultation with to the provincial congress. Hooper acquiesced, and the house adopted unanimously his draft of an address to the inhabitants of the British empire, most solemnly disavowing the desire of independence, consenting to the continuance of the old injurious and oppressive regulation of trade, and asking only to be restored to the state existing before 1763.

On the eighteenth of October the provincial council held its first meeting. Among its members were Samuel Johnston; Samuel Ashe, a man whose integrity even his enemies never questioned, whose name a mountain county and the fairest town in the western part of the commonwealth keep in memory; Abner Nash, an eminent lawyer, described by Martin as the oracle of the committee of Newbern, and a principal promoter of sedition; but on neither of these three did the choice of president fall; that office of peril and power was bestowed unanimously on Cornelius Harnett, of New Hanover, whose earnestness of purpose and disinterested, unquenchable zeal had made him honored as the Samuel Adams of North Carolina. Thus prepared, the people of that colony looked towards the future with dignity and fearlessness. The continent, still refusing to perceive the impending necessity of independence, awaited the answer to its last petition to the king.

during the first weeks of July the king contem- Chap. XLVII.} 1775. July. plated America with complacency; assured that, in New York, his loyal subjects formed the majority, that in Virginia the rebels could be held in check by setting upon them savages and slaves. Ships were to be sent at once; and if they did not reduce the country, the soldiery would finish the work at the very worst in one more campaign. Alone of the ministers, Lord North was ill at ease, and when a friend said to him, The rebels may make you propositions, he replied with vivacity, Would to God they may. Neither the court, nor the ministers, nor the people at large had as yet taken a real alarm. Even Edmund Burke, who, as the agent of New York, had access to exact information and foresaw an engagement at Boston, believed that Gage, from his discipline and artillery as well as his considerable numbers, would beat the raw American troops, and succeed. An hour before noon of the twenty fifth, tidings of the Bunker Chap. XLVII.} 1775. July. Hill battle reached the cabinet, and spread rapidly through the kingdom and through Europe. Two more such victories, said Vergennes, and England will have no army left in America. The great loss of officers in the battle saddened the anticipations of future triumphs; the ministry confessed the unexampled intrepidity of the rebels; many persons from that time believed, that the contest would end in their independence: but difficulties only animated the king; no one equalled him in ease, composure, and even gayety. He would have twenty thousand regular soldiers in America by the next spring. Barrington, the secretary at war, was of opinion, that no such number could be procured; he therefore entreated the secretary of state to give no expectation of the kind in the despatches going out to the colonies; and he wrote plainly to his sovereign: The proposed augmentation cannot possibly be raised, and ought not to be depended on. But George the Third, whose excitement dispelled hesitation and gloom and left in his heart nothing but war, threw his eye confidently over the continent of Europe, resolved at any cost to accomplish his purpose.

The ministers were of opinion that Gage, at an Aug. early day, ought to have occupied the heights of Dorchester and of Charlestown; and he was recalled, though without official censure. For the time, the command in America was divided; and assigned in Canada to Carleton, in the old colonies to Howe. Ten thousand pounds and an additional supply of three thousand arms were forwarded to Quebec, and notwithstanding the caution of Barrington, word was sent to Carleton, that he might depend upon a re- Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Aug. enforcement of regular troops, that it was hoped the next spring to have in North America an army of twenty thousand men, exclusive of the Canadians and Indians. The first contribution was made by the king as elector of Hanover; nor did he drive a hard bargain with the British treasury: his predecessor, through Newcastle, took so much for the loan of Hanoverian troops, that no account of the payment could be found; George the Third asked only the reimbursement of all expenses. His agent, Colonel William Faucett, leaving England early in August, stopped at the Hague just long enough to confer with Sir Joseph Yorke on getting further assistance in Holland and Germany, and straightway repaired to Hanover to muster and receive into the service of Great Britain five battalions of electoral infantry. They consisted of two thousand three hundred and fifty men, who were to be employed in the garrisons of Gibraltar and Minorca, and thus to disengage an equal number of British troops for service in America. The recruiting officers of Frederic of Prussia and of other princes environed the frontier with the express design of tempting them to desert; for they were supposed to have an aversion for the sea. The port of Ritzebuttell, near the mouth of the Elbe, in the territory of Hamburg, was selected as the place of their embarkation, which was courteously promoted by the senate of that republic. It was the fifth of October before they got on board the transports, and then a strong south-west wind that blew incessantly for several weeks, locked them up till the afternoon of the first of November.

Three days after the arrival of the news of the Chap. XLVII.} 1775. July and Aug. Charlestown battle, Rochford, the secretary of state, called the attention of De Guines, the French ambassador, to the dispute with the colonies; and remarked that many persons of both parties were thoroughly persuaded that the way to terminate the war in America, was to declare war against France. De Guines suppressed every sign of indignation or of surprise; and encouraged the secretary's communicativeness. It was declared to be the English opinion, that England now, as before the last peace, was a match for Spain and France united; that, in the event of a war with those powers, America, through fear of the recovery of Canada by France, would give up her contest and side with England. Rochford repeated these remarks to the Spanish minister, from indiscretion, or in the hope to intimidate the two courts; but as the ministry had no object so dear as that of keeping their places, it followed that if the nation should clamor for an attack on the house of Bourbon, they would at once become belligerent. The subject was calmly revolved by Vergennes; who was unable to imagine, how sensible people could regard a war with France as a harbor of refuge; especially as her marine, which had been almost annihilated, was restored. The English cabinet is greatly mistaken, said he, if it thinks we regret Canada; it may come to pass that they will themselves repent having made its acquisition. He felt the want of gaining exact information on the state of opinion in America. For that end accident offered a most trusty agent in De Bonvouloir, a French gentleman, cousin german to the Marquis de Lambert; a man of good judgment and impenetrable secrecy. He had been driven from St. Domingo by the climate, Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Aug. had returned by way of the English colonies, had, at Philadelphia, New York, Providence, and near Boston, become acquainted with insurgent Americans; and he reported that in America every man was turned soldier; that all the world crowded to the camp of liberty. The proposition to send him back to America was submitted by the ambassador at London through Vergennes to Louis the Sixteenth, who consented. Here is the beginning of his intervention in the American revolution. Neither his principles nor his sentiments inclined him to aid insurgents; but the danger of an attack from the English was held before his eyes, and on the seventh of August Vergennes could reply to De Guines: Be assured, sir, the king very much approves sending Bonvouloir with such precaution that we can in no event be compromised by his mission. His instructions should be verbal and confined to the two most essential objects; the one, to make to you a faithful report of events and of the prevailing disposition of the public mind; the other, to secure the Americans against that jealousy of us, with which so much pains will be taken to inspire them. Canada is for them the object of distrust; they must be made to understand that we do not think of it at all; and that far from envying them the liberty and independence which they labor to secure, we admire the nobleness and the grandeur of their efforts, have no interest to injure them, and shall with pleasure see happy circumstances place them at liberty to frequent our ports; the facilities that they will find there for their commerce will soon prove to them our esteem. With these instructions Bonvouloir repaired to the Low Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Aug. Countries, and after some delay found at Antwerp an opportunity of embarking for the colonies. His report might open the way for relations and events of the utmost importance. Yet all the while the means of pacifying America were so obvious that Vergennes was hardly able to persuade himself they could be missed by the English ministers. The folly imputed to them was so great, and was so sure to involve the loss of their possessions, that he called in question the accounts which he had received. The ambassador replied: You say what you think ought to be done, but the king of England is the most obstinate prince alive, and his ministers will never adopt the policy necessary in a great crisis, for fear of compromising their safety or their places.

The affairs of the United Colonies were at that time under discussion in the heart of the Russian empire, the ancient city of Moscow, at the court of Catharine the Second. The ruling opinion in Russia demanded the concentration of all power in one hand. From the moment the empress set her foot on Russian soil, it became her fixed purpose to seize the absolute sway and govern alone. Though she mixed trifling pastime with application to business, and for her recreation sought the company of the young and the very gay, she far excelled those around her in industry and knowledge. Frederic said of her, that she had an infinity of talent and no religion; yet she went over to the Greek church and played the devotee. Distinguished for vivacity of thought and judgment, for the most laborious attention to affairs, very proud of the greatness and power of her empire, her intercourse with all her subjects was marked by Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Aug. mildness and incomparable grace; and she made almost incredible exertions as a monarch to be useful even to the meanest, to benefit the future as well as the present age. Tragedy, comedy, music wearied her; she had no taste but to build, or to regulate her court; no passion but to rule and to make a great name; and this led her to undertake too much herself without sufficient aid from her ministers. In the crowd of the ambitious, who were all eager for advancement and favor, she compared herself to a hare worried by many hounds; and among an unscrupulous nobility in a land which was not that of her birth, she was haunted by a feeling of insecurity, and revealed a secret unrest and discontent of soul. But those around her were not offended at the completeness with which she belonged to a century representing the supremacy of the senses; the spiritual life that diffused itself over her form was a refinement of delight in physical pleasures; the blandishments of her manner, the smiles on her face, the flowers on her breast, covered fiery passions that coursed riotously through her veins.

Her first minister was Panin, without whom no council was held, no decision taken in foreign or domestic affairs. He alone could effectually promote her schemes of administrative greatness; though he was guided by experience rather than comprehensive views. With the faults of pride, inflexibility, and dilatoriness, he also had incorruptness; and he was acknowledged to be the fittest man for his post. At home his political principles led him to desire some limitation of the power of the sovereign by a council of nobles; towards foreign powers he was Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Aug. free from rancor. It had been the policy of France to save Poland by stirring up Sweden and Turkey against Russia; yet Panin did not misjudge the relations of Russia to France. Nor was he blinded by love for England; he wanted no treaty with her except with stipulations for aid in the contingency of a war with the Ottoman Porte, and as that condition could not be obtained, he always declined her alliance. His weak side was vanity, and Frederic of Prussia was said to have chained him to his interests by frequent presents of small value, and autograph letters filled with delicate flatteries. But Panin was thoroughly a Russian statesman, and to win his favor Frederic submitted to promise subsidies against Turkey.

The British minister relied on the good — will of Alexis Orloff, who had been a principal person in raising Catharine to the throne; but his influence was on the wane, and his brother, who remained for about ten years her favorite concubine, had been recently superseded and dismissed from the court.

His successor was Potemkin, who, to the person of a Titan joined a resolute ambition, and a commanding will, that became terrible to the empress herself; so that when she dismissed him from her bed, she found herself more and more subject to his control in the administration. Never did a favorite rise so rapidly, but at this time he cultivated the greatest intimacy with Panin, whose opinion he professed to follow.

The indifference of the king of Prussia on the relation of England to her colonies, extended to the court of Moscow, and the Russian ministers never Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Aug. spoke of the strife but as likely to end in American independence. Yet this coolness was not perceived by the British minister. One day Panin inquired of him the news; remembering his instructions, Gunning seized the moment to answer, that the measures in progress would shortly end the rebellion in America; then, as if hurried by excess of zeal to utter an idle, unauthorized speculation of his own, he asked leave to acquaint his king, that in case the circumstances of affairs should render any foreign forces necessary, he might reckon upon a body of her imperial majesty's infantry. On the morning of the eighth of August, Panin reported the answer of the empress. Nothing was said specifically about troops; still less of placing Russian battalions under the command of a British general, or despatching them across the Atlantic; but she gave the strongest assurance of her entire readiness, from gratitude for favors received from England during her last war, upon this and upon every other occasion, to give the British king assistance, in whatever manner he thought proper. She charged Panin to repeat her very words, that she found in herself an innate affection for the British nation which she should always cherish. The unobserving envoy drank in the words with delight; and interpreted a woman's lavish sentimentality as a promise of twenty thousand men to be forwarded from Asia and Eastern Europe to America. He flattered himself that he had conducted the negotiation with delicacy and success, and that the proposal, which was flying on the winds to other courts, was a secret to everybody but Panin and the empress.

The reply to Bunker Hill from England reached Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Sept. Washington before the end of September; and the manifest determination of the ministers to push the war by sea and land with the utmost vigor, removed from his mind every doubt of the necessity of independence. Such, also, was the conclusion of Greene; and the army was impatient when any of the chaplains prayed for the king. The general congress had less sagacity. It should have assembled on the fifth of September; but for eight days more there were too few delegates for the transaction of business.

The whole province of Georgia was now represented, and henceforward the confederacy never embraced less than thirteen members. The war developed the germ of a state that was to include both slopes of the Green Mountains, whose people fought with the army of the continent under officers of their own election; but the pretensions of New York to jurisdiction over their territory forbade as yet their recognition as a separate political body.

From the new commonwealth which was rising on the west of Virginia, an agent soon presented himself. The adventurers in that region spread the fame of the healthfulness of its climate, the wonderful goodness of its ranges for all kinds of game, and the seemingly miraculous fertility of the soil where it was underlaid by limestone; and they already foretold the great city that was to rise at the falls of the Ohio. Their representative discussed in private the foundation on which the swiftly growing settlements of Kentucky should rest; and received advice from their northern well-wishers to reserve that most agreeable country exclusively for the free. The territorial claim of Virginia barred against him the doors Chap. XLVII.} 1775 Sept. of congress, but the affection of the West flowed in a full current towards the Union.

The inexpressibly distressing situation of Washington demanded instant and earnest attention; but the bias of the continental congress was to inactivity. The intercepted letters of John Adams, in which he had freely unbosomed his complaints of its tardiness, and had justly thrown blame on the piddling genius, as he phrased it, of Dickinson, were approved by many; but Dickinson himself was unforgiving; wounded in his self-love and vexed by the ridicule thrown on his system, from this time he resisted independence with a morbid fixedness. He brushed past John Adams in the street without returning his salutation; and the New England statesman encountered also the hostility of the proprietary party and of social opinion in Philadelphia, and the distrust even of some of the delegates from the South. At times, an unhappy jealousy of New England broke forth; but when a member insinuated distrust of its people, as artful and designing men, altogether pursuing selfish purposes, Gadsden, of South Carolina, said in their defence: I only wish we would imitate, instead of abusing, them. I thank God we have such a systematic body of men, as an asylum that honest men may resort to in the time of their last distress, if driven out of their own states; so far from being under any apprehensions, I bless God there is such a people in America.

Harmony was maintained only by acquiescence in the policy of Dickinson. From Pittsburg, Lewis Morris of New York and James Wilson of Pennsylvania, the commissioners, recommended an expe- Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Sept. dition to take Detroit: the proposal, after a full discussion, was rejected; but the invasion of Canada, by way of the Chaudiere and of Isle aux Noix, was approved; and delegates from a convention of the several parishes of Canada would have been a welcome accession. Much time was spent in wrangling about small expenditures. The prohibition by parliament of the fisheries of New England and the restriction on the trade of the southern colonies, went into effect on the twentieth of July: as a measure of counteraction, the ports of America should have been thrown open; but though secret directions were given for importing powder and arms from the foreign West Indies, the committee on trade was not appointed till the twenty second of September; and then they continued day after day, hesitating to act. The prospect of financial ruin led De Hart, of New Jersey, to propose to do away with issuing paper money by the provincial conventions and assemblies; but no one seconded him. The boundary line between Virginia and Pennsylvania was debated; as well as the right of Connecticut to hold possession of Wyoming. The roll of the army at Cambridge had, from its first formation, borne the names of men of color; but as yet without the distinct sanction of legislative approval. On the twenty sixth, Edward Rutledge, of South Carolina, moved the discharge of all the negroes in the army, and he was strongly supported by many of the southern delegates; but the opposition was so powerful and so determined that he lost his point.

At length, came a letter from Washington, implying his sense that the neglect of congress had brought Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Sept. matters in his army to a crisis. Not powder and artillery only were wanting, but fuel, shelter, clothing, provisions, and the soldiers' pay; and, while a great part of the troops were not free from mutiny, by the terms of their enlistment all of them, except the riflemen, were to be disbanded in December. For this state of things, congress could provide no adequate remedy. On the thirtieth of September, they therefore appointed Franklin, Lynch, and Harrison, a committee to repair to the camp, and, with the New England colonies and Washington, to devise a method for renovating the army.

While the committee were on the way, Gage, Oct. on the tenth of October, embarked for England, bearing with him the large requirements of Howe, his successor, which he warmly seconded. The king, the ministers, public opinion in England had made very free with his reputation; but, on his arrival, he was allowed to wear a bolder front than he had shown in Massachusetts, and was dismissed into retirement with the rank and emoluments of his profession. To Howe, the new commander-in-chief, the ministers had sent instructions, which permitted and advised the transfer of the war to New York; but, from the advanced state of the season, and the want of sufficient transports, he decided to winter at Boston, which place he did not doubt his ability to hold.

On the fifteenth of October, the committee from congress arrived at the camp. Franklin, who was its soul, brought with him the conviction that the American people, though they might be made to suffer, could never be beaten into submission; that a separation Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Oct. from Britain was inevitable. His presence in the camp, within sight of his native town, was welcomed with affectionate veneration. During the whole evening, wrote Greene, I viewed that very great man with silent admiration. With Washington for the military chief, with Franklin for the leading adviser from congress, the conference with the New England commissioners, notwithstanding all difficulties, harmoniously devised a scheme for forming, governing, and supplying a new army of about twenty three thousand men, whom the general was authorized to enlist without delay. The proposed arrangements, in all their details, had the aspect of an agreement between the army, the continental congress, and the New England colonies; their successful execution depended on those four colonies alone.

After the conference broke up, the committee remained two days, to advise with the general on every remaining question, and thus to establish a perfect understanding between him and the civil power. On this occasion Franklin confirmed that affection, confidence, and veneration, which Washington bore him to the last moment of his life. The committee were uncertain how to deal with Church, formerly an active member of the Boston committee, lately the director general of the hospital, a man of unsteady judgment, who had been discovered in a secret correspondence with the enemy in Boston: the extent of his indiscretion or complicity was uncertain; after an imprisonment for some months, he was allowed to pass to the West Indies; but the ship in which he sailed was never again heard of.

Franklin was still at the camp, when news from Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Oct. Maine confirmed his interpretation of the purposes of the British. In the previous May, Mowat, a naval officer, had been held prisoner for a few hours, at Falmouth, now Portland; and we have seen Linzee, in a sloop-of-war, driven with loss from Gloucester; it was one of the last acts of Gage to plan with the admiral how to wreak vengeance on the inhabitants of both those ports. The design against Gloucester was never carried out; but Mowat, in a ship of sixteen guns, attended by three other vessels, went up the harbor of Portland, and after a short parley, at half-past 9, on the morning of the sixteenth of October, he began to fire upon the town. In five minutes, several houses were in a blaze; parties of marines landed to spread the conflagration by hand. All sea-going vessels were burned except two, which were carried away. The cannonade was kept up till after dark; St. Paul's church, the public buildings, and about one hundred and thirty dwelling houses, three-fourths of the whole, were burned down; those that remained standing were shattered by balls and shells. By the English account, the destruction was still greater. At the opening of a severe winter, the inhabitants were turned adrift in poverty and misery. The wrath of Washington was justly kindled, as he heard of these savage cruelties, this new exertion of despotic barbarity. Death and destruction mark the footsteps of the enemy, said Greene; fight or be slaves is the American motto; and the first is by far the most eligible. Sullivan was sent to fortify Portsmouth; Trumbull, of Connecticut, took thought for the defence of New London.

Meantime, the congress at Philadelphia was still Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Oct. halting in the sluggishness of irresolution; and, so long as there remained the dimmest hope of favor to its petition, the lukewarm patriots had the advantage. No court as yet had power to sanction the condemnation of vessels taken from the enemy. On the third of October, one of the delegates of Rhode Island laid before Congress their instructions to use their whole influence for building, equipping, and employing an American fleet. It was the origin of our navy. The proposal met great opposition; but John Adams engaged in it heartily, and pursued it unremittingly, though for a long time against wind and tide. On the fifth, Washington was authorized to employ two armed vessels to intercept British storeships, bound for Quebec; on the thirteenth, congress voted two armed vessels, of ten and of fourteen guns, and seventeen days later, two others of thirty six guns. But much time would pass before their equipment; as yet, war was not waged on the high sea, nor reprisals authorized, nor the ports opened to foreign nations.

On the sixteenth of October, the day on which Mowat anchored below Falmouth, the new legislature of Pennsylvania was organized. Chosen under a dread of independence, all of its members who were present subscribed the usual engagements of allegiance to the king. In a few days the Quakers presented an address, in favor of the most conciliatory measures, and deprecating every thing likely to widen or perpetuate the breach with their parent state. To counteract this movement, the committee for the city and liberties of Philadelphia, sixty six in number, headed by George Clymer and McKean, went two by two to Chap. XLVII.} 1775. Oct. the state-house, and delivered their remonstrance; but the spirit of the assembly, under the guidance of Dickinson, followed the bent of the quakers.

Congress, for the time, was like a ship at sea without a rudder, still buoyant, but rolling on the water with every wave. One day would bring measures for the defence of New York and Hudson river, or for the invasion of Canada; the next, nothing was to be done that could further irritate Great Britain. The continuance of the army around Boston depended on the efficiency of all the New England provinces; of these, New Hampshire was without a government. On the eighteenth of October, her delegates asked in her behalf, that the general congress would sanction her instituting a government, as the only means of preventing the greatest confusion; yet the majority of that body let the month run out before giving an answer, for they still dreamed of conciliation, and of the good effects of their last petition to the king.

The chronicler of manners and events can alone Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. measure his own fairness, for no one else knows so well what he throws aside. The greatest poet of action has brought upon the stage the panorama of mortal being, without once finding occasion to delineate a faultless hero. No man that lives has not sinned. The gentlest of historians, recounting in the spirit of love the mighty deeds which divide the new civilization from the old, tells how one of his fellow messengers, thrice in the same night, denied the master by whom he had been called. Indiscriminate praise neither paints to the life, nor teaches by example, nor advances social science; history is no mosaic of funeral eulogies and family epitaphs, nor can the hand of truth sketch character without shadows as well as light. The crimes and the follies which stand in the line of causes of revolution, or modify the development of a state, or color the morals of an age, must be brought up for judgment; and yet the hu- Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. mane student of his race, in his searches into the past, contemplates more willingly those inspirations of the beautiful and the good, which lift the soul above the interests of the moment, demonstrate our affinity with something higher than ourselves, point the way to principles that are eternal, and constitute the vital element of progress.

From immeasurable distances in the material universe the observer of the stars brings back word, that the physical forces which rule our neighborhood maintain an all-pervading energy; and the records imbedded in the rocks, teaching how countless myriads of seasons have watched the sun go forth daily from his chamber, and the earth turn on its axis, and the sea ebb and flow, demonstrate that the same physical forces have exerted their power without change for unnumbered periods of bygone years. The twin sciences of the stars and of the earth establish the cosmical unity of the material universe in all that we can know of time and space. But the conception of the perfect order and unity of creation does not unfold itself in its beauty and grandeur, so long as the guiding presence of intelligence is not apprehended. From the depths of man's consciousness, which envelopes sublimer truths than the firmament over his head can reveal to his senses, rises the idea of right; and history, testing that idea by observation, traces the vestiges of moral law through the practice of the nations in every age, proves experimentally the reality of justice, and confirms by induction the intuitions of reason.

The historian, not less than philosophers and nat- Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. uralists, must bring to his pursuit the freedom of an unbiassed mind; in his case the submission of reason to prejudice would have a deeper criminality; for he cannot neglect to be impartial without at once falsifying nature and denying providence. The exercise of candor is possible; for the world of action has its organization and is obedient to law. The forces that constitute its antagonisms are very few, and are always and everywhere present, and are always and everywhere the same, though they make their appearance under many shapes. Human nature is forever identical with itself; and the state ever contains in its own composition all the opposite tendencies which constitute parties. The problems of politics cannot be solved without passing behind transient forms to efficient causes; the old theories, founded on the distinction of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, must give place to an analysis of the faculties in man, and the unvarying conditions, principles, and inherent wants out of which they have been evolved; and it will be found, that as every class of vertebrate animals has the forms of the same organs, so an exact generalization establishes the existence of every element of civil polity and of the rudiments of all its possible varieties and divisions in every stage of human being

Society is many and is one; and the organic unity of the state is to be reconciled with the separate existence of each of its members. Law which restrains all, and freedom which adheres to each individual, and the mediation which adjusts and connects these two conflicting powers, are ever present as constituent ingredients; each of which, in its due proportion is essential to the well being of a state, and is Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. ruinous when it passes its bounds. It has been said that the world is governed too much; no statesman has ever said that there should be no government at all. Anarchy is at one extreme, and the pantheistic despotism, which is the absorption of the people into one man as the sovereign, at the other. All governments contain the two opposite tendencies; and were either attraction or repulsion, central power or individuality, to disappear, civil order would be crushed or dissolved.

The state has always for its life-giving principle the idea of right; the condition of facts can never perfectly represent that idea; and unless this antagonism also is reconciled, no durable constitution can be formed, and government totters of itself to its fall, or is easily overthrown. Here, then, is another cause of division; one party clings to the bequests of the past, and another demands reform; the fanatics for conservatism are met by enthusiasts for ideal freedom, while there is always an effort to bring the established order into a nearer harmony with the eternal law of justice. These principles have manifested their power in every country in every stage of its existence, and must be respected, or society will perish in chaotic confusion or a stagnant calm.

The duty of impartiality in accounting for political conflicts, is then made easy, if behind every party there lies what an English poet has called an eternal thought, and if the generating cause of every party, past, or present, or hereafter possible, is a force which is never absent, which in its proper proportion is essential to the wellbeing of society, and which turns into a poison only in its excess. It may take a di- Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. versity of names as it comes into flower respectively among savages or the civilized, in kingdoms, in empires, or in republics; and yet every party has an honest origin in human nature and the necessities of life in a community.

To fail in impartiality with regard to men, is not merely at variance with right; it is also sure to defeat itself. The fame which shines only in an eclipse of that of others, is necessarily transitory; the eclipse soon passes away and the brighter light recovers its lustre. The fond biographer who constructs the road to the monument of his idol over the graves of the reputation of great men, will find the best part of his race refusing to travel it. Besides, superior merit, to be discerned, must be surrounded by the meritorious; the glory of the noblest genius of his age would be sacrificed by detraction from the ability of his antagonists, his competitors, and his associates. Real worth delights to be environed by the worthy; it is serene, and can be duly estimated only by the serene; the chord of human sympathy does not vibrate to eulogy that grates with malignity.

The idea of humanity, which, by its ever increasing clearness, furnishes the best evidence of the steady melioration of the race, teaches to judge with equity the reciprocal relations of states. The free development of all inherent powers is the common aim, and the acknowledgment of the universal right to that free development is the bond of unity. Between Britain and the new empire which she founded, the duty of impartiality belongs equally to the men of the two countries; but experience has shown that it is practised with most difficulty by those of the parent land. The Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. moral world knows only one rule of right; but men in their pride create differences among themselves. The ray from the eternal fountain of justice suffers a deflection, as it falls from absolute princes on their subjects, from an established church on heretics, from masters of slaves on men in bondage, from hereditary nobles on citizens and peasants, from a privileged caste on an oppressed one. Something of this perverseness of pride has prevailed in the metropolitan state towards its colonies; it is stamped indelibly on the statute book of Great Britain, where all may observe and measure its intensity. That same pride ruled without check in the palace, and was little restrained in the house of lords: it broke forth in the conduct of the administration and its subordinates; it tinged the British colonial state papers of the last century so thoroughly, that historians who should follow them implicitly as guides, would be as erroneous in their facts as the ministers of that day were in their policy. This haughty feeling has so survived the period of revolutionary strife, that even now it sometimes hangs as a heavy bias on the judgment even of Englishmen professing liberal opinions. The Americans more easily recovered their equanimity. They intended resistance to a trifling tax and a preamble, and they won peace with liberty; the vastness of the acquisition effaced the remembrance of a transient attempt at oppression, and left no rankling discontent behind. The tone of our writers has often been deferentially forbearing; those of our countrymen who have written most fully of the war of our revolution, brought to their task no prejudices against England, and while they gladly recall the relations of kindred, Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. no one of them has written a line with gall.

Nor are citizens of a republic most tempted to evil speaking of kings and nobles; it takes men of the privileged class to scandalize their peers and princes without stint. The shameless slanders which outrage nature in the exaggerations of the profligacy of courts have usually originated within palaces, and been repeated by men of rank;--American writers have no motive to take them up; the land of equality recognises sovereigns and aristocrats as men, and places them under the protection of the tribunal of humanity.

The Americans, entering most reluctantly on a war with Britain, preserved an instinctive feeling, that the relations of affinity were suspended rather than destroyed; they held themselves called to maintain the rights of mankind, the liberties of the English people, as well as their own; they never looked upon the transient ministers who were their oppressors as the type of the parent country. The moment approaches when the king proclaimed his irrevocable decision; to understand that decision it is necessary to state with precision the question at issue.

The administration of numerous colonies, each of which had a representative government of its own, was conducted with inconvenience from a want of unity; in war, experience showed a difficulty in obtaining proportionate aid from them all; in peace, the crown officers were impatient of owing their support to the periodical votes of colonial legislatures. To remedy this seeming evil by a concentration of power, James the Second usurped all authority over Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. the country north of the Potomac, and designed to consolidate and govern it by his own despotic will.

The revolution of 1688 restored to the colonies their representative governments, and the collision between the crown officers and the colonial legislatures was renewed; threats of parliamentary intervention were sometimes heard; but for nearly three quarters of a century no minister had been willing to gratify the pertinacious entreaties of placemen by disturbing America in the enjoyment of her liberties.

Soon after the accession of George the Third, the king, averse to governing so many prosperous and free and loyal colonies by consent, resolved, through the paramount power of parliament, to introduce a new colonial system, which Halifax, Bedford, and especially Charles Townshend, had matured, and which was to have sufficient vigor to control the unwilling. First: the charter governments were to be reduced to one uniform direct dependence on the king, by the abolition of the jurisdiction of the proprietaries in Maryland and Pennsylvania, and by the alteration or repeal of the charters of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Secondly: for the pay of the crown officers, the British parliament was to establish in each colony a permanent civil list, independent of the assemblies, so that every branch of the judicial and executive government should be wholly of the king's appointment and at the king's will. Thirdly: the British parliament was, by its own act of taxation, to levy on the colonies a revenue towards maintaining their military establishment. Townshend, as the head of the board of trade, was unfolding the plan in the Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. house of commons just before Bute retired.

The execution of the design fell to George Grenville. Now Grenville conceived himself to be a whig of the straitest sect, for he believed implicitly in the absolute power of parliament, and this belief he regarded as the great principle of the revolution of 1688. He was pleased with the thought of moulding the whole empire into closer unity by means of parliamentary taxation; but he also preserved some regard for vested rights, and this forbade him to consent to a wilful abrogation of charters. The Americans complained to him that a civil list raised by the British parliament would reduce the colonial assemblies to a nullity; Grenville saw the justice of the objection, disclaimed the purpose, dropped that part of the plan also, and proposed to confine the use of the parliamentary revenue to the expenses of the military establishment. The colonists again interposed with the argument, that by the theory of the British constitution, taxation and representation are inseparable correlatives; to this Grenville listened and answered, that the whole empire was represented collectively, though not distributively, in parliament as the common council; but that, as even in Britain some reform by an increase of the number of voters was desirable, so taxation of the colonies ought to be followed by a special colonial representation; and, with this theory of constitutional law, he passed the stamp act.

When a difference at court drove Grenville from office, his theory lost its importance, for no party in England or America undertook its support. The new ministers by whom his colonial policy was to be Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. changed, had the option between repealing the tax as an act of justice to the colonies, or repealing it as a measure of expediency to Britain. The first was the choice of Pitt, and its adoption would have ended the controversy; the second was that of Rockingham. He abolished the tax, and sent over assurances of his friendship; but his declaratory act established as the rule for the judiciary and the law of the empire, that the legislative power of parliament reached to the colonies in all cases whatsoever. This declaration opened the whole question of the nature of representation, and foreshadowed a revolution or peaceful reform in America and in England. In 1688 the assertion of the paramount power of parliament against a king, who would have sequestered all legislative liberty, was a principle of freedom; but in the eighteenth century, the assertion of the absolute power of a parliament acting in concert with the king was to frame an instrument of tyranny. The colonies denied the unqualified authority of a legislature in which they were not represented; and when they were told that they were as much represented as nine tenths of the people of Britain, the discussions which followed awakened the British people from that day to complain unceasingly of the inadequate composition of a parliament, in whose election nine tenths of them had no voice whatever.

The agitation of reform for England was long deferred; the question was precipitated upon America. In the very next year, Charles Townshend, resuming the system which he had advocated in the administration of Bute, proposed a parliamentary tax to be Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. collected in America on tea, glass, paper, and painters' colors, and introduced the tax by a preamble, asserting that it is expedient that a revenue should be raised in his majesty's dominions in America for defraying the charge of the administration of justice and support of civil government, and towards further defraying the expenses of defending the said dominions. Grenville had proposed taxes for the defence of the colonies; Townshend's preamble promised an ever increasing American civil list, independent of American assemblies, to be disposed of by ministers at their discretion for salaries, gifts, or pensions. Here lay the seeds of a grievance indefinite in its extent, taking from the colonies all control over public officers, and menacing an absolute government to be administered for the benefit of office holders, without regard to the rights, and liberties, and welfare of the people.

Just as Townshend had intrenched the system in the statute book, he died, and left behind him no great English statesman for its steadfast upholder; while the colonies were unanimous in resisting the innovation, and at once avoided the taxes by agreements to stop imports from Britain. The government gave way, and repealed all Townshend's taxes except on tea. Of that duty Lord North maintained that it was no innovation, but a reduction of the ancient duty of a shilling a pound to one of threepence only; and that the change of the place where the duty was to be collected, was no more than a regulation of trade to prevent smuggling tea from Holland. The statement, so far as the tax was concerned, was unanswer- Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. able; but the sting of the tax act lay in its preamble: Rockingham's declaratory act affirmed the power of parliament in all cases whatsoever; Townshend's preamble declared the expediency of using that power to raise a very large colonial revenue. Still collision was practically averted, for the Americans, in their desire for peace, gave up the importation of tea. No revenue, therefore, was collected; and by resolute self-denial, the colonies escaped the mark of the brand which was to show whose property they were.

At this the king, against the opinion of Lord North and of the East India Company, directed that company itself to export tea to America, and there to pay the duty, hoping that a low price would tempt Americans to buy. But the colonists would not suffer the tea to be exposed for sale; the crown officers yielded to their unanimous resistance, every where except at Boston, and there the tea was thrown overboard.

To close the port of Boston and require an indemnity for the East India Company's loss, was the advice of Hutchinson, and neither New York, nor Pennsylvania, nor Virginia would have supported a refusal to such a requisition; but the king and the Bedford party seized the occasion to carry into effect part of their cherished system, and changed by act of parliament the charter granted by William and Mary to Massachusetts. The object of the change was the compression of popular power in favor of the prerogative. The measure could bring no advantage to Britain and really had nothing to recommend it; to the people of Massachusetts and to the people of Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. all the colonies, submission to the change seemed an acknowledgment of the absolute power of parliament over liberty and property in America. The people of Massachusetts resisted: the king answered, blows must decide. A congress of the colonies approved the conduct of Massachusetts; parliament pledged itself to the king. In 1773 a truce was possible; after the alteration of the charter of Massachusetts, in 1774, America would have been pacified by a simple repeal of obnoxious acts; in 1775, after blood had been shed at Lexington, some security for the future was needed.

British statesmen of all schools but Chatham's, affirmed the power of parliament to tax America; America denied that it could be rightfully taxed by a body in which it was not represented, for taxation and representation were inseparable. British politicians rejoined, that taxation was but an act of legislation; that, therefore, to deny to parliament the right of taxation, was to deny to parliament all right of legislation for the colonies, even for the regulation of trade. To this America made answer that, in reason and truth, representation and legislation are inseparable; that the colonies, being entitled to English freedom, were not bound by any act of a body to which they did not send members; that in theory the colonies were independent of the British parliament; but as they honestly desired to avoid a conflict, they proposed as a fundamental or an organic act their voluntary submission to every parliamentary diminution of their liberty which time had sanctioned, including the navigation acts and taxes for regulating Chap. Xlviii} 1775. Aug. trade, on condition of being relieved from every part of the new system of administration and being secured against future attempts for its introduction. Richard Penn, the agent of congress, was in London with its petition to the king, to entreat his concurrence in this endeavor to restore peace and union.

the king's proclamation was a contemptuous defi- Chap. L.} 1775. Sept. ance of the opposition, alike of the party of Rockingham and the party of Chatham, as the instigators, correspondents, and accomplices of the American rebels. Party spirit was exasperated and embittered, and Rochford was heard repeatedly to foretell, that before the winter should pass over, heads would fall on the block. The king of England, said Wilkes, the lord mayor of London, in conversation at a public dinner, hates me; I have always despised him: the time is come to decide which of us understands the other best, and in what direction heads are to fall. The French statesmen who, with wonderful powers of penetration, analyzed the public men and their acts, but neither the institutions nor the people of England, complacently contrasted its seeming anarchy with their own happiness in living peacefully under a good and virtuous king. For a moment they Chap L.} 1775. Sept. thought that danger menaced George the Third himself, and that he was deficient in the greatness of character which his position required; but his fortitude was exemplary in difficulties, and he always bore adversity with a courage that would have become a righteous cause. Others might quail; he scoffed at the thought of an insurrection, but stationed troops where riotous disorder was apprehended. I know, said he, what my duty to my country makes me undertake, and threats cannot prevent me from doing that to the utmost extent. A rumor prevailed that seven or eight members of the opposition would be sent to the tower of London; but this happened only to Stephen Sayre, an American by birth, a man of no political importance.

Loyal addresses began to come in, to the joy of Lord North; but the king, from his fatal experience and his instincts, which, on the subject of despotic authority, were more true than those of any man in his cabinet, wished to avoid the appeal to popular opinion. Yet for a time the public was united by the representation, that the insurrection in the colonies had been long premeditated with the deliberate design of achieving independence; and while that delusion lasted, the violent measures of coercion were acquiesced in by a majority of individuals of all ranks and professions; yet their countenance of the ministry was passive, without zeal, and unattended by a willingness to serve in America, so that the regiments could not be kept full by enlistments in Britain. The foreign relations of England became, therefore, of paramount importance.

The secretary of state desired to draw from the Chap. L.} 1775. Sept. French ambassador at London a written denial of Lee's assertion, that the Americans had a certainty of receiving support from France and Spain; but the intimation was evaded, for the king of France would not suffer himself to be made an instrument to bend the resistance of the Americans. If they should make us any application, said Vergennes, we shall dismiss them politely, and we shall keep their secret.

Beaumarchais who was then in England as an emissary from Louis the Sixteenth, and who from the charms of his conversation, his ability to write verses and to sing well, his generous style of living, and his apparent want of an official character, had opportunities of gaining information from the most various sources, encouraged the notion that England might seek to recover her colonies by entering on a war with France, and thus reviving their ancient sympathies. Having become acquainted with Arthur Lee, and having received accurate accounts of the state of America from persons newly arrived, he left London abruptly, ran over to Paris, and through De Sartine, presented to the king a secret memorial in favor of taking part with the insurgents. The Americans, said he, are full of the enthusiasm of liberty, and resolve to suffer everything rather than yield; such a people must be invincible; all men of sense are convinced that the English colonies are lost for the mother country, and that is my opinion too.

On the twenty-second of September, the day after the subject was discussed in the council of the king, De Sartine put a new commission into the hands of Beaumarchais. Vergennes continued to present Chap. L} 1775. Sept. America to his mind in every possible aspect. He found it difficult to believe, that the mistakes, absurdity, and passion of the British ministers could be so great as they really were; otherwise he never erred in his judgment. He received hints of negotiations for Russian troops; but yet he held it impossible that the king of England should be willing to send foreign mercenaries against his own subjects. Henry the Fourth would not have accepted the aid of foreign troops to reduce Paris; their employment would render it in any event impossible to restore affectionate relations between the parent state and the colonies. But Vergennes had not penetrated the character of the British government of his day, which, in the management of domestic affairs, was tempered by a popular influence, but which, in its foreign policy, consulted only the interests or the pride of the oligarchy, and was less capable of a generous impulse than that of France. The ministry did not scruple to engage troops wherever they chanced to be in the market.

The hereditary prince of Hesse Cassel, who was already the ruler of the little principality of Hainau, had instinctively scented the wants of England, and written to George the Third: I never cease to make the most ardent vows and prayers for the best of kings; I venture to offer, without the least condition, my regiment of five hundred men, all ready to sacrifice with me their life and their blood for your majesty's service. Deign to regard the motive and not the thing itself. Oh! that I could offer twenty thousand men to your majesty; it should be done with the same zeal; my regiment is all ready at the first Chap. L.} 1775. Sept. twinkle that shall be given me; and like the beggar that sends his goods as a present to a rich patron from whose charity he means to extort more than the market price, he demanded nothing, but was now in England to renew his solicitations.

The king wished leave to recruit in Holland, and also to obtain of that republic the loan of its so called Scottish brigade, which consisted no longer of Scots, but chiefly of Walloons and deserters. The consent of the house of Orange could easily have been gained; but the dignity, the principles, and the policy of the States General forbade. This is the first attempt of either party to induce Holland to take part in the American war; and its neutrality gave grievous offence in England.

Sir Joseph Yorke, at the Hague, was further directed to gain information on the practicability of using the good dispositions of the king's friends upon the continent, and the military force which its princes might be engaged to supply. For England to recruit in Germany was a defiance of the law of the empire; but Yorke reported that recruits might be raised there in any number, and at a tolerably easy rate; and that bodies of troops might be obtained of the princes of Hesse Cassel, Wurtemberg, Saxe Gotha, Darmstadt, and Baden.

But for the moment England had in contemplation a larger scheme. Gunning's private and confidential despatch from Moscow was received in London on the first day of September, with elation and delight. That very day Suffolk prepared an answer to the minister. To Catharine, George himself, with his own hand wrote a very polite epistle, requesting her friendly Chap. L.} 1775. Sept. assistance: I accept the succor that your majesty offers me of a part of your troops, whom the acts of rebellion of my subjects in some of my colonies in America unhappily require; I shall provide my minister with the necessary full powers; nothing shall ever efface from my memory the offer your imperial majesty has made to me on this occasion. Armed with this letter, Gunning was ordered to ask an audience of the empress, and to request of her the assistance of twenty thousand disciplined infantry, completely equipped and prepared on the opening of the Baltic in spring, to embark by way of England for Canada, where they were to be under the supreme command of the British general. The journey from London to Moscow required about twenty three days; yet they were all so overweeningly confident, that they hoped to get the definitive promise by the twenty third of October, in season to announce it at the opening of parliament; and early in September Lord Dartmouth and his secretary hurried off messages to Howe and to Carleton, that the empress had given the most ample assurances of letting them have any number of infantry that might be wanted.

On the eighth, Suffolk despatched a second courier to Gunning, with a project of a treaty for taking a body of Russian troops into the pay and service of Great Britain. The treaty was to continue for two years, within which the king and his ministers were confident of crushing the insurrection. The levy money for the troops might be seven pounds sterling a man, payable one half in cash and the other half on embarkation. A subsidy was not to be refused. I will not conceal from you, wrote Suffolk to Gunning, Chap. L.} 1775. Sept. that this accession of force being very earnestly desired, expense is not so much an object as in ordinary cases.

Scarcely had the project of a treaty left England, when, on the tenth of September, Gunning at court poured out to the empress assurances of the most inviolable attachment on the part of England. Has any progress been made, asked the empress with the utmost coolness, towards settling your dispute in America? and without waiting for an answer, she added: For God's sake put an end to it as soon as possible, and do not confine yourselves to one method of accomplishing this desirable end; there are other means of doing it than force of arms, and they ought all to be tried. You know my situation has lately been full as embarrassing, and, believe me, I did not rest my certainty of success upon one mode of acting. There are moments when we must not be too rigorous. The interest I take in everything that concerns you, makes me speak thus freely upon this subject.

The measures which are pursuing to suppress the rebellion, answered Gunning, who found himself most unexpectedly put upon the defensive, are such as are consistent with his majesty's dignity and that of the nation, and I am persuaded that your majesty would neither advise nor approve of any that were not so; resentment has not yet found its way into his majesty's councils. But Catharine only repeated her wishes for a speedy and a peaceful end to the difference; thus reading the king of England a lesson in humanity, and citing her own example of lenity and concession as the best mode of suppressing a re- Chap. L.} 1775 Sept. bellion.

Late on the twenty fourth, the first British courier reached Moscow a few hours after Catharine's departure for some days of religious seclusion in the monastery at Voskresensk, for she was scrupulous in her observance of the forms and usages of the Greek church. As no time was to be lost, Gunning went to Panin, who received him cordially, heard his communication without any sign of emotion, and consented to forward to the empress in her retirement a copy of the king's letter. It was the policy of the empire to preserve amicable relations with George the Third; the vice chancellor Ostermann, therefore, calmly explained the impossibility of conceding his request; but the British envoy persisted in his urgency, and wilfully deluded by the tranquil self-possession and friendly manner of the Russian minister, left him with the belief that if the British requisition should come to be a matter of debate, it would be supported by his voice.

The empress having returned to Moscow, Gunning, at five in the afternoon of the thirtieth, waited on Panin, by appointment. The autograph letter, which he wished to deliver in person, said positively that she had made him an offer of troops; Panin denied that any offer of troops had been made, and after much expostulation, Gunning confessed: It is true; in your answer to me no explicit mention was made of troops.

The message of the empress now was, that she was affected by the cordiality of the king, that in return, her friendship was equally warm, but that she had much repugnance to having her troops employed in Chap. L.} 1775. Sept. America. And could not his majesty, asked Panin, make use of Hanoverians?

Gunning replied at great length: Would the refusal of troops be a suitable return for our conduct during the late war, for our having foregone the commercial advantages which the Porte would undoubtedly have granted us, could she only have obtained a real neutrality on our part, which our partiality for Russia prevented us from observing. Were not the king's harbors, his subjects, and the credit and influence of the nation at her service during the whole war? Did not her majesty, at the risk of a rupture with France and Spain, forbid those powers to molest the Russian fleet which they would otherwise have annihilated? And though these services were rendered from the most pure and disinterested motives, yet as it had pleased the empress so frequently to express her wishes for an occasion of showing her sense of their merit, it is with the utmost astonishment I see her decline the present occasion of evincing it. I conjure you, by regard for the honor of your sovereign, to reflect on the light in which such a refusal must be looked upon by us, as well as by all the powers in Europe, and on the effect it might have on the conduct of some of them. And as he was refused an audience, he desired Panin himself to deliver the autograph letter of George the Third.

The next morning, Gunning went to Panin before Oct. he was up, and to remove objections, offered to be content with a corps of fifteen thousand men. At court, though it was the grand duke's birthday, he found that the empress would not appear. He returned to the palace in the evening, but the empress, Chap. L.} 1775 Oct. feigning indisposition, excused herself from seeing him.

Meantime the subject was debated in council, and objections without end rose up against the proposed traffic in troops, from the condition of the army wasted by wars, the divisions in Poland, the hostile attitude of Sweden, the dignity of the empress, the danger of disturbing her diplomatic relations with other European powers, the grievous discontents it would engender among her own subjects. She asked Panin whether granting the king such assistance would not disgust the British nation; and Ivan Ctzernichew, lately her ambassador at London, now minister of the marine, declared that it would give offence to the great body of the people of England, who were vehemently opposed to the policy of the king and his ministers.

Besides, what motive had the people of Russia to interfere against the armed husbandmen of New England? Why should the oldest monarchy of modern Europe, the connecting link between the world of antiquity and the modern world, assist to repress the development of the youngest power in the west? Catharine claimed to sit on the throne of the Byzantine Cesars, as heir to their dignity and their religion; and how could she so far disregard her own glory, as to take part in the American dispute, by making a shambles of the mighty empire which assumed to be the successor of Constantine's? The requisition of England was marked by so much extravagance, that nothing but the wildest credulity of statesmanship could have anticipated success.

The first suggestion to Catharine that the king of England needed her aid, was flattering to her vanity, Chap. L.} 1775 Oct. and, supposing it had reference only to entanglements in Europe, she was pleased with the idea of becoming the supreme arbiter of his affairs. But when the application came to be exhibited to her as a naked demand of twenty thousand men to be shipped to America, where they were to serve, under British command, not as auxiliaries but as mercenaries, with no liberty left to herself but to fix the price of her subjects in money and so plunge her hand as deeply as she pleased into the British exchequer, the offer was taken as an offence to her pride, and an insult to her honor. Using no palliatives she framed accordingly a sarcastic and unequivocal answer: I am just beginning to enjoy peace, and your majesty knows that my empire has need of repose. It is also known what must be the condition of an army, though victorious, when it comes out of a long war in a murderous climate. There is an impropriety in employing so considerable a body in another hemisphere, under a power almost unknown to it, and almost deprived of all correspondence with its sovereign. My own confidence in my peace, which has cost me so great efforts to acquire, demands absolutely that I do not deprive myself so soon of so considerable a part of my forces. Affairs on the side of Sweden are but put to sleep, and those of Poland are not yet definitively terminated. Moreover, I should not be able to prevent myself from reflecting on the consequences which would result for our own dignity, for that of the two monarchies and the two nations, from this junction of our forces, simply to calm a rebellion which is not supported by any foreign power.

Every word of the letter of the king of England Chap. L.} 1775. Oct. to the empress of Russia was in his own hand; she purposely employed her private secretary to write her answer. The second English courier, with the project of a treaty, reached Gunning on the fourth of October; he seized the earliest opportunity to begin reading it to Panin, and was willing to come down in his demand to ten thousand men; but the chancellor, interrupting him, put into his hands Catharine's answer, and declined all further discussion.

The letter seemed to the British envoy in some passages exceptionable, and he was in doubt whether it was fit to be received; but suppressing his discontent, he forwarded it to his sovereign.

The conduct of this negotiation was watched with the intensest curiosity by every court from Moscow to Madrid, and its progress was well understood; but no foreign influence whatever, not even that of the king of Prussia, however desirous he might have been of rendering ill offices to England, had any share in determining the empress. The decision was founded on her own judgment and that of her ministers, on the necessities of her position and the state of her dominions. For a short time a report prevailed through western Europe, that the English request was to be granted; but Vergennes rejected it as incredible, and wrote to the French envoy at Moscow: I cannot reconcile Catharine's elevation of soul with the dishonorable idea of trafficking in the blood of her subjects.

On the last day of October, the French minister asked Panin of the truth of the rumors, and Panin answered: People have said so, but it is physically impossible; besides, it is not consistent with the dig- Chap. L.} 1775. Oct. nity of England to employ foreign troops against its own subjects.

The empress continued to be profuse of courtesies to Gunning; and when in December he took his leave, she renewed the assurances of affection and esteem for his king, whom she expressed her readiness to assist on all occasions, adding, however: But one cannot go beyond one's means.

when the Russians arrive, will you go and see Chap. LI.} 1775. Oct. their camp? wrote Edward Gibbon to a friend. We have great hopes of getting a body of these barbarians; the ministers daily and hourly expect to hear that the business is concluded; the worst of it is, the Baltic will soon be frozen up, and it must be late next year before they can get to America. The couriers that, one after another, arrived from Moscow, dispelled this confidence. The king was surprised by the refusal of the empress of Russia, and found fault with her manner as not genteel; for, said he, she has not had the civility to answer me in her own hand; and has thrown out expressions that may be civil to a Russian ear, but certainly not to more civilized ones. Yet he bore the disappointment with his wonted firmness; and turned for relief to the smaller princes of Germany, who now, on the failure of his great speculation, had the British exchequer at their Chap. LI.} 1775. Oct. mercy.

The plan of the coming campaign was made in the undoubting expectation of completely finishing the war in season to disband the extraordinary forces within two years. For the Russians, who were to have protected the city and province of Quebec, Germans were to be substituted, whatever might be the cost. The advantage of keeping possession of Boston as a means of occupying the attention of New England, was considered; but it was determined to concentrate the British forces at New York, as the best means of securing the central provinces and the connection with Canada. The vaunts of Dunmore were so far heeded, that a small force of some hundred men was held sufficient, with the aid of loyalists and negroes, to recover the province. The promises of Martin led to the belief that, on the appearance of a few regiments, the Highland emigrants and many thousands in the back counties of North Carolina would rally round the royal standard; and in consequence, five regiments of infantry, with ten thousand stand of arms, six small field pieces, two hundred rounds of powder and ball for each musket and field piece, were ordered to be in readiness to sail from Cork early in December; and this force was soon after made equal to seven regiments. I am not apprized where they are going; thus Barrington expostulated with Dartmouth; but if there should be an idea of such a force marching up the country, I hope it will not be entertained. Allow me once more to remind you of the necessity there is in all military matters, not to stir a step without full consultation of able military men, after giving them the most perfect Chap. LI.} 1775. Oct. knowledge of the whole matter under consideration, with all its circumstances. The warning had no influence, for the king, in his dauntless self-will, would not consult those who were likely to disagree with him. A naval force, equal to the requirements of the governor of South Carolina for the recovery of that province, was also prepared.

Of the hearty concurrence of parliament no doubt was harbored. I am fighting the battle of the legislature, said the king; I therefore have a right to expect an almost unanimous support; I know the uprightness of my intentions and am ready to stand any attack of ever so dangerous a kind.

The good sense of the English people reasoned very differently, and found an organ among the ministers themselves. The duke of Grafton, by letter, entreated Lord North to go great lengths to bring about a durable reconciliation, giving as his reasons that the general inclination of men of property in England differed from the declarations of the congress in America little more than in words; that many hearty friends to government had altered their opinions by the events of the year; that their confidence in a strong party among the colonists, ready to second a regular military force, was at an end; that if the British regular force should be doubled, the Americans, whose behavior already had far surpassed every one's expectation, could and would increase theirs accordingly; that the contest was not only hopeless, but fraught with disgrace; that the attendant expenses would lay upon the country a burden which nothing could justify but an insult from a foreign enemy; that, therefore, the colonies should be Chap. LI.} 1775. Oct. invited by their deputies to state to parliament their wishes and expectations, and a truce be proclaimed, until the issue should be known. Of this communication Lord North took no note whatever until within six days of the opening of parliament, and then replied by enclosing a copy of the intended speech.

Hastening to court, Grafton complained of the violent, injudicious, and impracticable schemes of the ministers, framed in a misconception of the resources of the colonies; and he added: Deluded themselves, they are deluding your majesty. The king debated the business at large; but when he announced that a numerous body of German troops was to join the British forces, Grafton answered earnestly: Your majesty will find too late that twice the number will only increase the disgrace, and never effect the purpose.

On the twenty sixth of October, two days after the refusal of the empress of Russia was known, the king met the parliament. Of the many who were to weigh his words spoken on that occasion, the opinion of those not present was of the most importance. Making no allusion whatever to the congress or to its petition, he charged the people in America with being in a state of openly avowed revolt, levying a rebellious war for the purpose of establishing an independent empire; he professed to have received the most friendly offers of foreign assistance; and he announced that he had garrisoned Gibraltar and Port Mahon with his electoral troops, in order to employ the former garrisons in America. To make a speedy end of the disorders by most decisive exer- Chap. LI.} 1775. Oct. tions, he recommended an increase of the navy and the army; at the same time he proposed to send over commissioners with power to grant pardons and receive the submission of the several colonies. Thus the speech, which in its words and its effects was irrevocable, presented a false issue. The Americans had not designed to establish an independent government; of their leading statesmen it was the desire of Samuel Adams alone; they had all been educated in the love and admiration of constitutional monarchy, and even John Adams and Jefferson so sincerely shrunk back from the attempt at creating another government in its stead, that, to the last moment, they were most anxious to avert a separation, if it could be avoided without a loss of their inherited liberties.

The house of commons took the king at his word; Acland, who moved the address, reduced the question into a very short compass: Does Britain choose to acquiesce in the independence of America, or to enforce her submission? Lyttelton, whom we have seen as governor of South Carolina, in seconding the address, explained the inherent weakness of the southern colonies; and with obvious satisfaction intimated that, if a few regiments were sent there, the negroes would rise, and imbrue their hands in the blood of their masters. He was against conciliatory offers; the honor of the nation required coercive measures; the colonies ought to be conquered before mercy should be shown them. The house sustained these sentiments by a vote of two hundred and seventy eight against one hundred and ten.

On the report of the address, the debate was renewed. If we suffer by the war, said Lord North, Chap. LI.} 1775. Oct. the Americans will suffer much more. Yet, he added, I wish to God, if it were possible, to put the colonies on the same footing they were in 1763. His seeming disinclination to the measures of his own ministry, justly drew on him the rebuke from Fox for not resigning his place. The present war, argued Adair at length, is unjust in its commencement, injurious to both countries in its prosecution, and ruinous in its event, staking the fate of a great empire against a shadow. The quarrel took its rise from the assertion of a right, at best but doubtful in itself; a right, from whence the warmest advocates for it have long been forced to admit that this country can never derive a single shilling of advantage. The Americans, it is said, will be satisfied with nothing less than absolute independence. They do not say so themselves; they have said the direct contrary: Restore the ancient constitution of the empire, under which all parts of it have flourished; place us in the situation we were in the year sixty three, and we will submit to your regulations of commerce, and return to our obedience and constitutional subjection: this is the language of the Americans. Our ministers tell us they will not in truth be content with what they themselves have professed to demand. Have you tried them? Make the experiment. Take them at their word. If they should recede from their own proposals, you may then have recourse to war, with the advantage of a united, instead of a divided people at home. Sir Gilbert Elliot was unwilling to send a large armament to America without sending at the same time terms of accommodation. I vote for the address, said Rig- Chap. LI.} 1775. Oct. by, because it sanctifies coercive measures. America must be conquered, and the present rebellion must be crushed, ere the dispute will be ended. The commons unhesitatingly confirmed their vote of the previous night.

Among the lords, Shelburne insisted that the petition of the congress furnished the fairest foundation for an honorable and advantageous accommodation; and he bore his testimony to the sincerity of Franklin as one whom he had long and intimately known, and had ever found constant and earnest in the wish for conciliation upon the terms of ancient connection. His words, which were really a prophecy of peace and a designation of its mediators, were that night unheeded; and he was overborne by a majority of two to one. Some of the minority entered their protest, in which they said: We conceive the calling in foreign forces to decide domestic quarrels, to be a measure both disgraceful and dangerous.

That same day the university of Oxford, the favored printer of the translated Bible for all whose mother tongue was the English, the natural guardian of the principles and the example of Wickliffe and Latimer and Ridley and Cranmer, the tutor of the youth of England, addressed the king against the Americans as a people who had forfeited their lives and fortunes to the justice of the state.

On the last day of October, Lord Stormont, the British ambassador in France, who had just returned to his post, was received at court. The king of France, whose sympathies were all on the side of monarchical power, said to him: Happily the opposition party is now very weak. From the king, Stormont went to Chap. LI.} 1775. Oct. Vergennes, who expressed the desire to live in perfect harmony with England; far from wishing to increase your embarrassments, said he,we see them with some uneasiness. The consequences, observed Stormont, cannot escape a man of your penetration and extensive views. Indeed they are very obvious, responded Vergennes; they are as obvious as the consequences of the cession of Canada. I was at Constantinople when the last peace was made; when I heard its conditions, I told several of my friends there, that England would ere long have reason to repent of having removed the only check that could keep her colonies in awe. My prediction has been but too well verified. I equally see the consequences that must follow the independence of North America, if your colonies should carry that point, at which they now so visibly aim. They might, when they pleased, conquer both your islands and ours. I am persuaded that they would not stop there, but would in process of time advance to the southern continent of America, and either subdue its inhabitants or carry them along with them, and in the end not leave a foot of that hemisphere in the possession of any European power. All these consequences will not indeed be immediate Neither you nor I shall live to see them; but for be ing remote they are not less sure.

The moderate men among British statesmen saw Nov. no less clearly that the king's policy was forcing independence upon the colonies. On the first of November the Duke of Manchester said to the lords: The violence of the times has wrested America from the British crown, and spurned the jewel because the setting appeared uncouth; but the debate Chap. LI.} 1775. Nov. which he opened had no effect except that Grafton took part with him, and as a consequence resigned his place as keeper of the privy seal. Every effort of the opposition was futile. On the tenth of November Richard Penn was called to the bar of the house of lords, where he bore witness in great detail to the sincerity of the American congress in their wish for conciliation, and to the unanimity of support which they received from the people. Under the most favorable auspices the duke of Richmond proposed to accept the petition from that congress to the king as a ground for conciliation; he was ably supported by Shelburne; but his motion, like every similar motion in either house, was negatived by a majority of about two to one.

On the same day, the definitive ministerial changes, which were to give a character to the whole war, were completed. Rochford retired on a pension, and his place was taken by Lord Weymouth, who greatly surpassed him in ability and resolution. Dartmouth, who was mild tempered, amiable, and pure, yet weak, ignorant, and narrow, one of the best disposed of British statesmen, yet one whose hand was set to the most cruel and most arbitrary measures, exchanged his seat in the cabinet for the privy seal, consoling himself with the belief that he had been ever laboring for conciliation, while in fact he had been sanctioning and executing the policy at which his soul revolted. The seals of the American department were transferred to Lord George Sackville Germain, who owed his selection to his speech in the house of commons on the twenty eighth of March, 1774, and who came into office on the condition of his enforcing the measures Chap. LI.} 1775. Nov. recommended in that speech.

Germain stood before Europe as a cashiered officer, disgraced for cowardice on the field of battle; and his unquestioning vanity made him eager to efface his ignominy by a career that should rival that of Pitt in the Seven Years war. Haunted by corroding recollections, he stumbled like one in the dark as he struggled to enter the temple of fame, and eagerly went about knocking for admission at every gate but the right one. He owed his rehabilitation to Rockingham, to whom he instantly proved false; Chatham would never sit with him at the council board. His career was unprosperous, from causes within himself. His powers were very much overrated; he had a feverish activity, punctuality to a minute, and personal application, but no sagacity, nor quickness or delicacy of perception, nor soundness of judgment. He wanted altogether that mastery over others which comes from warmth of heart. Minutely precise and formal, he was a most uncomfortable chief, always throwing upon the officers under his direction the fault of failure even in impossible schemes. His rancor towards those at whom he took offence was bitter and unending. His temper was petulant; his selfish passions were violent and constant, yet petty in their objects. Apparelled on Sunday morning in gala, as if for the drawing room, he constantly marched out all his household to his parish church; where he would mark time for the singing gallery, chide a rustic chorister for a discord, stand up during the sermon to survey the congregation, or overawe the idle, and with unmoved sincerity gesticulate approbation to the preacher, whom he sometimes cheered on by name. Chap. LI.} 177 Nov. Though smooth and kindly to his inferiors and dependents, he was capable of ordering the most relentless acts of cruelty; could chide his generals for checking savages in their career as destroyers; and at night, on coming home to his supper and his claret, the friendless man, unloving and unloved, could, with cold, vengeful malice, plan how to lay America in ashes, because he could not have the glory of reducing her to submission.

An opportunity soon offered for the new secretary to unfold his policy. On the sixteenth Burke brought forward a bill for composing the existing troubles, by formally renouncing the pretension to an American revenue. If we are to have no peace, replied Germain, unless we give up the right of taxation, the contest is brought to its fair issue. I trust we shall draw a revenue from America; the spirit of this country will go along with me in the idea to crush rebellious resistance.

As he said this, the orders were already on the way to hire troops of the roytelets of Brunswick and Hesse Cassel, and in defiance of the laws of the empire to raise four thousand recruits in Germany; for if Germain was to crush the Americans, it could not be done by Englishmen. The ministry was the master of parliament, but not of the affections of the English people. Germain's appointment shows how little their sympathies were considered; the administration, as it was now constituted, was the weakest, the least principled, and the most unpopular of that century. The England that the world revered, the England that kept alive in Europe the vestal fire of freedom, was at this time outside of the Chap. LI.} 1775. Nov. government, though steadily gaining political strength. Chatham, while he had life in him, was its nerve. Had Grenville been living, it would have included Grenville; it retained Rockingham, Grenville's successor; it had now recovered Grafton, Chatham's successor; and Lord North, who succeeded Grafton, sided with Germain and Sandwich only by spasms, and though he loved his place, was more against his own ministry than for it. The king's policy was not in harmony with the England of the Revolution, nor with that of the eighteenth century, nor with that of the nineteenth. The England of to-day, which receives and brightens and passes along the torch of liberty, has an honest lineage, and springs from the England of the last century; but it had no representative in the ministry of Lord North, or the majority of the fourteenth parliament. America would right herself within a year; Britain and Ireland must wait more than a half century.

Still less did the ministry possess the hearts of the people of Ireland; though it controlled a majority of her legislature, and sought to allay discontent by concessions in favor of her commerce and manufactures. The consent of the Irish house of commons was requested to sending four thousand of the troops on the Irish establishment to America, and receiving in their stead four thousand German Protestants. If we give our consent, objected Ponsonby, in the debate on the twenty fifth of November, we shall take part against America, contrary to justice, to prudence, and to humanity. The war is unjust, said Fitzgibbons, and Ireland has no reason to be a party therein. Sir Edward Newenham could not agree to send more Chap. LI.} 1775. Nov. troops to butcher men who were fighting for their liberty; and he reprobated the introduction of foreign mercenaries as equally militating against true reason and sound policy. If men must be sent to America, cried George Ogle, send there foreign mercenaries, not the brave sons of Ireland. Hussey Burg condemned the American war as a violation of the law of nations, the law of the land, the law of humanity, the law of nature; he would not vote a single sword without an address recommending conciliatory measures; the ministry, if victorious, would only establish a right to the harvest when they had burned the grain. Yet the troops were voted by one hundred and twenty one against seventy six, although the resolution to replace them by foreign Protestants was negatived by sixty eight against one hundred and six.

The majority in parliament did not quiet Lord Dec. North. Sir George Saville describes him as one day for conciliation; but as soon as the first word is out, he is checked and controlled, and instead of conciliation out comes confusion. On the first day of December, he pressed to a second reading the American prohibitory bill, which consolidated the three special acts against the port of Boston, the fisheries, and the trade of the southern colonies, and enlarged them into a prohibition of all the trade of all the thirteen colonies. American vessels and goods were made the property of their captors; the prisoners might be compelled to serve the king even against their own countrymen. No one American grievance was removed; but commissioners were to be appointed to accept the submission of the colonies, or parts of colonies, one by one; with power to grant pardons to individ- Chap. LI.} 1775. Dec. uals or to a whole community in the lump. The atrocity of the measure was exposed in the house of commons, but without effect; on the third reading, in the house of lords, Mansfield explained his own views, which in their essential features were also those of the king: The people of America are as much bound to obey the acts of the British parliament as the inhabitants of London and Middlesex. I have not a doubt in my mind, that ever since the peace of Paris the northern colonies have been meditating a state of independence on this country. But allowing that all their professions are genuine, that every measure hitherto taken to compel submission to the parliamentary authority of this country was cruel and unjust, yet what, my lords, are we to do? Are we to rest inactive with our arms across, till they shall think proper to begin the attack, and gain strength to do it with effect? We are now in such a situation that we must either fight or be pursued. As a Swedish general said to his men of their enemy, If you do not kill them, they will kill you; if we do not, my lords, get the better of America, America will get the better of us. Are we to stand idle, because we are told this is an unjust war? I do not consider who was originally in the wrong; we are now only to consider where we are. The justice of the cause must give way to our present situation; and the consequences which must ensue should we recede, would, nay must be, infinitely worse, than any we have to dread by pursuing the present plan, or agreeing to a final separation. After these words the bill was adopted without a division.

From the beginning of the troubles, George the Chap. LI.} 1775. Third had regarded the renunciation of the colonies as preferable to the continuance of the connection on the American principles; for such a continuance would have overturned or endangered his system of government at home. To him it was an option between losing the brightest jewel in his crown, or losing the crown itself, in so far as it was an emblem of monarchical power. The same consideration animated Fox and Rockingham to defend American liberty as the bulwark of the rights of the British people. If a cordial reconciliation should not be speedily effected, to lose America entirely seemed to them a less evil than to hold her as a conquered country; for the maintaining of that dominion by an army only would inevitably terminate in the downfall of the constitution.

Outside of parliament, the most intelligent among the philosophers of North Britain yielded to the ministerial measures a reluctant acquiescence or discountenanced them by open rebuke. The lukewarm Presbyterian, William Robertson, whose smooth style in his more elaborate pages is like satin without a crease, and whose discreet method in history palliated or veiled the enormities of the Spaniards, forgot how well he had written at the time when the men in power were repealing the stamp act. If the wisdom of government could now terminate the contest with honor instantly, he thought that would be the most desirable issue; but yet he would have the British leaders at once exert the power of the British empire in its full force. He would even have approved stationing a few regiments in each capital. He was certain that the Americans had been aiming Chap. LI.} 1775. all along at independence, and like the Bedford party in parliament, he held it fortunate that matters had so soon been brought to a crisis. As a lover of mankind, he was ready to bewail the check to prosperous and growing states; but, said he, we are past the hour of lenitives and half exertions.

On the other hand, John Millar, the professor of law in the university of Glasgow, taught the youth of Scotland who frequented his lectures, that the republican form of government is by far the best, either for a very small or a very extensive country.

I cannot but agree with him, said David Hume, who yet maintained that it would be most criminal to disjoint the established government in Great Britain, where he believed a republic would so certainly be the immediate forerunner of despotism, that none but fools would think to augment liberty by shaking off monarchy. He had written the history of England without love for the country, or comprehension of its early popular liberty, or any deep insight into its parties, or exact study of its constitution. He that reads his lucid and attractive pages will not learn from them the formation of the native English tongue, or of the system of English government, or of religious opinion, or of English philosophy, or of English literature; his work is the work of a sceptic, polemic against the dogmatism of the church, otherwise unbiassed except by the sceptic's natural predilection for the monarchical principle. But he had no faith in the universal application of that principle. The ancient republics, said he, rising above the influence of his philosophy, were somewhat ferocious and torn by bloody factions; but they were still much Chap. LI.} 1775. preferable to the ancient monarchies or aristocracies, which seem to have been quite intolerable. Modern manners have corrected this abuse; and all the republics in Europe, without exception, are so well governed, that one is at a loss to which we should give the preference. I am an American in my principles, and wish we would let them alone to govern or misgovern themselves, as they think proper; the affair is of no consequence or of little consequence to us.

But one greater than Robertson and wiser than Hume gave the best expression to the mind of Scotland. Adam Smith, the peer and the teacher of statesmen, enrolled among the servants of humanity and benefactors of our race, one who had closely studied France as well as Britain, and who in his style combined the grace and the clearness of a man of the world with profound wisdom and the sincere search for truth, applied to the crisis those principles of freedom and right which made Scotland, under every disadvantage of an oppressive form of feudalism and a deceitful system of representation, an efficient instrument in promoting the liberties of mankind. He would have the American colonies either fairly represented in parliament, or independent. The prohibitory laws of England towards the colonies he pronounced a manifest violation of the most sacred rights, impertinent badges of slavery imposed upon them without any sufficient reason by the groundless jealousy of the merchants and manufacturers of the mother country. Great Britain, said he, derives nothing but loss from the dominion she assumes over her colonies. It is not very probable Chap. LI.} 1775. that they will ever voluntarily submit to us; the blood which must be shed in forcing them to do so is every drop of it the blood of those who are or of those whom we wish to have for our fellow citizens. They are very weak who flatter themselves that in the state to which things are come, our colonies will be easily conquered by force alone. And he pointed out the vast immediate and continuing advantages which Great Britain would derive, if she should voluntarily give up all authority over her colonies, and leave them to elect their own magistrates, to enact their own laws, and to make peace and war as they might think proper.

Josiah Tucker, an English royalist writer on political economy, had studied perseveringly the laws of nature, which are the laws of God, in their application to commerce; and at the risk of being rated a visionary enthusiast, he now sought to convince the landed gentry, that Great Britain would lose nothing if she should renounce her colonies and cultivate commerce with them as an independent nation. This he enforced with such strength of argument and perspicuity of statement, that Soame Jenyns wrote verses in his praise, and Mansfield approved his treatise.

Thus rose through the clouds of conflict and passion the cheering idea, that the impending change, which had been deprecated as the ruin of the empire, would bring no disaster to Britain. American statesmen had struggled to avoid a separation, which neither the indefatigable zeal of Samuel Adams, nor the eloquence of John Adams, nor the sympathetic spirit of Jefferson, could have brought about. The king was the author of American independence. Chap. LI.} 1775. His several measures, as one by one they were successively borne across the Atlantic—his contempt for the petition of congress, his speech to parliament, his avowed negotiations for mercenaries, the closing the ports of all the thirteen colonies and confiscating all their property on the ocean—forced upon them the conviction that they must protect and govern themselves.

when Carleton heard of the surrender of Ticon- Chap. LII.} 1775. deroga to Allen and Arnold, he resolved to attempt its recovery. The continental congress had, on the first of June, explicitly disclaimed the purpose of invading Canada; and a French version of their resolution was very widely distributed among its inhabitants. But on the ninth of that month the governor of the province proclaimed the American borderers to be a rebellious band of traitors, established martial law, and summoned the French peasantry to serve under the old colonial nobility, while the converted Indian tribes and the savages of the northwest were instigated to take up the hatchet against New York and New England. These movements affected the intentions of congress, and made the occupation of Canada an act of self-defence.

The French nobility, of whom many under the Quebec act were received into the council or appointed to executive offices, and the Catholic clergy Chap. LII.} 1775 who were restored to the possession of their estatesand their tithes, acquiesced in the new form of government; but by a large part of the British residents it was detested, as at war with English liberties, and subjecting them to arbitrary power. The instincts of the Canadian peasantry inclined them to take part with the united colonies: they denied the authority of the French nobility as magistrates, and resisted their claim of a right as seignors to command their military services. Without the hardihood to rise of themselves, they were willing to welcome an invasion.

Carleton, in his distress, appealed to the Catholic bishop. That prelate, who was a stipendiary of the British king, sent a mandate to the several parishes, to be read by the subordinate clergy after divine service, but the peasantry persisted in refusing to come out.

We have seen the feeble and disorderly condition of the northern army at the time of Schuyler's arrival. His first object was to learn the state of Canada, and in Major John Brown he found a fearless, able, and trusty emissary. He next endeavored to introduce order into his command. On the twenty seventh of July the regiment of Green Mountain Boys elected its officers; the rash and boastful Ethan Allen was passed by, and instead of him Seth Warner, a man of equal courage and better judgment, was elected its lieutenant colonel.

Under the direction of Schuyler, boats were built Aug. at Ticonderoga as fast as possible; and his humanity brooked no delay in adopting measures for the relief of the sick; but as twelve hundred men formed the whole force that he could as yet lead beyond the bor- Chap. LI.} 1775. Aug. der, he feared that the naval strength of the enemy might prevent his getting down the Sorel river; and on the sixth of August he wrote to congress, which had already adjourned, for information whether he was to proceed. The reference implied his own conviction, that his army was inadequate to the vast enterprise. Before the middle of the month, Brown returned from his perilous march of observation, and reported that now was the time to carry Canada; that the inhabitants were friends; that the number of regulars in Canada was only about seven hundred, of whom three hundred were at St. John's; that the militia openly refused to serve under the French officers lately appointed. At the same time a new arrival at Ticonderoga changed the spirit of the camp.

We have seen Richard Montgomery, who had served in the army from the age of fifteen, gain distinction in the Seven Years war. Several years after his return to Ireland, he took the steps which he believed sufficient for his promotion to a majority; failing in his pursuit and thinking himself overreached, he sold his commission in disgust and emigrated to New York. Here, in 1773, he renewed his former acquaintance with the family of Robert R. Livingston, and married his eldest daughter. Never intending to draw his sword again, studious in his habits, he wished for retirement; and his wife, whose affections he entirely possessed, willingly conformed to his tastes. At Rhinebeck a mill was built, a farm stocked, and the foundation of a new house laid, so that peaceful years seemed to await them. Montgomery was of a sanguine temperament, yet the experience of life had tinged his spirit with Chap. LII.} 1775. melancholy, and he would often say: My happiness is not lasting; but yet let us enjoy it as long as we may, and leave the rest to God. And they did enjoy life; blest with parents, brothers, sisters, and friends, their circle was always enlivened by intelligent conversation and the undisturbed flow of affection. The father of his wife used to say, that if American liberty should not be maintained, he would carry his family to Switzerland, as the only free country in the world. War was the dream of her grandfather alone, the aged Robert Livingston, the staunchest and most sagacious patriot of them all. In 1773, in his eighty fourth year, he foretold the conflict with England, and when his son and grandchildren smiled at his credulity, You, Robert, said he to his grandson, will live to see this country independent. At the news of the retreat of the British from Concord, the octogenarian's eye kindled with the fire of youth, and he confidently announced American independence. Soon after the battle of Bunker Hill, he lay calmly on his deathbed, and his last words were: What news from Boston?

From such a family circle the county of Dutchess, in April, 1775, selected Montgomery as a delegate to the first provincial convention in New York, where he distinguished himself by unaffected modesty, promptness of decision, and soundness of judgment. On receiving his appointment as brigadier general he reluctantly bade adieu to his quiet scheme of life; perhaps, he said, for ever, but the will of an oppressed people, compelled to choose between liberty and slavery, must be obeyed.

On the sixth of August, from Albany, he advised Chap. LII.} 1775. Aug. that Tryon, whose secret designs he had penetrated, should be conducted out of the way of mischief to Hartford. He reasoned justly on the expediency of taking possession of Canada, as the means of guarding against Indian hostilities, and displaying to the world the strength of the confederated colonies; it was enlarging the sphere of operations, but a failure would not impair the means of keeping the command of Lake Champlain. Summoned by Schuyler to Ticonderoga, he was attended as far as Saratoga by his wife, whose fears he soothed by cheerfulness and good humor, and his last words to her at parting were: You will never have cause to blush for your Montgomery.

On the seventeenth of August his arrival at Ticonderoga was the signal for Schuyler to depart for Saratoga, promising to return on the twentieth. That day came, and other days followed, and still Schuyler remained away. On the twenty fifth Montgomery wrote to him entreatingly to join the army with all expedition, as the way to give the men confidence in his spirit and activity. On the evening of the twenty sixth he received an express from Washington, who urged the acquisition of Canada and explained the plan for an auxiliary enterprise by way of the Kennebec. I am sure, wrote the chief, you will not let any difficulties, not insuperable, damp your ardor; perseverance and spirit have done wonders in all ages. You will therefore, by the return of this messenger, inform me of your ultimate resolution; not a moment's time is to be lost. In obedience to this letter, Schuyler left the negotiation with Indians to the other com- Chap. LII.} 1775. Aug. missioners at Albany, and set off for his army.

Montgomery, wherever he came, looked to see Aug. what could be done, and to devise the means of doing it; he had informed Schuyler that he should probably reach St. John's on the first day of September. Schuyler sent back no reply. Moving without your orders, rejoined Montgomery, I do not like; but the prevention of the enemy is of the utmost consequence; for if he gets his vessels into the lake, it is over with us for the present summer; and he went forward with a thousand or twelve hundred men. Retarded by violent head winds and rain, it was the Sept. third of September when he arrived at Isle La Motte. On the fourth he was joined by Schuyler, and they proceeded to Isle aux Noix. The next day a declaration of friendship was dispersed amongst the inhabitants. On the sixth Schuyler, whose forces did not exceed a thousand, embarked for St. John's. They landed without obstruction, a mile and a half from the fortress, towards which they marched in good order over marshyand wooded ground. In crossing a creek, the left of their advanced line was attacked by a party of Indians; but being promptly supported by Montgomery, it beat off the assailants, yet with a loss of nine subalterns and privates. Schuyler's health had declined as he approached the army. In the night a person came to his tent with false information, which he laid before a council of war; their opinion being consonant with his own, he immediately ordered a retreat, and without carefully reconnoitring the fortress, he led back the troops unmolested to the Isle aux Noix. From that station he wrote to congress: I have not enjoyed a moment's Chap. LII.} 1775. Sept. health since I left Fort George; and am now so low as not to be able to hold the pen. Should we not be able to do any thing decisively in Canada, I shall judge it best to move from this place, which is a very wet and unhealthy part of the country, unless I receive your orders to the contrary.

This letter was the occasion of a large controversy in congress; his proposal to abandon Isle aux Noix was severely disapproved; it was resolved to spare neither men nor money for his army, and if the Canadians would remain neuter, no doubt was entertained of the acquisition of Canada. He himself was encouraged to attend to his own health, and this advice implied a consent that the command of the invading forces should rest with Montgomery.

Meantime Schuyler, though confined to his bed, sent out on the tenth a party of five hundred; they returned on the eleventh, disgraced by unbecoming behavior. Upon this Montgomery, having discerned in the men a rising spirit more consonant with his own, entreated permission to retrieve the late disasters; and Schuyler, who was put into a covered boat for Ticonderoga, turned his back on the scene with regret, but not with envy, and relinquished to the gallant Irishman the conduct, the danger, and the glory of the campaign.

The day after Schuyler left Isle aux Noix, Montgomery began the investment of St. John's. The Indians kept at peace, and the zealous efforts of the governor, the clergy, and the French nobility, had hardly added a hundred men to the garrison. Carleton thought himself abandoned by all the earth, and wrote to the commander in chief at Boston: I had Chap. LII.} 1775. Sept. hopes of holding out for this year, had the savages remained firm; but now we are on the eve of being overrun and subdued.

On the morning after Montgomery's arrival near St. John's, he marched five hundred men to its north side. A party which sallied from the fort was beaten off, and the detachment was stationed at the junction of the roads to Chambly and Montreal. Additions to his force and supplies of food were continually arriving, through the indefatigable attention of Schuyler; and though the siege flagged for the want of powder, the investment was soon made so close that the retreat of the garrison was impossible.

The want of subordination delayed success. Ethan Allen had been sent to Chambly to raise a corps of Canadians. They gathered round him with spirit, and his officers advised him to lead them without delay to the army; but dazzled by vanity and rash ambition, he attempted to surprise Montreal. Dressed as was his custom when on a recruiting tour, in a short fawn skin, double breasted jacket, a vest and breeches of woollen serge, and a red worsted cap, he passed over from Longeuil to Long Point, in the night preceding the twenty fifth of September, with about eighty Canadians and thirty Americans, though he had so few canoes, that but a third of his party could embark at once. On the next day he discovered that Brown, whom he had hoped to find with two hundred men on the south side of the town, had not crossed the river. Retreat from the island was impossible; about two hours after sunrise he was attacked by a motley party of regulars, English residents of Montreal, Canadians, and Indians, in all about five hun- Chap. LII.} 1775. Sept. dred men, and after a defence of an hour and three quarters, he, with thirty eight men, was obliged to surrender; the rest fled to the woods. At the barrack yard in Montreal, Prescott, a British brigadier, asked the prisoner: Are you that Allen who took Ticonderoga? I am the very man, quoth Allen. Then Prescott, in a great rage, called him a rebel and other hard names, and raised his cane. At this Allen shook his fist, telling him: This is the beetle of mortality for you, if you offer to strike. Youshall grace a halter at Tyburn, cried Prescott, with an oath.

The wounded, seven in number, entered the hospital; the rest were shackled together in pairs, and distributed among different transports in the river. But Allen, as the chief offender, was chained with leg irons weighing about thirty pounds; their heavy substantial bar was eight feet long; the shackles, which encompassed his ancles, were so very tight and close that he could not lie down exeept on his back; and in this plight, thrust into the lowest part of a vessel, the captor of Ticonderoga was dragged to England, where imprisonment in Pendennis Castle could not abate his courage or his hope.

The issue of this rash adventure daunted the Oct. Canadians for a moment, but difficulties only brought out the resources of Montgomery. He was obliged to act entirely from his own mind; for there was no one about him competent to give advice. Of the field officers, he esteemed Brown alone for his ability; though McPherson, his aide-de-camp, a very young man, universally beloved, of good sense, and rare endowments, gave promise of high capacity for war. But his chief difficulties grew out of the badness of Chap. LII.} 1775. Oct. the troops. Schuyler also complained of the Connecticut soldiers, announcing even to congress: If Job had been a general in my situation, his memory had not been so famous for patience. The New Englanders, wrote Montgomery, are the worst stuff imaginable for soldiers. They are homesick; their regiments are melted away, and yet not a man dead of any distemper. There is such an equality among them, that the officers have no authority, and there are very few among them in whose spirit I have confidence; the privates are all generals, but not soldiers; and so jealous that it is impossible, though a man risk his person, to escape the imputation of treachery.

Of the first regiment of Yorkers, he gave a far worse account; adding: The master of Hindostan could not recompense me for this summer's work; I have envied every wounded man who has had so good an apology for retiring from a scene where no credit can be obtained. O fortunate husbandmen; would I were at my plough again! Yet, amidst all his vexations, his reputation steadily rose throughout the country, and he won the affection of his army, so that every sick soldier, officer, or deserter, that passed home, agreed in praising him wherever they stopped.

The wearisomeness of delay, occasioned by the want of munitions of war, increased the anxiety of Montgomery. There was no hope of his reducing the garrison from their want of provisions. The ground on which he was encamped was very wet; the weather cold and rainy, so that the troops suffered exceedingly from sickness. Insubordination heightened his distress. Seeing that the battery was ill placed, he would have erected one at the distance Chap. LII.} 1775. Oct. of four hundred yards from the north side of the fort; but the judgment of the army was against him. I did not consider, said he, I was at the head of troops who carried the spirit of freedom into the field and think for themselves; and saving appearances by consulting a council of war, he acquiesced in their reversing his opinion. In John Lamb, the captain of a New York company of artillery, he found a restless genius, brave, active, and intelligent, but very turbulent and troublesome.

Anxious to relieve St. John's, Carleton, after the capture of Allen, succeeded in assembling about nine hundred Canadians at Montreal; but a want of mutual confidence and the certainty that the inhabitants generally favored the Americans, dispirited them, and they disappeared by desertions, thirty or forty of a night, till he was left almost as forlorn as before. The Indians, too, he found of little service; they were easily dejected, and chose to be of the strongest side, so that when they were most wanted they vanished. But history must preserve the fact that, though often urged to let them loose on the rebel provinces, in his detestation of cruelty, he would not suffer a savage to pass the frontier.

In this state of mutual weakness, the inhabitants of the parishes of Chambly turned the scale. Ranging themselves under James Livingston of New York, then a resident in Canada, and assisted by Major Brown, with a small detachment from Montgomery, they sat down before the fort in Chambly, which, on the eighteenth of October, after a siege of a day and a half was ingloriously surrendered by the English commandant. The colors of the seventh regi- Chap. LII.} 1775. Oct. ment, which were here taken, were transmitted as the first trophy to congress; the prisoners, one hundred and sixty eight in number, were marched to Connecticut; but the great gain to the Americans was seventeen cannon and six tons of powder.

The siege of St. John's now proceeded with efficiency. The army of Montgomery yielded more readily to his guidance; Wooster of Connecticut had arrived, and set an example of cheerful obedience to his orders. At the northwest, a battery was constructed on an eminence within two hundred and fifty yards of the fort; and by the thirtieth it was in full action.

To raise the siege Carleton planned a junction with McLean; but Montgomery sent Easton, Brown, and Livingston to watch McLean, who was near the mouth of the Sorel, while Warner was stationed near Longeuil. Having by desperate exertions got together about eight hundred Indians, Canadians, and regulars, Carleton, on the last day of October embarked them at Montreal, in thirty four boats, to cross the Saint Lawrence. But Warner, with three hundred Green Mountain Boys and men of the second New York regiment, watched their approach, and as they drew near the bank, poured on them so destructive a fire from the one four-pounder of the Americans, that they retired precipitately with loss and in disorder.

On the news of Carleton's defeat, McLean, de- Nov. serted by the Canadians, and losing all hope of support, retired to Quebec; while the besiegers pushed on their work with unceasing diligence, keeping up a well-directed fire by day and night. On the third of November, after a siege of fifty days, the fort of St. Chap. LII.} 1775. Nov. John's surrendered; and its garrison, consisting of five hundred regulars and one hundred Canadians, many of whom were of the French gentry, marched out with the honors of war.

Montgomery now hastened to Montreal as rapidly as the bad weather and worse roads would permit; and on the twelfth of November, unopposed, he took possession of the town. He came as the auxiliary of the Canadians, to give them the opportunity of establishing their freedom and reforming their laws; and he requested them to choose as soon as possible faithful representatives to sit in the continental congress, and make a part of that union. He sought to impress them with the idea that the freedom of the thirteen colonies could never be securely enjoyed, so long as arbitrary government should remain established in Canada; that no reconciliation could take place till the liberties of all should be secured on the same basis. He did not think himself a great politician, but his plan had, as he believed, the merit of being liberal, and of coming from an honest heart, void of any ambition but that of serving the public. He earnestly urged Schuyler to pass the winter at Montreal. In the midst of his unparalleled success, the hero longed to be below the Catskills, with his young wife, his pleasant farm occupations, and his books. I am weary of power, said he to Schuyler; I must go home this winter, if I walk by the side of the lake. I have courted fortune, he wrote to his brother-in-law, and found her kind. I have one more favor to solicit, and then I have done. Without Quebec, Canada remained unconquered; and honor forbade him to turn back before attempting its cap- Chap. LII.} 1775. ture. Men, money, and artillery were wanting; in the face of a Canadian winter, he nevertheless resolved to go down to Quebec, and pledged his word that on his part there should be no negligence of duty, no infirmity of purpose.

The detachment which Washington, as he thought- Chap. LIII.} 1775. Sept. fully brooded over the future without hope of a speedy termination of the war, sent against Quebec, consisted of ten companies of New England infantry, one of riflemen from Virginia, and two from Pennsylvania, in all two battalions of about eleven hundred men. The command was given to Arnold, who, as a trader in years past, had visited Quebec, where he still had correspondents. In person he was short of stature and of a florid complexion; his broad, compact frame displayed a strong animal nature and power of endurance; he was complaisant and persuasive in his manners; daringly and desperately brave; avaricious and profuse; grasping but not sordid; sanguinely hopeful; of restless activity; intelligent and enterprising.

The next in rank as lieutenant colonels were Roger Enos, who proved to be a craven, and the brave Christopher Greene of Rhode Island. The ma- Chap. LIII.} 1775 Sept. jors were Return J. Meigs of Connecticut, and Timothy Bigelow, the early patriot of Worcester, Massachusetts. Morgan, with Humphreys and Heth, led the Virginia riflemen; Hendricks, a Pennsylvania company; Thayer commanded one from Rhode Island, and like Arnold, Meigs, Dearborn, Henry, Senter, Melvin, left a journal of the expedition. Aaron Burr, then but nineteen years old, and his friend Matthias Ogden, carrying muskets and knapsacks, joined as volunteers. Samuel Spring attended as chaplain.

The humane instructions given to Arnold enjoined respect for the rights of property and the freedom of opinion, and aimed at conciliating the affectionate cooperation of the Canadians. If Lord Chatham's son, so wrote Washington, should be in Canada, and in any way should fall into your power, you cannot pay too much honor to the son of so illustrious a character, and so true a friend to America. Chatham, on his part, from his fixed opinion of the war, withdrew his son from the service; and Carleton, anticipating that decision, had already sent him home as bearer of despatches.

To the Canadians, Washington's words were: The cause of America and of liberty is the cause of every virtuous American citizen, whatever may be his religion or his descent. Come then, range yourselves under the standard of general liberty.

Boats and provisions having been collected, the detachment, on the evening of the thirteenth of September, marched to Medford. On the nineteenth they sailed from Newburyport, and on the morning of the twentieth were borne into the Kennebec. They passed the bay where that river and the An- Chap. LIII.} 1775. Sept. droscoggin hold their merry meeting; on the twenty first they reached the two block houses, and one large house, enclosed with pickets, which stood on the east bank of the river, then known as Fort Western, on the site of Augusta. An exploring party of seven men went in advance to discover the shortest carrying place from the Kennebec to the Dead River, one of its branches, along a path which had already been marked, but which they made more distinct by blazing the trees and snagging the bushes. The detachment followed in four divisions, in as many successive days. Each division took provisions for forty five days. On the twenty fifth Morgan and the riflemen were sent first to clear the path; the following day Greene and Bigelow started with three companies of musketeers; Meigs with four companies was next in order; Enos with three companies closed the rear.

They ascended the river slowly to Fort Halifax, opposite Waterville; daily up to their waists in water, hauling their boats against a very rapid current. On the fourth of October they passed the vestiges Oct. of an Indian chapel, a fort, and the grave of the missionary Rasle. After they took leave of settlements and houses at Norridgewock, their fatiguing and hazardous course lay up the swift Kennebec, and they conveyed arms and stores through the thick woods of a rough, uninhabited, and almost trackless wild; now rowing, now dragging their boats, now bearing them on their backs round rapids and cataracts, across morasses, over craggy highlands. On the tenth the party reached the dividing ridge between the Kennebec and Dead River. Their road now lay through Chap. LIII.} 1775 Oct. forests of pines, balsam fir, cedar, cypress, hemlock, and yellow birch, and over three ponds, that lay hid among the trees and were full of trout. After passing them, they had no choice but to bear their boats, baggage, stores, and ammunition across a swamp, which was overgrown with bushes and white moss, often sinking knee deep in the wet turf and bogs. From Dead River, Arnold on the thirteenth wrote to the commander of the northern army, announcing his plan of co-operation. Of his friends in Quebec he inquired as to the number of troops at Quebec, what ships were there, and what was the disposition of the Canadians and merchants; and he forwarded his letter by an Indian.

On the fifteenth the main body were on the banks of the Dead River; following its direction a distance of eighty three miles, encountering upon it seventeen falls, large enough to make portages necessary, and near its source a series of small ponds choked with fallen trees, in ten or twelve days more they arrived at the great carrying place to the Chaudiere.

On the way they heard the disheartening news, that Enos, the second in command, had deserted the enterprise, leading back three companies to Cambridge. Yet the diminished party, enfeebled by sickness and desertion, with scanty food, and little ammunition, still persevered in their purpose to appear before a citadel, which was held to be the strongest in North America, and which the English officers in Canada would surely defend to the last.

The mountains had been clad in snow since September; winter was howling around them, and their Chap. LIII.} 1775. Oct. course was still to the north. On the night preceding the twenty eighth of October, some of the party encamped on the height of land that divides the waters of the Saint Lawrence and the Atlantic. As they advanced their sufferings increased. Some went barefoot for days together. Their clothes had become so torn, they were almost naked, and in their march were lacerated by thorns; at night they had no couch or covering but branches of evergreens. Often for successive days and nights they were exposed to cold, drenching storms, and had to cross streams that were swelling with the torrents of rain. Their provisions failed, so that they even eat the faithful dogs that followed them into the wilderness.

Many a man, vainly struggling to march on, sank down exhausted, stiffening with cold and death. Here and there a helpless invalid was left behind, with perhaps a soldier to hunt for a red squirrel, a jay, or a hawk, or various roots and plants for his food, and to watch his expiring breath. On Dead River, McLeland, the lieutenant of Hendrick's company, caught a cold, which inflamed his lungs; his friends tenderly carried him on a litter across the mountain, Hendrick himself in his turn putting his shoulder to the loved burden.

The men had hauled up their barges nearly all the way for one hundred and eighty miles, had carried them on their shoulders near forty miles, through hideous woods and mountains, often to their knees in mire, over swamps and bogs almost impenetrable, which they were obliged to cross three or four times to fetch their baggage; and yet starving, deserted, with an enemy's country and uncertainty Chap. LIII.} 1775. Oct. ahead, officers and men, inspired with the love of liberty and their country, pushed on with invincible fortitude.

The foaming Chaudiere hurries swiftly down its rocky channel. Too eager to descend it quickly, the adventurers had three of their boats overset in the whirls of the stream; losing ammunition and precious stores, which they had brought along with so much toil.

The first day of November was bright and warm, Nov. like the weather of New England. I passed a number of soldiers who had no provisions, and some that were sick and had no power to help them, writes one of the party. At last, on the second of that month, French Canadians came up with two horses, driving before them five oxen; at which the party fired a salute for joy, and laughed with frantic delight. On the fourth, about an hour before noon, they descried a house at Sertigan, twenty five leagues from Quebec, near the fork of the Chaudiere and the De Loup. It was the first they had seen for thirty one days; and never could the view of rich cultivated fields or of flourishing cities awaken such ecstasy of gladness as this rude hovel on the edge of the wilderness. They did not forget their disabled fellow soldiers: McLeland was brought down to the comfortable shelter, though he breathed his farewell to the world the day after his arrival.

The party followed the winding of the river to the parish of St. Mary, straggling through a flat and rich country, which had for its ornament many low bright whitewashed houses, the comfortable abodes of a cheerful, courteous, and hospitable people. Here Chap. LIII.} 1775. Nov. and there along the road chapels met their eyes, and images of the Virgin Mary and rude imitations of the Savior's sorrows.

For seven weeks Cramahe, the lieutenant governor, had been repairing the breaches in the walls of Quebec, which were now put into a good posture for defence. The repeated communications, intrusted by Arnold to friendly Indians, had been, in part at least, intercepted. On the eighth of November his approach was known at Quebec, but not the amount of his force; and the British officers, in this state of uncertainty, were not without apprehensions that the affair would soon be over.

On the tenth Arnold arrived at Point LeVI, but all boats had been carefully removed from that side of the Saint Lawrence. He waited until the thirteenth for the rear to come up, and employed the time in making ladders and collecting canoes, while Quebec was rapidly gaining strength for resistance. On the fifth of November a vessel from Newfoundland had brought a hundred carpenters. Colonel Allan McLean arrived on the twelfth with a hundred and seventy men, levied chiefly among disbanded Highlanders who had settled in Canada. The Lizard and the Hunter, ships of war, were in the harbor; and the masters of merchant ships with their men were detained for the defence of the town. At nine in the evening of the thirteenth, Arnold began his embarkation in canoes, which were but thirty in number, and carried less than two hundred at a time; yet by crossing the river three several times, before daybreak on the morning of the fourteenth, all of his party, except about one hundred and fifty left at Chap. LIII.} 1775. Nov. Point Levi, were landed undiscovered, yet without their ladders, at Wolfe's cove. The feeble band met no resistance as they climbed the oblique path to the Plains of Abraham. Wolfe had come, commanding the river with a fleet; they, in frail bark canoes, hardly capable of holding a fourth of their number at a time; Wolfe, with a well appointed army of thousands, they with less than six hundred effective men or a total of about seven hundred, and those in rags, barefooted, and worn down with fatigue; Wolfe with artillery, they with muskets only, and those muskets so damaged that one hundred were unfit for service; Wolfe with unlimited stores of ammunition, they with spoiled cartridges and a very little damaged powder.

If it had required weeks for Montgomery with an army of two thousand men to reduce St. John's, how could Quebec, a large and opulent town of five thousand inhabitants, strongly fortified and carefully guarded, be taken in a moment by five hundred half armed musketeers? The enemy being apprised of our coming, says Arnold, we found it impracticable to attack them without too great risk. In the course of the day he led two or three hundred men within sight of the walls, where they gave three huzzas of defiance; and in the evening he sent a flag to demand the surrender of the place. The flag was not received, and the British would not come out. For two or three days Arnold encamped about a mile and a half from town, posting on all its avenues small guards which actually prevented fuel or refreshments of any kind being brought in. Yet the invaders were not to be dreaded, except for their friends within Chap. LIII.} 1775. Nov. the walls, whose rising would have offered the only chance of success; but of this there were no signs. Arnold then ordered a strict examination to be made into the state of his ammunition, and as the result showed no more than five rounds to each man, it was judged imprudent to run the risk of a battle; and on the nineteenth his party retired to Point aux Trembles, eight leagues above Quebec, where they awaited the orders of Montgomery.

The day before Montgomery entered Montreal, Chap. LIV.} 1775 Nov. Carleton, with more than a hundred regulars and Canadians, embarked on board some small vessels in the port to descend to Quebec. He was detained in the river for several days by contrary winds, and moreover he found the St. Lawrence, near the mouth of the Sorel, guarded by continental troops under Easton. On the seventeenth of November, Prescott, the brigadier who had so lately treated Allen with insolent cruelty, surrendered the flotilla of eleven sail with all the soldiers, sailors, and stores on board; but in the darkest hour of the previous night, Carleton, entering a small boat in the disguise of a peasant, had been safely paddled through the islands that lie opposite the Sorel. Touching as a fugitive at Trois Rivieres, he arrived on the nineteenth at Quebec, where his presence diffused joy and confidence among the loyal. Thus far he had shown great poverty of resources as a military chief; but his Chap. LIV.} 1775. Nov. humane disposition, his caution, his pride, and his firmness were guarantees that Quebec would be pertinaciously defended. Besides, he had been Wolfe's quartermaster general, and had himself witnessed how much of the success of his chief had been due to the rashness of Montcalm in risking a battle outside of the walls.

The rapid success of Montgomery had emboldened a party in Quebec to confess a willingness to receive him on terms of capitulation. But on the twenty second, Carleton ordered all persons who would not join in the defence of the town, to leave it within four days; and after their departure he found himself supported by more than three hundred regulars, three hundred and thirty Anglo-Canadian militia, five hundred and forty three French Canadians, four hundred and eighty five seamen and marines, beside a hundred and twenty artificers capable of bearing arms.

Montgomery had conquered rather as the leader of a disorderly band of turbulent freemen, than as the commander of a disciplined army. Not only had the troops from the different colonies had their separate regulations and terms of enlistment, but the privates retained the inquisitiveness and self-direction of civil life; so that his authority depended chiefly on his personal influence and his powers of persuasion. Now that Montreal was taken and winter was come, homesickness so prevailed among them that he was left with no more than eight hundred men to garrison his conquests, and to go down against Quebec. He was deserted even by most of the Green Mountain Boys, who at first were disposed to share his winter campaign. The continental congress, which was eager Chap. LIV.} 1775. Nov. for the occupation of Canada, took no seasonable care to supply the places of his men as their time of enlistment expired.

On the twenty sixth, leaving St. John's under the command of Marinus Willett of New York, and entrusting the government of Montreal to Wooster of Connecticut, and in the spirit of a lawgiver who was to regenerate the province, making a declaration that on his return he would call a convention of the Canadian people, Montgomery embarked on board three armed schooners with artillery and provisions and three hundred troops; and on the third day of De- Dec. cember, at Point aux Trembles, made a junction with Arnold. The famine-proof veterans, now but six hundred and seventy five in number, were paraded in front of the Catholic chapel, to hear their praises from the lips of the modest hero, who, in animating words, did justice to the courage with which they had braved the wilderness, and to their superior style of discipline. From the public stores which he had taken, they received clothing suited to the terrible climate; and about noon on the fifth, the little army, composed of less than a thousand American troops, and a volunteer regiment of about two hundred Canadians, appeared before Quebec, in midwinter, to take the strongest fortified city in America, defended by more than two hundred cannon of heavy metal, and a garrison of twice the number of the besiegers.

Quick of perception, of a hopeful temperament, and impatient of delay, Montgomery saw at a glance his difficulties, and yet thought there was a fair prospect of success. He could not expect it from a siege, for he had no battering train; nor by investing Chap. LIV.} 1775. Dec. the place, which had provisions for eight months; there could therefore be no hope of its capture but by storm, and as the engagements of the New England men ended with the thirty first of December, the assault must be made within twenty six days. He grieved for the loss of life that might ensue, but his decision was prompt and unchanging. The works of the lower town were the weakest; these he thought it possible to carry, and then the favor of the inhabitants in the upper town, their concern for their property, the unwarlike character of the garrison, the small military ability of Carleton, offered chances of victory.

The first act of Montgomery was a demand for the surrender of the city; but his flag of truce was not admitted. On the sixth he addressed an extravagant and menacing letter to Carleton, which was sent by a woman of the country, and of which a copy was afterwards shot into the town upon an arrow; but Carleton would hold no communication with him, and every effort at correspondence with the citizens failed.

Four or five mortars were placed in St. Roc's, but the small shells which they threw did no essential injury to the garrison. Meantime a battery was begun on the heights of Abraham, about seven hundred yards southwest of St. John's gate. The ground was frozen and covered with deep snow, so that earth was not to be had; the gabions and the interstices of the fascines were therefore filled with snow; and on this water was poured in large quantities, which froze instantly in the intense cold. On the fifteenth, the day after the work was finished, a flag of truce was Chap. LIV.} 1775. Dec. again sent towards the wall with letters for the governor; but he refused to receive them or hold any kind of parley with rebels. Montgomery knew that Carleton was sincere, and if necessary would sooner be buried under heaps of ruins than come to terms. The battery, consisting of but six twelve-pounders and two howitzers, had been thrown up only to lull the enemy into security at other points; it was too light to make any impression on the walls, while its embankment was pierced through and through, and its guns destroyed by the heavy artillery of the fortress. Some lives were lost, but the invaders suffered more from pleurisy and other diseases of the lungs; and the smallpox began its ravages.

A faint glimmer of hope still lingered, that the repeated defiance would induce Carleton to come out; but he could not be provoked into making an attempt to drive off the besiegers. To the storming we must come at last, said Montgomery. On the evening of the sixteenth, a council was held by all the commissioned officers of Arnold's detachment, and a large majority voted for making an assault as soon as the men could be provided with bayonets, hatchets, and hand grenades. In case of success, said Montgomery, the effects of those who have been most active against the united colonies must fall to the soldiery. Days of preparation ensued, during which he revolved his desperate situation. His rapid conquests had filled the voice of the world with his praise; the colonies held nothing impossible to his good conduct and fortune; he had received the order of congress to hold Quebec, if it should come into his hands; should that fortress be taken the Canadians Chap. LIV.} 1775. Dec. would enter heartily into the Union and send their deputies to congress. Fortune, said he, favors the brave; and no fatal consequences are likely to attend a failure.

One day the general, accompanied by his aidede-camp, Macpherson, the pure-minded, youthful enthusiast for liberty, went out to meditate on the spot where Wolfe had fallen, fighting for England in friendship with America. He ran a parallel in his mind between the career of Wolfe and his own; he had lost the ambition which once sweetened a military life, and a sense of duty was now his only spring of action; if the Americans should continue to prosper, he wished to return to the retired life in which he alone found delight; but said he, should the scene change, I shall be always ready to contribute to the public safety. And his last message to his brother-in-law was: Adieu, my dear Robert; may your happy talents ever be directed to the good of mankind.

As the time for the assault drew near, three captains in Arnold's battalion, whose term of service was soon to expire, created dissension and showed a mutinous disaffection to the service. In the evening of the twenty third, Montgomery repaired to their quarters, and in few words gave them leave to stand aside; he would compel none; he wanted with him no persons who went with reluctance. His words recalled the officers to their duty, but the incident hurried him into a resolution to attempt gaining Quebec before the first of January, when his legal authority to restrain the waywardness of the discontented would cease. At sundown of Christmas he reviewed Arnold's battalion at Morgan's quarters, and ad- Chap. LIV.} 1775 Dec. dressed them with spirit; after which a council of war agreed on a night attack on the lower town. For the following days the troops kept themselves in readiness at a moment's warning. In the interval the intention was revealed by a deserter to the garrison, so that every preparation was made against a surprise; two thirds of the men lay on their arms; in the upper town, Carleton and others not on duty slept in their clothes; in the lower, volunteer pickets kept watch; and they all wished ardently that the adventurous attempt might not be delayed.

The night of the twenty sixth was clear, and so cold that no man could handle his arms or scale a wall. The evening of the twenty seventh was hazy, and the troops were put in motion; but as the sky soon cleared up, the general, who was tender of their lives, called them back, choosing to wait for the shelter of a favorable night, that is, for a night of clouds and darkness with a storm of wind and snow.

For the next days the air was serene, and a mild westerly wind brightened the sky. On the thirtieth a snow storm from the northeast set in. But a few hours more of the old year remained, and with it the engagement of many of his troops would expire; Montgomery must act now, or resign the hope of crowning his career by the capture of Quebec. Orders were therefore given for the troops to be ready at two o'clock of the following morning; and that they might recognise one another, each soldier wore in his cap a piece of white paper, on which some of them wrote: liberty or death.

It was Montgomery's plan to alarm the garrison at once, along the whole line of their defences. Chap. LIV.} 1775. Dec. Colonel James Livingston, with less than two hundred Canadians, was to attract attention by appearing before St. John's gate, on the southwest; while a company of Americans under Brown was to feign a movement on Cape Diamond, where the wall faces south by west, and from that high ground, at the proper time, were to fire a rocket, as the signal for beginning the real attacks on the lower town, under Arnold from the west and north, under Montgomery from the south and east.

The general, who reserved for his own party less than three hundred Yorkers, led them in Indian file from head quarters at Holland House to Wolfe's Cove, and then about two miles further along the shore. The path was so rough that in several places they were obliged to scramble up slant rocks covered with two feet of snow, and then, with a precipice on their right, to descend by sliding down fifteen or twenty feet. The wind, which was at east by north, blew furiously in their faces, with cutting hail, which the eye could not endure; their constant step wore the frozen snow into little lumps of ice, so that the men were fatigued by their struggles not to fall, and they could not keep their arms dry.

The signal from Cape Diamond being given more than half an hour too soon, the general with his aidede-camps, Macpherson and Burr, pushed on with the front, composed of Cheesman's company and Mott's; and more than half an hour before day they arrived at the first barrier, with the guides and carpenters. The rest of the party lagged behind; and the ladders were not within half a mile. Montgomery and Cheesman were the first that entered the undefended bar- Chap. LIV.} 1775. Dec. rier, passing on between the rock and the pickets which the carpenters began to saw and wrench away. While a message was sent back to hurry up the troops, Montgomery went forward to observe the path before him. It was a very narrow defile, falling away to the river precipitously on the one side, and shut in by the scarped rock and overhanging cliff on the other, so that not more than five or six persons could walk abreast; a house built of logs and extending on the south nearly to the river, with loopholes for musketry and a battery of two three-pounders, intercepted the passage. It was held by a party consisting of thirty Canadian and eight British militiamen under John Coffin, with nine seamen under Barnsfare, the master of a transport, as cannoniers. The general listened, and heard no sound; and it was afterwards thought that the guard was not on the alert; but lights from lanterns on the plains of Abraham, as well as the signal rockets, had given the alarm; and at daybreak, through the storm, the body of troops was seen in full march from Wolfe's Cove. At their approach to the barrier, a part of the guard was scared with a panic; but Coffin, who during the siege had never missed an hour's duty, restored order, and the sailors stood at their guns with lighted linstocks.

Montgomery waited till about sixty men had joined him inside of the row of pickets; then exclaiming, Men of New York, you will not fear to follow where your general leads; push on, brave boys; Quebec is ours! he pressed forward at double quick time to carry the battery. As he appeared on a little rising in the ground, at a distance of fifty yards or less from the mouths of the cannon, which were loaded with grapeshot, Barnsfare discharged them with dead- Chap. LIV.} 1775. Dec. ly aim. Montgomery, his aid Macpherson, the young and gallant Cheesman, and ten others, instantly fell dead; Montgomery from three wounds. With him the soul of the expedition fled. Mott was eager to go forward; but some of the men complained that their arms were wet; one or more of the officers thought nothing further could be attempted with wearied troops and no arm but the bayonet; fireballs were thrown by the enemy to light up the scene; their musketeers began to fire from the loopholes of the blockhouse; and Donald Campbell, who assumed the command of the Yorkers, encountered the reproach of ordering an immediate retreat, which was effected without further loss.

On the northeastern side of the lower town, Arnold led the forlorn hope, which consisted of more than twice as many troops as followed Montgomery. The path along the St. Charles had been narrowed by masses of ice thrown up from the river; and the battery by which it was commanded might have raked every inch of it with grape shot, while their flank was exposed to musketry from the walls. As they reached Palace Gate, the bells of the city were rung, the drums beat a general alarm, and the cannon began to play. The Americans ran along in single file, holding down their heads on account of the storm, and covering their guns with their coats. Lamb and his company of artillery followed with a fieldpiece on a sled; the fieldpiece was soon abandoned, but he and his men took part in the assault.

The first barricade was at the Sault au Matelot, a jutting rock which left little space between the river Chap. LIV.} 1775. Dec.beach and the precipice. Near this spot Arnold was severely wounded in the leg by a musket ball and carried off disabled; but Morgan's men, who formed the van, rushed forward to the portholes and fired into them, while others, Charles Porterfield the first, Morgan himself the second, mounted by ladders, carried the battery, and took its captain and guard prisoners. But Morgan was at first followed only by his own company and a few Pennsylvanians. It was still very dark; he had no guide; and he knew nothing of the defences of the town. The cold was extreme; so that the men were hoar with icicles. Their muskets were made useless by the storm. The glow of attack began to subside, and the danger of their position to appear. They were soon joined by Greene, Bigelow, and Meigs, so that there were at least two hundred Americans in the town; and they all fearlessly pressed on in the narrow way to the second barricade, at the eastern extremity of Sault au