Beginnings of the American People Part 6

Lawrence, Quebec might add l.u.s.ter to the crown of Louis, but it could not greatly increase the commercial strength of France. A firm alliance with the northern tribes was therefore the first object. It was for this that military posts were established on the waterways of the interior.

And every stockaded fort was at once a trading camp and a mission house: merchants lured the Indian with brandy and firearms; civil officials and men at arms impressed him with the authority of the great king; Jesuit priests, strangely compounding true devotion and unscrupulous intrigue, learned the native languages, and with the magic of the crucifix and the _Te Deum_ converted the spirit-fearing savages into loyal children of the Bishop of Rome. Canada, with its center at Quebec, and its outposts at Michilimackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, was little more than "a musket, a rosary, and a pack of beaver skins": not so much a colony, indeed, as a mesh of interlacing interests cunningly designed to convert fur into gold. And so long as the tribes of the northern lakes annually brought their rich freightage of mink and beaver to Fort Frontenac or Montreal, to be exchanged there for arms and brandy, beads, hatchets, bracelets, and gay-colored fabrics, gold was not lacking--for the pockets of clever merchant and corrupt official, if not always for the royal treasury of France.

"The colonies of foreign nations so long settled on the sea board,"

wrote the Intendant Talon in 1671, "are trembling with fright in view of what your Majesty has accomplished here in the last seven years." In fact, the thrifty and unadventurous farmers along the Atlantic were as yet only too indifferent to the importance of Canada; still less did they foresee the New France of which La Salle was at that moment dreaming. After a dozen years of heart-breaking discouragements, that somber idealist finally reached the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Mississippi. It was on the 9th of April, 1682, at the mouth of the Father of Waters, that he proclaimed the sovereignty of Louis XIV over "this country of Louisiana, from the mouth of the river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio, as also along the river Colbert, or Mississippi, and the rivers that discharge thereinto, from its source as far as its mouth at the sea." To make sure the t.i.tle thus announced to the silent wilderness, a pillar bearing the arms of France was erected, and a lead plate buried in the sand. The inscription would scarcely have frightened away even a stray Englishman, had he chanced to see it; but when, in December of the same year, La Salle built his wooden fort on the rock of St. Louis, there began to emerge from the world of dreams to the world of realities the vision of a greater New France, held together by a chain of forts on all the inland waterways from the mouth of the St. Lawrence to the mouth of the Mississippi, and exploiting, through friendly alliance with the native tribes, the rich fur trade of the continent.

It was during the last decade of the Stuart regime, when the efficient committee known as the Lords of Trade had charge of colonial affairs, that the English Government first set seriously about the task of checking the growing power of France and of suppressing illicit trade.

To aid the governors in enforcing the navigation laws, collectors and comptrollers of the customs had been established in nearly every colony by 1678; in 1688 William Dyre, responsible to the English customs commissioners, was appointed surveyor-general and placed at the head of the American service; and it was mainly on the ground of illegal trade that Ma.s.sachusetts was made a crown colony in 1684. The doughty Colonel Dongan, who came out as Governor of New York in 1683, was one of the first to see the importance of Canada; and after 1685 he was supported by James in the attempt to divert the fur trade from Montreal to Albany by bringing the Iroquois Indians under English control. The scheme, which involved nothing less than the ruin of Canada, was by no means a visionary one. The Five Nations, lying south of the chain of lakes, could profit but little by the fur trade while it remained in French hands. But let Albany replace Montreal as the chief market, and they would become the indispensable middle carriers between the northern tribes and the English. And the northern tribes were themselves not ill-disposed to such a change. Undoubtedly the French had better manners than the English; undoubtedly French fire-water was of excellent flavor.

But the traders whom Dongan sent to Michilimackinac proved beyond cavil that English goods were cheap; and so long as a beaver skin was the price of a debauch on French brandy, whereas a mink skin was sufficient to attain the same exaltation by means of English rum, the French control of the fur trade rested on a precarious basis. The chief obstacle to Dongan's scheme was the division of executive authority in the colonies, the apathy of colonial a.s.semblies, and the lack of an adequate military force to protect the Iroquois from the enmity of the French. It was precisely to change these conditions, and to avoid the very evils which soon came to pa.s.s, that James II, who had at least the merit of an intelligent interest in the colonies, placed all New England under the single jurisdiction of Andros in 1686, and, in 1688, united New York and the Jerseys to New England.

The Revolution which drove James from the throne discredited his measures, but the twenty years of war with France which the Revolution brought in its train proved the wisdom of his policy. When Indian ma.s.sacres inspired at Quebec made a desolate waste of the New England frontier, while Boston and New York merchants filled their pockets by supplying the enemy with munitions of war, the inadequacy of the colonial system for defense, as well as all the worst evils of illicit trade, stood clearly revealed. Until 1715, the Board of Trade, which William appointed in 1696, maintained the traditions, if it did not exhibit all the efficiency, of the old committee of the Lords of Trade.

The Navigation Act of 1696, providing for nearly thirty officials at an annual cost of 1605, for the first time systematically extended the English customs service to the colonies. In the following year seven admiralty courts, subject to the Lords of the Admiralty, were erected in the continental colonies to try cases arising out of the violation of the Trade Acts, while special courts for dealing with piracy were established in 1700. But the customs and admiralty services, although directly responsible to the English Government, could never be fully effective unless they were vigorously supported by the colonial Governments. It was in order to make the enforcement of the commercial code more effective, as well as to secure better cooperation among the colonial Governments for military defense, that the Board of Trade repeatedly advised the recall of all the charters as a measure necessary above all others. The advice of the Board was followed only in part. The union of New England and New York was abandoned. Ma.s.sachusetts received a new charter; Connecticut and Rhode Island retained their old ones; Penn's charter, annulled in 1692, was restored in 1694. But under the charter granted to Ma.s.sachusetts in 1691 the governor was appointed by the Crown; New Jersey was made a royal province in 1702; and Maryland in 1691, although it was given back to the Baltimores in 1715. When the Peace of Utrecht was signed in 1713, the system devised by the Board of Trade for controlling the colonies thus lacked little of being completely established. The English customs and admiralty services had been fully extended to America; and while control of legislation was left mainly in the hands of a.s.semblies elected in each colony, executive authority was entrusted to Crown officials in every colony except Pennsylvania, where the governor was appointed by the proprietor, and Rhode Island and Connecticut, where he was still elected by the people.

III

It is only by courtesy that these measures for confining the trade of the empire may be called a colonial system; and it would have been well if England, profiting by the experience of the French wars, had set seriously about the task of fas.h.i.+oning a method of government adapted to the political as well as the commercial needs of her New World possessions. But it was not to be. With the accession of George I, enthusiasm for plantation ventures declined; interest in the colonies, undiminished, indeed, was more than ever concentrated upon their commercial possibilities; and the constructive policy of the Stuarts gave way, in the phrase of Burke, to one of "salutary neglect." The neglect was, indeed, by no means complete. Information was a.s.siduously gathered; many new laws were pa.s.sed; the number of officials greatly increased, and governors more carefully instructed; colonial statutes, more consistently inspected, were more often annulled. Yet it is true that for three decades after the Peace of Utrecht no attempt was made to transform the commercial code into a colonial system. And even the commercial code was administered in "a gentlemanlike and easy-going fas.h.i.+on: little was embitered and nothing solved."

Of many circ.u.mstances which contributed to this result, the effect of the Revolution on English politics was fundamental. Kings who ruled by grace of a statute, instead of by divine right, inevitably lost administrative as well as legislative authority. Colonial policy was therefore no longer determined, as in Stuart times, by the king in council, but by the ministers; by ministers who might listen to the Board of Trade, but could not take advice unless it squared with the wishes of the Parliament that made them. When, in 1715, Secretary Stanhope appointed George Vaughan, an owner of sawmills in New Hamps.h.i.+re, to be lieutenant-governor of that province, the Board of Trade protested; and quoted, in support of its protest, the remarks of Bellomont about Mr. Partridge. "To set a carpenter to preserve woods,"

said Bellomont, "is like setting a wolf to guard sheep; I say, to preserve woods, for I take it to be the chiefest part of the business of a Lt. Governor of that province to preserve the woods for the king's use." The protest was ignored; and for thirty years, while the Board of Trade fell almost to the level of a joke, the colonies were managed by a Secretary of State who was likely to be less interested in preserving the woods for the king's use than in advancing the interests of the Whig oligarchy which governed England.

It could not well have been otherwise. The Whig oligarchy, having driven the Stuarts from the throne, was bound to identify the welfare of the empire with the maintenance of the House of Hanover. Convinced that so long as there was peace and plenty in the land Jacobite exiles would wait in vain for the day when the body of James II, lying unburied in the church of St. Jacques, might be restored to English soil, ministers labored to make the nation loyal by making it comfortable. It was therefore necessary to guard with jealousy the material interests of the inarticulate Tory squire, who still harbored a sullen loyalty to the Stuarts, as well as of the merchants and moneyed men whose fortunes were bound up with the Revolution settlement. And year by year the Parliamentary influence of the latter increased. Members of the South Sea and East India Companies had seats in the House of Commons; and the West India Islands, where, it was estimated in 1775, property to the value of 14,000,000 was "owned by persons who live in England," were in very truth represented there. William Beckford, who entered Parliament in 1747, possessed of a great fortune acquired in Jamaica sugar plantations, and soon to become all-powerful in "the City," was only the most famous of those who effectively voiced the demands of colonial landlords and London merchants. "Such men used in times past to come hat in hand," said Newcastle; "now the second word is, 'you shall hear of it in another place.'" In fact, although ministers bowed to the king and spoke of His Majesty's Government, they knew well that the fortunes of the kingdom were in the hands of the big property interests that b.u.t.tressed an unstable throne.

And these masters of England, never interested in the colonies apart from their commercial value, were less so than ever during this Indian summer of prosperous content. Rising prices made the era of, the first Georges a golden age of agriculture; while the effect of the French wars was to "exalt beyond measure the maritime and commercial supremacy of England." The Treaty of Meuthen facilitated the importation of cloth into Portugal and the flow of Brazilian bullion to London. Levantine trade began to open to England after the conquest of Gibraltar and Minorca. English merchants acquired special privileges at Cadiz by the Treaty of Utrecht; and the _a.s.siento_ gave to the South Sea Company a monopoly of importing slaves into New Spain, and enabled it to secure, "by the ingenuity of British merchants," the greater part of the general commerce of the Spanish colonies. In 1710, the number of vessels clearing from English ports was 3550; it was 6614 in 1714; and during the same period the s.h.i.+pping of London increased from 806 to 1550. In 1758, imports from the continental colonies into England stood at 648,683, and from the West Indies at 1,834,036. "The colonies," said the elder Horace Walpole, "are the source of all our riches"; for it was the colonies, and above all the West Indies,--that subterranean channel by which the silks and teas from Vera Cruz, and Peruvian gold from Puerto Bello, found their way into England,--which alone "preserve the balance of trade in our favour."

If, as sometimes happened, powerful Parliamentary interests complained of conditions in the colonies, the Government was ready to comply with their demands. During the Walpole regime, the private smuggler in Spanish commerce, whether Englishman or New Englander, was suppressed in order that the South Sea Company might enjoy a monopoly of that profitable business. When Jamaica planters, unable to sell their sugar in Europe or Ma.s.sachusetts in compet.i.tion with the French islands, clamored for relief, the famous Mola.s.ses Act of 1733 was pa.s.sed, laying prohibitive duties upon the importation of sugar, mola.s.ses, and rum into the continental colonies. And in 1750, at the behest of the woolen and iron interests, rapidly growing industries in New England and Pennsylvania were restricted in order that the English landowner and English woolen and iron manufacturers might find in America the markets which they were losing in Europe. But in general neither the landed nor the industrial interests pressed the Government to meddle with the plantations; and when no one complained, ministers of the temper of Walpole or Newcastle were not disposed to concern themselves with the reform of the colonial system, or to inquire too curiously into the honesty or the efficiency with which it was administered. According to their philosophy, it mattered little whether the Governor of Virginia was an able man, or whether he resided in London or Jamestown; what mattered was that Newcastle should succeed, by a judicious distribution of offices, in maintaining a Parliamentary majority for the party which guarded the liberties of England. It mattered little whether the admiralty courts fell under the control of the merchants and landowners who dominated colonial a.s.semblies; what mattered was that the colonial merchant and landowner should be prosperous and maintain a safe credit balance with English merchants. And therefore let the governors be punctiliously instructed to perform their duties strictly; but let those be recalled who irritated the best people in the colonies by too officiously endeavoring to carry out their instructions. So long as the colonial planter was content and the Tory squire could not complain of high taxes or low rents, so long as merchants of standing in London or New York found business good, so long as the English manufacturer had ready markets and the trading companies distributed high dividends, it seemed folly indeed to attempt, with meticulous precision, to enforce the Trade Acts at every unregarded point, to construct ideal governments for communities that were every year richer than the last, or to provide at great expense for an adequate military defense against Canada when peace with France was the settled policy of England.

Unhappily for this policy of _quieta non movere_, peace with France came to an end after thirty years. And if since the Peace of Utrecht the English colonies had grown rich and populous, the French had strengthened their hold on all the strategic points of the interior from Quebec to New Orleans. The province of Louisiana, founded in 1699 by D'Iberville to forestall the English in occupying the mouth of the Mississippi, contained a population of more than ten thousand white settlers in 1745. The governor maintained friendly relations with the Choctaw Indians, and endeavored to alienate the Cherokees and the Creeks from the English alliance, and so to divert the rich peltry trade of the Southwest from Fort Moore and Charleston to New Orleans. Attached to Louisiana for administrative purposes were the small but thriving French settlements on the Mississippi, between the Illinois and the Ohio Rivers, centering about Forts Chartres, Cahokia, and Kaskaskia. Between Louisiana and Canada all the connecting waterways, save alone the upper Ohio, were guarded by military establishments and trading posts--on Green Bay, on the Wabash and Miami Rivers, at the southern end of Lake Michigan, at Detroit and Niagara. By discovery and occupation, the French claimed all the inland country; denied the right of Englishmen to settle or trade there; were prepared to defend it by force, and, in case of war, to release upon the unguarded English frontier from Maine to Virginia those savage tribes, whom legend credits with many n.o.ble virtues, but whom the colonists by bitter experience well knew to be cruel and treacherous and b.e.s.t.i.a.l beyond conception.

The possession of this hinterland was now, toward the middle of the century, become the vital issue; for the claims of France could not stay the populous English colonies from pus.h.i.+ng their frontier across the mountains, or prevent skillful English traders from undermining the loyalty of her Indian allies. There were settlements in the southern up-country as far west as Fort Moore on the Savannah, as far as Camden and Charlottesburg, and beyond Hillsborough. The outpost of Virginia was at Wills Creek, within striking distance of the Ohio; the valleys of the Blue Ridge were filling with Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch; while German and Dutch farmers of New York occupied both sides of the Mohawk nearly to its source. Oswego, long since established on Lake Ontario, was abundantly justifying the ambitious scheme inaugurated sixty years earlier by Governor Dongan; for official corruption at Montreal had not made French goods cheaper since the days of Frontenac, and the northern Indians yearly resorted to Oswego to trade with the English. And every year unlicensed traders, such as Christopher Gist and William Trent, not to mention many "more abandoned wretches," hired men on the Pennsylvania or Virginia frontier and with goods on pack-horses crossed the Alleghanies to traffic among the western Indians. In 1749, Celoron de Bienville, sent by the Governor of Canada to take possession of the Ohio Valley, found English traders at Logstown and Scioto, and in nearly every village as far west as the Miami. This was the very year that John Hanbury, a London merchant, and some Virginia gentlemen, among whom were Lawrence and Augustine Was.h.i.+ngton, pet.i.tioned the Board of Trade for a grant of five hundred thousand acres of land on the upper Ohio. And the pet.i.tion was granted, in order that the country might be more rapidly settled, and "to cultivate the friends.h.i.+p and carry on a more extensive commerce with the native Indians, and as a step towards checking the encroachments of the French."

Those who went into the back country received little a.s.sistance from Government, either English or colonial, in extending the frontier, and but little in defending it. Tide-water rice or tobacco planters, peaceful and gain-loving Quakers at Philadelphia, New York or Boston merchants trading in the West Indies, all untouched by Indian ma.s.sacre and absorbed in local politics, begrudged money spent to protect a half-alien people, often without their jurisdiction. The English Government, for its part, had long observed the comfortable maxim that if her navy policed the sea, the colonists were bound to provide their own defense in time of peace. Money for Indian presents was regularly sent; garrisons maintained in Nova Scotia and in the West Indies; a.s.sistance sometimes given for forts on the exposed New York or Carolina frontier. But the expense was slight indeed: in 1783 the total amount appropriated for defending the continental colonies, exclusive of Nova Scotia and not counting money for Indian presents, was 10,000; in 1743, it was 25,000. And the war which opened in 1743 demonstrated that a government which neglected defense in time of peace could scarcely provide it in time of war. The New England frontier was once more devastated by pillage and ma.s.sacre; and Philip Schuyler, to the high disgust of his Iroquois allies, was forced to abandon and burn Fort Saratoga for lack of supplies to maintain it. Yet New England farmers made possible the capture of Louisburg, and the colonies together raised nearly eight thousand troops to cooperate, in the conquest of Canada, with the fleet and army which the Duke of Newcastle promised but never sent. Ma.s.sachusetts was, indeed, generously repaid for the heavy expense which she incurred; but two hundred and seventeen chests of Spanish dollars and one hundred barrels of copper coin, sufficient to restore her credit, were scarce full return for the restoration of Louisburg to France after the war was over.

With how much ease, during the six years that followed the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, might the English and colonial Governments have prevented the worst horrors of the French and Indian War! Deprived of her Indian allies, Canada would scarce have been a danger; and at no time were the Indians better disposed toward the English. "All I can say," Celoron de Bienville announced when he returned from the Ohio in 1750, "is that all the nations of these countries are very ill-disposed toward the French, and devoted to the English." And in the next year Pere Piquet complained that Oswego "not only spoils our trade, but puts the English into communication with a vast number of our Indians far and near. It is true that they like French brandy better than English rum; but they prefer English goods to ours, and can buy for two beaver skins at Oswego a better silver bracelet than we sell at Niagara for ten."

Strongly garrisoned forts at Albany, at Oswego, and on the Ohio would have transformed this friendly disposition into a firm alliance. But there was little loyalty in the red man's heart for an unmilitary people; and cheap goods, however they might win the Indian in time of peace, made but a silken cord to hold him in time of war. "We would have taken Crown Point, but you prevented us," said Chief Hendrick at the conference hastily summoned at Albany to prepare for defense on the eve of war. "Instead you burned your own fort at Saratoga and ran away from it. You have no fortifications, no, not even in this city. The French are men; they are fortifying everywhere. But you are all like women, bare and open, without fortifications." Not one representative of seven colonies had authority to rea.s.sure him. Sir William Johnson did, indeed, negotiate a treaty of alliance with the Iroquois and the western Indians; and the Virginia a.s.sembly, yielding at last to Governor Dinwiddie's insistent demands, appropriated some money for maintaining the wooden fort, well named Fort Necessity, which Colonel Was.h.i.+ngton had built on the Ohio. But it was too late. The French built a better fort at Duquesne; and they had scarcely defeated the Virginia colonel and destroyed his fort before the English traders were driven from the Indian villages, and no English flag was to be seen west of the mountains. It was the western tribes that brought Braddock's expedition to a disastrous end. While the Quakers at Philadelphia denounced the iniquity of war, these quondam allies of England ravaged the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the northern tribes that had gladly come to Oswego to trade in 1754, a.s.sisted Montcalm to capture and destroy it in 1756.

Reverses in America were but part of the multiplied disasters which befell English arms at the opening of the Seven Years' War. At the close of the year 1756, with Hanover threatened and Minorca taken, with the Bourbon arms victorious in India and the Bourbon fleet unchecked upon the sea, with a million and a half of colonists seemingly helpless before eighty thousand French in America, it was clear at last that ministers who employed organized corruption to b.u.t.tress the throne, who rarely read the American dispatches, and were not quite sure where Nova Scotia was, had endangered that very peace and material prosperity with which they had been so long and so exclusively occupied. In this crisis many plans were forthcoming, at Albany and in London, for colonial union and imperial defense; plans doubtless excellent in themselves, but impracticable under the circ.u.mstances. They were therefore laid aside until the war should be over. A plan of attack, not of defense, was now the prime necessity. In face of this necessity, the Whig oligarchy, abdicated its high function of "muddling through" the business of government, while "an afflicted despairing nation turned to a private gentleman of slender fortune, wanting the parade of birth and t.i.tle, as the only saviour of England." "I know," said William Pitt, "that I can save England, and that n.o.body else can."

A most galling boast for both your houses of Pelham and Yorke, but a true one. Within three years the nation was raised from the depths of despair to the high level of its great leader's a.s.sured and arrogant confidence. It was not by colonial systems that Pitt brought victory, but by organizing efficiency in place of corruption and by inspiring many men to heroic effort. Wisdom born of sympathy and common sense soon accomplished in America what neither the bullying of Loudoun nor the New Englander's hatred of the French could effect. In 1756 no more than five thousand troops were raised in all New England and New York. Governor Pownall was haggling as usual with his a.s.sembly over a levy of two thousand men, when there arrived in Boston Pitt's order that henceforth colonial officers should take rank with regulars, according to the date of their commissions. The simple order was worth more than many plans of union. The very next morning, when the dispatch was read out, the Old Bay a.s.sembly voted the entire seven thousand men originally asked of the Northern colonies; and during the year 1758 nearly twenty-five thousand provincial troops were raised for the war. With this support, the English army and fleet, for the first time ably led and efficiently directed, soon destroyed the power of France in Canada: Louisburg was once more captured; Crown Point and Niagara were taken; Oswego was rebuilt; while the French, deserted by their savage allies as soon as the English won victories, destroyed their own fort at Duquesne; and at last the intrepid General Wolfe, fortunately aided by a strange combination of accidents, scaled the Heights of Quebec and defeated the army of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham.

When the war was over and Canada no longer the menace it had been, men without imagination, turning again to the schemes which had been laid aside in 1756, began to devise measures for a closer supervision of the "plantations," and for raising "a revenue in Your Majesty's dominions in America for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same." They were not aware that since the recall of the Ma.s.sachusetts charter the colonies had become something more than plantations, or that there was arising on the continent of America a people whose interests were national rather than imperial, and whose ideals of well-being transcended the dead level of material ambitions.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

For the settlement of the Southern and Middle colonies in this period, see Channing _History of the United States_, II, chaps. II, IV; Andrews, _Colonial Self-Government_, chaps. VI-VII, IX, XI. The best discussion of the reasons for a revival of interest in the colonies during the Restoration, and of the establishment and practical application of a system of colonial administration and control, is Beer's _The Old Colonial System_, Part I, 2 vols. See particularly, I, chaps, I-IV. For this subject, see also, Channing, II, chaps. I, VIII; Andrews, _Colonial Self-Government_, chaps. I-II; Andrews, _British Committees, Commissions, and Councils of Trade and Plantations_ (Johns Hopkins Studies, 1908); and Andrews, _The Colonial Period_, chap. V. For the relations between England and her colonies in the first half of the eighteenth century, see d.i.c.kerson, _American Colonial Government_ (Cleveland, 1912); Andrews, _The Colonial Period_, chaps. VI, VII; Greene, _Provincial America_, chaps. II-IV, XI; and Beer, _British Colonial Policy_, chap. I. The importance of the West Indies in determining the policy of Walpole is brought out by Temperley, _American Historical a.s.sociation Reports_, 1911, vol. I, p. 231. For the rise of New France and the conflict of France and England in America, see Fiske, _New France and New England_, chaps, I-II, IV, VIII-X; Thwaites, _France in America_, chaps. I, IV, VI, VIII; Channing, II, chaps. V, XVIII-XIX.

The most fascinating as well as the fullest treatment of this subject is contained in the works of Francis Parkman. His _Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV; Half Century of Conflict_, 2 vols., and _Montcalm and Wolfe_, 2 vols., make a fairly continuous history of the subject from 1672 to 1763.

CHAPTER V

THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

_America is formed for happiness but not for empire._

RICHARD BURNABY.

_At length one mentioned me, with the observation that I was merely an honest man, and of no sect at all, which prevailed with them to chuse me._

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

I

All accounts agree in celebrating the marvelous growth of the continental colonies in the eighteenth century. When the Ma.s.sachusetts charter was recalled they were in fact British "plantations"; weak and scattered coast settlements, hemmed in by hostile Indians, separated from each other by long stretches of wilderness; without the inclination or the opportunity for intercourse, they struggled in isolation, often for bare existence. At the time of the pa.s.sage of the Stamp Act they were wealthy and stable communities, whose thrifty and venturesome people had long since joined colony to colony all along the coast, and were already pus.h.i.+ng across the mountains to occupy the great interior valleys. And with rapid material development there had come a confident and aggressive spirit, a proud and intractable temper, a certain self-righteous sense of separation from the Old World and its traditions. The very rivalries between colony and colony were the result of close contact and daily intercourse, their very jealousies born of interrelated interests and the recognition of a common destiny.

In 1689 not more than 80,000 people lived in New England, a trifle more in the Southern, and half as many in the Middle colonies. Seventy years later, when all New France could not boast more than 80,000 people of European birth or descent, New England alone had a population of 473,000, the Middle Colonies about 405,000, and the plantations south, of Delaware 417,000, not including 300,000 negro slaves. Within three quarters of a century the people of the continental colonies had increased nearly eightfold--from 200,000 in 1689, to 1,500,000 in 1760.

And material prosperity had kept pace with the increase in population; so that there was some truth, even if some exaggeration, in the statement of Peter Kalm that "the English colonies in this part of the world have increased so much in their numbers of inhabitants, and in their riches, that they almost vie with Old England."

Of this rapid growth the colonists were well aware. They took to themselves full credit, as their descendants have done ever since, for having transformed a wilderness into a land of peace and plenty. With Richard Burnaby they could quite agree that such a town as Philadelphia, planted scarce eighty years, must be the "object of every one's wonder and admiration." It was this sense of unparalleled achievement that gave courageous conviction to the steady a.s.sertion of colonial rights. And the form of government in the provinces was well suited to secure for the colonists that independence which they claimed as a birthright, and the practical achievement of which is the cardinal political fact of the century. For it was no part of British policy to burden the English exchequer with the maintenance of the colonial establishments. The normal province was thought to be one in which legislation was entrusted mainly to local a.s.semblies elected by the colonists, while executive and administrative authority rested mainly with a governor and council responsible to the king. At the opening of the eighteenth century, colonial governments mostly conformed to this model: in each colony the owners of property regularly elected an a.s.sembly which levied taxes and made laws; in each colony, except in Rhode Island and Connecticut, the governor, and usually the council as well, were appointed by the Crown.

With authority thus divided, conflict was sure to arise. In theory, the interests of colony and Crown may have been identical; in fact the a.s.semblies looked at the affairs of the colony from the point of view of immediate local needs, while the governor was bound by his instructions to regard his province as but one of many whose special interests must be subordinated to the welfare of the whole empire. Of the a.s.semblies'

many advantages in this perennial conflict, control of the purse was the chief. "The governor," says a contemporary, "has two masters; one who gives him his commission, and one who gives him his pay." It required no little courage, and was likely to prove useless in the end, to ignore the latter master in obedience to the former. Placemen were little inclined to irritate those who paid them and were on the spot to watch their every move; while even the ablest governors often found themselves deserted by the Crown whose interests they attempted to defend. Before the middle of the century ministers were generally indifferent to the const.i.tutional tendencies in the colonies; repeated recommendations of the Board of Trade for an independent civil list went unheeded, and governors, such as Spotswood, who stirred up trouble by endeavoring to carry out their instructions, were likely to be replaced by others whose adroit concessions to the a.s.semblies created the illusion of a successful administration.

The concrete disputes in which the persistent opposition of governor and a.s.sembly found expression were many--quit-rents in Maryland, control of the judges in New York, taxation of proprietor's estates in Pennsylvania, and everywhere questions growing out of the problem of defense and the demand for paper money. Instructed in English precedent, the a.s.semblies knew well how to condition the grant of salary or necessary revenue upon the governor's surrender to their demands. But more insidious and far-reaching in its const.i.tutional effects was the practice by which the governor's executive and administrative functions were restricted. Money bills, even when unconnected with special riders, were often made minutely specific, both in respect to the purposes for which the money was to be used, and in respect to the officials by whom it was to be expended. Even salaries in the army were sometimes granted by individual appropriation. In many colonies, and notably in New York, it was by the constant and excessive use of specific appropriations that the governors were reduced to the level of executive figureheads--mere agents of the colonial a.s.sembly rather than representatives of the Crown exercising wise and effective administrative discretion. This process was especially rapid during the French wars, when the a.s.semblies were enabled to exact tremendous concessions in return for indispensable aid against the common enemy. "The New York a.s.sembly," said Peter Kalm about 1750, "may be looked upon as a Parliament or Diet in miniature.

Everything relating to the good of the province is here debated." In 1763 he might have said the same, not of New York alone, but of Ma.s.sachusetts and Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. And the governors of these provinces could have told him, as they repeatedly told the Board of Trade, that not only was everything debated there, but there everything was finally decided.

The a.s.semblies, which had thus so largely taken to themselves the functions of government, claimed to declare the rights and defend the interests of the people. But in fact they represented their colonies very much as Parliament represented England. In every colony a property test restricted the number of those who had a voice in the elections; while political methods and the traditions of society united to place effective control in the hands of the eminent few. No secret ballot or Australian system guarded the independence of the voter. It was not an age in which every individual was supposed to count for one and none for more than one. The rigid maintenance of cla.s.s distinctions, even in New England, where students in Harvard College were seated according to social rank and John Adams was but fourteenth in a cla.s.s of twenty-four, made it presumptuous for the ordinary man to dispute the opinion of his betters or contest their right to leaders.h.i.+p: to look up to his superiors and take his cue from them was regarded as the sufficient exercise of political liberty. The times were thought to be out of joint when effective control of colonial politics rested not with a few men who, through wealth or social standing, through official position, through well-considered marriage connections, had built up the rival or consolidated "interests" which played, each on its little stage, the part of Bedford or Pelham or Yorke in Old England.

The foundation of this miniature aristocracy was wealth; wealth acquired in the South mainly from the great plantations, in the North mainly from commerce. In South Carolina the unhealthful swamp lands, driving the planters to the coast during most of the year, made Charleston one of the first commercial centers of America. Three hundred and sixty vessels cleared from that port in 1764. Manigault and Mazyck, Laurens and Rutledge, were therefore merchants of note as well as planters, exporting provisions to the West Indies, the staples rice and indigo to England or to the Continent south of Finisterre, and bringing back slaves and English manufactures. In Virginia and Maryland, where there were no cities of importance, the planters turned all their profits into slaves and land. The second William Byrd, inheriting 26,000 acres, left to his son 179,000 acres of the best land in Virginia, and the right to represent his county in the a.s.sembly. All the great planters, Ludlow and Carter, Randolph, Fairfax and Blair, lived on their estates, and from their private wharves exported the tobacco which English commission merchants sold in London, and for which they sent in return such English commodities of all kinds as the planter might order. The great estates along the Hudson, owned by men like Van Rensselaer, a descendant of the old Dutch patroon, or Phillipse and Courtland and Livingston, who had profited by the lavish grants of early English governors, rivaled in extent the plantations of Virginia; and like the planters of South Carolina their owners were often engaged in commerce, and were connected, through business or marriage, with the wealthy merchant families of New York City--the Van Dams, Crugers, Waltons, and Ludlows.

Elsewhere in America there were not, as in these provinces, great estates ranging from two hundred thousand to more than a million acres.

But the thrifty Quakers of eastern Pennsylvania, engaging in less extensive enterprises, were less often in debt than the planters of the South, and no less shrewd at a bargain than the Dutch merchants of New York. Possessed of the best land in the province, or engaged at Philadelphia in the export of provisions to the West Indies, they built up many respectable estates among them, and by effective organization the leaders of the sect controlled the colony for many decades in the interest of a Quaker-merchant aristocracy inhabiting the three eastern counties of the province. And even in New England material interests were transforming the structure of society. Slave-owning planters of Newport now dominated the little colony which Roger Williams had established as an experiment in democracy and soul liberty. Boston shared with New York and Philadelphia the export of provisions with which the farms of the Middle and Northern colonies supplied the West Indies. It was the chief center of the New England fisheries.

s.h.i.+pbuilding was there, as at Newport, a great industry; and there, as at Newport, rum was extensively distilled from mola.s.ses procured in the sugar islands. The vessels of Boston and Newport merchants, loaded with rum and fish and tropical products, traded in many European ports, in the Azores, or on the African coast, returning with wine and slaves and every kind of English manufacture. In this material atmosphere the old Puritan spirit was being strangely subdued to the stuff it worked in.

Wealth and shrewdness were more effective than orthodoxy in achieving social and political eminence. A few names familiar to the seventeenth century are still to be met with in high places--Sewall, Dudley, Quincy, Hutchinson; but in the middle of the eighteenth century the names of repute in the Old Bay colony are mostly new--Oliver, Bowdoin, Boylston, Cooper, Phillips, Cus.h.i.+ng, Thatcher; names rescued from obscurity by men who had won distinction in the pulpit or at the bar, or by men who had made money in trade, and whose descendants, marrying with the old clerical or official families, had pushed their way, in the second or third generation, into the social and political aristocracy of the province.

Such were the "men of considerable estates" in whose hands the English Government was generally well content to leave the control of colonial politics; and as they were the men who profited most by the connection with England, they were the men whose outlook upon the world was least provincial and most European. Planters and merchants of the South, exporting their staples directly to England, were in constant communication with their London agents. Business or politics had taken many of them more than once across the ocean. Not a few had been sent in their youth to be educated in England; and had resided there for some years, forming acquaintance with prominent English families, listening to debates in the Commons or to arguments in the courts of law, diverting themselves in theaters and coffee-houses, acquiring the latest modes and mannerisms, moulding themselves upon some favorite model of a city magnate or country gentleman. In the Northern colonies, trade relations with England were less direct. Business rarely called the merchant to Europe; and Yale or Harvard was regarded as a satisfactory subst.i.tute for Oxford or Cambridge. Yet the merchants of Boston and New York had their agents in many European ports; kept informed of conditions of trade and s.h.i.+pping throughout the world; and eagerly scanned the foreign gazettes which recounted the political and social happenings of Old England. In North and South, the well-to-do, as they were able, built and furnished their houses upon English models, and were not content with modes of dress which were known, twelve months late, not to be the fas.h.i.+on abroad. Especially fortunate were those whose wealth was dignified by distinction of birth, the walls of whose houses were hung with oil portraits of eminent ancestors.

And the genuine colonial aristocrat, such as Colonel Byrd or Governor Thomas Hutchinson, was proud to have it thought that his mind as well as his house was furnished after the best English fas.h.i.+on. Even more than others, those who were condemned to be provincials of the province consciously endeavored, to avoid provincialism of the spirit; to be mistaken in London for an English gentleman of parts was a much-sought compensation for being, at Williamsburg or Boston, no more than the first gentleman of America. In the middle of the eighteenth century, eccentricity was not yet a mark of genius; and the "best people in the colonies" learned from English authors what high intellectual merit there was in being close to the center. "Your authors know but little of the fame they have on this side of the ocean," Franklin a.s.sured William Strahan when he wrote to order six sets of a new edition of Pope's works. The four thousand volumes at Westover, or the books in Governor Hutchinson's Boston house, would have given any cultivated Englishman a reputation for good taste and discriminating judgment. Colonel Byrd could as readily as Voltaire detect in the fantastic beliefs of an American savage "the three great articles of Natural Religion." We find the youthful Adams, who read Bolingbroke for his style and laboriously copied out Berkeley and Tillotson, entering the lists of "moderns" to defend the advantages of eighteenth-century Boston against those of Rome in the age of Tully, renouncing, with the a.s.surance of Locke, and with some of his phrases, the outworn fallacy of innate ideas, and navely confiding to his journal, after the manner of Diderot, that a man born blind would have never a notion of color. Franklin was only the most distinguished of those who read with pleasure the Queen Anne poets and essayists, who learned in Tillotson that theology might be compatible with reason and common sense, or in Shaftesbury that an enlightened free-thinker might still be a gentleman and a man of virtue. Among the cultivated and the well-bred it was no more than good form to open the mind to all the tolerant liberalisms of the age; and no one in the colonies lost caste who endeavored, in the manner if not in the substance of his thinking, to achieve the polished urbanity of those Englishmen who made a point of being scholars without a touch of pedantry, and men of virtue without the taint of prejudice.

Yet few of these emanc.i.p.ated citizens of the world had permitted the dissolvent philosophy of the century to enter the very pith and fiber of their mental quality. For the rich and the well-born it was rather an imported fas.h.i.+on, an attractive drapery laid over the surface of minds that were conventional down to the ground, the modish mental recreation of men who lived by custom and guided their steps in the well-worn paths of precedent. In America, as in England, as in France, itself, the formulae of radicalism were well p.r.o.nounced by many whose hearts grew faint at the first rude contact with the thing itself. And of all the phrases of that age, the ones best suited to the temper and purposes of the colonial aristocracies, and understood by them with reservations the most characteristically English, were those employed by Locke to justify the natural right of Englishmen to become free while remaining unequal.

The colonials of substantial estates, long occupied in their a.s.semblies in resisting the governor's authority, thought of themselves often enough as but rehearsing the traditional conflict between Crown and Parliament. Like their prototypes they identified the rights of property with natural right, and translated political liberty in terms of prescriptive privilege. The rights of man and the rights of Englishmen were thus thought to be synonymous terms: a happy confusion by which it was possible for them to defend liberty against the encroachments of their equals in England, without sharing it with their inferiors in the colonies.

II

"My ancestors," says Devereaux Jarrett, who was born on a small plantation in New Kent County, Virginia, about 1733, "had the character of honesty and industry, by which they lived in credit among their neighbors, free from real want, and above the frowns of the world. This was also the habit in which my parents were. They always had plenty of plain food and raiment, suitable to their humble station. We made no use of tea or coffee; meat, bread, and milk was the ordinary food of all my acquaintance. I suppose the richer sort might make use of those and other luxuries, but to such people we had no access. We were accustomed to look upon what were called _gentle folks_ as beings of a superior order. For my part, I was quite shy of them, and kept off at a humble distance. A periwig in those days, was a distinguis.h.i.+ng badge of gentle folk. Such ideas of the difference between gentle and simple, were, I believe, universal among all my rank and age."