Chapter 1:
Common Undertakings

THERE had been some noteworthy passages in the reports which Colonel Francis Nicholson sent to the government at home when he was first governor of Virginia (1690); for he studied his duties in those days with wide-open eyes, and had sometimes written of what he saw with a very statesmanlike breadth and insight. It was very noteworthy, among other things, that he had urged a defensive confederation of the colonies against the French and Indians, under the leadership of Virginia, the most loyal of the colonies. He had made it his business to find out what means of defence and what effective military force there were in the other colonies, particularly in those at the north, conferring with their authorities with regard to these matters in person when he could not get the information he wished by deputy. The King and his ministers in England saw very clearly, when they read his careful despatches, that they could not wisely act upon such suggestions yet; but they knew that what Colonel Nicholson thus openly and definitely advised was what must occur to the mind of every thoughtful and observant man who was given a post of authority and guidance in the colonies, whether he thought it wise to advise action in the matter or not. It was evident, indeed, even to some who were not deemed thoughtful at all. Even the heedless, negligent Lord Culpeper, little as he really cared for the government he had been set to conduct, had suggested eight years ago that all questions of war and peace in the colonies should be submitted for final decision to the governor and council of Virginia, where it might be expected that the King’s interests would be loyally looked after and safe guarded.

No doubt the colonies would have objected to and resisted such an arrangement with a very hot resentment, and no one in authority in London dreamed for a moment of taking either Lord Culpeper’s or Colonel Nicholson’s advice in the matter; but it was none the less obvious that the King and his officers must contrive some way, if they could, by which they might use the colonies as a single power against the French in America, if England was indeed to make and keep an empire there. If King James, who leaned upon France as an ally and prayed for the dominion of the Church of Rome, had seen this, it was not likely that William of Orange, who was the arch-enemy of France and the champion of Protestantism against Rome, would overlook it. He was no sooner on the throne than England was plunged into a long eight years’ war with the French. And so it happened that the colonies seemed to reap little advantage from the "glorious revolution" which had put out a tyrant and brought in a constitutional King. William of Orange, it presently appeared, meant to unite groups of colonies under the authority of a single royal governor, particularly at the north, where the French power lay, as James before him had done; giving to the governors of the principal colonies the right to command the military forces of the colonies about them even if he gave them no other large gift of power. He did more than James had done. Being a statesman and knowing the value of systematic administration, he did systematically what James had done loosely and without consistent plan. The Board of Trade and Plantations, which he organized to oversee and direct the government of the colonies, did more to keep their affairs under the eye and hand of the King than any group of James’s ministers had been able to do. The great Dutch King was determined to wield England and her possessions as a single imperial power in the game of politics he was playing in Europe.

The French power, which he chiefly feared, had really grown very menacing in America; was growing more so every year; and must very soon indeed be faced and overcome, if the English were not to be shut in to a narrow seaboard, or ousted altogether. It was not a question of numbers. It was a question of territorial aggrandizement, rather, and strategic advantage. Probably there were not more than twelve thousand Frenchmen, all told, in America when William became King (1689); whereas his own subjects swarmed there full two hundred thousand strong, and were multiplying by the tens of thousands from decade to decade. But the French were building military posts at every strategic point as they went, while the English were building nothing but rural homes and open villages. With the French it did not seem a matter of settlement; it seemed a matter of conquest, rather, and of military occupation. They were guarding trade routes and making sure of points of advantage. The English way was the more wholesome and the more vital. A hardy, self-dependent, crowding people like the English in Massachusetts and Virginia, and the Dutch in New York, took root wherever they went, spread into real communities, and were not likely to be got rid of when once their number had run into the thousands. Their independence, too, and their capable way of managing their own affairs without asking or wanting or getting any assistance from government, made them as hard to handle as if they had been themselves an established continental power. But the French had an advantage, nevertheless, which was not to be despised. They moved as they were ordered to move by an active and watchful government which was in the thick of critical happenings where policies were made, and which meant to cramp the English, if it could not actually get rid of them. They extended and organized the military power of France as they went; and they were steadily girdling the English about with a chain of posts and settlements which bade fair to keep all the northern and western regions of the great continent for the King of France, from the mouth of the St. Lawrence round about, two thousand miles, to the outlets of the Mississippi at the Gulf.

Their movement along the great rivers and the lakes had been very slow at first; but it had quickened from generation to generation, and was now rapid enough to fix the attention of any man who could hear news and had his eyes abroad upon what was happening about him. Jacques Cartier had explored the noble river St. Lawrence for his royal master of France a long century and a half ago, in the far year 1535, fifty years before the English so much as attempted a settlement. But it was not until 1608, the year after Jamestown was begun, that Samuel de Champlain established the first permanent French settlement, at Quebec, and there were still but two hundred lonely settlers there when nearly thirty years more had gone by (1636). It was the quick growth and systematic explorations of the latter part of the century that made the English uneasy. The twelve thousand Frenchmen who were busy at the work of occupation when William of Orange became King had not confined themselves to the settlements long ago made in the Bay of Furidy and at Montreal, Quebec, and Tadousac, where the great river of the north broadened to the sea. They had carried their boats across from the upper waters of the Ottawa to the open reaches of Lake Huron; had penetrated thence to Lake Michigan, and even to the farthest shores of Lake Superior, establishing forts and trading posts as they advanced. They had crossed from Green Bay in Lake Michigan to the waters of the Wisconsin River, and had passed by that easy way into the Mississippi itself. That stout-hearted pioneer Pare Marquette had descended the Father of Waters past the Ohio to the outlet of the Arkansas (1673); and Robert La Salle had followed him and gone all the long way to the spreading mouths of the vast river and the gates of the Gulf (1682), not by way of the Wisconsin, but by crossing from the southern end of Lake Michigan to the stream of the Illinois, and passing by that way to the Mississippi.

And so the lakes and the western rivers and the Mississippi itself saw the French; and French posts sprang up upon their shores to mark the sovereignty of the King of France. Frenchmen easily enough learned the ways of the wilderness and became the familiars of the Indians in their camps and wigwams; and they showed themselves of every kind,—some rough and lawless rovers, only too glad to throw off the restraints of the orderly life to which they had been bred and live as they pleased in the deep, secluded forests, trading without license, seeking adventure, finding a way for the civilization which was to follow them, but themselves anxious to escape it; others regular traders, who kept their hold upon the settlements behind them and submitted when they were obliged to official exactions at Montreal; some intrepid priests, who preached salvation and the dominion of France among the dusky tribes, and lived or died with a like fortitude and devotion, never willingly quitting their sacred task or letting go their hold upon the hearts of the savage men they had come to enlighten and subdue; some hardy captains with little companies of drilled men-at-arms from the fields of France:—at the front indomitable explorers, far in the rear timid farmers clearing spaces in the silent woodland for their scanty crops, and little towns slowly growing within their walls where the river broadened to the sea.

This stealthy power which crept so steadily southward and westward at the back of the English settlements upon the coast was held at arm’s length throughout that quiet age of beginnings, not by the English, but by a power within the forests, the power of the great confederated Iroquois tribes, who made good their mastery between the Hudson and the lakes: the Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas, and Mohawks. They were stronger, fiercer, more constant and indomitable, more capable every way, than the tribes amidst whom the French moved; and Champlain had unwittingly made them the enemies of the French forever. Long, long ago, in the year 1609, which white men had forgotten, he had done what the Iroquois never forgot or forgave. He had come with their sworn foes, the Algonquins, to the shores of that lake by the sources of the Hudson which the palefaces ever afterwards called by his name, and had there used the dread fire-arms of the white men, of which they had never heard before, to work the utter ruin of the Mohawks in battle. They were always and everywhere ready after that fatal day to be any man’s ally, whether Dutch or English, against the hated French; and the French found it necessary to keep at the back of the broad forests which stretched from the eastern Lakes to the Hudson and the Delaware, the wide empire of these dusky foes, astute, implacable. They skirted the domains of the Iroquois when they were prudent, and passed inland by the lakes and the valley of the Mississippi.

But, though they kept their distance, they advanced their power. The colonists in New England had been uneasy because of their unwelcome neighborhood from the first. Once and again there had been actual collisions and a petty warfare. But until William of Orange made England a party to the great war of the Protestant powers against Louis XIV. few men had seen what the struggle between French and English held in store for America. The English colonies had grown back not a little way from the sea, steadily pushed farther and farther into the thick-set forests which lay upon the broad valleys and rising slopes of the interior by mere increase of people and drift of enterprise. Before the seventeenth century was out adventurous English traders had crossed the Alleghenies, had launched their canoes upon the waters of the Ohio, and were fixing their huts here and there within the vast wilderness as men do who mean to stay. Colonel Dongan, the Duke’s governor in New York (1683), like many another officer whose duties made him alert to watch the humors and keep the friendship of the Iroquois, the masters of the northern border, had been quick to see how "inconvenient to the English" it was to have French settlements "running all along from our lakes by the back of Virginia and Carolina to the Bay of Mexico." There was keen rivalry in trade, and had been these many years, between the men of the English and Dutch colonies and the men of the French for the profitable trade in furs which had its heart at the north; and it was already possible for those who knew the forest commerce to reason right shrewdly of the future, knowing, as they did, that the English gave better goods and dealt more fairly for the furs than the French, and that many of the very Frenchmen who ranged the forests in search of gain themselves preferred to send what they had to Albany for sale. But, except for a few lonely villages in far-away Maine, there was nowhere any close contact between French and English in America. Few, except traders and thoughtful governors and border villagers, who feared the tribes whom the French incited to attack and massacre, knew what France did or was planning.

King William’s War (1689-1697), with its eight years of conscious peril, set new thoughts astir. It made America part of the stage upon which the great European conflict between French and English was to be fought out; and immediately a sort of continental air began to blow through colonial affairs. Colonial interests began to seem less local, more like interests held in common, and the colonies began to think of themselves as part of an empire. They had no great part in the war, it is true. Hale Sir William Phips, that frank seaman adventurer, led an expedition against Acadia in 1690, took Port Royal, and stripped the province of all that could be brought away; but that had hardly had the dignity of formal war. He had chiefly relished the private gain got out of it as a pleasant reminder of that day of fortune when he had found the Spanish treasure-ship sunk upon a reef in far Hispaniola. His second expedition, made the same year against Quebec, no doubt smacked more of the regular business, for he undertook it as an accredited officer of the crown; but when it failed it is likely he thought more of the private moneys subscribed and lost upon it than of the defeat of the royal arms. There was here the irritation, rather than the zest, of great matters, and the colonial leaders were not becoming European statesmen of a sudden. Their local affairs were still of more concern to them than the policies of European courts. Nevertheless the war made a beginning of common undertakings. The colonies were a little drawn together, a little put in mind of matters larger than their own.

New York felt herself no less concerned than Massachusetts and Maine in the contest with the French, with its inevitable accompaniment of trouble with the Indians; and Jacob Leisler, plebeian and self-constituted governor though he was, had made bold to take the initiative in forming plans for the war. Count Louis de Frontenac had been made governor of New France the very year William established himself as king in England (1689), and had come instructed, as every Englishman in America presently heard rumor say, to attack the English settlements at their very heart,—at New York itself. It was this rumor that had made Leisler hasten to seize the government in King William’s name, seeing King James’s governor hesitate, and hearing it cried in the streets that the French were in the very Bay. He had thought it not impossible that James’s officers might prove traitors and friends of King Louis in that last moment of their poker. And then, when the government was in his hands, this people’s governor called a conference of the colonies to determine what should be done for the common defence. Massachusetts, Plymouth, and Connecticut responded, and sent agents to the conference (1690), the first of its kind since America was settled. It was agreed to attempt the conquest of New France. Sir William Phips should lead an expedition by sea against Quebec; and another force should go by land out of Connecticut and New York to attack Montreal, the only other stronghold, taking their Iroquois allies with them. But the land expedition was every way unfortunate, and got no farther than Lake Champlain. Frontenac was able to devote all his strength to the defence of Quebec; and Sir William Phips came back whipped and empty-handed. The first effort at a common undertaking had utterly miscarried.

But that was not the end of the war. Its fires burned hot in the forests. Frontenac prosecuted the ugly business to the end as he had begun it. He had begun, not by sending a fleet to New York, for he had none to send, but by sending his Indian allies to a sudden attack and savage massacre at Schenectady, where sixty persons, men and women, old and young, saw swift and fearful death (1689); and year by year the same hideous acts of barbarous war were repeated—not always upon the far-away border, but sometimes at the very heart of the teeming colony,—once (1697) at Haverhill, not thirty-five miles out of Boston itself. Such a war was not likely to be forgot in the northern colonies, at any rate, and in New York. Its memories were bitten into the hearts of the colonists there as with the searings of a hot iron; and they knew that the French must be overcome before there could be any lasting peace, or room enough made for English growth in the forests.

They would rather have turned their thoughts to other things. There were home matters of deep moment which they were uneasy to settle. But these larger matters, of England’s place and power in the world, dominated them whether they would or no. King William’s War was but the forerunner of many more, of the same meaning and portent. Wars vexed and disciplined them for half a century, and their separate interests had often to stand neglected for years together in order that their common interests and the interests of English empire in America might be guarded.

And yet those who were thoughtful did not lose sight of the great, though subtle, gain which came with the vexing losses of war, to offset them. They had not failed to notice and to take to heart what had happened in England when William and Mary were brought to the throne. They were none the less Englishmen for being out of England, and what Parliament did for English liberty deeply concerned them. Parliament, as all the world knew, had done a great deal during those critical days in which it had consummated the "glorious revolution" by which the Stuarts were once for all put from the seat of sovereignty. It had reasserted the ancient rights named in Magna Charta; it had done away with the King’s arrogated right to tax; it had destroyed his alleged right to set laws aside, or alter them in any way; it had reduced him from being master and had made him a constitutional king, subject to his people’s will, spoken through their legal representatives in Parliament. The new King, too, had shown himself willing to extend these principles to America. In the charters which he granted or renewed, and in the instructions which he gave to the governors whom he commissioned, he did not begrudge an explicit acknowledgment of the right of the colonies to control their own taxation and the expenditures of their own colonial establishments.

War embarrassed trade. It made hostile territory of the French West Indies, whence New England skippers fetched molasses for the makers of rum at home; and that was no small matter, for the shrewd New England traders were already beginning to learn how much rum would pay for, whether among the Indians of the forest country, among the savages of the African slave coast, or among their own neighbors at home, where all deemed strong drink a capital solace and defence against the asperities of a hard life. But it needed only a little circumspection, it turned out, to keep even that trade, notwithstanding the thing was a trifle difficult and hazardous. There was little cause for men who kept their wits about them to fear the law on the long, unfrequented coasts of the New World; and there was trade with the French without scruple whether war held or ceased. Buccaneers and pirates abounded in the southern seas, and legitimate traders knew as well as they did how confiscation and capture were to be avoided.

The main lines of trade ran, after all, straight to the mother country, and were protected when there was need by English fleets. Both the laws of Parliament and their own interest bound the trade of the colonies to England. The Navigation Act of 1660, in force now these forty years, forbade all trade with the colonies except in English bottoms; forbade also the shipment of their tobacco and wool anywhither but to England itself; and an act of 1663 forbade the importation of anything at all except out of England, which, it was then once for all determined, must be the entrepot and place of staple for all foreign trade. It was determined that, if there were to be middlemen’s profits, the middlemen should be English, and that the carrying trade of England and her colonies should be English, not Dutch. It was the Dutch against whom the acts were aimed. Dutch ships cost less in the building than ships built in England; the Dutch merchantmen could afford to charge lower rates of freight than English skippers; and the statesmen of King Charles, deeming Holland their chief competitor upon the seas and in the markets of the world, meant to cut the rivalry short by statute, so far as the English realm was concerned.

Fortunately the interests of the colonists themselves wore easily enough the harness of the acts. For a while it went very hard in Virginia, it is true, to pay English freight rates on every shipment of tobacco, the colony’s chief staple, and to sell only through English middlemen, to the exclusion of the accommodating Dutch and all competition. Trade touched nothing greater than the tobacco crop. Virginia supplied in that alone a full half of all the exports of the colonies. Her planters sharply resented "that severe act of Parliament which excludes us from having any commerce with any nation in Europe but our own"; for it seemed to put upon them a special burden. "We cannot add to our plantation any commodity that grows out of it, as olive trees, cotton, or vines," complained Sir William Berkeley very bluntly to the government in 1671. "Besides this, we cannot procure any skilful men for one now hopeful commodity, silk; for it is not lawful for us to carry a pipe stave or a barrel of corn to any place in Europe out of the King’s dominions. If this were for his Majesty’s service or the good of his subjects, we should not repine, whatever our sufferings are for it; but on my soul, it is the contrary for both." But the thing was eased for them at last when they began to see how their interest really lay. They had almost a monopoly of the English market, for Spanish tobacco was kept out by high duties, the planting of tobacco in England, begun on no mean scale in the west midland counties in the days of the Protectorate, was prohibited by law, and a rebate of duties on all tobacco re-exported to the continent quickened the trade with the northern countries of Europe, the chief market in any case for the Virginian leaf. Grumbling and evasion disappeared in good time, and Virginia accommodated herself with reasonable grace to what was, after all, no ruinous or unprofitable arrangement.

New England, where traders most abounded, found little in the acts that she need complain of or seek to escape from. No New England commodity had its route and market prescribed as Virginian tobacco had; New England ships were "English" bottoms no less than ships built in England itself; they could be built as cheaply as the Dutch, and the long coast of the continent was clear for their skippers. If laws grew inconvenient, there were unwatched harbors enough in which to lade and unlade without clearance papers. English capital quickened trade as well as supplied shipping for the ocean carriage. And the King’s navy made coast and sea safe. If it was irritating to be tied to the leading-strings of statutes, it was at least an agreeable thing that they should usually pull in the direction merchants would in any case have taken. Though all products of foreign countries had to be brought through the English markets and the hands of English middlemen, the duties charged upon them upon their entrance into England were remitted upon their reshipment to America, and they were often to be had more cheaply in the colonies than in London.

In 1699, when the war was over, Parliament laid a new restriction upon the colonies, forbidding them to manufacture their own wool for export, even for export from colony to colony. Good housewives were not to be prevented from weaving their own wool into cloth for the use of their own households; village weavers were not to be forbidden their neighborhood trade; but the woollen weavers of England supplied more than half of all the exports to the colonies, and had no mind to let woollen manufacture spring up in America if Parliament could be induced to prohibit it. It made no great practical difference to the colonies, though it bred a bitter thought here and there. Manufactures were not likely to spring up in America. "No man who can have a piece of land of his own, sufficient by his labor to subsist his family in plenty," said Mr. Franklin long afterwards, "is poor enough to be a manufacturer and work for a master. Hence, while there is land enough in America for our people, there can be no manufactures to any amount or value." But the woollen manufacturers in England meant to take no chances in the matter; and the colonists did no more than grumble upon occasion at the restraints of a law which they had no serious thought of breaking.

It was not breaches of the Acts of Navigation and the acts concerning woollen manufacture that the ministers found it necessary to turn their heed to when the war ended, but, rather, the open piracies of the southern seas. By the treaty of Ryswick, which brought peace (1697), France, England, Holland, and Spain, the high contracting parties, solemnly bound themselves to make common cause against buccaneering. Spain and England had been mutually bound since 1670 to abolish it. Buccaneering abounded most on the coasts of America. The lawless business had begun long ago. Spain had provoked it. She had taken possession of all Central and South America and of the islands of the West Indies, and had bidden all other nations stand off and touch nothing; while her fleets every year for generations together came home heavy with treasure. She had denied them the right of trade; she had forbidden their seamen so much as to get stores for their own use anywhere within the waters of Spanish America. She treated every ship as an intruder which she found in the southern seas, and the penalties she inflicted for intrusion upon her guarded coasts went the length of instant drowning or hangings at the yard-arm. It was a day when there was no law at sea. Every prudent man supplied his ship with arms, and was his own escort; and since Spain was the common bully, she became the common enemy. English and French and Dutch seamen were not likely very long to suffer themselves to be refused what they needed at her ports; and after getting what they needed, they went on to take whatever they wanted. They were intruders, anyway, for whatever purpose they came, and they might as well, as a witty Frenchman among them said, "repay themselves beforehand" for the losses they would suffer should Spanish cruisers find and take them.

The spirit of adventure and of gain grew on them mightily. At first they contented themselves with an illicit trade at the unguarded ports of quiet, half-deserted islands like Hispaniola, where they could get hides and tallow, smoked beef and salted pork, in exchange for goods smuggled in from Europe. But they did not long stop at that. The exciting risks and notable profits of the business made it grow like a story of adventure. The ranks of the lawless traders filled more and more with every sort of reckless adventurer and every sort of unquiet spirit who found the ordinary world stale and longed for a change of luck, as well as with hosts of common thieves and natural outlaws. Such men, finding themselves inevitably consorting, felt their comradeship, helped one another when they could, and made a common cause of robbing Spain, calling themselves "Brethren of the Coast." They took possession, as their numbers increased, of the little twin islands of St. Christopher and Nevis for rendezvous and headquarters, and fortified distant Tortuga for a stronghold; and their power grew apace through all the seventeenth century, until no Spanish ship was safe on the seas though she carried the flag of an admiral, and great towns had either to buy them off or submit to be sacked at their pleasure. They mustered formidable fleets and counted their desperate seamen by the thousands.

They were most numerous, most powerful, most to be feared at the very time the English colony was begun at Charleston (1670). All the English sea coast at the south, indeed, was theirs in a sense. They were regulars, not outlaws, when France or Holland or England was at war with Spain, for the great governments did not scruple to give them letters of marque when they needed their assistance at sea. English buccaneers had helped Sir William Penn take Jamaica for Cromwell in 1655. And when there was no war, the silent, unwatched harbors of the long American sea coast were their favorite places of refuge and repair. New Providence, England’s best anchorage and most convenient port of rendezvous in the Bahamas, became their chief place of welcome and recruiting. The coming of settlers did not disconcert them. It pleased them, rather. The settlers did not molest them,—had secret reasons, as they knew, to be glad to see them. There were the English navigation laws, as well as the Spanish, to be evaded, and the goods they brought to the closed markets were very cheap and very welcome,—and no questions were asked. They were abundantly welcome, too, to the goods they bought. For thirty years their broad pieces of gold and their Spanish silver were almost the only currency the Carolinas could get hold of. Governors winked at their coming and going,—even allowed them to sell their Spanish prizes in English ports. Charleston, too, and the open bays of Albemarle Sound were not more open to them than New York and Philadelphia and Providence, and even now and again the ports of Massachusetts. They got no small part of their recruits from among the lawless and shiftless men who came out of England or Virginia to the Carolinas for a new venture in a new country where law was young.

Richard Coote, the Earl of Bellomont, came out in 1698 to be Governor General of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire, specially instructed to stamp out the piracy of the coasts; but he found it no light task. His predecessor in the government of New York, Benjamin Fletcher, had loved the Brethren of the Coast very dearly: they had made it to his interest to like them; and the merchants of New York, as of the other seaport towns, were noticeably slow to see the iniquity of the proscribed business. Lord Bellomont bitterly complained that the authorities of Rhode Island openly gave notorious pirates countenance and assistance. Mr. Edward Randolph, whose business it was to look after the King’s revenues, declared in his anger that North Carolina was peopled by nobody but smugglers, runaway servants, and pirates. South Carolina, fortunately, had seen the folly of harboring the outlaws by the time Lord Bellomont set about his suppression in the north. Not only had her population by that time been recruited and steadied by the coming in of increasing numbers of law-abiding and thrifty colonists to whom piracy was abhorrent, but she had begun also to produce great crops of rice for whose exportation she could hardly get ships enough, and had found that her whilom friends the freebooters did not scruple to intercept her cargoes on their way to the profitable markets of Holland, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Portugal. She presently began, therefore, to use a great pair of gallows, set up very conspicuously on "Execution Dock" at Charleston, for the diligent hanging of pirates. But the coast to the northward still showed them hospitality, and Lord Bellomont made little headway at New York,—except that he brought the notorious Captain Kidd to justice. William Kidd, a Scotsman, had made New York his home, and had won there the reputation of an honest and capable man and an excellent ship captain; but when he was given an armed vessel strongly manned, and the King’s commission to destroy the pirates of the coast, the temptation of power was too great for him. He incontinently turned pirate himself, and it fell to Lord Bellomont to send him to England to be hanged.

The interval of peace during which English governors in America could give their thoughts to the suppression of piracy proved all too short. "Queen Anne’s War" followed close upon the heels of King William’s, and the French and Indians became once again more threatening than the buccaneers. Nevertheless some important affairs of peace were settled before the storm of war broke again. For one thing, Mr. Penn was able once more to put in order the government of Pennsylvania. For two years (1692-1694) he had been deprived of his province, because, as every one knew, he had been on very cordial terms of friendship with James Stuart, the discredited King, and it was charged that he had taken part in intrigues against the new sovereign. But it was easy for him to prove, when the matter was dispassionately looked into, that he had done nothing dishonorable or disloyal, and his province was restored to him. In 1699 he found time to return to America and reform in person the administration of the colony. Bitter jealousies and sharp factional differences had sprung up there while affairs were in confusion after the coming in of William and Mary, and the two years Mr. Penn spent in their correction (1699-1701) were none too long for the work he had to do. He did it, however, in his characteristic healing fashion, by granting privileges, more liberal and democratic than ever, in a new charter. One chief difficulty lay in the fact that the lower counties by the Delaware chafed because of their enforced union with the newer counties of Pennsylvania; and Mr. Penn consented to an arrangement by which they should within three years, if they still wished it, have a separate assembly of their own, and the right to act for themselves in all matters of local government. Self-government, indeed, was almost always his provident cure for discontent. He left both Pennsylvania and the Delaware counties free to choose their own courts,—and Philadelphia free to select her own officers as an independently incorporated city. Had he been able to give his colony governors as wise and temperate as himself, new troubles might have been avoided as successfully as old troubles had been healed.

While Mr. Penn lingered in America the rights of the proprietors of West Jersey, his own first province, passed finally to the crown. In 1702 all proprietary rights, alike in East and in West Jersey, were formally surrendered to the crown, and New Jersey, once more a single, undivided province, became directly subject to the King’s government. For a generation, indeed, as it turned out, she was to have no separate governor of her own. A separate commission issued from the crown to the governor of New York to be also governor of New Jersey, upon each appointment in the greater province. But New Jersey kept her own government, nevertheless, and her own way of life. She suffered no merger into the larger province, her neighbor, whose governor happened to preside over her affairs.

Many things changed and many things gave promise of change in the colonies as Mr. Penn looked on. In 1700 Virginia had her population enriched by the coming of seven hundred French Huguenots, under the leadership of the Marquis de La Muce,—some of them Waldenses who had moved, in exile, through Switzerland, Alsace, the Low Countries, and England ere they found their final home of settlement in Virginia,—all of them refugees because of the terror that had been in France for all Protestants since the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). That same year, 1700, Williamsburg, the new village capital of the "Old Dominion," grew very gay with company come in from all the river counties, from neighboring colonies, too, and even from far-off New England, to see the first class graduated from the infant college of William and Mary. The next year (1701) Connecticut, teeming more and more with a thrifty people with its own independent interests and resources, and finding Harvard College at Cambridge too far away for the convenience of those of her own youth who wished such training as ministers and professional men in general needed, set up a college of her own, the college which half a generation later she called Yale, because of Mr. Elihu Yale’s gift of eight hundred pounds in books and money.

Then King William died (1702,—Mary, his queen and consort, being dead these eight years), and Anne became queen. It was a year of climax in the public affairs of Europe. In 1701, Louis XIV. had put his grandson, Philip of Anjou, on the throne of Spain, in direct violation of his treaty obligations to England, and to the manifest upsetting of the balance of power in Europe, openly rejoicing that there were no longer any Pyrenees, but only a single, undivided Bourbon power from Flanders to the Straits of Gibraltar; and had defied England, despite his promises made at Ryswick, by declaring James’s son the rightful heir to the English throne. Instantly England, Holland, and Austria drew together in grand alliance against the French aggression, and for eleven years Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands rang with the War of the Spanish Succession. The storm had already broken when Anne became queen.

England signalized the war by giving a great general to the world. It was the day of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, of whose genius soldiers gossiped to their neighbors and their children for half a century after the great struggle was over. The English took Gibraltar (1704). Prince Eugene of Savoy helped great Marlborough to the famous victory of Blenheim (1705),—and Virginians were not likely to forget that it was Colonel Parke, of Virginia, who took the news of that field to the Queen. Marlborough won at Ramillies and Eugene at Turin (1706). The two great captains triumphed together at Oudenarde (1708) and at Malplaquet (1709). The crowns of France and Spain were separated, and France was lightened of her overwhelming weight in the balance of power.

But for the colonies in America it was only "Queen Anne’s War," full of anxiety, suffering, and disappointment,—massacres on the border, expeditions to the north blundered and mismanaged, money and lives spent with little to show for the sacrifice. The ministers at home had made no preparation in America for the renewal of hostilities. There had been warnings enough, and appeals of deep urgency, sent out of the colonies. Every observant man of affairs there saw what must come. But warnings and appeals had not been heeded. Lord Bellomont, that self-respecting gentleman and watchful governor, had told the ministers at home very plainly that there ought to be a line of frontier posts at the north, with soldiers for colonists, and that simply to pursue the Indians once and again to the depths of the forests was as useless "as to pursue birds that are on the wing." An English prisoner in the hands of the French had sent word what he heard they meant to do for the extension of their boundaries and their power. The deputy governor of Pennsylvania had proposed a colonial militia to be kept at the frontier. Certain private gentlemen of the northern settlements had begged for a common governor "of worth and honor," and for some system of common defence. Mr. Penn, looking on near at hand, had advised that the colonists be drawn together in intercourse and interest by a common coinage, a common rule of citizenship, a common system of justice, and by duties on foreign timber which would in some degree offset the burdens of the Navigation Acts,—as well as by common organization and action against the French and against the pirates of the coast. But nothing had been done.

Even the little that had been gained in King William’s War had now to be gained all over again. Sir William Phips had taken Port Royal very handily at the outset of that war (1690), and Acadia with it, and there had been no difficulty in holding the conquered province until the war ended; but the treaty of Ryswick had handed back to the French everything the English had taken, the statesmen of England hardly heeding America at all in the terms they agreed to,—and so a beginning was once more to be made.

The war began, as every one knew it must, with forays on the border: the Indians were the first afoot, and were more to be feared than the French. The first movement of the English was made at the south, where, before the first year (1702) of the war was out, the Carolinians struck at the power of Spain in Florida. They sent a little force against St. Augustine, and easily swept the town itself, but stood daunted before the walls of the castle, lacking cannon to reduce it, and came hastily away at sight of two Spanish ships standing into the harbor, leaving their very stores and ammunition behind them in their panic. They had saddled the colony with a debt of six thousand pounds and gained nothing. But they at least kept their own borders safe against the Indians and their own little capital at Charleston safe against reprisals by the Spaniards. The Apalachees, who served the Spaniards on the border, they swept from their forest country in 1703, and made their border quiet by fire and sword, driving hundreds of the tribesmen they did not kill to new seats beyond the Savannah. Three years went by before they were in their turn attacked by a force out of Florida. Upon a day in August, 1706, while the little capital lay stricken with yellow fever, a fleet of five French vessels appeared off the bar at their harbor mouth, bringing Spanish troops from Havana and St. Augustine. There was a quick rally to meet them. Colonial militia went to face their landing parties; gallant Colonel Rhett manned a little flotilla to check them on the water; and they were driven off, leaving two hundred and thirty prisoners and a captured ship behind them. The southern coast could take care of itself.

Nothing had been done meanwhile in the north. The first year of the war (1702) had seen Boston robbed of three hundred of her inhabitants by the scourge of small-pox, and New York stricken with a fatal fever brought out of the West Indies from which no man could rally. That dismal year lingered for many a day in the memory of the men of the middle colonies as "the time of the great sickness." The northernmost border had been harried from Wells to Casco by the French Indians (1703); Deerfield, far away in the wilderness by the Connecticut, had been fearfully dealt with at dead of night, in the mid-winter of 1704, by a combined force of French and Indians; in 1705 the French in Acadia had brought temporary ruin upon the English trading posts in Newfoundland; and a French privateer had insolently come in open day info the Bay at New York, as if to show the English there how defenceless their great harbor was, with all the coast about it (1705). And yet there had been no counterstroke by the English,—except that Colonel Church, of Massachusetts, had spent the summer of 1704 in destroying as he could the smaller and less defended French and Indian villages upon the coasts which lay about the Penobscot and the Bay of Fundy. In 1707 a serious attempt was made to take Port Royal. Colonel March took a thousand men against the place, in twenty-three transports, convoyed by a man-of-war, and regularly laid siege to it; but lacked knowledge of the business he had undertaken and failed utterly.

Another three years went by before anything was accomplished; and the French filled them in, as before, with raids and massacres. Again Haverhill was surprised, sacked, and burned (1708). The English were driven from the Bahama islands. An expedition elaborately prepared in England to be sent against the French in America was countermanded (1709), because a sudden need arose to use it at home. Everything attempted seemed to miscarry as of course. And then at last fortune turned a trifle kind. Colonel Francis Nicholson, governor of Virginia till 1705, had gone to England when he saw things stand hopelessly still in America, and, being a man steadfast and hard to put by, was at last able, in 1710, to obtain and bring assistance in person from over sea. He had recommended, while yet he was governor of Virginia, it was recalled, that the colonies be united under a single viceroy and defended by a standing army for which they should themselves be made to pay. The ministers at home had been too prudent to take that advice; but they listened now to his appeal for a force to be sent to America. By the 24th of September, 1710, he lay off Port Royal with a fleet of thirty-five sail, besides hospital and store ships, with four regiments of New England militia aboard his transports and a detachment of marines. On the 1st of October he opened the fire of three batteries within a hundred yards of the little fort that guarded the place, and within twenty-four hours he had brought it to its capitulation, as Sir William Phips had done twenty years before. Acadia was once more a conquered province of England. Colonel Nicholson renamed its port Annapolis Royal, in honor of the Queen whom he served. The name of the province itself the English changed to Nova Scotia.

Two years more, and the war was practically over; but no victories had been added to that lonely achievement at Port Royal. Colonel Nicolson went from his triumph in Acadia back to England again, to solicit a yet stronger force to be taken against Quebec, and once more got what he wanted. In midsummer of 1711 Sir Hovenden Walker arrived at Boston with a great fleet of transports and men-of-war, bringing Colonel Hill and seven of Marlborough’s veteran regiments to join the troops of New England in a decisive onset upon the stronghold of New France. Colonel Nicholson was to lead the colonial levies through the forests to Quebec; Sir Hovenden Walker was to ascend the St. Lawrence and strike from the river. But neither force reached Quebec. The admiral blundered in the fogs which beset him at the mouth of the great stream, lost eight ships and almost a thousand men, and then put about in dismay and steered straightway for England, to have his flag-ship blow up under him at Spit-head. Colonel Nicholson heard very promptly of the admiral’s ignoble failure, and did not make his march. The next year, 1712, the merchants of Quebec subscribed a fund to complete the fortifications of their rock-built city, and even women volunteered to work upon them, that they might be finished ere the English came again. But the English did not come. That very summer brought a truce; and in March, 1713, the war ended with the peace of Utrecht. The treaty gave England Hudson’s Bay, Acadia, Newfoundland, and the little island of St. Christopher alongside Nevis in the Lesser Antilles.

"Queen Anne’s War" was over; but there was not yet settled peace in the south. While the war lasted North Carolina had had to master, in blood and terror, the fierce Iroquois tribe of the Tuscaroras, who mustered twelve hundred warriors in the forests which lay nearest the settlements. And when the war was over South Carolina had to conquer a whole confederacy of tribes whom the Spaniards had stirred up to attack her. The Tuscaroras had seemed friends through all the first years of the English settlement on their coast; but the steady, ominous advance of the English, encroaching mile by mile upon their hunting grounds, had at last maddened them to commit a sudden and awful treachery. In September, 1711, they fell with all their natural fury upon the nearer settlements, and for three days swept them with an almost continuous carnage. The next year the awful butchery was repeated. Both times the settlements found themselves too weak to make effective resistance; both times aid was sent from South Carolina, by forced marches through the long forests; and finally, in March, 1713, the month of the peace of Utrecht, an end was made. The Tuscaroras were attacked and overcome in their last stronghold. The remnant that was left migrated northward to join their Iroquois kinsmen in New York,—and Carolina was quit of them forever.

The strong tribes which held sway in the forests of South Carolina,—the Yamassees, Creeks, Catawbas, and Cherokees,—were no kinsmen of these alien Iroquois out of the north, and had willingly lent their aid to the English to destroy them. But, the war over, the Spaniards busied themselves to win these tribes also to a conspiracy against the English settlements, and succeeded only too well. They joined in a great confederacy, and put their seven or eight thousand braves on the war-path to destroy the English. For almost a whole year (April, 1715, to February, 1716) they kept to their savage work unsubdued, until full four hundred whites had lost their lives at their hands. Then the final reckoning came for them also, and the shattered remnants of their tribes sought new homes for themselves as they could. The savages had all but accomplished their design against the settlements. The awful work of destroying them left the Carolinas upon the verge of utter exhaustion, drained of blood and money, almost without crops of food to subsist upon, quite without means to bear the heavy changes of government in a time of war and sore disorder. There were some among the disheartened settlers who thought of abandoning their homes there altogether and seeking a place where peace might be had at a less terrible cost. But there was peace at least, and the danger of absolute destruction had passed.

New York had had her own fright while the war lasted. A house blazed in the night (1712), and certain negroes who had gathered about it killed some of those who came to extinguish the flames. It was rumored that there had been a plot among the negroes to put the whole of the town to the torch; an investigation was made, amidst a general panic which rendered calm inquiry into such a matter impossible; and nineteen blacks were executed.

But in most of the colonies domestic affairs had gone quietly enough, the slow war disturbing them very little. Connecticut found leisure of thought enough, in 1708, to collect a synod at Saybrook and formulate a carefully considered constitution for her churches, which her legislature the same year adopted. In 1707 New York witnessed a notable trial which established the freedom of dissenting pulpits. Lord Cornbury, the profligate governor of the province, tried to silence the Rev. Francis Mackemie, a Presbyterian minister,—pretending that the English laws of worship and doctrine were in force in New York; but a jury made short work of acquitting him. Massachusetts endured Joseph Dudley as governor throughout the war (1702-1715), checking him very pertinaciously at times when he needed the assistance of her General Court, but no longer refusing to live with reasonable patience under governors not of her own choosing.

Fortunately for the Carolinas, a very notable man had become governor of Virginia ere the Tuscaroras took the war-path. There were tribes at the border,—Nottoways, Meherrins, and even a detached group of the Tuscaroras themselves,—who would have joined in the savage conspiracy against the whites had not Colonel Spotswood been governor in Virginia and shown himself capable of holding them quiet with a steady hand of authority—a word of conciliation and a hint of force. Alexander Spotswood was no ordinary man. He added to a gentle breeding a manly bearing such as Virginians loved, and the administrative gifts which so many likable governors had lacked. His government was conducted with clear-eyed enterprise and steady capacity. It added to his consequence that he had borne the Queen’s commission in the forces of the great Marlborough on the field of Blenheim, and came to his duty in Virginia (1710) bearing a wound received on that famous field. His blood he took from Scotland, where the distinguished annals of his family might be read in many a public record; and a Scottish energy entered with him into the government of Virginia,—as Bell as a Scottish candor and directness in speech,—to the great irritation presently of James Blair, as aggressive a Scotsman as he, and more astute and masterful.

It was Colonel Spotswood who, in 1716, gathered a company of gentlemen about him for a long ride of discovery into the Alleghanies. They put their horses through the very heart of the long wilderness, and won their way despite all obstacles to a far summit of the Blue Ridge, whence, first among all their countrymen, they looked forth to the westward upon the vast slopes which fell away to the Ohio and the great basin of the Mississippi. Colonel Spotswood, standing there the leader of the little group, knew that it was this way the English must come to make conquest of the continent. He urged his government at home to stretch a chain of defensive posts beyond the mountains from the lakes to the Mississippi, to keep the French from those inner valleys which awaited the coming of the white man; but he did not pause in the work he could do himself because the advice went unheeded. He kept the Indians still; he found excellent lands for a thrifty colony of Germans, and himself began the manufacture of iron in the colony, setting up the first iron furnace in America. The debts of the colony were most of them discharged, and a good trade in corn, lumber, and salt provisions sprang up with the West Indies. He rebuilt the college, recently destroyed by fire, and established a school for Indian children. He improved as he could the currency of the colony. His works most were the quiet works of most peace and development,—except for his vigorous suppression of the pirates of the coast,—and his administration might have outrun the year 1722, which saw him removed, had he been a touch less haughty, overbearing, unused to conciliating or pleasing those whose service he desired. He made enemies, and was at last ousted by them.

Some of the best qualities of the soldier and administrator came out in him in the long struggle to put the pirates down once and for all Queen Anne’s War had turned pirates into privateers and given pause to the stern business for a little, but it began again in desperate earnest when the war was over and peace concluded at Utrecht. It was officially reported by the secretary of Pennsylvania in 1717 that there were still fifteen hundred pirates on the coasts, making their headquarters at the Cape Fear and at New Providence in the Bahamas, and sweeping the sea as they dared from Brazil to Newfoundland. But the day of their reckoning was near at hand. South Carolina had cleared her own coasts for a little at the beginning of the century, but the robbers swarmed at her inlets again when the Indian massacres had weakened and distracted her, and the end of the war with France set many a roving privateersman free to return to piracy. The crisis and turning-point came in the year 1718. That year an English fleet crossed the sea, took New Providence, purged the Bahamas of piracy, and made henceforth a stronghold there for law and order. That same year Stede Bonnet, of Barbadoes, a man who had but the other day held a major’s commission in her Majesty’s service, honored and of easy fortune, but now turned pirate, as if for pastime, was caught at the mouth of the Cape Fear by armed ships under redoubtable Colonel Rhett, who had driven the French out of Charleston harbor thirteen years ago, and was taken and hanged on Charleston dock, all his crew having gone before him to the ceremony. "This humour of going a-pyrating," it was said, "proceeded from a disorder in his mind, which had been but too visible in him some time before this wicked undertaking; and which is said to have been occasioned by some discomforts he found in a married state"; but the law saw nothing of that in what he had done. While Bonnet awaited his condemnation, Edward Thatch, the famous "Blackbeard," whom all the coast dreaded, went a like just way to death, trapped within Ocracoke Inlet by two stout craft sent against him out of Virginia by Colonel Spotswood. And so, step by step, the purging went on. South Carolina had as capable a governor as Virginia in Robert Johnson; and the work done by these and like men upon the coasts, and by the English ships in the West Indies, presently wiped piracy out. By 1730 there was no longer anything for ships to fear on those coasts save the Navigation Acts and stress of sea weather.

It was a long coast, and it took a long time to carry law and order into every bay and inlet. But every year brought increase of strength to the colonies, and with increase of strength power to rule their coasts as they chose. Queen Anne’s War over, quiet peace descended upon the colonies for almost an entire generation (1712-1740). Except for a flurry of Indian warfare now and again upon the borders, or here and there some petty plot or sudden brawl, quiet reigned, and peaceful progress. Anne, the queen, died the year after peace was signed (1714); and the next year Louis XIV. followed her, the great king who had so profoundly stirred the politics of Europe. An old generation had passed away, and new men and new measures seemed now to change the whole face of affairs. The first George took the throne, a German, not an English prince, his heart in Hannover; and presently the affairs of England fell into the hands of Sir Robert Walpole. Sir Robert kept his power for twenty-one years (1721-1742), and conducted the government with the shrewd, hard-headed sense and administrative capacity of a steady country squire,—as if governing were a sort of business, demanding, like other businesses, peace and an assured and equable order in affairs. It was a time of growth and recuperation, with much to do, but little to record.

The colonies, while it lasted, underwent in many things a slow transformation. Their population grew in numbers not only, but also in variety. By the end of the war there were probably close upon half a million people within their borders, counting slave with free; and with the return of peace there came a quickened increase. New England slowly lost its old ways of separate action as a self-constituted confederacy; and Massachusetts, with her new system of royal governors and a franchise broadened beyond the lines of her churches, by degrees lost her leadership. She was losing her old temper of Puritan thought. It was impossible to keep her population any longer of the single strain of which it had been made up at the first. New elements were steadily added; and new elements brought new ways of life and new beliefs. She was less and less governed by her pulpits; turned more and more to trade for sustenance; welcomed new-comers with less and less scrutiny of their ways of thinking; grew less suspicious of change, and more like her neighbors in her zest for progress.

Scots-Irish began to make their appearance in the colony, some of them going to New Hampshire, some remaining in Boston; and they were given a right willing welcome. The war had brought sore burdens of expense and debt upon the people, and these Scots-Irish knew the profitable craft of linen-making which the Boston people were glad to learn, and use to clothe themselves; for poverty, they declared, "is coming upon us as an armed man." These new immigrants brought with them also the potato, not before used in New England, and very acceptable as an addition to the colony’s bill of fare. Small vessels now began to venture out from Cape Cod and Nantucket, moreover, in pursuit of the whales that came to the northern coasts, and it was not long before that daring occupation began to give promise of wealth and of the building up of a great industry. Population began slowly to spread from the coasts into the forests which lay at the west between the Connecticut and the Hudson. In 1730 a Presbyterian church was opened in Boston,—almost as unmistakable a sign of change as King’s Chapel itself had been with its service after the order of the Church of England.

The middle colonies and the far south saw greater changes than these. South Carolina seemed likely to become as various in her make-up as were New York and Pennsylvania with their mixture of races and creeds. Scots-Irish early settled within her borders also; she had already her full share of Huguenot blood; and there followed, as the new century advanced through the lengthened years of peace, companies of Swiss immigrants, and Germans from the Palatinate. Charleston, however, seemed English enough, and showed a color of aristocracy in her life which no one could fail to note who visited her. Back from the point where the rivers met, where the fortifications stood, and the docks to which the ships came, there ran a fine road northward which Governor Archdale, that good Quaker, had twenty years ago declared more beautiful’ and pleasant than any prince in Europe could find to take the air upon when he drove abroad. From it on either side stretched noble avenues of live oaks, their strong lines softened by the long drapery of the gray moss,—avenues which led to the broad verandas of country residences standing in cool and shadowy groves of other stately trees. In summer the odor of jasmine filled the air; and even in winter the winds were soft. It was here that the ruling men of the colony lived, the masters of the nearer plantations,-men bred and cultured after the manner of the Old World. The simpler people, who made the colony various with their differing bloods, lived inland, in the remoter parishes, or near other harbors above or below Charleston’s port. It was on the nearer plantations round about Charleston that negro slaves most abounded; and there were more negroes by several thousand in the colony than white folk. Out of the 16,750 inhabitants of the colony in 1715, 10,500 were slaves. But the whites were numerous enough to give their governors a taste of their quality.

There were well-developed political parties in South Carolina, for all she was so small; and astute and able men to lead them, like Colonel Rhett, now soldier, now sailor, now statesman, and Mr. Nicholas Trott, now on one side and again on the other in the matter of self government as against the authority of the proprietors or the crown, but always in a position to make his influence felt. The province practically passed from the proprietors to the crown in 1719, because the people’s party determined to be rid of their authority, and ousted their governor, exasperated that in their time of need, their homes burned about their ears by the savages, their coasts ravaged by freebooters, they should have been helped not a whit, but left to shift desperately for themselves. In 1729 the proprietors formally surrendered their rights. Colonel Francis Nicholson acted as provisional governor while the change was being effected (1719-1725), having been meantime governor of Acadia, which he had taken for the crown. In 1720 he was knighted; and he seems to have acted as soberly in this post in Carolina as he had acted in Virginia. He was truculent and whimsical in the north; but in the south his temper seemed eased and his judgment steadied. The change of government in South Carolina was really an earnest of the fact that the people’s representatives had won a just and reasonable ascendency in the affairs of the colony; and Sir Francis did not seriously cross them, but served them rather, in the execution of their purposes.

Every colony had its own movements of party. Everywhere the crown desired the colonial assemblies to provide a permanent establishment for the governor, the judges, and the other officers who held the King’s commission,—fixed salaries, and a recognized authority to carry out instructions; but everywhere the people’s representatives persistently refused to grant either salaries or any additional authority which they could not control in the interest of their own rights from session to session. They would vote salaries for only a short period, generally a year at a time; and they steadily denied the right of the crown to extend or vary the jurisdiction of the courts without their assent. Sometimes a governor like Mr. Clarke, of New York, long a resident in his colony and acquainted with its temper and its ways of thought, got what he wanted by making generous concessions in matters under his own control; and the judges, whatever their acknowledged jurisdiction, were likely to yield to the royal wishes with some servility: for they were appointed at the King’s pleasure, and not for the term of their good behavior, as in England. But power turned, after all, upon what the people’s legislature did or consented to do, and the colonists commonly spoke their minds with fearless freedom.

In New York the right to speak their minds had been tested and established in a case which every colony promptly learned of. In 1734 and 1735 one John Peter Ziegler, a printer, was brought to trial for the printing of various libellous attacks on the governor and the administration of the colony,—attacks which were declared to be highly "derogatory to the character of his Majesty’s government," and to have a tendency "to raise seditions and tumults in the province"; but he was acquitted. The libel was admitted, but the Jury deemed it the right of every one to say whatever he thought to be true of the colony’s government; and men everywhere noted the verdict.

A second negro plot startled New York in 1741, showing itself, as before, in sudden incendiary fires. It was thought that the slaves had been incited to destroy the town; and there was an uneasy suspicion that these disturbing occurrences were in some way connected with the slave insurrections in the south. Uprising of the slaves had recently occurred in the West Indies. South Carolina had suffered such an outbreak a little more than two years before. In 1738 armed insurgent negroes had begun there, in a quiet parish, the execution of a terrible plot of murder and burning which it had taken very prompt and summary action to check and defeat. Such risings here specially ominous where the slaves so outnumbered the whites; and it was known in South Carolina whence the uneasiness of the negroes came. At the south of the province lay the Spanish colonies in Florida. Negroes who could manage to run away from their masters and cross the southern border were made very welcome there; they were set free, and encouraged in every hostile purpose that promised to rob the English settlements of their ease and peace. Bands of Yamassees wandered there, too, eager to avenge themselves as they could for the woful defeat and expulsion they had suffered at the hands of the Carolinians, and ready to make common cause with the, negroes. When bands of negroes, hundreds strong, began their sudden work of burning, plunder, and murder where the quiet Stono runs to the sea no one doubted whence the impulse came. And though a single rising was easily enough put down, who could be certain that that was the end of the ominous business? No wonder governors at Charleston interested themselves to increase the number of white settlers and make their power of self-defence sure.

Such things, however, serious as they were, did not check the steady growth of the colonies. It was not yet questions of self-government or of the preservation of their peace that dominated their affairs; and only those who observed how far-away frontiers were being advanced and two great nations being brought together for a reckoning face to face saw what was the next, the very near, crisis in store for the English in America. Through all that time of peace a notable drama was in fact preparing. Slowly, but very surely, English and French were drawing nearer and nearer within the continent,—not only in the north, but throughout all the length of the great Mississippi. Step by step the French had descended the river from their posts on the lakes; and while peace reigned they had established posts at its mouth and begun to make their way northward from the Gulf. So long ago as 1699 they had built a stockade at Biloxi; in 1700 they had taken possession of Mobile Bay; by 1716 they had established posts at Toulouse (Alabama) and at Natchez. In 1718 they began to build at New Orleans. In 1719 they captured and destroyed the Spanish post at Pensacola. By 1722 there were five thousand Frenchmen by the lower stretches of the great river; and their trading boats were learning all the shallows and currents of the mighty waterway from end to end. Meantime, in the north, they advanced their power to Lake Champlain, and began the construction of a fort at Crown Point (1721). That same year, 1721, French and English built ominously near each other on Lake Ontario, the English at Oswego, the French at Niagara among the Senecas. In 1716, the very year Governor Spotswood rode through the western forests of Virginia to a summit of the Blue Ridge, the French had found a short way to the Ohio by following the Miami and the Wabash down their widening streams. It was while they thus edged their way towards the eastern mountains and drew their routes closer and closer to their rivals on the coast that that adventurous, indomitable people, the Scots-Irish, came pouring of a sudden into the English colonies, and very promptly made it their business to pass the mountains and take possession of the lands which lay beyond them, as if they would deliberately go to meet the French by the Ohio.

For several years after the first quarter of the new century had run out immigrants from the north of Ireland came crowding in, twelve thousand strong by the year. In 1729 quite five thousand of them entered Pennsylvania alone: and they pressed without hesitation and as if by preference to the interior. From Pennsylvania they passed along the broad, inviting valleys southward into the western parts of Virginia. By 1730 a straggling movement of settlers had begun to show itself even upon the distant lands of Kentucky. Still farther south traders from the Carolinas went constantly back and forth between the Indian tribes of the country by the Mississippi and the English settlements at the coast. Nine thousand redskin warriors lay there in the forests. Some traded with the French at the river, some with the English at the coast. They might become foes or allies, might turn to the one side or the other, as passion or interest led them.

In 1739 the French at the north put an armed sloop on Champlain. The same year the English built a fortified post at Niagara. Everywhere the two peoples were converging, and were becoming more and more conscious of what their approach to one another meant. So long ago as 1720 orders had come from France bidding the French commanders on the St. Lawrence occupy the valley of the Ohio before the English should get a foothold there. The places where the rivals were to meet it was now easy to see, and every frontiersman saw them very plainly. The two races could not possess the continent together. They must first fight for the nearer waterways of the West, and after that for whatever lay next at hand.

It was no small matter, with threat of such things in the air, that the English chose that day of preparation for the planting of a new colony, and planted it in the south between Carolina and the Florida settlements,—a barrier and a menace both to French and Spaniard. It was James Oglethorpe, a soldier, who planned the new undertaking; and he planned it like a soldier,—and yet like a man of heart and elevated purpose, too, for he was a philanthropist and a lover of every serviceable duty, as well as a soldier. He came of that good stock of country gentlemen which has in every generation helped so sturdily to carry forward the work of England, in the field, in Parliament, in administrative office. He had gone with a commission into the English army in the late war a mere lad of fourteen (1710); and, finding himself still unskilled in arms when England made peace at Utrecht, he had chosen to stay for six years longer, a volunteer, with the forces of Prince Eugene in the East. At twenty-two he had come back to England (1718), to take upon himself the responsibilities which had fallen to him by reason of the death of his elder brothers; and in 1722 he had entered the House of Commons, eager as ever to learn his duty and do it. He kept always a sort of knightly quality, and the bower to plan and hope and push forward that belongs to youth. He was a Tory, and believed that the Stuarts should have the throne from which they had been thrust before he was born; but that did not make him disloyal. He was an ardent reformer; but that did not make him visionary, for he was also trained in affairs. His clear-cut features, frank eye, erect and slender figure bespoke him every inch the high- bred gentleman and the decisive man of action.

In Parliament he had been made one of a committee to inspect prisons; and he had been keenly touched by the miserable plight of the many honest men who, through mere misfortune, were there languishing in hopeless imprisonment for debt. He bethought himself of the possibility of giving such men a new chance of life and the recovery of fortune in America; and the thought grew into a plan for a new colony. He knew how the southern coast lay vacant between Charleston and the Spaniards at St. Augustine. There were good lands there, no doubt; and his soldier’s eye showed him, by a mere glance at a map, how fine a point of vantage it might be made if fortified against the alien power in Florida. And so he made his plans. It should be a military colony, a colony of fortified posts; and honest men who had fallen upon poverty or misfortune at home should have a chance, if they would work, to profit by the undertaking, though he should take them from debtors’ prisons. Both King and Parliament listened very willingly to what he proposed. The King signed a charter, giving the undertaking into the hands of trustees, who were in effect to be proprietors (June, 1732); and Parliament voted ten thousand pounds as its subscription to the enterprise; while men of as liberal a spirit as Oglethorpe’s associated themselves with him to carry the humane plan out, giving money, counsel, and service without so much as an expectation of gain to themselves, or any material return for their outlay. Men had ceased by that time to dream that colonization would make those rich who fathered it and paid its first bills. By the end of October, 1732, the first shipload of settlers was off for America, Oglethorpe himself at their head; and by February, 1733, they were already busy building their first settlement on Yamacraw Bluff, within the broad stream of the Savannah.

The colony had in its charter been christened Georgia, in honor of the King, who had so cordially approved of its foundation; the settlement at Yamacraw, Oglethorpe called by the name of the river itself, Savannah. His colonists were no mere company of released debtors and shiftless ne’er-do-wells. Men had long ago learned the folly of that mistake, and Oglethorpe was too much a man of the world to repeat the failures of others. Every emigrant had been subjected to a thorough examination regarding his antecedents, his honesty, his character for energy and good behavior, and had been brought because he had been deemed fit. Italians skilled in silk culture were introduced into the colony. Sober German Protestants came from Moravia and from Salzburg, by Tyrol, and were given their separate places of settlement,—as quiet, frugal, industrious, pious folk as the first pilgrims at Plymouth. Clansmen from the Scottish Highlands came, and were set at the extreme south, as an outpost to meet the Spaniard. Some of the Carolina settlers who would have liked themselves to have the Highlanders for neighbors tried to dissuade them from going to the spot selected for their settlement. They told them that the Spaniards were so near at hand that they could shoot them from the windows of the houses that stood within the fort. "Why, then, we shall beat them out of their fort, and shall have houses ready built to live in!" cried the men In kilts, very cheerily, and went on to their settlement.

Fortunately it was seven years before the war with Spain came which every one had known from the first to be inevitable; and by that time the little colony was ready enough. Georgia’s territory stretched upon the coast from the Savannah to the Altamaha, and from the coast ran back, west and northwest, to the sources of those rivers; from their sources due westward "to the South Seas." Savannah was thus planted at the very borders of South Carolina. New settlers were placed, as they came, some in Savannah, many by the upper reaches of the river. The Highlanders had their post of danger and honor upon the Altamaha; and before war came new settlers, additional arms and stores, and serviceable fortifications had been placed at St. Simon’s Island at the mouth of the Altamaha. Every settlement was in some sort a fortified military post. The first settlers had been drilled in arms by sergeants of the Royal Guards in London every day between the time of their assembling and the time of their departure. Arms and ammunition were as abundant almost as agricultural tools and food stores in the cargoes carried out. Negro slavery was forbidden in the colony, because it was no small part of Oglethorpe’s purpose in founding it to thrust a solid wedge of free settlers between Carolina and the country to the south, and close the border to fugitive slaves. Neither could any liquor be brought in. It was designed that the life of the settlements should be touched with something of the rigor of military discipline; and so long as Oglethorpe himself was at hand laws were respected and obeyed, rigid and unacceptable though they were; for he was a born ruler of men.

He had not chosen very wisely, however, when he brought Charles and John Wesley out as his spiritual advisers and the pastors of his colony. They were men as inapt at yielding and as strenuous at prosecuting their own way of action as he, and promoted diversity of opinion quite as successfully as piety. They stayed but three or four uneasy years in America, and then returned to do their great work of setting up a new dissenting church in England. George Whitefield followed them (1738) in their missionary labors, and for a little while preached acceptably enough in the quiet colony; but he, too, was very soon back in England again. The very year Oglethorpe brought Charles Wesley to Georgia (1734) a great wave of religious feeling swept over New England again,—not sober, self-contained, deep-currented, like the steady fervor of the old days, but passionate, full of deep excitement, agitated, too like a frenzy. Enthusiasts who saw it rise and run its course were wont to speak of it afterwards as "the Great Awakening," but the graver sort were deeply disturbed by it. It did not spend its force till quite fifteen years had come and gone. Mr. Whitefield returned to America in 1739, to add to it the impulse of his impassioned preaching, and went once more to Georgia also. Again and again he came upon the same errand, stirring many a colony with his singular eloquence; but Georgia was busy with other things, and heeded him less than the rest.

When the inevitable war came with Spain, in 1739,—inevitable because of trade rivalries in the West Indies and in South America, and because of political rivalry at the borders of Florida,—Oglethorpe was almost the first to strike. Admiral Vernon had been despatched in midsummer, 1739, before the declaration of war, to destroy the Spanish settlements and distress Spanish commerce in the West Indies; and had promptly taken Porto Bello in November, scarcely a month after war had been formally declared. Oglethorpe struck next, at St. Augustine. It was this he had looked forward to in founding his colony. In May, 1740, he moved to the attack with a mixed army of redskins and provincial militia numbering a little more than two thousand men,—supported at sea by a little fleet of six vessels of war under Sir Yelverton Peyton. But there had been too much delay in getting the motley force together. The Spaniards had procured reinforcements from Havana; the English ships found it impracticable to get near enough to the Spanish works to use their guns with effect; Oglethorpe had no proper siege pieces; and the attack utterly failed. It had its effect, nevertheless. For two years the Spaniards held nervously off, carefully on the defensive; and when they did in their turn attack, Oglethorpe beat them handsomely off, and more than wiped out the disrepute of his miscarriage at St. Augustine. In June, 1742, there came to St. Simon’s Island a Spanish fleet of fifty-one sail, nearly five thousand troops aboard, and Oglethorpe beat them off with six hundred and fifty men,—working his little forts like a master, and his single guard-schooner and few paltry armed sloops as if they were a navy. Such a deliverance, cried Mr. Whitefield, could not be paralleled save out of Old Testament history.

Meanwhile Vernon and Wentworth had met with overwhelming disaster at Cartagena. With a great fleet of ships of the line and a land force of nine thousand men, they had made their assault upon it in March, 1741; but because Wentworth bungled everything he did with his troops the attack miserably failed. He was caught by the deadly wet season of the tropics; disease reduced his army to a wretched handful; and thousands of lives were thrown away in his dismal disgrace. Both New England and Virginia had sent troops to take their part with that doomed army; and the colonies knew, in great bitterness, how few came home again. The war had its issues for them, they knew, as well as for the governments across the water. It meant one more reckoning with the Spaniard and the Frenchman, their rivals for the mastery of America. And in 1745 New England had a triumph of her own, more gratifying even than Oglethorpe’s astonishing achievement at St. Simon’s Island.

Only for a few months had England dealt with Spain alone upon a private quarrel. In 1740 the male line of the great Austrian house of Hapsburg had run out: Maria Theresa took the throne; rival claimants disputed her right to the succession; and all Europe was presently plunged into the "War of the Austrian Succession" (1740-1748). "King George’s War" they called it in the colonies, when France and England became embroiled; but the name did not make it doubtful what interests, or what ambitions, were involved; and New England struck her own blow at the power of France. A force of about four thousand men, levied in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, moved in the spring of 1745 against the French port of Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. Commodore Warren, the English naval commander in the West Indies, furnished ships for their convoy, and himself supported them in the siege; and by the 16th of June the place had been taken. For twenty-five years the French had been slowly building its fortifications, covering with them an area two and a half miles in circumference. They had made them, they supposed, impregnable. But the English had struck quickly, without warning, and with a skill and ardor which made them well-nigh irresistible; and their triumph was complete. Provincial troops had taken the most formidable fortress in America. William Pepperrell, the gallant gentleman who had led the New Englanders, got a baronetcy for his victory. Warren was made an admiral.

The next year an attack was planned against the French at Crown Point on Champlain, but nothing came of it. The war almost stood still thenceforth, so far as the colonies were concerned, till peace was signed at Aix-la-Chapelle in October, 1748. That peace brought great chagrin to New England. By its terms Louisbourg and all conquests everywhere were restored. The whole work was to do over again, as after King William’s War and the restoration of Port Royal, which Sir William Phips had been at such pains to take. The peace stood, however, little longer than that which had separated King Williams War from the War of the Spanish Succession. Seven years, and France and England had once more grappled,—this time for a final settlement. All the seven years through the coming on of war was plainly to be seen by those who knew where to look for the signs of the times. The French and English in that brief interval were not merely to approach; they were to meet in the western valleys, and the first spark of a war that was to embroil all Europe was presently to flash out in the still forests beyond the far Alleghanies.

It was on the borders of Virginia this time that the first act of the drama was to be cast. The French determined both to shorten and to close their lines of occupation and defence from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi and the Gulf. They knew that they could do this only by taking possession of the valley of the Ohio; and the plan was no sooner formed than it was attempted. And yet to do this was to come closer than ever to the English and to act under their very eyes. A few German families had made their way far to the westward in Pennsylvania, and hundreds of the indomitable Scots-Irish had been crowding in there for now quite twenty years, passing on, many of them, to the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah below, and pressing everywhere closer and closer to the passes which led down but a little way beyond into the valleys of the Alleghany, the Monongahela, and the Ohio. These men, at the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, were sure to observe what was going forward in front of them, and to understand what they saw. Traders crossed those mountains now by the score from the English settlements,—three hundred in a year, it was said. They knew the waters that ran to the Ohio quite as well as any Frenchman did. Their canoes had followed the turnings of the broad Ohio itself, and had found it a highway to the spreading Mississippi, where French boats floated slowly down from the country of the Illinois, carrying their cargoes of meat, grain, tobacco, tallow, hides, lead, and oil to the settlements on the Gulf. In 1748, the year of the last peace, certain leading gentlemen in Virginia had organized an Ohio Land Company,—among the rest Mr. Augustus Washington, who had served with Vernon and Wentworth at Cartagena and had lost his health in the fatal service. He had named his estate by the Potomac, his home of retirement, Mount Vernon, as his tribute of admiration to the gallant sailor he had learned to love during those fiery days in the South. In 1750 the English government had granted to the Company six hundred thousand acres of land on the coveted river. Virginian officials themselves had not scrupled meanwhile also to issue grants and titles to land beyond the mountains. The English claim to the Ohio country was unhesitating and comprehensive.

The English had seized French traders there as unlicensed intruders, and the French in their turn had seized and expelled Englishmen who trafficked there. French and English matched their wits very shrewdly to get and keep the too fickle friendship of the Indians, and so make sure of their trade and their peace with them; and the Indians got what they could from them both. It was a sharp game for a great advantage, and the governments of the two peoples could not long refrain from taking a hand in it.

The French authorities, it turned out, were, as usual, the first to act. In 1752 the Marquis Duquesne became governor of Canada, an energetic soldier in his prime; and it was he who took the first decisive step. In the spring of 1753 he despatched a force to Presque Isle, on the southern shore of Lake Erie, built a log fort there, and thence cut a portage for his boats southward a little way through the forest to a creek (French Creek the English called it afterwards) whose waters, when at flood, would carry his boats to the Alleghany, and by that open stream to the Ohio. It was the short and straight way from the St. Lawrence to the Mississippi and the Gulf. At the creek’s head he placed another log fort (Le Boeuf), and upon the Alleghany a rude outpost.

The same year that saw the Marquis Duquesne made governor of Canada saw Robert Dinwiddie come out as governor of Virginia, and no one was likelier than he to mark and comprehend the situation on the border. Mr. Dinwiddie had been bred in a counting house, for he was the son of a well-to-do merchant of Glasgow; but business had long since become for him a matter of government. He had gone in his prime to be collector of customs in Bermuda and after serving in that post for eleven years he had been made surveyor general of customs in the southern ports of America,—a post in which he served most acceptably for another ten years. For twenty years he had shown singular zeal and capacity in difficult, and, for many men, demoralizing, matters of administration. He had lived in Virginia when surveyor general of customs. During the two years which immediately preceded his appointment to the governorship of the Old Dominion he had engaged in business on his own account in London, and had become by purchase one of the twenty stockholders of the Ohio Land Company. He came to his new office, therefore, acquainted in more than one way with the leading men of the colony,—especially with Mr. Augustine Washington, now the Ohio Company’s president, and the little group of influential gentlemen,—Lees, Fairfaxes, and the rest,—often to be found gathered at Mount Vernon. He came, therefore, with his eyes on the western lands where the company and his government were alike bound to see to it that the French were checked.

He saw Duquesne’s movement, consequently, at its very outset, warned the government at home, and was promptly instructed to require the French "peaceably to depart," and if they would not go for the warning, "to drive them off by force of arms." He chose as his messenger to carry the summons Mr. George Washington, half-brother to Mr. Augustine Washington, of Mount Vernon. George Washington was only a lad of twenty-one; but he had hardened already to the work of a man. He had received no schooling in England such as Augustine had had, but had gone from the simple schools and tutors of the Virginian country-side to serve as a surveyor for Lord Fairfax in the rough country of the Shenandoah,—whither Fairfax, heir of the old Culpeper grants, had come to seek a life away from courts in the picturesque wilderness of America. Augustine Washington died the very year Mr. Dinwiddie became governor, though he was but thirty four; and he had left George, lad though he was, to administer his estate and serve in his stead as commander of the militia of eleven counties. Governor Dinwiddie knew whom he was choosing when he sent this drilled and experienced youngster, already a frontiersman, to bid the French leave the Ohio.

The message was carried in the dead of winter to the grave and courteous soldier who commanded at Fort Le Boeuf; and Washington tried the endurance even of the veteran frontiersman who accompanied him by the forced marches he made thither and back again through the dense and frosted woods, across frozen streams, and through the pathless, storm-beaten tangles of deep forests, where there was hardly so much as the track of a bison for their horses to walk in. He reported that the French had received him very graciously; but had claimed the Ohio as their own, had made no pretence that they would abandon it because the English bade them, and clearly meant to establish themselves where they were. Juniors among their officers had told him so very plainly as he sat with them after dinner in a house which they had seized from an English trader.

He was back at Williamsburg with his report by the middle of January, 1754; and the next month a small body of frontiersmen was hurried forward to make a clearing at the forks of the Ohio and begin the construction of fortifications there ere spring came, and the French. The French came, nevertheless, all too soon. By the 17th of April their canoes swarmed there, bearing five hundred men and field ordnance, and the forty Englishmen who held the rude, unfinished defences of the place had no choice but to retire or be blown into the water. The French knew the importance of the place as a key to the western lands, and they meant to have it, though they should take it by an open act of war. Their force there numbered fourteen hundred before summer came. They built a veritable fort, of the rough frontier pattern, but strong enough, as it seemed, to make the post secure, and waited to see what the English would do.

Dinwiddie had acted with good Scots capacity, as efficiently and as promptly as he could with the power he had. He was obliged to deal with a colonial assembly,—the French governors were not; and the Virginian burgesses thought of domestic matters when Dinwiddie’s thought was at the frontier. While Washington was deep in the forests, bearing his message, they quarrelled with the governor about the new fees which were charged since his coming for grants of the public land; and they refused him money because he would not yield in the matter. But when they knew how things actually stood in the West, and saw that the governor would levy troops for the exigency whether they acted with him or not, and pay for them out of his own pocket if necessary, they voted supplies.

There was no highway of open rivers for the Virginians, as for the French, by which they could descend to the forks of the Ohio; and Virginia had no troops ready as the French had. Raw levies of volunteers had first to be got together; and when they had been hastily gathered, clothed, and a little drilled, the first use to which it was necessary to put them was to cut a rough, mountainous road for themselves through the untouched forests which lay thick upon the towering Blue Ridge! It was painfully slow work, wrought at for week after week, and the French were safely intrenched at their fort "Duquesne" before the tired Virginian recruits had crossed the crest of the mountains. By midsummer they were ready to strike and drive the English back.

Blood had been spilled between the rivals ere that. Washington was in command of the little force which had cut its way through the forest, and he did not understand that he had been sent into the West this time merely to bear a message. When, therefore, one day in May (28 May, 1754) he found a party of French lurking at his front in a thicketed glade, he did not hesitate to lead an attacking party of forty against them. The young commander of the French scouts was killed in the sharp encounter, and his thirty men were made prisoners. Men on both sides of the sea knew, when they heard that news, that war had begun. Young Washington had forced the hands of the statesmen in London and Paris, and all Europe presently took fire from the flame he had kindled. In July, Washington was obliged to retire. He had only three hundred and fifty men, all told, at the rudely intrenched camp which he had constructed in the open glade of "Great Meadows" as the best place to await reinforcements; and in July the French were upon him with a force of seven hundred. All day he fought (3 July, 1754), and in a drenching rain, the French firing from the edges of the woods, his own men in their shallow, flooded trenches in the open; but by night he knew he must give way. The French offered him an honorable capitulation, and the next day let him go untouched, men and arms, with such stores as he could carry.

It was a bad beginning at winning the West from the French; and all the worse because it showed how weak the English were at such work. The danger was not Virginia’s alone; it touched all the English in America; but the colonies could not cooperate, and, when they acted at all, acted sluggishly, as if war would wait for both parties to get ready. The assemblies of Pennsylvania and New York declared very coldly that they did not see what right the English crown had to the valley of the Ohio. Maryland had been about to raise a force, but had not yet done so when the fatal day at Great Meadows came. Two "independent companies" in the King’s pay had been ordered from New York, and a like company from South Carolina; and North Carolina had sent forward three hundred and fifty men; but only the single company from South Carolina had reached Great Meadows, where Washington was, before the French were upon him.

Dinwiddie and every other governor who heeded or wrote of the business told the ministers in England that they must act, and send the King’s own troops; and happily the ministers saw at last the importance of what should be won or lost in America. Troops were sent. For Europe it was the beginning of the Seven Years’ War (1755-1763), which was to see the great Frederick of Prussia prove his mastery in the field; which was to spread from Europe to Asia and to Africa; which was to wrest from the French for England both India and America. But for the colonists in America it was only "the French and Indian War." Their own continent was the seat of their thoughts.

The beginnings the home government made were small and weak enough; but it did at least act, and it was likely that, should it keep long enough at the business, it would at last learn and do all that was necessary to make good its mastery against a weaker rival. By the 20th of February, 1755, transports were in the Chesapeake, bringing two regiments of the King’s regulars, to be sent against Duquesne. The French, too, were astir. Early in the spring eighteen French ships of war sailed for Canada, carrying six battalions and a new governor; and though the English put an equal fleet to sea to intercept them, the Frenchmen got into the St. Lawrence with a loss of but two of their ships, which had strayed from the fleet and been found by the English befogged and bewildered off the American coast. The scene was set for war both north and south.

Major General Edward Braddock commanded the regiments sent to Virginia, and was commissioned to be commander-in-chief in America. He therefore called the principal colonial governors to a conference at Alexandria, his headquarters. By the middle of April five had come: Robert Dinwiddie, of course, the governor of Virginia; Robert Hunter Morris, whose thankless task it was to get war votes out of the Pennsylvanian assembly of Quakers and lethargic German farmers; Horatio Sharpe, the brave and energetic gentleman who was governor of Maryland; James DeLancey, the people’s governor, of New York; and William Shirley, governor of Massachusetts, past sixty, but as strenuous as Dinwiddie, and eager for the field though he had been bred a lawyer,—every inch "a gentleman and politician," it was said. It was he who had done most to organize and expedite the attack on Louisbourg which had succeeded so handsomely ten years ago (1745). He would at any rate not fail for lack of self-confidence. The conference planned an attack on Niagara, to be led by Shirley himself, to cut the French off from Duquesne; an attack on Crown Point, to be led by Colonel William Johnson, of New York, whom the Mohawks would follow, to break the hold of the French on Champlain; an attack upon Beausejour, in Acadia, under the leadership of Lieutenant-Colonel Monckton, of the King’s regulars; and a movement under the command of General Braddock himself straight through the forests against Duquesne, by the way Washington had cut to Great Meadows.

It would have been much better had General Braddock chosen a route farther to the north, where the Pennsylvanian farmers of the frontier had begun to make roads and open the forests for the plough; but it made little difference, after all, which way he went: his temper and his training doomed him to fail. He lacked neither courage nor capacity, but he sadly lacked discretion. He meant to make his campaign in the wilderness by the rules of war he had learned in Europe, where the forests were cleared away and no subtile savages could dog or ambush an army; and he would take no advice from provincials. Few but Washington cared to volunteer advice, for the commander-in-chief was "a very Iroquois in disposition." He took two thousand men into the wilderness, with artillery trains and baggage: fourteen hundred regulars, nearly five hundred Virginians, horse and foot, two independent companies from New York, and sailors from the transports to rig tackle to get his stores and field-pieces out of difficulties in the rough road. Washington went with the confident commander, by special invitation, to act as one of his aides, and was the only provincial officer whose advice was given so much as consideration during all the weary weeks in which the little army widened and levelled its way with axe and spade through the dense woods. And then the fatal day came which filled all the colonies with dismay.

The French commander at Duquesne had no such force as Braddock was bringing against him. He expected to be obliged to retire. But on the 9th of July the English general, with his advance force of twelve hundred men, forded the shallow Monongahela but eight miles from Duquesne, and striking into the trail which led to the fort, walked into an ambush. A thousand men,—Indians, chiefly, and Canadian provincials, poured a deadly fire upon him from the thick cover of the woods on either hand. He would not open his order and meet the attack in forest fashion, as Washington begged him to do, but kept his men formed and crowded in the open spaces of the road, to be almost annihilated, and driven back, a mere remnant, in utter rout. It was shameful, pitiful. Washington and his Virginian rangers could with difficulty keep the rear when the rout came, and bring the stricken commander off, to die in the retreat. Dinwiddie could not persuade the officers left in command even to stay upon the Virginian frontier to keep the border settlements safe against the savages. It was Washington’s impossible task for the rest of the war to guard three hundred and fifty miles of frontier with a handful of half-fed provincial militia, where the little huts and tiny settlements of the Scots-Irish immigrants lay scattered far and wide among the foothills and valleys of the spreading mountain country, open everywhere to the swift and secret onset of the pitiless redskins.

Braddock’s papers, abandoned in the panic of the rout, fell into the hands of the French, and made known to them all the English plans. They were warned what to do, and did it as promptly as possible. Shirley gave up the attempt to take Niagara before reaching the lake. Johnson, assisted by Lyman, of Connecticut, met the French under Dieskau at Lake George, and drove them back (September 8, 1755),—the commander and part of the force the French had so hastily despatched to America in the spring—and Dieskau himself fell into their hands; but they did not follow up their success or shake the hold of the French upon the line of lakes and streams which ran from the heart of New York, like a highway, to the valley of the St. Lawrence. The attack upon Beausejour alone accomplished what was planned. A force of two thousand New England provincials under Colonel Monckton and Colonel John Winslow, found the half-finished fortifications of the French on Beausejour hill in their hands almost before their siege was fairly placed; and Acadia was more than ever secure.

There followed nearly three years of unbroken failure and defeat. In 1756 the Marquis Montcalm succeeded Dieskau as commander in Canada, and the very year of his coming took and destroyed the English forts at Oswego. That same year the Earl of London came over to take charge of the war for the English; but he did nothing effective. The government at home sent reinforcements, but nothing was done with them that counted for success. "I dread to hear from America," exclaimed Pitt. In 1757 London withdrew the best of his forces to the north, to make an attack on Louisbourg. Montcalm took advantage of the movement to capture Fort William Henry, the advanced post of the English on Lake George; and London failed in his designs against Louisbourg. Even the stout and wily English frontiersmen of the northern border found themselves for a little while overmatched. In March, 1758, Robert Rogers, the doughty New Hampshire ranger whose successful exploits of daring all the northern border knew, was beaten by a scouting party from Ticonderoga, and barely came off with his life. The pouring in of troops, even of regulars from over sea, seemed to count for nothing. General James Abercrombie led an army of fifteen thousand men, six thousand of them regulars, against Ticonderoga, where Montcalm had less than four thousand; blundered at every critical point of the attack; lost two thousand men; and retired almost as if in flight (July, 1758).

But that was the end of failure. The year 1757 had seen the great Pitt come into control of affairs in England, and no more incompetent men were chosen to command in America. Pitt had been mistaken in regard to Abercrombie, whom he had retained; but he made no more mistakes of that kind, and a war of failure was transformed into a war of victories, quick and decisive. Two more years, and the French no longer had possessions in America that any nation need covet. Pitt saw to it that the forces, as well as the talents, used were adequate. In July, 1758, a powerful fleet under Admiral Boscawen, and twelve thousand troops under General Jeffrey Amherst, whom Pitt had specially chosen for the command, invested and took Louisbourg. In August, Colonel John Bradstreet, with three thousand of Abercrombie’s men, drove the French from Fort Frontenac at Oswego. In November the french abandoned Fort Duquesne upon the approach of a force under General Forbes and Colonel Washington. In June, 1759, Johnson captured the French fort at Niagara and cut the route to the Ohio,—where Fort Duquesne gave place to Fort Pitt. At midsummer General Amherst, after his thorough fashion, led eleven thousand men against Ticonderoga, and had the satisfaction of seeing the French retire before him. He cleared Lake George and captured and strengthened Crown Point upon Champlain. The French needed all their power in the north, for Pitt had sent Wolfe against Quebec. They had concentrated quite fourteen thousand men in and about the towering city ere Wolfe came with scarcely nine thousand (June 21,1759), and their fortifications stood everywhere ready to defend the place. For close upon three months the English struck at their strength in vain, first here and then there, in their busy efforts to find a spot whereto get a foothold against the massive stronghold,—Montcalm holding all the while within his defences to tire then, out; until at last, upon a night in September which all the world remembers, Wolfe made his way by a path which lay within a deep ravine upward to the heights of Abraham, and there lost his life and won Canada for England (September 13, 1759).

After that the rest of the task was simple enough. The next year Montreal was yielded up, all Canada passed into the hands of the English, and the war was practically over. There were yet three more years to wait before formal peace should be concluded, because the nations of Europe did not decide their affairs by the issue of battles and sieges in America; but for the English colonies the great struggle was ended. By the formal peace, signed in 1763, at Paris, England gained Canada, Nova Scotia, Cape Breton Island, and all the islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the river and harbor of Mobile, and all the disputed lands of the continent, north and south, between the eastern mountain ranges and mid-stream of the Mississippi, except New Orleans,—besides the free navigation of the great river. From Spain she got Florida. France had the year before (1762) ceded to Spain her province of "Louisiana," the great region beyond the Mississippi, whose extent and boundaries no man could tell. She was utterly stripped of her American possessions, and the English might look forward to a new age in their colonies.

The general authorities for the condition of the country and the movement of affairs during this period are the well known histories of Bancroft, Hildreth, and Bryant the third volume of J. A. Doyle’s English Colonies in America; the third volume of J. G. Palfrey’s Compendious History of New England; W. B. Weeden’s Economic and Social History of New England; Mr. Barrett Wendell’s Cotton Mather; Mr. Eben G. Scott’s Development of Constitutional Liberty in the English Colonies of America; C. W. Baird’s Huguenot Emigration to America; James Russell Lowell’s New England Two Centuries Ago, in his Among My Books; Mr. Brooks Adams’s Emancipation of Massachusetts; Madame Knight’s Journal (1704); John Fontaine’s Diary, in the Memoirs of a Huguenot Family; and Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.

A more particular account of many of the transactions that fell within the period may be found in Justin Winsor’s New England, 1640-1763, in the fifth volume of Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America; Berthold Fernow’s Middle Colonies, Justin Winsor’s Maryland and Virginia, and William J. Rivers’s The Carolinas, in the same volume of Winsor; Charles C. Smith’s The Wars on the Seaboard: Acadia and Cape Breton, and Justin Winsor’s Struggle for the Great Valleys of North America, in the same volume of Winsor.

The chief authorities for the settlement and early history of Georgia are Bancroft, Hildreth, and Bryant; Charles C. Jones’s History of Georgia and English Colonization of Georgia in the fifth volume of Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America; W. E. H. Lecky’s History of England in the Eighteenth Century; Alexander Hewatt’s Historical Account of the Rise and Progress of the Colonies of South Carolina and Georgia, in Carroll’s Historical Collections of South Carolina; the first and second volumes of Peter Force’s Tracts and Other Papers relating to the Colonies in North America; and the Colonial Acts of Georgia.