The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 by Julian Hawthorne

J >> Julian Hawthorne >> The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1

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The least revolting feature of the Indian warfare was the habit they
acquired, through French suggestion doubtless, of taking large numbers of
persons captive, and carrying them north. If they weakened on the journey,
they were of course tomahawked out of the way at once; but if they
survived, they were either sold as slaves to the Canadians, or were kept
by the Indians, who adopted them into their tribes, having no system of
slavery. Many a woman and little girl from New England became the mother
of Indian children; and when the captives were young enough at the
beginning, they generally grew to love the wild life too well to leave it.
Indeed, they were generally treated well by both the Canadians and the
Indians after they got to their destination. On the other hand, there were
the fathers and mothers and relatives of the lost planning their
redemption or rescue, and raising money to buy them back. Many a thrilling
tale could be told of these episodes. But we must imagine beautiful young
women, who had been taken away in childhood, found after years of
heart-breaking search and asked to return to their homes. What was their
home? They had forgotten New England, and those who loved them and had
sorrowed for them there. The eyes of these young women, clear and bright,
had a wildness in their look that is never seen in the children of
civilization; their faces were tanned by sun and breeze, their figures
lithe and athletic, their dress of deerskin and wampum, their light feet
clad in moccasins; their tongues and ears were strange to the language of
their childhood homes. No: they would not return. Sometimes, curiosity, or
a vague expectation, would induce them to revisit those who yearned for
them; but, having arrived, they received the embraces of their own flesh
and blood shyly and coldly; they were stifled and hampered by the houses,
the customs, the ordered ways of white people's existence. A night must
come when they would arise silently, resume with a deep in-breathing of
delight the deerskin raiment, and be gone without one last loving look at
the faces of those who had given them life, but from whom their souls were
forever parted. There is a harrowing mystery in these estrangements: how
strong, and yet how helpless is the human heart; all the world cannot
break the bonds it ties, nor can all the world tie them again, once the
heart itself has dissolved them.

Thus, in more ways than one, the blood of the English colonists became
wedded to the soil of the wilderness, if wilderness the settlements could
now be called. And they became like the captives we have just been
imagining, who cared no longer for the land and the people that had been
their home. Not more because they were estranged by England's behavior
than because they had formed new attachments beside which the old ones
seemed pale, were they now able to contemplate with composure the idea of
a final separation. America was no longer England's daughter. She had
acquired a life of her own, and could look forward to a destiny which the
older country could never share. The ways of the two had parted more fully
than either, as yet, quite realized; and if they were ever to meet
again hereafter, it must be the older, and not the younger, who must
change.

Apart from the Indian episodes, little was done until 1710, when a large
fleet left Boston and again captured Port Royal, to which the name of
Annapolis was given as a compliment to the snuffy little woman who sat on
the English throne. This success was made the basis of a proposition to
put an end to the development of the French settlements west of the
Alleghanies. It was represented to the English government that the entire
Indian population in the west was being amalgamated with the French; the
Jesuits ensnaring them on the spiritual side, and the intermarrying system
on the other. The English Secretary of State was Bolingbroke--or
Saint-John as he was then--a man of three and thirty, brilliant, graceful,
gifted, versatile; but without principle or constancy, who never
emancipated his superb intellect from his restless and sensuous nature.
After hearing what the American envoys had to say, and thinking the matter
over, Saint-John made up his mind that it could do no harm, as a
beginning, to capture Quebec; and that being safe in English hands, the
rest of the programme could be finished at leisure. Seven regiments of
Marlborough's veterans, the best soldiers in the world at that time, a
battalion of marines, and fifteen men-of-war, were intrusted to the
utterly incompetent and preposterous Hovenden Walker, with the not less
absurd Jack Hill, brother of Mrs. Masham, as second in command. In short,
the expedition was what would now be called a "job" for the favorites and
hangers-on of the Court; the taking of the Canadian fortress was deemed so
easy a feat that even fools and Merry-Andrews could accomplish it. The
Americans had meantime made their preparations to co-operate with this
imposing armada; an army of colonists and Iroquois were at Albany, ready
for a dash on Montreal. But week after week passed away, and the fleet,
having got to Boston, seemed unable to get away from it. No doubt
Hovenden, Hill and the rest of the rabble were enjoying themselves in the
Puritan capital. The Boston of stern-visaged, sad-garmented,
scripture-quoting men and women, of unpaved streets and mean houses, was
gone; Boston in the first quarter of the Eighteenth Century was a city--a
place of gayety, fashion and almost luxury. The scarlet coats of the
British officers made the narrow but briskly-moving streets brilliant; but
even without them, the embroidered coats, silken small clothes and clocked
stockings, powdered wigs and cocked hats of the fine gentlemen, and the
wide hoops and imposing head-dresses of the women, made a handsome show.
People of many nationalities mingled in the throng, for commerce had
brought the world in all its various forms to the home of the prayers of
Winthrop and Higginson; the royal governors maintained a fitting state,
and traveled Americans, then as now, brought back with them from Europe
the freshest ideas of modishness and style. There were folk of quality
there, personages of importance and dignity, forming an inner aristocratic
circle who conversed of London and the Court, and whose august society it
was the dear ambition of the lesser lights to ape, if they could not join
it. Democratic manners were at a discount in these little hotbeds of
amateur cockneyism; the gloomy severities of the old-fashioned religion
were put aside; there was an increasing gap between the higher and the
lower orders of the population. This appearance was no doubt superficial;
and the beau-monde is never so numerous as its conspicuousness leads one
to imagine. When the rumblings of the Revolutionary earthquake began to
make themselves heard in earnest, the gingerbread aristocracy came
tumbling down in a hurry, and the old, invincible spirit, temporarily
screened by the waving of scented handkerchiefs, the flutter of fans, and
the swish of hoop-skirts, made itself once more manifest and dominant. But
that epoch was still far off; for the present court was paid to Hovenden
and his officers; and the British coffee-house in King Street was a noble
sight.

What bottles of wine those warriors drank, what snuff they took, what
long pipes they smoked, how they swore and ruffled, and what tales they
told of Marlborough and the wars! The British army swore frightfully in
Flanders, and in King Street, too. There, also, they read the news in the
newspapers of the day, and discussed matters of high policy and strategy,
while the civilians listened with respectful admiration. And see how that
dapper young officer seated in the window arches his handsome eyebrows and
smirks as two pretty Boston girls go by! Yes, it is no wonder that the
British fleet needed a long time to refit in Boston harbor, before going
up to annihilate those French jumping-jacks on the banks of the St.
Lawrence. "La, Captain, I hope you won't get hurt!" says pretty Miss
Betty, with her white wig and her beauty spots; and that heroic young
gentleman lifts her hand to his lips, and swears deeply that, for a glance
from her bright eyes, he would go forth and capture Quebec single-handed.

While these dalliances were in progress, the French jumping-jacks were
putting things in order to receive their expected guests in a becoming
manner. They held a great pow-wow of representatives of Indian tribes from
all parts of the seat of the projected war, and bound them by compacts to
their assistance. Everybody, even the women, worked on the fortifications,
or on anything that might aid in the common defense. Before the end of
August, at which time the outlookers reported signs of a fleet of near a
hundred sail, flying the British flag, all was ready for them in the
French strongholds. So now let the mighty combat begin.

But it was not to come this time: the era of William Pitt and General
Wolfe was nearly half a century distant. The latter would not be born for
sixteen years, and the former was a pap-eating babe of three. Meanwhile
the redoubtable Hovenden was snoring in bed, while his fleet was
struggling in a dense fog at night, being driven on the shoals of the Egg
Islands near the mouth of the St. Lawrence. "For the Lord's sake, come on
deck!" roars Captain Goddard, thrusting his head into the cabin for the
second time, "or we shall all be lost!" Thus adjured, the old imbecile
huddles on his dressing gown and slippers, and finds himself, sure enough,
close on a lee shore. He made shift to get his own vessel out of harm's
way, but eight others went down, and near nine hundred men were drowned.
"Impossible to go on," was the vote of the council of war the next
morning; and "It's all for the best," added this remarkable admiral; "for
had we got to Quebec, ten or twelve thousand of us must have perished of
cold and hunger; Providence took eight hundred to save the rest!"

So back they went, with their tails between their legs, without having
had a glimpse of the citadel which they were to have captured without an
effort; and of course the army waiting at Albany for the word to advance
got news of a different color, and Montreal was as safe as Quebec. In the
west, the Foxes, having planned an attack on Detroit, did really lay siege
to it; but Du Buisson, who defended it, summoned a swarm of Indian allies
to his aid, and the Foxes found that the boot was on the other leg; they
were all either slain or carried into slavery. Down in the Carolinas, a
party of Tuscaroras attacked a settlement of Palatines near Pamlico Sound,
and wiped them out; and some Huguenots at Bath fared little better.
Disputes between the governor and the burgesses prevented aid from
Virginia; but Barnwell of South Carolina succeeded in making terms with
the enemy. A desultory and exhausting warfare continued however,
complicated with an outbreak of yellow fever, and it was not until 1713
that the Tuscaroras were driven finally out of the country, and were
incorporated with the Iroquois in the north. The war in Europe had by that
time come also to an end, and the treaty of Utrecht brought about an
ambiguous peace for a generation.

George I. now became king of England; because he was the son of Sophia,
granddaughter of James I., and professed the Protestant religion. He was a
Hanoverian German, and did not understand the English language; he was
stupid and disreputable, and better fitted to administer a German
bierstube than a great kingdom. But the Act of Settlement of 1701 had
stipulated that if William or Anne died childless, the Protestant issue of
Sophia should succeed. That such a man should prove an acceptable
sovereign both to Great Britain and her American colonies, showed that the
individuality on the throne had become secondary to the principles which
he stood for; besides, George profited by the easy, sagacious,
good-humored leadership of that unprincipled but common-sensible
man-of-the-world, Sir Robert Walpole, who was prime minister from 1715 to
1741, with an interval of only a couple of years. Walpole's aim was to
avoid wars and develop commerce and manufactures; and while he lived, the
colonies enjoyed immunity from conflicts with the French and Spanish.

They were not to forget the use of arms, however; for the Indians were
inevitably encroached upon by the expanding white population, and resented
it in the usual way. In 1715 the Yemasses began a massacre on the Carolina
borders; they were driven off by Charles Craven, after the colonists had
lost four hundred men. The proprietors had given no help in the war, and
after it was over, the colony renounced allegiance to them, and the
English government supported their revolt, regarding it in the light of an
act of loyalty to George. Francis Nicholson, a governor by profession, and
of great experience in that calling, was appointed royal governor, and
made peace with the tribes; and in 1729 the crown bought out the claims of
the proprietors. North Carolina, without a revolt, enjoyed the benefits
obtained by their southern brethren. The Cherokees became a buffer against
the encroachments of the French from the west.

In the north, meanwhile, the Abenakis, in sympathy with the French,
claimed the region between the Kennebec and the St. Croix, and applied to
the French for assistance. Sebastian Rasles, a saintly Jesuit priest and
Indian missionary, had made his abode at Norridgwock on the Kennebec; he
was regarded by Massachusetts as an instigator of the enemy. They seized
his post, he escaping for the time; the Indians burned Brunswick; but in
1723 Westbrooke with a company of hardy provincials, who knew more of
Indian warfare than the Indians themselves, attacked an Indian fort near
the present Bangor and destroyed it; the next year Norridgwock was
surprised, and Rasles slain. He met his death with the sublime
cheerfulness and courage which were the badge of his order. French
influence in northeastern Massachusetts was at an end, and John Lovewell,
before he lost his life by an ambush of Saco Indians at Battle Brook, had
made it necessary for the Indians to sue for peace. Commerce took the
place of religion as a subjugating force, and an era of prosperity began
for the northeastern settlements.

There was no settled boundary between northern New York and the French
regions. Each party used diplomatic devices to gain advantage. Both built
trading stations on doubtful territory, which developed into forts. Burnet
of New York founded Oswego in 1727, and gained a strip of land from the
Iroquois; France built a fort on Lake Champlain in 1731. Six years before
that, they had established, by the agency of the sagacious trader
Joncaire, a not less important fort at Niagara. Upon the whole, the French
gained the better of their rivals in these negotiations.

Louisiana, as the French possessions, or claims, south of Canada were
called, was meanwhile bidding fair to cover most of the continent west of
the Alleghanies and north of the indeterminate Spanish region which
overspread the present Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Mexico.
No boundary lines could be run in those enormous western expanses; and it
made little practical difference whether a given claim lay a thousand
miles this way or that. But on the east it was another matter. The French
pursued their settled policy of conciliating the Indians wherever they
hoped to establish themselves; but though this was well, it was not
enough. Narrow though the English strip of territory was, the inhabitants
greatly outnumbered the French, and were correspondingly more wealthy.
Spotswood of Virginia, in 1710, was for pushing out beyond the mountains,
and Logan of Pennsylvania also called Walpole's attention to the troubles
ahead; but the prime minister would take no action. On the other hand, the
white population of Louisiana was ridiculously small, and their trade
nothing worth mentioning; but when Anthony Crozar resigned the charter he
had received for the district, it was taken up by the famous John Law, the
English goldsmith's son, who had become chief financial adviser of the
Regent of France; and immediately the face of things underwent a change
like the magic transformations of a pantomime.

The Regent inherited from Louis XIV. a debt which there was not money
enough in all France to pay. Law had a plan to pay it by the issue of
paper. Louisiana offered itself as just the thing for purposes of
investment, and a pretext for the issue of unlimited "shares." Not to
speak of the gold and silver, there was unlimited wealth in the unknown
country, and Law assumed that it could be produced at once. Companies were
formed, and thousands of settlers rushed to the promised paradise. But we
have to do with the Mississippi Bubble only as it affected America. The
Bubble burst, but the settlers remained, and were able to prosper, in
moderation, like other settlers in a fertile country. A great area of land
was occupied. Local tribes of Indians joined in a massacre of the
colonists in 1729. They in turn were nearly exterminated by the French
forces during the next two years, but the war aroused a new hostility
among the red tribes against the French, which redounded to the English
advantage. In 1740, Bienville was more than willing to make a peace, which
left to France no more than nominal control of the tract of country
drained by the southern twelve hundred miles of the Mississippi. The
population, after all the expense and efforts of half a century, numbered
about five thousand white persons, with upward of two thousand slaves. The
horse is his who rides it. The French had not proved themselves as good
horsemen as the English. The English colonies had at the same time a
population of about half a million; their import and export trade
aggregated nearly four million dollars; they had a wide and profitable
trade; and the only thing they could complain of was the worthless or
infamous character of the majority of the officials which the shameless
corruption of the Walpole administration sent out to govern--in other
words, to prey upon--them. But if this was the only subject of complaint,
it could not be termed a small subject. It meant the enforcement of the
Navigation Acts in their worst form, and the restriction of all manner of
manufactures. Manufactures would tend to make the colonies set up for
themselves, and therefore they must be forbidden:--such was the
undisguised argument. It was a case of the goose laying golden eggs.
America had in fact become so enormously valuable that England wanted it
to become profit and nothing else--and all the profit to be England's.
They still failed to realize that it was inhabited by human beings, and
that those human beings were of English blood. And because the northern
colonies, though the more industrious, produced things which might
interfere with British goods, therefore they were held down more than the
southern colonies, which grew only tobacco, sugar, rice and indigo, which
could in no degree interfere with the sacred shopkeepers and mill-owners
of England. An insanity of blindness and perversity seized upon the
English government, and upon most of the people; they actually were
incapable of seeing justice, or even their own best interests. It seems
strange to us now; but it was a mania, like that of witchcraft, though it
lasted thrice as many years as that did months.

The will of England in respect of the colonies became as despotic as
under the Stuarts; but though it delayed progress, it could not break down
the resistance of the assemblies; and Walpole would consent to no
suggestion looking toward enforcing it by arms. Stamp duties were spoken
of, but not enacted. The governors raged and complained, but the
assemblies held the purse-strings. Would-be tyrants like Shute of Boston
might denounce woe, and Crosby of New York bellow treason, but they were
fain to succumb. Paper money wrought huge mischief, but nothing could
prevent the growing power and wealth of the colonies, fed, also, by the
troubles in Europe. In 1727 the Irish, always friends of liberty, began to
arrive in large numbers. But what was of better augury than all else was
the birth of two men, one in Virginia, the other in Boston. The latter was
named Benjamin Franklin: the former, George Washington.

CHAPTER ELEVENTH

QUEM JUPITER VULT PERDERE

There are times when, upon nations as upon individuals, there comes a
wave of evil tendency, which seems to them not evil, but good. Under its
influence they do and think things which afterward amaze them in the
retrospect. But such ill seasons are always balanced by the presence and
opposition of those who desire good, whether from selfish or altruistic
motives. And since good alone has a root, connecting it with the eternal
springs of life, therefore in the end it prevails, and the movement of the
race is on the whole, and in the lapse of time, toward better conditions.

England, during the Eighteenth Century, came under the influence of a
selfish spirit which could not but lead her toward disaster, though at the
time it seemed as if it promoted only prosperity and power. She thought
she could strengthen her own life by restricting the natural enterprise
and development of her colonies: that she could subsist by sucking human
blood. She believed that by compelling the produce of America to flow
toward herself alone, and by making America the sole recipient of her own
manufactures, she must be immeasurably and continually benefited; not
perceiving that the colonies could never reach the full limit of their
productiveness unless freedom were conceded to all the impulses of their
energy, or that the greater the number of those nations who were allowed
freely to supply colonial wants, the greater those wants would become.
Moreover, selfishness is never consistent, because it does not respect the
selfishness of others; and England, at the same time that she was
maintaining her own trade monopolies, was illicitly undermining the
similar monopolies of other nations. She promoted smuggling in the Spanish
West Indies, and made might right in all her dealings with foreign
peoples. The assiento--the treaty giving her exclusive right to supply the
West Indian islands with African slaves--was actively carried out, and the
slave-trade reached enormous proportions; it is estimated that from three
to nine millions of Africans were imported into the American and Spanish
colonies during the first half of the Eighteenth Century, yielding a
revenue for their importation alone of at least four hundred million
dollars. But the profit did not end there; for their labor on the
plantations in the southern colonies (where alone they could be used in
appreciable numbers) multiplied the production and diminished the cost of
the articles of commerce which those colonies raised. There were
individuals, almost from the beginning, who objected to slavery on grounds
of abstract morality; and others who held that a converted African should
cease to be a slave. But these opinions did not impress the bulk of the
people; and laws were passed classing negroes with merchandise. "The trade
is very beneficial to the country" was the stereotyped reply to all
humanitarian arguments. The cruelties of transportation in small vessels
were regarded as an unavoidable, if disagreeable, necessity; it was
pointed out that the masters of slaves would be prompted by self-interest
to treat them well after they were landed; and it was obvious that
negroes, after a generation of captivity, were less remote from
civilization than when fresh from Africa.

The good to balance this ill was supplied by the American colonies. Their
resistance to English selfishness may have been in part animated by
selfishness of their own; but it none the less had justice and right
behind it. In any argument on fundamental principles, the colonists always
had the better of it. Their rights as free men and as chartered
communities were indefeasible, were always asserted, and never given up.
They did not hesitate to disregard the more unjust of England's exactions
and restrictions; it was only by such defiance that they maintained their
life. And against the importation of slaves there was a general feeling,
even among the Southern planters; because, not to speak of other
considerations, they multiplied there to an alarming extent, and the fact
that they cheapened production and lowered prices was manifestly as
unwelcome to the planters as it was favorable to English traders.

But in order to be effective, the protest of a people--their
enlightenment, their virtue and patriotism, their courage and philosophy,
their firmness and self-reliance, their hatred of shams, dishonesty and
tyranny--must be embodied and summed up in certain individuals among them,
who may thus be recognized by the community as their representatives in
the fullest sense, and therefore as their natural champions and leaders.
America has never lacked such men, adapted to her need; and at this period
they were coming to maturity as Franklin and Washington. They will be with
us during the critical hours of our formative history, and we shall have
opportunity to measure their characters. Meanwhile there is another good
man deserving of passing attention; not born on our soil, but meriting to
be called, in the best sense, an American. In the midst of a corrupt and
self-seeking age, he was unselfish and pure; and while many uttered pretty
sentiments of philanthropy, and devised fanciful Utopias for the
transfiguration of the human race, he went to work with his hands and
purse as well as with his heart and head, and created a home and happiness
for unhappy and unfortunate people in one of the loveliest and most
fertile spots in the western world. If he was not as wise as Penn, he was
as kind; and if his colony did not succeed precisely as he had planned it
should, at any rate it became a happy and prosperous settlement, which
would not have existed but for him. He had not fully fathomed the truth
that in order to bestow upon man the best chance for earthly felicity, we
must, after having provided him with the environment and the means for it,
let him alone to work it out in his own way. But he had such magnanimity
that when he found that his carefully-arranged and detailed schemes were
inefficient, he showed no resentment, and did not try to enforce what had
seemed to him expedient, against the wishes of his beneficiaries; but
retired amiably and with dignity, and thus merited the purest gratitude
that men may properly accord to a man.

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