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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Washington's instructions required him to proceed to Venango and
Waterford, a distance of more than four hundred miles, through forests and
over mountains, with rivers to cross and hostile Indians to beware of; and
it was the middle of November when he set out, with the most inclement
season of the year before him. Kit Gist, a hunter and trapper of the Natty
Bumppo order, was his guide; they laid their course through the dense but
naked forests as a mariner over a sullen sea. Four or five attendants,
including an interpreter, made up the party. Day after day they rode,
sleeping at night round a fire, with the snow or the freezing rain falling
on their blankets, and the immense silence of the winter woods around
them. On the 23d of the month they came to the point of junction between
two great rivers--the Monongahela and the Alleghany. A wild and solitary
spot it was, hardly visited till then by white men; the land on the fork
was level and broad, with mighty trees thronging upon it; opposite were
steep bluffs. The Alleghany hurried downward at the rate a man would walk;
the Monongahela loitered, deep and glassy. Washington had acted as
adjutant of a body of Virginia troops for the past two or three years, and
he examined the place with the eyes of a soldier as well as of a surveyor.
It seemed to him that a fort and a town could be well placed there; but in
the pure frosty air of that ancient forest, untenanted save by wild
beasts, there was no foreshadowing of the grimy smoke and roar, the
flaring smelting-works, the crowded and eager population of the Pittsburgh
that was to be. Having fixed the scene in his memory, Washington rode his
horse down the river bank, and plunging into the icy current, swam across.
On the northwest shore a fire was built, where the party dried their
garments, and slept the sleep of frontiersmen.

Conducted now by the Delawares, they crossed low-lying, fertile lands to
Logstown, where they got news of a junction between French troops from
Louisiana and from Erie. Arriving in due season at Venango, Washington
found the French officer in command there very positive that the Ohio was
theirs, and that they would keep it; they admitted that the English
outnumbered them; but "they are too dilatory," said the Frenchman, staring
up with an affectation of superciliousness at the tall, blue-eyed young
Virginian. The latter thanked the testy Gaul, with his customary grave
courtesy, and continued his journey to Fort Le Boeuf. It was a structure
characteristic of the place and period; a rude but effective redoubt of
logs and clay, with the muzzles of cannon pouting from the embrasures, and
more than two hundred boats and canoes for the trip down the river. "I
shall seize every Englishman in the valley," was the polite assurance of
the commander; but, being a man of pith himself, he knew another when he
saw him, and offered Washington the hospitalities of the post. But the
serious young soldier had no taste for hobnobbing, and returned at once to
Venango, where he found his horses unavailable, and continued southward on
foot, meeting bad weather and deep snow. He borrowed a deerskin shirt and
leggins from the tallest of the Indians, dismissed his attendants, left
the Indian trail, and struck out for the Forks by compass, with Gist as
his companion. A misguided red man, hoping for glory from the white
chief's scalp, prepared an ambush, and as Washington passed within a few
paces, pulled the trigger on him. He did not know that the destiny of half
the world hung upon his aim; but indeed the bullet was never molded that
could draw blood from Washington. The red man missed; and the next moment
Gist had him helpless, with a knife at his throat. But no: the man who
could pour out the lives of his country's enemies, and of his own
soldiers, without stint, when duty demanded it, and could hang a gallant
and gently nurtured youth as a spy, was averse from bloodshed when only
his insignificant self was concerned. Gist must sulkily put up his knife,
and the would-be assassin was suffered to depart in peace. But in order to
avoid the possible consequences of this magnanimity, the envoy and his
companion traveled without pausing for more than sixty miles. And then,
here was the Alleghany to cross again, and no horse to help one. Swimming
was out of the question, even for the iron Washington, for the river was
hurtling with jagged cakes of ice.

A day's hacking with a little hatchet cut down trees enough--not apple
trees--to make a raft, on which they adventured; but in mid-stream
Washington's pole upset him, and he was fain to get ashore on an island.
There must they pass the night; and so cold was it, that the next morning
they were able to reach the mainland dry shod, on the ice. What was
crossing the Delaware (almost exactly twenty-three years afterward)
compared to this? Washington was destined to do much of his work amid snow
and ice; but for aught anybody could say, the poles or the equator were
all one to him.

In consequence of his report a fort was begun on the site of Pittsburgh,
and he was appointed lieutenant-colonel to take charge of it, with a
hundred and fifty men, and orders to destroy whomsoever presumed to stay
him. Two hundred square miles of fertile Ohio lands were to be their
reward. An invitation to other colonies to join in the assertion of
English ownership met with scanty response, or none at all. The idea of a
union was in the air, but it was complicated with that old bugbear of a
regular revenue to be exacted by act of Parliament, which Shirley and the
others still continued to press with hungry zeal; while the assemblies
were not less set upon making all grants annual, with specifications as to
person and object. While the matter hung in the wind, the Virginians were
exposed to superior forces; but in the spring of 1754 Washington, with
forty men, surprised a party under Jumonville, defeated them, killed
Jumonville, and took the survivors prisoners. Washington was exposed to
the thickest showers of the bullets; they whistled to him familiarly, and
"believe me," he assured a correspondent, "there is something charming in
the sound." His life was to be sweetened by a great deal of that kind of
charm.

But the French were gathering like hornets, and the Lieutenant-colonel
must needs take refuge in a stockaded post named Fort Necessity, where his
small force was besieged by seven hundred French and Indians who, in a
nine hours' attack, killed thirty of his men, but used up most of their
own ammunition. A parley resulted in Washington's marching out with all
his survivors and their baggage and retiring from the Ohio valley. The war
was begun; and it is worth noting that Washington's command to "Fire!" on
Jumonville's party was the word that began it. But still the other
colonists held off. The Six Nations began to murmur: "The French are men,"
said they; "you are like women." In June, 1754, a convocation or congress
of deputies from all colonies north of the Potomac came together at
Albany. Franklin was among them, with the draught of a plan of union in
his ample pocket, and dauntless and deep thoughts in his broad mind. He
was always far in advance of his time; one of the most "modern" men of
that century; but he had the final excellence of wisdom which consists in
never forcing his contemporaries to bite off more than there was
reasonable prospect of their being able to chew. He lifted them gently up
step after step of the ascent toward the stars.

Philadelphia is a central spot (this was the gist of his proposal), so
let it be the seat of our federal government. Let us have a triennial
grand council to originate bills, allowing King George to appoint the
governor-general who may have a negative voice, and who shall choose the
military officers, as against the civil appointees of the council. All war
measures, external land purchases and organization, general laws and taxes
should be the province of the federal government, but each colony should
keep its private constitution, and money should issue only by common
consent. Once a year should the council meet, to sit not more than six
weeks, under a speaker of their own choosing.--In the debate, the scheme
was closely criticised, but the suave wielder of the lightning gently
disarmed all opponents, and won a substantial victory--"not altogether to
my mind"; but he insisted upon no counsel of perfection. England, and some
of the colonies themselves, were somewhat uneasy after thinking it over;
mutual sympathy is not created by reason. England doubted on other
grounds; a united country might be more easy to govern than thirteen who
each demanded special treatment; but then, what if the federation decline
to be governed at all? Meanwhile, there was the federation; and Franklin,
looking westward, foresaw the Nineteenth Century.

[Illustration: Death of General Braddock]

Doubtless, however, outside pressure would be necessary to re-enforce the
somewhat lukewarm sentiment among the colonies in favor of union. A review
of their several conditions at this time would show general prosperity and
enjoyment of liberty, but great unlikenesses in manners and customs and
private prejudices. Virginia, most important of the southern group, showed
the apparent contradiction of a people with republican ideas living after
the style of aristocrats; breeding great gentlemen like Washington,
Jefferson, Madison and Patrick Henry, who were to be leaders in the work
of founding and defending the first great democracy of the world. Maryland
was a picturesque principality under the rule of a dissolute young prince,
who enjoyed a great private revenue from his possessions, and yet
interfered but little with the individual freedom of his subjects.
Pennsylvania was administering itself on a basis of sheer civic equality,
and was absorbing from Franklin the principles of liberal thought and
education. New York was so largely tinged with Dutchmanship that it
resented more than the others the authority of alien England, and fought
its royal governors to the finish. New England was an aggregation of
independent towns, each a little democracy, full of religious and
educational vigor. In Delaware, John Woolman the tailor was denouncing
slavery with all the zeal and arguments of the Garrisons of a century
later. These were incongruous elements to be bound into a fagot; but there
was a policy being consolidated in England which would presently give them
good reason for standing together to secure rights which were more
precious than private pet traditions and peculiarities. Newcastle became
head of the English government; he appointed the absurd Duke of
Cumberland, captain-general of the English army, to the direction of
American military affairs; and he picked out an obstinate, ruffianly,
stupid martinet of a Perthshire Scotchman, sixty years old and of ruined
fortunes, to lead the English forces against the French in America.
Braddock went over armed with the new and despotic mutiny bill, and with
directions to divest all colonial army officers of their rank while in his
service. He was also to exact a revenue by royal prerogative, and the
governors were to collect a fund to be expended for colonial military
operations. This was Newcastle's notion of what was suitable for the
occasion. In the meantime Shirley, persistently malevolent, advocated
parliamentary taxation of the colonies and a congress of royal governors;
and to the arguments of Franklin against the plan, suggested colonial
representation in Parliament: which Franklin disapproved unless all
colonial disabilities be removed, and they become in all political
respects an integral portion of England. During the discussion, the
colonies themselves were resisting the royal prerogative with embarrassing
unanimity. Braddock, on landing and finding no money ready, was exceeding
wroth; but the helpless governors told him that nothing short of an act of
Parliament would suffice; possibly not even that. Taxation was the one cry
of every royal office-holder in America. What sort of a tax should it be?
--Well, a stamp-tax seemed the easiest method: a stamp, like a mosquito,
sucks but little blood at a time, but mosquitoes in the aggregate draw a
great deal. But the stamp act was to be delayed eleven years more, and
then its authors were to receive an unpleasant surprise.

There was a strong profession of reluctance on both the French and
English side to come formally to blows; both sent large bodies of troops
to the Ohio valley, "but only for defense." Braddock was ready to advance
in April, if only he had "horses and carriages"; which by Franklin's
exertions were supplied. The bits of dialogue and comment in which this
grizzled nincompoop was an interlocutor, or of which he was the theme, are
as amusing as a page from a comedy of Shakespeare. Braddock has been
called brave; but the term is inappropriate; he could fly into a rage when
his brutal or tyrannical instincts were questioned or thwarted, and become
insensible, for a time, even to physical danger. Ignorance, folly and
self-conceit not seldom make a man seem fearless who is a poltroon at
heart. Braddock's death was a better one than he deserved; he raged about
the field like a dazed bull; fly he could not; he was incapable of
adopting any intelligent measures to save his troops; on the contrary he
kept reiterating conventional orders in a manner that showed his wits were
gone. The bullet that dropped him did him good service; but his honor was
so little sensitive that he felt no gratitude at being thus saved the
consequences of one of the most disgraceful and willfully incurred defeats
that ever befell an English general. The English troops upon whom,
according to Braddock, "it was impossible that the savages should make any
impression," huddled together, and shot down their own officers in their
blundering volleys. In the narrow wood path they could not see the enemy,
who fired from behind trees at their leisure. Half of the men, and
sixty-three out of the eighty-six officers, were killed or wounded. In
that hell of explosions, smoke, yells and carnage, Washington was
clear-headed and alert, and passed to and fro amid the rain of bullets as
if his body were no more mortal than his soul. The contingent of Virginia
troops--the "raw American militia," as Braddock had called them, "who have
little courage or good will, from whom I expect almost no military
service, though I have employed the best officers to drill them":--these
men did almost the only fighting that was done on the English side, but
they were too few to avert the disaster.

The expedition had set out from Turtle Creek on the Monongahela on the
ninth of July--twelve hundred men. The objective point was Fort Duquesne,
"which can hardly detain me above three or four days," remarked the dull
curmudgeon. No scouts were thrown out: they walked straight into the
ambuscade which some two hundred French and six hundred Indians had
prepared for them. The slaughter lasted two hours; there was no
maneuvering. Thirty men of the three Virginia companies were left alive;
they stood their ground to the last, while the British regulars "ran as
sheep before hounds," leaving everything to the enemy. Washington did
whatever was possible to prevent the retreat from becoming a blind panic.
When the rout reached the camp, Dunbar, the officer in charge there,
destroyed everything, to the value of half a million dollars, and ran with
the rest. Reviewing the affair, Franklin remarks with a demure arching of
the eyebrow that it "gave us Americans the first suspicion that our
exalted ideas of the prowess of British regular troops had not been well
founded."

It was indeed an awakening for the colonists. For all their bold
resistance to oppression, they had never ceased to believe that an English
soldier was the supreme and final expression of trained and disciplined
force; and now, before their almost incredulous eyes, the flower of the
British army had been beaten, and the bloody remnant stampeded into a
shameful flight by a few hundred painted savages and Frenchmen. They all
had been watching Braddock's march; and they never forgot the lesson of
his defeat. From that time, the British regular was to them only a
"lobster-back," more likely, when it came to equal conflict with
themselves, to run away than to stand his ground.

Instead of throwing themselves into the arms of France, however, the
colonists loyally addressed themselves to helping King George out of his
scrape; and though they would not let him tax them, they hesitated not to
tax themselves.

Pennsylvania raised fifty thousand pounds, and Massachusetts sent near
eight thousand men to aid in driving the French from the northern border.
Acadia's time had come. Though the descendants of the Breton peasants, who
dated their settlement from 1604, had since the Peace of Utrecht nominally
belonged to England, yet their sentiments and mode of life had been
unaltered; Port Royal had been little changed by calling it Annapolis, and
the simple, old-fashioned Catholics loved their homes with all the
tenacity of six unbroken generations. Their feet were familiar in the
paths of a hundred and fifty quiet and industrious years; their houses
nestled in their lowly places like natural features of the landscape;
their fields and herds and the graves of their forefathers sweetened and
consecrated the land. They were a chaste, industrious, homely, pious, but
not an intellectual people; and to such the instinct of home is far
stronger than in more highly cultivated races. They had prospered in their
modest degree, and multiplied; so that now they numbered sixteen thousand
men, women and children. During the past few years, however, they had been
subjected to the unrestrained brutality of English administration in its
worst form; they had no redress at law, their property could be taken from
them without payment or recourse; if they did not keep their tyrant's
fires burning, "the soldiers shall absolutely take their houses for fuel."
Estate-titles, records, all that could identify and guarantee their
ownership in the means and conditions of livelihood, were taken; even
their boats and their antiquated firearms were sequestrated. And orders
were actually given to the soldiers to punish any misbehavior summarily
upon the first Acadian who came to hand, whether or not he were guilty of,
or aware of, the offense, and with absolutely no concern for the formality
of arrest or trial. In all the annals of Spanish brutality, there is
nothing more disgraceful to humanity than the systematic and enjoined
treatment of these innocent Bretons by the English, even before the
consummating outrage which made the whole civilized world stare in
indignant amazement.

It is a matter for keen regret that men born on our soil should have been
even involuntarily associated with this episode. The design was kept a
secret from all until the last moment; but one could wish that some
American had then committed an act of insubordination, though at the cost
of his life, by way of indicating the detestation which all civilized and
humane minds must feel for such an act. The colonists knew the value of
liberty; they had made sacrifices for it; they had felt the shadow of
oppression; and they might see, in the treatment of the Acadians, what
would have been their fate had they yielded to the despotic instincts of
England. The best and the worst that can be said of them is that they
obeyed orders, and looked on while the iniquity was being perpetrated.

The force of provincials and regulars landed without molestation, and
captured the feeble forts with the loss of but twenty killed. The Acadians
agreed to take the oath of fidelity, but stipulated not to be forced to
bear arms against their own countrymen. General Charles Lawrence, the
lieutenant-governor of Nova Scotia, replied to their plea that they be
allowed to have their boats and guns, that it was "highly arrogant,
insidious and insulting"; and Halifax, another of the companions in
infamy, added that they wanted their boats for "carrying provisions to the
enemy"--there being no enemy nearer than Quebec. As for the guns, "All
Roman Catholics are restrained from having arms, and are subject to
penalties if arms are found in their houses."--"Not the want of arms, but
our consciences, would engage us not to revolt," pleaded the unhappy men.
--"What excuse can you make," bellows Halifax, "for treating this
government with such indignity as to expound to them the nature of
fidelity?" The Acadians agreed to take the oath unconditionally: "By
British statute," they were thereupon informed, "having once refused, you
cannot after take the oath, but are popish recusants." Chief-justice
Belcher, a third of these British moguls, declared they obstructed the
progress of the settlement, and that all of them should be deported from
the province. Proclamation was then made, ordering them to assemble at
their respective posts; and in the morning they obeyed, leaving their
homes, to which, though they knew it not, they were never to return. "Your
lands and tenements, cattle of all kinds, and livestock of all sorts, are
forfeited to the crown," they were told, "and you yourselves are to be
removed from this province." They were kept prisoners, without food, till
the ships should be ready. Not only were they torn from their homes, but
families were separated, sons from their mothers, husbands from their
wives, daughters from their parents, and, as Longfellow has pictured to
us, lovers from one another. Those who tried to escape were hunted by the
soldiers like wild beasts, and "if they can find a pretext to kill them,
they will," said a British officer. They were scattered, helpless,
friendless and destitute, all up and down the Atlantic coast, and their
villages were laid waste. Lord Loudoun, British commander-in-chief in
America, on receiving a petition from some of them written in French, was
so enraged not only at their petitioning, but that they should presume to
do so in their own language, that he had five of their leading men
arrested, consigned to England, and sent as common seamen on English
men-of-war. No detail was wanting, from first to last, to make the crime
of the Acadian deportation perfect; and only an Irishman, Edmund Burke,
lifted his voice to say that the deed was inhuman, and done "upon
pretenses that, in the eye of an honest man, are not worth a farthing."
But Burke was not in Parliament until eleven years after the Acadians were
scattered.

The incident, from an external point of view, does not belong to the
history of the United States. Yet is it pertinent thereto, as showing of
what enormities the English of that age were capable. Their entire conduct
during this French war was dishonorable, and often atrocious. Forgetting
the facts of history, we often smile at the grumblings of the Continental
nations anent "Perfidious Albion" and "British gold." But the acts
committed by the English government during these years fully justify every
charge of corruption, treachery and political profligacy that has ever
been brought against them. It was a strange age, in which a great and
noble people were mysteriously hurried into sins, follies and disgraces
seemingly foreign to their character. It was because the people had
surrendered their government into alien and shameless hands. They deserved
their punishment; for it is nothing less than a crime, having known
liberty, either to deny it to others, or for the sake of earthly advantage
to consent to any compromise of it in ourselves.

CHAPTER TWELFTH

THE PLAINS OF ABRAHAM AND THE STAMP ACT

The gathering of soldiers from France, England and the colonies, and the
rousing of the Indians on one side and the other, made the great forest
which stretched across northern New York and New England populous with
troops and resonant with the sounds of war. Those solemn woodland aisles
and quiet glades were desecrated by marchings and campings, and in the
ravines and recesses lay the corpses of men in uniforms, the grim remains
of peasants who had been born three thousand miles away. Passing through
the depths of the wilderness, apparently remote from all human habitation,
suddenly one would come upon a fortress, frowning with heavy guns, and
surrounded by the log-built barracks of the soldiery, who, in the
intervals of siege and combat, passed their days impatiently, thinking of
the distant homes from which they came, and muttering their discontent at
inaction and uncertainty. The region round the junction of Lake George and
Lake Champlain, where stood the strongholds of Fort Edward and Fort
William Henry, of Crown Point and Ticonderoga, was the scene of many
desperate conflicts, between 1758 and 1780; and the wolves of the forest,
and the bears of the Vermont mountains, were disturbed in their lairs by
the tumults and the restless evolutions, and wandered eastward until they
came among the startled hamlets and frontier farms of the settlements. The
savagery of man, surpassing theirs, drove them to seek shelter amid the
abodes of man himself; but there was no safety for them there, as many a
bloody head and paws, trophies of rustic marksmanship, attested. The
dominion of the wilderness was approaching its end in America. Everywhere
you might hear the roll of the drum, and there was no family but had its
soldier, and few that did not have their dead. There were a score of
thousand British troops in the northern provinces, and every week brought
rumors and alarms, and portents of victory or defeat. The haggard
post-rider came galloping in with news from north and west, which the
throng of anxious village folks gather to hear. There have been
skirmishes, successes, retreats, surprises, massacres, retaliations; there
is news from Niagara and Oswego on far away Lake Ontario, and echoes of
the guns at Ticonderoga. There are proclamations for enlistment, and
requisitions for ammunition; and the tailors in the towns are busy cutting
out scarlet uniforms and decorating them with gold braid. Markets for the
supply of troops are established in the woods, far from any settled
habitations, where shrewd farmers bargain with the hungry soldiery for
carcasses of pigs and beeves, and for disheveled hens from distant
farmyards; the butcher's shop is kept under the spreading brandies of the
trees, from whose low limbs dangle the tempting wares, and a stump serves
as a chopping-block. Under the shrubbery, where the sun cannot penetrate,
are stored home-made firkins full of yellow butter, and great cheeses, and
heaps of substantial home-baked bread. Kegs of hard cider and spruce beer
and perhaps more potent brews are abroach, and behind the haggling and
jesting and bustle you may catch the sound of muskets or the whoop of the
Indians from afar. Meanwhile, in the settlements, all manner of industries
were stimulated, and a great number of women throughout the country, left
to take care of their children and themselves by the absence of their
men-folk, went into business of all kinds, and drove a thriving trade.
Lotteries were also popular, the promoters retaining a good share of the
profits after the nominal object of the transaction had been attained. It
was well that the war operations were carried on far from the populous
regions, so that only the fighters themselves were involved in the
immediate consequences. The battle was for the homes of posterity, where
as yet the woodman's ax had never been heard, except to provide defenses
against death, instead of habitations for life. Those who could not go to
the war sat round the broad country hearthstones at night, with the fire
of logs leaping up the great cavern of the chimney, telling stories of
past exploits, speculating as to the present, praying perhaps for the
future, and pausing now and then to listen to strange noises abroad in the
night-ridden sky--strains of ghostly music playing a march or a charge, or
the thunder of phantom guns.

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