less real, and was but mitigated by an order from Government, allowing small vessels to bring victuals and fuel into the harbour, from various places along the coast, with a proviso for searching them at Marblehead, to prevent the introduction of other goods. Thirty thousand townsfolk, the busiest English industrial and mercantile community beyond the seas, were reduced to compulsory idleness; a multitude of sailors, shipwrights, coopers, packers, store-keepers, and porters, lounged sadly in the streets, on the quays and wharves, in the vacant building-yards and workshops, or sullenly looked forth upon the interdicted water on which they were forbidden to launch the smallest boat.* This was the state of things decreed by Parliament, and by George III., for the correction of political errors in the minds of Americans. On the very next day after the shutting up of the port of Boston, came from London the news of the two other Acts of Parliament, by which all the chartered franchises and the old political constitution of Massachusetts were utterly destroyed; while the provincial judges and magistrates were deprived of their ordinary jurisdiction, so far should be needed to check any deeds of violence which the soldiery, or other Government servants and partisans, might afterwards perpetrate in the helpless city. The Acts were known to be in progress at Westminster, but they only obtained the Royal assent on the 20th of May. These were terrible blows at American civil liberty; and how to ward them off was a care even more urgent than to relieve the present distress of the Boston people. It was known, too, that General Gage had particular instructions to seize the persons of the leading Boston patriots, and send them to England for Bancroft, Vol. VI., chap. 4. "The law was executed with a rigour that went beyond the intentions of its authors. Not a scow could be manned by oars to bring an ox, or a sheep, or a bundle of hay from the islands. All water-carriage from pier to pier, though but of lumber or bricks or lime, was strictly forbidden. The boats between Boston and Charleston could not ferry a parcel of goods across Charles River; the fishermen of Marblehead, when, from their hard pursuit, they bestowed quintals of dried fish on the poor of Boston, were obliged to transport their offerings in waggons by a circuit of thirty miles." We do not impugn the substantial accuracy of this description; but it does not readily agree, in the particulars of the sentence last quoted, with the effect of the Treasury instructions, dated March 31st, to which Mr. Bancroft has nowhere alluded, and by which coasting vessels, with fuel or victuals for the town, were exempted from the blockade. The remainder of his description may be admitted. "The warehouses of the thrifty merchants were at once made valueless; the costly wharves, which extended far into the channel, and were so lately covered with the produce of the tropics and with English fabrics, were become solitary places; the harbour, which had resounded incessantly with the cheering voices of prosperous commerce, was now disturbed by no sounds but from British vessels of war." trial upon the charge of treason; but this was the least anxiety for men like Adams, Warren, Hancock, and others, who were ready to sacrifice themselves, yet who knew that Gage had no wish to harm them. The military Governor, indeed, was a dull, good-natured sort of man, apt to swagger about what he would do, and to promise his Ministerial patrons a vast display of energetic authority, but inclined to live and let live, on good-neighbourly terms, with the people whom he offered to rule. Still, he would doubtless have obeyed peremptory orders for the arrest of the alleged Boston traitors, if no discretion had been left him in the matter; but Lord Dartmouth, the Secretary of State, was himself much indisposed to acts of personal severity; nor were such acts congenial to Lord North. The Massachusetts political leaders were thus left free to take counsel with their associates, and to avail themselves of existing means of opposition, during those Midsummer weeks of uncertainty, while the new machinery of provincial government, in the clumsy and feeble hands of Gage, could not speedily be got into working order. It was not till the 6th of August, as we shall observe, that authentic official copies of the Acts which became law on the 20th of May were put into his hands, with that which enabled him to quarter his troops in the towns of Massachusetts. The intervening period was at the disposal of the popular party for labours of agitation and organisation, preparatory to a General Congress. They lost no time in making use of their advantages; nor was this activity at Boston diminished by the removal of the seat of government and Provincial Assembly to Salem. Faneuil Hall, with the Boston Committee of Correspondence, augmented by those of the neighbouring townships or villages, Dorchester, Brookline, Roxbury, Charleston, and Cambridge, was the headquarters of important business in that summer of 1774. The first act of those who here directed all the social opinion of Massachusetts, and in some degree of New England, was to issue a form of "Solemn League and Covenant," whereby its subscribers were bound not to purchase or consume any British commodity after the end of August. This was circulated everywhere, as "the last and only means of preserving the land from slavery, without drenching it in blood." It was upon this proposal, as we have seen, that the prevailing party in New York and Philadelphia differed from that of Massachusetts. The next point was to get the provincial Legislature, as upon former occasions, to initiate the combined arrangements of the different provinces for a General 1774.] EFFECTS OF THE BOSTON PORT ACT. Congress; and it would then be requisite to have a provincial convention expressly for the election of delegates to the proposed Congress. This was the outline of the political scheme; but several other matters urgently demanded attention. The Boston Port Act enjoined that the town should pay full compensation to the East India Company for the tea which had been destroyed. "Don't pay for an ounce of the damned tea," wrote one of the staunch Southern friends of Boston, Christopher Gadsden, of South Carolina. It would never do to compromise that matter, for additional shipments of tea had since been made. A vessel named the Fortune, about the end of February, came to Boston with some, which the people threw overboard; another cargo, on the 19th of March, was similarly treated at New York. Only by the loss of such consignments were the owners to be compelled to desist from relying upon the enforcement of the Customs' duty. The citizens of Boston, moreover, were too well aware that they would not, by complying with this clause of the penal enactment, obtain the Royal forgiveness and the opening of their port, unless they would also consent to the abolition of the Massachusetts Constitutional Charter. For these reasons, it was obviously not their policy to offer payment for the tea; let the British Government pay for it. Such was the decision of a town meeting on the 17th of June, notwithstanding the encampment of two regiments, the 4th and the 43rd, on Boston Common, and the reinforcements of artillery and infantry at Castle William. On the 4th of July, a day which was destined otherwise to become celebrated, the forces on the Common, almost beleaguering the land side of Boston, were increased by the 5th and 38th Regiments, with a train of cannon, while Admiral Graves had a powerful squadron of war-ships in the silent harbour. The undaunted town, promptly suppressing an effort made by some timid or selfish tradesmen to advocate unworthy submission, went on signing its pledge against the luxuries imported from England. This method of passive resistance, General Gage denounced, by proclamation, as an act of traitorous hostility to the King and Parliament, and commanded the instant arrest of all persons who should dare to publish, to sign, or to invite others to sign, the non-importation agree ment. All eyes were turned on Boston; and from every other town, district, and province of that which was soon to be called "the American Union," hands were stretched with gifts of food, clothing, and money, to comfort her distressed population. Salem and Marblehead, the neighbouring seaports, instead of seeking to profit by her mercantile extinction for the time, offered the free use of their maritime accommodation, without cost or charge, to her strangled and stifled trade. To feed the unemployed and destitute working-class families of Boston, subscriptions were opened all over America; the list of which for Virginia was headed by George Washington with a donation of £50. The stores of corn and flour, sheep and cattle, from the inland farms, and the produce of coast fisheries, or of the hunter's quest in the backwoods, or of the ricefields in South Carolina, were brought by the land road into the suffering city. It was a spectacle of no slight moral interest; a sign of the birth, in painful throes, of a young English nation, about to live its own life apart from the mother country, and endowed with equal capacities of social welfare. The General Congress of American Provinces, to which all looked forward through the summer of 1774, was to begin the task of protecting and fostering that birth of a nation. Its appointment to meet at Philadelphia, on the 1st of September, was resolved upon by the Massachusetts House of Representatives at Salem, sitting with locked doors, while the Governor's message of dissolution was kept outside, on the 17th of June. Meantime, before we come to view this important assembly of delegates from so many different British colonies on the Western Continent, a statistical account of their population and resources will not be inopportune. CHAPTER XI. An ominous Lull in American History-State of the Colonies shortly before the Outbreak of the War of Independence-Burke on American Population-Condition of Virginia, and Divisions in Virginian Society-Patrick Henry-Condition of Massachusetts-Opposition to the taking of a Census-New England Austerity of Manners-Decay of the Indian RaceResistance of the Americans to English Taxation-Colonisation of Wyoming-Religion in New England-Progress of Maryland-Frederick, Lord Baltimore-The Carolinas-The Middle States-Georgia-General Development and Tendencies of America-The Coming Change. A GREAT and ominous lull in American history preceded the disruption of the Thirteen Provinces from the British Dominions. There can be little doubt that the approach of some mighty crisis was felt by anticipation, and that the colonies were, as if spontaneously, preparing for it. The triple war had of course not been without its influences; that against the mis-named Indians, the French, and the Spaniards, had awakened a martial spirit, which not even the sense of exhaustion could quell; and yet the growth of pure domestic manners and social morals more than kept pace with the troubling influences of the times. The American Provinces, in a word, had been successful in their efforts to create a political existence for themselves, and the epoch was now at hand wherein they were to be compelled to establish this upon an independent and permanent basis. If we look at the materials then at their disposal, they will be found to present a picture which might not be unfavourably compared with that exhibited by many among the societies of the older world. They had begun, even as colonists, by laying deep and well-fitted foundations for their public life; they had created for themselves a military reputation by a tenacious resistance to the encroachments of the French; they had gone through a conflict for existence itself with the native races, to whom their predecessors had given only too much reason for fear and hatred. The wealth of the land had not increased; its population had been, proportionately speaking, somewhat diminished; both immigration and speculation had been checked; yet, in spite of all, the leading colonies were more opulent and flourishing at the Peace of Paris than when the high contracting parties signed the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. The great tobaccogrowing province of Virginia, in the year 1758, exported no less than seventy thousand hogsheads of its special produce, or the largest quantity ever carried across the seas in a single year; the average being 55,000 hogsheads. Five years later, its population was computed by some at 170,000, and by others at 200,000. In the absence of any census, however, these figures represent guesswork rather than statistics. If the opinions of the day be regarded, they are represented, on one side at any rate, by the celebrated language of Edmund Burke. "The first thing we have to consider is the number of people in the colonies. I have taken for some years a good deal of pains on this point. I can by no calculation justify myself in placing the number below two millions of inhabitants of our own Euro. pean blood and colour; besides at least half-a-million others, forming no inconsiderable part of the strength and opulence of the whole. There is no occasion to exaggerate. Whether I put the total too high or too low, it is of little moment. Such is the strength with which population shoots in that part of the world that, state the numbers as high as we will, while the dispute continues, the exaggeration ends. Whilst we are discussing any given magnitude, they are grown to it. Whilst we spend our time in deliberating on the mode of governing two millions, we shall find we have millions more to manage. Your children do not grow faster from infancy to manhood than they spread from families to communities, and from villages to nations." This passage, uttered in 1765, can never be omitted from any History of America. It is the preface to the War of Independence. More than half, however, of those who then peopled the Virginian soil were slaves; and the province appears to have been backward in its cultivation of the arts and sciences, though it is impossible to accept, on this point, all the assertions of contemporary writers, whose statements were often not less inaccurate than their prophecies were fallacious. Thus, one writer predicted that centuries must elapse before any outgrowth of educational institutions surrounded the parent college of William and Mary, in Virginia. The only importance of the opinion consists in the contrast it suggests between that solitary seminary and the multitude of academies which, in the course of one hundred years, were gathered about it. Even then, however, there was much exaggeration in the accounts given in England of the American colonies, which were far from being at the low intellectual standard described by writers like Burnaby, who represented, for example, that the Virginian dissenting denominations, in the aggregate, constituted only an insignificant minority, whereas they were exceed of ingly numerous. The chroniclers of that time, it must be remembered, were all more or less inspired by prejudice on account of the questions then rapidly arising, and growing into formidable proportions between the mother country and her dependencies. From one of them, however, we obtain a spirited picture which, compared with several others drawn by contemporary pens, will appear, upon the whole, just and accurate. Virginia occupied a peculiar, even an unique, position in the world. It stood alone; it had few relations with the great communities of the Eastern hemisphere; with the sister colonies its intercourse was irregular and rare; its very industry and commerce were, so to speak, of an isolated character; foreigners, as well as new settlers, were few and far between; and thus was created a state of society sui generis, though falling naturally into the inevitable series of elevations, levels, and abysses, characteristic of the organisations of mankind, subject or dominating, Imperial or Republican, everywhere. Particular families had amassed wealth, and preserved it for their posterity by a law of entail; and these riches were often enjoyed by men capable of making an intellectual and beneficent use of them. The Far West had no attractions, in those days, except for the hunter and the trapper; so that the principal inhabitants remained stationary, from generation to generation, and became an aristocracy of the soil, hardly less proud or less exclusive than any in Europe. Between them and the rest of the continent, moreover, a living barrier had been placed by the Irish settlers in the broad and fertile valley between North Mountain and Blue Ridge settlers who seem to have been objects of some repugnance to the slave-holding lowlanders. The German immigration had not long commenced, and never, indeed, had much tendency Southwards. Its future field was to be rather in the western territories, though a certain proportion found its way to Virginia and the Carolinas. The Dutch held to their old ground in New York and New Jersey, where the original names are to this day perpetuated; while the French still affected the south-west, and were numerous in Louisiana, and along the western margin of the Mississippi. There was a considerable scattering of them, however, among the sugar-plantations of Florida. Thus a community had been formed of different strata, wavy, as those of geology are, and occasionally blending. In the patrician State-for the colonies styled themselves States even then-of Virginia, the nobility of riches, where no titles existed, necessarily stood highest, and this was composed of the great landholders whose estates spread below tide 95 water on the banks of the main rivers, and who lived with a luxury frequently ruinous to themselves, and often exasperating to their less opulent neighbours. It is to be mentioned, at the same time, that they did not style themselves, as, at a later date, their countrymen did in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York, "the first people in the place:" their social superiority being incontestable, no necessity existed for asserting it. And, while proud and self-conscious to an extreme degree, they were a generous race, and the poor travellers of that age who recorded their reminiscences speak pleasantly of the hospitalities of the planter's table, laden from morning till night with hot wheaten bread, hominy, ham, eggs uncountable, wines, liqueurs, tongues, poultry, spiced meats, custards, creams, fruits, and a hundred various dainties in which the traditions of the Old World and the inventions of the New were combined. Next followed their immediate relatives, the semi-aristocrats of the colony, descendants of younger sons and daughters, who inherited all their haughtiness without their riches, were addicted to marrying early, were often more in debt than in luck, and added not much to the family honours.* But one class of these began, or, perhaps, it should be said, took part in, a work that has since proved of inestimable value to the continent of North America. These were termed, as they continued to be termed until lately, solitaires; that is, individuals or families who turned their backs upon the ripening civilisation that rose along the coast, plunged into the forest or the prairie, built huts, cleared and planted, drained swamps, put up fences, traced the outlines of miniature graveyards, felled wood, and dared all the dangers. of a wild life for the sake of its independence. They were not many in number; yet the paths they crushed and hewed through the brushwood have been converted into highways, along which steam-caravans of true American magnitude thunder daily. In their rear, and not in very favourable comparison with them, the biographer of Patrick Henry places the "pretenders;" men who, as he says, from vanity, or the influence of increasing wealth, or from that spirit of enterprise inseparable from talent, however immoral, sought to detach themselves from the plebeian ranks, to which they properly belonged, and imitated at a distance the manners and pretensions of the orders above them. Lastly-since, in the social scale, the negro ranked nowhere was the overseer, justly depicted, no doubt, in a majority of instances, as at once a slave to those superior, * Wirt's Life of Patrick Henry. |