The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910 Read online

  Why were they killed? Had they harmed their killers? Was any military advantage gained by their death?--They had harmed no one, and nothing was gained, or pretended to be gained, by their murder: nothing except to establish the principle that, since two countries in Europe were at war, those emigrants of theirs who had voyaged hither in quest of peace and happiness should lie in wait to destroy one another. Human sympathies have, sometimes, strange ways of avouching themselves.

  People become accustomed even to massacre. But the children born in these years, who were themselves to be the fathers and mothers of the generation of the Revolution, must have sucked in stern and fierce qualities with the milk from their mothers' breasts. No one, even in the midst of Massachusetts, was safe during that first decade of the Eighteenth Century. A single Indian, in search of glory, would spend weeks in creeping southward from the far border; he would await his chance long and patiently; he would leap out, and strike, and vanish again, leaving that silent horror behind him. Such deeds, and the constant possibility of them, left their mark upon the whole population. They grew up familiar with violent death in its most terrible forms. The effect of Indian warfare upon the natures of those who engage in it, or are subjected to its perils, is different from that of what we must call civilized fighting. The end as well as the aim of the Indian's battle is death--a scalp. Murder for the mere pleasure of murdering has an influence upon a community far more sinister than that of death by war waged for recognizable causes. The Puritans of the Eighteenth Century were another people than those of the Seventeenth. There had been reason in the early Indian struggles, when the savages might have hoped to exterminate the settlers and leave their wilderness a wilderness once more; but there could be no such hope now. The desire for revenge was awakened and fostered as it had never been before. Many other circumstances combined to modify the character of the people of New England during this century; but perhaps this new capacity for revenge was not the least potent of the influences that made the seven years of the Revolution possible.

  Peter Schuyler protested in vain against the "savage and boundless butchery" into which the conflict between "Christian princes, bound to the exactest laws of honor and generosity," was degenerating; but the only way to stop it appeared to be to extirpate the perpetrators; and to that end a fifth part of the population were constantly in arms. The musket became more familiar to their hands than the plow and spade; and their marksmanship was near perfection. They gradually developed a system of tactics of their own, foreign to the manuals. The first thing you were aware of in the provincial soldier was the puff of smoke from the muzzle of his weapon; almost simultaneously came the thud of his bullet in your breast, or crashing through your brain. He loaded his gun lying on his back beneath the ferns and shrubbery; he advanced or retreated invisibly, from tree to tree. Your only means of estimating his numbers was from your own losses. It was thus that the American troops afterward gained their reputation of being almost invincible behind an intrenchment; it gave its character to the engagements at Concord and along the Boston Road, and sent hundreds of redcoats to death on the slopes of Bunker Hill. It was not magnificent--to look at; but it was war; combined with the European tactics acquired later on, it survived reverses that would have driven other troops from the field, and, with Washington at the head, won our independence at last.

  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.