Chapter X: Part 10

So now, after so prolonged and annoying a delay, the royal libertine had his Puritan victim gagged and bound, and could proceed to enjoy her at his leisure. But it so fell out that the judgment against the charter was received in Boston on the second of July, 1685, whereas Charles II. died in London on February 6th of the same year; so that he did not get his reward after all: not, at least, the kind of reward he was looking for. But, so far as Massachusetts was concerned, it made little difference; since James II. was as much the foe of liberty as was his predecessor, and had none of his animal amiability. The last act of the Massachusetts assembly under the old order was the appointing of a day of fasting and prayer, to beseech the Lord to have mercy upon his people.

The reign of James II. was a black season for the northern American colonies; we can say no better of it than that it did not equal the bloody horrors which were perpetrated in Scotland between 1680 and 1687. Massacres did not take place in Massachusetts; but otherwise, tyranny did its perfect work. The most conspicuous and infamous figures of the time are Sir Edmund Andros and Edward Randolph.

Andros, born in 1637, was thirty-seven years of age when he came to the colonies as governor of New York on behalf of the Duke of York. He was a lawyer, and a man of energy and ability; and his career was on the whole successful, from the point of view of his employers and himself; his tenure of office in New York was eight years; he was governor of New England from 1686 to 1689, when he was seized and thrown in jail by the people, on the outbreak of the Revolution in England; and he afterward governed Virginia for seven years (1692-1698), which finished his colonial career. But from 1704 to 1706 the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, was intrusted to his rule; and he died in London, where he was born, in 1714, being then seventy-seven years old, not one day of which long life, so far as records inform us, was marked by any act or thought on his part which was reconcilable with generosity, humanity or honor. He was a tyrant and the instrument of tyranny, hating human freedom for its own sake, greedy to handle unrighteous spoils, mocking the sufferings he wrought, triumphing in the injustice he perpetrated; foul in his private life as he was wicked in his public career. A far more intelligent man than Berkeley, of Virginia, he can, therefore, plead less excuse than he for the evil and misery of which he was the immediate cause. But no earthly punishment overtook him; for kings find such men useful, and God gives power to kings in this world, that mankind may learn the evil which is in itself, and gain courage and nobility at last to cast it out, and trample it under foot.

James II. was that most dangerous kind of despot--a stupid, cold man; even his libertinism, as it was without shame, so was it without passion. In his public acts he plodded sluggishly from detail to detail, with eyes turned downward, never comprehending the larger scope and relations of things. He was incapable of perceiving the vileness, cruelty, or folly of what he did; the almost incredible murders in Scotland never for a moment disturbed his clammy self-complacency. Perhaps no baser or more squalid soul ever wore a crown; yet no doubt ever crept into his mind that he was God's chosen and anointed. His pale eyes, staring dully from his pale face, saw in the royal prerogative the only visible witness of God's will in the domain of England; the atmosphere of him was corruption and death. But from 1685 to 1688 this man was absolute master of England and her colonies; and the disease which he bred in English vitals was hardly cured even by the sharp medicine of the Boyne.

By the time Andros came to New England, he had learned his business. The year after his appointment to New York, he attempted to assert his sovereignty up to the Connecticut River; but he was opposed by deputy governor Leet, a chip of the old roundhead block, who disowned the patent of Andros and practically kicked him out of the colony. Connecticut paid for her temerity when the owner of Andros became king. In the meanwhile he returned to New York, where he was not wanted, but was tolerated; the settlers there were a comfortable people, and prosperous in the homely and simple style natural to them: they demanded civil rights in good, clear terms, and cannot be said to have been unduly oppressed at this time. New York for awhile included the Delaware settlements, and Andros claimed both east and west Jersey. The claim was contested by Carteret and by the Quakers. When the Jersey commerce began to be valuable, Andros demanded tribute from the ships, and shook the Duke's patent in the people's faces. They replied, rather feebly, with talk of Magna Charta. In 1682, the western part came by purchase into Quaker ownership, and, three years afterward, the eastern part followed by patent from the Duke. To trace the vicissitudes of this region to their end, it was surrendered to England in 1702, and united to New York; and in 1788, in compliance with the desire of the inhabitants, it became its own master. The settlers were of composite stock: Quakers, Puritans, and others; and at the time of the Scotch persecutions, large numbers of fugitive Covenanters established themselves on the eastern slopes. The principle on which land was distributed, in comparatively small parcels, made the Jerseys a favorite colony for honest and industrious persons of small means; and, upon the whole, life went well and pleasantly with them.

At the time of the return of Andros to England, in 1682, the assembly decreed free trade, and Dongan, the new Roman Catholic governor, permitted them to enact a liberal charter. In the midst of the happiness consequent upon this, the Duke became king and lost no time in breaking every contract that he had, in his unanointed state, entered into. Taxes arbitrarily levied, titles vacated in order to obtain renewal fees, and all the familiar machinery of official robbery were put in operation. But Dongan, a kindly Kildare Irishman--he was afterward Earl of Limerick--would not make oppression bitter; and the New Yorkers were not so punctilious about abstract principles as were the New England men. Favorable treaties were made with the Indians; and the despot's heel was not shod with iron, nor was it stamped down too hard. The Dongan charter, as it was called, remained in the colony's possession for over forty years. The rule of Dongan himself continued till 1688.

Andros, after an absence from the colonies of five years, during which time a native but unworthy New Englander, Joseph Dudley, had acted as president, came back to his prey with freshened appetite in 1686. He was royal governor of all New England. Randolph, an active subordinate under Dudley, had already destroyed the freedom of the press. Andros's power was practically absolute; he was to sustain his authority by force, elect his own creatures to office, make such laws as pleased him, and introduce episcopacy. He forbade any one to leave the colony without leave from himself; he seized a meeting house and made it into an Episcopal church, in spite of the protests of the Puritans, and the bell was rung for high-church service in spite of the recalcitrant Needham. Duties were increased; a tax of a penny in the pound and a poll tax of twenty pence were levied; and those who refused payment were told that they had no privilege, except "not to be sold as slaves." Magna Charta was no protection against the abolition of the right of Habeas Corpus: "Do not think the laws of England follow you to the ends of the earth!" Juries were packed, and Dudley, to avoid all mistakes, told them what verdicts to render. Randolph issued new grants for properties, and extorted grievous fees, declaring all deeds under the charter void, and those from Indians, or "from Adam," worthless. West, the secretary, increased probate duties twenty-fold. When Danforth complained that the condition of the colonists was little short of slavery, and Increase Mather added that no man could call anything his own, they got for answer that "it is not for his majesty's interest that you should thrive." In the history of Massachusetts, there is no darker day than this.

The great New England romancer, writing of this period a hundred and seventy years later, draws a vivid and memorable picture of the people and their oppressors. "The roll of the drum," he says, "had been approaching through Cornhill, louder and deeper, till with reverberations from house to house, and the regular tramp of martial footsteps, it burst into the street. A double rank of soldiers made their appearance, occupying the whole breadth of the passage, with shouldered matchlocks, and matches burning, so as to present a row of fires in the dusk. Their steady march was like the progress of a machine, that would roll irresistibly over everything in its way. Next, moving slowly, with a confused clatter of hoofs on the pavement, rode a party of mounted gentlemen, the central figure being Sir Edmund Andros, elderly, but erect and soldier-like. Those around him were his favorite councilors, and the bitterest foes of New England. At his right rode Edward Randolph, our arch-enemy, that 'blasted wretch,' as Mather calls him, who achieved the downfall of our ancient government, and was followed with a sensible curse, through life and to his grave. On the other side was Bullivant, scattering jests and mockery as he rode along. Dudley came behind, with a downcast look, dreading, as well he might, to meet the indignant gaze of the people, who beheld him, their only countryman by birth, among the oppressors of his native land. The captain of a frigate in the harbor, and two or three civil officers under the Crown, were also there. But the figure that most attracted the public eye, and stirred up the deepest feeling, was the Episcopal clergyman of King's Chapel, riding haughtily among the magistrates in his priestly vestments, the fitting representative of prelacy and persecution, the union of church and state, and all those abominations which had driven the Puritans to the wilderness. Another guard of soldiers, in double rank, brought up the rear. The whole scene was a picture of the condition of New England, and its moral, the deformity of any government that does not grow out of the nature of things and the character of the people. On one side the religious multitude, with their sad visages and dark attire, and, on the other, the group of despotic rulers, with the high churchman in the midst, and here and there a crucifix at their bosoms, all magnificently clad, flushed with wine, proud of unjust authority, and scoffing at the universal groan. And the mercenary soldiers, waiting but the word to deluge the street with blood, showed the only means by which obedience could be secured."

Education was temporarily paralyzed, and the right of franchise was rendered nugatory by the order that oaths must be taken with the hand on the Bible--a "popish" ceremony which the Puritans would not undergo. The town meetings, which were the essence of New Englandism, were forbidden except for the election of local officers, and ballot voting was stopped: "There is no such thing as a town in the whole country," Andros declared. Verily, it was "a time when New England groaned under the actual pressure of heavier wrongs than those threatened ones which brought on the Revolution." Yet the spirit of the people was not crushed; their leaders did not desert them; in private meetings they kept their faith and hope alive; the ministers told them that "God would yet be exalted among the heathen"; and one at least among them, Willard, significantly bade them take note that they "had not yet resisted unto blood, warring against sin!"

Boston was Andros's headquarters, and in 1688 was made the capital of the whole region along the coast from the French possessions in the north to Maryland in the south. But Andros had not yet received the submission of Rhode Island and Connecticut. Walter Clarke was the governor of the former colony in 1687, when, in the dead of winter, Andros appeared there and ordered the charter to be given up. Roger Williams had died three years before. Clarke tried to temporize, and asked that the surrender be postponed till a fitter season. But Andros dissolved the government summarily, and broke its seal; and it is not on record that the Rhode Islanders offered any visible resistance to the outrage. From Rhode Island Andros, with his retinue and soldiers, proceeded to Hartford, which had lost its Winthrop longer ago than the former its Williams. Governor Dongan of New York had warned Connecticut of what was to come, and had counseled them to submit. Three writs of quo warranto were issued, one upon another, and the colony finally petitioned the king to be permitted to retain its liberties; but in any case to be merged rather in Massachusetts than in New York. It was on the last day of October, 1687; Andros entered the assembly hall, where the assembly was then in session, with Governor Treat presiding. The scene which followed has entered into the domain of legend; but there is nothing miraculous in it; a deed which depended for its success upon the secrecy with which it was accomplished would naturally be lacking in documentary confirmation. Upon Andros's entrance, hungry for the charter, Treat opposed him, and entered upon a defense of the right of the colony to retain the ancient and honorable document, hallowed as it was by associations which endeared it to its possessors, aside from its political value. Andros, of course, would not yield; the only thing that such men ever yield to is superior force; but force being on his side, he entertained no thought of departing from his purpose. The dispute was maintained until so late in the afternoon that candles must be lighted; some were fixed in sconces round the walls, and there were others on the table, where also lay the charter, with its engrossed text, and its broad seal. The assemblymen, as the debate seemed to approach its climax, left their seats and crowded round the table, where stood on one side the royal governor, in his scarlet coat laced with gold, his heavy but sharp-featured countenance flushed with irritation, one hand on the hilt of his sword, the other stretched out toward the coveted document:--on the other, the governor chosen by the people, in plain black, with a plain white collar turned down over his doublet, his eyes dark with emotion, his voice vibrating hoarsely as he pleaded with the licensed highwayman of England. Around, is the ring of strong visages, rustic but brainy, frowning, agitated, eager, angry; and the flame of the candles flickering in their heavily-drawn breath.

Suddenly and simultaneously, by a preconcerted signal, the lights are out, and the black darkness has swallowed up the scene. In the momentary silence of astonishment, Andros feels himself violently shoved aside; the hand with which he would draw his sword is in an iron grasp, as heavy as that which he has laid upon colonial freedom. There is a surging of unseen men about him, the shuffling of feet, vague outcries: he knows not what is to come: death, perhaps. Is Sir Edmund afraid? We have no information as to the physical courage of the man, further than that in 1675 he had been frightened into submission by the farmers and fishermen at Fort Saybrook. But he need not have been a coward to feel the blood rush to his heart during those few blind moments. Men of such lives as his are always ready to suspect assassination.

But assassination is not an American method of righting wrong. Anon the steel had struck the flint, and the spark had caught the tinder, and one after another the candles were alight once more. All stared at one another: what had happened? Andros, his face mottled with pallor, was pulling himself together, and striving to resume the arrogant insolence of his customary bearing. He opens his mouth to speak, but only a husky murmur replaces the harsh stridency of his usual utterance. "What devilish foolery is this--" But ere he can get further, some bucolic statesman brings his massive palm down on the table with a bang that makes the oaken plank crack, and thunders out--"The charter! Where's our charter?"

Where, indeed? That is one of those historic secrets which will probably never be decided one way or the other. "There is no contemporary record of this event." No: but, somehow or other, one hears of Yankee Captain Joe Wadsworth, with the imaginative audacity and promptness of resource of his race, snatching the parchment from the table in the midst of the groping panic, and slipping out through the crowd: he has passed the door and is inhaling with grateful lungs the fresh coolness of the cloudy October night. Has any one seen him go? Did any one know what he did?--None who will reveal it. He is astride his mare, and they are off toward the old farm, where his boyhood was spent, and where stands the great hollow oak which, thirty years ago, Captain Joe used to canvass for woodpeckers' nests and squirrel hordes. He had thought, in those boyish days, what a good hiding-place the old tree would make; and the thought had flashed back into his mind while he listened to that fight for the charter to-day. It did not take him long to lay his plot, and to agree with his few fellow-conspirators. Sir Edmund can snatch the government, and scrawl Finis at the foot of the Connecticut records; but that charter he shall never have, nor shall any man again behold it, until years have passed away, and Andros has vanished forever from New England.

Meanwhile, he returned to Boston, there, for a season, to make "the wicked walk on every side, and the vilest to be exalted." Then came that famous April day of 1689; and, following, event after event, one storming upon another's heels, as the people rose from their long bondage, and hurled their oppressors down. The bearer of the news that William of Orange had landed in England, was imprisoned, but it was too late. Andros ordered his soldiers under arms; but the commander of the frigate had been taken prisoner by the Boston ship-carpenters; the sheriff was arrested; hundreds of determined men surrounded the regimental headquarters; the major resisted in vain; the colors and drums were theirs; a vast throng at the town house greeted the venerable Bradstreet; the insurrection was proclaimed, and Andros and his wretched followers, flying to the frigate, were seized and cast into prison. "Down with Andros and Randolph!" was the cry; and "The old charter once more!" It was a hundred years to a day before that shot fired at Concord and heard round the world.

CHAPTER NINTH

THE NEW LEAF, AND THE BLOT ON IT

Popular liberty is one thing; political independence is another. The latter cannot be securely and lastingly established until the former has fitted the nation to use it intelligently. When the component individuals have thrown off the bondage of superstition and of formulas, their next step must be, as an organization, to abrogate external subordination to others, and, like a son come of age, to begin life on a basis and with an aim of their own.

But such movements are organic, and chronologically slow; so that we do not comprehend them until historical perspective shows them to us in their mass and tendency. They are thus protected against their enemies, who, if they knew the significance of the helpless seed, would destroy it before it could become the invincible and abounding tree. Great human revolutions make themselves felt, at first, as a trifling and unreasonable annoyance: a crumpling in the roseleaf bed of the orthodox and usual. They are brushed petulantly aside and the sleeper composes himself to rest once more. But inasmuch as there was vital truth as the predisposing cause of the annoyance it cannot thus be disposed of; it spreads and multiplies. Had its opponents understood its meaning, they would have humored it into inoffensiveness; but the means they adopt to extirpate it are the sure way to develop it. Truth can no more be smothered by intolerance, than a sown field can be rendered unproductive by covering it with manure.

When Christ came, the common people had no recognized existence except as a common basis on which aristocratic institutions might rest. That they could have rights was as little conceived as that inanimate sticks and stones could have them; to enfranchise them--to surrender to them the reins of government--such an idea the veriest madness would have started from. Philosophy was blind to it; religion was abhorrent to it; the common people themselves were as far from entertaining it as cattle in the fields are to-day. Christ's sayings--Love one another--Do as ye would be done by--struck at the root of all arbitrary power, and furnished the clew to all possible emancipations; but their infinite meaning has even yet been grasped but partially. A thousand years are but as yesterday in the counsels of the Lord. The early Christians were indeed a democracy; but they were common people to begin with, and the law of love suggested to them no thought of altering their condition in that respect. The only liberty they dreamed of claiming was liberty to die for their faith; and that was accorded to them in full measure. Indeed, an apprenticeship, the years of which were centuries, must be served before they could be qualified to realize even that they could become the trustees of power.

Their simple priesthood, beginning by sheltering them from physical violence, ended by subjecting them to a yet more enslaving spiritual tyranny. Philosophers could frame imaginative theories of human liberty; but the people could be helped only from within themselves. Wiclif, giving them the Bible in a living language, and intimating that force was not necessarily right, began their education; and Luther, in his dogma of justification by faith alone, forged a tremendous weapon in their behalf. Beggars could have faith; princes and prelates might lack it; of what avail was it to gain the whole world if the soul must be lost at last? The reasonings and discussions to which his dogma gave rise called into existence two world-covering armies to fight for and against it. Peace has not been declared between them yet; but there has long ceased to be any question as to who shall have the victory.

When the battle began, however, the other side had the stronger battalions, and there would have been little chance for liberty, but for the timely revelation of the western continent. And, inevitably, it was the people who went, and the aristocrats who stayed behind; because the new idea favored the former and menaced the latter. Inevitably, too, it was the man who had the future in him that was the exile, and the man of the past who drove him forth. And whenever we find a man of the aristocratic order emigrating to the colonies, we find in him the same love of liberty which animates his plebeian companion, graced by a motive even higher, because opposed to his inherited interests and advantages. Thus the refuge of the oppressed became by the nature of things the citadel of the purest and soundest civilization.

Luther, Calvin, and Jonathan Edwards were in the line of succession one from the other; each defined the truth more nearly than his predecessor, but left it still in the rough. The whole truth is never revealed at one time, but so much only as may forge a sword for the immediate combat. Faith alone was a good blade for the first downright strokes of the battle; predestination had a finer edge; and Edwards's dialectical subtleties on the freedom of the will sharpen logic to so fine a point that we begin to perceive that not logic but love is the true weapon of the Christian: the mystery of God is not revealed in syllogisms. But each fresh discrimination was useful in its place and time, and had to exist in order to prepare the way for its successor. The Puritans would have been less stubborn without their background of spiritual damnation. That awful conscience of theirs would have faltered without its lake of fire and brimstone to keep out of; and if it had faltered, the American nation would have been strangled in its cradle.

America, then, having no permanent attractions as a residence for any of the upper classes of European society, became the home of the common people, in whom alone the doctrine of liberty could find a safe anchorage, because in them alone did the need for it abide. The philosophy, the religion, the tolerance, the civil forms, which are broad enough to suit the common people, must be nearly as broad as truth itself, and therefore as unconquerable. But the broader they appear, the more must they be offensive to the orthodox and conventional, who by the instinct of self-preservation will be impelled to attack them. There was never a more obvious chain of cause and effect than that which is revealed in the history of the United States; and having shown the conditions which led to the planting in the wilderness of the elements which constitute our present commonwealth, we shall now proceed to trace the manner in which they came to be wrought into a united whole. They were as yet mainly unconscious of one another; the opportunity for mutual knowledge had not yet been presented, nor had the causes conducive to crystallization been introduced. Oppression had awakened the colonists to the value of their religious and civic principles; something more than oppression was requisite to mold them into independent and homogeneous form. This was afforded, during the next eighty years, by their increase in numbers, wealth, familiarity with their country, and in the facilities for intercommunication; and also, coincidently, by the French and Indian wars, which apprised them of their strength, trained them in arms, created the comradeship which arises from common dangers and aims, and developed vast tracts of land which had otherwise been unknown. A country which has been fought for, on whose soil blood has been shed, becomes dear to its inhabitants; and the heroism of the Revolution gathered heart and perseverance from the traditions and the graves of the soldiers of the Intercolonial wars.

The English Revolution benefited the colonies, though to a less extent than might have been expected. William of Orange was the logical consequence, by reaction, of James II. The latter had so corrupted and confused the kingdom, that William, whose connection with England arose from his marriage with Mary, James's daughter, was invited to usurp the throne by Tories, Whigs and Presbyterians--each party from a motive of its own. The people were not appealed to, but they acquiesced. The Roman Catholics were discriminated against, and the nonconformists were not requited for their services; but out of many minor injustices and wrongs, a condition better than anything which had preceded it was soon discernible. The principle was established that royal power was not absolute, nor self-continuing; it could be created only by the representatives of the people, who could take it away again if its trustee were guilty of breach of contract. The dynastic theory was disallowed; kings were to come by election, not succession. The nobility were recognized as the medium between the king and the people, but not before they had conceded to the commons the right to elect a king for life; and presently there came into existence a new power--that of the commercial classes, the moneyed interest, which, in return for loans to government, received political consideration. Ownership of land ceased to be the sole condition on which a candidate could appeal to the electors; and merchants were raised to a position where they could control national policies. Merchants might not be wiser or less selfish than the aristocracy; but at all events they were of the people, and the more widely power is diffused, the less likely is any class to be oppressed. It was no longer possible for freemen to be ruled otherwise than by governments of their own making, and subject to their approval. Freedom of the press, which means liberty to criticise all state and social procedure, was established, and public opinion, instead of being crushed, was consulted. The aristocracy could retain its ascendency only by permitting more weight to the middle class, whose influence was therefore bound gradually to increase. Popular legislatures were the final arbiters; and the advantages which the English had obtained would naturally be imparted to the colonies, which, in addition, were unhampered by the relics of decaying systems which still impeded the old country.

William cared little for England, nor were the English in love with him; but he was the most far-seeing statesman of his day, and his effect was liberalizing and beneficial. He kept Louis XIV. from working the mischief that he desired, and prevented the disturbance of political equilibrium which was threatened by the proposed successor to the extinct Hapsburg dynasty on the Spanish throne. William was outwardly cold and dry, but there was fire within him, if you would apply friction enough. He was under no illusions; he perfectly understood why he was wanted in England; and for his part, he accepted the throne in order to be able to check Louis in his designs upon the liberties of Holland. In defending his countrymen he defended all others in Europe, whose freedom was endangered.

But if William's designs were large, they were also, and partly for that reason, unjust in particulars. He was at war with France; France held possessions in America; and it was necessary to carry on war against her there as well as in Europe. The colonists, then, should be made to assist in the operations; they must furnish men, forts, and, to some extent at least, supplies. It was easy to reach this determination, but difficult to enforce it under the circumstances. The various colonies lacked the homogeneity which was desirable to secure co-operative action from them; some of them were royal provinces, some proprietary, some were in an anomalous state, or practically without any recognizable form of government whatever. Each had its separate interests to regard, and could not be brought to perceive that what was the concern of one must in the end be the concern of all. But the greatest difficulty was to secure obedience of orders after they had been promulgated; the colonial legislatures pleaded all manner of rights and privileges, under Magna Charta and other charters; they claimed the privileges of Englishmen, and they stood upon their "natural" rights as discoverers and inhabitants of a new country. They were spread over a vast extent of territory, so that in many cases a journey of weeks would be required, through pathless forests, across unbridged rivers, over difficult mountains, by swamps and morasses--in order to carry information of the commands of the government to no more than a score or a hundred of persons. And then these persons would look around at the miles of unconquerable nature stretching out on every side; and they would reflect upon the thousands of leagues of salt water that parted them from the king who was the source of these unwelcome orders; and, finally, they would glance at the travel-stained and weary envoy with a pitying smile, and offer him food and drink and a bed--but not obedience. The colonists had imagination, when they cared to exercise it; but not imagination of the kind to bring vividly home to them the waving of a royal scepter across the broad Atlantic.

Another cause of embarrassment to the king was the reluctance of Parliament to pass laws inhibiting the reasonable liberties of the colonies. The influence of the Lords somewhat preponderated, because they controlled many of the elections to the Commons; but neither branch was disposed to increase the power of the king, and they were, besides, split by internal factions. It was not until the mercantile interest got into the saddle that Parliament saw the expediency of restricting the productive and commercial freedom of the colonies, and the necessity, in order to secure these ends, of diminishing their legislative license. Meanwhile, William tried more than one device of his own. First, by dint of the prerogative, he ordered that each colony north of Carolina should appoint a fixed quota of men and money for the defense of New York against the common enemy; this order it was found impossible to carry out. Next, he caused a board of trade to be appointed in 1696 to inquire into the condition of the colonies, and as to what should be done about them; and after a year, this board reported that in their opinion what was wanted was a captain-general to exercise a sort of military dictatorship over all the North American provinces. But the ministry held this plan to be imprudent, and it fell through. At the same time, William Penn worked out a scheme truly statesmanlike, proposing an annual congress of two delegates from each province to devise ways and means, which they could more intelligently do than could any council or board in England. The plan was advocated by Charles Davenant, a writer on political economy, who observed that the stronger the colonies became, the more profitable to England would they be; only despotism could drive them to rebellion; and innovations in their charters would be prejudicial to the king's power. But this also was rejected; and finally the conduct of necessary measures was given to "royal instructions," that is, to the king; but to the king subject to the usual parliamentary restraint. And none of the better class of Englishmen wished to tyrannize over their fellow Englishmen across the sea.

Under this arrangement, the appointment of judges was taken from the people; Habeas Corpus was refused, or permitted as a favor; censorship of the press was revived; license to preach except as granted by a bishop was denied; charters were withheld from dissenters; slavery was encouraged; and the colonies not as yet under royal control were told that the common weal demanded that they should be placed in the same condition of dependency as those who were. But William died in 1702, before this arrangement could be carried out. Queen Anne, however, listened to alarmist reports of the unruly and disaffected condition of the colonies, and allowed a bill for their "better regulation" to be introduced. It was now that the mercantile interest began to show its power.

The old argument, that every nation may claim the services of its own subjects, wherever they are, was revived; and that England ought to be the sole buyer and seller of American trade. All the oppressive and irritating commercial regulations were put in force, and all colonial laws opposing them were abrogated. Complaints under these regulations were taken out of the hands of colonial judges and juries, on the plea that they were often the offenders. Woolen manufactures, as interfering with English industry, were so rigorously forbidden, that a sailor in an American port could not buy himself a flannel shirt, and the Virginians were put to it to clothe themselves at all. Naturally, the people resisted so far as they could, and that was not a little; England could not spare a sufficient force to insure obedience to laws of such a kind. "We have a right to the same liberties as Englishmen," was the burden of all remonstrances, and it was supported by councilors on the bench and ministers in the pulpit. The revenues were so small as hardly to repay the cost of management. It is hard to coerce a nation and get a profit over expenses; and the colonies were a nation--they numbered nearly three hundred thousand in Anne's reign--without the advantage of being coherent; they were a baker's dozen of disputatious and recalcitrant incoherencies. The only arbitrary measure of taxation that was amiably accepted was the post-office tax, which was seen to be productive of a useful service at a reasonable cost; and an act to secure suitable trees for masts for the navy was tolerated because there were so many trees. The coinage system was no system at all, and led to much confusion and loss; and the severe laws against piracy, which had grown to be common, and in the profits of which persons high in the community were often suspected and sometimes proved to have been participants, were less effective than they certainly ought to have been; but they, and the bloody and desperate objects of them, added a picturesque page to the annals of the time.

Concerning the condition of the several colonies during the years following the Revolution of 1688, it may be said, in general, that it was much better in fact than it was in theory. There were narrow and unjust and short-sighted laws and regulations, and there were men of a corresponding stamp to execute them; but the success such persons met with was sporadic, uncertain, and partial. The people were grown too big, and too well aware of their bigness, to be ground down and kept in subjection, even had the will so to afflict them been steady and virulent--which it cannot be said to have been. The people knew that, be the law what it might, it could, on the whole, be evaded or disregarded, unless or until the mother country undertook to enforce it by landing an army and regularly making war; and England had too many troubles of her own, and also contained too many liberal-minded men, to attempt such a thing for the present. The proof that the colonies were not seriously or consistently oppressed is evident from the fact that they all increased rapidly in population and wealth, notwithstanding their "troubles"; and it was not until England had settled down under her Georges, and that Providence had inspired the third of that name with the pig-headedness that cost his adopted subjects so dear, that the Revolution became a possibility. Yet even now there was no lack of talk of such an eventuality; the remark was common that in process of time the colonies would declare their independence. But perhaps it was made rather with intent to spur England to adopt preventative measures in season, than from a real conviction that the event would actually take place.

New York, at the time of William's accession, had been under the control of Andros, who at that epoch commanded a domain two or three times as large as Britain. Nicholson was his lieutenant; and on the news of the Revolution Jacob Leisler, a German, who had come over in 1660 as a soldier of the Dutch West India Company, and had made a fortune, unseated Nicholson and proclaimed William and Mary. Supported by the mass of the Dutch inhabitants, but without other warrant, he assumed the functions of royal lieutenant-governor, pending the arrival of the new king's appointee. In the interests of order, it was the best thing to do. But he made active enemies among the other elements of the cosmopolitan population of New York, and they awaited an opportunity to be avenged on him. This came with the arrival of Henry Sloughter in 1691, with the king's commission. Sloughter can only be described as a drunken profligate. At the earliest moment, Leisler sent to know his commands, and offered to surrender the fort. Sloughter answered by arresting him and Milborne, his son-in-law, on the charge of high treason--an absurdity; but they were arraigned before a partisan court and condemned to be hanged--they refusing to plead and appealing to the king. It is said that Sloughter did not intend to carry the sentence into effect; but the local enemies of Leisler made the governor drunk that night, and secured his signature to the decree. This was on May 14, 1691; on the 15th, the house disapproved the sentence, but on the 16th it was carried out, the victims meeting their fate with dignity and courage. In 1695, the attainder was reversed by act of parliament; but it remains the most disgraceful episode of William's government of the colonies.

Meanwhile, Sloughter was recalled, and Fletcher sent out. He was not a sodden imbecile, but he was ill-chosen for his office. He described the New Yorkers of that day as "divided, contentious and impoverished" and immediately began a conflict with them. His attitude may be judged from a passage in his remarks to the assembly soon afterward: "There never was an amendment desired by the council board but what was rejected. It is a sign of a stubborn ill-temper.... While I stay in this government I will take care that neither heresy, schism, nor rebellion be preached among you, nor vice and profanity be encouraged. You seem to take the power into your own hands and set up for everything." This last observation was probably not devoid of truth; nor was a subsequent one, "There are none of you but what are big with the privileges of Englishmen and Magna Charta." That well describes the colonist of the period, whether in New York or elsewhere. It had been said of New Yorkers, however, that they were a conquered people, who had no rights that a king was bound to respect; and the grain of truth in the saying may have made the New Yorkers more than commonly anxious to keep out the small end of the wedge. Bellomont's incumbency was mild, and chiefly memorable by reason of his having commissioned a certain William Kidd to suppress piracy; but Kidd--if tradition is to be believed:--certainly his most unfair and prejudiced trial in London afforded no evidence of it--found more pleasure in the observance than in the breach, and became the most famous pirate of them all. There is gold enough of his getting buried along the coasts to buy a modern ironclad fleet, according to the belief of the credulous. A little later, Steed Bonnet, Richard Worley, and Edward Teach, nicknamed Blackbeard, had similar fame and fate. Their business, like others of great profit, incurred great risks.

Of Lord Cornbury, the next governor, Bancroft remarks, with unwonted energy, that "He joined the worst form of arrogance to intellectual imbecility," and that "happily for New York, he had every vice of character necessary to discipline a colony into self-reliance and resistance." He began by stealing $1,500 appropriated to fortify the Narrows; it was the last money he got from the various assemblies that he called and dissolved, and the assemblies became steadily more independent and embarrassing. In 1707, the Quaker speaker read out in meeting a paper accusing him of bribe taking. Cornbury disappears from American history the next year; and completed his career, in England, as the third Earl of Clarendon.

Under Lovelace, the assembly refused supplies and assumed executive powers; when Hunter came, he found a fertile and wealthy country, but nothing in it for him: "Sancho Panza was but a type of me." He was a man of humor and sagacity, and perceived that "the colonists are infants at their mother's breasts, but will wean themselves when they come of age." Before he got through with the New Yorkers, he had reason to suspect that the weaning time had all but arrived.

New Jersey passed through many trivial vicissitudes, changes of ownership, vexed land-titles, and royal encroachments. For several years the people had no visible government at all. They did not hold themselves so well in hand as did New York, and were less audacious and aggressive in resistance; but in one way or another, they fairly held their own, prospered and multiplied. Pennsylvania enjoyed from the first more undisturbed independence and self-direction than the others; at one time it seemed to be their ambition to discover something which Penn would not grant them, and then to ask for it. But the great Quaker was equal to the occasion; no selfishness, crankiness, or whimsicality on their part could wear out his patience and benevolence. In the intervals of his imprisonments in England he labored for their welfare. The queen contemplated making Pennsylvania a royal province, but Penn, though poor, would not let it go except on condition it might retain its democratic liberties. The people, in short, kept everything in their own hands, and their difficulties arose chiefly from their disputes as to what to do with so much freedom. It was a colony where everybody was equal, without an established church, where any one was welcome to enter and dwell, which was destitute of arms or defense or even police, which yet grew in all good things more rapidly than any of its sister colonies. The people waxed fat and kicked, but they did no evil in the sight of the Lord, whatever England may have thought of them; and after the contentious little appendage of Delaware had finally been cut off from its big foster sister (though they shared the same governors until the Revolution) there is little more to be said of either of them.

The Roman Catholic owners of Maryland fared ill after William came into power; he made the colony a royal province in 1691, and for thirty years or more there were no more Baltimores in the government. Under Copley, the first royal governor, the Church of England was declared to be established; but dissenters were afterward protected; only the Catholics were treated with intolerance in the garden themselves had made. The people soon settled down and became contented, and slowly their numbers augmented. But the Baltimores were persistent, and the fourth lord, in 1715, took advantage of his infancy to compass a blameless reconciliation with the Church of England, thereby securing his installation in the proprietary rights of his forefathers, from which the family was not evicted until the Revolution of the colonies in 1775 opened a new chapter in the history of the world.

Virginia recovered rapidly from Berkeley, and suffered little from Andros, who was governor in 1692, but with his fangs drawn, and an experience to remember. The people still eschewed towns, and lived each family in its own solitude, hospitable to all, but content with their own company. The love of independence grew alike in the descendants of the cavaliers and in the common people, and the wide application of the suffrage equalized power, and even enabled the lower sort to keep the gentry, when the fancy took them, out of the places of authority and trust. Democracy was in the woods and streams and the blue sky, and all breathed it in and absorbed it into their blood and bone. They early petitioned William for home rule in all its purity; he permitted land grants to be confirmed, but would not let their assembly supplant the English parliament as a governing power. He sought, unsuccessfully, to increase the authority of the church; for though the bishop might license and the governor recommend, the parish would not present. It was a leisurely, good-natured, careless, but spirited people, indifferent to commerce, content to harvest their fields and rule their slaves, and let the world go by. A more enviable existence than theirs it would be hard to imagine. All their financial transactions were done in tobacco, even to the clergyman's stipend and the judge's fee. No enemy menaced them; politics were rather an amusement than a serious duty; yet in these fertile regions were made the brains and characters which afterward, for so many years, ruled the councils of the United States, or led her armies in war. They lay fallow for seventy-five years, and then gave the best of accounts of themselves. England did not quite know what to make of the Virginians; to judge by the reports of the governors, they were changeable as a pretty woman. But they were simply capricious humorists, full of life and intelligence, who did what they pleased and did not take themselves too seriously. They indulged themselves with the novel toy, the post-office; and founded William and Mary College in 1693. This venerable institution passed its second centennial with one hundred and sixty students on its roll; but, soon after, it "ceased upon the midnight, without pain." Anybody may have a college in these days.

The Carolinas, no longer pestered by Grand Models, became another rustic paradise. Their suns were warm, their forests vast, their people delighting in a sort of wild civilization. When James II. went down, the Carolinians needed no care-taker, and declined to avail themselves of the martial law suggested by the anxious proprietors. But in 1690 they allowed Seth Sothel to occupy the gubernatorial seat, and sent up a legislature. The southern section was subjected to some superficial annoyance by the proprietors, who wished to make an income from the country, but were unwilling to put their hands in their pockets in the first place; they insisted upon their authority, and the colonists did not say them nay, but maintained freedom of action in all their concerns nevertheless. A series of proprietary governors were sent out to them--Ludwell first, then Smith; both failed, and retired. Then came Archdale, the Quaker, who struck a popular note in his remark that dissenters could cut wood and hoe crops as well as the highest churchmen; his policy was to concede, to conciliate and to harmonize, and he was welcome and useful. The Indians, and even the Spaniards, were brought into friendly relations. Liberty of conscience was accorded to all but "papists," who were certainly hardly used in these times. An attempt to base political power on possession of land was defeated in 1702. The Church of England was accepted in 1704, and though dissenters were tolerated, it remained the official dispenser of religion until the Revolution. All these things were on the surface; the colony, inside, was free, happy and prosperous; it had adopted rice culture, with a great supply of negro slaves, and it brought furs from far in the interior. The Huguenots had been enfranchised as soon as it was known that England had turned her back on Catholicism and James. None of the colonies had before them a future more peaceful and profitable than South Carolina. The slaves were her only burden; but at that period they seemed not a burden, but the assurance of her prosperity.

North Carolina was as happy and as peaceful as her southern sister, but the conditions of life there were different. The proprietors attempted to control the people, but were worsted in almost every encounter. Laws were passed only to be disregarded. Here, as elsewhere, the Quakers became conspicuous in inculcating liberal notions, and were paid the compliment of being hated and feared by the emissaries of England. What was to be done with a population made up of fugitives of all kinds, not from Europe only, but from the other colonies, who held all creeds, or none at all; who lived by hunting and tree-cutting; who were as averse from towns as Virginia, and many of whom could not be said to have any fixed abode at all? If restraints were proposed, they ignored them; if they were pressed, they resisted them, sometimes boisterously, but never with bloodshed. Robert Daniel, deputy governor in 1704, tried to establish the Church of England; a building was erected, but in all the province there was but one clergyman, with an absentee congregation scattered over hundreds of miles of mountain and forest. In the following year there were two governors elected by opposite factions, each with his own legislature; and in 1711 Edward Hyde, going out to restore order, confounded the confusion. He called in Spotswood from Virginia to help him; but there were too many Quakers; and the old soldier, after landing a party of marines to indicate his disapproval of anarchy, retired. Meantime, fresh emigrants kept arriving, including many Palatinates from Germany. It was not a profitable country to its reputed owners, who, in 1714, received a hundred dollars apiece from it. But it supported its inhabitants all the better; and it was eight years more before they supplied themselves with a court house, and forty, before they felt the need of a printing press.