In Albany the streets were cleaned and repaired by order of the City Council, and the delegates were given a public dinner at the municipal expense. The Congress met in the City Hall on the 19th of June, 1754, twenty-five delegates from nine colonies being present; and whether in personal or in representative dignity formed the most august assembly which up to this time had ever been held in the Western World. The colonies were named in the minutes according to their situation from north to south. All were represented, except New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Georgia.

The business proper began when Johnson read a paper, which was the official report of the Board of Commissioners on Indian Affairs, in which the political situation was exposed. In it propositions were made to build forts in the Onondaga and Seneca countries, with a missionary in each place; to forbid the sale of rum, and to expel and keep the Frenchmen out of the Indian castles. The speech, prepared as the voice of the Congress, was delivered June 28 to the Indians who were present, and who had to be urged by the governor to attend. After various conferences and much speech-making on either side, including an address by Abraham, a scorching philippic by King Hendrick,—both Mohawk sachems and brothers,—and the distribution of gifts, the Indians went home apparently satisfied. To the edification of delegates from some of the colonies, where Indians were deemed incapable of understanding truth and honour, they found that Governor De Lancey and Colonel Johnson treated them as honest men who understood the nature of covenants. Whereas the laws of Joshua and Moses had been elsewhere applied only too freely to Indian politics by the elect of Jehovah, the New York authorities really believed that the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule had a place in Indian politics.

Other questions of vital interest to the colonies were discussed. On the fifth day of the session of the Congress, while waiting for the Indians to assemble, a motion was made and carried unanimously that “a union of all the colonies” was absolutely necessary for their security and defence. A committee of six was appointed to prepare plans of union, and from the ninth day until the end of the session this important matter was under debate. On the 9th of July the Congress voted “That there be a union of his Majesty’s several governments on the continent, so that their councils, treasure, and strength may be employed in due proportion against their common enemy.” On the 10th of July the plan was adopted, and ordered to be sent to London for the royal consideration.

How far this Albany plan of union, which looked to a Great Council of forty-eight members meeting at Philadelphia under a President-general, resembled or foreshadowed the National Constitution of 1787, we need not here discuss. Certain it is, that though the exact plan proposed was rejected, both by the colonies and by Great Britain, the spirit of the movement lived on. Between the year 1754 and that of 1776 was only the space of the life of a young man. Between the “Congress”—the word in this sense was a new coinage, dating from the meeting of colonial delegates in Albany, after the burning of Schenectady in 1690—in the State House at Albany and the one in Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, the time was even less. Certain it is that the assembly of representatives of the colonies at Albany in 1690 was the first occasion of the popular use of the word “Congress” as now used, and usually written with a capital, while that in 1748 made it a word of general acceptance in the English language. Before that time and meeting it had other significations not so august; but while these have fallen away, the other and chief signification in English remains. Further, from this time forth the “Continental”—that is, the American as distinct from the British, the independent as discriminated from the transatlantic—idea grew. In common speech, the continental man was he who was more and more interested in what all the colonies did in union, and less in what the king’s ministers were pleased to dictate. More and more after the Albany Congress Wycliffe’s idea prevailed,—that even King George’s “dominion was founded in grace” and not on prerogative. More and more the legend on the coins, “Georgius Rex Dei Gratia,” faded into the nature of a fairy tale, while the idea grew that the governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed. To those wedded to the idea that religion can live only when buttressed by politics, that a church owes its life to the state, this increase of democratic doctrines was horrible heresy, portending frightful immorality and floods of vice. A State without a King, a Church without politically appointed rulers and the support of public taxation, a coin without the divine name stamped on it, were, in the eyes of the servants of monarchy, as so many expressions of atheism. Not so thought the one member of the Albany Congress who lived to sign the Declaration of Independence and the National Constitution of 1787,—Benjamin Franklin, who incarnated the state founded politically by Penn; nor the Quaker, Stephen Hopkins, of Rhode Island, who lived to put his sign-manual to Jefferson’s immortal document, July 4, 1776.

By the movements in Western Pennsylvania, the war had already broken out, though the diplomatists on the transatlantic side had not yet said so. By the first week in May, the raids on the northern border began by the destruction of Hoosic, within ten miles of Fort Massachusetts. The half-naked or starving refugees reaching Albany furnished a vivid object-lesson of reality. Under Johnson’s vigilance and activity, the people in the forts, block-houses, and palisaded villages were kept on guard night and day. In this work he was ably seconded by Governor De Lancey. Politics make strange bed-fellows; and the late critic and opponent, now that he occupied the seat of the person whom he had, largely out of party spirit, opposed, became a warm friend of his friend Johnson, the untiring frontiersman.

When in New York, Feb. 28, 1755, Johnson learned of the official declaration of war, and the sailing from Cork, Ireland, of General Braddock with one thousand regulars, bound for Alexandria, Va.; and to this place Johnson with Governor De Lancey made a journey. At the council held by the five royal governors, expeditions against Nova Scotia, Crown Point, Niagara, and Fort Du Quesne were planned. Johnson was again made Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and appointed as major-general to command the forces for the reduction of Crown Point.

The story of the success of one of these expeditions and the failure of two of them under Braddock and Shirley, is known to all. We may now glance at that under Johnson. After a great council held in June, attended by eleven hundred of all ages and sexes, to the devastation of Johnson’s larder, King Hendrick and many hundred fighting men promised to be ready for war. After various delays, the motley army gathered from the colonies left Albany August 8, 1755, and on the 28th Johnson reached the Lake of the Holy Sacrament. A true courtier, he changed the name given by Isaac Jogues, which had superseded the Indian term, Andiatarocte; and in honour of his sovereign George, and “to ascertain his undoubted right there,” called the beautiful water by the name it still bears. The modern fanciful name “Horicon” seems to be nothing more than a printer’s mistake, glorified by a romancer.

Parkman’s magic pen has drawn the picture of the movements of Dieskau, the German, and his French and Indian forces opposed to the provincial army, and has brilliantly described the camp and forces at Lake George, when, on the morning of Sept. 8, 1755, the Canadians, Indians, and French, numbering fifteen hundred, being, unknown to the English, only an hour’s march distant, one thousand men sallied out from the camp to capture Dieskau and his forces. The spirit of Braddock seemed to be still in the air; and the men—New England and New York militia—sallied out jauntily, expecting easy victory, but in reality to what proved “the bloody morning scout.” They were led by Col. Ephraim Williams—whose will, creating what is now Williams College, had been made a few days before at Albany—and by Lieutenant-Colonel Whiting. In three divisions the little army marched out and soon disappeared from view in the forest, just before nine o’clock a. m. The two columns, French and English, were thus approaching each other in a narrow road, like trains on a single track in a tunnel.

Not knowing what the issue might be, Johnson made preparation for all risks. He at once ordered trees felled and laid lengthwise. With these and the wagons, bateaux, and camp equipage, he constructed a rough line of defence, which faced all along the one side of the camp which an assaulting party might be reasonably expected to attack,—that is, on that side of the rough quadrangle which was parallel to the lake. At that portion fronting the road, he planted three of his heaviest pieces of cannon, one thirty-two and two eighteen-pounders. Another was posted a little way round to the left, while five howitzers of smaller calibre, with the mortars, one of thirteen-inch, and four of smaller calibre, were stationed to throw shell in the morasses and woods on the flanks. The superb artillerist, Major William Eyre, with a company of British sailors, served the guns.

The situation then was as follows: Colonel Williams’s party was marching southward along the stump-embossed road cut by Johnson’s axemen a few days before. After advancing two miles he halted for the other divisions to come up, and then moved in a solid body. With what seems incredible carelessness, neglecting to send out scouts, they moved on, Braddock-like, unsuspicious of danger, imagining that the French were miles away.

On the contrary, Dieskau’s scouts had watched their departure from the camp, and quickly reported the news to the German baron. He at once ordered his regulars to halt, and sent the Canadians and Indians into the forest, three hundred paces ahead, with orders to lie flat on the ground behind trees, rocks, and bushes, and make no noise or sign until the regulars had fired, when all were to rise and surround the English.

Here, then, was a horseshoe ambuscade in a swampy spot. It was another case of “the fatal defile.” The regulars were, to the party approaching them, invisible, for they lay behind a swell of ground. All was as silent as the grave when the head of Colonel Williams’s line entered the trap. Had it not been for the treachery of the Indians, or the warning signal of the French Iroquois to their kindred, given by the discharge of a gun,—though it may be possible that this unexpected shot was an accident,—the English would have been nearly annihilated. But before the party had passed the calks of the horseshoe at the ends of the ambuscade, the war-whoop and the countless puffs of smoke and whistling bullets told the whole story. The silent wilderness at once became hell.

Colonel Williams at once took in the situation, and mounting a rock to direct his men, ordered them to spread out on the hill to the right. He was soon shot through the head. Hendrick had fallen at the first fire. The Americans were rallied by Nathan Whiting, and retreated stubbornly, contesting the ground rod by rod, and firing from behind trees and rocks at the Canadians and Indians, who followed the same tactics. Where they met reinforcements sent out by Johnson, their firing was more steady and destructive.

It was near Bloody Pond that Lieutenant Cole and the three hundred men sent out from camp by Johnson met them, and ably covered their retreat, so that the wounded were brought in, and the main body reached the camp in good order about ten o’clock. Le Gardeur, the officer to whom Washington had surrendered a few months before, commanded the Canadian Indians in this battle, and was slain. The savages, seeing the English out of the way for the present, at once fell back to scalp and plunder the slain Americans. Dieskau ordered them off, refusing to let them stop and thus lose time. Though obeying, they were angry and insubordinate, and later in the day sneaked out of the fight, to return like dogs to their vomit of war. Dieskau ordered the bugles to sound the assembly, and re-formed his forces, hoping by a rush on Johnson’s camp to capture it at once. Unfortunately for him, he had to reckon with Indians and bush-rangers instead of with trained soldiers.

Once inside the camp, the Massachusetts men were ranged on the right, the Connecticut men on the left, with the New York and New Hampshire men between. Five hundred troops were posted on the flanks in reserve. Lying down flat on their stomachs behind the hastily thrown up barricade, they lay awaiting the enemy, whom they expected at a double-quick pace.

Everything now depended on the steadiness of the militia. The officers threatened death to all who flinched from the foe. All eyes were bent on the woods in front, and especially down the road whence they expected to see the regulars rush on them with levelled bayonets. Could raw provincials, commanded by a fur-trader and a lawyer, face the veterans of Europe?

Three long, cold iron noses poked out at them were too much for Dieskau’s Indians. The black-mouthed cannon, intercepting with their round circles a charming view of the blue lake ahead, took away the courage of the bush-rangers, and both reds and whites scattered and took to the woods. To the exasperation of Dieskau, all his life used to regular military formations, his great host melted away from his sight in the undergrowth and behind trees; where, now creeping forward, now squatting or lying, they began a dropping fire in the front and on the flanks of the Americans. In traditional European style, the French regulars, in white uniforms and with glittering bayonets, marched up and delivered their volleys from double ranks.

Platoon-firing was then the orthodox method of war. The long, thin lines of battle which now obtain in the field, and which the Americans taught to Europe, were not then known to men accustomed to the cleared land and level fields of the Low Countries, and of Europe generally. Soon moving forward into the clearing, and deploying to double width, the regulars fired by platoons of three lines,—the first file of men kneeling down, and the rear, or third file, delivering their volleys over the shoulders of those of the second line in front. Aiming too high and being too far off for the effective range of flint-lock smooth-bores, the result of their general miss was to arouse the spirits of the Americans, even to gayety. After the first hour their nerves became more steady, and they aimed with deadly effect, while the irritated and excited veterans fired too high to do much execution. When the cannon served by the sailors under Major Eyre began to tear their ranks with round shot and canister, the great gaps made among the white coats cheered the provincials still more. Gallantly dressing up, they endeavoured for many minutes to present an orderly front; but, finally, Dieskau had to break from the road, and moving to the right in the face of a murderous fire, began the attack on the three regiments of Colonels Williams, Ruggles, and Whitcomb. Here for another hour they stood their ground manfully, in the face of a fire whose rapidity and accuracy were the astonishment of Dieskau, who bravely led his troops until struck down.

The commanders on either side in this battle were wounded, and had to retire in favour of others. Johnson, shortly after the first volley of the French regulars, was struck by a ball in the thigh which made a painful flesh wound. The ball broke no bones, but was never extracted, and the lacerated nerves troubled him more or less all his life thereafter. He retired to his tent, and Gen. Phineas Lyman took command, cheering his men, and exposing himself with reckless bravery both behind and outside the barricade. In fact, this battle of Lake George was Lyman’s battle, and was largely Lyman’s victory.

Dieskau had bravely led his men during several hours, but while giving an order to his Indians to move farther to the left, he approached so near the intrenchments that he received, from an American standing behind a tree, his first wound. Ordering the Chevalier de Montreuil to take command, and to order retreat if necessary, then to do his best, and to send men to remove him, Dieskau crawled near a tree and sat with his back against it. One Canadian sent to remove him was picked off by an American, and fell across the baron’s wounded knee. The other went off for assistance; but soon after his disappearance the retreat was sounded. A renegade Frenchman, on the American side, then approached within twelve paces of the German baron, and deliberately shot him, the bullet traversing his hips. Dieskau had received, in all, five wounds.

Blodget, a sutler in Johnson’s army, stood like a war-correspondent on the hill near by, watching the fighting. He was thus enabled to make a sketch of the battle, which he published as a cheap print, “with a full though short history,” some weeks afterward, in Boston. Even the wagoners, in the intervals between carrying to Surgeon Williams the wounded who lay on the ground behind the log-house, took their part in fighting; each probably doing as much execution as the average farmer’s boy. For, despite the hot fire so long maintained, the number of killed and wounded on the enemy’s side, except among the French regulars whose white uniform made them easy targets, was not very great. It was not easy to hit men ensconced behind trees or stumps, or occasionally rising in the smoke above the underbrush, while the enemy could, during most of the time, see only here and there a head. The Mohawks in the camp were mostly useless, except to keep up yelling while their white brothers fought beyond the breastworks; and they enjoyed seeing how the pale faces fought. Nevertheless, about forty of their number lost their lives during the day in ambuscade and battle.

While this attack of the regulars on the right was progressing, the French Canadians and the Abenaki Indians boldly attempted to flank the left of the camp, many of them even going away round toward the lake, and clustering in a morass where the musketry fire could not well reach them. Fortunately, however, Johnson had posted a field-piece advantageously on the extreme left of his front, which now harassed the squatting Indians, while on those in the marsh the mortars and howitzers were trained. Although the howitzers split and became useless, the mortars did well; and some shells skilfully dropped drove the lurking enemy away, and completely relieved this flank of danger.

Brave as were the Americans behind the rude barricade, they did not excel the French regulars, who fought until they were nearly annihilated. It was well into the afternoon when they were deserted by hundreds of French forest-rangers and Canadian Indians, who, seeing no hope of winning the day, skulked away to the scene of the morning’s ambuscade,—the one set to plunder, and the other to scalp the slain. About four o’clock so many of the white-coated regulars were prone on the ground and so few in action, all their officers being disabled, while the fire of the others had slackened, that the Americans began to get out of their breastworks, and to fight in the woods. This made the French give way so visibly that the whole of Lyman’s force rushed out on the enemy with their hatchets and clubbed muskets, pushing them out of ambush into full retreat. This onset took place between four and five o’clock p. m., and resulted in completely driving the enemy off the field.

The fighting was not yet over, for the third battle on this eventful day was yet to take place. Hearing the distant firing, Colonel Blanchard, of Fort Lyman, sent out a party of two hundred and fifty men under command of the brave Captain McGinnis, who, with his Schenectady men, led the van. Warily approaching the place of the morning’s ambuscade, with scouts ahead, they succeeded in getting between the piled-up baggage of the French army and a vidette of five or six men who were keeping a lookout on a hill. Moving farther up the road, they found a party of three hundred French and Indians, consisting of those who had plundered the slain, and of other remnants of the beaten army, who were eating cold rations out of their packs. They sat along Rocky Brook and the marshy pond. McGinnis and his men approached stealthily until within firing distance, and then, after a volley, charged like tigers upon their prey.

In the fight which ensued the Americans contested against heavy odds; but although their brave captain was mortally wounded, he directed their movements till the firing ceased, and the third battle of this eventful day resulted in victory. Not till the next evening did the scattered band of Dieskau’s army meet, exhausted and famished, at the place where they had left their canoes.

The next day the marshy pool, in places reddened with the blood of the slain, thrown into it to save burial, was given the name—which it ever afterward kept—of “Bloody Pond.” When the writer saw it, in 1877, the sunbeams danced merrily on its dimpled face, as the snow-white and golden pond-lilies were swayed by the morning’s breeze, rippling the water’s surface, while yet held at anchor beneath. In this threefold battle the Americans lost most heavily in the “bloody morning scout” at the ambuscade,—their total being two hundred and twenty killed, and ninety wounded. The well-plied tomahawks, after the surprise in the woods, and the poisoned bullets of the French Canadians accounted for the disproportionate number of the dead over the wounded. Among the officers were Colonel Williams, Major Ashley, Captains Keys, Porter, Ingersoll, and twelve others. Captain McGinnis died in the camp two days afterward. Of the Indians, beside Hendrick, thirty-eight were slain. On the French side the loss must have been fully four hundred, or probably one third of those actually engaged.

In this battle farmers and traders prevailed over European troops, trained woodcraftsmen, and fierce savages. The honours of the command belong equally to three men. The credit of the defences, and the excellent disposition of marksmen, artillery, and reserves, belongs to Johnson, who, unfortunately, was wounded in the hips in the first part of the battle, and had to leave the field for shelter. The command then devolved upon Gen. Phineas Lyman, who deserves equal honour with Johnson. The Connecticut general, cool and alert, displayed the greatest courage, and was largely influential in securing the final result. To McGinnis belongs the credit of winning a victory,—the second of the day, in what may be called the third battle of this eventful 8th of September. Nevertheless, such are the peculiarities of the military mind, that Johnson never mentioned Lyman’s name in his official despatch. For this reason, and because they unjustly suspected cowardice in Johnson during the battle, and because they saw comparatively little of him before and after it, withal being sectional and clannish in their opinions, Johnson was extremely unpopular with the New England soldiers. Their judgments have mightily influenced the accounts of the threefold battle of Lake George as found in the writings of New England annalists and historians.

Johnson was at once rewarded by being made a baronet, with the gift of five thousand pounds, while Lyman received the ordinary stipend of his rank,—another ingredient in Johnson’s unpopularity in the Eastern colonies.

Three days after, the Iroquois allies waited on Johnson and informed him that, according to custom, after losing comrades in battle, they must return home to cheer their people, and protect their castles against the Abenaki Indians, from whom they feared an attack. It was in vain that Johnson tried to show them that the campaign had hardly begun, and to persuade them to alter their purpose. They insisted on going away, promising, however, to come again soon with fresh zeal.

Dissensions and jealousies between the troops of the various colonies now broke out. Both the generals commanding, and the new governor, Hardy, thought that a strong fort should be built to command the water-way to Canada, by way of Lake George. Though as important for the defence of New England as of New York, the Eastern officers and men could not see the need of a fort here, and the work dragged. When finished, it was called by the courtier, Johnson, Fort William Henry, after the king’s grandson, and had a notable history. Meanwhile, owing to remissness of contractors, the petty jealousies of the officers and militia of five or more colonies, and the overcautiousness of Johnson, nothing aggressive was done. Late in November, the fort being finished, the unpopular duty of garrisoning it devolved upon a medley of six hundred men from the various colonies. The army was disbanded, and the levies marched home. Johnson resigned his commission, and returned to Mount Johnson about the middle of December. About ten days later he was in New York, enjoying, as well as his wound would allow, the parade and illumination of the city in his honour; while Dieskau languished in the Schuyler mansion in Albany, waiting for some of his many wounds to heal; and Lyman received modest honours at home. The patent of Johnson’s baronetcy was dated Nov. 27, 1755. He invested the four thousand nine hundred and forty-five pounds eighteen shillings and sixpence which came into his hands, in three per cent bank annuities.

His coat-of-arms consisted of a heart-shaped shield held and flanked on either side by an Indian equipped with feathers, medal, quiver, and bow. On the shield are three fleurs-de-lis; and on the convex band across the shield, two shells, and between them a smaller heart, on which lies an open hand supine. Above the shield a hand grasps a dart. The motto is Deo Regique Debeo. The full inscription of the blazon in the language of heraldry is given in the standard books which treat of the British peerage.

The versatile Johnson, turning from military to civil duties, remained in New York during the whole of the month of January, 1756. The men then in control of the British government, with their usual obtuseness, sent another sailor to do the work of a statesman. Sir Charles Hardy, after appointing October 2 as a day of public thanksgiving for the victory at Lake George, celebrated it himself by starting on a visit to Albany. He proposed to effect such a resumption of active military operations as would secure the main object of the great expedition,—the capture of Crown Point. His presence, however, was fruitless, and he returned to New York, November 26. Then, on the 2d of December, he met his little Parliament, and told them all about the victory of General Johnson or Baron Dieskau. The stolid Dutchmen and others were unable, as the Indian orators would say, “to see it in that light.” They could not do other than anticipate the verdict of the critical scholarship of this generation, for they looked upon the whole affair as “a failure disguised under an incidental success.” Further, instead of hearing that the English flag waved over Crown Point, and that English cannon guarded the narrows of Lake Champlain, they were asked to pay for Fort William Henry and Fort George, both of which were but an ordinary day’s horseback-ride from Albany. At the same time Sir Charles demanded in King George’s name a permanent revenue, with which to pay governors, judges, and the general expenses of the government.

To the first proposition, to pay their share of expense for forts in which all the colonies were interested, the Assembly at once responded favourably. To the second they gave a flat refusal, declaring that the idea of a permanent revenue was in direct opposition to the public sentiment of the colony.

On the same day on which the Assembly met, Governor Shirley arrived in New York. Being, by the death of Braddock, the king’s chief military representative in America, he summoned a congress of colonial governors to meet in New York December 12. With his usual extraordinary mental activity, he was full of schemes, one of which was a midwinter campaign against Ticonderoga. The congress approved of it; but the hard-headed members of the Assembly, the people generally, and Johnson, did not. With all admiration for the fussy politician, who planned superbly on paper, but somehow failed in the field, they had a sincere respect, which was, however, tempered by excellent common-sense.

As for Shirley and Johnson, they seemed always unable to work harmoniously together, the latter resenting what he believed to be the needless interference of the other. Shirley found Johnson more than a match for him in the rather acrid correspondence conducted in New York during January. Living but a few rods apart, the liveried coloured servants of these colonial dignitaries kept their soles warm in carrying despatches. In jealousy of each other, the two gentlemen were as incompatible as Siamese twins, their only common ligament being loyalty to the Crown. Johnson was determined to get and hold his commission from the Crown, and not be subject to colonial governors or assemblies. He laid the whole matter before the Lords of Trade, and aided by his friends at Court, secured a flattering verdict in his favour. In July, 1756, there came to him from his Majesty’s Secretary, Fox, a commission as Colonel, Agent, and sole Superintendent of all the affairs of the Six Nations, and other Northern Indians, with an annual salary of six hundred pounds. By orders from the same august source, the Northern colonies were prohibited from transacting business with the Indians, so that the whole matter was settled in Johnson’s hands.

Being now well intrenched in his office and authority, Johnson, with his usual versatility and vigour, turned from the duties of the desk and council-room to the activities of the field. The frontiers of New Hampshire had been harassed during the winter by prowling bands of savages, but the French now attempted a more ambitious raid. Warned by Indian runners, who had made the first part of their journey on snow-shoes from Fort Bull at the Oneida “carry,” he at once sent ammunition to the garrison of thirty men. On skates from Montreal to Fort Presentation, and thence on snow-shoes to the Oneida portage, the party of nearly three hundred Frenchmen, after ten days of gliding and stepping, appeared before the wooden fort, March 27. Their demand for surrender was met by a volley, which in return was answered by a charge, a crushing in of the gate, and a massacre of all but five of the garrison. Among the military stores destroyed were two tons of powder. About the same time the ship-carpenters at Oswego became the prey of raiding Indians from Niagara, who returned with three prisoners and twelve scalps. Forays were made by Canadian savages, even into Ulster and Orange Counties, within a day’s horse-ride of New York.

The winter was unusually mild, which caused the utter abandonment of Shirley’s expedition to Crown Point; while the numerous petty successes of the French and Indians turned the faces of the vacillating members of the Iroquois cantons toward Canada as the winning side.

Yet strange as it may seem, the New York Assembly was slow in voting supplies. The ultra-loyalists who supported Hardy, who was backed by the king and his council, now vented their maledictions upon the “foreigners” who made the cosmopolitan population of the province, and their representatives in the Assembly. All this seems strange to the average historiographer, especially to the copyist of loyalist or other writers who rely on such men as Colden, Smith, Jones, Washington Irving, and the like, for their ideas of Colonial New York and her people. There was good reason for the stubbornness of the legislators. The fact is, that the people of the province of New York were mostly descendants of the sturdy Republicans who had fought under William the Silent. They believed that the encroachments of monarchy—that is, one-man power—were more dangerous than the raids of hostile Indians. The Dutch, Germans, Scots, Irish, Huguenots, were almost a unit in their democratic ideas. This province, unlike others of the original thirteen, was not settled by people of aristocratic England, in which a republic, once begun, had gone to pieces inside of twelve years, but by men long trained in self-government and in a republic. Even their forms of church life were as nurseries for the training of men in democratic principles. To the loyalist historian, Jones, a Presbyterian seems to be a synonym for rebel, of whatever name or strain of blood. Congregationalists, fed on the rhetoric and oratory of Forefathers’ Day, find it hard to believe that the democratic idea in Church and State flourished anywhere outside of New England. The New York men were determined at all hazards—even the hazards of savage desolation—to resist any further trenching upon their rights by King George, or his subservient Parliament, or his bullying governor.

England had sent over, after Clinton, another illiterate sailor to enforce a fresh demand,—even the passage of a law for settling a permanent revenue on a solid foundation; said law to be indefinite and without limitation of time. The descendants of the Hollanders who had long ago, even against mighty Spain, settled the principle of no taxation without consent, and had maintained it in a war of eighty years, were resolved to fight again the same battle on American soil. They now set themselves resolutely to resist the demands of the Crown, and this whether Indians were in Orange County or at Niagara. Despite the protests of such incorrigible Tories as Smith, Colden, and others in the Executive Council, the people’s representatives persevered.

It is needless to say that the Assembly gained their point, and that the greatest and most lasting victory of the people in the long story of American liberty was won. A few months after, at the autumn session, the joyful news reached New York that the Crown had virtually repealed the instructions to Sir Danvers Osborne, which had made the colonists of New York set themselves in united array of resistance to “their most gracious sovereign.”

The war had thus far been carried on without profession or declaration. The diplomatists of London and Versailles had been as polite and full of smooth words as if profound peace reigned. The English were following their old trade of piracy, and had captured hundreds of French vessels, and imprisoned thousands of French sailors. The French, on the other hand, were doing with England as they did with China in 1885, when they bombarded cities, treacherously got behind forts in the Pearl River, and killed thousands of Chinese, while all the time professing to be at peace. At length the British went through the formality of declaring war, May 17. On the French side, the necessary parchment, red tape, and seals were prepared, and the official ink flowed two years after blood had flowed like water.

Now at last, in Pitt, England had a premier who knew something about the geography of America; and “geography,” as Von Moltke teaches, “is half of war.” William Pitt thought the time had come for intelligent and active operations looking to the conquest of North America by the English. His first selection of men, however, was not particularly wise or evident of genius. Listening to the word of Johnson, and others in New York, he removed Shirley from the chief command, and sent out, successively, Colonel Webb, General Abercrombie, and Lord Loudon,—all of them, as it proved, failures.

The three men appointed were alike in their supercilious contempt for American militia and officers, and were all destined, through their ignorant pride, to disgust Americans with English ways, and steadily to determine them toward independence. Abercrombie, on his arrival, at once began to cast firebrands of discontent among the colonial troops by nullifying the intelligent and well-laid plans of Shirley, and promulgating the exasperating order that all regular officers were to be over those in the colonial service of the same rank. General Winslow fortunately succeeded in dissuading the Britisher from his madness, before desertions and threatened resignations became too numerous; but with the compromise that the imported soldiers should garrison the forts while the Americans went to the front. In other words, the provincials were to see and do the severest service. Abercrombie further showed his obstinacy and ignorance of affairs by billeting ten thousand soldiers on the citizens of Albany, instead of at once advancing to Oswego. He thus unwittingly helped to create that sentiment against the outraging of American homes by the forced presence of soldiers which, later, found expression for all time in the amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Abercrombie wasted the whole summer at Schenectady, which now became the headquarters of the armies. It was determined to build forts at all the portages between this town and Oswego, as well as at South Bay, to protect Fort Edward. While the boat-yards along the Mohawk River were in full activity, and stores were being collected, he employed his men part of the time in teaching the people of Albany and Schenectady how to build earthworks in European style, in digging ditches, and in putting up heavier stockades around the two towns.

One of the good things done by Parliament at this time was the formation of the Royal American Regiment of four battalions, each a thousand strong. Of the fifty officers commissioned, nearly one third were Germans and Swiss. Most of the rank and file were Palatine and Swiss-Germans in America, who enlisted for three years. None of the officers could rise above the rank of lieutenant-colonel, and the Earl of Loudon was appointed first colonel-in-chief. Loudon was succeeded in 1757 by Abercrombie, and in 1758 by Lord Amherst. Until the Revolutionary War, this cosmopolitan regiment did noble service under Stanwix, Bouquet, Forbes, Prideaux, Wolfe, and Johnson. From 1757 to 1760 we find one or more battalions of the regiment in active service in the various parts of New York. The famous Rev. Michael Schlatter, the organizer of the German Reformed Church in Pennsylvania, was the regimental chaplain. On the 15th of June, 1756, the forty German officers who were to raise the recruits arrived, one of the ablest being Colonel Bouquet. This Swiss officer, with the Germans, at Bushy Run in Pennsylvania largely retrieved the disasters caused by Braddock’s defeat, and restored the frontiers of Pennsylvania to comparative safety and comfort.

While Abercrombie, who was one of those military men whose reliance is less upon the sword than the spade, was digging ditches in Albany, Johnson was arranging for a great Indian council at his house on the Mohawk. He had in view the double purpose of winning the Delawares and other Pennsylvania tribes from war against the English colonists, and of inducing all the Northern Indians to join in the expedition against the French posts on Lake Ontario. Braddock’s defeat had been the signal for the Delawares, under the direct influence of the French, to break the peace of more than seventy years, and to scatter fire and blood in Pennsylvania, from the Monongahela to the Delaware. The solemn treaty of Penn—which Voltaire, with more wit than truth, declared was “never sworn to and never broken”—was now a thing of the past. The wampum was unravelled, and the men with hats and the men with scalp-locks were in deadly conflict. While the Friends remained at their Philadelphia firesides, the German and Scotch settlers on the frontier bore the brunt of savage fury. When public action was taken, it was in the double and contradictory form of peace-belts of wampum sent by the Friends, and a declaration of war by Governor Morris. In this mixed state of things it was hard for Johnson to know what to do. Through his influence the Iroquois, uncles and masters, had summoned by wampum belts their nephews and vassals to the great conference which was opened at his house in February, 1756. To prepare for this, Johnson had made a journey to the council-fire of the Confederacy at Onondaga, arriving June 15. There he succeeded in neutralizing in part the work done by the French, and obtained an important concession. The Iroquois voted to allow a road to be opened through the very heart of their empire to Oswego, and a fort to be built at Oswego Falls.

These severe exertions cost Johnson a fit of sickness; but on the 7th of July he met the Iroquois, Delawares, and Shawanese at his house. After the usual consumption, on both sides, of wampum, verbosity, and rum, all the Indians were won over to the English cause. The covenant chain of peace was renewed, the war-belts were accepted by the sachems, and medals hung around their necks by Johnson himself. The Delawares had “their petticoats taken off,”—or, in other words, they were no longer squaws in the eyes of the Iroquois, but allies, friends, and men. Without detracting from Johnson’s reputation, it is probable that the possession by many of the Delawares of the rifles made by the Pennsylvania Swiss and Germans, which gave them such an advantage over Dutch and English smooth-bores, had much to do with winning the respect of the Iroquois.

Through Johnson’s influence two councils were held in Pennsylvania, at Easton, when the Delawares under their great chief, Teedyuscung, met delegations of the Iroquois and Governor Denny. Teedyuscung had for his secretary “the Man of Truth,” Charles Thompson, master of the Friends’ Free School in Philadelphia. The proceedings lasted nine days; Denny by his tact being able “to put his hand in Teedyuscung’s bosom and draw out the secret” of his uneasiness. The council was adjourned to Lancaster in the spring of 1757, when, however, the Delaware chief failed to appear. Nevertheless peace was obtained on the Pennsylvania borders, the credit for which was claimed by the Senecas.

To turn now to the field of war, we find that Governor Shirley had organized a corps of armed boatmen, and had sent them under Colonel Bradstreet to Oswego. Bradstreet was successful in thus provisioning the forts with a six months’ store for five thousand men. After his brilliant exploit he was attacked on his way back, three leagues from the fort, by De Villiers with eleven hundred men. Despite the sudden fury of the attack, Bradstreet beat off the enemy with loss, only a heavy rain preventing his gaining a greater victory. Reaching Albany, he urged General Abercrombie to march at once to the forts. A large expedition under Montcalm was already on its way to remove these, the chief obstacles to their plans of empire. Johnson in person seconded Bradstreet’s appeal, urging that if Oswego fell, the Iroquois would be sure to join the French. Abercrombie stupidly refused to move until Lord Loudon’s arrival, and the golden opportunity was lost.

This slow-minded personage, Lord Loudon, the Scotsman, reached Albany on the 29th of July; but correct ideas as to the situation percolated into his brain with difficulty. Indeed, as with Sydney Smith’s proverbial joke about the Scotchman’s skull, it seemed necessary to perform a surgical operation in order to show him how needful it was to march at once to Oswego, notwithstanding that Montcalm with his host was daily approaching.

While Loudon was fooling away his time in jealousy of the provincial militia, and sending a force in the wrong direction at Crown Point, Montcalm with three thousand troops and plenty of cannon, part of which had been captured from Braddock, settled himself before Oswego. Of the three forts garrisoned by Shirley’s and Pepperell’s regiments of New England men, only one was able to stand a protracted siege. All assembled in this fort, Ontario, and fought gallantly until Colonel Mercer was cut in half by a cannon-shot. Then a panic ensued. The one hundred women in the fort begged that the place should be surrendered, and the white flag was shortly afterward hoisted. The forts were burned, and the place left a desolation, in which the priest, Picquet, set up a lofty cross, and beside it the arms of France. The French were now masters of Lake Ontario, and of the passages by land and water to the Ohio, and free to attack the Lake George forts. They found themselves enriched to the extent of sixteen hundred prisoners, one hundred and twenty cannon, six ships of war, three hundred boats, three chests of money, besides a great quantity of provisions and the stores of war. The destruction instead of the occupation of the forts was a master stroke of policy in favor of conciliating the Six Nations.

In this affair Montcalm showed the nobility of his nature in protecting, at the hazard of his life, the prisoners from massacre. When the Indians, filled with rum, had turned into devils, and were sinking their hatchets in the brains of the unarmed, Montcalm, as the eyewitness John Viele of Schenectady on his return testified before Johnson, ordered out his troops and fired on the brutes. Six of the drunken savages were shot dead. The murdering ceased at once, and there was no massacre.

Loudon the lazy had finally awaked to the situation, and sent General Webb with twelve hundred men to reinforce Oswego. At the Oneida portage Webb heard of the surrender, and hoping to delay the French who were advancing, as he supposed, on Albany, he had some trees chopped down to delay their boats. He then hastily retreated to the fort at German Flats. Johnson, at Albany, heard the news August 20, and under Loudon’s orders, with two battalions of the Valley militia and a corps of three hundred Indians, hastened to reinforce Webb. Remaining in camp fifteen days, until hearing of the removal of the French, he dismissed the militia and returned home.

So passed another year of failure. John Campbell, Scotsman, otherwise called Earl of Loudon, had been sent out as the representative of Lord Halifax and of the Lords of Trade. Having decided to unite all the colonies under military rule, and force them to support a standing army, they selected this man, who was strong in the idea of colonial subordination, but was vacillating, incapable, vain, wasteful, and lazy. His first winter campaign consisted chiefly in scolding Shirley, and making the Massachusetts governor the scapegoat for his own shortcomings; in disgusting the people of New York by billeting his officers upon them; and in both New York and Boston diligently hastening the separation of the colonies from Great Britain by making a fool of himself generally.

With the regulars in winter quarters, the militia dismissed to their homes, the whole frontier, except in the Lake George region, open and exposed, five of the Six Nations practically alienated from the English and already making terms with the French, the outlook was dark.

However, the Mohawks were faithful; and Johnson took heart, believing he could yet win and hold the Iroquois. Sending his captains, the two Butlers, and Jellis Fonda to the various castles, and to the fireplace of the Confederacy at Onondaga, he appointed a great council to meet, June 10, 1757. Meanwhile he sent the Mohawks out upon the war-path, and had the satisfaction of hearing of the repulse of the French and the safe defence of the Fort William Henry which he had built two years before at Lake George. Major William Eyre, the ordnance officer who had served the guns so efficiently at the battle of Lake George against Dieskau’s regulars, was in command of the fort, with four hundred men. The commander of the American rangers, with Eyre, was John Stark. The long and dreary winter was nearly over, and Saint Patrick’s Day was at hand. The French knew as well that the Irish soldiers would be drunk on the 18th of March, as Washington knew that the Hessians would be unfit for clear-headed fighting the day after Christmas. Fortunately, through the thoughtfulness of the future hero of Bennington, his own rangers were kept sober by enforced total abstinence, and the Irish had the rum and drunkenness all to themselves. The French force of fifteen hundred regulars, wood-rangers, and savages came down the lakes on the ice, dragging, each man, his sledge containing provisions, arms, and various equipments, among which were three hundred scaling-ladders. They began a furious attack at sunrise on the 18th, expecting easy victory; but Eyre used his artillery with such deadly effect that despite four separate attacks within twenty-four hours, the expedition ended in total failure. Seized with a panic, the besiegers fled, leaving their sledges and much valuable property behind, besides their dead.

Johnson first heard of this event in a letter from Colonel Gage,—him who married an American wife, and afterward occupied Boston with the redcoats, only to be compelled to leave it at the request of Washington, his old comrade-in-arms on Braddock’s Field. It is a curious coincidence that Colonel Gage has unwittingly furnished Yankee Boston with a public holiday in honour of Ireland’s patron, Saint Patrick,—which the Irish majority in the Boston City Council first inaugurated in 1890, under the disguise of “Evacuation Day.” The date which the Frenchmen chose for their approach to Fort William Henry was the date also on which Gage, in 1775, sailed away to the land whence the Canadians had come in 1757.

Johnson’s tremendous energies now shone forth. He at once summoned the Mohawk Valley militia, and sent his trusty interpreter, Arent Stevens, to rouse the Mohawks. The meeting-place was at his house. The news came on Sunday the 24th; and on Monday, at daylight, the column of twelve hundred militia and the Indians were on the march which in less than four days brought them to Fort William Henry.

Finding the enemy gone, Johnson allowed his men two days’ rest, and was about to start homeward, when hearing that the French meditated a blow on the frontier village of German Flats, he kept in the saddle all night, reaching home at four a. m. Fortunately the news was not confirmed; but he nevertheless ordered the militia to Burnet’s Field, and made his headquarters there. This energetic action had a good effect upon the Iroquois who had been invited to the grand council at Fort Johnson, as his house was now called, and on the 10th of June the proceedings were duly opened. The result of the ten days’ conference was that the neutrality of the Senecas, Cayugas, and Onondagas was secured; while the three other tribes—the Oneidas, Tuscaroras, and Mohawks—were heartily enlisted to fight for the English against the French.

Summer passed away in Johnson’s despatching Indian parties to Canada; in Governor Hardy’s returning to the more congenial quarter-deck, exchanging civil for naval life; in Loudon’s making a grand failure at Louisburg, as usual blaming the colonial officers and troops for his own blunders; and in the shameful loss of Fort William Henry through the cowardice of General Webb.

Johnson had warned Webb of the coming of Montcalm with nearly eight thousand men, including a body of Indians said to be gathered from forty-one tribes. On the 1st of August, while holding a council with the Cherokees at his house, he received news from General Webb that Montcalm was moving down upon Colonel Monro, who with two thousand men occupied the fort and adjoining camp. Johnson at once adjourned the council, and summoning the militia and Mohawks, quickly reached Fort Edward, and begged to be sent to reinforce Monro. The double-minded Webb at first consented, and then ordered him back. Within sound of the cannon, Webb held back his whole force, and sent Monro a note advising him to surrender. Only when his ammunition was nearly exhausted, his heavy cannon burst, three hundred of his men killed or wounded, many others helpless with small-pox, and the outlook hopeless, did Monro surrender. As usual, the Indians, many of them from tribes utterly unused to any control, got at the rum-barrels, and were converted into devils, whom Montcalm in vain endeavoured to control, until after they had butchered scores of Monro’s unarmed people, including women and children. The fort and barracks were burned, and on great heaps of the fuel thus obtained the bodies of the slain were given cremation.

Webb, almost scared out of his wits, would have moved southward to West Point, but that Lord Howe, who had arrived with reinforcements, calmed him. Almost as a matter of course, the blame was laid by the British officers and regulars on the provincial troops. This military bigotry, and the inveterate prejudice of the regulars against volunteers had a tremendous effect in making the native-born militia suspect that they could some day do without the supercilious and conceited king’s servants. They saw that most of the hard fighting had been done by militiamen at the front, who, notwithstanding the immense resources of Great Britain, were not properly supported at the right time. They were tired of being led to the slaughter by fussy, incompetent, and often cowardly commanders. They noted, also, that the regulars were mostly kept in garrison, while the militia were sent to the front, where, usually in battle with the Indians, the Americans stood their ground, fighting behind trees, while the handsomely uniformed regulars were flying to the rear. Further yet, the regulars stationed in the forts in the Mohawk Valley were so arrogant and conceited as to look—as the average Englishman is so apt to do—upon the Dutchmen and Germans as a sort of inferior cattle. The consequence was that they were practically useless as defenders.

Johnson was so heartily disgusted with the state of affairs that it is probable that his sickness in October and November was a direct result of exposure in camp, and distraction of mind. He knew that the French would now at the first opportunity strike the western frontier. He therefore wrote to Abercrombie in September, to reinforce the Valley forts and send scouts and rangers to German Flats. All such warnings, however, were like “an east wind in an ass’s ears.” Abercrombie and his men drilled, drank, swore, gambled, dug ditches, and caricatured the Dutch people in church, and otherwise amused themselves in Albany. At German Flats the long strain of duty in watch and ward resulted in the inevitable reaction; and when the danger was greatest and nearest, the nerves relaxed, the midnight lantern went out, and the sentinel and people alike slept. The friendly Oneidas informed the Germans, fifteen days in advance, of the enemy’s movements. A week later, a chief came in person to warn them; but the people took it as a joke, laughed in his face, and sent no word to Johnson. Tired of hearing the cry of “wolf,” they neglected to provide for their sheep. Despite the fort, the block-houses, and the militia company of one hundred men, the blow fell. Fortunately the minister and some of his people heeded the friendly warning of the Oneidas, and the day before the attack, crossed the river to a place of safety. Those left were infatuated until the last moment.

It was on the morning of Nov. 13, 1757, that the Canadian, Belletre, and his three hundred white and red savages surrounded the doomed village, raised the yell, and began the attack. The people were dazed. After some fitful musketry-firing, the Indians succeeded in setting the houses on fire, and in tomahawking and scalping the people as they rushed out of the flames. One of the block-houses was surrendered by the head man of the village, who asked for quarter. Numbers of the people were killed as they ran out to the fording-place of the river to escape to the opposite side, or were shot while in the water. The settlement was totally destroyed. Of the three hundred people, a sixth were killed and one half taken prisoners; the remainder escaped, or had already fled to Fort Herkimer. The abundant live-stock was destroyed or driven off, and the place left in ashes. All this was done almost under the eyes of the commander of Fort Herkimer, but a short distance off, across the Mohawk River. Having a small garrison, he, though fully warned by Oneida Indians of the coming blow, was unable to send assistance, and perhaps anticipated an attack on his own post.

The people of Stone Arabia and Cherry Valley were excited, and prepared to leave these places when the escaped refugees brought the news. Lord Howe, with his reinforcements, though too late for action, prevented the depopulation of the settlements.

The sage Lord Loudon heard of this latest disaster while in Albany, and his conduct was characteristic. Eager to find a victim on whom to vent his rage and to bear his own and his officers’ shortcomings, he blamed the Iroquois, and even proposed to make war against them. It was, probably, only by the active persuasion of Johnson that he was turned from his madness.

Imagination vainly seeks to picture the results had Loudon, the grand master of Great Britain’s resources, even begun his folly, and broken the peace league which Van Curler had made, Schuyler extended, and Johnson perfected. Had he practically betrayed his country by turning the whole Indian power of the continent over to the French, the history of this country would have been vastly different from that we know. Had Johnson done nothing else than prevent this, he would deserve a high place among the Makers of America.