When the conference opened, August 19, Dr. Cadwallader took the place of Governor Clinton, who was down with fever. The two delegates from Massachusetts, Mr. Nelles and Colonel Wendell, were also present, but none from Connecticut appeared. Colden’s speech was a bubble of rhetoric, fairly dazzling with the prismatics of a lively imagination. It rehearsed facts, fancies, and prophecies appropriate to the situation. The colossal but purely mythical preparations supposed to be made in Great Britain, in the reality of which the sailor-governor himself heartily believed, were duly set forth. Then the wrongs suffered by the Indians at the hands of the “perfidious” French were detailed, until the braves were stirred in eye and nostril, and the chiefs grunted out, “Yo-hay! yo-hay!” (“Do you hear! do you believe!”), and general applause in Indian fashion followed as the interpreter finished each sentence. The war spirit was further roused by flatteries which fell like oil on the flames, kindling the fiercest enthusiasm. After the usual promises of gifts and equipment, with assurance of reward and booty in the future, the orator wound up by narrating the murder of some white men, their brothers, even since their arrival in Albany, and calling upon his hearers for immediate and permanent revenge.

Taking it all in all, this speech of Clinton and Colden’s is a fair sample of the lies, false promises, and irresponsible assertions on which the red man has been fed, from the first coming of the whites, to the battle with the Sioux, near Pine Ridge Agency, in January, 1891. The proper peroration of the speech, according to Indian etiquette, was the casting down of a wampum war-belt with verbal assurances and in symbolic intent that the British would live and die with their brethren the Iroquois. When this was done, a war-whoop was raised that must have been heard in every cabin and iron-monogrammed brick-house in the colony and manor.

On that very day, as was soon afterward learned, the French were at Fort Massachusetts,^[5] which had been built by Col. Ephraim Williams. It stood in the meadows east of Williamstown, under the shadow of old Greylock, beyond the present town of North Adams. After two days’ siege the brave garrison surrendered and were led away to Canada. The French lost forty-seven men. The fort was afterward, in 1747, rebuilt, and was the scene of more than one attack by the enemy.

The council-fire was then raked up, so that the braves might have time to sleep, smoke, and deliberate for reply. When the council re-opened on the 24th, the governor was present, and the first orator at the rekindled fire was an Onondaga chief. After the usual efflorescence of forest rhetoric, he promised in the name of the Seven Nations—a small army of eight hundred braves from Detroit and the Lake country, the Missesagues, having temporarily joined the confederates for the common purpose—to dig up the hatchet against the French and their allies. They further agreed to roast alive any French priest who came among them. The next day was devoted to distributing the presents sent from the king and the governors of Virginia and Massachusetts; the new tribe, Missesagues, receiving one fourth. On the 26th the kettle was hung over the fire, and a great war-dance held, in which, after unusual smearings of paint, the weird, wild, and guttural, but pathetic songs were sung. After a few private interviews with the chiefs, and further tickling of their palms with presents and their stomachs with fire-water, the council-fire was put out by separation and scattering. Part of the Valley Indians remained in Albany, in token of their loyalty to the English, while most of them returned to their castles to organize war-parties. Unfortunately an epidemic of the small-pox broke out at this time all along the Valley, carrying off hundreds of the Indians, among whom were the two delegates from the Missesagues.

Other councils were held with lesser bodies of Indians; and Johnson, despite the raging of the small-pox among the Valley Indians, endeavoured to keep the savages on the war-path toward Canada; but little was accomplished during the summer. While the coming French fleet was destroyed by storm, Johnson increased his fortune by being appointed government contractor for Oswego, and his fame by being commissioned by Clinton as Colonel of militia. The only campaign in 1747 was one of paper and ink, Shirley and Clinton being the chief combatants. There were also raids and fights on the New England borders, but little took place that needs to be chronicled here. Clinton and De Lancey kept up their quarrels; the former warning Johnson of his illustrious relative, venting his wrath on the Dutch legislators, and taking high-handed vengeance on Judge Daniel Horsmanden. This champion of the Assembly and people, and one of the ablest jurists in the province, was most obnoxious, politically, to the king’s representatives. He was also personally offensive as being the co-worker with Chief-Justice De Lancey.

On the 12th of September Horsmanden was suspended from service as a member of the council. The fact was published in the journal; but no reason was given for this, except that the governor announced that he would explain his action to the king. Horsmanden was also removed from his other positions,—as commissioner to meet the representatives of the other colonies, and as judge and recorder of the city. This act of the governor’s still further irritated the “stubborn Dutchmen,” whose hostility now turned into a war to the knife. Even though savages were ravaging the suburbs of New York, it is doubtful whether they would have been turned from their determination to fight absolutism, in the person of Clinton. When the governor announced the return of Johnson from his fruitless search after the enemy at Crown Point, the temper of the Assembly was not improved. They were tired of having the praises of Johnson sounded in their ears. They still refused, in the face of Johnson’s contract, while still in force, to furnish extra guards for the fulfilment of his stipulation in provisioning Oswego. They also adhered to their determination not to yield to the governor’s demands, so long as he thwarted their purposes. In affirming their former resolutions, they, nevertheless, offered to indemnify Johnson if through accident he became a loser by fulfilling his contract.

Meanwhile, the governor held counsel with the New England commissioners, and despite the remonstrances of the members, bluffed off his little Parliament until October 5. The frontier was still exposed. It was hard to get volunteers for Oswego, largely owing to the abominable drunkenness of the officers there, and the lack of good discipline. Two companies from Colonel Schuyler’s regiment were therefore drafted for the purpose. It being practically impossible to maintain the weak force at Saratoga, this post, which had been named Fort Clinton, was burned by order, and the ordnance and stores removed to Albany. In this unpleasant state of affairs Colonel Johnson was summoned to New York, and on October 9 was examined by the committee of the Executive Council. He exposed the grave state of affairs, in that the Indians had been kept from hunting for a whole year, and were now destitute. Unless something were speedily done, he felt he must abandon Mount Johnson and his interests in the Mohawk Valley. He even imagined that his leaving would be the general signal for an exodus of all the white people from the Mohawk basin. He recommended the erection of forts both in the Seneca and the Oneida districts. He believed that these measures, with plenty of presents, and the ferreting out of the miscellaneous rumsellers who debauched the Indians, would make safe the northern frontier and save the colony.

Clinton’s message to the Assembly, October 6, was presented with high praises of Johnson, a vindication of himself, and an exhortation to act promptly and liberally, as the Iroquois sachems were waiting with Johnson in the city to see what would be done in their behalf. The conquest of Crown Point was still in view; and men, money, and supplies were asked for. It was intimated that the Crown (the mother country) had already done its full part, and that the colonies should now do theirs.

Still the Assemblymen, who thought the Indians ought to have been allowed to go on their hunting, ought to have been kept friendly, but not stirred up to fight the French or be sent to Canada, and ought to have stayed in New York to guard their own old men and squaws instead of having white men drafted to do it, distrusted the servant of the king and the tool of Colden, and doubted the fitness of the governor’s appointees to office. They questioned the wisdom of the governor’s general policy; and they intimated, with only too good reason, that the money so freely distributed for the Indians was not properly and publicly accounted for. They voted promptly all that was necessary for the expedition against Canada. They fully realized the necessity of holding firm the loyalty of the Six Nations; and to keep it, they offered at once to vote the sum of eight hundred pounds, provided the persons chosen to distribute the people’s money were such as they approved of. In regard to the forts on the distant frontier, so near Canada, they considered that the other colonies should share the expense of permanently guarding the king’s dominions.

In answer to these defiant resolutions, which practically impeached the governor, Clinton sent a curt and insulting note of less than one hundred words. The Dutchman’s ire now blazed fiercely. After the significant ceremony of locking the door and laying the key on the table, they proceeded to issue a manifesto, marshalling in review the whole proceedings since June 6, 1746. They censured him for removing the former commissioners of Indian affairs, and for practically making Dr. Colden the real administrator of affairs in the cabinet, and Colonel Johnson in the field. They sneered at the pretensions and vanity of the governor in his constant boasting of what he claimed to have done. They charged him with treating the people of the colony with contempt, and with insulting them by vile epithets. They complained of the many brief and inconvenient adjournments to which he had needlessly subjected them. Especially were they enraged in their feelings at the deference paid, at their expense, to the commissioners from Massachusetts and Connecticut. They claimed that they ought to have been kept in session, in order that they might have been advised with, and their opinions consulted from time to time as to the matters under consideration.

In this last point, especially, the Dutch blood was roused; for although in monarchical England the power of making treaties is vested in the sovereign, yet in the Dutch Republic, then a living reality before their eyes, the States-General, like the United States Senate, shared with the Stadtholder or President the right of treaty-making, and had the power of veto upon all compacts. Even in Great Britain, the exercise of the treaty-making power by the king was subject to parliamentary censure, and ministers negotiating a disadvantageous treaty were liable to impeachment. This right had been several times exercised in the sixteenth and even in the fifteenth century.

The address wound up by this declaration: “No treatment your Excellency can use toward us, no inconveniences how great soever that we may suffer in our own persons, shall ever prevail upon us to abandon, or deter us from steadily preserving the interest of our country.”

A committee waited upon the governor on the 9th of October, to present the address; but the angry executive would not hear it, nor receive a copy, and three days later replied with all the artillery of rhetoric and abuse which he and his secretary were able to load into the document. It was as full of vituperation as a carronade of later day was of langrage shot. As to their complaint that the money intended for Indian presents was not honestly distributed, he charged the House with telling “as bold a falsehood as ever came from a body of men.” He was in no way accountable to the Assembly for the manner in which he distributed the money of the Crown. He charged them with violating both the civil and military prerogatives of the king. “Nor will I,” he said, “give up the least branch of it [the military prerogative] on any consideration, however desirous you may be to have it, or to bear the whole command.” He also asserted, with some attempt at humour, that their farce of locking the door and placing the key upon the table—a symbolic act charging breach of privilege upon the executive—was a high insult to King George’s authority, and in so far, an act of disloyalty. He charged that they were assuming the rights and privileges of the House of Commons, and renouncing their subjection to the Crown and Parliament. He had his Majesty’s express command not to suffer them to bring some matters into the House, nor to debate upon them; and he intimated that he had a right to stop proceedings when they seemed to him improper or disorderly. After a tirade upon their insolence and unbecoming conduct, his peroration was a warning not to infringe upon the royal prerogative.

Safety-valves having thus been opened through the ink-bottles, the war of words ceased, and both governor and legislators proceeded to diligence in business. In expectation that Massachusetts and Connecticut would bear their quota of expense, the governor was requested, October 15, to carry out his plan of sending gunsmiths and other mechanics to live among and assist the tribes of the Confederacy westward of the Mohawks. Four days after, however, news came from England ordering the disbanding of all the levies for the expedition to Canada. This was disheartening alike to the governors and the people of the colonies; but some compromise measures were amicably agreed upon between Clinton and the Assembly.

Peace, in New York City at least, seemed almost at hand, when Clinton again attempted folly in trying to muzzle the press. The Assembly had ordered Parker, the public printer, to publish the address and remonstrance of the Assembly, in which they asserted the rights of the people. The governor commanded him to desist. Parker stood by the people and their Assembly, as against the king and his foolish governor. After Cosby’s ignominious failure to restrain the liberty of the press by imprisoning Zenger, this act of Clinton’s seemed like that of a madman or a man who had no memory. The Assembly ordered Parker to print their manifests, and to furnish each member with two copies, “that their constituents might know it was their firm resolution to preserve the liberty of the press.”

In a word, all this wrangle between colonial governor and Assembly was really the cause of popular liberty against monarchy, of ordered freedom under law against despotism. It was part of the chequered story of liberty, in which the people of New York were in no whit behind those of any of the colonies, but rather led them. Clinton, by his blunders, and Colden, by his toryism, helped grandly forward the American revolution, while the names of Parker and Zenger belong with those of the promoters of order and freedom. When on the 25th day of November, 1747,—significant date, for on that day, only thirty-six years later, King George’s troops and mercenaries evacuated that very city of New York, in which Clinton had illustrated the folly of monarchy,—after addressing, or rather berating, the people’s representatives, he concluded his address with the significant words:—

“Your continued grasping for power, with an evident tendency to the weakening of the dependency of the province on Great Britain, accompanied by such notorious and public disrespect to the character of your governor, and contempt of the king’s authority intrusted with him, cannot longer be hid from your superiors, but must come under their observation, and is of most dangerous example to your neighbours.”

It was, indeed, true that New York was setting what was in the eyes of the Tories a most dangerous example to her neighbours. Most of the people of this colony were descendants of those who had come from the Dutch Republic, where the taxation without consent had been resisted for centuries, and where resistance to monarchy and feudal ideas had been exalted into a principle. It was this determined spirit, reinforced by the lovers of liberty, whether of Huguenot, Irish, Scottish, or Welsh blood, or men from the mother country who believed that the rights of Englishmen were still theirs, that made New York lead all the thirteen original colonies in outgrowing the colonial spirit. New Yorkers first took the steps which must logically and actually lead to separation from the transatlantic country, whose language was indeed spoken in America, but by colonists who had continued the institutions not of monarchical England, but of republican Holland.

To reorganize the demoralized militia of the northern counties, Governor Clinton in November offered the command of the entire frontier to Johnson, who after due consideration accepted. Besides having the confidence of the people, among whom he was personally popular, Johnson, being backed by the Executive Council, was able to do the work expected of him, and bring about much needed reform, especially in improving the quality of the officers and the general discipline. The able-bodied men of the Mohawk Valley, mostly Dutch and German, with a few English, Irish, and Scots, were organized into nine companies of militia. Each village or settlement had its company of one hundred men, the most westward being at German Flats. Schenectady had two companies, and at Albany there were several; while all the farmers living in the open country, between forts or palisaded villages, were likewise enrolled.

Johnson’s wealth as farmer, fur-trader, army-contractor, and salaried officer was now steadily increasing. Even the victualling of Oswego ceased to be a losing enterprise, since the Assembly, in February, 1748, voted two hundred pounds to reimburse him for the extraordinary charges to which he had been put. The same Assembly, however, voted one hundred and fifty pounds to Mr. Horsmanden, whom Clinton had arbitrarily deposed from the Council, and also appointed an agent to reside in London to represent them and act with them and for the people against the governor. In this the Dutch legislators were following a precedent which their fathers had established, in having agents to represent them to the States-General in Holland, and which they continued under English rule, when they sent Peter Stuyvesant to the Court of King Charles II. in 1667.

The expedition to Canada being wholly given up, it was necessary to conciliate the Indians with presents. In April, Johnson set out to Onondaga, the central council-fire of the Iroquois Confederacy, to meet the delegates of all the tribes, in order to ascertain their temper and invite them to a great council at Albany. His other purposes in going were to circumvent the schemes of Joncaire the French Jesuit, and talk the Indians into giving their permission to have forts erected in their country. As usual, he was not too squeamish in the use of means to accomplish his purpose. He wrote from Albany, April 9, 1748, to Captain Catherwood: “I shall leave no stone unturned to accomplish what I go at, either by fair or foul means; for if they are obstinate—I mean the Onondagas—I shall certainly talk very harsh with them, and try what that will do.”

Leaving Mount Johnson with a guard of fifty men, with Captain Thomas Butler and Lieutenant Laurie as officers, he set off, in bateaux heavily laden with presents and provisions, up the Mohawk. To move these loaded boats against the current, by punting, pushing, pulling, sailing, or floating their way along, was slow work, but was safely accomplished. Some of the Indians had come with pleasant remembrances of the courtesy of Mount Johnson. They felt deeply that sort of gratitude which has been defined as a “lively sense of favours to come.” Having arrived some days before, and waited with attenuated rations, they were ravenous when Johnson and his stores arrived on April 24. After a salute of fire-arms and the unfurling of a British flag, three bark houses were assigned to the company, while Johnson was escorted to a large new lodge in which the mats were fresh and clean. That night a feast was given to the Indians out of the stores brought, all business being deferred until next day.

With all formality of pipes and tobacco, splendour of Indian and civilized costume, the council opened next morning. It was a contest of tongues, and one garrulous Irishman was here to enter the lists and to pit himself, with seemingly interminable prolixity of speech and the fixed ammunition of Indian rhetoric, against a host of tireless tongues. With plenty of talk to fill their ears and abundance of good things to tickle their stomachs, Johnson succeeded in strengthening the covenant of Corlaer; and the issue of the council was, on the whole, all that, even to Johnson, could be expected. In reporting results, Johnson suggested to the governor that proper regulation of the sale of rum among the Indians was the first thing to be considered.

Clinton, while happy in knowing that the Iroquois would come to the Albany council, was brooding over the tendency everywhere manifest in the colonies to assert their independence. Johnson’s full report of the tongue-victory at the Onondaga council was laid before the Assembly, June 21. The governor added, that to hold the Indians loyal to the English it would be necessary to prosecute the expedition against Crown Point, and at once make arrangements for exchange of prisoners. In this latter suggestion, and with that recommending a severe enactment against rumsellers, the Assembly at once concurred. A few days after came news of the treaty of peace at Aix-la-Chapelle.

Johnson, by unremitting exertion, had succeeded in securing the largest attendance of Indians that had ever assembled in Albany. They came from all the tribes of the Confederacy and from the lake region westward, besides remnants of New England and Hudson River Indians. Many of these Indians had never seen a civilized town, and greatly enjoyed the regular meals and other comforts of civilization, while interested in studying houses with chimneys, carpets, glass windows, and other things unknown to forest life. Great preparations had been made to receive them and to keep them in the best of humour. What with the clerks, quartermasters, interpreters, and others of the official class, the militia and the citizens, the farming folk who had flocked into the city to see the sights, in addition to villagers from the region around, Albany had never before beheld so large a population, nor shown such picturesque activity in her streets. In the oldest city in any of the colonies north of the municipality on Manhattan Island, these few days in the month of July were long remembered.

The eighteenth day of July had come; and all the Indians expected, hundreds in number, had already arrived, and were beginning to think “Brother Corlaer” was as dilatory as his war operations had all along been. Governor Shirley and the Massachusetts commissioners, however, had come; and all lay down at night expecting the great palaver would be but a day or two off. But before Clinton was to arrive, they were to learn how near the enemy was even at that moment.

In the evening exciting news was brought them from Schenectady. A battle had been fought between a party of Canadian Indians and the militia and villagers just beyond Schenectady, in which twenty whites had been killed and a number taken prisoners. The drums at once beat to quarters, and Captain Chew with one hundred militiamen and two hundred of the Indians, told off from those in convention, marched at once in pursuit. The Indians from Albany expected to head off the raiders, and hence went along the usual trails to Canada; but this time the Canada savages had retreated along the Sacandaga road and creek, “by a different road from what they used to go,” as Onnasdego, an Onondaga sachem, said to Clinton in his oration a few days afterward. Johnson remained in Albany attending to his horde of guests; while Captain Chew and his band made vain pursuit. On the 22d, the day of the opening of the council, he received a letter from Albert Van Slyck, dated “Schonaictaiday, July 21st, 1749,” giving a brief detail of the bloody affray. Van Slyck was an honest Dutch farmer, whose defective powers in English composition were in contrast with his courage; and his Dutch-English account is difficult to make certain sense of, especially in its blotted, time-stained, and torn condition in the Johnson manuscripts at Albany; but, except some entries in the family Bibles of people in or near the town, this is the only known contemporaneous writing by one who was in the fight. It is not mentioned even in Parkman’s “Montcalm and Wolfe,” nor in the colonial or more recent histories, except Drake’s, though sometimes referred to inaccurately.

Further, it was difficult, until 1752, for an intelligent Hollander or American of Holland descent, whose ancestors since 1581 had adopted the calendar of Christendom to keep the run of English chronology, which was eleven days behind the rest of the world. For over a century and a half, England was very much in the condition of Russia of the present day, as compared with the rest of Europe. The English used “the old style,” or the calendar of Julius Cæsar, while the continental nations made use of the modern or Gregorian calendar. It may be that this explains why Van Slyck dated his letter one year ahead, 1749, instead of 1748.

Van Slyck’s letter describes an event which for a generation formed a leading topic at the evening firesides of the people of Schenectady, and of many in Connecticut. The tremendous loss in men, chiefly heads of families, that fell upon this frontier town is almost unknown to history; yet the fight at Beechdale was one of the most stubbornly contested little battles of the Old French War. Instead of being “an autumnal foray” upon a party of woodmen, it was a stand-up, hand-to-hand fight by the Schenectady men against savages who were consummate ambuscaders, and well versed in all the arts of woodcraft and the tricks most likely to confound raw militiamen.

The battle-field lies on the Toll Farm, three miles west of Schenectady, and is visible from the car-windows to the right of a train on the New York Central Railroad going westward. A company of Schenectady men were at Maalwyck, a place not far from the town, on the north side of the river. Messrs. Dirk Van Voast and Daniel Toll, with Toll’s negro slave, Ryckert, left their comrades to find their horses which had strayed off. A few minutes after they had left, firing was heard in the direction in which they had gone, by the Van Slyck brothers, Adrian and Albert, one of whom was afterward in the fight and wrote the meagre account which is now among the Johnson papers. They at once sent a messenger, their negro slave, to Schenectady to give the alarm, which was doubtless sounded out from the belfry of the strong fortress-church by the Widow Margarita Veeder, the klok-luider or bell-ringer at that time. The summons came first before noon. The negro delivered his message, bidding the men go out to Abraham De Graaf’s house at Beukendal, where Van Slyck would meet them.

At this time there was a company of New England militia in the town under the command of Captain Stoddard, who was then absent, his place being filled by Lieut. John Darling. The militiamen were from Connecticut, and were raw levies unused to Indian warfare. They started off accompanied by five or six young men and Daniel Van Slyck, another brother of the writer. The party numbered about seventy men in all. Another company of armed men, whose number is not stated, left for the scene of conflict a few minutes later, to see if they could find or see Daniel Toll.

Toll and Van Voast, after leaving the Van Slycks at Maalwyck, had reached a place two miles away, near the house of De Graaf, and called in Dutch, Poopendaal, or later, Beukendal or Beech Dale. Within or beyond the dale, was a well-known place on hard clayey soil, full of deer-licks at which the deer used to come to lick the salt. At this kleykuil, or clay-pit, the two men imagined they heard, about ten o’clock, the sound of horses’ hoofs stamping on the hard ground, but with a regularity that seemed very suspicious. Approaching warily nearer, they discovered that the noise came from a party of Indians playing quoits. Almost as soon as the two white men came in sight, they were fired on by the savages, who had seen their coming. Toll was instantly killed, and Van Voast was wounded and made prisoner. The black man, Ryckert, fled toward Schenectady.

The wily savages now prepared to ambuscade the party which they knew would soon appear from Schenectady. For this purpose they laid a sensational trap in a field, somewhat off from the path and in a defile near the creek, which was surrounded with forest and bush. Taking the dead body of Mr. Toll, they set it up against a fence and tied a live crow in front of the corpse. This curious sight of a wild crow flying up and down before an apparently living man they knew would at once excite the attention, especially of the impulsive and unwary young men who, as they supposed, would be the first on the field. The sequel proves they were not disappointed.

Lieutenant Darling and his Connecticut men marched out, cautiously searching for the enemy, but seeing no trace of any. At Mr. Simon Groot’s unoccupied house they found Adrian Van Slyck, who with a few men had arrived and learned from the negro boy Ryckert, that his master, Mr. Toll, had been shot. Though nearly paralyzed with fear, he offered to point out the place where he fell. The negro was furnished with a horse, and acted as pilot to the advance party of about forty men. Soon after they had gone, Ackes Van Slyck arrived and remained with his men near the house.

Pretty soon the strange phenomenon of a crow playing near a man arrested their attention, and they at once marched into the trap to see the curious sight. Very soon they discovered that the man was a corpse, and the crow was tied to it with a string. At this moment when nearly all were in the defile along the creek, and off their guard, the crash of the enemy’s guns enlightened them as to the situation. They found themselves in a ravine or hollow curved like a horseshoe, and nearly surrounded on both sides by woods, from which puffs of white smoke and flashes of fire were issuing from unseen enemies. Eight or ten of the whites were at once stretched dead on the clay ground, and then the yelling savages leaped out of cover with knife and hatchet.

The militiamen soon broke and ran, but the Schenectady men bravely stood their ground. It took a moment to deliver their fire, and then with musket clubbed or thrown aside, the fighting became, for a few minutes, a series of desperate encounters between white and red man, in which it happened more than once that both buried their knives in each other. After the battle the bodies of Glen, De Graaf, and other noted Indian fighters were found alongside their dead enemies with whom they had wrested in deadly struggle. In this hand-to-hand fight twelve of the party of whites were killed, and five made prisoners; Lieutenant Darling’s company losing seven men, who were shot dead, and six missing.

Adrian Van Slyck and a company of New York militiamen now reached the scene, where the little band of whites were found behind trees and stumps holding the enemy at bay; Lieutenant Darling having been killed at the first fire, Ackes Van Slyck was directing the fight. No sooner had the New York reinforcements got into the line of Indian fire, than they all fled in the most cowardly manner. Adrian Van Slyck and the two or three Schenectady men who stood by him in this part of the field were shot down.

The rest of the original party of whites now retreated out through the western entrance of the vale, and joined by Albert Van Slyck and a few men from the village, reached the house of Abraham De Graaf near by. This substantial edifice—still standing, but used as a dried-apple bleacher when the writer visited it—was not then occupied, but was new and strong, and stood on commanding ground. The fact of its being empty shows the condition of affairs; the people who lived in isolated farm-houses being at this time gathered almost wholly in palisaded villages or other fortified places.

Hastily entering, they barred the door, and reaching the second story, tore off all the boards near the floor and eaves, and prepared for a stubborn defence. With their keen marksmanship they kept the enemy at bay, completely baffling the savages, who peppered the house in vain. While this siege was going on, the two Indian lads left in charge of Dirk Van Voast, eager to see the fight, tied their prisoner to a tree, and climbing up the slope of the ravine, became absorbed in the firing. Van Voast succeeded in reaching his knife, cut the thongs binding him, and ran off to Schenectady, meeting another squad of armed men from the village hastening to the scene. These were led by Jacob Glen, and Albert Van Slyck, the writer describing the event.

Van Slyck had hoped to gather enough men to get out and surround the Indians so as to capture the whole band; but Garret Van Antwerp, fearing lest the town would be left without a garrison in case of attack, would suffer no more to leave the palisades. However, this last reinforcement reached the battle-ground in time to drive off the savages, who were fighting the previously sent party from behind trees, and to save the bodies of Adrian Van Slyck and the dead men near him from being scalped and stripped. Seeing this last party approaching, the savages drew off, retreating up the Sacandaga road. All the whites, including the last comers, the scattered out-door fighters behind trees, and the little garrison in the house, now united. They proceeded at once to count up their loss, and to gather up the dead men and load them on wagons for burial in Schenectady.

What the loss of the Indians was in this battle, as in most others, the white men were never able to find out. Except at the scene of the first firing and ambuscade, Indian corpses were not visible. The first purpose of the redskins, as soon as the opening fury of battle slackened, was to conceal their loss. To run out from cover, even in the face of the fire, and draw away the corpses of their friends, was their usual habit, and to this they were thoroughly trained. Exposure in such work was more cheerfully borne than in regular combat, though usually the dead body was reached by cautious approach, and with as much concealment as possible in the undergrowth. A noose at the end of a rope was skilfully thrown over the head of the corpse, and the end of the rope carried back into cover. As skilfully as a band of medical students or resurrectionists can put a hook under the chin of a corpse and hoist it up from under the coffin-lid half sawed off, the savages in ambush would draw the body of their fallen comrade out of sight, to be quickly concealed or buried. Indian fighters often told stories of dead men apparently turning into snakes and gliding out of sight. Owing to this habit of the Indians, it was very difficult to arrive at the exact execution done by the white man’s fire. As most of the Schenectady men were trained Indian fighters, the loss of the savages was probably great.

This was a sad day for Schenectady. One third of the white force engaged were dead or wounded. Twenty corpses—twelve of them Schenectady fathers, sons, or brothers, and eight Connecticut men—were laid on the floor of a barn, near the church, which is still standing. The sorrowing wives, mothers, and sisters came to identify the scalped and maimed dear ones. Thirteen or fourteen men were missing, while the number of wounded was never accurately known. In the Green Street burying-ground, east of the “Old Queen’s Fort,” the long funeral procession followed the corpses, while Domine Van Santvoord committed dust to dust.

Many are the touching traditions of sorrow connected with this “Beukendal massacre.” So it, indeed, appeared to the people of Schenectady, because of so many of their prominent men thus suddenly slain. To them it was in some sense a repetition of the awful night of Feb. 8, 1690. Yet, instead of its being a massacre, it was a stand-up, hand-to-hand fight in Indian fashion, and a typical border-battle. In the superb and storied edifice of “The First Reformed Protestant Dutch Church of Schenectady, in the county of Albany,”—so called in the old charter given by King George II., and so rich in the graphic symbols of “the church in the Netherlands under the Cross,” as well as of local history,—a tablet epitomizing the history of the church in its five edifices was set in its niche after the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of the church, celebrated June 21, 1880. It is “in pitiful remembrance of the martyrs who perished in the massacres of February 9th, 1690, and July 18th, 1748.” From the rear church window one may still look, in 1891, on the barn on the floor of which the bodies were brought and laid for identification on the day when the sturdy Dutch-American Albert Van Slyck signed his letter to “Coll. William Johnson at Albany,” “your Sorrowfull and Revengfull friend on those Barbarous Enemys, and am at all Times on your Command.”

Clinton, accompanied by his satellite, Dr. Colden, and some other members of his council, arrived in Albany, July 20. The next day, after those necessary ceremonies to which the Indians are as great bond-slaves as their civilized brethren, the council fairly opened. A great palaver ensued, and talk flowed unceasingly for hour after hour, until many ears needed rest even more than the few busy tongues. The governor wound up his long address by referring to the battle of Beukendal, so recent and so near by.

After three days of smoke and thought, a wordy warrior from Onondaga replied for the Confederacy in prolix detail. The day was closed with a dance by the young braves, and the king’s health was drunk in five barrels of beer.

On the following day the River Indians spoke, expressing gratitude for favours past, and asserting that if they had been present when news of the Schenectady battle reached Albany, they would have cheerfully joined in pursuit, even to the gate of Crown Point.

By this time it was no longer possible to suppress the news of peace in Europe, and the poor savages who had been goaded into digging up the hatchet and neglecting their hunting, and who were thirsting for revenge, were now left in the lurch, and told to go quietly home. Nevertheless, most of the colonists were satisfied with the result of the council, and Johnson’s popularity increased. The Iroquois were pleased when they found that both Shirley and Clinton were about to send back all the French prisoners to Canada, and to ask for the return of both the white, red, and black captives, who had been carried away from their homes south of the St. Lawrence.

Lieutenant Stoddard and Captain Anthony Van Schaick went to Canada, and into the Indian country; but their success was not gratifying. Only twenty-four prisoners accompanied Lieutenant Stoddard when he left Canada, June 28, 1750. The white boys and girls who had nearly or wholly forgotten their old home and kin, and had been adopted into the tribes, declined, or were forced to decline, going back. Occasionally white women had abjured their religion, and in other cases the red squaws threatened sure death to the adopted captives should they try to return, even at the French governor’s orders. With the Indians, however, exchange was more easy, though the savages were unable to understand the delays of diplomacy between Clinton and Gallissonière; and to pacify them, Johnson was often at his wits’ end. However, by his personal influence, by visits of condolence, by social participation in their games and feasts, by persistent patience, public eloquence, private persuasion, and the frequent use of money and other material gifts, he won fresh laurels of success. In spite of the diplomacy of La Gallissonière, the ceaselessly active Jesuit priests, French cunning and strategy on the one hand, and English and Dutch weakness and villany on the other, he held the whole Iroquois Confederacy loyal to the British Crown. The greatness of Johnson is nobly shown in thus foiling the French and all their resources.

This year, amid manifold commercial, military, and domestic cares, he entertained the famous Swedish botanist, naturalist, and traveller, Peter Kalm, with whose name the evergreen plant Kalmia is associated. He had come at the suggestion of Linnæus to investigate the botany and natural history of North America. He arrived at Fort Johnson with a letter from Dr. Colden, who was as fond of physical science as he was of his Toryism. After dispensing courtly hospitality, Johnson furnished him with a guide to Oswego and Niagara, and a letter to the commandant at the former place. Kalm’s “Voyage to North America” was translated and published in London in 1777, and the map accompanying it is of great interest. After him was named that family of evergreens in which is found the American laurel, Kalmia latifolia, which has been proposed as the national flower of the United States.

The Old French War, or the War of the Austrian Succession, was foolishly begun in Germany, and foolishly ended in Europe, Asia, and America. The peace which came without honour settled nothing as regarded the questions at issue in America. In reality this treaty guaranteed another American war. Louisburg was again handed over to the French in exchange for Madras. All prisoners in the three continents were to be released without ransom, and a return of all conquered territory and property was agreed to. The balance of power now rested level on its fulcrum, ready for some fly’s weight to tilt it and cause the scale-pans to bounce.

In what part of the world first? With unspeakable disgust the raw troops and scarred veterans, and the people generally of the colonies, received the news. Not a few thought it was time to think of not only fighting their own battles, but of making their own treaties. The continental or American spirit, already a spark, was fanned almost to a flame.

Meanwhile, in home politics, New York was steadily advancing in the pathway that was to merge into the highway of national independence. To a New England writer, accustomed to the unbridled laudation of his own State and ancestry as those who led the Teutonic-American colonies in the struggle for liberty, the doings in the New York Assembly may seem “teapot-tempest politics.” To those less prejudiced, it is a noble chapter in the story of freedom, when they see an ultra-Tory British governor fast relegated to a position of impotence, though backed by the able Tory, Cadwallader Colden, while the people’s will is manifested in persistent limitation of the royal prerogative.

This was the state of affairs in May, 1750, when, on the death of Philip Livingston, Col. William Johnson was appointed to a seat in the governor’s Executive Council. The Livingstones were sturdy men of Scottish descent, descended from a Presbyterian minister who had been banished for non-conformity. Like so many of the founders of America, the Pilgrim Fathers and most of the chief settlers of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, he reinforced his democratic ideas by some years’ residence in the Dutch Republic, living gladly under the red, white, and blue flag of the United States of Holland. The Livingstones in America married into families of Dutch descent, and thereby were still further imbued with Republican ideas. Robert and Philip had been secretaries of Indian affairs, and had thus gained great favour and influence over the Iroquois. Of their descendants, one was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and others were officers in the Revolutionary army, while others are even yet adorning the annals of freedom, progress, and order.

Clinton was, no doubt, very glad to have, in place of a Livingstone, one who was so loyally devoted to the Crown, and so good a personal friend as Johnson near him, Johnson, however, was not sworn in and seated until 1751.

The state of affairs was growing worse and worse, and Clinton the foolish had attempted to stay the tide of democracy by having no Assembly called for two years. When, however, it met on Sept. 4, 1750, Johnson’s bills for six hundred and eighty-six pounds, for provisions sent to Oswego, were cheerfully paid; but the vote was so made that the governor’s claims were, as he thought, invaded. However, for good reasons, and fearing the loss of trade, he submitted. Could Johnson’s invaluable services have been acknowledged without also making recognition of Clinton’s pretensions, the Assembly would have been more liberal. The remarks and strictures of the biographer and eulogist of Johnson about the Dutch traders of Albany, and “the love of gain so characteristic of that nation” (sic) seem strange when the same love of gain was, and is, equally characteristic of Englishman, Yankee, Scotsman, Huguenot, and Quaker. No one will justify the members of the New York Colonial Assembly in all their acts, especially those which were clearly contemptible; but we cannot see that Johnson, Clinton, or the English loved either lucre or liquor any less than the Albany Dutchmen. Indeed, it was the well-founded suspicion that Clinton was using his office largely to recoup his broken fortunes that made the representatives resist him at every point. Johnson, however, finding that the Assembly and the governor could never be reconciled, and that his first bill of two thousand pounds would be likely, under existing circumstances, to remain unpaid, resigned his office of Superintendent of Indian Affairs. To his Iroquois friends he announced this step by sending wampum belts to all the chief fortified towns of the Confederacy.

Neither war nor peace had settled the question of the boundary lines between the French and English possessions in America. The French claimed the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys by right of prior discovery by La Salle and others. The English based their ownership on occupation by the Iroquois or their vassals, and because the Five Nations were allies of Great Britain. Both parties now began anew to occupy the land. The race was westward through the Ohio Valley to the Mississippi. The starting-points were from tidewater Virginia and from Montreal. Not on parallel lines, but toward the apex of a triangle, and straight toward collision, the movement began. The Ohio Company was formed with a grant of six hundred thousand acres by the English Government, chiefly to speculators in Virginia. George Washington was one of the first to be smitten with the fever of speculation, and to the end of his days he made investments in the Western lands as eagerly as many do now in Western farm mortgages.

La Gallissonière instructed Celoron de Bienville, one of the four famous brothers of a remarkable family, to occupy definitely the Ohio Valley in the name of Louis XIV., King of France. Like a sower going forth to sow, Bienville went in a canoe with a sack full of leaden plates, depositing one in the soil at the mouth of every important tributary, so as to publish to the world that from the source of the Ohio to its mouth, the country watered by it belonged to France. Up to 1891 several of these plates have been dug up,—coming thus to resurrection like faint memories of vanished dreams.

While thus the lines of empire were once more drawn between Celt and Teuton, the same masters again held the key to the situation,—the Iroquois. To win these over to French alliance or vassalage, all the arts of peace were now to be employed by the ablest intellects employing the strongest forces of religion, education, diplomacy, cunning, and material gifts. France with her compact military and religious system in America was a unity. Soldier, priest, and semi-feudal tenant were parts of one machine moved by one head. With the unity of a phalanx and the constrictive power of a dragon, she expected to crush to atoms, or at least coop up between mountains and sea, the English colonies. The heterogeneous collection of people from north continental and insular Europe, of many languages and forms of religion, dwelling between the Merrimac and the Everglades, were held together only by the one tie of allegiance to the British Crown.

Francis Picquet, priest, soldier, and statesman, saw the necessity of securing the loyalty of the Six Nations; and receiving the French Governor’s assent, established himself at La Presentation, on the St. Lawrence River, between Oswego and Montreal, a fort and a chapel. Ostensibly his mission was the conversion of the Iroquois. No more strategic point could have been selected. Whether for peace, war, trade, voyaging, or education and general influence, the site was supremely appropriate. When Johnson heard of the man called, according to which side of the border his name was spoken, “Apostle of the Iroquois” or “Jesuit of the West,” he was alarmed, especially when he learned that this lively hornet, Joncaire, was busy in fomenting trouble among the tribes in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. Before long, this Jean Cœur had succeeded in reviving between the Iroquois and western tribes and the Catawbas an old feud. Very soon Clinton received word from Gov. James Glenn, of South Carolina, that the Senecas were on the war-path and murdering the Catawbas. In this action the Senecas were repeating one of the numerous southern raids to which their grandfathers had been addicted, and one of which Col. John Washington, ancestor of George, assisted to repel. At Johnson’s suggestion, Clinton now invited all the tribes composing the Confederacy or in alliance with the Iroquois to meet at the ancient place of treaties,—the ground on which now stands the new Capitol at Albany,—while Clinton himself called upon the governors of all the colonies to form a plan of union for uniting the tribes and resisting French aggression. On the 28th of June, 1751, the tribes met in Albany, again to renew the covenant first confirmed by Arendt Van Curler. There were present delegates from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, and Indians from the Great Lakes, besides six Catawba chiefs and representatives of the Six Nations.

The first point made by the Iroquois was that Colonel Johnson should be reappointed Superintendent of Indian Affairs. They begged leave to try to influence him by sending a string of wampum to him at Mount Johnson. They despatched a swift footman to his house. A man is a finer animal than a horse, and, in the long run, swifter and more enduring. They chose two human soles rather than four horse’s hoofs for their messenger. Johnson met the wampum-bearer at Schenectady; but when at Albany, despite the eloquence of Clinton and the Indians, he firmly declined serving again while his salary depended upon the Assembly. He now took the oath of office and his seat in the governor’s Council. He retained this dignity while he lived.

The great council formally opened on the 6th of July, 1751. Besides the usual eloquence there was much singing, with ceremonial dances and enjoyment of that aboriginal custom and product,—the pipe and tobacco. The sucking and actual whiffing of the calumet, the metaphorical burying of the hatchet and planting of the tree of peace, signified that war was over between the Southern and Northern Indians. The confederates living above the not yet made Mason’s and Dixon’s line clasped hands across the bloody chasm with the Southerners, and peace again reigned from Pilgrim Land to the Salzburger Germans in Ogelthorpe’s country. The “late unpleasantness” was past. After the usual drinking of fire-water and distribution of presents, the council adjourned, and the Indians went home.

While the Pennsylvania traders were establishing posts on the Ohio, under British authority, the French were also busy. Early in September, from a French deserter, Johnson learned the startling news that a great fleet of canoes manned by twelve hundred Frenchmen and two hundred Adirondack Indians, had passed Oswego, bound for the Ohio. News also arrived by a Cayuga chief that at Cadaracqui a large French man-of-war was being built for the reduction of Oswego. This fort was then in command of Lieutenant Lindsay, founder of the Scottish settlement at Cherry Valley.

Johnson was in New York attending to his duties as a member of the Council, when the harassing news was received. In addition to the anxiety this caused him, he was selected by Clinton to do what proved to be a disagreeable task to himself, and in the eyes of the people’s representative a repulsive one. Indeed it seemed to them to be doing the governor’s dirty work. When the House sent to the Council an act for paying several demands upon the colony, it pleased Clinton and the Council to demand vouchers, and Johnson was sent to the Assembly to request them. The offended and angry representatives of the people declared that the demand was extraordinary and unprecedented, and declined to consider the request until the first of May. The Council, angry in turn, sent Johnson back with a bill of their own originating,—in clear violation of right precedent and propriety, “applying the sum of five hundred pounds for the management of Indian affairs and for repairing the garrison at Oswego.”

As might be expected, this bill was not allowed even a second reading, but a motion was at once passed “that it was the great essential and undoubted right of the representatives of the people of this colony to begin all bills from raising and disbursing of money,” and that the bill of the Council should be rejected. In an address to the governor it was intimated that the one thousand pounds recently voted for entertaining the Indians at the council at Albany had been used for other purposes than the public good. After four days of foolish resistance, the governor, knowing he was unable to make headway when so clearly in the wrong, passed all the bills. Then, gratifying a personal spite at the expense of the public, he dissolved the Assembly.

All this was what those who think the story of American liberty was fought out chiefly in New England would call the “teapot-tempest politics of the New York Assembly.” Yet here was the great principle upon which republican government is founded, and for which Holland revolted against Spain, and the American colonies against England; “our great example,” as Franklin declared, being the Dutch republic.

The Dutch had, centuries before, beyond the dikes of Holland, developed and fought for the doctrine of “no taxation without consent;” and Clinton, Colden, and their coadjutors were clearly in the wrong. Further, the representatives were right in hinting that Clinton and his flatterers were too anxious to improve their own fortunes, and to make the people pay for their needless junketings enjoyed in the name of public service. Those who read the local history of the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys know how burdensome to the people was the silly and costly pageantry of royal governors on their travels.

Johnson, probably with his eyes needfully opened, on reaching his home after the dissolution of the Assembly, found the outlook for the ultimate occupation of the mid-continent by the English rather gloomy. The French held the frontier of New York on its three strategic lines,—Crown Point, La Presentation, and Niagara. They were now planning to plant a mission, which should mean a fort and a church, at Onondaga Lake, near which had perhaps been—if we so interpret the inscription on the Pompey stone—a Spanish settlement once destroyed by the Senecas. Even if the stone, inscribed with the symbols and chronology of Christendom, were that of a captive, it is a mournful but interesting relic.

When Johnson heard the news, the Jesuits had already succeeded in winning the consent of the chiefs even at this ancient hearth of the Iroquois Confederacy. Such a move must be checkmated at once. Despite the raw and inclement weather of late autumn, and his desire for rest and reading, Johnson determined on a journey with its attendant exposure. He set out at once for Onondaga. Summoning the chief men, he asked them, as a proof of their many professions of friendship, to give and deed to him the land and water around Onondaga Lake, to the extent of two miles in every direction from the shores, for which he promised a handsome present. Unable to resist their friend, the sachems signed the deed made out by Johnson, who handed over money amounting to three hundred and fifty pounds, and left for home. Writing to Governor Clinton, he offered the land to the Government of New York at the price he had paid. Thus were the designs of the French again foiled.

With the country at peace, and himself released from the responsibility of Indian affairs, Johnson began to indulge himself more and more in literary pursuits, the development of the Mohawk Valley, the moral and intellectual improvement of the Indians, and the social advantage of the white settlers. He had already a pretty large collection of books from London in his mansion, but he sent an order, August 20, 1752, to a London stationer for the “Gentlemen’s Magazine,” the “Monthly Review,” the latest pamphlets, and “the newspapers regularly, and stitched up.” He persuaded many of the Mohawks to send their children to the school at Stockbridge, Mass., founded by John Sergeant in 1741, and served after his death by America’s greatest intellect, Jonathan Edwards. His uncle, the admiral, had already given seven hundred pounds to the support of this school. Johnson’s correspondence was with the Hon. Joseph Dwight, once Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, who had married Mr. Sergeant’s widow, and was deeply interested in Indian education.

In 1753 Rev. Gideon Hawley, who had taught the children of the Mohawks, Oneidas, and Tuscaroras at Stockbridge, was sent from Boston to establish a mission school on the Susquehanna River, west of Albany. Visiting Mount Johnson, the young missionary was received by the host in person at the gate. He spent a night enjoying the hospitality, and left with Johnson’s hearty godspeed. Hawley was able to pursue his work quietly until the breaking out of the war in 1756. After serving as chaplain to Col. Richard Gridley’s regiment, he spent from 1757 to 1807, nearly a half-century of his long and useful life, among the Indians at Mashpee, Mass.

Johnson was also in warm sympathy with the efforts of Dr. Eleazar Wheelock, who since 1743, when he began with Samson Occum, a Mohegan Indian, had been steadily instructing Indian youths at Lebanon, Conn. “Moor’s Indian Charity School,” as then called, was set upon a good financial basis when in 1776 Occum and Rev. Nathaniel Whitten crossed the ocean, and in England obtained an endowment of ten thousand pounds; William Legge, Earl of Dartmouth, being president of the Board of Trustees. At this school, among the twenty or more Indian boys, Joseph Brant, sent by Johnson, was educated under Dr. Wheelock. Later the Wheelock school was transferred to Hanover, N. H., and named after Lord Dartmouth. On the college seal only, the Indian lads are still seen coming up to this school instead of attending Hampton in Virginia, or Carlisle in Pennsylvania. However, ancient history and tradition, after long abeyance, were revived when, in 1887, a full-blooded Sioux Indian, Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, was graduated from Dartmouth’s classic halls.

Various other attempts were made by Johnson, especially during the last decade of his life, to interest the British authorities in Church and State in the spiritual improvement of the Indians. The evidences of his good intentions and generous purposes are seen in his correspondence. Interesting as they are, however, they bore little fruit, owing to the outbreak of the Revolution which divided both the red and the white tribes. The baronet built a church for the Canajoharie Indians, and supported religious teachers for a while at his own expense. In 1767, being a man above his sect, he would have had the Indian school, which grew into Dartmouth College, removed, and established in the Mohawk Valley. Sectarian influence and ecclesiastical jealousies at Albany prevented his plan from being carried out. The Valley was thus without a college, until Union, founded and endowed almost entirely by the Dutchmen of Schenectady, was established in 1786, free from sectarian control, as its name implies. Under Eliphalet Nott’s presidency of sixty-two years, its fame became national, and within its walls have been educated some of the most useful members of the aboriginal race called, by accident, Indians.

Admiral Warren died in Dublin, July 29, 1752, of fever; and Johnson received the news shortly before setting out to attend the Executive Council in New York, which met in October.

Fortunately for the Commonwealth, Governor Clinton had taken other advice than that so liberally furnished in the past by the particular member so obnoxious to the Assembly; and his opening message was commendably brief, being merely a salutation, which was as briefly and courteously returned. Now that the Tory firebrand was “out of politics” for a while, peace once more reigned. An era of good feeling set in, and harmony was the rule until Clinton’s administration ended. A new Board of Indian Commissioners was chosen, by a compromise between the governor and his little parliament. Plans for paying the colonial debt, for strengthening the frontier, and for establishing a college were all carried out.

Oswego was the watch-house on the frontier. In the early spring of 1753 the advance guard of a French army left Montreal to take possession of the Ohio Valley. Descried alike by Iroquois hunters at the rapids of the St. Lawrence and by the officers at Oswego, the news was communicated to Johnson by foot-runners with wampum and by horseback-riders with letters. Thirty canoes with five hundred Indians under Marin were leading the six thousand Frenchmen determined to hold the domain from Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico.

Whether troubled the more by the encroachments of the warlike French, or by the English land-speculators and enterprising farmers who were now clearing forests and settling on their old hunting-grounds, the Indians could scarcely tell. Dissatisfied at having lost officially their friend Johnson, disliking the commissioners, seeing what they considered as their property, the Ohio, invaded by the French, while the New York Government seemed to be inert or asleep, they sent a delegation to lay their complaints before the governor and Council in New York. There they roundly abused the whole government, and threatened to break the covenant chain. As matter of fact, the trouble concerning land patents arose out of transactions settled before Clinton’s time, which could not at once be remedied in curt Indian fashion. All legal land alienations in New York were, after the custom originating in Holland, and thence borrowed by the American colonists and made a national procedure in all the United States, duly registered; and into these examination must be made. Both house and governor, however, agreed in choosing Johnson as the man for the critical hour, and requested him to meet the tribes at the ancient council-fire at Onondaga. Johnson, hearing that the Iroquois had broken faith and again attacked the Catawbas in the Carolinas, hastened matters by summoning one tribe, the Mohawks, to meet him at his own home.

Again the stone house by the Mohawk became the seat of an Indian council, and was enveloped in clouds of tobacco smoke. Johnson, compelling them to drink the cup mingled with upbraiding and kindness, while bountifully filling their stomachs from his larder, sent them away in good humour, and most of them burning with loyalty. Besides thus manifesting his singular power over the Mohawk savages, he met the representatives of the United Confederacy at Onondaga, September 9. The result of the ceremonies, the eloquence, the smoke, and the eating was that the confederates, though sorely puzzled to know what to do between the French and the English, promised loyalty to the brethren of Corlaer. They would, however, say nothing satisfactory concerning the Catawbas, some of whose scalps, and living members reserved for torture, even then adorned their villages.

Governor Clinton had grown weary of the constant battle which he was, probably with the stolid ignorance of many men of his time and class, fighting against the increasing power of popular liberty. He saw it was vain to resist the spirit which the Dutch, Scots, and French Huguenots had brought into New York with them, or inherited from their sires, and he longed for a rest and a sinecure post in England. He liked neither the New York people nor the climate. When therefore his successor, Sir Danvers Osborne, arrived on Sunday, October 7, Clinton hailed the day as one of the happiest of his life. He shortly after sailed for home, to spend the remainder of his years in a post for which he was better fitted,—the governorship of Greenwich Hospital. He died in 1761, fourteen years before the breaking out of the war which his own actions had strongly tended to precipitate. His son, Sir Henry, led the British regulars and mercenaries who were bluffed in North Carolina, driven off at Fort Moultrie, and finally won victory at Long Island. He failed to relieve Burgoyne, fought the drawn battle at Monmouth, captured Charleston, dickered with Arnold, left Cornwallis in the lurch, and returning baffled to England, shed much ink in defending himself against his critics. Another family of Clintons shed high lustre on the American name and the Empire State. One added another river parallel to the Mohawk, flowing past Johnson’s old home, and joining the waters of the Great Lakes to those of the Hudson and the Atlantic, making the city of New York the metropolis of the continent.

Sir Danvers Osborne’s career in America was a short tragedy in three acts. It lasted five days. He came to be ground as powder between the upper millstone of royal prerogative and the nether disk of popular rights. He came from an aristocratic and monarchical country, whose government believed that it was the source of power to the people, to colonists whose fathers had been educated mostly under a republic, where it was taught that the people were, under God, the originators of power. Charged with instructions much more stringent than those given to his predecessor, he was confronted in the town-hall by the city corporation, whose spokesman’s opening sentence was that “they would not brook any infringement of their liberties, civil or religious.” On meeting his Council for the first time, he was informed that any attempt to enforce the strict orders given him and to insist upon an indefinite support, would be permanently resisted. That night the unfortunate servant of the king took his own life. He committed suicide by hanging himself on his own garden wall.

De Lancey, the chief-justice, was now called to the difficult post of governor, and to the personally delicate task of serving King George and his former associates, whom he had so diligently prodded against Clinton, Colden, and Johnson. This was especially difficult, when the Assembly found, in the instructions to Sir Danvers Osborne, how diligently the late governor and his advisers had slandered and misrepresented them to the British Government. The good results of a change in the executive were, however, at once visible, and the Assembly promptly voted money for the defence of the frontier, for the governor’s salary, for his arrears of pay as chief-justice, for Indian presents, for his voyage to Albany, and indeed, for everything reasonable. They added a complaint against Clinton, and a defence of their conduct to the Crown and Lords of Trade, which De Lancey sent to London.

The clouds of war which had gathered in the Ohio Valley now broke, and M. Contrecœur occupied Fort Du Quesne. George Washington began his career on the soil of the State of Pennsylvania, in which his longest marches, deepest humiliations, fiercest battles, and most lasting civil triumphs were won; and on the 4th of July, 1754, honourably surrendered Fort Necessity. The French drum-beat was now heard from Quebec to Louisiana. The English were banished behind the Alleghanies, and their flag from the Ohio Valley.

It was now vitally necessary that the colonies should form a closer union for defence against French aggression and the inroads of hostile savages. The Iroquois tribes had been able to unite themselves in a stable form of federalism. Why could not the thirteen colonies become confederate, and act with unity of purpose? Besides so great an example on the soil before them, there was the New England Confederation of 1643, which had been made chiefly by men trained in a federal republic. Both the Plymouth men and many of the leaders of New England had lived in the United States of Holland, and under the red, white, and blue flag. There they had seen in actual operation what strength is derived from union. Concordia res parvæ crescunt (“By concord little things become grand”), was the motto of the Union of Utrecht, familiar to all; but in New York the republican motto Een-dracht maakt Macht (“Union makes strength”) needed no translation, for its language was the daily speech of a majority of the people.

It seemed now, at least, eminently proper that the Congress of Colonies should be in the state settled first by people from a republic, and at Albany, the ancient place of treaties, and at the spot in English America where red and white delegates from the north, east, west, and south can even now assemble without climbing or tunnelling the Appalachian chain of mountains.

By direction of the Lords of Trade, the governments of all the colonies were invited to meet at Albany, so that a solemn treaty could be at one time made with all the Indian tribes, by all the colonies, in the name of the king.

For treaty-making with the Iroquois, the most powerful of all the Indian tribes, there was only one place,—Albany. Dinwiddie, of Virginia, vainly wanted it at Winchester, Va., while Shirley, of Massachusetts, jealous of New York, and a genuine politician, wished to keep himself before the voters, and to come after the elections were over. His party was more than his province or the country. As the Indians had already, according to orders from England, been notified, the New York Assembly declined to postpone time or place.