The accession of the House of Hanover to the British throne was hailed throughout the British American colonies as a Whig and protestant triumph, especially welcome to the northern states.
We have already spoken of the financial difficulties into which the late wars had in every case brought the states engaged in them—French as well as English—and which gave rise to the emission of a vast amount of paper money, in every case only increasing the difficulty; while in some, as in that of Louisiana, the most disastrous results were the consequence.
The French had at this period apparently gained firm possession of a powerful extent of American territory. In 1713, they erected on the banks of Lake Champlain, the whole basin of which they claimed, the Fort at Crown Point, and soon after the fortress of Niagara. Anthony Crozat, a wealthy French merchant, took over in 1712 a second colony to Detroit, which was now a flourishing settlement. He also held a patent from Louis XIV. for the exclusive trade of Louisiana, in which De la Motte Cadillac, the governor, became his partner.
Now in possession of the most important western routes to the Mississippi, the French had the satisfaction of seeing their various settlements at Chicago, Vincennes and Kaskasia, all in a flourishing condition. It was the boast of the royal geographer of France, that the American territory of New France “extended to the remotest waters which flowed west to the Mississippi, south to the Mobile, and north to the St. Lawrence;” and in order to defend as well as to connect this vast territory, a line of military forts was designed and in part erected. The English were not unmoved spectators of these ambitious designs, and eagerly awaited the time when they might defeat them. As yet, however, the two rival powers were separated by extensive tracts of country occupied by the most formidable savage tribes of America, but who were destined ere long to be involved in the great struggle between these two civilised nations.
But to return to Anthony Crozat, the merchant whose opulence was said to be “the astonishment of the world.” The most extravagant ideas had been circulated through France regarding the gold and silver mines of Louisiana, and Crozat anticipated that their treasures, and a trade which he intended to establish with Mexico, would augment his wealth still more. But of gold and silver there were none, and every Spanish harbour on the Gulf of Mexico was closed against his ships. Disappointed in his hopes, after five years of vain perseverance, he threw up his patent, only to be succeeded by other adventurers of a much more dangerous character. The exclusive commerce of Louisiana for twenty-five years, with a monopoly of the Canadian fur trade, was conferred upon the “Mississippi Company,” or “the Company of the Indies,” which soon became notorious for the ruin which it brought on thousands. At the time when the colony was transferred to this dangerous company it contained about 700 people.
The Mississippi Company was connected with John Law’s Bank, one of the most gigantic financial speculations of any age. Law, a native of Edinburgh, and controller-general of France, conceived a plan of paying off the national debt of that country by means of the profits arising in part from this Mississippi Company. The French ministry fell into the scheme, and Law opened a bank under the auspices of the Duke of Orleans, then regent of France, and most of the people of property in that country, deluded by the prospect of the immense gains which were promised them, became shareholders either in the bank or in one of Law’s companies, for he had an East India as well as a Mississippi Company. Law’s Bank was declared a royal bank in 1718, and the shares rose to such a value that they were soon worth eighty times the amount of all the current specie of France. The very next year the great bubble burst—only one year before the bursting of the South Sea bubble in England,—and so great was the ruin which it involved, that the French government was almost overthrown, and tens of thousands of families reduced to beggary and despair.
Meantime, the Mississippi Company had undertaken to introduce 6,000 white settlers and half that number of blacks into the colony; and the enormous sums which were soon realised by the sale of land-shares enabled both this company and private speculators to send over great numbers. Of the grants of land which were made, it may suffice to say that Law himself received twelve square miles on the Arkansas, which he undertook to settle with 1,500 Germans.
Bienville, now re-appointed governor, selected, in June 1718, a site on the banks of the Mississippi for the capital of the new empire; it was in the middle of a swamp, which he set a party of convicts to clear,—but no matter, a grand empire was to be founded, and in honour of the regent the city was called New Orleans. On the 25th of August, 1719, 800 emigrants from France chanted Te Deum as they cast anchor near Dauphin’s Island. Here full of rejoicing hopes they landed, and with that the joy and the hope was at an end. Disappointment was the condition of all, despair and death that of many. Almost the only colonists who were successful in Louisiana were emigrants from Canada, resolute and hardy men, “who came,” says Bancroft, “with little beyond a staff and the clothes that covered them.”
In 1722, Charlevoix reports of this infant metropolis, which Bienville had made the seat of government, that it consisted of a large wooden warehouse, a shed for a church, two or three ordinary houses, and a quantity of huts crowded together, the whole being a savage and desert place, as yet almost entirely covered with canes and trees.
The failure of Law’s bank put a period to emigration to Louisiana, nevertheless great numbers of new settlers were already there, many of whom were of a more resolute character than those of New Orleans; and it was to this very desert of cane-brake that Law’s German settlers on the Arkansas removed, and here, receiving allotments of land on each side of the river, they soon began to prosper; the rich tract of land known to this day as the “German coast” testifying to the success of their early labours.
Louisiana was at length established; the upper and more remote parts were placed under the care of the Jesuits, the lower under that of the Capuchins. Eight hundred and fifty French and Swiss troops were maintained in the country, and the administration committed to a commandant-general, two king’s lieutenants, a senior councillor, three other councillors, an attorney-general, and a clerk. These, with any director of the company who might be in the province, formed the Superior Council, which was also the supreme tribunal in civil and criminal matters.
“Rice was the principal crop, the main resource for feeding the population; to this were added tobacco and indigo. The bayberry, a natural production of that remote region, was cultivated for its wax. The fig had been introduced from Province, and the orange from St. Domingo. As the settlements in the Illinois country were increased by immigration from Canada, supplies of flour began to be received from that region.”[32]
The French, however, did not establish themselves amid this vast territory without a struggle with the aboriginal possessors, whose blood ever crimsoned the soil as if in preparation for the harvests of the white man. The Choctas, inhabiting the lower Mississippi, were allies of the French. In the midst of this nation dwelt the Natchez, a peculiar race, worshippers of the sun like the Peruvians.
Alarmed by the encroachments of the French, who had built Fort Rosalie in the Natchez country, and instigated by the hostile Chickasaws, they rose in 1729, and massacred nearly the whole of the whites, about 200 in number. Terror spread through the colony, from New Orleans into Illinois, and the French, with their allies the Choctas, rose for vengeance. A war of extermination began; and within two years the great chief of the tribe, the Great Sun, as he was called, with 400 prisoners, were shipped off to Hispaniola, and sold as slaves; the few scattered remnants of the nation were received among the Chickasaws and the Musgogees. The Natchez as a race were no more.
The Mississippi Company, disappointed in every hope of profit, and still further embarrassed by the Natchez war, threw up their patent, and Bienville was appointed royal governor of Louisiana. His first business was to subdue the Chickasaws, who, undaunted by the fate of their friends, the Natchez, threatened to become as formidable adversaries in the South as the Iroquois in the North.
We will not go into the terrible details of this war, which lasted for about three years, during which some of the noblest men of the province suffered the horrors of Indian martyrdom, among whom was the brave Vincennes, whose name is preserved in the oldest settlement in Indiana. At length in 1740, after four years of fruitless warfare and unexampled suffering, peace was said to be concluded, but the Chickasaws remained masters of the wilderness, and continued as a defence to the English settlements on the west.
Half a century after the first colonisation of Louisiana by La Salle, says Bancroft, its population probably amounted to 5,000 whites and half that number of blacks. The valley of the Mississippi was still nearly a wilderness. Half a century, with kings for its patrons, had not accomplished for Louisiana one tithe of the prosperity which within the same period had sprung naturally from the benevolence of William Penn to the peaceful settlers on the Delaware.
The paper money put into circulation by Massachusetts to defray her late war expenses brought her also into the extremest financial difficulties. The attention of the colony was directed to remedy these, and three parties were formed, each with its several plan; and the scheme of a public bank, the government being pledged for the value of the issues, was adopted, and bills of credit to the amount of £50,000 put in circulation; but the scheme failed, and Governor Shute, who succeeded Dudley in 1766, recommended a further emission of bills of credit, which led to the issue of double the former amount. It was but like the drunkard’s dram, to steady for a moment the shattered nervous system, only by increasing the mischief.
The governor lost his popularity, the currency was depreciated, and disputes arose on the question of his salary, which he demanded should be raised, while the people, attributing to him some of the present difficulties, insisted equally resolutely on its reduction.
Wearied at length with contention, he returned to England, to prefer his complaints to parliament, and succeeded so far as to obtain the introduction of two clauses in the Massachusetts charter, which controlled her liberties, and which, for fear of something worse, the council was obliged to submit to.
While these violent contentions were going forward between the governor and the colony, the utmost alarm was excited by the breaking out of the small-pox in Boston, which led to much popular exasperation. Cotton Mather, now a much wiser man than in the days of the Salem witchcraft, having read in the transactions of the Royal Society an account of the Turkish mode of inoculation for this terrible malady, resolved to stem the present affliction by this remedy. After applying in vain to various medical practitioners, he at length prevailed on Zabdiel Boylston to try the experiment. Boylston, a native of the colony, and a man of courage and enlightenment, made the first attempt upon his own son. Inoculation was successful in every case where it was used, but a violent opposition against it, as an interference with the will of God, arose; pamphlets of the most virulent character were circulated; the incensed mob, who regarded this new-fangled mode of practice as the infusion of poison into the blood, paraded the streets with halters in their hands to hang the inoculators, and a lighted grenade was even thrown into the house of Cotton Mather, as expressive of the popular exasperation. But neither Cotton Mather, nor his enlightened friend, Zabdiel Boylston, were men to be easily daunted. The zeal which thirty years before had made Mather a knight-errant against witchcraft, sustained him now, even though the general court itself seemed inclined to prohibit inoculation by legal enactment. Fortunately, however, humanity and science prevailed; the bill was thrown out of the council, and the same remedy being at the very same period introduced into England, no further opposition was made.
The popular controversies which had lately been carried on by pamphlets on the paper money, Governor Shute’s salary, and now on the small-pox, led James Franklin, a printer of Boston, to commence a newspaper called the “New England Courant.” There were already in Boston two newspapers, or rather advertising sheets, which satisfied themselves with a bald summary of news. Franklin, however, aimed at the discussion of public questions, and the diffusion of free opinion. Benjamin Franklin, then a boy of fifteen, was his brother’s assistant, not only composing the types and carrying out the paper, but himself writing for its columns. Strange to say, this paper was one of the opponents of inoculation. This might have passed; but when the hypocrisy of “religious knaves” was attacked, and the acts of government censured, the two printers were cited before the council, and charged with “mocking religion and bringing it into contempt; affronting his majesty’s ministers, and disturbing the good order of the province.” The elder Franklin was imprisoned, the younger, the real offender, admonished. The paper was continued in the name of Benjamin Franklin, but its credit was gone, and after languishing some little time it expired. The elder brother blamed the younger severely as the author of his misfortunes, and the next year Benjamin fled to New York to escape the tyranny of his brother, and thence on foot to the Delaware, arriving in Philadelphia with one dollar in his pocket, but without friends or home.
Again the Indian war was carried on in the northern frontier, and even as far west as Connecticut River, where Fort Dummer was erected as a defence of the towns in that quarter. Fort Dummer is now Brattleborough, the oldest town in the present state of Vermont. Without going into the particulars of this war, it is sufficient to say, that it was terrible and bloody, as all such former wars; that the premium on Indian scalps rose to £100; and that Norridgewock was taken, and the Jesuit father, Sebastian Rasles, slain, with numbers of his Indian disciples, the chapel profaned and burned, together with the whole village.
The English government, jealous of the growing prosperity of the colonies, and incited by the dissatisfaction of the royal governors, menaced the American provinces by the loss of their charters, by the curtailment of their popular liberty, and the imposition of taxes. The latter, however, the scheme of which originated, it is said, with Sir William Keith, at one time governor of Pennsylvania, was rejected by the commissioners of trade and by Sir Robert Walpole, who, foreseeing the impolicy of such a measure, replied, “I will leave the taxing of the British colonies to some of my successors who have more boldness than I have, and who are less the friends of commerce than myself.”
Every means was taken to advance the British manufacturer at the expense of the colonies, and all competition of industry in the colonies was prohibited. It was soon found that hats could be made most advantageously in the land of the beaver, but this was forbidden; nor in any wise could the provinces he allowed to trade with each other. In 1719, the House of Commons declared, that the erecting of manufactories in the colonies tended to decrease their dependence on Great Britain, and the production of iron was strictly forbidden: “None in the plantations should manufacture iron-wares of any kind whatsoever, nor make bar nor iron-rod.” The northern colonies opposed this hill resolutely. Logan, the excellent governor of Pennsylvania, justly remarked, “To prohibit our making bar-iron for our own use, is the very way to alienate the minds of the people of these parts, and shake their dependence on Britain.” To promote the interests of the British sugar colonies, all intercourse was forbidden between the northern provinces and any tropical island, except those belonging to Britain, which put a stop to the commercial transactions between the northern colonies and the French and Dutch islands, whereby the provisions, horses and timber of the north had been exchanged for rum, sugar and molasses. In 1733, parliament having recognised the “sugar colonies of America as the most important to the trade of England,” imposed a duty of 9d. on every gallon of rum, 6d. on every gallon of molasses, and 5s. on every hundred-weight of sugar, or on any of these articles imported from foreign plantations into the British colonies. This led to extreme dissatisfaction, to contraband trade, and, in the case of molasses, to almost entire prohibition; for, rather than submit, the resolute colonists gave up the use of it. In Maine, also, where a royal monopoly of the fir-timber existed, the settlers were brought into continual and vexatious collision with the revenue officers. If a single tree were felled on any of the land claimed by the British Crown, the settler was liable to punishment for trespass and for the destruction of timber destined for the royal navy. Added to all this, were financial difficulties and disputes about the currency. Unceasing discontent and dissatisfaction existed between the colonies and Great Britain. The seeds of the great approaching struggle were already sown.
In 1728, Burnet, the son of Bishop Burnet, was appointed governor of Massachusetts and New Hampshire, in the place of Shute, and again the controversy rose respecting salary. £1,400 were offered, which, he refused, and removed, on suspicion of undue influence, the general court from Boston to Salem; but even there it was equally refractory, when it was again adjourned, and met in four months at Cambridge, but with no favourable result. The following month, harassed with the difficulties of his position, Burnet sickened of fever and died, bequeathing the old quarrel to his successor, Belcher. The instructions of the new governor forewarned him of the temper of the people he had to govern, and that “for some years they had been attempting by unwarrantable practices, to weaken, if not cast off, the obedience which they owed to the crown, and the dependence which all colonies ought to have on the mother-country.” Belcher, therefore, as the wisest policy, accepted such amount of salary as the assembly chose to vote him.
During the time of Belcher’s governorship, the metaphysician Berkeley, the advocate of the non-existence of matter, removed to Newport, in Rhode Island, intending to become a citizen of the New World. He had conceived the idea of establishing a college in the Bermudas for the instruction of Indians and the education of missionaries; and resigning his rich sinecure Irish deanery of Derry, he proposed to become rector of this college, which was to be endowed by the sale of lands in the portion of St. Kitts ceded to the English, at £100 per annum. George I. took an interest in the scheme, and the House of Commons gave the necessary assent, when Berkeley, just married, arrived at Newport, now a “gay, thriving and commercial city of five thousand inhabitants.” Berkeley, pleased by his reception, bought land and built a house, intending here to wait till all requisite arrangements were made. But George I. died, and the requisite arrangements never were made; and after two years Berkeley returned to England, and became Bishop of Cloyne.
In New York the people and the governor came also into collision, and in the midst of the excitement it occasioned, a newspaper appeared as the organ of the popular cause, which soon led to the imprisonment of its printer, John Peter Zenger. The trial was an important one. The aged Andrew Hamilton, a lawyer of Philadelphia, addressed the jury for the printer. “This is not,” he said, “the cause of a poor printer of New York alone; it is the best cause—the cause of liberty. Every man who prefers freedom to a life of slavery will bless and honour you as men, who, by an impartial verdict, lay a noble foundation for securing to ourselves, our posterity, and our neighbours, that to which nature and the honour of our country have given us a right—the liberty of opposing arbitrary power by speaking and writing truth.” The jury returned a verdict of “Not Guilty;” and not only the colony of New York, but all the other colonies in which the struggle for the birth of liberty had commenced, exulted as for a great triumph. At the same time, Benjamin Franklin, through a paper which he had established in Philadelphia, was giving a voice to the sentiment which was vital in every American breast. “The judgment of a whole people,” declared he, “if unbiased by faction, undeluded by the tricks of designing men, is infallible. The people cannot, in any sense, divest themselves of the supreme authority, inasmuch as the voice of a whole people is the voice of God.”
“The colonies,” says Bancroft, “were forming a character of their own, Throughout the whole continent national freedom and independence were gaining vigour and maturity.”