The Express Train of the American Revolution.—The Hard Lot of the Colonists, and what they got from it.—Colonial Governors, like Old Topers at a Free Opening of a Tavern.—The Miseries of a Visit from Relatives poor and proud.—How, like poor Fowls, the Navigation Acts laid many bad Eggs.—Examples cited.—Parliamentary Laws ingeniously floored and roofed.—English Strabismus, or Squint-eyedness, sought to be made Fashionable in the Colonies.—Success in Canada.—English Tubs to catch Revenue off American Slopes.—Manufacture of Hats prohibited; how and where the Fur flew.—What a Cute Yankee saw from the Top of the American Roof.—How Four Yards are worth more than Five.—Bull-yism defined, and its Laws stated.—The First Bill to raise Revenue; the large Bird behind it described.—Sent over to America, it was foul-ly treated.—Molasses denied to Colonists.—Effects on Yankee Appetites and on the Increase of Straws in Custom-House Casks.—Stamps and Stampedes.—The Act repealed; the Sting left in.—Another Bill and larger Bird behind it in 1767.—The First Blood.—The Wheel starts; its Hub, Spokes, and Periphery.—English Bees swarm over and settle in Boston and other tender Parts.—The Dis-cordant Sounds at Concord.—George Washington; his Appearance and Costume, and what befell him, June, 1775.—Gage falls from a Tree.—Why and Howe?—Washington seizes Boston Neck.—The Spasms.—Bunker Hill gets a Scar and afterwards an Ugly Monumental Patch.—The Boone Colonists in Kentucky.—How they blazed a-way thither from Virginia.—Washington at Cambridge.—Unseasoned Troops seasoned.—General Montgomery earns Laurels at Quebec mixed with Cypress.—The Revolutionary Wheel throws off Dusty Colonial Governors.—How Washington broke up the Hessian Swarm at Boston, and Howe they flew to Halifax.—Washington attends a Lecture in Boston.—General Lee’s Neck-and-Neck Race with Sir Henry Clinton for New York; Lee ahead 120 Minutes.—Sir Henry and a Party of Jolly Dogs alight near Charleston, and how the Waspish Lee lit upon and stung them.—Where the Jolly Dogs then went.—The Wheel well started.

There is always a strange curiosity to see an express-train go by. Everybody crowds up to witness the great red eye glare and scowl, as if it resented the safe inspection which those on the platform give it, as it rushes past. Every one, young and old, watches, with concentrated interest, the momentarily visible heads of the passengers, dusty, dishevelled, and hot, seen through the passing windows, as the train pants, hurrying around a curve, into the darkness. Not a little of the interest is enhanced by the feeling that it will bring up safely far away in a metropolitan depot, and there decant its well-shaken, effervescing freight.

So stand we, surrounded by our readers, on the platform of history, to see the American Revolution rush along upon its own way, grim, earnest, resolute, tracking its onward march towards the great end for which it set out.

“Le genie,” says Buffon, “c’est la patience.” If the naturalist’s definition be true, the colonial patience constituted a most remarkable exhibition of genius.

In 1763 the greater part of the colonists were the descendants of men who had escaped from hard civil and ecclesiastical exactions in their home lands, and had set up for themselves in an unappropriated field. From this new lot they sought to extract, by the difficult labor of one hand, its reluctant yield for subsistence, and by the other to keep off from it enemies ready to take and cut their crops. Uninvited pensioners, called Governors, were soon sent out, in showy tinsel, to tithe their laboriously earned products, and to fence in by golden bars wrought by the settlers the royal prerogatives and pretensions, from which those settlers had endeavored to rid themselves by self-exile. In some of the Colonies mint and cummin were extracted for a church, between whose ecclesiastical detectives and themselves they had essayed to put three thousand miles of disagreeable pickle, with rods enough in it to terrify even lean curates with little to throw up. The English civil list, portioned off upon the young emigrants in the shape of office-holders, sucked up—like an old toper in a newly established tavern—the very best that the place afforded. These officials thus suffered at first to partake of the generous, open-house entertainment, soon cast around them to effect a permanent claim for free commons, where they had been only tolerated by an unselfish hospitality. As no one likes to be eaten out or evicted from his own house and home, even by assumed and softly spoken friends, these self-imposed guests were naturally regarded as poor, proud relatives, who came unbidden at first, put on company airs, insisted on company fare, needed extra waiting on, bred disaffection among the servants, and set up the children to fancies beyond the parental means or authority.

The Navigation Acts, to which we have already adverted, which sought, contrary to all equity, right, or decency, to compel the poor fugitives from plenty and power to send away their scanty surplus of corn, and to get what few things they needed and could afford with difficulty to procure, oceanwise, and in vessels exclusively owned, built, manned, and officered in England, were standing grievances. They were so hard and stiff, that every one ran against them, and after picking himself up, looked back at them in very bad humor and with adjectives which in such moments some utter, but which types refuse to immortalize.

Poor fowls breed rapidly. The Navigation Acts soon laid other vicious eggs. On the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II., in 1660, the colonists were still further tied up by an act which restricted them in the disposition of their salable products to England alone,—a very desirable thing for English purchasers, but deemed by the pinched colonists rather rough upon them. The affectionate step-children, however, overlooked this selfishness of the cross-grained old step-mother, and clung with romantic attachment to the dear old homestead, from which they got nothing but cheap messages of cunning endearment, in return for the substantial contributions which were taken back in the Thames-built clippers.

These acts of Parliament were of course floored with thick, wide planking of well-jointed terms, and roofed in with a royal signature, which in English, and especially in colonial eyes until opened, made even thin shingles shine like stars; but for all this parliamentary carpentering the gales and storms of real life soughed and swept in through the clapboarding, sometimes chilling, and sometimes wetting, the colonial tenants.

Colonial lands, too, were given away as loosely and as liberally as by Congress now; then to royal, as now to railroad, favorites. A commercial strabismus, or English squint-eyedness, was sought to be made fashionable in the North American communities, just as now prevails in Canada,—an apparent look at their own interests in one direction, while in fact by this crooked optical inversion, the eye is all the time looking intently in quite another quarter. That direction was of course northeastwardly towards those little specks of islands, that were left, in the miscellaneous creation of things, near the outer rim of Europe, and so diminutive, that the very strain to discover them behind piles of parliamentary selfishness and supports, huge stacks of manufactured iron, steel, cotton, wool, and puffy conceits, was sure to injure the sight and at last to produce qualms and nausea.

A single tub will catch all the rain that falls over a very wide roofed house, if the gutters are rightly adjusted. The little tub of England caught all the waters that ran from the wide American slopes. Then she had them all around her. She has many still; an East India tub, a West India tub, an Australian tub, etc. The bore of the tubes which lead to these are not, perhaps, as great now as formerly; but now the waters are distilled before they are sent through, and so run a much more profitable stream. Of course she labels them all with very fine names, “Philanthropy,” “Free Trade,” “Justice,” etc. It matters little, however, what the name is: the stuff in the tub is of the same color, a buff yellow, and of the same metallic ingredients.

Her little North American tub, at the period of which we speak, was continually changing,—a larger one being substituted every few years, as new gutters were laid down, and new ways found to enlarge the water-sheds. In 1732, for example, the colonists were forbidden to sell hats to each other,—a felt grievance which made the fur fly for a time; but, as usual, it only flew from, although for, England. The next year, another gutter was put down by the parliamentary tin-man. Hatters were only allowed two apprentices,—a provision which, although very merciful now, considering the short work and manners and very long pay of employees,—was then English disinterestedness. A few years later, the spirits and sweetening of the colonists were taxed, of course not to raise the former or increase the latter, but all for the benefit of that little Anglo-American tub. Manufactories of various kinds were prohibited to be set up, the profits arising from the sales in America of the articles manufactured in England dripping through the philanthropic tubes into the tight English vat. At last some patriotic and far-seeing colonist, getting out through the scuttle-way upon the wide American roof, discovered not only pipes leading in all directions over it, but, on looking sharply around with a half-prying Yankee curiosity, also remarked some curiously contrived parliamentary ladders of rope, hemp, leather, and other material, placed on the rear of the house, and cunningly attached to the pipes by patented clasps, stamped “Revenue”; so that, by an arrangement peculiarly English, and invented by some benevolent gentleman over there, an official friend inside could, for example, cut off a yard from every piece five yards long, or take out two quarts from a bushel of wheat, or a pint from a gallon of molasses or sack, and pass these clippings down the back ladders and so off home to England, while the colonists were meanwhile entertained by an argument, solidly supported by figures, and looking as convincing as a six-barrelled revolver pointed at you, to prove that there was no loss incurred, but that, on the contrary, it was the very way to make the remainder more valuable.

As long as France stayed in the American schoolhouse there were two big, full-grown bullies, whose mutual jealousy and antagonism were the best protection of the children from either; but after the overthrow of M. Jean Crapeau in 1763, Mr. Bull thought that he could have things just as he pleased, could sit down where he liked, in such gear as he chose to make himself comfortable in,—shirt-sleeves or hunting-coat, muddy or indecently short,—could eat up any one’s lunch if he fancied, and munch the choicest fruit that the youngsters were keeping for their own use at play-time. And so, by a law of bullyism,—which is human nature ossified by success,—the moment of the triumph over the one standing champion, was the moment when the intoxication of fancied supreme power, producing a vertigo of insolence, brought out around the object of the championship rivals never before suspected.

In a word, by slow and painful training, the Colonies had become their own champions.

The very year that saw the treaty of peace signed between France and England, by which the former gave up all her American possessions east of the Mississippi, and resigned the belt of North America to the latter, George Grenville, the English minister, gave notice that he should introduce into Parliament a bill to oblige every colonist, who used in any way receipts, notes, drafts, leases, deeds, mortgages, or any such crafty documents, to buy from the British government and put upon them stamps, the proceeds of which sale was to be spent, of course, not among the colonists themselves, but in England, in paying the national debt or in some other facetious way. Of course, Americans did not object to stamps in themselves, provided they helped to make or to hold the die which printed them, and had a hand in grooving and directing the channels in which the pay for them should flow. But they did object—and as the event proved most sanguinarily—to the slicing of their family loaf by a parliamentary knife called a stamp act, sharpened on a London stone, and whittling off their living even with the sparing charity of the Bull family. They did not think it either safe or right for any Taurian, or Teutonic, or Gallic chap, however gentlemanly in manners or benevolent in professions, to be trusted in the pantry, there to use to any extent what he might find, whether articles of luxury, as pies or other poisons, or necessities, as bread, butter, cider, or other field distillations.

The bill of Mr. Grenville was a little one,—very small and very timid,—but there was a bird behind it, as large as all the English crows and jackdaws put together. The bird was not introduced until the next year, 1764, when it was tricked off with some bright beads and spangles around its neck, to disguise its genus. But many in England discovered immediately that it belonged to the family Falco Britannicus, the genuine old-fashioned British falcon, with strong, sharp claws and curved short bill to seize, and long, powerful wings to bear away across seas, the colonial prey. It is a bird now shot at by every philosophic, well-charged English muzzle whenever it makes its appearance; but at the time of which we speak there were public game-keepers of the Grenville kind, not only in England but in other countries, who believed in training and keeping up the breed of parliamentary or royal falcons for colonial and also for home service. These well-fed keepers stoutly maintained that it was right for these fowls, deigning to leave their royal perches in Hesse or Hanover, to alight for their royal pleasure upon private barn-yards and in granaries, and that the people were proper game and profitable sport, and should even feel honored by the eagle-like visits.

It was thought best, however, by the English huntsman of state to send across the Atlantic and exhibit here specimens of the fowl. Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams, James Otis, Richard Henry Lee, and others, well acquainted with the game and domestic birds of North America, at once pointed out and denounced the cruel spurs which this short-billed, sharp-clawed British falcon wore. Others, if possible more outspoken, declared their opinion that this bird never could be domesticated on this side the water, but would get its spurs cut away and perhaps its well-feathered neck wrung, whenever it was sent over for real use among the colonists.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bull declared that the colonists should not have any molasses to lick, unless he himself brought it and sold it to them. Of course from that time forward New England people got to love molasses with patriotic obstinacy, and above all things liked to tickle it with a straw out of those very solemn-looking and otherwise forsaken casks, lying in the neglected custom-houses at Boston, Salem, Newport, and New Haven.

In 1765, the new bird was brought over full-fledged, guarded by numerous fowl-fanciers, who watched it vigilantly on both sides, as the lion and unicorn are represented watching the British crown. But as usual, American quickness to its own interests was quite equal to British selfishness, and, ere the heavy guardians could turn around to see who of the many spectators was teasing and worrying the bird, his feathers were dreadfully plucked, and the poor thing left with exposed claws and crooked bill to the keen ridicule of the by-standers.

On the 1st of November, when the Stamp Act was to go into effect, most of the bales of stamped paper, kindly sent out to emblazon colonial writings, had either been destroyed or shipped back to their parliamentary manufacturers. Colonial pluck went further. It agreed upon total abstinence from everything foreign-made, until the Stamp Act should be repealed. In 1766, after hot debate, the Stamp Act was repealed by the British Parliament; but not before its offensive sting was pulled out and pettishly thrown across the water in the form of a resolution, declaring the right of the London law manufactory to tax the Colonies whenever they wanted any money.

The old circumlocution office had neither learned how to do it, nor how graciously or gracefully to leave off attempts which had resulted in not doing it.

During the year following, 1767, came another bill, with a still larger fowl behind it, a curious, sleepy-eyed, dove-colored bird, with prehensile claws admirably sheathed when not taking hold, but very strong when its real strength was tested.

This bill was to tax glass, paper, painters’ colors, and tea. More colonial pluck,—more total abstinence,—more brisk talk between governors and colonial legislatures,—more effervescing revolutions produced by patriotic acids and alkalies stirred by newly cut sticks,—more courteous shows of loyalty and equally firm, resolute, belligerent acts.

The colonial grievances were gathering into preparations and generating motive-power to start the revolutionary wheel.

At Boston, in March, 1770, the first blood was shed. The ink of the Boston “News-Letter,” which was still published, seemed to have turned red, and was beginning to be let out. All duties were now repealed, except those on tea. The old sting was thus again left, and the colonial face, into which it thrust its tiny hornet spear, began to swell and inflame.

Preparations were now made to drive back the English bees which were now seen to come over in swarms, and to settle down around Boston and other tender spots. Congress—that academy of celebrated American state doctors—was called for in September, 1774, to apply poultices and such other remedies as they deemed best to the inflamed parts. After much consultation together, feeling the patient’s pulse and testing his vitality, they became convinced that they had to deal with one of those surgical cases which are quoted often afterwards as leading, and for the successful operation in which careful preparations must be made.

The military revolutionary wheel was at length set in motion. It had thirteen spokes, made of various kinds of wood, all unseasoned; but they were, after a little patient effort, compactly and well fitted into the hub. A patriotic band, put around its periphery, held the wheel together, and enabled it to work successfully many years, and to endure the strains and jars of colonial revolutionary wagoning.

It is noteworthy that the first formal demonstration in the war, was the despatch by the British commander, Gage, April 18, 1775, of eight hundred men to destroy some colonial stores at Concord,—an irruption into the very temple of peace itself. At Lexington, half-way to their destination, this detachment was met by some seventy provincial volunteers, who entered a bayonet protest against this breach of the peace; but this mild protestation was answered by a sharp, crackling retort, which was heard all through the Colonies. It was the mot de resistance. The protesters retired, and the detachment, riding eight miles further, to the Emerson-ian city, scattered the ammunition and food there, and rode back again to Boston, being quickened on the way by fowling-pieces and duck-guns, discharged at the red-breasted coveys. On hearing the news of the battle of Lexington, Ethan Allen, gathering together a party of Green Mountain boys, presented himself on the evening of May 10, 1775, before the sleepy, dozy doors of Fort Ticonderoga, which were knocked open, and its commandant, De La Plaine, knocked up by a summons to surrender in the name of the great Jehovah and the Continental Congress. The success of this little surprise party was much talked of, and raised more spirits than the revenue acts.

Within Boston all of Gage’s forces, numbering three thousand English, Scotch, and Irish regulars, with many hired Hessians and Waldeckers, now retired; while twenty thousand very irregulars, farmers’ boys, and mechanics, with John Stark in his bear-skin coat, Israel Putnam in leather apron, and other leaders, drawn by centripetal patriotism from their ill-supplied homes, and in such accoutrements as old family chests yielded up, assembled in a tumultuous crowd at the American camp, and formed a weak line around the land side of the city. While this cord was thus stretched on the weak side of Boston,—if, indeed, she ever had a weak side,—George Washington, then forty-three years old, hitherto pursuing the double business of farmer and surveyor, overlaying both ever with the cultured ease and polish of a high-bred gentleman, already known to military men on both sides the sea by his practical capacity in their science, evinced in Braddock’s march and defeat, confessedly a large-headed, well-balanced, wise man, and of intense personal courage and patriotism, was, on the 17th June, 1775, appointed Commander-in-Chief. No statelier figure than his—over six feet in height as it was, and cased ordinarily in large, roomy buckskin trousers, a handsomely fitting blue coat and buff vest—was seen at any time in the American camp for the next eight years.

About the same time the British troops under Gage were reinforced, until they counted twelve thousand veterans. Gage, however, did not long swing on the military tree, or remain to be shaken from the Boston bough by the Yankee farmers and mechanics. He was superseded by Sir William Howe, who, in a few days after Washington’s appointment, landed at Boston, accompanied by Sir Henry Clinton and General Burgoyne.

Believing that what cometh out of the mouth is more hurtful than what enters it, the American army now seized Boston Neck tightly. This contraction produced some spasms in the apoplectic-looking, newly arrived Englishmen, who moved galvanically towards Bunker’s Hill, on the opposite side of the city. To this point Colonel Prescott, with one thousand men,—including some negroes,—was despatched; and here, as is well known, he and Warren and their little party-colored regiment did such things, June 17, 1775, to General Howe and his three thousand attacking men, reinforced by Clinton during the day, as have been deemed worthy of much speaking about ever since.

The brow of Bunker Hill received that day, where Warren and others fell, a scar which not even the hard monumental patch since imposed upon it can make us wish to forget. Higher praise of that scar we cannot accumulate.

While these patriotic doings were going on around Boston, movements equally patriotic were pushed forward in an entirely new quarter,—movements, in fact, which resulted in hiring the coachman of the Sun to drive for the future an American emigrant wagon-train, in company with the old Western solar line. Daniel Boone, then in his forty-fifth year, having four years before blazed a-way with his rifle through the woods from North Carolina across the Cumberland Mountains to the river of the same name, led out in May, 1775, a boon company, founding a Colony on the Kentucky River, at first called Transylvania, but which subsequently threw off, with its hunting-shirt, this long Latinized cognomen, and stood at the dewy font to receive the dear old name of Kentucky. The little Colony started on good wholesome diet,—religious toleration; representatives elected by the people, from the people, for the people; and taxation only by their own representatives. Sheltered by its seclusion from the now daily swelling insurrection on the Atlantic coasts, the riflemen’s settlement grew apace, picking up its flints from the primeval rocks which propped up the neighboring Alleghany range, but pecking them for use only upon abundant game that hovered over its dinner-pots and sauce-pans, ready to drop into them at proper signals.

In July, 1775, Washington went on to Cambridge and took charge of the Continental forces. These forces were, it is well known, about as unmanageable as those at work in volcanic mountains, sometimes making an ominous rumbling, sometimes erupting awkwardly for the peace of others near them, and occasionally discharging themselves most inconveniently for those whose duty it was to watch them. The hot patriotic principles, however, of these raw, unscored militia materials helped essentially the warm endeavors of Washington, Gates, Ward, and Lee to season them into tough disciplined, serviceable timber, and so to support loads and resist strains. In a few months even the most unpromising sticks were dry enough to be piled up around Boston, and thus to burn out General Howe.

Following the old colonial habit of casting sheep’s-eyes upon Canada whenever the dogs of war were unkennelled, that shepherd dog, Ethan Allen, scented game at Crown Point, on the western side of Lake Champlain. Bounding away in long leaps, without a whine or a howl to indicate his purpose or direction, he suddenly sprang upon the British flocks quietly feeding there, and effectually penned and secured them. Hardly stopping to be petted for this exploit, the brave colly tore off, with only a small pack of eighty, to Montreal; but the British keepers there, apprised of his approach, managed, as he came up near the folds, to seize him, put a collar around his neck, and to send him to England, where, however, he never would hunt with the royal pack.

General Montgomery was more fortunate; for within a month after, having taken St. John’s and Fort Chambly, he followed the footprints of Allen, and captured Montreal. Leaving about two hundred troops in that island city,—now the crowning jewel in the Anglo-American stomacher,—he pushed down the St. Lawrence, and at a point twenty miles above Quebec, absorbing the detachment of six hundred men led by the bold, dashing, unprincipled Arnold, he advanced upon the citadel of English America. Here in front of Quebec, after battling the cold for four weeks, the gallant Irishman, on the last day of 1775, amidst a storm of snow and of pelting iron hail, led on a vigorous assault against the place where, sixteen years before, in company with the brave Wolfe, he had gathered the bright laurels of victory, unmixed, as was not his commander’s,—with the gloomy cypress. Now the cypress was all that he was destined to grasp from the grim rock which resented a second capture by the same mortal.

He fell, however, as those fall who do more than achieve success,—deserving it. Under the portico of St. Paul’s Church, in the city of New York, at the confluence of those pulsing streams of life which surge down Broadway and the Bowery,—gathering a volume sufficiently strong to overcome the heavy whirlpools of Wall Street,—lie what of Richard Montgomery was mortal, borne thither sixty-three years after his death by his grateful fellow-citizens, who have laid on the island of Manhattan, now glittering with superb edifices, no corner-stone nobler or more imperishable than that which they then deposited.

The Revolutionary wheel had now fairly started, and one of the first results of its motion was the shaking off those dusty particles, the royal governors,—Dunmore, in Virginia; Lord William Campbell, in South Carolina; Sir Joseph Wright, in Georgia; and others,—each of whom, measuring his own weight on his own scales, fancied—as we now can read in their despatches to the Colonial Office—that he was himself a stone large enough, if dropped in front of the wheel, to stop forever its further advance.

The Hessian bees, shaken off the home twigs by their owners, the fussy, poverty-ridden dukes, princes, landgraves, and margraves, swarmed over and settled at Boston on the oaken boughs planted there by Lord Howe. George Washington was determined to make a vigorous effort to break up the hive and to get its military honey. In March, 1776, he drew near to Boston, sitting down on Dorchester Heights with an earth curtain before him, to guard against the stings of any vagrants that might stray away from the main swarm. Scarcely, however, had our general, in his buckskin breeches, begun to feel around the nest, before, to his great surprise, and to the infinite wonderment of George III., and his minister, Lord North, the entire swarm with a peculiar buzz, rose at four o’clock in the morning from their new-made hive and flew away in a bee-line for Halifax. Much honey, then particularly dear to Americans, was gathered after they left; as much as two hundred and fifty combs, in the shape of cannon, and not a little of that bee dust, so very scarce in March, 1776, called powder. Washington was much concerned lest the pesky swarm might turn their flight and settle down in New York. So, after attending a lecture the night following his entrance into Boston, in order not to excite by his absence any hubbub in that literary and then religious place, he set in motion the great body of his troops towards the island of Manhattan.

Major-General Charles Lee, a Welshman by birth, and a soldier of fortune, who had fought in Portugal and Poland, mettlesome and waspish in temper, was despatched in April with other troops to New York, where, after a neck-and-neck race with Sir Henry Clinton, accompanied by a large British force from England, he arrived only two hours before his competitor. Sir Henry, although anxiously expected on shore by several British friends, at length concluded that it was too early in the season to alight so far north, and so cruised southward for a milder climate and reception. Sailing leisurely down our wave-dented shores, he joined the squadron of his old boon companions in arms, Admiral Sir Peter Parker and Earl Cornwallis, with some two thousand five hundred jolly dogs, hired at fourpence a day to come out and inspect our country. Strolling on together pleasantly in a warm latitude, with flying-fish to amuse them on the outside, and broiled fish inside the ships, they touched land at last near Charleston. The restless, waspish Lee, who had been also flying down southwards over the land, hovering on quick wing and watching the jolly dogs to see where they would come ashore, no sooner found that they thought of landing at Sullivan’s Island, and visiting a military summer-house there, built of palmetto wood, and called Fort Moultrie, than he lit upon them, stung two hundred of them more or less uncomfortably, and compelled them all to go off wholly from that place, the pleasure of reaching which depends so much upon the feelings of those to whom the visit is proposed.

New England and the South were now alike freed from British tourists and German musket-holders.

Where Sir Henry and his jolly dogs, constituting one party, and Lord Howe with his lively squad, still enjoying themselves at Halifax after their rapid journey from Boston, making up the other British set, would next prospect, much concerned the Continental Congress, George Washington, Charles Lee, and the colonial people generally. The uncertainty was soon ended. Lord Howe, sailing from Halifax, June 11th, reached Sandy Hook on the 25th of the same month, and dropping anchor off Staten Island, July 2d, was soon joined by Sir Henry and his jolly dogs, feeling a little uneasy of stomach, and somewhat less merry than when they left England nearly three months before, and vowing, ’pon honor, that Sir Henry had somewhat taken them in at Charleston, although, in fact, the real trouble was that he had not taken them in at all there.

Truly the Revolutionary wheel was now well started, and began to get in earnest motion.

Review of our Historical Journey from the Start up to the Summit of the 4th of July.—Résumé of our Tramp through Pre-Columbian and Post-Columbian Times.—Our March from St. Augustine, via Jamestown and the Manhattan Cabins, to the Temperance Tavern at Plymouth.—Descriptions of Indian Interruptions.—Polite Interferences of Gallic Gentlemen at Narrow Parts of the Road in 1689, 1710, 1745, etc.—Banditti on the Highways of History, English, French, and Dutch.—Blazing Description of the Summit, the Flagstaff, Flag, and Eagle.—The Grand Political Picnic there of Fifty-one Wise Men.—The Thunder-Storms around them; and their Behavior.—General Account of this Group; and how remarkable and marked.—Special Portraitures of Thirteen of them.—Some Peculiar Heads there, and how much George III. wanted them.—Prayer of John Adams.—A Great Freshet of a Speech and what it carried off.—A Remarkable Declaration made by Jefferson.—An Electrical Battery charged and discharged.—The Peppering George III. got.—How he worked Seven Years against the Declaration.—The Gunpowdery Effect of the first Fourth, and the Fire-Crackers since touched off by it.—Independence originally handled without Gloves; now by Aldermen and very Common Councilmen with a half-dozen Pair apiece.—The Fourths up to 1850.—Tar-Barrel Eloquence.—Military and Civic Renown snatched on that Day.—What Eggs, containing Addling Heroes, pip on that Day.—How Swords embarrass Crooked Legs.—Militia Lines, and what Snarls they get into.—Dissolving Bursts of Golden Glories.—Effects of Sulphur administered to a Rural Population.—Cakes of Gingerbread, and how they stuck in the Teeth, Stomach, and Memory.—Lamentations over the Decay of the Old-time Fourths.

Long time have we been climbing together up the political eminence, until we have at last reached its high summit,—the Fourth of July. Cold and bleak was the weather, and wholly new and uncleared the path on which we set out, thousands of years ago, among the hitherto unknown, pre-Columbian regions of America. The way was beset with obstructions,—heaps of coal and fossil remains,—and strewn with bones of races, human and animal, as strange even to our museums as they were novel to ourselves. Among these freshly discovered relics of our great ancestors, we trode carefully, and lingered with pleased wonder among ruins, which shamed by their age and size the usurping glories of Egyptian, Chinese, and Assyrian antiquities. At last, however, having traversed those broad plains, over which hung the gray, uncertain twilight of chronicle and geological fiction, we emerged, by a sudden turn in the road, into the clearer light and more solid undebatable ground rediscovered and retouched by more modern nations; convinced by our large inspection and survey, that those who landed on our shores long before Columbus—the Cabots, Cortereals, Verrazannis, Vespuccis, etc.—had, like provident patres familias, packed carefully away large stores of carbonized fuel and bone manure for the use of those who should come behind and after them, and had left well-feathered nests for the more helpless brood which might flock here in times long subsequent to their own.

Refreshed from the fatigues of this long wandering tramp, we then took a fresh start 304 years ago from Sainte Augustine, plodded on northwards forty-eight years to Jamestown, in six years more passed the little group of Dutch cabins on Manhattan island, and so, trending off eastward, followed the wavy coast for eight years more, until we brought up, in 1620, at the newly erected temperance inn at Plymouth, where we halted, glad even of its scant and unpromising cheer. Very early after leaving the James, we were accosted by that well-known wag, John Smith, who turned up in high feather with Pocahontas,—the future mother of Virginia,—and who keeps turning up and down everywhere in all humors, moods, and tenses,—active, passive, transitive, and intransitive,—to suit and amuse every taste.

Mile-stone after mile-stone has been left behind us. We have been hindered by Indian ambushes along the wayside, and have been obliged often to pick out arrows shot into our covered emigrant-wagon, as we have toiled up and over the New England hills, through the Mohawk Valley, and along the broad bottom-lands of Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas. French gentlemen with pleasant manners have often stopped us at cross-roads, and attempted by very sharp arguments to convince us that we were on the wrong track. Several large parties of these Gallic gentlemen, at various narrow parts of the way, especially in 1689, 1710, 1745, and notably for nine consecutive years from 1754 to 1763, have warned us back, and indeed endeavored to turn us entirely off the road, claiming that it was a private one of their own. But past all these have we succeeded in pushing our historic journey, shunning the miry places left open by colonial negligence, the shaky bridges full of witch holes, the badly mended ruts of religious bigotry, and the rough patches of corduroy posts, laid crosswise over trembling, low-lying swamps of political scheming and financial speculation. Here and there we have found bits of plank road, laboriously and ambitiously placed over the public highway in front of colleges, school-houses, churches, and occasionally through pleasant thrifty villages.

Now and then we have ascended, after much patient up-hill work, to large, noble summits of civil or religious freedom, commanding wide horizons and broad views; but often, too, have we felt a sinking of spirits, a saddening depression, as we have been compelled to descend to lower levels and to jog along again over wearisome flats.

We have been detained occasionally by civil-spoken English governors and royal councillors, who have persuaded us to alight and partake of their cheer, which, it must be admitted, was much better than that which we obtained along the common road; but well knowing that it had never been honestly paid for or justly earned, we should have found it more palatable had it been thus properly seasoned. Landed proprietors, with smooth, royal manners, have, also, sometimes stopped us to state little points of difference between themselves and their North American tenants.

Several times have we crossed the Atlantic together for the purpose of obtaining certain information about the colonial ways, rights, manners, customs, and costumes, which could only be cleared up by papers which had been either accidentally or carelessly left behind, when the first emigrants packed their chests with the prime necessaries for subsistence on their briny journey. As we returned and again resumed our land travels, we had only proceeded a short distance before we were stopped by unceremonious and hard-visaged European highwaymen, French, Dutch, and English, with whom we have had stout fights, to prevent the party which we were convoying from being captured, plundered, and carried off to foreign lands. But, thanks to a kind Providence and the strong arms and plucky vigor of the brave chaps inside the wagon, we have been able to disperse these banditti. Two of them, however, as we have just noted, escaping from those lesser encounters, entered formally into a set contest with each other for the championship and custody of our historical party,—a contest which came off a few rods from the top of the hill, and which we halted to witness.

At last, however, we have reached the summit of the great pass,—the high beacon-point of American history,—where the sleepless, vigilant eagle sits screaming, while his strong, horny claws grasp the flag-staff, from whose top the flag of the married empires is anxiously ready, day and night, to slap in its saucy, quarrelsome face every wind that whispers a provocation. Here, on this elevated plateau, we come suddenly upon a very nice party of picturesquely dressed, intelligent, earnest, and thoughtful gentlemen, looking like a large gathering of state midwives, called together to consider a most important, impending family event.

Let us take breath for a few moments after our long ascent, and look more carefully at this noteworthy group. It is the 4th of July,—always a very hot day; and yet, although the weather is characteristic, and there is very warm work ahead, all the party—numbering that day fifty-one persons—seem, with few exceptions, to be very cool and unheated. They are quite unconcerned about the thunder-storm, signalled by white caps fringing the black heads which crowd the eastern horizon beyond the Atlantic, and which has shaken from its heavy locks leaden powder, which has sprinkled the exposed plantations, Breed’s Hill, Concord, Lexington, Ticonderoga, Crown Point, and Long Island, and even shaken its disastrous dust upon Quebec and Montreal.

This notable group is sometimes called the Second Continental Congress. Remarkable in looks and marked men are nearly all of the persons there gathered,—remarkable for their average youth, as most of the members became equally famous for great age,—remarkable, too, in a majority of the whole number, for handsome features and intellectual presence, for their aptitude for, and ready proficiency in, the then very mysterious and royal business of statecraft, law-making, and army-raising,—for their thoughtful air and high-bred bearing, and their readiness in argument, logic, and knowledge of human rights and human nature; marked by the heavy Hanoverian displeasure of George III., of the aristocratic Frederic, Lord North, his minister, and of Sir William Howe, his military generalissimo in the Colonies. Many of them, too, were marked by heads so peculiar that the three English gentlemen just named became very desirous of having them to put into the English State Museum, and even went so far as to offer heavy sterling rewards for any one who would secure them.

One of these heads immediately arrests our attention. It is very handsome, and is set upon a fine, tall, gentlemanly figure,—both owned by one John Hancock from Boston, only thirty-nine years of age, of large wealth for those simple days honorably acquired by trade, of manners conspicuously high-bred, and with a soul that, like a lamp burning inside an alabaster vase, illuminates the beautiful characters which the highest culture has traced and wrought. Two years ago, when Boston was patiently biding the expected period of English justice, triumphing over a short-sighted selfishness, and was carrying, as best she might, meanwhile, the cruel burdens of the Boston Port Bill, and when General Gage was sent out to see that she did not cut the straps, shift the load, or escape its grievous weight, John Hancock,—who the evening before had rallied with soul-lifting eloquence his fellow-sufferers at Faneuil Hall to the unjustly imposed duty of throwing off the crushing load,—rode at the head of his Boston Cadets, to bear with restrained courtesy from the Long Wharf to the State House this hard plum from the royal enclosure,—a Gage that he was careful not to pluck, but to preserve until it was fully ripe. Among this group he sits on a raised seat, and acts as president.

A few gentlemen, more advanced in years than the rest, are sprinkled through the company. One, an old acquaintance of ours, the boy who in 1721 furnished through the “New England Courant” such strong food for even Boston, and afterwards set up an intellectual bakery at Philadelphia, now seventy years old, rests his massive benevolent figure in a chair made comfortable by his presence,—his broad mild face, so largely serene, framed in by flowing soft locks, and beaming with a placid composure, as if the ploughshare of hard work had not turned a furrow there. He looks as if he could forgive George III. for his narrow notions, wedged inextricably fast in his narrow brain, and even his sallow, bilious, meadow-bottomed, Hanoverian dulness, dripping in pestilent, unhealthy oozings through his slow liver into his slower understanding. Well does the serenely fronted old sage know all the importance and the character of the business in hand. His clear, philosophic mind has weighed in its calm well-adjusted balances the questions now to be decided. He has but lately escaped from England, where, as agent for the Colonies, he was watched and treated by the government with incised and rigorous dislike; yet, as a man and thinker, he was there welcomed by the best men and most advanced statesmen. With Pitt, Camden, Burke, Charles James Fox, and even Lord North, he met, and with calm, compact, sensible, logical eloquence discussed the nature of the principles, alike dangerous in England as in the Colonies, which the Ministry, in the name of the former, were seeking to fasten, as the shirt of Nessus, upon the latter. While on his ungracious mission, he had, also, encountered that ponderous, fact-clad, political Goliath, Samuel Johnson, who had lately stepped forth in front of the ministerial Philistines, and defied any one to prove that taxation of a people unrepresented was tyranny. In that encounter, the American, armed only with a simple Quaker sling, planted in the giant’s head a stone harder even than itself, and very uncomfortable therein. Few now were Franklin’s words; but each one weighed ten pounds, and though perhaps homely in shape and unrounded at the angles, when hurled out by an honest heart-force, they crashed resistlessly through all the fences and thickets of sophistry or learned show.

Having to manage those two difficult problems in the political economy which then crowded up for solution, namely, how to raise a revenue out of 2,800,000 poor colonists, which, in weight, should put it in equipoise with the heavy stacks of English pounds sterling; and how to make 7,754 soldiers, constituting, as Washington had that very morning reported from head-quarters, the entire colonial army, successfully oppose 28,000 English and 17,000 Hessian troops, this American Witenagemote had conscious need of all poor Richard’s solid, homespun sense and wise-headed prudence and resource. But the grand old man, who by virtuous kiting had obtained naturally lightning out of heaven by an easy discount, was equal to the task of drawing credit out of the well-soiled banks of his country. On a ring, circling his forefinger, and given him by an ardent friend, one may—by a near inspection, when the large head leans against his right hand—see carved that motto, which is his condensed biography,