It could not well have been otherwise. The Whig oligarchy, having driven the Stuarts from the throne, was bound to identify the welfare of the empire with the maintenance of the House of Hanover. Convinced that so long as there was peace and plenty in the land Jacobite exiles would wait in vain for the day when the body of James II, lying unburied in the church of St. Jacques, might be restored to English soil, ministers labored to make the nation loyal by making it comfortable. It was therefore necessary to guard with jealousy the material interests of the inarticulate Tory squire, who still harbored a sullen loyalty to the Stuarts, as well as of the merchants and moneyed men whose fortunes were bound up with the Revolution settlement. And year by year the Parliamentary influence of the latter increased. Members of the South Sea and East India Companies had seats in the House of Commons; and the West India Islands, where, it was estimated in 1775, property to the value of £14,000,000 was "owned by persons who live in England," were in very truth represented there. William Beckford, who entered Parliament in 1747, possessed of a great fortune acquired in Jamaica sugar plantations, and soon to become all-powerful in "the City," was only the most famous of those who effectively voiced the demands of colonial landlords and London merchants. "Such men used in times past to come hat in hand," said Newcastle; "now the second word is, 'you shall hear of it in another place.'" In fact, although ministers bowed to the king and spoke of His Majesty's Government, they knew well that the fortunes of the kingdom were in the hands of the big property interests that buttressed an unstable throne.
And these masters of England, never interested in the colonies apart from their commercial value, were less so than ever during this Indian summer of prosperous content. Rising prices made the era of, the first Georges a golden age of agriculture; while the effect of the French wars was to "exalt beyond measure the maritime and commercial supremacy of England." The Treaty of Meuthen facilitated the importation of cloth into Portugal and the flow of Brazilian bullion to London. Levantine trade began to open to England after the conquest of Gibraltar and Minorca. English merchants acquired special privileges at Cadiz by the Treaty of Utrecht; and the Assiento gave to the South Sea Company a monopoly of importing slaves into New Spain, and enabled it to secure, "by the ingenuity of British merchants," the greater part of the general commerce of the Spanish colonies. In 1710, the number of vessels clearing from English ports was 3550; it was 6614 in 1714; and during the same period the shipping of London increased from 806 to 1550. In 1758, imports from the continental colonies into England stood at £648,683, and from the West Indies at £1,834,036. "The colonies," said the elder Horace Walpole, "are the source of all our riches"; for it was the colonies, and above all the West Indies,—that subterranean channel by which the silks and teas from Vera Cruz, and Peruvian gold from Puerto Bello, found their way into England,—which alone "preserve the balance of trade in our favour."
If, as sometimes happened, powerful Parliamentary interests complained of conditions in the colonies, the Government was ready to comply with their demands. During the Walpole régime, the private smuggler in Spanish commerce, whether Englishman or New Englander, was suppressed in order that the South Sea Company might enjoy a monopoly of that profitable business. When Jamaica planters, unable to sell their sugar in Europe or Massachusetts in competition with the French islands, clamored for relief, the famous Molasses Act of 1733 was passed, laying prohibitive duties upon the importation of sugar, molasses, and rum into the continental colonies. And in 1750, at the behest of the woolen and iron interests, rapidly growing industries in New England and Pennsylvania were restricted in order that the English landowner and English woolen and iron manufacturers might find in America the markets which they were losing in Europe. But in general neither the landed nor the industrial interests pressed the Government to meddle with the plantations; and when no one complained, ministers of the temper of Walpole or Newcastle were not disposed to concern themselves with the reform of the colonial system, or to inquire too curiously into the honesty or the efficiency with which it was administered. According to their philosophy, it mattered little whether the Governor of Virginia was an able man, or whether he resided in London or Jamestown; what mattered was that Newcastle should succeed, by a judicious distribution of offices, in maintaining a Parliamentary majority for the party which guarded the liberties of England. It mattered little whether the admiralty courts fell under the control of the merchants and landowners who dominated colonial assemblies; what mattered was that the colonial merchant and landowner should be prosperous and maintain a safe credit balance with English merchants. And therefore let the governors be punctiliously instructed to perform their duties strictly; but let those be recalled who irritated the best people in the colonies by too officiously endeavoring to carry out their instructions. So long as the colonial planter was content and the Tory squire could not complain of high taxes or low rents, so long as merchants of standing in London or New York found business good, so long as the English manufacturer had ready markets and the trading companies distributed high dividends, it seemed folly indeed to attempt, with meticulous precision, to enforce the Trade Acts at every unregarded point, to construct ideal governments for communities that were every year richer than the last, or to provide at great expense for an adequate military defense against Canada when peace with France was the settled policy of England.
Unhappily for this policy of quieta non movere, peace with France came to an end after thirty years. And if since the Peace of Utrecht the English colonies had grown rich and populous, the French had strengthened their hold on all the strategic points of the interior from Quebec to New Orleans. The province of Louisiana, founded in 1699 by D'Iberville to forestall the English in occupying the mouth of the Mississippi, contained a population of more than ten thousand white settlers in 1745. The governor maintained friendly relations with the Choctaw Indians, and endeavored to alienate the Cherokees and the Creeks from the English alliance, and so to divert the rich peltry trade of the Southwest from Fort Moore and Charleston to New Orleans. Attached to Louisiana for administrative purposes were the small but thriving French settlements on the Mississippi, between the Illinois and the Ohio Rivers, centering about Forts Chartres, Cahokia, and Kaskaskia. Between Louisiana and Canada all the connecting waterways, save alone the upper Ohio, were guarded by military establishments and trading posts—on Green Bay, on the Wabash and Miami Rivers, at the southern end of Lake Michigan, at Detroit and Niagara. By discovery and occupation, the French claimed all the inland country; denied the right of Englishmen to settle or trade there; were prepared to defend it by force, and, in case of war, to release upon the unguarded English frontier from Maine to Virginia those savage tribes, whom legend credits with many noble virtues, but whom the colonists by bitter experience well knew to be cruel and treacherous and bestial beyond conception.
The possession of this hinterland was now, toward the middle of the century, become the vital issue; for the claims of France could not stay the populous English colonies from pushing their frontier across the mountains, or prevent skillful English traders from undermining the loyalty of her Indian allies. There were settlements in the southern up-country as far west as Fort Moore on the Savannah, as far as Camden and Charlottesburg, and beyond Hillsborough. The outpost of Virginia was at Wills Creek, within striking distance of the Ohio; the valleys of the Blue Ridge were filling with Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch; while German and Dutch farmers of New York occupied both sides of the Mohawk nearly to its source. Oswego, long since established on Lake Ontario, was abundantly justifying the ambitious scheme inaugurated sixty years earlier by Governor Dongan; for official corruption at Montreal had not made French goods cheaper since the days of Frontenac, and the northern Indians yearly resorted to Oswego to trade with the English. And every year unlicensed traders, such as Christopher Gist and William Trent, not to mention many "more abandoned wretches," hired men on the Pennsylvania or Virginia frontier and with goods on pack-horses crossed the Alleghanies to traffic among the western Indians. In 1749, Céloron de Bienville, sent by the Governor of Canada to take possession of the Ohio Valley, found English traders at Logstown and Scioto, and in nearly every village as far west as the Miami. This was the very year that John Hanbury, a London merchant, and some Virginia gentlemen, among whom were Lawrence and Augustine Washington, petitioned the Board of Trade for a grant of five hundred thousand acres of land on the upper Ohio. And the petition was granted, in order that the country might be more rapidly settled, and "to cultivate the friendship and carry on a more extensive commerce with the native Indians, and as a step towards checking the encroachments of the French."
Those who went into the back country received little assistance from Government, either English or colonial, in extending the frontier, and but little in defending it. Tide-water rice or tobacco planters, peaceful and gain-loving Quakers at Philadelphia, New York or Boston merchants trading in the West Indies, all untouched by Indian massacre and absorbed in local politics, begrudged money spent to protect a half-alien people, often without their jurisdiction. The English Government, for its part, had long observed the comfortable maxim that if her navy policed the sea, the colonists were bound to provide their own defense in time of peace. Money for Indian presents was regularly sent; garrisons maintained in Nova Scotia and in the West Indies; assistance sometimes given for forts on the exposed New York or Carolina frontier. But the expense was slight indeed: in 1783 the total amount appropriated for defending the continental colonies, exclusive of Nova Scotia and not counting money for Indian presents, was £10,000; in 1743, it was £25,000. And the war which opened in 1743 demonstrated that a government which neglected defense in time of peace could scarcely provide it in time of war. The New England frontier was once more devastated by pillage and massacre; and Philip Schuyler, to the high disgust of his Iroquois allies, was forced to abandon and burn Fort Saratoga for lack of supplies to maintain it. Yet New England farmers made possible the capture of Louisburg, and the colonies together raised nearly eight thousand troops to coöperate, in the conquest of Canada, with the fleet and army which the Duke of Newcastle promised but never sent. Massachusetts was, indeed, generously repaid for the heavy expense which she incurred; but two hundred and seventeen chests of Spanish dollars and one hundred barrels of copper coin, sufficient to restore her credit, were scarce full return for the restoration of Louisburg to France after the war was over.
With how much ease, during the six years that followed the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, might the English and colonial Governments have prevented the worst horrors of the French and Indian War! Deprived of her Indian allies, Canada would scarce have been a danger; and at no time were the Indians better disposed toward the English. "All I can say," Céloron de Bienville announced when he returned from the Ohio in 1750, "is that all the nations of these countries are very ill-disposed toward the French, and devoted to the English." And in the next year Père Piquet complained that Oswego "not only spoils our trade, but puts the English into communication with a vast number of our Indians far and near. It is true that they like French brandy better than English rum; but they prefer English goods to ours, and can buy for two beaver skins at Oswego a better silver bracelet than we sell at Niagara for ten." Strongly garrisoned forts at Albany, at Oswego, and on the Ohio would have transformed this friendly disposition into a firm alliance. But there was little loyalty in the red man's heart for an unmilitary people; and cheap goods, however they might win the Indian in time of peace, made but a silken cord to hold him in time of war. "We would have taken Crown Point, but you prevented us," said Chief Hendrick at the conference hastily summoned at Albany to prepare for defense on the eve of war. "Instead you burned your own fort at Saratoga and ran away from it. You have no fortifications, no, not even in this city. The French are men; they are fortifying everywhere. But you are all like women, bare and open, without fortifications." Not one representative of seven colonies had authority to reassure him. Sir William Johnson did, indeed, negotiate a treaty of alliance with the Iroquois and the western Indians; and the Virginia assembly, yielding at last to Governor Dinwiddie's insistent demands, appropriated some money for maintaining the wooden fort, well named Fort Necessity, which Colonel Washington had built on the Ohio. But it was too late. The French built a better fort at Duquesne; and they had scarcely defeated the Virginia colonel and destroyed his fort before the English traders were driven from the Indian villages, and no English flag was to be seen west of the mountains. It was the western tribes that brought Braddock's expedition to a disastrous end. While the Quakers at Philadelphia denounced the iniquity of war, these quondam allies of England ravaged the frontiers of Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the northern tribes that had gladly come to Oswego to trade in 1754, assisted Montcalm to capture and destroy it in 1756.
Reverses in America were but part of the multiplied disasters which befell English arms at the opening of the Seven Years' War. At the close of the year 1756, with Hanover threatened and Minorca taken, with the Bourbon arms victorious in India and the Bourbon fleet unchecked upon the sea, with a million and a half of colonists seemingly helpless before eighty thousand French in America, it was clear at last that ministers who employed organized corruption to buttress the throne, who rarely read the American dispatches, and were not quite sure where Nova Scotia was, had endangered that very peace and material prosperity with which they had been so long and so exclusively occupied. In this crisis many plans were forthcoming, at Albany and in London, for colonial union and imperial defense; plans doubtless excellent in themselves, but impracticable under the circumstances. They were therefore laid aside until the war should be over. A plan of attack, not of defense, was now the prime necessity. In face of this necessity, the Whig oligarchy, abdicated its high function of "muddling through" the business of government, while "an afflicted despairing nation turned to a private gentleman of slender fortune, wanting the parade of birth and title, as the only saviour of England." "I know," said William Pitt, "that I can save England, and that nobody else can."
A most galling boast for both your houses of Pelham and Yorke, but a true one. Within three years the nation was raised from the depths of despair to the high level of its great leader's assured and arrogant confidence. It was not by colonial systems that Pitt brought victory, but by organizing efficiency in place of corruption and by inspiring many men to heroic effort. Wisdom born of sympathy and common sense soon accomplished in America what neither the bullying of Loudoun nor the New Englander's hatred of the French could effect. In 1756 no more than five thousand troops were raised in all New England and New York. Governor Pownall was haggling as usual with his assembly over a levy of two thousand men, when there arrived in Boston Pitt's order that henceforth colonial officers should take rank with regulars, according to the date of their commissions. The simple order was worth more than many plans of union. The very next morning, when the dispatch was read out, the Old Bay assembly voted the entire seven thousand men originally asked of the Northern colonies; and during the year 1758 nearly twenty-five thousand provincial troops were raised for the war. With this support, the English army and fleet, for the first time ably led and efficiently directed, soon destroyed the power of France in Canada: Louisburg was once more captured; Crown Point and Niagara were taken; Oswego was rebuilt; while the French, deserted by their savage allies as soon as the English won victories, destroyed their own fort at Duquesne; and at last the intrepid General Wolfe, fortunately aided by a strange combination of accidents, scaled the Heights of Quebec and defeated the army of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham.
When the war was over and Canada no longer the menace it had been, men without imagination, turning again to the schemes which had been laid aside in 1756, began to devise measures for a closer supervision of the "plantations," and for raising "a revenue in Your Majesty's dominions in America for defraying the expenses of defending, protecting, and securing the same." They were not aware that since the recall of the Massachusetts charter the colonies had become something more than plantations, or that there was arising on the continent of America a people whose interests were national rather than imperial, and whose ideals of well-being transcended the dead level of material ambitions.