KILLING AND SCALPING OF FATHER RASLE AT NORRIDGEWOCK
By Massachusetts scalp hunters, £100 bounty was offered for the scalp of a male Indian, and £50 for that of women or children.
To any statesman who looked into the question inquiringly and with clear vision, it must have appeared evident that, if the English colonies resolved to sever themselves from the British Empire, it would be impossible to prevent them. Their population was said to have doubled in twenty-five years. They were separated from the mother country by three thousand miles of water, their seaboard extended for more than one thousand miles, their territory was almost boundless in its extent and resources, and the greater part of it no white man had traversed or seen. To conquer such a country would be a task of greatest difficulty and stupendous cost. To hold it in opposition to the general wish of the people would be impossible. The colonists were chiefly small and independent freeholders, hardy backwoodsmen and hunters, well skilled in the use of arms and possessed of all the resources and energies which life in a new country seldom fails to develop. They had representative assemblies to levy taxes and organize resistance. They had militia, which in some colonies included all adult freemen between the ages of sixteen and fifty or sixty, and, in addition to Indian raids, they had the military experience of two great wars. The first capture of Louisburg, in 1745, had been mainly their work. In the latter stages of the war, which ended in 1763, there were more than twenty thousand colonial troops under arms, ten thousand of them from New England alone, and more than four hundred privateers had been fitted out in colonial harbors.[18]
There were assuredly no other colonies in the world so favorably situated as these were at the close of the Seven Years' War. They had but one grievance, the Navigation Act, and it is a gross and flagrant misrepresentation to describe the commercial policy of England as exceptionally tyrannical. As Adam Smith truly said, "Every European nation had more or less taken to itself the commerce of its colonies, and upon that account had prohibited the ships of foreign nations from trading with them, and had prohibited them from importing European goods from any foreign nation," and "though the policy of Great Britain with regard to the trade of her colonies has been dictated by the same mercantile spirit as that of other nations, it has, upon the whole, been less illiberal and oppressive than any of them."[19]
There is, no doubt, much to be said in palliation of the conduct of England. If Virginia was prohibited from sending her tobacco to any European country except England, Englishmen were prohibited from purchasing any tobacco except that which came from America or Bermuda. If many of the trades and manufactures in which the colonies were naturally most fitted to excel were restrained or crushed by law, English bounties encouraged the cultivation of indigo and the exportation to England of pitch, tar, hemp, flax and ship timber from America, and several articles of American produce obtained a virtual monopoly of the English market by their exemption from duties which were imposed on similar articles imported from foreign countries.
The revenue laws were habitually violated. Smuggling was very lucrative, and therefore very popular, and any attempt to interfere with it was greatly resented. The attention of the British government was urgently called to it during the war. At a time when Great Britain was straining every nerve to free the English colonies from the incubus of France, and when millions of pounds sterling were being remitted from England to pay colonists for fighting in their own cause, it was found that French fleets, French garrisons, and the French West India Islands were systematically supplied with large quantities of provisions by the New England colonies. Pitt, who still directed affairs, wrote with great indignation that this contraband trade must be stopped, but the whole community of the New England seaports appeared to favor or was partaking in it, and great difficulty was found in putting the law into execution.[20]
From a legal point of view, the immense activity of New England was for the most part illicit. In serene ignorance the New England sailor penetrated all harbors, conveying in their holds, from the North, where they belonged, various sorts of interdicted merchandise, and bringing home cargoes equally interdicted from all ports they touched. The merchants, who since 1749, through Hutchinson's excellent statesmanship, had been free from the results of a bad currency, greatly throve. The shipyards teemed with fleets, each nook of the coast was the seat of mercantile ventures. It was then that in all the shore towns arose the fine colonial mansions of the traders along the main streets, that are even admired today for their size and comeliness. Within the houses bric-a-brac from every clime came to abound, and the merchants and their wives and children were clothed gaily in rich fabrics from remote regions. Glowing reports of the gaiety and luxury of the colonies reached the mother country.[21] The merchants and sailors were, to a man, law-breakers. It was this universal law-breaking, after the fall of Quebec, that the English ministry undertook to stop over its extended empire. This caused friction, which gave rise to fire, which increased until the ties with the mother land were quite consumed.
As early as 1762 there were loud complaints in Parliament of the administration of custom houses in the colonies. Grenville found on examination that the whole revenue derived by England from the custom houses in America amounted only to between one and two thousand pounds a year, and that for the purpose of collecting this revenue the English exchequer was paying annually between seven and eight thousand pounds. Nine-tenths, probably, of all the tea, wine, fruit, sugar and molasses consumed in the colonies, were smuggled. Grenville determined to terminate this state of affairs. Several new revenue officers were appointed with more rigid rules for the discharge of their duties. "Writs of assistance" were to be issued, authorizing custom house officers to search any house they pleased for smuggled goods. English ships of war were at the same time stationed off the American coast for the purpose of intercepting smugglers.
Adam Smith, writing in 1776, says:
"Parliament, in attempting to exercise its supposed right, whether well or ill-grounded, of taxing the colonies, has never hitherto demanded of them anything which even approached to a just proportion to what was paid by their fellow subjects at home. Great Britain has hitherto suffered her subjects and subordinate provinces to disburden themselves upon her of almost the whole expense."
The colonists had profited by the successful war incomparably more than any other British subjects. Until the destruction of the French power, a hand armed with a rifle or tomahawk and torch seemed constantly near the threshold of every New England home. The threatening hand was now paralyzed and the fringe of plantations by the coast could now extend itself to the illimitable West in safety. No foreign foe could now dictate a boundary line and bar the road beyond it. The colonists were asked only to bear a share in the burden of the empire by a contribution to the sum required for maintenance of the ten thousand soldiers and of the armed fleet which was unquestionably necessary for the protection of their long coast line and of their commerce.