Although the naval expedition against Quebec reached its objective, it also was unsuccessful, and was a mixture of farce and tragedy. Phips, who was quite incompetent as the leader of such an undertaking, was put in chief command, and on August 9 sailed from Boston with a force of about twenty-two hundred men, in thirty-two vessels of all sorts, mostly small. For some reason, which does not appear, nine weeks were consumed in reaching Quebec, of which the last three were spent within a few days of the city, owing to the lack of a pilot.[[1117]] The failure of the land expedition against Montreal, and Phips's delay in ascending the river, had allowed Frontenac to reach Quebec with reinforcements before the hostile fleet dropped anchor a little below the town. The conqueror of Port Royal first tried the effect of a demand for surrender, and sent a summons “as severe as our four clergymen (who were joined to the Council of War) could make it.”[[1118]] Frontenac treated it with contempt, and refused to send more than a verbal reply, except by his cannon.
Phips then called another council of war, and delayed action while seven hundred more reinforcements arrived at the city. The plan finally decided upon was a simultaneous attack by land and water. About twelve hundred men were to be landed, and after crossing a small river, were to ascend to the rear of the city, which they were to attempt to carry by assault, while the fleet bombarded it from the front. The land forces, under Major Walley, were set on shore, where they remained for some days, unable to advance, and suffering greatly from disease, hunger, and exposure. The necessary and expected support which the fleet was to provide them was almost wholly lacking, and neither boats, ammunition, nor food was supplied in proper quantities. On the other hand, Phips, with a total disregard of the land expedition with which he was supposed to be coöperating, fired away all the fleet's scanty store of powder and shot, expending a considerable portion of it in an unsuccessful effort to hit a picture of the Holy Family, which had been hung on the cathedral spire. Nothing having been accomplished by the futile cannonading, except to provide the Quebec gunners with shot for their guns, and the English ammunition being exhausted, the incompetent commander had nothing to do but to order a retreat and return to Boston. The land forces under Walley had behaved well, but in reëmbarking lost all semblance of discipline, took to the boats much like a base-ball crowd to the street cars, and abandoned their cannon.[[1119]] The self-flattering belief of democracy that training of any sort is a waste of time, and that, in military affairs, competent commanders and disciplined troops can be found at any moment in a crisis, had again proved a costly fallacy.
In November, Phips reached Boston with the first of his armada; and other vessels continued to straggle in at intervals until February. Some of them were never heard of at all. As the colony gradually came to a realization of the magnitude of the disaster, it was in despair, as it well might be. Few men had fallen in fighting, but, owing to the incompetence and thoughtlessness of the leaders, both civil and military, the mortality had been great. The lack of clothes and food, the cold, smallpox, fever, and exposure had killed men by scores. The loss was estimated as high as a thousand, and certainly ran into many hundreds.[[1120]] Moreover, the government, with an empty treasury, had recklessly financed the expedition by promises to pay, expecting to be reimbursed from the anticipated plunder. There was no plunder, and the colossal failure had cost £50,000.[[1121]] A Boston merchant wrote to a correspondent in London that, since assuming office, the new government had involved the colony to the extent of, possibly, £200,000, and that it was almost “run aground.”[[1122]]
Virtually bankrupt, and with the discharged soldiers and other creditors clamoring for their pay, the government took the first step on the road to paper money, which was later to cost it dear. The debts were ordered paid with certificates receivable for taxes, ranging in denomination from two shillings to ten pounds.[[1123]] An original issue of £7000 was increased in a few months to £40,000; and owing to the government's lack of credit and stability, the notes fell quickly in value, and were soon at a discount of thirty to fifty per cent.[[1124]] Taxes rose to formerly unheard-of amounts, and the depression both of business and of sentiment became extreme.[[1125]] Cotton Mather was said to be satisfied to attribute all the colony's troubles to the presence of the Episcopalian congregation worshiping in the King's Chapel; and the Governor and Council wrote to England, pointing out that the whole disaster must have been due to God, who had “spit in our faces”—a phrase for a state paper which darts a vivid light, in several directions, among the colony's elect.[[1126]] There were many, however, who were inclined to lay the blame for the growing ruin of all their affairs in less exalted quarters. The government did its best to suppress or refute all criticism, and the press, whose lack of freedom had been so bitterly complained of only a few months before under Andros, was quickly taken in hand again, and a stricter censorship than ever established.[[1127]] Although nothing could be printed except propaganda in favor of the provisional government, the increasing discontent of many in all classes made itself heard, both in the colony and in England.
Original Draft of Indented Notes of 1690
Massachusetts Archives, State House, Boston
Despite all that has been written of the town-meeting, and the general impression that the average New Englander was almost solely a political and religious animal, there is little evidence to prove that the ordinary man in that section cared any more about government than the ordinary man in Virginia or Maryland. In fact, at a little later period, the more accurate election returns would seem to indicate that he then cared even less.[[1128]] The small minority that ran the government and the churches was naturally active and vocal. But the fact that four fifths of the people were reasonably content to join no church, and to have no voice in the government, certainly does not argue, in that time and place, any very high degree of political, religious, or intellectual interest as compared with the rest of America. In the blue haze of that incense in honor of the colonial New Englanders, lighted by themselves and tended by their descendants, we are apt, a little absurdly sometimes, to lose sight of coarse fundamentals. The average man or boy in the New England of this period probably looked upon the theory that the main end of the colony's existence was to make the world safe for the Congregational church, in very much the same way in which those of us who happened to be in France lately found that the average “doughboy” regarded his main end there to be making the world safe for democracy.
Such very truthful remarks as that already quoted, made by the residents of Cape Ann, when they replied to an early whiff of the incense by saying that their main end had been fish, cannot be too much emphasized. They are as precious as they are rare. Impersonal love of liberty is about as common as uncombined oxygen; and so long as the average man could catch cod, sell whiskey to the Indians, raise crops on land he felt was his own, or stand at his little shop-counter, he did not much care—much as, by way of conversation, he might talk—about the governor in Boston or the king in England. But let him believe that either was threatening his God-given right to accumulate pine-tree shillings, and there would be trouble.
This, the Governor and Council, by their evident inability to handle the situation, were rapidly bringing about. There is nothing unexpected in the cry now beginning to ascend to England, that “we mightily want a government,”[[1129]] or unpatriotic in the attitude of those who did not desire the complete restoration of the former conditions. In England, however, that was exactly what the agents, with Mather at their head, were striving for. Their charges against Andros had entirely broken down, as had their hopes of a restoration of the old charter.[[1130]] Attempts to have it restored by Parliamentary action or by a Writ of Error had both failed, and the agents' efforts were thereafter directed to obtaining from the King a new charter, with as favorable terms as possible.[[1131]] It may be pointed out that the agents were not representatives of the colony as a whole, but only of the old church party, and that the terms which would be considered favorable by them would be such as would ensure continued control by the theocratic element.
The echoes of the events in the colony that we have been describing had been sounding in England with increasing loudness and frequency, in the shape of private letters and formal addresses.[[1132]] Mather, indeed, attempted to minimize all complaints from the colony, from whatever source, and was somewhat reckless in his imputations and disregard of facts. Thirty-four petitioners of Charlestown, including many substantial men, he characterized as “a few bankrupt Publicans and Vagabonds,” “persons brought up and educated in all manner of Debauchery and Depravation,” “greedy as Hell.”[[1133]] In his effort to prove the great prosperity and importance of New England under the old theocratic government, he grotesquely claimed that, whereas New England had turned a wilderness into a fruitful field, most of the other colonies had “turned a fruitful field into a barren wilderness.” The facts were probably far better known to the Lords of Trade than they were to Mather, and these showed that the population of the other colonies outnumbered that of New England more than two to one, while of England's colonial trade seven eighths was with the “barren wildernesses” of the sugar and tobacco colonies, and only one ninth with New England's “fruitful field.”[[1134]] In that very year, of the two hundred and twenty-six ships sailing from England to colonial ports, but seven were bound for New England.[[1135]]