The colonial colts which we left tied up to the bars of the eighteenth century could not, with their American blood, stand there for any length of time without chafing to be let into “fresh fields and pastures new.” The bars down, off they scampered, dashing up their heels and tossing their heads in the fresh air.
Scarcely, however, had they gone a stone’s throw in the great unfenced field, before they snuffed a sulphurous smell from the adjacent lot, the French settlements of Acadia. Queen Anne, the second daughter of James II., who, in 1702 had succeeded her sister Mary, which aforesaid Mary, with her husband, the Orange William, had, as we have already seen, found England too small for them and the aforementioned James, also took a fancy that France was being made too comfortable for her migratory parent, and, in order to keep him travelling, bombarded that country. This little experiment, called in the large-bore histories, Queen Anne’s War, lasted eleven years, and cost England about one sixteenth of her entire value. She obtained, however, as compensation for this outlay, these results in Europe: several fresh monuments in Westminster Abbey, a staggering back-load of debt, a crowd of one-sleeved men, many young women in becoming widow’s caps, Marlborough and wife with salaries amounting yearly to three hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars besides the snug little box at Blenheim Palace, the glorious though empty victories of Ramillies, Malplaquet, Oudenarde, and Blenheim, and that very big elephant, the rock of Gibraltar.
Of course our colts became intensely excited by the gunpowdery air, tore away into the northern French lot, and fell to kicking most lustily. The French fillies there naturally bit back and let fly their gallic-shod heels freely; but the New England ponies so worried and wounded them in the flanks and hips as to drive them clean out of the field. Port Royal was reduced and became Ann-apolis; and Acadia, battered by colonial guns to a wreck, and turning up in her distress under the name of Nova Scotia, grasped one of those long humane lines which the Marine Society, or government located at London, threw out at that time continually for distressed communities. To this sea line the blue-nosed, fish-shaped peninsula has since held with the bite of a codfish, trolled and played by the Izaak Walton of nations, until the fish shows signs of letting go the hook.
Amid the Alpine glaciers of war, however, there bloomed, as travellers find high up among the ice-fields, the graceful and tender flowers of gentler life.
The Colonies started the century with a newspaper. The Boston “News-Letter,” printed on a foolscap sheet, and issued[issued] once a week, in 1704, only twenty-eight years after the first newspaper was started, and in the very year the first editor, Roger l’Estrange, died, was the parent of that large family of children of all sizes and with such varied characters, which are now disseminated through almost every village of the land, and has acquired such a wide influence, interest, and large real estates among us. Meet it was that this prolific stock should have originated on the spot where, as is now pretty well proved, the first white men who visited our continent made their first landing within our borders, seven hundred years before. It must not, however, be supposed, that the pioneers in newspapers were Danes. From all that can now be ascertained, they were Bohemians. We may add that the “News-Letter” was never merged in the New York “Herald.” As it never issued but a single edition on any one day, and had no contemporaries at first to cull from, it did not become the New York “Express.” It is also a common mistake to suppose that it was afterwards expanded into the “North American Review,” or became by cultivation that large, flowering double monthly rose, “The Atlantic.” The “News-Letter” offered no premiums to multiply subscribers or to divide the claims of competitors; for it had no rival for fifteen years. Then Philadelphia, always emulous, got up a second sheet, a warm, gray worsted one, which wrapped up comfortably her growing youth, and displayed most acceptably her comely proportions. Two years later, in 1721, James Franklin established at Boston “The New England Courant,” the fourth American newspaper, full of audacious thinking and independent notions, some of which were furnished by his brother Benjamin, then a stripling of fifteen years. The criticisms were too strong, even for Boston; and after trying in vain for two years to nurse the place up to the wholesome diet, Benjamin left it. After a perilous journey to New York, whence he footed it across New Jersey without being policed or tolled,—for the Camden and Amboy Railroad had not yet subjected that Province to its sway,—he entered Philadelphia with two loaves of bread for himself. He soon set up a good intellectual oven of his own, and distributed, not Boston brown bread, but well-baked, healthy, family loaves, made of the best white flour to be had, to the world and—Philadelphia.
In 1740 there were eleven newspapers in America, one in each of the Colonies of New York, Virginia, and South Carolina, three in Pennsylvania, and five in Boston, which thus early began to gather Massachusetts to a head.
But these were not the only papers issued. The Bank of England had been established in 1694; and eighteen years later, paper credits were issued by South Carolina to the amount of £48,000. Massachusetts with her presses could of course print more promises, and in 1714 she beat South Carolina by £2,000. Other Colonies followed, even Rhode Island, distrusting Providence, built a paper-house on the sands of credit. The floods soon came upon all these unstable edifices, and there were many “moving accidents by flood” to the washed banks. The slight silver foundations were undermined, and the banking-houses fell, and “great was the fall thereof.” Twenty-five years after the first bank was established, few of the credits were worth over twenty cents on the promised dollar. Those of North Carolina descended to seven,—almost as low as Confederate paper in 1865.
But the scheme most American in size and promises was started in France by a Scotchman in 1716. He proposed to the French Regent and established upon the boundless trust in the untold, because not unfolded, mining wealth of the valley of the Mississippi, a company, spawning 200,000 shares of stock, aggregating at the par value one thousand millions of livres, which, on the iron strength of human faith, six millions only of silver in its own vaults, and the handsome certificates that hinted at more figures than ordinary arithmetic can compute, agreed to pay the vast public debt of France, swollen under Louis XIV. higher than a Mississippi freshet, and to distribute forty per cent annually to the stockholders. Omne ignotum pro magnifico. It seemed as if the steel armor of De Soto, buried in the oozy bottom of the Mississippi River, touched by John Law’s paper wand, had dissolved, and by a wonderful alchemy had been turned into liquid gold, whose exuberant floods were to make of France an auriferous Delta. The prophets of a rise were many, the real profits very few; and in four years the principal had gone where De Soto’s armor was rusting. The golden Armada of France was snagged, and dispersed beyond the reach of diver or bell. The speed with which shares, swollen from one thousand to ten thousand, were suddenly pricked and vanished, and the rapid changes in the fortunes of their holders, are well expressed by a French pasquinade of the period:—
“Lundi, j’achetais des actions;
Mardi, je gagnai des millions;