The treaty of Utrecht in 1713 closed and sealed Queen Anne’s war. There was a repose through the Colonies for thirty-one years. During this period the Colonies stretched themselves, took in new ideas, and let out the strait bandages which still swathed them. Delaware, dandled on the knee of Pennsylvania until 1708, having cut her first teeth, was set down to crow like a young cock among the blue hen’s chickens. Vermont, as we have before seen, undergoing pretty rugged nursing through her vigorous babyhood, was at last plumped upon the floor by New York, in 1724, with a smart cuff on the ears, and the ungracious and thankless advice, “Now go, if you must, and take care of yourself.” The youngster, who had found out for some time that she could not only run alone, but could even climb up to her own Saddle-Back, immediately started off, and was soon seen setting up education factories, saw-mills, meeting-houses, and nut-shellers, and running a variety of very transporting businesses between Lake Champlain and the Connecticut River. It was a long time before she got her lines with New York out of tangle and settled; but as Vermonters never felt any practical difficulty in crossing lines whenever they saw pleasanter ones in better places, this uncertainty as to the exact limits of her colonial cords rather facilitated than impeded her circulation and growth. New Hampshire—well out at length from the leading-strings of Massachusetts, in 1741—toddled slowly up into hardy strength. From her whitened hills she was obliged to keep a sharp lookout northwards upon the saucy French and tricky Indians, and, in spite of all her sentries and vigilant scouts, suffered more than her share from them both. The Indians took off many of her scalps; but, notwithstanding all their sharp knives, she kept her Profile safe and unscarred, and was even Keene enough to outlive the neighboring tomahawks and the more distant and swooping night-hawks from the St. Lawrence.
New York was stunted in her growth for a short time, in 1741, by the report of a negro plot. It turned out, however, to be “a great cry and little wool.” Yet on the bare suspicion of a design to burn the city, more than thirty slaves were judicially massacred. The golden waves of commerce, however, soon closed over the momentary plunge of the sable coffins, and the delusion, like that at Salem half a century before, rippled away from the spot in widening circles until it broke upon the historic shore. Some events, insignificant at the time, grow larger as they approach the higher land of civilization; others, magnified by local passion, soon sink forever out of sight. The former are buoyed up by the life-floats of principle; the latter, unworthy of salvage, break and vanish.
Thus the contests of the colonists with the proprietors, slowly marking the advancing tide of civil freedom, are hardened on the shore line of our past history. Although they themselves were too busy in making to study the results when accomplished, their descendants, from more cultivated heights, ponder carefully the wave-tracks, as geologists mark and measure the traces of ancient sea-marks in coal-beds, overlaid to-day with the weighty accumulations of ages. On the other hand, the petty struggles in Virginia, Massachusetts, and South Carolina to establish ecclesiastical supremacy, and in other Colonies to set up sumptuary laws prescribing the number, cost, or cut of garments, although at the time tossing up great masses of foam, like foam speedily dissolved into nothingness.
Great doors swing on small hinges. The Colonies, towards the close of the first half of the century, were destined to add another example to the many notable proofs which the history of nations before them had furnished of this fact historically observed. The Macedonian Empire burst over the little excess of wine poured one day into Alexander’s cup. The chance meeting of Henry VIII. with Anna Boleyn altered the dynastic current and the religious faith of England, changed the European Atlas, and affected forever the settlement, civilization, and characters of the American Colonies. The acid temper of Tetzel precipitated into Luther’s cup, raised the Reformation into sudden effervescence. The evenly grooved disposition of William the Silent was a pivotal point around which the liberties of the Dutch Republic safely turned. An accident might have easily changed the character or shifted that individual centre, and sent the unbalanced periphery of the state into disastrous confusion or ruin. And so the accidental birth of a daughter, instead of a son, to Charles VI. of Austria, was an unfortunate windfall, which in 1744 raised a tempest of war that enveloped all Europe, and swept with fury over their Transatlantic Colonies. The entire Continent was marshalled into two hostile camps for eight years; England, France, Austria, Prussia, Spain, Holland, and nearly all the minor states, let out their best blood,—the heart’s,—or crippled the best limbs of their young and middle-aged men, spent all their available cash, and mortgaged the future; summer fields of grain were trampled out and remanured by the bone-dust of poor soldiers; Fontenoy, Bergen-op-Zoom, and other places were made, by their horrors, resorts ever since of idle tourists; and all Europe, in fact, begirt with war-fires which burnt up the accumulated wealth of generations,—and all because of that little windfall on the lot of Charles VI. Of all the multitudes maimed, butchered, or consigned to costly pension lists, only two individuals had the slightest interest in the wild carnival,—Maria Theresa, the windfall, the Pomona apple of discord, and one Charles Albert, Elector of Bavaria. France and England were of course on opposite sides, and the Colonial clocks marked Greenwich or Paris time as the master hands set them. The great iron pendulums on each side the sea swung together. The hour-hands constantly set off bells that tolled to funerals. The Colonies followed the hearses in mourning purchased by themselves. Genuine Americans already, they disdained to mention the expense, or to complain that it was beyond their means. In spite of funerals, however, and though the bells toll never so sadly, boys will grow.
The first George had come to the English throne in 1714. The second, third, and fourth of the same name successively covered it with their persons until 1830,—a century of English Georgics, full enough of bucolic stupidity and ox-like lolling down in rich clover, so far as the sovereigns were concerned, but bristling with short-horned and long-horned wars that pushed and gored in all directions. The second George, imported, like his sire, from Hanover, had been rolling in the rich English pastures for thirteen years, when the war of which we are now speaking commenced impaling so many victims,—a war which passes in our American chronicles under the name of “King George’s war,” but in European history is known as “the war of the Austrian succession.” As might be expected, after the old stiff-necked leader of the English herd commenced pushing the continental cows, the American young bulls—possessing all the red fire and knotted thews of the home stock—sprung over into the French lot, and after goring and receiving thrusts from the Gallic steers, at length, in 1745, made a dash at Louisburg in the island of Cape Breton, and ripped it out of the side of French America, leaving a sore gash that festered for six years.
It will be our duty hereafter to note the results of these wounds in mortifying French pride, and ultimately destroying the carefully nursed French colonial stock in North America.
CHAPTER XII.
THE CHAMPIONSHIP FOR THE AMERICAN BELT.
1754 TO 1763.
No Hopes for the Millennium in American Colonies up to 1754.—More Swords than Ploughshares.—Mars in America.—Sixteen Indian Wars in 147 Years.—How they were fed by French Oil and blown by French Bellows.—The Five Great Continental Wars, and how they reached over and handled the Colonies.—The Treaty Patches, and how they failed to cover the War Breaches.—The Volcanic Character of American Soil.—How the Animosities of France and England grew through Four Centuries, and in what a Hateful Harvest they waved, in 1754, each Side the Sea.—Celebrated Fights between the Rivals in Europe.—How Commercial Competition rubbed in Salt Water, and Religious Differences Brimstone, into the Wounds.—Memorable Cases of Battle Surgery.—The Relative Merits of English and French Claims to America fully stated.—Deeds of Land and of Arms clash.—French Jesuits with Crosses and Traders with Skins encompass the English Plantations from Maine to Minnesota, and thence to Alabama and Texas.—Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, Lallemand and others.—The Former escaped the Fast Life of Chicago, and La Salle the Hazards of Natchez.—France seeks to fasten a Remarkable Rosary around the Neck of Young America; England to cut it.—Suitors to the same Maiden, they suited not her nor each other.—Their soft Ways to her.—Their Hardness to each other.—Their Long Quarrels over her Person and Purse result at last in a Decisive Fight.—The Championship for the American Belt.—The Champions, the Belt, and the Ring described.—How John Bull and Jean Crapeau stepped into the Latter.—The Nine Rounds from 1754 to 1763.—How Mr. Bull won; what he said, and how Monsieur Crapeau behaved.—A Suitor pleased, and a Suitor non-suited.
The American colonists up to 1754 could not well entertain, from their own experience, any well-founded hopes of the speedy advent of the millennium, when meek-eyed Peace is to hold the good reapers—McCormicks or others—beaten out from ugly swords, and when war is to be banished somewhere, probably to that red-faced Mars, whose vulgar manners, bricky hair, and swaggering gait have not unfrequently brought him into disgrace with his neighbors, particularly with the touchy Venus, and sometimes put him into an eclipse with that steady-going old tramper, the Earth. But somehow, in spite of his disreputable antecedents, Mars had contrived to acquire a very strong influence over that part of our planet occupied by the thirteen Colonies, from the time of the very first settlement at Jamestown, in 1607, throughout all the century and a half which followed. Over that tract of time, their march along the highway of life was like an Irish landlord’s visit to his own estate,—armed, grim, and hostilely interrogative of all who approached. Like his, their advance, too, was
“Per ignes