Nothing did so much toward bringing the several colonies face to face with a great continental situation as the struggle with France which began with the expulsion of the Stuarts in 1689 and was not to be decided until seventy years later, when Wolfe climbed the Heights of Abraham. The destruction of the Invincible Armada, a century before the downfall of James II., had shown that Great Britain was to belong to the Protestant Reformers; the latter event had shown that she was not to be won back to the Catholic Counter-Reformation which, starting with the election of Paul IV. in 1555, had gained formidable strength in many quarters. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the colony of Virginia was founded, the France of Henry IV. was in sympathy with England and hostile to Spain. Before the end of that century the France of Louis XIV. had been won over to the Counter-Reformation. The dethronement of England’s Catholic king came almost like a rejoinder to the expulsion of a million Protestants from France. The mighty struggle which then began was to determine whether North America should be controlled by Protestantism and Whiggery, or by the Counter-Reformation and the Old Régime.
The Continental Congress of 1690.
The first notable effect wrought in English America by the outbreak of hostilities was the assembling of a Continental Congress at New York in 1690, the first meeting of that sort in America. The continental aspects of the situation were not as yet apparent save to a few prescient minds. The infant settlements in Carolina hardly counted for much. Virginia was too far from Canada to feel deeply interested in the organization of resistance to the schemes of Frontenac, and so the southernmost colony represented in the first American Congress was Maryland.
Franklin’s plan for a Federal Union.
Origin of the Stamp Act.
It was not long, however, before the continental aspects of the situation began to grow more conspicuous. The reader will remember how, in 1708, the government at Charleston, in an official report on the military resources of the colony, laid stress upon the circumstance that Carolina was a frontier to all the English settlements on the mainland. The occasion for this emphasis was the great European war that broke out in 1701, when Louis XIV. put his grandson, Philip of Anjou, on the vacant throne of Spain. The alliance of Spain with France threatened English America at both ends of the line. The destruction of Deerfield by an expedition from Canada in 1704, and the attempt upon Charleston by an expedition from Florida in 1706, were blows delivered by the common enemy, Louis XIV., the persecutor of Huguenots, the champion of the Counter-Reformation, the accomplice of the Stuarts. From that moment we may date the first dawning consciousness of a community of interests all the way from Massachusetts to Carolina. But it was only a few clear-headed persons that were quick to understand the situation. The average members of a legislature were not among these; their thoughts were much more upon the constituencies “to whom they owed their elections” than upon any wide or far-reaching interests. Such of the royal governors as were honest and high-minded men saw the situation much more clearly, since it was their business to look at things from the imperial point of view. Especially such a man as Spotswood, a soldier of noted ability, who had himself been scarred in fighting the common enemy, could not fail to understand the needs of the hour. His official letters abundantly show his disgust over the froward and niggardly policy that refused prompt aid to hard-pressed Carolina.[321] To sit wrangling over questions of prerogative while firebrand and tomahawk were devouring their brethren on the frontier! To our valiant soldier such behaviour seemed fit only for churls; while waiting for the danger to come upon one, instead of marching forth to attack the danger, was surely as impolitic as unchivalrous. So, without waiting on the uncertain temper and devious arguments of many-headed King Demos, the governor hurried his men on board ship as fast as he could enlist and arm them, well knowing that in a “dangerous conjuncture” the more precious minutes one loses, the more costly grow those that are left. During half of the eighteenth century, as the conflict with France was again and again renewed, such experiences as those of Spotswood with his burgesses were repeated in most of the colonies, until the royal governors became profoundly convinced that the one thing most needed in English America was a Continental Government that could impose taxes, according to some uniform principle, upon the people of all the colonies for the common defence. At the Albany Congress of 1754, when the war-clouds were blacker than ever, Benjamin Franklin came forward with a scheme for creating such a central government for purely federal purposes. That scheme would have inaugurated a Federal Union, with president appointed by the crown; it would have lodged the power of taxation, for continental purposes, in a federal council representing the American people; and it would have left with the several states all governmental functions and prerogatives not explicitly granted to the central government. Had Franklin’s plan been adopted and proved successful in its working, the political separation between English America and English Britain would not have occurred when it did, and possibly might not have occurred at all. But Franklin’s plan failed of adoption just at the moment when American politics were becoming more completely and conspicuously continental than ever before. In the presence of a gigantic war that extended “from the coast of Coromandel to the Great Lakes of North America,”[322] the need for a continental government and the evils that flowed from the want of it were felt with increasing severity; the old difficulties which had beset honest Spotswood were renewed in manifold ways; until, when the war was over, Parliament, with the best of intentions but without due consideration, undertook in the Stamp Act to provide a steady continental revenue for America. When the Americans refused to accept Parliament as their continental legislature, and, in alliance with Pitt and his New Whigs, won a noble victory in the repeal of the Stamp Act, a great American question became entangled in British politics, and a situation was thus created which enabled the unscrupulous and half-crazy George III. to force upon America the quarrel that parted the empire in twain. Nowhere in history is the solidarity of events, in their causal relations, more conspicuous than in America during the eighteenth century; and for this reason the disputes of the royal governors with their refractory assemblies are nearly always rich in political lessons.
The unknown West.
Spotswood crosses the Blue Ridge, 1716.
Looking back from the present time at Spotswood’s administration, we find its incidents perpetually reminding us that the colonies were already entering upon that long period of revolution from which they were not to emerge until the adoption of our Federal Constitution. We never lose consciousness of the French and Indian background against which the events are projected. Toward this vast dim background Spotswood set his face in 1716, in his memorable expedition across the Blue Ridge. For more than a century since the founding of Jamestown had the beautiful valley of the Shenandoah remained unknown to Virginians. It was still part of the strange, unmeasured wilderness that stretched away to the remote shores which Drake had once called by the name New Albion.[323] Some of its most savage solitudes had in Spotswood’s youth been traversed by the mighty La Salle, and other adventurous Frenchmen kept up explorations among freshwater seas to the northwestward, where English and Scotch officials of the Hudson Bay Company were beginning to come into contact with them. What was to be found between those freshwater seas and the Gulf of Mexico no Englishman could tell, save that it had been found to be solid land, and not a Sea of Verrazano.[324] So much might Spotswood have gathered from reading and from hearsay, but not through any work done by Englishmen. In the early days, as we have seen, Captain Newport had tried to reach the mountains and failed.[325] In 1653 it was enacted that, “whereas divers gentlemen have a voluntarie desire to discover the Mountains and supplicated for lycence to this Assembly, ... that order be granted unto any for soe doing, Provided they go with a considerable partie and strength both of men and amunition.”[326] But nothing came of this permission. In Spotswood’s time the very outposts of English civilization had not crept inland beyond tidewater. A strip of forest fifty miles or more in breadth still intervened between the Virginia frontier and those blue peaks visible against the western sky. This stalwart governor was not the man to gaze upon mountains and rest content without going to see what was behind them. Especially since the French were laying claim to the interior, since they had for some time possessed the Great Lakes, and since they had lately been busy in erecting forts at divers remote places in the western country,[327] it was worth while for Englishmen to take a step toward them by crossing the mountains.[328] The expedition was extremely popular in Virginia. A party of fifty gentlemen, with black servants, Indian guides, and packhorses, started out toward the end of August and made quite an autumn picnic of it. One can fancy what prime shooting it was in the virgin forest all alive with the finest of game. To wash down so much toothsome venison and grouse, the governor brought along several casks of native wines—red and white Rapidan, so to speak—made by his Spottsylvania Germans; but cognac and cherry cordial were not forgotten, and champagne-corks popped merrily in the wilderness. Crossing the Blue Ridge at Swift Run Gap,[329] on nearly the same latitude as Fredericksburg, the party entered the great valley a little north of the present site of Port Republic, and about eighty miles southwest from Harper’s Ferry. The exploits of Stonewall Jackson in 1862 have clothed the region with undying fame. Spotswood called the river the Euphrates, an early instance of the vicious naming by which the map of the United States is so abundantly disfigured, but happily the melodious native name of Shenandoah has held its place. On the bank of that fair stream one of the empty bottles was buried, with a paper inside declaring that the river and all the soil it drained were the property of the King of Great Britain. Having thus taken formal possession of the valley, the picnickers returned to their tidewater homes.
Knights of the Golden Horseshoe.