So back they went, with their tails between their legs, without having had a glimpse of the citadel which they were to have captured without an effort; and of course the army waiting at Albany for the word to advance got news of a different color, and Montreal was as safe as Quebec. In the west, the Foxes, having planned an attack on Detroit, did really lay siege to it; but Du Buisson, who defended it, summoned a swarm of Indian allies to his aid, and the Foxes found that the boot was on the other leg; they were all either slain or carried into slavery. Down in the Carolinas, a party of Tuscaroras attacked a settlement of Palatines near Pamlico Sound, and wiped them out; and some Huguenots at Bath fared little better. Disputes between the governor and the burgesses prevented aid from Virginia; but Barnwell of South Carolina succeeded in making terms with the enemy. A desultory and exhausting warfare continued however, complicated with an outbreak of yellow fever, and it was not until 1713 that the Tuscaroras were driven finally out of the country, and were incorporated with the Iroquois in the north. The war in Europe had by that time come also to an end, and the treaty of Utrecht brought about an ambiguous peace for a generation.
George I. now became king of England; because he was the son of Sophia, granddaughter of James I., and professed the Protestant religion. He was a Hanoverian German, and did not understand the English language; he was stupid and disreputable, and better fitted to administer a German bierstube than a great kingdom. But the Act of Settlement of 1701 had stipulated that if William or Anne died childless, the Protestant issue of Sophia should succeed. That such a man should prove an acceptable sovereign both to Great Britain and her American colonies, showed that the individuality on the throne had become secondary to the principles which he stood for; besides, George profited by the easy, sagacious, good-humored leadership of that unprincipled but common-sensible man-of-the-world, Sir Robert Walpole, who was prime minister from 1715 to 1741, with an interval of only a couple of years. Walpole's aim was to avoid wars and develop commerce and manufactures; and while he lived, the colonies enjoyed immunity from conflicts with the French and Spanish.
They were not to forget the use of arms, however; for the Indians were inevitably encroached upon by the expanding white population, and resented it in the usual way. In 1715 the Yemasses began a massacre on the Carolina borders; they were driven off by Charles Craven, after the colonists had lost four hundred men. The proprietors had given no help in the war, and after it was over, the colony renounced allegiance to them, and the English government supported their revolt, regarding it in the light of an act of loyalty to George. Francis Nicholson, a governor by profession, and of great experience in that calling, was appointed royal governor, and made peace with the tribes; and in 1729 the crown bought out the claims of the proprietors. North Carolina, without a revolt, enjoyed the benefits obtained by their southern brethren. The Cherokees became a buffer against the encroachments of the French from the west.
In the north, meanwhile, the Abenakis, in sympathy with the French, claimed the region between the Kennebec and the St. Croix, and applied to the French for assistance. Sebastian Rasles, a saintly Jesuit priest and Indian missionary, had made his abode at Norridgwock on the Kennebec; he was regarded by Massachusetts as an instigator of the enemy. They seized his post, he escaping for the time; the Indians burned Brunswick; but in 1723 Westbrooke with a company of hardy provincials, who knew more of Indian warfare than the Indians themselves, attacked an Indian fort near the present Bangor and destroyed it; the next year Norridgwock was surprised, and Rasles slain. He met his death with the sublime cheerfulness and courage which were the badge of his order. French influence in northeastern Massachusetts was at an end, and John Lovewell, before he lost his life by an ambush of Saco Indians at Battle Brook, had made it necessary for the Indians to sue for peace. Commerce took the place of religion as a subjugating force, and an era of prosperity began for the northeastern settlements.
There was no settled boundary between northern New York and the French regions. Each party used diplomatic devices to gain advantage. Both built trading stations on doubtful territory, which developed into forts. Burnet of New York founded Oswego in 1727, and gained a strip of land from the Iroquois; France built a fort on Lake Champlain in 1731. Six years before that, they had established, by the agency of the sagacious trader Joncaire, a not less important fort at Niagara. Upon the whole, the French gained the better of their rivals in these negotiations.
Louisiana, as the French possessions, or claims, south of Canada were called, was meanwhile bidding fair to cover most of the continent west of the Alleghanies and north of the indeterminate Spanish region which overspread the present Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California and Mexico. No boundary lines could be run in those enormous western expanses; and it made little practical difference whether a given claim lay a thousand miles this way or that. But on the east it was another matter. The French pursued their settled policy of conciliating the Indians wherever they hoped to establish themselves; but though this was well, it was not enough. Narrow though the English strip of territory was, the inhabitants greatly outnumbered the French, and were correspondingly more wealthy. Spotswood of Virginia, in 1710, was for pushing out beyond the mountains, and Logan of Pennsylvania also called Walpole's attention to the troubles ahead; but the prime minister would take no action. On the other hand, the white population of Louisiana was ridiculously small, and their trade nothing worth mentioning; but when Anthony Crozar resigned the charter he had received for the district, it was taken up by the famous John Law, the English goldsmith's son, who had become chief financial adviser of the Regent of France; and immediately the face of things underwent a change like the magic transformations of a pantomime.
The Regent inherited from Louis XIV. a debt which there was not money enough in all France to pay. Law had a plan to pay it by the issue of paper. Louisiana offered itself as just the thing for purposes of investment, and a pretext for the issue of unlimited "shares." Not to speak of the gold and silver, there was unlimited wealth in the unknown country, and Law assumed that it could be produced at once. Companies were formed, and thousands of settlers rushed to the promised paradise. But we have to do with the Mississippi Bubble only as it affected America. The Bubble burst, but the settlers remained, and were able to prosper, in moderation, like other settlers in a fertile country. A great area of land was occupied. Local tribes of Indians joined in a massacre of the colonists in 1729. They in turn were nearly exterminated by the French forces during the next two years, but the war aroused a new hostility among the red tribes against the French, which redounded to the English advantage. In 1740, Bienville was more than willing to make a peace, which left to France no more than nominal control of the tract of country drained by the southern twelve hundred miles of the Mississippi. The population, after all the expense and efforts of half a century, numbered about five thousand white persons, with upward of two thousand slaves. The horse is his who rides it. The French had not proved themselves as good horsemen as the English. The English colonies had at the same time a population of about half a million; their import and export trade aggregated nearly four million dollars; they had a wide and profitable trade; and the only thing they could complain of was the worthless or infamous character of the majority of the officials which the shameless corruption of the Walpole administration sent out to govern—in other words, to prey upon—them. But if this was the only subject of complaint, it could not be termed a small subject. It meant the enforcement of the Navigation Acts in their worst form, and the restriction of all manner of manufactures. Manufactures would tend to make the colonies set up for themselves, and therefore they must be forbidden:—such was the undisguised argument. It was a case of the goose laying golden eggs. America had in fact become so enormously valuable that England wanted it to become profit and nothing else—and all the profit to be England's. They still failed to realize that it was inhabited by human beings, and that those human beings were of English blood. And because the northern colonies, though the more industrious, produced things which might interfere with British goods, therefore they were held down more than the southern colonies, which grew only tobacco, sugar, rice and indigo, which could in no degree interfere with the sacred shopkeepers and mill-owners of England. An insanity of blindness and perversity seized upon the English government, and upon most of the people; they actually were incapable of seeing justice, or even their own best interests. It seems strange to us now; but it was a mania, like that of witchcraft, though it lasted thrice as many years as that did months.
The will of England in respect of the colonies became as despotic as under the Stuarts; but though it delayed progress, it could not break down the resistance of the assemblies; and Walpole would consent to no suggestion looking toward enforcing it by arms. Stamp duties were spoken of, but not enacted. The governors raged and complained, but the assemblies held the purse-strings. Would-be tyrants like Shute of Boston might denounce woe, and Crosby of New York bellow treason, but they were fain to succumb. Paper money wrought huge mischief, but nothing could prevent the growing power and wealth of the colonies, fed, also, by the troubles in Europe. In 1727 the Irish, always friends of liberty, began to arrive in large numbers. But what was of better augury than all else was the birth of two men, one in Virginia, the other in Boston. The latter was named Benjamin Franklin: the former, George Washington.