The French, however, did not establish themselves amid this vast territory without a struggle with the aboriginal possessors, whose blood ever crimsoned the soil as if in preparation for the harvests of the white man. The Choctas, inhabiting the lower Mississippi, were allies of the French. In the midst of this nation dwelt the Natchez, a peculiar race, worshippers of the sun like the Peruvians.
Alarmed by the encroachments of the French, who had built Fort Rosalie in the Natchez country, and instigated by the hostile Chickasaws, they rose in 1729, and massacred nearly the whole of the whites, about 200 in number. Terror spread through the colony, from New Orleans into Illinois, and the French, with their allies the Choctas, rose for vengeance. A war of extermination began; and within two years the great chief of the tribe, the Great Sun, as he was called, with 400 prisoners, were shipped off to Hispaniola, and sold as slaves; the few scattered remnants of the nation were received among the Chickasaws and the Musgogees. The Natchez as a race were no more.
The Mississippi Company, disappointed in every hope of profit, and still further embarrassed by the Natchez war, threw up their patent, and Bienville was appointed royal governor of Louisiana. His first business was to subdue the Chickasaws, who, undaunted by the fate of their friends, the Natchez, threatened to become as formidable adversaries in the South as the Iroquois in the North.
We will not go into the terrible details of this war, which lasted for about three years, during which some of the noblest men of the province suffered the horrors of Indian martyrdom, among whom was the brave Vincennes, whose name is preserved in the oldest settlement in Indiana. At length in 1740, after four years of fruitless warfare and unexampled suffering, peace was said to be concluded, but the Chickasaws remained masters of the wilderness, and continued as a defence to the English settlements on the west.
Half a century after the first colonisation of Louisiana by La Salle, says Bancroft, its population probably amounted to 5,000 whites and half that number of blacks. The valley of the Mississippi was still nearly a wilderness. Half a century, with kings for its patrons, had not accomplished for Louisiana one tithe of the prosperity which within the same period had sprung naturally from the benevolence of William Penn to the peaceful settlers on the Delaware.
The paper money put into circulation by Massachusetts to defray her late war expenses brought her also into the extremest financial difficulties. The attention of the colony was directed to remedy these, and three parties were formed, each with its several plan; and the scheme of a public bank, the government being pledged for the value of the issues, was adopted, and bills of credit to the amount of £50,000 put in circulation; but the scheme failed, and Governor Shute, who succeeded Dudley in 1766, recommended a further emission of bills of credit, which led to the issue of double the former amount. It was but like the drunkard’s dram, to steady for a moment the shattered nervous system, only by increasing the mischief.
The governor lost his popularity, the currency was depreciated, and disputes arose on the question of his salary, which he demanded should be raised, while the people, attributing to him some of the present difficulties, insisted equally resolutely on its reduction.
Wearied at length with contention, he returned to England, to prefer his complaints to parliament, and succeeded so far as to obtain the introduction of two clauses in the Massachusetts charter, which controlled her liberties, and which, for fear of something worse, the council was obliged to submit to.
While these violent contentions were going forward between the governor and the colony, the utmost alarm was excited by the breaking out of the small-pox in Boston, which led to much popular exasperation. Cotton Mather, now a much wiser man than in the days of the Salem witchcraft, having read in the transactions of the Royal Society an account of the Turkish mode of inoculation for this terrible malady, resolved to stem the present affliction by this remedy. After applying in vain to various medical practitioners, he at length prevailed on Zabdiel Boylston to try the experiment. Boylston, a native of the colony, and a man of courage and enlightenment, made the first attempt upon his own son. Inoculation was successful in every case where it was used, but a violent opposition against it, as an interference with the will of God, arose; pamphlets of the most virulent character were circulated; the incensed mob, who regarded this new-fangled mode of practice as the infusion of poison into the blood, paraded the streets with halters in their hands to hang the inoculators, and a lighted grenade was even thrown into the house of Cotton Mather, as expressive of the popular exasperation. But neither Cotton Mather, nor his enlightened friend, Zabdiel Boylston, were men to be easily daunted. The zeal which thirty years before had made Mather a knight-errant against witchcraft, sustained him now, even though the general court itself seemed inclined to prohibit inoculation by legal enactment. Fortunately, however, humanity and science prevailed; the bill was thrown out of the council, and the same remedy being at the very same period introduced into England, no further opposition was made.
The popular controversies which had lately been carried on by pamphlets on the paper money, Governor Shute’s salary, and now on the small-pox, led James Franklin, a printer of Boston, to commence a newspaper called the “New England Courant.” There were already in Boston two newspapers, or rather advertising sheets, which satisfied themselves with a bald summary of news. Franklin, however, aimed at the discussion of public questions, and the diffusion of free opinion. Benjamin Franklin, then a boy of fifteen, was his brother’s assistant, not only composing the types and carrying out the paper, but himself writing for its columns. Strange to say, this paper was one of the opponents of inoculation. This might have passed; but when the hypocrisy of “religious knaves” was attacked, and the acts of government censured, the two printers were cited before the council, and charged with “mocking religion and bringing it into contempt; affronting his majesty’s ministers, and disturbing the good order of the province.” The elder Franklin was imprisoned, the younger, the real offender, admonished. The paper was continued in the name of Benjamin Franklin, but its credit was gone, and after languishing some little time it expired. The elder brother blamed the younger severely as the author of his misfortunes, and the next year Benjamin fled to New York to escape the tyranny of his brother, and thence on foot to the Delaware, arriving in Philadelphia with one dollar in his pocket, but without friends or home.