The same year, 1722, Daniel Coxe,[1550] in his Carolana, offered another theory of union.
In June, 1744, George Clinton, of New York, submitted to a convocation of deputies from Massachusetts a plan of union something like the early New England confederacy. The Six Nations sent their sachems.
On July 23, 1748, there was another conference for mutual support at Albany, at which the Six Nations met the deputies of New York and Massachusetts.
In 1751, Clinton, of New York, invited representatives of all the colonies from New Hampshire to South Carolina to meet the Six Nations for compacting a league. The journal of the commissioners is in the Mass. Archives, xxxviii. 160.[1551]
In 1751, Archibald Kennedy, in his tract The importance of gaining and preserving the friendship of the Indians to the British interest considered, N. Y., 1751, and London, 1752 (Carter-Brown, iii. 955, 975), developed a plan of his own.[1552]
In 1752 Governor Dinwiddie advocated distinct northern and southern confederacies.
In June, 1754, the most important of all these congresses convened at Albany,[1553] under an order from the home government. The chief instigator of a union was Shirley,[1554] and the most important personage in the congress was Benjamin Franklin, who was chiefly instrumental in framing the plan finally adopted, though it failed in the end of the royal sanction as too subversive of the royal prerogative, while it lost the support of the several assemblies in the colonies because too careful of the same prerogative. Franklin himself later thought it must have hit a happy and practicable mean, from this diversity of view in the crown and in the subject.
This plan, as it originally lay in Franklin’s mind, is embodied in his “Short Hints towards a Scheme for uniting the Northern Colonies,” which is printed in Franklin’s Works.[1555] This draft Franklin submitted to James Alexander and Cadwallader Colden, and their comments are given in Ibid., pp. 28, 30, as well as Franklin’s own incomplete paper (p. 32) in explanation.
It was Franklin’s plan, amended a little, which finally met with the approval of all the commissioners except those from Connecticut.
This final plan is printed, accompanied by “reasons and motives for each article,” in Sparks’s ed. of Franklin’s Works, i. 36.[1556]