There is much about the congress in the Doc. Hist. New York, i. 553-54; ii. 545, 564, 570-71, 589-91, 605, 611-15, 672.
Of the later accounts, that given by Richard Frothingham in his Rise of the Republic is the most extensive and most satisfactory.[1559]
After the Albany plan had been rejected by the Massachusetts assembly, another plan, the MS. of which in Hutchinson’s hand exists in the Mass. Archives, vi. 171,[1560] was brought forward in the legislature. It was intended to include all the colonies except Nova Scotia and Georgia. It failed of acceptance. It is printed in the appendix of Frothingham’s Rise of the Republic.
Pownall suggested, in his Administration of the Colonies, a plan for establishing barrier colonies beyond the Alleghanies, settling them with a population inured to danger, so that they could serve as protectors of the older colonies, in averting the enemy’s attacks. Franklin shared his views in this respect. (Cf. Franklin’s Works, iii. 69, and also Pennsylvania Archives, ii. 301, vi. 197.)
Among the Shelburne Papers (Hist. MSS. Commissioners’ Report, no. 5, p. 218) is a paper dated at Whitehall, Oct. 29, 1754, commenting upon the Albany congress, and called “A Representation[1561] to the King of the State of the Colonies,” and “A Plan for the Union of the Colonies,” signed August 9, 1754, by Halifax and others.[1562] This was the plan already referred to, presented by the ministry in lieu of the one proposed at Albany, which had been denied. Bancroft (United States, orig. ed., iv. 166) calls it “despotic, complicated, and impracticable.” It is named in the draft printed in the New Jersey Archives, 1st ser., viii., Part 2d, p. 1, as a “Plan by the Lords of Trade of general concert and mutual defence to be entered into by the colonies in America.”
In the interval before it became a serious question of combining against the mother country, two other plans for union were urged. John Mitchell (Contest in America) in 1757 proposed triple confederacies, and in 1760 a plan was brought forward by Samuel Johnson. (N. Y. Col. Docs., vii. 438.)
B. Cartography of the St. Lawrence and the Lakes in the Eighteenth Century.—Various extensive maps of the St. Lawrence River were made in the eighteenth century. Chief among them may be named the following:—
There is noted in the Catal. of the Lib. of Parliament (Toronto, 1858, p. 1619, no. 65) a MS. map of the St. Lawrence from below Montreal to Lake Erie, which is called “excellent à consulter,” and dated 1728.
Popple’s, in 1730, of which a reduction is given in Cassell’s United States, i. 420.
A “Carte des lacs du Canada, par N. Bellin, 1744,” is in Charlevoix, iii. 276.