The reader must turn to another chapter for the progress of the siege.[292] Good fortune favored this time the bold as well as the brave. Word coming back to Boston for reinforcements, an express was sent to Captain Williams, at Fort Shirley, and in six days he reported in Boston with 74 men, and sailed on the 23d of June. Louisbourg, however, had already surrendered (June 16), two days after the Rhode Island sloop “Tartar”[293] and two other war-sloops had dispersed the flotilla which was speeding from Annapolis to its assistance. This was the only active force of Rhode Islanders in the campaign; her contingent of foot, which was intended to join the Connecticut regiment, did not reach the ground till after the surrender; but her privateers did good service elsewhere, meanwhile, having sent into Newport during the year a full score of prizes.
It was on a fast day, July 2d, that the news of the success reached Boston, and spread throughout the colonies, occasioning[294] exuberant rejoicing, which the ministers tempered as best they could with ascribing the conquest to the finger of God, shown “more clearly, perhaps,” as Charles Chauncy said, “than since the days of Joshua and the Judges.” Modern historians think that Douglass was right, and that extraordinary good luck was a chief reason of the success.
The colonies beyond the Hudson were now anxious to be partakers in the cost and in the burden of the future defence of the captured fortress, if they had not shared the danger and exhaustion of the victory.[295] Pennsylvania offered £4,000, New Jersey £2,000, and New York £3,000.
The victorious Pepperrell returned to Boston in June, 1746. Cannon from the batteries saluted the frigate which brought him. The governor welcomed him at the Castle and escorted him to the landing of the town, where the Cadets received him and led the way to the council chamber. Here addresses and congratulations were exchanged, and the successful general started for his home in Maine, meeting demonstrations of honor at every town on his way.
Shirley now resolved on further conquest, and plans were being arranged for an armament sufficient for the conquest of all New France, with the help this time of veterans from England, when news came of the speedy arrival of a large French fleet on the coast, with a mission of reprisals and devastation.[296] In August a thanksgiving for the victory at Culloden was held, and Thomas Prince spoke in the Old South in Boston. In September there was little giving of thanks, and there was much fear of the French admiral, D’Anville. Troops were pouring into Boston from the country. Douglass says he saw six or seven thousand of them on Boston Common. The defences of the harbor were being rapidly strengthened. All the coast lookouts were reëstablished, and shore batteries were manned. Rhode Island pushed work on her forts. Connecticut sent promises of large reinforcements, if the attack should fall on Boston. Every Frenchman was put under surveillance, and the times inciting to strong language, the General Court issued orders for greater publicity to be given to the act against profaneness. There was a fast to supplicate for mercy. Thomas Prince in his pulpit heard the windows of the meeting-house rattle with a rising storm. He prayed that it might destroy the French fleet. It did. Divided counsels, disappointments in plans, the sudden death of D’Anville, its commander, the suicide of his lieutenant, disorganized the purpose of the enemy; the waves and the rocks did the rest, and only a fragment of the great armament went staggering back to France. Boston breathed easily, and the hasty soldiers marched home to their harvests; and when news came of the compact which George Clinton had made with the Six Nations at Albany, in August and September, hope and courage prevailed, though the tidings from Fort Massachusetts were distressing. Then came other massacres, and Indians were reported prowling through northern Hampshire. It had been intended to make a demonstration against Crown Point in the autumn. Provisions and munitions were hurried from Boston; Massachusetts men gathered at Albany. Winter came, disconcerting plans, and discouragement ensued.[297]
The next year Boston had a taste of the old-world despotism to which it had not been accustomed. Commodore Knowles, commanding a part of the fleet which had assisted in the capture of Louisbourg, came to Boston. Some of Knowles’ men deserted, and as enlistments did not bring what recruits the fleet needed, the commodore sent a press-gang to town (November 17, 1747), which seized whomever they found about the wharves. Boston was enraged. A mob gathered, and demanded that some of the officers of the fleet, who were in town, should be detained as hostages. The air grew murkier, and Shirley became frightened and fled to the Castle. The legislature tried to settle the difficulty, and Knowles threatened to bombard the town, unless his officers were released. The General Court denounced the riot, but signified to the commodore the necessity of redress. Under its order, the officers returned to the fleet, and Knowles, finding the business had become dangerous, let most if not all of his recruits go, and set sail, but not till the governor, gathering courage from the control over the mob which a town meeting had seemed to acquire, had come back to town, when he was escorted to his house by the same militia that had refused his summons before.
It was a violent reaction for Shirley from the enthusiasm of the Louisbourg victory, thus to experience the fickleness of what he called the “mobbishness” of the people; and his trust in the town meeting and the assembly was not strengthened when the representatives reduced his allowance, on pretence of the burdens which the war had brought. Shirley intimated that the 200,000 population of the province and a capital with 20,000 inhabitants did not mark a people incompetent to pay their rulers equably; but his intimations went for little. The colony was not in very good humor. England, in making the treaty of Aix la Chapelle (October 7, 1748), had agreed to restore Louisbourg to the French, and leave the bounds as before the war. There were discordant opinions among the advisers of the government touching the real value of Louisbourg as a military post; but it was unfortunate that to redress the balance in Europe England had to relinquish the conquests of her colonists. It may not have been wholly without regard to the quelling of the New England pride, which might become dangerous,—since Sam. Adams was pluming his political rhetoric in the Independent Advertiser at this time,—that it was thought best by that treaty to give to the province an intimation of the superior authority of the Crown.[298] The province was not without its own power of warning, for Hugh Orr, a young Scotchman, manufactured about this time at Bridgewater 500 stands of arms for the province of Massachusetts Bay; which are said to have been carried off by the British from Castle William when they evacuated Boston in March, 1776. They are supposed to have been the first made in America.[299]
Meanwhile, Horatio Walpole, the auditor-general, with an eye to his own personal advantage, had brought forward a project of the Board of Trade for overruling the charters of the colonies; but the strenuous opposition of William Bollan and Eliakim Palmer for Massachusetts and Connecticut made the advocates of the measure waver, and the movement failed. Shirley was devising a plan of his own, which looked to such an extension of the parliamentary prerogative as had not yet been attempted. His scheme was to build and maintain a line of posts at the eastward, the expense of which all the colonies should share under a tax laid by Parliament.[300] In the pursuit of this plan, Shirley obtained leave of absence, and went to England (1749), while the conduct of affairs was left in the hands of Spencer Phips, the lieutenant-governor, a man of experience and good intentions, but not of signal ability. Thomas Hutchinson, James Otis, and two others meanwhile went to Falmouth to engage the eastern Indians, who were far from quiet, in a treaty, which was finally brought to a conclusion on October 16, 1749. In the following winter (1749-50), Sylvanus Cobb was in Boston fitting out his sloop for a hostile raid through the Bay of Fundy; but Cornwallis at Halifax thought the preparations for it had become known to the French, and the raid was not accomplished.
The next year (1750), Parliament touched the provinces roughly. The English tanners wished for bark, and they could get it cheap if the English land-owners could sell their wood to the furnaces, and the furnaces would buy it if they could find a sufficient market for their iron and steel, as they could do if they had no rivals in America. It was a chain of possibilities that Parliament undertook to make realities, and so passed an act forbidding the running of slitting and rolling mills in the colonies, and Charles Townshend, who introduced the bill, found no opposer in Shirley. The bold utterances that Jonathan Mayhew was making in indignant Boston carried a meaning that did not warn, as it might, the Board of Trade in England.
Shirley, after four years’ absence, during which he had been employed in an unsuccessful mission to Paris about the Acadian boundaries, came back to Boston in 1753, to be kindly received, but to feel in bringing with him a young Catholic wife, whom he had married in Paris, the daughter of his landlord, that he gave her the position of the first lady in the province not without environing himself and her with great embarrassment, in a community which, though it had departed widely from the puritanism of the fathers, was still intolerant of much that makes man urbane and merry. While Shirley had been gone, the good town had been much exercised over an attempt to introduce the drama, and the performance of Otway’s Orphan at a coffee-house in King Street had stirred the legislature to pass a law against stage plays. The journals of Goelet[301] and others give us some glimpses of life, however, far from prudish, and show that human nature was not altogether suppressed, nor all of the good people quite as stiff as Blackburn was now painting them.