From showing the world's right to the epoch of '76, and sketching the progress of the century in its wider aspect, a natural transition is to the part played in illustrating the period by the people from whose political birth it dates, and who have made the task of honoring it their own. They have reached their first resting-place, and pardonably enjoy the opportunity of looking back at the road they have traversed. They pause to contemplate its gloomy beginning, the perilous precipices along which it wound, and the sudden quagmires that often interrupted it, all now softened by distance and by the consciousness of success. Opening with a forest-path, it has broadened and brightened into a highway of nations.
So numerous and various were the influences, formative and impellent, which combined to bring the colonies up to the precise ripening-point of their independence, as to make it difficult to assign each its proper force. In the concentric mass, however, they stand out sharp and clear, and the conjoint effect seems preordained. That the event should have come when it did, and not before or after, is as obvious as any of history's predictions after the fact. Looking through the glasses of to-day, we find it hard to realize that the Continental Congress renewed its expressions of loyalty to the king three weeks after the battle of Bunker Hill, so distinct before us rises the completed and symmetrical edifice of separation ready for its capstone, from its foundations growing steadily through the past.
Thirteen years—one for each State—were occupied in the topping-off. The Seven Years' War, that created the new central power of modern Europe, had a great deal to do with creating the new American power. It taught the colonies their strength, gave them several thousand native soldiers, and sent them from over the water the material, some of it completely wrought, for more in the German immigration consequent upon it. Out of it grew the obnoxious enactments that brought on the end. So closely simultaneous were these with the king's proclamation of October 7, 1763, prohibiting all his subjects "from making any purchases or settlements whatever, or taking possession of any of the lands, beyond the sources of any of the rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the west or north-west," as to support the suspicion that the British ministry had a premonitory sense of the coming struggle, and meant to prepare for it by checking the expansion of the colonies. The pressure applied to front and rear was part of one and the same movement; and is incompatible with the accepted view that neither cabinet nor Parliament anticipated, in the first instance, any American opposition to the Stamp Act and the system of legislation to which it was the opening wedge. The England of that day proposed to rule America after much the same fashion with Ireland, the Alleghanies presenting themselves very conveniently for an Indian Pale. This line of policy was in harmony with the ideas then predominant in England, and was fully understood by the colonists. They could not possibly have been blind to it, in view of the continuous and repeated claims of absolute legislative supremacy formally put forth, from the bill to that effect passed coincidently with the repeal of the Stamp Act down to the alterations made in the Massachusetts charter in 1774; the latter proceeding being in close harmony, both in time and motive, with the extension of the province of Quebec to the Ohio—one of the very rare evidences of sagacity and foresight discernible in the course of the ministry; for, while it did not avail to dam the westward flood, it certainly contributed, with other concessions made at the same time to the Canadians, to save the St. Lawrence to the Crown.
As apropos to this point, we transcribe from the original manuscript, written in the round, clear, unhesitating but steady hand characteristic of all Washington's letters, the following to James Wood of Winchester, afterward governor of Virginia, but then little more than a stripling:
"MOUNT VERNON, Feb'y 20th, 1774.
"DEAR SIR: I have to thank you, for your obliging acc't of your trip down the Mississippi, contained in a Letter of the 18th of Octob'r from Winchester—the other Letter, therein refer'd to, I have never yet receiv'd, nor did this come to hand till some time in November, as I was returning from Williamsburg.
"The contradictory acc'ts given of the Lands upon the Mississippi are really astonishing—some speak of the Country as a terrestrial Paradise, whilst others represent it as scarce fit for anything but Slaves and Brutes. I am well satisfied, however, from your description of it, that I have no cause to regret my disappointment:—The acc't of Lord Hillsborough's sentiments of the Proclamation of 1763, I can view in no other light than as one, among many other proofs, of his Lordship's malignant disposition towards us poor Americans, formed equally in malice, absurdity, and error; as it would have puzzled this noble Peer, I am persuaded, to have assigned any plausible reason in support of this opinion.
"As I do not know but I may shortly see you in Frederick, and assuredly shall before the Assembly, I shall add no more than that, it will always give me pleasure to see you at this place whenever it is convenient to you, and that with compliments to your good Mother I remain, D'r Sir, Y'r most Obed't H'ble Serv't,
"G'o WASHINGTON."
This private note, discussing casually and curtly the great river of the West, and the minister who endeavored to make it a flumen clausum to the colonists, nearly equidistant in date between the Boston Tea-party and the meeting of the Assembly which called the first Continental Congress, has some public interest. The West always possessed a peculiar attraction for Washington. He explored it personally and through others, and lost no occasion of procuring detailed information in regard to its capabilities. He acquired large bodies of land along the Ohio at different points, from its affluents at the foot of the Alleghany to the Great Kanawha and below. Now we see him gazing farther, over the yet unreddened battle-grounds of Boone and Lewis, to the magnificent province France and Spain were carefully holding in joint trusteeship for the infant state he was to nurse. The representative in the provincial legislature of a frontier county stretching from the Potomac to the Ohio, we may fancy him inspired, as he looked around from his post on the vertebral range of the continent, with "something of prophetic strain." If so, he was not long to have leisure for indulging it. Within eighteen months his life's work was to summon him eastward to the sea-shore. The Dark and Bloody Ground must wait. For its tillage other guess implements than the plough were preparing—the same that beckoned him to Cambridge and the new century.
The slender driblet of population which at this juncture flowed toward the Lower Mississippi was due to the anxiety of Spain to get a home-supply of wheat, hemp and such-like indispensables of temperate extraction for her broad tropical empire. A newspaper of August 20, 1773 gives news from New York of the arrival at that port of "the sloop Mississippi, Capt. Goodrich, with the Connecticut Military Adventurers from the Mississippi, but last from Pensacola, the 16th inst." They had "laid out twenty-three townships at the Natchez," where lands were in process of rapid occupation, the arrivals numbering "above four hundred families within six weeks, down the Ohio from Virginia and the Carolinas." The Connecticut men doubtless came back prepared, a little later, to vindicate their martial cognomen; and to aid them in that they were met by Transatlantic recruits in unusual force. The same journal mentions the arrival at Philadelphia of 1050 passengers in two ships from Londonderry; this valuable infusion of Scotch-Irish brawn, moral, mental and muscular, being farther supplemented by three hundred passengers and servants in the ship Walworth from the same port for South Carolina. The cash value to the country of immigrants was ascertainable by a much less circuitous computation then than now; many of them being indentured for a term of years at an annual rate that left a very fair sum for interest and sinking fund on the one thousand dollars it is the practice of our political economist of to-day to clap on each head that files into Castle Garden. The German came with the Celt in almost equal force—enough to more than balance their countrymen under Donop, Riedesel and Knyphausen. The attention drawn to the colonies by the ministerial aggressions thus contributed to strengthen them for the contest.
But with all these accessions in the nick of time, two millions and a quarter of whites was a meagre outfit for stocking a virgin farm of fifteen hundred miles square, to say nothing of its future police and external defence against the wolves of the deep. It barely equaled the original population, between the two oceans, of nomadic Indians, who were, by general consent, too few to be counted or treated as owners of the land. It fell far short of the numbers that had constituted, two centuries earlier, the European republic from which our federation borrowed its name. The task, too, of the occidental United States was double. Instead of being condensed into a small, wealthy and defensible territory, they had at once to win their independence from a maritime power stronger than Spain, and to redeem from utter crudeness and turn into food, clothing and the then recognized appliances of civilized life the wilderness thus secured. The result could not vary nor be doubted; but that the struggle, in war and in peace, must be slow and wearing, was quite as certain. It is dreary to look back upon its commencement now, and upon the earlier decades of its progress; and we cannot wonder that those who had it to look forward to half shrank from it. Among them there may have been a handful who could scan the unshaped wilderness as the sculptor does his block, and body forth in imagination the glory hidden within. That which these may have faintly imagined stands before us palpable if not yet perfected, the amorphous veil of the shapely figure hewn away, and the long toil of drill and chisel only in too much danger of being forgotten.