Fortunately for the Commonwealth, Governor Clinton had taken other advice than that so liberally furnished in the past by the particular member so obnoxious to the Assembly; and his opening message was commendably brief, being merely a salutation, which was as briefly and courteously returned. Now that the Tory firebrand was “out of politics” for a while, peace once more reigned. An era of good feeling set in, and harmony was the rule until Clinton’s administration ended. A new Board of Indian Commissioners was chosen, by a compromise between the governor and his little parliament. Plans for paying the colonial debt, for strengthening the frontier, and for establishing a college were all carried out.
Oswego was the watch-house on the frontier. In the early spring of 1753 the advance guard of a French army left Montreal to take possession of the Ohio Valley. Descried alike by Iroquois hunters at the rapids of the St. Lawrence and by the officers at Oswego, the news was communicated to Johnson by foot-runners with wampum and by horseback-riders with letters. Thirty canoes with five hundred Indians under Marin were leading the six thousand Frenchmen determined to hold the domain from Ontario to the Gulf of Mexico.
Whether troubled the more by the encroachments of the warlike French, or by the English land-speculators and enterprising farmers who were now clearing forests and settling on their old hunting-grounds, the Indians could scarcely tell. Dissatisfied at having lost officially their friend Johnson, disliking the commissioners, seeing what they considered as their property, the Ohio, invaded by the French, while the New York Government seemed to be inert or asleep, they sent a delegation to lay their complaints before the governor and Council in New York. There they roundly abused the whole government, and threatened to break the covenant chain. As matter of fact, the trouble concerning land patents arose out of transactions settled before Clinton’s time, which could not at once be remedied in curt Indian fashion. All legal land alienations in New York were, after the custom originating in Holland, and thence borrowed by the American colonists and made a national procedure in all the United States, duly registered; and into these examination must be made. Both house and governor, however, agreed in choosing Johnson as the man for the critical hour, and requested him to meet the tribes at the ancient council-fire at Onondaga. Johnson, hearing that the Iroquois had broken faith and again attacked the Catawbas in the Carolinas, hastened matters by summoning one tribe, the Mohawks, to meet him at his own home.
Again the stone house by the Mohawk became the seat of an Indian council, and was enveloped in clouds of tobacco smoke. Johnson, compelling them to drink the cup mingled with upbraiding and kindness, while bountifully filling their stomachs from his larder, sent them away in good humour, and most of them burning with loyalty. Besides thus manifesting his singular power over the Mohawk savages, he met the representatives of the United Confederacy at Onondaga, September 9. The result of the ceremonies, the eloquence, the smoke, and the eating was that the confederates, though sorely puzzled to know what to do between the French and the English, promised loyalty to the brethren of Corlaer. They would, however, say nothing satisfactory concerning the Catawbas, some of whose scalps, and living members reserved for torture, even then adorned their villages.
Governor Clinton had grown weary of the constant battle which he was, probably with the stolid ignorance of many men of his time and class, fighting against the increasing power of popular liberty. He saw it was vain to resist the spirit which the Dutch, Scots, and French Huguenots had brought into New York with them, or inherited from their sires, and he longed for a rest and a sinecure post in England. He liked neither the New York people nor the climate. When therefore his successor, Sir Danvers Osborne, arrived on Sunday, October 7, Clinton hailed the day as one of the happiest of his life. He shortly after sailed for home, to spend the remainder of his years in a post for which he was better fitted,—the governorship of Greenwich Hospital. He died in 1761, fourteen years before the breaking out of the war which his own actions had strongly tended to precipitate. His son, Sir Henry, led the British regulars and mercenaries who were bluffed in North Carolina, driven off at Fort Moultrie, and finally won victory at Long Island. He failed to relieve Burgoyne, fought the drawn battle at Monmouth, captured Charleston, dickered with Arnold, left Cornwallis in the lurch, and returning baffled to England, shed much ink in defending himself against his critics. Another family of Clintons shed high lustre on the American name and the Empire State. One added another river parallel to the Mohawk, flowing past Johnson’s old home, and joining the waters of the Great Lakes to those of the Hudson and the Atlantic, making the city of New York the metropolis of the continent.
Sir Danvers Osborne’s career in America was a short tragedy in three acts. It lasted five days. He came to be ground as powder between the upper millstone of royal prerogative and the nether disk of popular rights. He came from an aristocratic and monarchical country, whose government believed that it was the source of power to the people, to colonists whose fathers had been educated mostly under a republic, where it was taught that the people were, under God, the originators of power. Charged with instructions much more stringent than those given to his predecessor, he was confronted in the town-hall by the city corporation, whose spokesman’s opening sentence was that “they would not brook any infringement of their liberties, civil or religious.” On meeting his Council for the first time, he was informed that any attempt to enforce the strict orders given him and to insist upon an indefinite support, would be permanently resisted. That night the unfortunate servant of the king took his own life. He committed suicide by hanging himself on his own garden wall.
De Lancey, the chief-justice, was now called to the difficult post of governor, and to the personally delicate task of serving King George and his former associates, whom he had so diligently prodded against Clinton, Colden, and Johnson. This was especially difficult, when the Assembly found, in the instructions to Sir Danvers Osborne, how diligently the late governor and his advisers had slandered and misrepresented them to the British Government. The good results of a change in the executive were, however, at once visible, and the Assembly promptly voted money for the defence of the frontier, for the governor’s salary, for his arrears of pay as chief-justice, for Indian presents, for his voyage to Albany, and indeed, for everything reasonable. They added a complaint against Clinton, and a defence of their conduct to the Crown and Lords of Trade, which De Lancey sent to London.
The clouds of war which had gathered in the Ohio Valley now broke, and M. Contrecœur occupied Fort Du Quesne. George Washington began his career on the soil of the State of Pennsylvania, in which his longest marches, deepest humiliations, fiercest battles, and most lasting civil triumphs were won; and on the 4th of July, 1754, honourably surrendered Fort Necessity. The French drum-beat was now heard from Quebec to Louisiana. The English were banished behind the Alleghanies, and their flag from the Ohio Valley.
It was now vitally necessary that the colonies should form a closer union for defence against French aggression and the inroads of hostile savages. The Iroquois tribes had been able to unite themselves in a stable form of federalism. Why could not the thirteen colonies become confederate, and act with unity of purpose? Besides so great an example on the soil before them, there was the New England Confederation of 1643, which had been made chiefly by men trained in a federal republic. Both the Plymouth men and many of the leaders of New England had lived in the United States of Holland, and under the red, white, and blue flag. There they had seen in actual operation what strength is derived from union. Concordia res parvæ crescunt (“By concord little things become grand”), was the motto of the Union of Utrecht, familiar to all; but in New York the republican motto Een-dracht maakt Macht (“Union makes strength”) needed no translation, for its language was the daily speech of a majority of the people.
It seemed now, at least, eminently proper that the Congress of Colonies should be in the state settled first by people from a republic, and at Albany, the ancient place of treaties, and at the spot in English America where red and white delegates from the north, east, west, and south can even now assemble without climbing or tunnelling the Appalachian chain of mountains.