By direction of the Lords of Trade, the governments of all the colonies were invited to meet at Albany, so that a solemn treaty could be at one time made with all the Indian tribes, by all the colonies, in the name of the king.
For treaty-making with the Iroquois, the most powerful of all the Indian tribes, there was only one place,—Albany. Dinwiddie, of Virginia, vainly wanted it at Winchester, Va., while Shirley, of Massachusetts, jealous of New York, and a genuine politician, wished to keep himself before the voters, and to come after the elections were over. His party was more than his province or the country. As the Indians had already, according to orders from England, been notified, the New York Assembly declined to postpone time or place.
In Albany the streets were cleaned and repaired by order of the City Council, and the delegates were given a public dinner at the municipal expense. The Congress met in the City Hall on the 19th of June, 1754, twenty-five delegates from nine colonies being present; and whether in personal or in representative dignity formed the most august assembly which up to this time had ever been held in the Western World. The colonies were named in the minutes according to their situation from north to south. All were represented, except New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Georgia.
The business proper began when Johnson read a paper, which was the official report of the Board of Commissioners on Indian Affairs, in which the political situation was exposed. In it propositions were made to build forts in the Onondaga and Seneca countries, with a missionary in each place; to forbid the sale of rum, and to expel and keep the Frenchmen out of the Indian castles. The speech, prepared as the voice of the Congress, was delivered June 28 to the Indians who were present, and who had to be urged by the governor to attend. After various conferences and much speech-making on either side, including an address by Abraham, a scorching philippic by King Hendrick,—both Mohawk sachems and brothers,—and the distribution of gifts, the Indians went home apparently satisfied. To the edification of delegates from some of the colonies, where Indians were deemed incapable of understanding truth and honour, they found that Governor De Lancey and Colonel Johnson treated them as honest men who understood the nature of covenants. Whereas the laws of Joshua and Moses had been elsewhere applied only too freely to Indian politics by the elect of Jehovah, the New York authorities really believed that the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule had a place in Indian politics.
Other questions of vital interest to the colonies were discussed. On the fifth day of the session of the Congress, while waiting for the Indians to assemble, a motion was made and carried unanimously that “a union of all the colonies” was absolutely necessary for their security and defence. A committee of six was appointed to prepare plans of union, and from the ninth day until the end of the session this important matter was under debate. On the 9th of July the Congress voted “That there be a union of his Majesty’s several governments on the continent, so that their councils, treasure, and strength may be employed in due proportion against their common enemy.” On the 10th of July the plan was adopted, and ordered to be sent to London for the royal consideration.
How far this Albany plan of union, which looked to a Great Council of forty-eight members meeting at Philadelphia under a President-general, resembled or foreshadowed the National Constitution of 1787, we need not here discuss. Certain it is, that though the exact plan proposed was rejected, both by the colonies and by Great Britain, the spirit of the movement lived on. Between the year 1754 and that of 1776 was only the space of the life of a young man. Between the “Congress”—the word in this sense was a new coinage, dating from the meeting of colonial delegates in Albany, after the burning of Schenectady in 1690—in the State House at Albany and the one in Carpenter’s Hall in Philadelphia, the time was even less. Certain it is that the assembly of representatives of the colonies at Albany in 1690 was the first occasion of the popular use of the word “Congress” as now used, and usually written with a capital, while that in 1748 made it a word of general acceptance in the English language. Before that time and meeting it had other significations not so august; but while these have fallen away, the other and chief signification in English remains. Further, from this time forth the “Continental”—that is, the American as distinct from the British, the independent as discriminated from the transatlantic—idea grew. In common speech, the continental man was he who was more and more interested in what all the colonies did in union, and less in what the king’s ministers were pleased to dictate. More and more after the Albany Congress Wycliffe’s idea prevailed,—that even King George’s “dominion was founded in grace” and not on prerogative. More and more the legend on the coins, “Georgius Rex Dei Gratia,” faded into the nature of a fairy tale, while the idea grew that the governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed. To those wedded to the idea that religion can live only when buttressed by politics, that a church owes its life to the state, this increase of democratic doctrines was horrible heresy, portending frightful immorality and floods of vice. A State without a King, a Church without politically appointed rulers and the support of public taxation, a coin without the divine name stamped on it, were, in the eyes of the servants of monarchy, as so many expressions of atheism. Not so thought the one member of the Albany Congress who lived to sign the Declaration of Independence and the National Constitution of 1787,—Benjamin Franklin, who incarnated the state founded politically by Penn; nor the Quaker, Stephen Hopkins, of Rhode Island, who lived to put his sign-manual to Jefferson’s immortal document, July 4, 1776.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE BATTLE OF LAKE GEORGE.
By the movements in Western Pennsylvania, the war had already broken out, though the diplomatists on the transatlantic side had not yet said so. By the first week in May, the raids on the northern border began by the destruction of Hoosic, within ten miles of Fort Massachusetts. The half-naked or starving refugees reaching Albany furnished a vivid object-lesson of reality. Under Johnson’s vigilance and activity, the people in the forts, block-houses, and palisaded villages were kept on guard night and day. In this work he was ably seconded by Governor De Lancey. Politics make strange bed-fellows; and the late critic and opponent, now that he occupied the seat of the person whom he had, largely out of party spirit, opposed, became a warm friend of his friend Johnson, the untiring frontiersman.
When in New York, Feb. 28, 1755, Johnson learned of the official declaration of war, and the sailing from Cork, Ireland, of General Braddock with one thousand regulars, bound for Alexandria, Va.; and to this place Johnson with Governor De Lancey made a journey. At the council held by the five royal governors, expeditions against Nova Scotia, Crown Point, Niagara, and Fort Du Quesne were planned. Johnson was again made Superintendent of Indian Affairs, and appointed as major-general to command the forces for the reduction of Crown Point.
The story of the success of one of these expeditions and the failure of two of them under Braddock and Shirley, is known to all. We may now glance at that under Johnson. After a great council held in June, attended by eleven hundred of all ages and sexes, to the devastation of Johnson’s larder, King Hendrick and many hundred fighting men promised to be ready for war. After various delays, the motley army gathered from the colonies left Albany August 8, 1755, and on the 28th Johnson reached the Lake of the Holy Sacrament. A true courtier, he changed the name given by Isaac Jogues, which had superseded the Indian term, Andiatarocte; and in honour of his sovereign George, and “to ascertain his undoubted right there,” called the beautiful water by the name it still bears. The modern fanciful name “Horicon” seems to be nothing more than a printer’s mistake, glorified by a romancer.