The United States : its history and Constitution

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Contents

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I. Colonization 1

II. The Struggle for Expansion . . . .23

II. The Struggle For Expansion

1750-63.

25. The English settlements along the Atlantic had covered the narrow strip of coast territory quite thoroughly before it was possible to think of expansion westward. Since about 1605 Canada had been undisputedly in the hands of the French. Their traders ^^ ^ ^

The French

and missionaries had entered the present in Canada western United States ; Marquette and Joliet (1673) and La Salle (1682) had explored the upper Mississippi river, and others, following their track, had explored most of the Mississippi valley and had built forts in various parts of it. About 1700 the French opened ground at the mouth of the Mississippi : D'lberville (1702) founded Mobile and the French Mississippi Company (1718) founded the city of New Orleans. Consistent design, foiled at last only by failure of material, marks the proceedings of the French commanders in America for the next thirty years. New Orleans and Quebec were the extremities of a line of well-placed forts which were to secure the whole Mississippi valley, and to confine the English settlements forever to the strip of land along the coast bounded on the west by the Appalachian or Alleghany range of mountains, which is parallel to the coast and has but one important break in its barrier, the opening through which the Hudson river flows. The practical genius of the French plans is shown by the fact that so many of these old forts have since become the sites of great and flourishing western cities : Natchez, Vincennes, Peoria, Fort Wayne, Toledo, Detroit, Ogdensburgh, and Montreal either are built on or are so near to the old forts as to testify to the skill and foresight against which the English colonies had to contend. To this whole territory, extending from the mouth of the Mississippi to that of the St. Lawrence, covering even the western part of the present State of New York, the name of New France was given. The English possessions, extending in hardly any place more than a hundred miles from the ocean, except where the Dutch had long ago planted the outpost of Fort Orange, or Albany, on the upper Hudson, were generally restricted to the immediate neighborhood of the coast, to which the early population had naturally clung as its base of supplies.

26. The French difficulties were even greater than those of the English. The French people had never had

,., , that love of emia^ration which had given the

Weakness ° ^

of the English colonies their first great impetus. French system. -^^^^ ^j^^^^ ^j^^ Frcuch scttlcd they showcd

more of a disposition to coalesce with the native population than to form a homogeneous people. The French were commonly far stronger with the Indians than were the English ; but at the end of a hundred and fifty years, when the English colonists numbered a million and a quarter, all animated by the same political purposes, the population of all New France was only about 100,000, and it is doubtful whether there were 7500 in the whole Mississippi valley. The whole French system, wisely as it was designed, was subject to constant and fatal interference from a corrupt court. Its own organization was hampered by attempts to introduce the feudal features of home social life. A way was thus opened to exactions from every agent of the court, to which the people submitted with hereditary patience, but which were fatal to all healthy development. Perhaps worst of all was the natural and inevitable formation of the French line of claims. Trending westward from Quebec to meet the northward line of forts from New Orleans, it was bent at the junction of the two parts, about Detroit, and its most important part lay right athwart the path of advancing English migration. The English wave was thus to strike the weaker French line in flank and at its weakest point, so that the final issue could not in any event have been doubtful. The French and Indian war probably only hastened the result.

27. There had been wars between the French and the English colonies since the accession of William and Mary, mostly accessory to wars between the mother inter-coioniai countries. The colonies had taken part in the '^^'=- wars ended by the peace of Ryswick (1697), the peace of Utrecht (1713), and the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748). The alliance of the French and Indians made all these struggles wretched experiences for the English. The province of Canada became a prison-pen, where captives were held to ransom or adopted into savage tribes. Outlying settlements were broken up, or forced to expend a large part of their energy in watchful self-defence ; and it required all the persistence of the English colonies to continue their steady forward movement. Nevertheless they even undertook offensive operations. They captured Port Eoyal in 1690, but it was given up to the French in 1697. They captured it again in 1710, and this time it was kept, with most of Acadia, which was now to be known as Nova Scotia. In 1745 the colonies took the strongest French fortress, Louisburgh, on Cape Breton Island, with very little assistance from the home Government. Their land expeditions against Montreal and Quebec were unsuccessful, the reason for failure being usually defective transport.

28. In the treaties which closed these wars, the interests of the colonies met with little consideration. The

The most notable instance of this was the 12th " asiento." articlc of the treaty of Utrecht, by which an English company was secured the exclusive right to carry African slaves into American ports. Originally meant to obtain the Spanish trade in negroes, the company had influence enough to commit the crown to a steady support of the African slave-trade in its own colonies. Again and again the English legislatures in North America attempted to stop the slave-trade, and were prevented by the royal veto. This will serve to explain a passage in Jefferson's first draft of the American Declaration of Independence, as follows : — " He [the king] has waged cruel war against human nature itself. . . . Determined to keep open a market where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce."

29. All parties seem to have felt that the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle was but a truce at the best ; and the French court seems to have come at last to some comprehension of its extensive opportunities and duties in North America. With its tardy sympathy, its agents on the new continent began the erection of barriers against the great wave of English westward migration which was just appearing over the crest of the Alleghanies. It was too late, however, for the English colonies were really able to sustain themselves against the French colonies and court together. Their surveyors (1747) had crossed the crests of the mountains, and had brought back appetizing accounts of the quality of the lands which lay beyond. The Ohio Company (1749), formed partly of The Ohio Com- Virginian speculators and partly of English- P^^ymen, had obtained a grant of 500,000 acres of land in the western part of Pennsylvania (then supposed to be a part of Virginia), with a monopoly of the Indian trade. As the grant was completely on the western side of the Alleghanies, and was the first English intrusion into the ■ Ohio valley, it behooved the French to meet the step with prompt action. Their agents traversed the Ohio country, making treaties with the Indians and burying lead plates inscribed with the lilies of France and a statement of the French claims. The erection of the Ohio Company's first fort (1752) brought on the crisis. The main line of French forts was too far away to be any check upon it. The French leaders therefore began to push a branch line eastward into the disputed territory. Their first work (1753) was put up at Presque Isle (now Erie), about 100 miles north of the Ohio Company's fort. The citadel of the disputed territory had been begun on the spot where Pittsburgh now stands, where the Alleghany and Monongahela unite to form the Ohio river. Governor Dinwiddle, of Virginia, had obtained the right to erect the fort by treaty with the Indians. From Presque Isle the French began running a line of forts south, through the present "oil district" of Pennsylvania, towards the headquarters of the English.

30. Washington was then a land-surveyor, barely of age ; but he was the agent whom Dinwiddle selected to carry an ultimatum to the French at Presque Isle. After a perilous winter passage through the wilderness, he found that the French had no intention of evacuating their position, and returned. Virginia at once (January, 1754) voted money and men to maintain the western claims of the colonies ; and Washington was sent with 400 provincial troops to secure the half-built fort at the head of the Ohio. The French were also pushing for that place. They won in the race, drove away the English workmen, and finished Fort Du Quesne, named after their governor. Washington, compelled to stop and fortify his position, won the first skirmish of the war with the French advanced guard, but was forced to surrender on terms (July 4, 1754). The usual incidents of a general Indian warfare followed for the rest of the year.

31. Both Governments began to ship regular troops to America, though there was no formal declaration of war The French and uutil 1756. The ycar 1755 was marked by Indian War. j^j^g surprlsc and defeat of Braddock, a gallant and opinionated British officer who commanded an expedition against Fort Du Quesne, by the complete conquest of Nova Scotia, and by the defeat of the French, under their principal officer, Dieskau, at Lake George, in New York, by a force of provincial troops under Sir William Johnson. In 1756 the greatest of French Canadian governors, Montcalm, arrived ; and the tide of war went steadily against the English. The officers sent out by the home Government were incompetent, and they generally declined to draw on the colonists for advice. Montcalm found them an easy prey; and his lines were steadily maintained at the point where they had been when Washington surrendered at Fort Necessity. Pitt's entrance to the Newcastle ministry (June,

1757) changed all this. For the first time the colonies found a man who showed a sympathy with them and a willingness to use them. Their legislatures were summoned into counsel as to the conduct of the war ; and their alacrity in response was an augury of a change in its fortune. Incompetent officers were weeded out, with little regard to family or court influence. The whole force of the colonies was gathered up, and in 1758 was launched at the French. All western New York was cleared of the enemy at a blow ; Fort Du Quesne was taken and renamed Fort Pitt ; Louisburgh, which had been restored to France at Aix-la-Chapelle, was again taken ; and the only failure of the year was the dreadful butchery of the English in assaulting the walls of Ticonderoga. Louisburgh made an excellent point of attack against Quebec, and Montcalm was forced to draw off nearly all his troops elsewhere for the defence of his principal post. The year 1759 was therefore begun by the capture of Ticonderoga and almost all the French posts within the present United States, and was crowned by Wolfe's capture of the towering walls of Quebec. In 1760, while George II. lay dying, the conquest of Canada was completed, and the dream of a great French empire in North America disappeared forever.

32. The war continued through the first three years of George III., and the colonies took part in the capture of Havana after Spain had entered the struggle as an ally of France. The peace of Paris, which put an end to the war, restored Havana to Spain, in exchange for Florida, which now became English. France retired from North America, giving to Spain all her claims west of the Mississippi and that small portion east of the Mississippi which surrounds New Orleans, and to England the remainder of the continent east of the Mississipjji. Spain retained for her territory the name of Louisiana, originally given by the French. The rest of the continent was now " the English colonies of North America."

33. It is evident now that the French and Indian war was the prelude to the American revolution. It trained the officers and men for the final struggle. It released the colonies from the pressure of the French in Canada so suddenly that the consciousness of their own strength came at the same instant with the removal of the ancient barrier to it. It united the colonies for the first time ; few things are more significant of the development of the colonies than the outburst of plans for colonial union between 1748 and 1755, the most promising, though it finally failed, being that of Franklin (1754) at the .Albany conference of Indian commissioners from the various colonies. The practical union of the colonies, however, was so evident that it might have been foreseen that they would now unite instinctively against any common enemy, even the mother country.

34. The war, too, while it obtained its main object in the view of the colonies — an unlimited western expan-

The conquered siou — brought thc sccds of enmity between territory, thcm aud thc crowu. The claims of the English on the continent, as has been said, were based on the voyages of the Cabots. Under them the crown had granted in the charters of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia a western extension at first to the Pacific Ocean and finally to the Mississippi. This was what the colonies had fought for; and yet at the end of the war (1763) a royal proclamation was issued forbidding present land sales west of the Alleghanies and practically reserving the conquered territory as a crown domain. In this, if in nothing else, lay the seeds of the coming revolution, as it afterwards almost disrupted the rising Union. The war had welded the thirteen colonies into one people, though they hardly dreamed of it yet ; they had an underlying consciousness that this western territory belonged to the new people, not to the crown or to the separate colonies which had charter claims to it ; and they would have resisted the claims of the crown as promptly as they afterwards resisted the claims of the individual colonies.

35. Finally, the war broke the feeling of dependence on the mother country. Poorly armed, equipped, and disciplined, the colonial or " provincial " troops Effects of the had certainly shown fighting qualities of no ^^''• mean order. Colonists would not have been disposed, under any circumstances, to underrate the military qualities of their own men, but their self-glorification found a larger material because of the frequently poor quality of the officers who were sent through family and court influence to represent Great Britain in the colonies. The bitter words in which Junius refers to British military organization in after years were certainly even more applicable in 1750 ; and the incompetency of many of the British officers is almost incomprehensible. Its effects were increased by an utter indifference to the advice of colonial leaders which, in a new and unknown country, was certain to place British soldiers again and again in positions where they appeared to great disadvantage alongside of their colonial allies or rivals. The provincial who had stood his ground, firing from behind trees and stumps, while the regulars ran past him in headlong retreat, came home with a sense of his own innate superiority which was sure to bring its results. Braddock's defeat was the prologue to Bunker Hill. The results were strengthened by the fact that most of the war was fought either in New England, the most democratic of the colonies, or by New England men. Their leaders had always been sought for by annual popular elections and re-elections, the promotion of approved men, and the retention of men of poorer quality in lower grades of office. To them the aristocratic influences which gave place and power to such men as Loudoun and " Mrs. Nabbycrombie " were simply ridiculous, and marked only an essential difference between themselves and their English brethren which was to the disadvantage of the latter, even though it occasionally evolved a man like Howe or Pitt. Taking all the influences together, it is plain that the French and Indian war not only brought into being a tangible union of the colonies, but broke many of the cords which had held the colonies to the mother country.

III. The Struggle For Uniok 1763-75

36. It is generally believed that the abandonment of North America by France was the result of profound policy, — that she foresaw that her retirement would be followed by the independence of the English colonies, and that Great Britain's temporary aggrandizement would result in a more profound abasement. Vergennes and Choiseul both stated the case in just this way in 1763 ; and yet it may be doubted whether this was not rather an excuse for yielding to necessity than a political motive. At all events, it is certain that the peace, even with its release of the colonies from French pressure, was not enough to secure colonial union. For this it was necessary that the home Government should go on and release the colonists from their controlling feeling that they were rather Englishmen than Americans.

37. This feeling was not an easy one to eradicate, for it was based in blood, training, and sympathies of every nature. It would not have been easy to dis- ^ ,. ^

''^ English sym-

tinguish the American from the Englishman ; pathies of the it would, indeed, have been less easy than now, when the full effects of a great stream of immigration have begun to appear. American portraits of the time show typical English faces. Wherever life was relieved of the privations involved in colonial struggle, the person at once reverted to the type which was then the result of corresponding conditions in England. The traditions of American officers were English ; their methods were English; even the attitude which they took towards the private soldiers of their armies was that which was characteristic of the English officer of the time. In the South the men who led and formed public opinion had almost all been trained in England and were ingrained with English sympathies and even prejudices. In the North the acute general intellect had long ago settled upon the " common rights of Englishmen " as the bulwark behind which they could best resist any attempt on their liberties. The pride of the colonists in their position as Englishmen found a medium of expression in enthusiasm for ^^ the young king " ; and it would be hard to imagine a more loyal appendage of the crown than its English colonies in North America in 1760.

38. Unfortunately, the peace of Paris did not result

merely in freeing the colonies from dependence on the

Change of Eng- mother couutry ; it had the more important

lish policy, effect of freeing the mother country from fear of France, and of thus encouraging it to open a controversy with the colonies which had not been ventured on before. Quebec had hardly fallen and given the home Government promise of success when the work was begun (1761). The Board of Trade began to revive those regulations of colonial trade which had been practically obsolete in New England ; and its customs officers applied to the Massachusetts courts for " writs of assistance " to enable them to enforce the regulations. Instant resistance was offered to the attempt to burden the colonies with these writs, which governed all men, were returnable nowhere, gave the officers absolute power, and opened every man's house and property to their entrance. The argument of the crown advocates based the power of issuing such writs on parliament's extension of the English revenue system to the colonies, backed by a statute of Charles II. permitting writs of assistance ; to refuse to grant the writs was therefore to impeach the power of parliament to legislate for the colonies. The counter-argument of James Otis was the key-note of the revolution. It declared in terms that no Act of parliament could establish such a writ, that it would be a nullity even if it were expressed in the very terms which the customs officers claimed, and that " an Act of parliament against the constitution was void."

39. Perhaps Otis meant by " the constitution " merely the fundamental relations between the mother country and the colonies, for this claim was the first ^, ^

' _ _ The English

step on the way to the final irreconcilable theory of colonial difference as to these relations. The English "^^^^' theory of the connection had been completely put into shape by 1760, with very little objection from the colonists, whose attention had not yet been strongly drawn to the subject. It held that even the two charter colonies, and a fortiori still more such a royal province as New York, were merely corporations, erected by the king, but subject to all the English laws relating to such corporations. The king was their visitor, to inquire into and correct their misbehaviors ; his courts, on quo warranto, could dissolve them ; and parliament had the same omnipotent power over them which it had over any other civil corporation, — to check, amend, punish, or dissolve them. These propositions must have seemed unquestionable to the English legal mind in 1763. Their weak point, the assumption that parliament had power to control a corporation extra quatuor maria, had been covered by a new development of the English theory during the century. Parliament, originally a merely English body, had grown in its powers and claims until now the common use of the phrase " imperial parliament " connoted claims to which the "four seas" were no longer a limitation, in law or fact. Parliament was to give the law to the whole empire. Hitherto this had been developed as a purely legal theory ; it was now first attempted to be put into practice when the enforcement of the Navigation Acts was begun in 1761. The first objections offered by the colonists were easily shown to be illogical and inconsistent with this legal theory of the relations between the home country and the colonies, but this only drove the colonists higher, step by step, in their objections, — from objections to taxation by parliament into objections to legislation by parliament, — until they had developed, about 1775, a theory of their own, logical enough in itself, but so inconsistent with the English theory that war was the consequence of their collision.

40. Passing over the intermediate steps, the form which the colonial theory finally took amounted to this. The colonists' Thc iutroductiou of the idea of an "imperial theory. parliament" was itself a revolution, which could not bind the colonists, or change the conditions under which they had settled the new country. Their relations, originally and properly, had been with the crown alone, and they had had nothing to do with parliament. The crown had seen fit to constitute new dominions for itself beyond the seas, with forms of government which were irrepealable compacts between it and the people whom it had thus induced to settle the new territory, and not mere civil corporations. It would follow, then, that the king was no longer king merely of Great Britain and Ireland ; he had at least thirteen kingdoms beyond seas, and a parliament in each of them. For the British parliament to interfere with the special concerns of Massachusetts was as flagrant a wrong as it would have been for the parliament of Massachusetts to interfere with the affairs of Great Britain; and Massachusetts had a right to expect her king to protect her from such a wrong. The subject of Massachusetts knew the king only as king of Massachusetts, and the parliament of Great Britain not at all. It needed many years of successful but suicidal logic on the part of their opponents to force the Americans to this point ; they even continued to petition parliament until 1774; but after that time they were no further inconsistent, and held that the king was the only bond of union between the parts of the empire.

When he wanted money from his American dominions, he was to get it, as he had always got it, by applying to the assembly of the colony, through the governor, for a grant. In the new seats of the race, as in the old, an Englishman was to be taxed only by his own representatives. In other words, each of the English colonies claimed, in its own field and for its own citizens, the exact principles of " English liberty " which had been established in England as the relations of the English subject to the crown. Each colony was to be governed by its own laws, just as in Jersey and Guernsey, in Scotland before the Union, or in Hanover in 1763, with appeal to the king in council, not to English courts or to the House of Lords. For the British parliament, or still more the British citizen, to talk of "our sovereignty" over the colonies was a derogation from the king's sovereignty, the only sovereignty which the colonies knew. "I am quite sick of 'our sovereignty,'" wrote Franklin in 1769. The case of the colonies was evidently that of Ireland also ; and Franklin notes the fact that several members of colonial assemblies had been admitted to the privileges of the Irish parliament, on the ground that they were members of '' American parliaments." To this statement of their case the Americans adhered with progressive closeness from 1763 until the end. In their final Declaration of Independence it will be found that it is a declaration of their independence of the king only ; they do not then admit that the British parliament had ever had any authority over them ; and that hodij is only mentioned in one place, in 'one of the counts of the indictment of the king, for having given his assent to certain " acts of pretended legislation," passed by " a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws," that is to say, by the British parliament.

41. Two irreconcilable theories were thus presented. Between them were two courses, either of which the Possible com- colouics wcrc willing to accept. Under their promises, thcory there was no "imperial parliament." They were willing to have one constituted, even if it were only a development of the British parliament through admission of colonial representatives ; but the time for this passed before the parties could debate it. On the other hand, the colonies were willing to abandon to the wealthier British parliament, which sustained so much larger a proportion of the cost of the standing army and navy, the privilege of regulating external trade for the general good. So late as 1774 the Continental Congress, while maintaining the sole right of the colonial assemblies to levy internal taxation and make local laws, declared their willingness to yield to the British parliament the power to make snch regulations of external trade as were bona fide meant to benefit trade, and not to raise a revenue from Americans without their own consent. This solution could have been only temporary at best, and war cut off any discussion of it.

42. The work of quiet revolution was begun in March, 1763, in the closing hours of the Bute ministry, Charles Townshend being first lord of trade and administrator of the colonies. It was decided to make a point of having all the American judges and other officials hold office during the king's pleasure, and to make their salaries independent of the colonial assemblies. The army estimates were increased by an American standing force of twenty regiments, to be paid for by Great Britain for the first year, and thereafter out of a revenue to be raised in America by Act of parliament. Bute's purposes were political, — the diminution of democracy in America. The Wilkes uproar drove him out of power before he could develop his plans ; but his successor, Grenville, followed them out for financial reasons, and in February, 1765, the Stamp Act " was passed through both Houses

with less opposition than a turnpike bilL" ^ amp c .

43. For the past two years the colonists had had other things to think of. Under Grenville the Acts in restraint of colonial trade (§§ 20, 21), which had been The Navigation allowed to become practically obsolete, were '-^^^• put into force with unsparing rigor. The numbers of the customs officers were increased; their duties were more plainly declared ; naval officers were encouraged to take the oaths of customs officers and share in the plunder of the commerce which had grown up between America and the West Indian Islands and other parts of the world. Search was constant; confiscation usually followed search; and appeal was even more costly than confiscation. In the confusion arising from the efforts of American commerce to escape its new enemies, it was not wonderful that other questions were allowed to go by default. But the mutterings of resistance were heard. The Massachusetts assembly protested against any schemes to create a standing army in America, to make ofiicers independent of the assemblies, or to raise a revenue without consent of the assemblies, and appointed a committee to secure the united action of all the colonies. This was the first movement in the struggle for union. Its importance was hidden from the ministry by the official class in the colonies, whose members — the governors, judges, and other crown officials — continued to urge a persistence in the new policy, and to represent the Adamses, Otis, and the other colonial leaders as animated by a perverse desire to destroy the unity of the empire.