keep the idea of their civil rights associated with your government, they will cling and grapple to you; and no force under heaven will be of power to tear them from their allegiance. But let it be once understood that your government may be one thing and their privileges another, that these two things may exist without any mutual relation, the cement is gone, the cohesion is loosened, and every thing hastens to decay and dissolution. As long as you have the wisdom to keep the sovereign authority of this country as the sanctuary of liberty, the sacred temple consecrated to our common faith, wherever the chosen race and sons of England worship freedom, they will turn their faces towards you. The more they multiply, the more friends you will have; the more ardently they love liberty, the more perfect will be their obedience. Slavery they can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. But, until you become lost to all feeling of your true interest and your natural dignity, freedom they can have from none but you. This is the commodity of price, of which you have the monopoly. This is the true act of navigation, which binds to you the commerce of the colonies, and through them secures to you the wealth of the world. Deny them this participation of freedom, and you break the unity of the empire. It is the spirit of the English constitution, 1775. which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even down to the minutest member. Is it not the same virtue which does every thing for us here in England?

Mar. 22.

"All this, I know well enough, will sound wild and chimerical to the profane herd of those vulgar and mechanical politicians, who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material; and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. But, to men truly initiated and rightly taught, these ruling and master principles, which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth every thing, and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom

the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together. If we are conscious of our situation, and glow with zeal to fill our places as becomes our station and ourselves, we ought to auspicate all our public proceedings on America with the old warning of the church: Lift up your HEARTS! We ought to elevate our minds to the greatness of that trust to which the order of Providence has called us. By adverting to the dignity of this high calling, our ancestors have turned a savage wilderness into a glorious empire; and have made the most extensive and the only honorable conquests, not by destroying, but by promoting the wealth, the number, the happiness of the human race." For three hours, Burke was heard with attention; but, after a reply by Jenkinson, his deep wisdom was Mar. 22. scoffed away by vote of more than three to one.

1775.

It was the moment of greatest depression to the friends of liberty in England; their efforts in parliament only exposed their want of power. Ministers anticipated as little resistance in the colonies.

1775.

CHAPTER XXV.

VIRGINIA PREPARES FOR SELF-DEFENCE.

MARCH-APRIL, 1775.

Ar the north, a state was preparing to rise through anarchy into self-existence, peace, and order. The March. court of common pleas was to be opened by the royal judges in what was called the New York county of Cumberland, at Westminster, in the New Hampshire Grants, on the eastern side of the Green Mountains. To prevent this assertion of the jurisdiction of New York and

of the authority of the king, a body of young men Mar. 13. from the neighboring farms on the thirteenth of

March took possession of the court house. The royal sheriff, who, against the wish of the judges, had raised sixty men armed with guns and bludgeons, demanded possession of the building; and after reading the riot act, and refusing to concede terms, late in the night ordered his party to fire. In this way he made his entry by force, having mortally wounded William French, of Brattleborough, and Daniel Houghton, of Dummerston. The rash act closed the supremacy of the king and of New York to the east of Lake Champlain. Armed men poured in from towns in the Grants and from the borders of New Hampshire and Massachusetts, till their number reached five hundred and they became irresistible. They instituted a jury of inquest, and the royalists implicated in the attack were sent to jail in Massachusetts for trial. They were soon released; but the story of what had happened was told from village to village, as a tale of tyranny and murder; and historians of Vermont keep alive the memory of those who fell as of the first martyrs in the contest with the king.

Just before this shedding of blood, Ethan Allen, already foreseeing war with Great Britain, engaged to Oliver Wolcott, of Connecticut, that "the regiment of Green Mountain Boys would assist their American brethren;" and now John Brown, of Pittsfield, who had passed through the settlements on his way to Montreal, on the twenty-ninth wrote to Samuel Adams and Joseph Warren at Boston, that, "should hostilities be committed by the king's troops, the people on New Hampshire Grants would seize the fort at Ticonderoga; and they were the proper persons for the job."

1775.

Mar. 13.

The assembly of Delaware, which met on the day of the shedding of blood in Vermont, approved the proceedings of the congress at Philadelphia; but, in re-electing their deputies, they avowed their most ardent wish for an accommodation with Great Britain, for which end they were willing to yield claims of right that were either doubtful or "not essentially necessary to their well-being;" and they disregarded the prayer of freemen of Kent county to adopt the resolution of Maryland and of Washington. The session was specially important from the instruction given to their deputies in congress, to urge decently but firmly the right of their province to a voice equal with any other province on this continent. For more than twelve years the little government of Delaware steadfastly maintained the right of each colony to an equal vote, and surrendered it at last only on a compromise. It now carried a bill prohibiting the importation of slaves; but the proprietary governor, constrained by the decision of the king in council, interposed his veto. In the neighboring county of Westchester, in Pennsylvania, a more thorough movement was made "for the manumission of slaves, especially of all infants born of black mothers within the colony." Could the bringing in of African bondsmen from abroad be for ever forbidden, the public opinion of Pennsylvania was ripe for putting an end to bondage.

Early in March, the governor of North Carolina, who had just returned from New York by land, reported to the secretary of state the result of his observations: "In Vir

ginia, I found the heats among the people still more violent and universal, and the committees appointed under the prescription of the congress had proceeded in some places to the most arbitrary and unwarrantable exertions of power; the ferment there, I perceive, has in no sort abated, as I think the advertisement of Mr. Washington and others, that your lordship will find enclosed, plainly discovers." This advertisement of Washington consisted of the Fairfax resolves, to which he had set his name, and which were in this manner brought to the notice of the king. In his own government, Martin sought to neutralize the convention by holding simultaneously a regular meeting of the legislature; but, on the fifth of April, the convention of North Carolina, in which Richard Caswell was the most conspicuous member, unanimously adhered to the general congress, and reelected their delegates with this comprehensive instruction: "They are hereby invested with such power as may make any act done by them, or any of them, or consent given in behalf of this province, obligatory in honor upon every inhabitant thereof." Yet the measures of North Carolina still looked to peace, and propositions to array an armed force were overruled.

March.

From prejudice, habit, and affection, the members 1775. of the convention of Virginia, in which even the part of Augusta county west of the Alleghany mountains was represented, cherished the system of limited monarchy under which they had been born and educated in their land of liberty. They were accustomed to associate all ideas of security in their political rights with the dynasty of Hanover, and had never, even in thought, desired to renounce their allegiance. They loved to consider themselves an integral part of the great British empire. The distant life of landed proprietors in solitary mansion-houses favored independence of thought; but it also generated an aristocracy, which differed widely from the simplicity and equality of New England. Educated in the Anglican church, no religious zeal had imbued them with a fixed hatred of kingly power; no deep-seated antipathy to a distinction of ranks, no theoretic zeal for the introduction of a republic, no spec