FRANKLIN IN THE FIRST AMERICAN CONGRESS. 145 sioners responded from every colony north of the Potomac; and even Virginia was represented by the presiding officer of the convention, Delancey, the Lieutenant-Governor of New York. It was an imposing, if not a numer ous assembly; composed of men who were afterwards to win the honorable title of Fathers of the American Republic. Amongst them was the sage Hutchinson, who had rescued Massachusetts from the thraldom of paper money;' Hopkins, the Rhode Island patriot; Pitkin, the faithful,' of Connecticut; Smith, the liberal,' of New York, and Tasker, of Maryland. Benjamin Franklin.—Greatest of all our political seers, that wisest and deepest statesman America has ever had, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, then in the early prime of his wonderful life-forty-eight years of age, twenty-six years older than Washington-stood the controlling spirit. On the morning of the FOURTH OF JULY, this delegate from Pennsylvania had matured and now submitted a plan of confederation, which crystallized under royal authority, the first clearly defined project of colonial confederation ever proposed.' It could not be imposed by authority, but it was ordered to be presented for the consideration of the colonies, and to be laid before the Board of Trade in London, which mainly controlled the affairs of the colonies. Nor was it fully carried into effect, for it was too democratic to suit England, and too aristocratic for some of the colonies. But the germ of union was planted; the thought of fraternization was clearly presented; the spirit was brooding over the bosom of the Thirteen Colonies, out of which National life was to The idea of federal union was then formed for defence against two common enemies-the French, with whom we had then no affiliations, and against whom we had inherited some of the prejudices of Englishmen—and the savage tribes, most of whom we regarded as merciless foes. And thus, in this old Dutch town, sat THE FIRST American Congress, ListenING TO THE PLAN OF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, 1754, TWENTY-TWO YEARS BEFORE THE GREAT DECLARATION. come. The fire was now spreading through the colonies; but all was confusion. The Indian allies of the French began their depredations along the frontiers of New England, while the tribes beyond the Alleghanies, inspired by French emissaries with the murderous spirit of extermination towards our settlers, were active in the west. Some of the colonies voted money and troops, and numerous but ineffectual preparations were made for the impending struggle.. England gave the trifling sum of fifty thousand dollars to assist the colonies, and commissioned Governor Sharpe, of Maryland, as commander-in-chief of all the colonial forces. But his appointment met with no favor; while certain unwise military measures of Dinwiddie had been followed by disputes about rank, which ended even in the resignation of Colonel Washington himself. New England colonies in their infancy had given birth to a confederacy William Penn, in 1697, had proposed an annual congress of all the provinces on the Game of America, with power to regulate commerce. Franklin revived the great idea, and breathed into it enduring life. As he descended the Hudson, the people of New York thronged about him to welcome him; and he, who had first entered their city as a runaway apprentice, was revered as the leader of American union.-Bancro': vol. iv., p. 125. 146 CAMPAIGN OF 1755. ZEAL OF THE COLONISTS. The Campaign of 1755.-War was about to be declared between France and England, and some vigorous measures had to be adopted by the British Government. Gen. Braddock, an Irish officer of distinction, arrived in the Chesapeake on the 20th of February, 1755, with two regiments of his countrymen in the regular service. He also bore a commission as commander-inchief of all the British and colonial forces in America. In the following April, six of the colonial Governors, at his request, met him in convention at Alexandria, to settle on a vigorous campaign.' Their deliberations resulted in planning three separate expeditions; one under General William Johnson, against Crown Point, on Lake Champlain; a second against Niagara and Frontenac, to be commanded by Shirley, Colonial Governor of Massachusetts; and the third, and chief, against Fort Duquesne, under the immediate command of Braddock himself. Separate from the action of this convention, a fourth expedition was also matured by Shirley and Governor Lawrence, of Nova Scotia, to wage a war of expulsion, and if necessary, of extermination, against all the French in that province, as well as throughout the settlements of Acadia. Patriotic Zeal of the Colonists.-With the exception of Pennsylvania, whose people were too deeply imbued with the peaceful spirit of their founder, and Georgia, then too feeble and poor to proffer any aid, all the colonies, through their legislatures, voted men, money and munitions of war. It was a hearty co-operation between them and the Imperial government: it being evident to all that the hour had come to determine which empire should rule America. The Doom of Acadia.-The movements of Shirley and Lawrence were the most rapid and energetic, and the troops of Massachusetts and Nova Scotia were first in the field. As early as the 20th of May, Gen. John Winslow, the great-grandson of Edward Winslow, the third Governor of Plymouth-a bold and competent soldier-sailed from Boston with three thousand men for the Bay of Fundy. Colonel Monckton, with three hundred British regulars, took command of the united forces, and after capturing the French forts, proclaimed martial law over the whole region. Sad enough is it that this memorable war, which was to be distinguished by so many brilliant deeds, and change the fortunes of the whole continent, should have been opened by so dreadful an act of inhumanity as we must now record. It was nothing less than the expulsion, or extermination of the entire French population of Acadia. It had been settled in the British councils, and General Winslow was intrusted with the execution of the inhuman decree. The plea was one of self-defence, of course; the inhabitants would join their countrymen in Canada, and they must be wiped out. 'The innocent and happy people were seized in their houses, fields and churches, and conveyed on board the English vessels 1 These Governors were Dinwiddie, of Virginia; Sharpe, of Maryland; Dobbs, of North Carolina; Morris, of Pennsylvania; Delancey, of New York; and Shirley, of Massachusetts. Admiral Keppel, com mander of the British fleet, also assisted. TERRIBLE DOOM OF ACADIA. 147 Families were broken, never to be united; and to complete the surrender of those who fled to the woods, their starvation was insured by a total destruction of their growing crops. The Acadians were stripped of everything, and those who were carried away, were scattered among the English colonies, helpless beggars, to die heart-broken in a strange land. In one short month their paradise had become a desolation, and a happy people were crushed into the dust.' ' Braddock's Expedition, June 10, 1755. However much this General 1 Lossing's Hist. of the U. S., p. 185. In his touching description of these disgraceful occurrences, Bancroft gives the following relation : To hunt them into the net was impracticable; artifice was therefore resorted to. By a general proclamation, on one and the same day, the scarcely conscious victims, 'both old men and young men, as well as all the lads of ten years of age,' were peremptorily ordered to assemble at their respective posts on the appointed 5th of September. They obeyed. At Grand Pre, for example, four hundred and eighteen unarmed men came together. They were marched into the church and its avenues were closed, when Winslow, the American commander, placed himself in their centre, and spoke :-'You are convened together to manifest to you his Majesty's final resolution to the French inhabitants of this his province. Your lands and tenements, cattle of all kinds, and live stock of all sorts, are forfeited to the crown, and you yourselves are to be removed from this his province. I am, through his Magesty's goodness, directed to allow you liberty to carry your money and household goods as many as you can, without discommoding the vessels you go in,'-and he then declared them the king's prisoners. Their wives and families shared their lot: their sons, 527 in number, their daughters, 576; in the whole, women and babes and old men and children all included, 1923 souls. The blow was sudden; they had left home but for the morning, and they never were to return. Their cattle were to stay unfed in the stalls, their fires to die out on their hearths. They had for the first day even no food for themselves or their children, and were compelled to beg for bread. The 10th of September was the day for the embarkation of a part of the exiles. They were drawn up six deep, and the young men, 161 in number, were ordered to march first on board the vessel. They could leave their farms and cottages, the shady rock on which they had reclined, their herds and their garners; but nature yearned within them, and they would not be separated from their parents. Yet of what avail was the frenzied despair of the unarmed youth? They had not one weapon; the bayonet drove them to obey; and they marched slowly and heavily from the chapel to the shore, between women and children, who, kneeling, prayed for blessings on their heads, they themselves weeping and praying, and singing hymns. The seniors went next; the wives and children must wait till other transport vessels arrive. The delay had its horrors. The wretched people left behind, were kept together near the sea, without proper food, or raiment, or shelter, till other ships came to take them away, and December, with its appalling cold, had struck the shivering, halfclad, broken-hearted sufferers, before the last of them were removed. 'The embarkation of the inhabitants goes on but slowly,' wrote Monckton, from Fort Cumberland, near which he had burned three hamlets; the most part of the wives of the men we have prisoners are gone off with their children, in hopes I would not send off their husbands without them.' Their hope was vain. Near Annapolis a hundred heads of families fled to the woods, and a party was detached on the hunt to bring them in. 'Our soldiers hate them,' wrote an officer on this occasion, and if they can but find a pretence to kill them, they will.' Did a prisoner seek to escape? He was shot down by the sentinel. Yet some fled to Quebec; more than 3,000 had withdrawn to Miramichi, and the region south of the Ristigouche; some found rest on the banks of the St. John's and its branches; some found a lair in their native forests; some were charitably sheltered from the English in the wigwams of the savages. But 7,000 of these banished people were driven on board ships, and scattered among the English colonies, from New Hampshire to Georgia ;-one thousand and twenty to South Carolina alone. They were cast ashore without resources; hat ing the poorhouse as a shelter for their offspring, and abhorring the thought of selling them as laborers. Households too were separated; the colonial newspapers contained advertisements of members of families seeking their companions, of sons anxious to reach and relieve their parents, of mothers mourning for their children. The wanderers sighed for their native country; but, to prevent their return, their villages, from Annapolis, tc the isthmus, were laid waste. Their old homes were but ruins. In the district of Minas, for instance, two hundred and fifty of their houses, and more than as many barns, were consumed. The live stock which belonged to them, consisting of great numbers of horned cattle, hogs, sheep, and horses, were seized as spoils and disposed of by the English officials. A beautiful and fertile tract of country was reduced to a solitude. There was none left round the ashes of the cottages of the Acadians, but a faithful watch-dog, vainly seeking the hands that fed him. Thickets of forest trees choked their orchards; the ocean broke over their neglected dikes, and desolated their meadows. Relentless misfortune pursued the exiles wherever they fled. Those sent to Georgia, drawn by a love for the spot where they were born as strong as that of the captive Jews, who wept by the side of the rivers of Babylon for their own temple and land, escaped to sea in boats, and went coasting from harbor to harbor; but when they reached New England, just as they would have set sail for their native fields, they were stopped by orders from Nova Scotia. Those who dwelt on the St. John's were torn once more from their new homes. When Canada surrendered, hatred with its worst venom pursued the fifteen hundred who remained south of the Ristigouche. Once those who dwelt in Pennsylvania presented a humble petition to the Earl of Loudoun, then the British commander-in-chief in America ; and the cold-hearted peer, offended that the prayer was made in French, seized their five principal men, who in their own land had been persons of dignity and substance, and shipped them to England, with the request that they might be kept from ever again becoming troubiesome, by being consigned to service as common sailors on board ships of war. No doubt existed of the king's approbation. The Lords of Trade, more merciless than the savages and than the wilderness in winter, wished very much that every one of the Acadians should be driven out; and when it seemed that the work was done, congratulated the king that the zealous endeavors of Lawrence had been crowned with an entire success.' I know not if the annals of the human race keep the record of sorrows so wantonly inflicted, so bitter, and so perennial, as fell upon the French inhabitants of Acadia. 'We have been true,' said they of themselves, 'to our religion, and true to ourselves; yet nature appears to consider us only as the objects of public vengeance.' The hand of the English official seemed under a spell with regard tc them; and was never uplifted but to curse them.--Ban croft, vol. iv., pp. 202–206. 148 DEFEAT AND DEATH OF GEN. BRADDOCK. may have known about the art of war, as carried on in Europe, his appointment to a command in the wilderness was most unfortunate. Impatient of advice, imperious in disposition, rash in language, and with no winning ways through kindness or dignity, he inspired little respect or confidence from the two thousand men he started with from Cumberland. Knowing something of the reputation of Colonel Washington, he was appointed to act as Aid to the commander-in-chief, and given the command of the provincial soldiers. He pushed on with twelve hundred men, by forced marches, leaving Col. Dunbar to bring up the rest with the baggage train. Knowing how little Braddock could possibly understand of the only successful way to make war in the wilderness, Washington modestly proffered his advice; but the obstinate and fiery Irishman rejected it with disdain.' Pressing his march, at mid-day the 9th day of July, on the south bank of the Monongahela, the advance guard, under Col. Gage,-afterwards commander-in-chief of the British forces. at Boston, in the beginning of the Revolution,-was surprised by a cloud of arrows, and a volley of bullets, from a ravine in a thicket, where a thousand Indians lay in ambush. Washington saw the peril, and once more begged his commander to retreat for a while, and prepare to prosecute the battle in a better way. But Braddock was as destitute of common sense as he was of personal fear; and without judgment he fought a European battle, his columns melting away in the useless conflict with a hidden but terrible foe. Death reigned all around. Every mounted officer, except Washington, was killed or wounded. At last the desperate Braddock himself fell mortally wounded, after having had several horses shot under him. For three hours the Provincial troops had been fighting with much useless courage, and with the full knowledge that their lives were being needlessly thrown away. They would no longer keep the field; and although the regulars were in a complete route after they saw their General fall, yet Washington by his magic power rallied his own countrymen, and covered the whole retreat in so masterly a manner that the enemy made no attempt to follow. Unfortunate as it seemed for the cause of the colonists, the death of Braddock excited little regret. It was afterwards supposed to be well ascertained, that he was shot by Thomas Faucett, a Provincial soldier, whose brother having, contrary to the silly order of the commander, protected himself behind a tree, had been struck down with the cleaving sword of Braddock, who dashed up to him when he discovered his position. With a flash from the surviving brother's musket, Braddock reeled from his saddle. It was at that moment that the Provincials were saved from complete slaughter by everywhere violating the order of the British General. 1 'The opinion in the provinces,' Bancroft remarks, I was very general that the war was conducted by a mixture of ignorance and cowardice. They believed that they were able to defend themselves against the French, without any assistance or embarrassments from England' 2 Dr. Craik, who was with Washington at this time, and also attended him in his last illness, says, that while in the Ohio cantry with him, fifteen years afterwards, an old Ind an chief came, as he said, 'a long way' to see the Virginia Colonel at whom he fired his GEN. JOHNSON'S EXFEDITION TO LAKE george. 149 Braddock's Burial, July 15, 1755.—Washington had recovered the body of Braddock, and a week after the battle he read over the corpse, by torchlight, the solemn service of the Church of England. The grave where his ashes repose can be seen to this day, near the National road, between the 53d and 54th mile from Cumberland. 1 The chief portion of the shattered remains of the fugitive battalions were marched back to Pennsylvania, by Col. Dunbar, while Washington led the rest home to Virginia. Shirley's Expedition to Niagara.-The month of August had nearly worn away before Shirley, with his twenty-five hundred men, reached Oswego. From that point he was to transport his troops by water to Niagara. But the storms of the late season, alarming disease in his camp, and the desertion of his Iroquois, and the Stockbridge Indians from the Housatonic, compelled him to abandon his plan; and leaving a small force to complete and garrison the fort he had begun, he marched the rest of his forces back to Massachu setts. Gen. Johnson's Expedition.-It was by far the largest and best managed of all; and although it failed in its chief object, it effectually revealed the strength of the contending parties, and opened up some of the most tragic scenes of the war. Six thousand of the troops of New England, New Jersey, and New York had gathered on the Hudson, fifty miles above Albany, under the command of Gen. Lyman, of Connecticut. Strong works had been constructed, which afterward took the name of Fort Edward. It was the most formidable expedition that had ever been seen on this continent. In August Gen. Johnson reached the camp, and marched to the head of Lake George, a distance of fifteen miles, where he established his headquarters, and prepared to open the campaign. Baron Dieskau, a French general of reputation, was, in the meantime, advancing from Montreal, by way of Lake Champlain, with two thousand Canadian militia and Indian allies. He landed his forces at Whitehall, with the intention of assaulting Fort Edward; but the sight of British cannon terrified the Indians, and he marched at once to attack Johnson on Lake George. The scouts bringing in the news of the approach of the French, Johnson sent Col. Ephraim Williams,' of Massachusetts, with a thousand of the troops of that colony, and two hundred Mohawks, led by their terrible chief, Hendrick, to cut off the advance of the enemy. They met in a narrow defile, four miles to the south of the lake. But while Williams was confidently advancing, he suddenly found himself in an ambuscade which threatened a general massacre. The enemy sprang upon them from every side. Williams and Hendrick were both killed. Nothing but the desperate valor of the Massachusetts men under Col. Timothy RugglesWhile on his way north, Williams stopped at on the right side of the road from Glenn's Falls to Albany, made his will, and bequeathed certain property Lake George, still bears his name; and a col'ection of to found a free school for western Massachusetts. This water on the battle-ground is called Bloody Pond.was the foundation of 'Williams College,' his best Lossing's Hist. of the U. S. p. 190-Note. The rock near which his body was found, monument. |