262 A PEOPLE IN ARMS-NOT AN ARMY. during this whole period of conflict, contemplated the issue with doubt, and greeted the final result with the gladness which always attends an unexpected triumph. From this standpoint, let the reader contemplate the Commander-inChief, on Monday morning, the third day of July, 1775, as he rode from his headquarters at Cambridge, attended by his staff, to a grand old elm-tree. that towered above the Common, to assume command of the Continental army. He found it composed of upwards of seventeen thousand men; their lines dispersed in a semi-circle from the west of Dorchester to Malden, a distance of nine miles. But it was all a scene of bewildering confusion. From every part of Massachusetts, and the nearest colonies, had come rushing enthusiastic multitudes, to make up a suddenly improvised, and halfequipped army, to resist the first onset of a disciplined force, which had not only been trained on the distant fields of Europe by the best Generals of the age, but were furnished with the completest equipment, and the most abundant munitions, which the art of war could provide. But these raw volunteers had stood their ground with the steadiness of veterans, twice repelling as well-conducted, and gallant assaults as are ever made on battlefields. There was indeed no lack of valor, nor was there to be for some time any lack of men in the patriot lines; and there was absolute devotion to country and to God. But when, after riding along all the lines, he returned to his headquarters at evening, and looked off on the surrounding hills, from which a new-born flag,'-which was afterwards to give place to the national standard,—was floating, and heard the shouts of welcome which rolled over those tiny plains and valleys, the Commander looked with the eyes of a soldier, in spite of the exultation which swelled the heart of the patriot. He saw only the rough material from which discipline, trial, and time alone could create an army. At the outset, therefore, he encountered an obstacle which military leaders have always regarded as the most formidable; for ardent as these 'Sons of Liberty' were, and complete as was their consecration to the national cause, and comprehending even somewhat of the greatness of their undertaking, and unappalled as they were at the dark cloud that shut down on the future, the great mass had no manner 1 That flag was composed of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, symbolizing the Thirteen revolted Colonies. In one corner was the device of the British Union Flag, namely, the Cross of St. George, composed of a horizontal and perpendicular bar, and the cross of St. Andrew, representing Scotland, which is in the form of an X. On the 14th of June, 1777, Congress ordered thirteen stars, white, in a blue field, to be put in the place of the British union device. Such is the design of our Flag at the Erate ay. A star has been added for every new admitted into the Union, while the original number of stripes is retained.-Lossing's Hist. U. S., as various as the tastes of their occupants. Some Elo VIRGINIA LEADS THE GRAND INSURRECTION. 263 of conception of the meaning of the words, subordination, or discipline. It was only a people in arms—an army was yet to be formed. The Virginians Leading the Grand Insurrection in the South.-Leaving Washington to organize the Army for Independence, let us cast a glance to our old favorite fields beyond the Potomac. The Virginians had come bravely up to meet the crisis, and the results showed that they were prepared to repel the aggressions of England in the same spirit which had marked the movements in Massachusetts. After Lord Dunmore had seized and removed the military stores from Williamsburg, then the capital of Virginia, and for which he had made payment to Patrick Henry on his demand at the head of his Culpeper regiment, he was driven from his palace, and compelled to take refuge on board a British man-of-war in the York River. He proclaimed martial law throughout Virginia, and attempting to excite insurrection among the slaves, offered rewards of liberty and money, for all fugitives who would escape to his protection. Having made his preparations for carrying on war with the aid of British vessels, he attacked Hampton, near Old Point Comfort, on the second of October. But the Virginians rallied, and in a severe battle on the 9th of December, at Great Bridge, twelve miles from Norfolk, they repulsed this motley army of British soldiers, negroes, refugees, and tories, and compelled the commander to escape to his shipping in Norfolk harbor. Five days later, the Virginians entered Norfolk in triumph, where they were joined by Colonel Robert Howe, who brought with him a regiment from North Carolina. Exasperated by his defeat, on the evening of New Year's day, 1776, Dunmore began the destruction of Norfolk, with a bombardment from sixty pieces of cannon. As night came on, several boats were sent ashore to burn the warehouses on the wharves and spread the flames along the river. Attempts were made to land, but they were unsuccessful. The town being built chiefly of pine wood, and favored by a high wind, the conflagration became general. Women and children, mothers with their little ones in their arms, fled, as best they could, through the burning streets. The fiendish work of destruction was kept up, until the fate of the town was sealed. The fire raged for three days, till most of the place was reduced to heaps of ashes. 6 In this manner the royal Governor burned and laid waste the best town in the oldest and most loyal colony of England, to which Elizabeth had given a name, and Raleigh devoted his fortune, and Bacon and Herbert foretokened greatness; the colony where the people of themselves had established the Church of England, and where many were still proud, that their ancestors in the day of the British Commonwealth, had been faithful to the line of kings.' ' When Washington heard of the fate of the richest town in his native State, in one of those sublime transports of indignation and grief that sometimes shook his majestic frame, he exclaimed, 'This, and the threatened devasta 1 Bancroft, vol. viii. page 231. 264 FRANKLIN APPOINTED POSTMASTER-GENERAL. tion of other places, will unite the whole country in one indissoluble band against the nation which seems lost to every sense of virtue, and those feel ings which distinguish a civilized people from the most barbarous savages.' After the destruction of Norfolk, a storm came on which threatened to shatter the titled incendiary's ships, and with such of the inhabitants as chose his protection, and about one thousand fugitive negroes all huddled together on board, destitute of every comfort, the humiliated Governor put to sea. Unable to carry on the war, except as a marauder, he committed depredations along the defenceless coast of Virginia, making his headquarters at Gwyn's Island, in Chesapeake Bay, until he was driven away by a brigade of Virginia troops under General Lewis. The blackness of his villany finally culminated as he reached the West Indies, where he sold the thousand negroes he had seduced from their homes, into the deep hopelessness of tropical slavery.' Benjamin Franklin Appointed Postmaster-General.-Let us look for a inoment at the proceedings of the Congress. A system of communication had to be established for conveying intelligence throughout the Colonies. There was but one man thought of for that business. By unanimous vote Benjamin Franklin was chosen PostmasterGeneral, with power to appoint deputies for carrying mails between Maine and Georgia. The service thus rendered can hardly be understood in our time. Nor is it quite enough to say that Franklin had more to do with the actual business arrangements of the American Revolution at home and abroad, than any other man, Washington alone excepted, and he only in the qua lity of commander-in-chief. While the public attention of a nation or community is absorbed in startling events, its business machinery ought to move steadily and securely on. During the long struggle, the brain of Franklin was ceaselessly at work on the practical business of the country. He overlooked nothing-he foresaw everything-he provided for the most unexpected exigencies-he devised means that nobody else had thought of-he multiplied resources where they existed-he created them where there were none he was led astray by no chimera-no sophistry or fallacy eluded the keen perception and grasp of his mind-in a word, he was the political philosopher of his age; doing for a whole people in almost every depart ment of public and private life, what Bacon did for philosophy in his system of induction; what Shakspeare did to teach men a knowledge of human nature; and what Galileo did to bring the heavens down to the earth. Franklin made a school-house of the Thirteen Colonies, in which he educated by his precepts, his example, his newspapers, his almanacs, his letters, and his deeds, the great mass of the American people in the practical concerns of 1 But in truth the cry of Dunmore did not rouse among the Africans a passion for freedom. To them bondage in Virginia was not a lower condition of being, than their former one; they had no regrets for ancient privileges lost; their memories prompted no demand for political changes; no struggling aspiration of their own had invited Dunmore's interposition; no memorial of their grievances had preceded his offer. What might have been accomplished had he been master of the country, and used an undisputed possession to embody and train the negroes, cannot be told; but as it was, though he boasted that they flocked to his standard, none combined to join him from a longing for an improved condition or even from ill-will to their masters.' Bancroft, vol. viii. p. 225. 265 THE OLIVE BRANCH REJECTED BY THE KING. every-day life. In these respects he has by general consent been regarded as immeasurably great. ་ The Royalists and Tories of the Revolution.-There were many rightminded and good men in the Colonies, who, up to the last moment, had deemed it possible to bring about a reconciliation with the Crown, and they were exhausting every means in their power to give realization to their hopes. There was as yet no unanimity on this subject, even in the Continental Congress. An absolute and final rupture with Great Britain was not readily entertained even by the most patriotic-Samuel Adams standing earliest and alone in his ultraism. But things had gone so far at last, that those who hung back from taking the irrevocable leap in the dark' began. to be regarded with coldness if not suspicion. Among those who distinguished themselves in the final futile effort to press the 'Olive Branch' upon the obstinate King of England, was Thomas, a descendant of William Penn, and one of the former Governors of the Colony of Pennsylvania. Confiding in the integrity of his character, he was made the bearer of a Petition to the king, drawn up by the Congress in most respectful terms, and which the monarch himself declared to be the least objectionable of all papers of that stamp ever sent to him. But the obstinate ruler returned insult for supplication, and in his speech to Parliament charged the petitioners with being 'rebels,' declaring that they had taken arms into their hands to establish an independent state.' Few kings have come nearer to uttering a great truth; and yet he had himself to blame for turning his accusation into fact. Anything like respect or kindness in the king's answer, would, for a time at least, have paralyzed the Revolution. But whatever loyalty there was left in the great heart of America, was pretty nearly extinguished by the sternness with which he recommended that an unrelenting policy should be adopted to reduce the Colonies to submission. The Olive Branch Rejected by the King. That famous Petition was called the Olive Branch.' The Colonists understood it at the same time to be their ultimatum; hence its rejection, which severed them from the throne, became the sole act of the king. At his bidding, Parliament soon afterward prohibited trade and commerce with the Colonies; closed all their ports; authorized the seizure and destruction of all American ships and cargoes, and the capture of all their crews, with the savage provision that they were to be treated neither as subjects, nor prisoners, but as slaves. Prison ships, irons, and that last infamy which insult could add to captivity, the lash—were decreed to be the fate of all Americans who refused to submit to the edicts of the throne. Foreign Mercenaries to be Employed. The 'Olive Branch' being thus disdainfully and insultingly rejected, and three millions of people proclaimed outlaws, the largest possible levy was made upon home subjects, to be 266 FOREIGN MERCENARIES EMPLOYED. sent to slaughter their brethren in America; and no other terms were offered than the choice between slavery or death on the one side, or base life with hopeless degradation, on the other. But resolved, at all hazards, either to tyrannize over, or annihilate the Thirteen young nations springing into existence in the New World, the author of this infamous policy boldly threw off the mask of whatever there was of decency in appearances, or of humanity in the age, and resorted to an act which covered the name of George III. and his truculent ministers with lasting disgrace. The assassin work which the king found neither disposition nor men enough in the British Islands to perform, was to be done by the hands of foreign mercenary slaves of petty German princes, who through kinship of blood, or marriage, or the corrupting power of gold, were to furnish a certain number of men at so much per head, to come to America for the avowed purpose of killing men, women, and children enough, burning houses and desolating towns, and spilling blood enough, to establish a principle which was at war with the British Constitution, and for which, after America had triumphed, no British statesman was ever after found base enough to advocate. The trenchant pen of Thomas Carlyle has put this business in its proper light. He says: "What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the net-purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by certain Natural Enemies' of the French, there are successively selected, during the French war, say thirty able-bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the south of Spain; and fed there till wanted. And now to that same spot, in the south of Spain, are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like manner wending, till at length, after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposition, and thirty stand fronting thirty, each with a gun in his hand. Straightway the word 'Fire' is given, and they blow the souls out of one another; and in place of sixty brisk, useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcases, which it must bury, and anew shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel? Busy as the Devil is, not the smallest! They lived far enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a Universe, there was even, unconsciously, by Commerce, some mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their Governors had fallen-out; and, instead of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot. Alas! so is it in Deutschland, and hitherto in all other lands; still as of old, 'what devilry soever kings do, the Greeks must pay the piper!' In that fiction of the English Smollet, it is true, the final Cessation of War is perhaps |