LECTURE III.

THE CONGRESS OF THE REVOLUTION.

W

E have followed the Revolution through all

its phases, from the sowing of the seed to the gathering in of the abundant harvest. We have seen that it began with the Navigation Act of 1660; that it worked slowly and surely, silently too for the most part, though not without occasional indications of its progress, till the Congress of 1754; that it received a new impulse from the old French war; and thenceforward, with the mind of New England prepared for the reception of its doctrines by the contest between monopoly and free labor, more persistently waged there than in the sister Colonies, it broke out in legal resistance to the writs of assistance, in forcible resistance to the Stamp Act, and, spreading through the whole country, received a definite direction from the Congress of 1765; an effective organization in the Committees of Correspondence; deliberate expression in the tea-question; and a natural termination in the Declaration of Independence.

We have traced the war rapidly from the camp

before Boston to the French alliance, and the general acceptance of the supremacy of Washington, its period of real doubt and real uncertainty, though not the period of greatest suffering, nor, except for a few weeks, of deepest depression; and thence to the immortal campaign of 1781 and the peace of 1783.

In going over a subject of such extent, I have necessarily taken many things for granted; have often been compelled to trust to your previous reading for my justification, and may sometimes have appeared obscure where I studied to be concise. I foresee the same difficulty, though not to the same degree, in the remainder of our course.

Our subject this evening is the Congress of the Revolution; and by the Revolution, as you have already seen, I mean not only the War of Independence, but the change of public sentiment, the alteration in the relations between England and the Colonies, which produced that war. In both of these, Congress bore an important part.

The first Congress, as well as the first essay of union, belong to early colonial history. The first union, as I have already said, was that of New England in 1643. The first Congress was that of New York, in 1690. The suggestion came from Massachusetts, and the place first indicated for the meeting was Rhode Island. But this was subsequently changed to New York; and there, upon a call of the General Court of Massachusetts by

circular letters, delegates from Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New York met to prepare a plan of concerted action for the invasion of Canada. And it is worthy of remark that the Massachusetts government, which made the call, was the government which sprang up between the overthow of Andros and the arrival of the new charter, and in which the popular element was more freely mingled; and the New York government which accepted it was the government of Leisler, which sprang directly from an uprising of the people. Thus the earliest utterance of the people's voice was a call for union.

Far more important, however, was the Albany Congress of 1754. Seven Colonies, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and the four Colonies of New England, stronger by the growth, wiser by the experience of another half-century, met in Congress, ostensibly to renew the treaty with the Six Nations, really, to take counsel together about a plan of union and confederacy. In feeling, Virginia was with them also; but the quarrel between her Governor and House of Burgesses rendered it impossible for her to send a legal delegation. The delegates from Massachusetts came with authority to enter at once upon the true subject, and pledge her to the union; for already the Board of Trade had inclined its ears to the suggestions of the royal Governors; and salaries, pensions, and sinecures, for which nothing but taxation could have supplied

the means, floated in dazzling visions before the eyes of placemen and courtiers.

No one doubted the importance of union, — the necessity of concerted action. War was at the door; war on the sea-board; war all along their northern and their western frontier. They had men and they had money; but without union neither their men nor their money could be made subservient to the common welfare.

On the 19th of June the delegates met, twentyfive in all, local celebrities of their day and generation, earnest and thoughtful men. But wisest of them all, and with a wisdom not of his day and generation alone, but of all ages, that son of a Boston soap-boiler, who was born in Milk Street, and whose serene face looks down upon us, lifelike, in Greenough's bronze, as we go through School Street. It was impossible that what concerned the .welfare of the Colonies so nearly should escape the keen eye of Benjamin Franklin. He had thought of it, indeed, long and deeply and wisely, as was his wont; drawing, perhaps, some ideas from Penn's plan of 1697, and Coxe's Corolana, first published in 1722, and republished in 1741. But whatever entered his plastic mind came out again with that mind's impress upon it; and one of the characteristics of that mind was its power of comprehending present wants, and of meeting them, not by palliatives, but by remedies. A judicious employment of the resources of the Colonies for

the protection of the Colonies, was the want; union the remedy. This all saw, all felt. But the conditions under which that remedy could best be applied were imperfectly seen and understood, both in England and in America.

Franklin, who cheerfully set his name to the Declaration of Independence in 1776, had no thought of asking for independence in 1754. That it must some day come, that such Colonies would sooner or later grow beyond the control of a small and distant island, he saw plainly; saw it as the historian Robertson saw it, and wished to put the evil day far off;-as the father of political economy saw it, and felt that both mother and daughter would gain by it. But he felt that the hour was not yet come, and that the truest-hearted American might still be both loyal to England and true to the best interests of America.

Therefore the Union that he asked for was a Union in honorable subjection to the crown, leaving the royal prerogative untouched, while it put the rights of the Colonies beyond the reach of further aggression,-a Union which, leaving to England an indefinite enjoyment of her supremacy, should accustom the Colonies to concerted action and collective growth, and thus slowly prepare the way for the inevitable day of separation.

But the Provincial Assemblies, to whom, after its acceptance by the Congress, it was referred for approval, condemned it as having "too much of