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Unable to arrest the progress of illiberal doctrines in the courts, the people of Boston, in May, 1761, with unbounded and very general enthusiasm, elected Otis one of their representatives to the assembly. "Out of this," said Ruggles to the royalist Chandler, of Worcester, "a faction will arise that will shake this province to its foundation." Bernard entreated the new legislature "to give no attention to declamations tending to promote a suspicion of the civil rights of the people being in danger. Such harangues might well suit in the reigns of Charles and James, but in the times of the Georges they were groundless and unjust." Yet he knew well the settled policy of the board of trade, and was ever stimulating them to destroy the charter and efface the boundaries of the province.

Virginia resisted the British commercial system from abhorrence of the slave-trade. Never before had England pursued the traffic in negroes with such eager avarice. Categorical instructions from the board of trade kept every American port open as markets for men. The legislature of Virginia had repeatedly shown a disposition to obstruct the commerce; a deeply seated public opinion began more

and more to avow the evils and the injustice of slav1761. ery itself; and, in 1761, it was proposed to suppress the importation of Africans by a prohibitory duty. Among those who took part in the long and violent debate. was Richard Henry Lee, the representative of Westmoreland. Descended from one of the oldest families in Virginia, he had been educated in England, and had returned to his native land familiar with the spirit of Grotius and Cudworth, of Locke and Montesquieu; his first recorded speech was against negro slavery, in behalf of human freedom. In the continued importation of slaves, he foreboded danger to the political and moral interests of the Old Dominion; an increase of the free Anglo-Saxons, he argued, would foster arts and varied agriculture, while a race doomed to abject bondage was of necessity an enemy to social happiness. He painted from ancient history the horrors of servile insurrections. He deprecated the barbarous atrocity of the trade with Africa, and its violation of the equal rights of

"Christi

men created like ourselves in the image of God. anity," thus he spoke in conclusion, "by introducing into Europe the truest principles of universal benevolence and brotherly love, happily abolished civil slavery. Let us who profess the same religion practise its precepts, and, by agreeing to this duty, pay a proper regard to our true interests and to the dictates of justice and humanity." The tax for which Lee raised his voice was carried through the assembly of Virginia by a majority of one; but from England a negative followed with certainty every colonial act tending to diminish the slave-trade.

South Carolina, appalled by the great increase of its black population, endeavored by its own laws to restrain importations of slaves, and in like manner came into collision with the same British policy. But the war with the Cherokees weaned its citizens still more from Great Britain.

1761.

"I am for war," said Saloué, the young warrior of Estatoe, at a great council of his nation. "The spirits of our murdered brothers still call on us to avenge them; he that will not take up this hatchet and follow me is no better than a woman." To reduce the native mountaineers of Carolina, General Amherst, early in 1761, sent a regiment and two companies of light infantry, under Lieutenant-colonel James Grant, the same who, in 1758, had been shamefully beaten near Pittsburg. The province added to the regular forces a regiment of its own, under the command of Henry Middleton, who counted among his officers Henry Laurens, William Moultrie, and Francis Marion.

At Fort Prince George, Attakulla-kulla met the expedition, entreating delay for a conference. But, on the seventh day of June, the army, which was formed of about thirteen hundred regulars, and as many more of the men of Carolina, pursued their march, followed by about seven hundred pack-horses and more than four hundred cattle. A party of Chickasaws and Catawbas attended as allies. On the eighth, they passed through the dreaded defiles of War-Woman's Creek, by a rocky and very narrow path between the overhanging mountain of granite and a deep precipice which had the rushing rivulet at its base.

Yet

1761. April.

they came upon no trace of the enemy, till, on the next day, they saw by the wayside, crayoned in vermilion on a blazed forest tree, a war-party of Cherokee braves, with a white man as a captive.

On the morning of the tenth, at about half-past eight, as the English army, having suffered from forced marches and rainy weather, were walking through thick woods on the bank of the Cowwee, or, as we call it, the Little Tennessee, about two miles from the battle-ground of Montgomery, at a place where the path runs along the foot of a mountain on the right, and near the river on the left, the Cherokees were discovered hovering over the right flank, while others fired from beyond the river. Quintine Kennedy, with a corps of ninety Indians and thirty Carolina woodsmen, began the attack. The unseen enemy were driven from their ambush near the river, but again rallied, mingling the noise of musketry with shouts and yells. After three hours' exposure to an irregular fire, the troops, following the river, emerged from the defile into an open savanna. Meantime, the Indian whoop was heard, as it passed from the front to the encumbered rear of the long-extended line, where the Cherokee fire seemed heaviest; but Middleton sent opportune relief, which secured the baggage. Happily for Grant, the Cherokees were in great need of ammunition. Of the white men, ten were killed and forty badly wounded; to save the dead from the scalping-knife, the river was their place of burial. Not till midnight did the army reach its place of encampment at Etchowee.

For thirty days, the whites sojourned west of the Alleghanies. They walked through every town in the middle settlement; and the outside towns, which lay on another branch of the Tennessee. The hamlets, fifteen in number, were pillaged, burned, and utterly destroyed, and four thousand of the red people were driven to wander among the mountains.

The English army, till its return in July to Fort Prince George, suffered from heat, thirst, watchings, and fatigue of all sorts; in bad weather, they had no shelter but branches of trees and bowers; for twenty days, they were on short

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allowance; their feet were torn by briers and mangled by the rocks: but they extended the English frontier seventy miles towards the west; and they compelled the Cherokees to covenant peace, at Charleston, with the royal governor and council. "I am come to you," said Attakullakulla, " as a messenger from the whole nation, to see what can be done for my people in their distress." Here he produced belts of wampum from the several towns, in token of his investment with full authority from all. "As to what has happened," he added, "I believe it has been ordered by our Great Father above. We are of different color from the white people; but the same Great Spirit made all. As we live in one land, let us love one another as one people." And the Cherokees pledged anew to Carolina the friendship which was to last as long as the light of morning should break above their villages, or fountains gush from their hillsides. Then they returned to dwell once more in their ancient homes. Around them, nature, with the tranquillity of exhaustless power, renewed her beauty: the forests blossomed as before; the thickets were alive with melody; the rivers bounded exultingly in their course; the glades sparkled with the strawberry and the wild flowers; but for the men of that region the inspiring confidence of independence in their mountain fastnesses was gone. They knew that they had come into the presence of a race more powerful than their own; and that the course of their destiny was irrevocably changed.

In these expeditions to the valley of the Tennessee, Gadsden and Middleton, Moultrie and Marion, were trained to arms. At Pittsburg, the Virginians, as all agreed, had saved Grant from utter ruin; the Carolinians believed his return from their western country was due to provincial courage. The Scottish colonel concealed the wound of his self-love by affecting towards the southern colonists that contemptuous superciliousness which had been promoted by Montgomery, and which had so infused itself into the British nation that it even colored the writings of Adam Smith. Resenting the arrogance with scorn, Middleton challenged his superior officer, and they met. The chal

lenge was generally censured, for Grant had come to defend their frontiers; but all the province took part in the excitement, and its long-cherished affection for England was mingled with disgust and anger.

The discontent of New York sprang from a cause which influenced the calmest minds, and was but strengthened and extended by deliberate reflection. It was not because the Episcopal clergy of that colony urged Secker, archbishop of Canterbury, to promote the abrogation of provincial charters; for the correspondence was concealed. It was not because they importunately demanded "bishops in America," as was their duty, if they sincerely believed that renovating truth is transmitted from generation to generation, not through the common mind of the ages, but through a separate order having perpetual succession; for on this point the British ministry was disinclined to act, while the American people were alarmed at Episcopacy only from its connection with politics. New York was aroused to opposition, because, as the first-fruits of the removal of Pitt from power, within six weeks of his resignation, the independency of the judiciary was struck at throughout all America, making revolution inevitable.

On the death of, the chief justice of New York, his successor, one Pratt, a Boston lawyer, was appointed at the king's pleasure, and not during good behavior, as had been done before the late king's death." The assembly held the new tenure of judicial power to be inconsistent with American liberty; the generous but dissolute Monckton, coming in glory from Quebec to enter on the government of New York, before seeking fresh dangers in the West Indies, censured it in the presence of the council; even Colden advised against it. "As the parliament," argued Pratt himself, after his selection for the vacant place on the bench, and when quite ready to use the power of a judge to promote the political interests of the crown, "as the parliament at the revolution thought it the necessary right of Englishmen to have the judges safe from being turned out by the crown, the people of New York claim the right of Englishmen in this respect;" and he himself was treated

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