less in debt than at its beginning. But his hopes of sure emoluments rested in England, and were connected with the success of the applications from New York.

1748. Dec.

The conspiracy against the colonies extended to New Jersey. In December, the council of that province found it "their indispensable duty to represent to his majesty the growing rebellion in their province." The conflict for lands in its eastern moiety, where Indian title-deeds, confirmed by long occupation, were pleaded against grants of an English king, led to confusion, which the rules of the English law could not remedy. The people of whole counties could not be driven from their homesteads or imprisoned in jails; Belcher, the temporizing governor, confessed that "he could not bring the delegates. into measures for suppressing the wicked spirit of rebellion." The proprietors, who had purchased the long dormant claim to a large part of the province, made common cause with men in office, invoked British interposition, and accused their opponents of treasonably denying the king's title to New Jersey. These appeals were to 'tally with and accredit the representation from New York."

From the first moment of his employment, Halifax stood forth the busy champion of the royal authority; and in December, 1748, his earliest official words of any import promised "a very serious consideration on" what he called "the just prerogatives of the crown, and those defects of the constitution," which had "spread themselves over many of the plantations, and were destructive of all order and government;" and he resolved on instantly effecting a thorough change, by the agency of parliament. While awaiting its meeting, the menaced encroachments of France

equally claimed his attention; and he determined to 1749. secure Nova Scotia and the Ohio valley.

The region beyond the Alleghanies had as yet no English settlement, except, perhaps, a few scattered cabins in Western Virginia. The Indians south of Lake Erie and in the Ohio valley were, in the recent war, friendly to the English, and were united to Pennsylvania by a treaty of

commerce. The traders, chiefly from Pennsylvania, who strolled from tribe to tribe, were without fixed places of abode, but drew many Indians over the lake to trade in skins and furs. The colony of New York, through the Six Nations, might command the Canadian passes to the Ohio valley; the grant to William Penn actually included a part of it; but Virginia bounded its rightful dominion on the north-west only by Lake Erie. To secure Ohio for the English world, Lawrence Washington of Virginia, Augustus Washington, and their associates, proposed a colony beyond the Alleghanies. "The country west of the great mountains is the centre of the British dominions," wrote Halifax and his colleagues, who were inflamed with the hope of recovering it by some sort of occupation; and the favor of Henry Pelham, with the renewed instance of the board of trade, obtained in March, 1749, the king's instructions to the governor of Virginia, to grant to John Hanbury and his associates in Maryland and Virginia five hundred thousand acres of land between the Monongahela and the Kanawha, or on the northern margin of the Ohio. The company were to pay no quit-rent for ten years, within seven years to colonize at least one hundred families, to select immediately two fifths of their territory, and at their own cost to build and garrison a fort. Thomas Lee, president of the council of Virginia, and Robert Dinwiddie, a native of Scotland, surveyor-general for the southern colonies, were shareholders.

1749.

Aware of these designs, France anticipated England. Immediately, in 1749, La Galissonière, whose patriotic mind revolved great designs of empire, and questioned futurity for the results of French power, population, and commerce in America, sent De Celoron de Bienville, with three hundred men, to the valley of the Ohio. On its southern bank, opposite the point of an island, and near the junction of a river, that officer buried, at the foot of a primeval red-oak, a plate of lead with the inscription that the country belonged to France; and he nailed the lilies of the Bourbons to a forest tree, in token of possession. "I am going down the river," said he to Indians at Logstown, "to scourge

home our children, the Miamis and the Wyandots;" and he forbade all trading with the English. "The lands are ours," replied the Indians; and they claimed freedom of commerce. The French emissary proceeded to the towns of the Miamis, expelled the English traders, and by letter requested Hamilton, the governor of Pennsylvania, to prevent all farther intrusion. But the Indians murmured, as he buried plates at the mouth of every remarkable creek. "We know," they said, "it is done to steal our country from us;" and they resolved to "go to the Onondaga council" for protection.

On the north-east, the well-informed La Galissonière took advantage of the gentle and unsuspecting character of the Acadians themselves, and of the doubt that existed respecting occupancy and ancient titles. In 1710, when Port Royal, now Annapolis, was vacated, the fort near the mouth of the St. John's remained to France. The English had no settlement on that river; and though they had, on appeal to their tribunals, exercised some sort of jurisdiction, it had not been clearly recognised by the few inhabitants, and had always been denied by the French government. It began to be insinuated that the ceded Acadia was but a part of the peninsula lying upon the sea between Cape Fourches and Cape Canso. The Abbé La Loutre, missionary and curate of Messagouche, now Fort Lawrence, which is within the peninsula, formed the plan, with the aid of La Galissonière and the court of France, to entice the Acadians from their ancient dwelling-places, and plant them on the frontier as a barrier against the English.

But, even before the peace, Shirley had represented that the inhabitants near the isthmus, being French and Catholic, should be removed into some other of his majesty's colonies, and that Protestant settlers should occupy their lands. From this atrocious proposal, Newcastle, who was cruel only from frivolity, did not withhold his approbation; but Bedford, his more humane successor, sought to secure the entire obedience of the French inhabitants by intermixing with them colonists of English descent.

The execution of this design, which the Duke of Cumberland, Pelham, and Henry Fox assisted in maturing, de

volved on Halifax. Invitations went through Europe to invite Protestants from the continent to emigrate to the British colonies. The good-will of New England was encouraged by care for its fisheries; and American whalemen, stimulated by the promise of enjoying an equal bounty with the British, learned to follow their game among the icebergs of the Greenland seas. But the main burden of securing Nova Scotia fell on the British treasury. While the general court of Massachusetts, through their agent in England, sought to prevent the French from possessing any harbor whatever in the Bay of Fundy, or west of it on the Atlantic, proposals were made, in March, 1749, to disbanded officers and soldiers and marines, to accept and occupy lands in Acadia; and, before the end of June, more than fourteen hundred persons, under the auspices of the British parlia ment, were conducted by Colonel Edward Cornwallis into Chebucto harbor. There, on a cold and sterile soil, covered to the water's edge with one continued forest of spruce and pine, whose thick underwood and gloomy shade hid rocks and the rudest wilds, with no clear spot to be seen or heard of, rose the first town of English origin east of the Penobscot. From the minister who imparted efficiency to the enterprise, it took the name of Halifax. Before winter three hundred houses were covered in. At Minas, now Lower Horton, a block-house was raised, and fortified by a trench and a palisade; a fort at Pesaquid, now Windsor, protected the communications with Halifax. These, with Annapolis on the Bay of Fundy, secured the peninsula.

The ancient inhabitants had, in 1730, taken an oath of fidelity to the English king, as sovereign of Acadia; and were promised indulgence in "the true exercise of their religion, and exemption from bearing arms against the French or Indians." They were known as the French Neutrals. Their hearts were still with France, and their religion made them a part of the diocese of Quebec. Of a sudden it was proclaimed to their deputies convened at Halifax, that English commissioners would repair to their villages, and tender to them, unconditionally, the oath of allegiance. They could not pledge themselves before

Heaven to join in war against the land of their origin and their love; and, in a letter signed by a thousand of their men, they pleaded rather for leave to sell their lands and effects, and abandon the peninsula for new homes, which France would provide. But Cornwallis would offer no option but between unconditional allegiance and the confiscation of all their property. "It is for me," said he, "to command and to be obeyed;" and he looked to the board of trade for further instructions.

With the Micmac Indians, who at the instigation of La Loutre, the missionary, united with other tribes to harass the infant settlements, the English governor dealt still more summarily. "The land on which you sleep is mine:" such was the message of the implacable tribe; "I sprung out of it, as the grass does; I was born on it from sire to son; it is mine for ever." So the council at Halifax voted all the poor red men that dwelt in the peninsula to be "so many banditti, ruffians, or rebels;" and, by its authority, Cornwallis, "to bring the rascals to reason," offered for every one of them, "taken or killed," ten guineas, to be paid on producing the savage or "his scalp." But the source of this disorder was the undefined state of possession between the European competitors for North America.

Meantime, La Galissonière, having surrendered his government to the more pacific La Jonquière, repaired to France, to be employed on the commission for adjusting the American boundaries. La Jonquière saw the imminent danger of a new war, and, like Bedford, would have shunned hostilities; but his instructions from the French ministry, although they did not require advances beyond the isthmus, compelled him to attempt confining the English within the peninsula of Acadia.

Thus, while France, with the unity of a despotic central power, was employing all its strength in Canada to make good its claims to an extended frontier, Halifax signalized his coming into office by planting Protestant emigrants in Nova Scotia, as a barrier against encroachments on the north-east; and by granting lands for a Virginia colony on both banks of the Ohio. With still greater impetuosity, he