XXXI. CHAPTER opposed to violent measures. The Germans, numerous in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas, ignorant of the En1774. glish language, and unaccustomed to political rights or discussions, did not fully enter into the feelings of the English colonists. The Scotch Highlanders, settled in New York, North Carolina, and Georgia, were very ignorant and very loyal. The arts of Governor Martin had secured the attachment of the North Carolina Regulators, from whom several loyal addresses had already been received. New England, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania were known to be deeply imbued with republican ideas; but the law of primogeniture which prevailed in New York and the South, co-operating with the institution of slavery, had raised up in those provinces a local aristocracy, whose opinions and feelings, as it was thought, could not, without the greatest difficulty, allow them permanently to co-operate with the democratic population of the other colonies. Should their union remain perfect, the united resources of the colonies were deemed wholly inadequate to any obstinate or lengthened resistance. With the usual bravado of military men, British officers boasted how, at the head of a few regiments, they could march from one end of America to the other. Even if the Americans dared to fight at all, which those officers professed very much to doubt, one or two battles, it was believed, would quell their proud spirit, and make them glad to accept of peace on almost any terms. Of all the British speakers and writers who exercised their pens and tongues on what had now become a question of universal interest, only one had the good sense and good feeling to recommend a peaceful separation. This was Dean Tucker, a pamphleteer of that day, author of the "Light of Nature," a work so much applauded by XXXL Paley. He proposed that Parliament, by a solemn act, CHAPTER declaring them to have forfeited all the privileges of British subjects by sea and land, should cut off the re- 1774. bellious provinces from the British empire; with provision, however, for granting pardon and restoration to either or all of them, on their humble petition to that effect. Had this pacific plan been adopted, Great Britain would still have retained in America a large party of influential adherents. The furious hatred which the war generated—a hatred which has not yet wholly died out-would not have been excited against her. The colonies, differing among themselves, might have adopted, in consequence, different lines of policy. At the worst, they could only have been lost, and that without the expenses of a war, and the mutual antipathy which the war produced. But this scheme, so different from vulgar expedients, was denounced on all sides as the height of folly. Even the philosophie Burke, whose philosophy, however, was always bounded by precedent, scouted it as "childish." A general election had recently taken place in Great Nov. 30. Britain, but the result boded no good to the colonies. Parties in the new House of Commons stood very much as before. Lord North, and his colleagues in the ministry, had an overwhelming majority. Ministers not only were sure of support from Parliament, and from the personal feelings of the king, strongly bent upon bringing the colonies to unconditional submission, they were also sustained by the general sentiment of the British people, by whom the stigma of rebellion was already affixed to the conduct of the colonists. Yet there was not wanting, both in and out of Parliament, a very respectable minority opposed to subduing the colonists by force, and anxious to promote an amica CHAPTER ble adjustment. XXXI. The merchants trading to America were very averse that any occasion should be given to 1774. their debtors for postponing or refusing the payment of their debts, or that actual war should put a final stop to a profitable trade already so seriously threatened by the American Association, compared with which all former non-importation agreements had been limited and inefficient. The English Dissenters were inclined by religious sympathies to favor the colonists. Such frag 1775. ments of the old Whig party as had not coalesced with the " king's friends," headed by the Marquis of Rockingham and the Earl of Chatham, supported by the colonial experience of Pownall and Johnstone, and sustained by the eloquence of Burke, Barre, Dunning, and the youthful Fox, few, but able, maintained with zeal those principles of liberty which had descended to them from the times of the English civil wars, and which the threatened civil war in America seemed now again to arouse to new life. After a long absence, Chatham reappeared in the Jan. 20. House of Lords, and proposed an address to the king advising the recall of the troops from Boston; but this motion, though supported by Lord Camden, after a warm debate was rejected by a very decisive majority. In the Commons, the papers relating to America were reJan. 26. ferred to a committee of the whole. The petitions for conciliation, which flowed in from all the great trading and manufacturing towns of the kingdom, ought properly to have gone to the same committee; but the ministers procured their reference to another committee for a subsequent day, which the opposition derided as a "committee of oblivion." Among the papers laid before Parliament was the petition from the Continental Congress to the king. Three of the colonial agents, Franklin, XXXI. Bollan, and Arthur Lee, to whose care this petition had CHAPTER been intrusted, asked to be heard upon it by counsel at the bar of the House. But their request was refused 1775. on the ground that the Congress was an illegal assembly, and the alleged grievances only pretended. Still persevering in his schemes for conciliation, Chatham brought forward in the Lords a bill for settling the Feb. 1. troubles in America. It required a full acknowledg ment on the part of the colonists of the supremacy and superintending power of Parliament, but provided that no tax should ever be levied except by consent of the colonial Assemblies. It contained, also, a provision for a Congress of the colonies to make the required acknowledgment, and to vote, at the same time, a free grant to the king of a certain perpetual revenue, to be placed at the disposal of Parliament. Chatham exerted himself on this occasion with renewed and remarkable vigor; but, in spite of all his efforts, after a warm and very pointed debate, his bill was refused the courtesy of lying on the table, and, contrary to the usual course, was rejected by a vote of two to one at the first reading. Agreeably to the scheme foreshadowed in his speech on the address, Lord North, in the House of Commons, brought in a bill for cutting off the trade of New En- Feb. 3. gland elsewhere than to Great Britain, Ireland, and the British West Indies-intended as an offset to the American Association-and suspending the prosecution from those colonies of the Newfoundland fishery, a principal branch at that time of their trade and industry. address to the throne, proposed by the ministers, and Feb. 7. carried after great debates, declared that a rebellion already existed in Massachusetts, countenanced and fo An mented by unlawful combinations in other colonies. Effectual measures were recommended for suppressing CHAPTER this rebellion; and the support of Parliament was pledged XXXI. to the king in the maintenance of the just authority of 1775. the crown and the nation. Yet the private sentiments of Lord North were not materially different from the opinions avowed and maintained by Chatham. In urging the use of force against the colonies, he yielded to the exigencies of his position at the head of the ministry rather than to his own sense of justice and sound policy. Not willing to relinquish the idea of conciliation, in the midst of the hot debate on the New England Restraining Bill, the minister astonished the nation, and his own party especially, by himself bringing forward a conciliatory proposition, in substance very little different from that which Chatham had offered, and which the House of Lords had so peremptorily rejected. This motion, less precise and specific than Chatham's, proposed, in vague and general terms, that when the Assembly of any province should offer to make a provision, suitable to its circumstances, for raising a sum of money, disposable by Parliament, for the common defense, and should engage to provide for the support of civil government and the administration of justice within its own limits, and such offers should be approved by the king and Parliament, it would be proper, so long as such provision should continue to be made, to forbear the levy of any duties or taxes within such colony by act of Parliament except such as might be required for the regulation of trade, the net produce to be carried to the account of such province. This motion was warmly opposed by the ultra supporters of the authority of the mother country, who complained of it as yielding up the whole matter in controversy. North argued, on the contrary, that it yielded nothing, and pledged the mother country to nothing. He did not expect that it would be generally ac |