selves to each other to keep a good firelock, ammunition, bullet-moulds, powder-horn, and bag for balls. The committee of Northampton county offered a premium for the manufacture of gunpowder. As Dunmore persisted in proroguing the Virginia assembly, Peyton Randolph, as the organ of the people against the representative of the crown, directed the choice of deputies to a colony convention in March.

The inhabitants of Maryland would hear of no opposition to the recommendations of congress. An armed organization sprung up in Delaware. Crown officers and royalists practised every art to separate New York from the general union. The president of its chartered college taught that "Christians are required to be subject to the higher powers; that an apostle enjoined submission to Nero;" that the friends of the American congress were as certainly guilty of "an unpardonable crime as that St. Paul and St. Peter were inspired men." There the Episcopal clergy fomented a distrust of the New England people as "rebellious republicans, intolerant toward the church of England and Quakers and Baptists, doubly intolerant toward the Germans and Dutch." There a corrupting influence grew out of contracts for the British service. The timid were alarmed by stories that "the undisciplined men of America could not withstand disciplined soldiers;" that "Canadians and unnumbered tribes of savages might be let loose upon them;" and that, in case of war, "the Americans must be treated as vanquished rebels." New York, too, was the seat of a royal government which dispensed commissions, offices, and grants of land, gathered round its little court a social circle to which loyalty gave the tone, and had for more than eight years craftily conducted the administration with the design to lull discontent. It permitted the assembly to employ Edmund Burke as its agent. In the name of the ministry, it lavished promises of favor and indulgence; extended the boundaries of the province at the north to the Connecticut river; and, contrary to the sense of right of Lord Dartmouth, supported the claims of New York to Vermont lands against the populous villages which had grown up under grants from the king's governor of New Hampshire. Both Tryon and Colden professed a sincere desire to take part with

the colony in obtaining a redress of all grievances and an improvement of its constitution; and Dartmouth was made to utter the hope "of a happy accommodation upon some general constitutional plan." Such a union with the parent state the New York committee declared to be the object of their earnest solicitude; and Jay "held nothing in greater abhorrence than the malignant charge of aspiring after independence." "If you find the complaints of your constituents to be well grounded," said Colden to the New York assembly in January, "supplicate the throne, and our most gracious sovereign will hear and relieve you with paternal tenderness."

In this manner one colony was to be won for a separate negotiation. The royalists were so persuaded of the success of their scheme that Gage, who had a little before written for at least twenty thousand men, sent word to the secretary, in January, that, "if a respectable force is seen in the field, the most obnoxious of the leaders seized, and a pardon proclaimed for all others, government will come off victorious, and with less opposition than was expected a few months ago."

On the twenty-sixth of January, Abraham Ten Broeck, of the New York assembly, moved to take into consideration the proceedings of the continental congress; but, though he was ably seconded by Nathaniel Woodhull, by Philip Schuyler, by George Clinton, and by the larger number of the members who were of Dutch descent, the vote was lost by a majority of one.

"That one vote was worth a million sterling," said Garnier to Rochford, with an air of patronage, on hearing the news; while he explained to Vergennes that the vote was to the ministry worth nothing at all, that New York was sure to act with the rest of the continent. The assembly, now in its seventh year, had long since ceased to represent the people.

In January the Quakers of Pennsylvania published an epistle, declaring that they would religiously observe the rule not to fight; and the meeting of the Friends of Pennsylvania and New Jersey gave their "testimony against every usurpation of power and authority in opposition to the laws of gov ernment." In the same month the popular convention of Pennsylvania was disinclined to arm the people; but the members pledged their constituents at every hazard to defend the rights

and liberties of America, and, if necessary, to resist force by force. They recommended domestic manufactures, and led the way to a law "prohibiting the importation of slaves." The legislature of Pennsylvania had, in December, unreservedly approved the proceedings of the continental congress, and to the next congress in May had elected seven delegates.

"Do not give up," wrote the town of Monmouth, in New Jersey, to the Bostonians; "and if you should want any further supply of bread, let us know." On the twenty-fourth of January the assembly of that colony, without a dissenting voice, adopted the measures of the last general congress, and elected delegates to the next. Three weeks later it transmitted to the king a separate petition; but it enumerated the American grievances without abatement.

In February the assembly of New York, against the most strenuous exertions of Schuyler and Clinton, refused to send delegates to the next general congress by a vote of seventeen to nine.

The people of New York were thrown back upon themselves under circumstances of difficulty that had no parallel in other colonies. They had no legally constituted body to form their rallying point; and, at a time when the continental congress refused to sanction any revolutionary institution of government even in Massachusetts, they were compelled to proceed to the methods of revolution. The colony was sure to emerge from all obstacles; its first organ was the press.

General Charles Lee denied the military capacity of England, as she could with difficulty enlist recruits enough to keep her regiments full; and he insisted that in a few months efficient infantry might be formed of Americans.

Two anonymous pamphlets, which dealt more thoroughly with the great questions at issue, are attributed to Alexander Hamilton, a gifted young man, who now shone like a star first seen above a haze, of whose rising no one had taken note. He was a West Indian, of whose existence the first written trace that has been preserved is of 1766, when his name occurs as a witness to a legal paper executed in the Danish island of Santa Cruz. Three years later, still a resident of the same island, he had learned to "contemn the

grovelling condition of a clerk," fretted at the narrow bounds of his island cage, and to a friend of his own years confessed his ambition. "I would willingly risk my life," wrote he, "though not my character, to exalt my station. I mean to prepare the way for futurity; we have seen such schemes successful when the projector is constant." That way he prepared by integrity of conduct, diligence, and study. After an education as a merchant, during which he once at least conducted a voyage, and once had the charge of his employer's business, he found himself enabled to repair to New York, of which he entered the college before the end of 1773. Trained from childhood to take care of himself, he possessed a manly self-reliance. His first sympathies in the contest had been on the British side against the Americans, but he had changed his opinions; and, in February 1775, when the necessity of the appeal to the people was become more and more urgent, the genial pilgrim from the South put forth all his ability, with a determined interest in the coming struggle, as if he had sprung from the soil whose rights he defended. Severe in youthful earnestness, he addressed the judgment, not the passions, aiming not at brilliancy of expression, but justness of thought. "I lament," wrote Hamilton, "the unnatural quarrel between the parent state and the colonies; and most ardently wish for a speedy reconciliation, a perpetual and mutually beneficial union. I am a warm advocate for limited monarchy, and an unfeigned well-wisher to the present royal family; but, on the other hand, I am inviolably attached to the essential rights of mankind, to civil liberty as the greatest of terrestrial blessings."

"You are quarrelling for threepence a pound on tea, an atom on the shoulders of a giant," said the tories; and he answered: "The parliament claims a right to tax us in all cases whatever; its late acts are in virtue of that claim; it is the principle against which we contend.”

"You should have had recourse to remonstrance and petition," said the time-servers. "In the infancy of the present dispute," rejoined Hamilton, "we addressed the throne; our address was treated with contempt and neglect. The first American congress in 1765 did the same, and met with similar

treatment. The exigency of the times requires vigorous remedies; we have no resource but in a restriction of our trade, or in a resistance by arms."

"But Great Britain," it was said, "will enforce her claims by fire and sword. The Americans are without fortresses, without discipline, without military stores, without money, and cannot keep an army in the field; nor can troops be disciplined without regular pay and government by an unquestioned legal authority. A large number of armed men might be got together near Boston, but in a week they would be obliged to disperse to avoid starving." "The courage of Americans," replied Hamilton, "has been proved. The troops Great Britain could send against us would be but few; our superiority in number would balance our inferiority in discipline. It would be hard, if not impracticable, to subjugate us by force. An armament sufficient to enslave America will put her to an insupportable expense. She would be laid open to foreign enemies. Rain like a deluge would pour in from every quarter."

"Great Britain," it was said, "will seek to bring us to a compliance by putting a stop to our whole trade." "We can live without trade," answered Hamilton; "food and clothing we have within ourselves. With due cultivation, the southern colonies, in a couple of years, would afford cotton enough to clothe the whole continent. Our climate produces wool, flax, and hemp. The silk-worm answers as well here as in any part of the world. If manufactures should once be established, they will pave the way still more to the future grandeur and glory of America, and will render it still securer against encroachments of tyranny."

"You will raise the resentment of the united inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland," objected his adversaries. "They are our friends," he retorted; "they know how dangerous to their liberties the loss of ours must be. The Irish will sympathize with us and commend our conduct."

The tories built confidently upon disunion. "A little time," replied Hamilton, " will awaken the colonies from their slumbers. I please myself with the flattering prospect that they will, ere long, unite in one indissoluble chain."

It was a common argument among the royalists of those