ern and western frontier, Britain sought to create under its own auspices a distinct empire, suited to restrain her original colonies from aspiring to independence. For this end, it annexed by act of parliament to the province which was called Quebec all the territory north-west of the Ohio, as far as the Mississippi river and thence to the head of Lake Superior; and consolidated all authority over this boundless region in the hands of the executive power of Great Britain. The Catholics were not displeased that the promise of a representative assembly was not kept. In 1763, they had all been disfranchised in a land where there were few Protestants, except attendants on the army and government officials. A representative assembly, to which none but Protestants could be chosen, would have subjected almost all the inhabitants to a resident oligarchy, hateful by their race and religion, their supremacy as conquerors, and their selfishness. The Quebec act authorized the crown to confer posts of honor and of business upon Catholics; and they chose rather to depend on the clemency of the king than to have an exclusively Protestant parlia ment, like that of Ireland. This limited political toleration left no room for the sentiment of patriotism. The French Canadians of that day could not persuade themselves that they had a country. They would have desired an assembly to which they should be eligible; but, since that was not to be obtained, they accepted their partial enfranchisement by the king, as a boon to a conquered people.

The owners of estates were gratified by the restoration of the French system of law. The English emigrants might complain of the want of jury trials in civil processes; but the French Canadians were grateful for relief from statutes which they did not comprehend, and from the chicanery of unfamiliar courts. The nobility of New France, who had ever been accustomed to arms, were still further conciliated by the proposal to enroll Canadian battalions, in which they could hold commissions on equal terms with English officers.

The capitulation of New France had guaranteed to the clergy freedom of public worship; by the Quebec act they were confirmed in the possession of their ancient churches and their revenues; so that the Roman Catholic worship was as

effectually established in Canada as the Presbyterian church in Scotland. When Carleton returned to his government, bearing this great measure of conciliation of which he was known to have been the adviser, he was welcomed by the Catholic bishop and priests of Quebec with professions of loyalty; and the memory of Thurlow and Wedderburn, who carried the act through parliament, is gratefully embalmed in Canadian history. Yet the clergy were conscious that the concession of these privileges was but an act of worldly policy, mainly due to the disturbed state of the Protestant colonies. For the cause of Great Britain, Catholic Canada could not uplift the banner of the King of heaven or seek the perils of martyrdom.

Such was the frame of mind of the French Canadians when the American congress sent among them its appeal. The time was come for applying the new principle of the power of the people to the old divisions in Christendom between the Catholic and the Protestant world. The Catholic church asserts the unity, the universality, and the unchangeableness of truth; and this principle rather demands than opposes universal emancipation and brotherhood. Yet Protestantism, in the sphere of politics, had hitherto been the representative of that increase of popular liberty which had grown out of free inquiry, while the Catholic church, under the early influence of Roman law and the temporal sovereignty of the Roman pontiff, had inclined to monarchical power. These relations were now to be modified.

The thirteen colonies were all Protestant; even in Maryland the Catholics formed scarcely an eighth, perhaps not more than a twelfth part of the population; their presence in other provinces, except Pennsylvania, was hardly perceptible. The members of congress had not wholly purged themselves of Protestant bigotry. In their address to the people of Great Britain, it was even said that the Roman Catholic religion had "dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of the world." But the desire of including Canada in the confederacy compelled the Protestants of America to extend the principle of religious equality and freedom to Catholics. In the masterly address to the inhabitants of the province of Quebec, drawn by Dickinson, all old religious jealousies were condemned as low-minded infirmities;

VOL. IV.-6

and the Swiss cantons were cited as examples of a union composed of Catholic and Protestant states.

After a clear analysis of the Quebec act, and the contrast of its provisions with English liberties, the shade of Montesquieu was evoked as saying to the Canadians: "The happiness of a people inevitably depends on their liberty, and their spirit to assert it. The value and extent of the advantages tendered to you are immense. This work is not of man; you have been conquered into liberty, if you act as you ought. Seize the opportunity presented to you by Providence itself. You are a small people, compared to those who with open arms invite you into a fellowship. The injuries of Boston have roused and associated every colony from Nova Scotia to Georgia. Your province is the only link wanting to complete the bright and strong chain of union. Nature has joined your country to theirs; do you join your political interests; for their own sakes, they never will desert or betray you.”

Whether the unanimous invitation of congress to the Canadians to "accede to their confederation" should be accepted or repelled, the old feud between members of the Roman Catholic church and the free governments which had sprung from Protestantism was coming to an end.

The attempt to extend the jurisdiction of Quebec to the Ohio river was resisted by the older colonies, especially by Virginia; and the interest of the crown officers in the adjacent provinces was at variance with the policy of parliament.

Lord Dunmore had reluctantly left New York, where, during his short career, he had acquired fifty thousand acres of land, and, as chancellor, was preparing to decide in his own court, in his own favor, a large and unfounded claim which he had preferred against the lieutenant-governor. Upon entering on the government of Virginia, his passion for land and fees outweighing the proclamation of the king and reiterated and most positive instructions from the secretary of state, he supported the claims of the colony to the West, and was a partner in two immense purchases of land from the Indians in southern Illinois. In 1773, his agents, the Bullets, made surveys at the falls of the Ohio; and parts of Louisville and of the towns opposite Cincinnati are now held under his warrant.

Pittsburg formed the rallying point for western emigration and Indian trade. It was a part of the county of Westmoreland, in Pennsylvania. Suddenly, and without proper notice to the council of that province, Dunmore extended his jurisdiction over the well-peopled region. He found a willing instrument in one John Connolly, a native of Pennsylvania, a physician, land-jobber, and subservient political intriguer, who had travelled much in the Ohio valley both by water and land. Commissioned by Dunmore as captain-commandant of Pittsburg and its dependencies, that is to say, of all the western country, Connolly opened the year 1774 with a proclamation of his authority, and directed a muster of the militia. The western people, especially the emigrants from Maryland and Virginia, spurning the meek tenets of the Quakers, inclined to the usurpation. The measures of the governor and council of Pennsylvania in support of their right, Dunmore passionately resented as a personal insult, and would neither listen to irrefragable arguments, nor to candid offers of settlement by joint commissioners, nor to the personal application of two of the council of Pennsylvania.

Virginia avoided strife with her great neighbor, Pennsylvania; but she applauded Dunmore when he set at naught the Quebec Act, and kept possession of the government and right to grant lands on the Scioto, the Wabash, and the Illinois. South of the Ohio river, Franklin's inchoate province of Vandalia stretched from the Alleghanies to Kentucky river; the treaty at Fort Stanwix bounded Virginia by the Tennessee; the treaty at Lochaber carried its limit only to the mouth of the Great Kanawha; but the king's instructions confined settlements to the east of the mountains. There was no one, therefore, having authority to give a title to any land west of the Alleghanies, or power to restrain the restlessness of the American emigrants. With the love of wandering that formed a part of their nature, the hardy backwoodsman, clad in a hunting-shirt and deerskin leggins, armed with a rifle, a powderhorn, and a pouch for shot and bullets, a hatchet and a hunter's knife, descended the mountains in quest of more distant lands, which he forever imagined to be richer and lovelier than those which he knew. Wherever he fixed his halt, the hatchet

hewed logs for his cabin, and blazed trees of the forest kept the record of his title-deeds; nor did he conceive that a British government had any right to forbid the occupation of lands which were either uninhabited or only broken by a few scattered clans of savages.

The adventurer in search of a new home on the banks of the Mississippi risked his life at every step; so that a system of independent defence and private war became the custom of the backwoods. The settler had every motive to preserve peace, yet he could not be turned from his purpose by fear, and trusted for security to his perpetual readiness for self-defence. Not a twelvemonth passed away without a massacre of pioneers. Near the end of 1773, Daniel Boone would have taken his wife and children to Kentucky. At Powell's valley he was joined by five families and forty men. In October, as they approached Cumberland gap, the young men, who had charge of the pack-horses and cattle in the rear, were suddenly attacked by Indians; one only escaped; the remaining six, among whom was Boone's eldest son, were killed on the spot, so that the survivors of the party were forced to turn back to the settlements on Clinch river. When the Cherokees were summoned by Virginia to give up the offenders, they evaded the accusation by shifting it from one tribe to another; but one of the emigrant party who had escaped avenged his companions by killing an Indian at a horse-race on the frontier. This was the first Indian blood shed by a white man from the time of the treaty of Bouquet.

In the beginning of February 1774, the Indians killed six white men and two negroes, and near the end of the same month they seized a trading canoe on the Ohio, killed the men on board, and carried their goods to the Shawnee towns. In March, Michael Cresap, after a skirmish and the loss of one man on each side, took from a party of Indians five loaded canoes. It became known that messages were passing between the tribes of the Ohio, the western Indians, and the Cherokees; and Connolly, from Pittsburg, on the twenty-first of April, wrote to the inhabitants of Wheeling to be on the alert.

Incensed by the succession of murders, the backwoodsmen began to form war-parties along the frontier from the Chero