The War of Independence | Page 6

that had lasted five years. That war had been
waged in America as well as in Europe, and American troops had
played a brilliant part in it. There was now a brief lull, soon to be
followed by another and greater war between the two mighty rivals,
and it was in the course of this latter war that some of the questions
were raised which presently led to the American Revolution. Let us
take the occasion of this lull in the storm to look over the American
world and see what were the circumstances likely to lead to the
throwing off of the British government by the thirteen colonies, and to
their union under a federal government of their own making.
[Sidenote: The four New England colonies.]
In the middle of the eighteenth century there were four New England
colonies. Massachusetts extended her sway over Maine, and the Green
Mountain territory was an uninhabited wilderness, to which New York
and New Hampshire alike laid claim. The four commonwealths of New
Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had all been
in existence, under one form or another, for more than a century. The
men who were in the prime of life there in 1750 were the
great-grandsons and great-great-grandsons of the men who crossed the
ocean between 1620 and 1640 and settled New England. Scarcely two
men in a hundred were of other than English blood. About one in a
hundred could say that his family came from Scotland or the north of

Ireland; one in five hundred may have been the grandchild of a
Huguenot. Upon religious and political questions these people thought
very much alike. Extreme poverty was almost unknown, and there were
but few who could not read and write. As a rule every head of a family
owned the house in which he lived and the land which supported him.
There were no cities; and from Boston, which was a town with 16,000
inhabitants, down to the smallest settlement in the White Mountains,
the government was carried on by town-meetings at which, almost any
grown-up man could be present and speak and vote. Except upon the
sea-coast nearly all the people lived upon farms; but all along the coast
were many who lived by fishing and by building ships, and in the
towns dwelt many merchants grown rich by foreign trade. In those days
Massachusetts was the richest of the thirteen colonies, and had a larger
population than any other except Virginia. Connecticut was then more
populous than New York; and when the four New England
commonwealths acted together--as was likely to be the case in time of
danger--they formed the strongest military power on the American
continent.
[Sidenote: Virginia and Maryland]
Among what we now call southern states there were two that in 1750
were more than a hundred years old. These were Virginia and
Maryland. The people of these commonwealths, like those of New
England, had lived together in America long enough to become
distinctively Americans. Both New Englander and Virginian had had
time to forget their family relationships with the kindred left behind so
long ago in England; though there were many who did not forget it, and
in our time scholars have by research recovered many of the links that
had been lost from memory. The white people of Virginia were as
purely English as those of Connecticut or Massachusetts. But society in
Virginia was very different from society in New England. The wealth
of Virginia consisted chiefly of tobacco, which was raised by negro
slaves. People lived far apart from each other on great plantations,
usually situated near the navigable streams of which that country has so
many. Most of the great planters had easy access to private wharves,
where their crops could be loaded on ships and sent directly to England

in exchange for all sorts of goods. Accordingly it was but seldom that
towns grew up as centres of trade. Each plantation was a kind of little
world in itself. There were no town-meetings, as the smallest political
division was the division into counties; but there were county-meetings
quite vigorous with political life. Of the leading county families a great
many were descended from able and distinguished Cavaliers or
King's-men who had come over from England during the ascendency of
Oliver Cromwell. Skill in the management of public affairs was
hereditary in such families, and during our revolutionary period
Virginia produced more great leaders than any of the other colonies.
[Sidenote: New York and Delaware]
There were yet two other American commonwealths that in 1750 were
more than a hundred years old. These were New York and little
Delaware, which for some time was a kind of appendage, first to New
York, afterward to Pennsylvania. But there was one important respect
in