by Boston." "If they come," said the veteran, "I am ready

to treat them as enemies."

The growing excitement attracted to New England Charles Lee, a restless officer, who, from having been aide-de-camp to the king of Poland, had the titular rank of a major-general. This claim, which gave him precedence over all who were likely to draw the sword for America, was, on occasion of his visit, universally acknowledged. He professed to see in the New England yeomanry the best materials for an army, and paid court to the patriots of Massachusetts.

Meantime, the delegates of Massachusetts to the general congress were escorted by great numbers as far as Watertown, where many had gathered to bid them a solemn farewell. On the Connecticut river they received a letter of advice from Hawley, the great patriot of Northampton, whose words were: "We must fight if we cannot otherwise rid ourselves of British taxation. The form of government enacted for us by the British parliament is evil against right, utterly intolerable to every man who has any idea or feeling of right or liberty. There is not heat enough yet for battle; constant and negative resistance will increase it. There is not military skill enough; that is improving, and must be encouraged. Fight we must finally, unless Britain retreats. Our salvation depends upon a persevering union. Every grievance of any one colony must be held as a grievance to the whole, and some plan be settled for a continuation of congresses, even though congresses will soon be declared by parliament to be high treason."

Hawley spoke the sentiments of western Massachusetts. When, on Tuesday, the sixteenth of August, the judges of the inferior court of Hampshire met at Great Barrington, it was known that the regulating act had received the royal approval. Before noon the town was filled with people of the county, and five hundred men from Connecticut, armed with clubs and staves. Suffering the royal courts of justice to sit seemed a recognition of the act of parliament, and the chief judge was forced to plight his honor that he and his associates would do no business. On the rumor that Gage meditated employing a part of his army to execute the new statute at Worcester, the inhabitants of that town prepared arms, musket-balls, and pow

der, and threatened to fall upon any body of soldiers who should attack them.

The mandamus councillors began to give way. Williams, of Hatfield, refused to incur certain ruin by accepting his commission; so did Worthington, of Springfield. Those who accepted dared not give advice.

Boston held a town-meeting. Gage reminded the selectmen of the act of parliament, restricting town-meetings without the governor's leave. "It is only an adjourned one,” said the selectmen. "By such means," said Gage, "you may keep your meeting alive these ten years." He brought the subject before the new council. "It is a point of law," said they, "and should be referred to the crown lawyers." He asked their concurrence in removing a sheriff. "The act of parliament," they replied, "confines the power of removal to the governor alone." Several members gave an account of the frenzy which was sweeping from Berkshire over the province, and might reach them all even while sitting in the presence of the governor. "If you value your life, I advise you not to return home at present," was the warning received by Ruggles from the town of Hardwick.

By nine o'clock on the morning of the twenty-sixth, more than two thousand men marched in companies to the common in Worcester, where they forced Timothy Paine to walk with his hat off as far as the centre of their hollow square and read a written resignation of his seat at the council board. A large detachment then moved to Rutland to deal with Murray. The next day at noon, Wilder of Templeton and Holden of Princeton brought up their companies; and by three in the afternoon about fifteen hundred men had assembled, most of them armed with bludgeons. But Murray had escaped on the previous evening, just before the sentries were set round his house and along the roads; they therefore sent him a letter requiring him to resign. "The consequences of your proceedings will be rebellion, confiscation, and death," said the younger Murray. "No consequences," they replied, "are so dreadful to a free people as that of being made slaves." "This," wrote he to his brother, "is not the language of the common people only: those that have heretofore sustained the fairest character are

VOL. IV.-4

you

the warmest in this matter; and, among the many friends have heretofore had, I can scarcely mention any to you now."

One evening in August the farmers of Union, in Connecticut, found Abijah Willard, of Lancaster, Massachusetts, within their precinct. They kept watch over him during the night, and the next morning would have taken him to the county jail; but, after a march of six miles, he begged forgiveness of all honest men for having taken the oath of office, and promised never to sit or act in council.

The people of Plymouth were grieved that George Watson, their respected townsman, was willing to act under his appointment. On the first Lord's day after his purpose was known, as soon as he took his seat in meeting, dressed in the scarlet cloak which was his wonted Sunday attire, his neighbors and friends put on their hats before the congregation and walked out of the house. The public indignity was more than he could bear. As they passed his pew he hid his face by bending his bald head over his cane, and determined to resign. Of thirty-six who received the king's summons as councillors, more than twenty declined to obey them, or revoked their acceptance. The rest fled in terror to the army at Boston, and even there could not hide their sense of shame.

The congressional delegates from Massachusetts, consecrated by their office as her suppliant ambassadors in the day of her distress, were welcomed everywhere on their journey with hospitable feasts and tears of sympathy. The men of Hartford, after giving pledges to abide by the resolutions of the congress, accompanied them to Middletown, from which place they were escorted by carriages and a cavalcade. The bells of New Haven were set ringing as they drew near, and those who had not gone out to meet them thronged the windows and doors to gaze. There they were encouraged by Roger Sherman, whom solid sense and the power of clear analysis were to constitute one of the master builders of our republic. "The parliament of Great Britain," said he, "can rightfully make laws for America in no case whatever." Simultaneously, James Wilson in Philadelphia, a Scot by birth, of rare ability, who, having been bred in the universities of his native land, emigrated to America in early manhood, and Jefferson in Vir

ginia, without a chance of concert, published the same opinion, the former deducing it from "the rights of British America," the latter from an able investigation of "the nature and extent of the legislative authority of the British parliament." The freeholders of Albemarle county, in Virginia, had, a month earlier, expressed the same conclusion; and, in the language of Jefferson, claimed to hold the privilege of exemp tion from the authority of every other legislature than their own as one of the common rights of mankind.

After resting one night at New Haven, the envoys visited the grave of the regicide Dixwell. As they reached the Hudson, they found that the British ministry had failed to allure, to intimidate, or to divide New York. A federative union of all the English colonies, under the sovereignty of the British king, had for a quarter of a century formed the aspiration of its ablest men. The great design had been repeatedly promoted by the legislature of the province. The people wished neither to surrender liberty nor to dissolve their connection with the crown of England. The possibility of framing an independent republic with one jurisdiction from the far North to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Atlantic indefinitely to the West, was a vision of which nothing in the history of man could promise the realization. Lord Kames, the friend of Franklin, though he was persuaded that the separation of the British colonies was inevitably approaching, affirmed that their political union was impossible. Prudent men long regarded the establishment of a confederacy of widely extended territories as a doubtful experiment, except under the moderating influence of a permanent executive. That the colonies, if disconnected from England, would fall into bloody dissensions among themselves, was the fear of Philip Livingston of New York. Union under the auspices of the British king, with the security of all constitutional rights, was still the purpose of Jay and his intimate associates. This policy had brought all classes together, and loyal men, who, like William Smith, were its advocates, passed for "consistent, unshaken friends to their country and her liberties;" but the "appeal" to arms was nearer at hand than the most sagacious believed.

Before Samuel Adams departed, he had concerted the

measures by which Suffolk county would be best able to bring the wrongs of the town and the province before the general congress; and he left the direction with Warren, who had reluctantly become convinced that all connection with the British parliament must be thrown off. Since town-meetings could not be called, on the sixteenth of August 1774, a county congress of the towns of Suffolk, which then embraced Norfolk, met at a tavern in the village of Stoughton. As the aged Samuel Dunbar, the rigid Calvinist minister of its first parish, breathed forth among them his prayer for liberty, the venerable man seemed inspired with "the most divine and prophetical enthusiasm." "We must stand undisguised upon one side or the other," said Thayer of Braintree. The members were unanimous; and, in contempt of Gage and the act of parliament, they directed special meetings in every town and precinct in the county, to elect delegates with full powers to appear at Dedham on the first Monday in September. From such a county congress Warren predicted "very important consequences."

On Friday, the twenty-sixth, the committee of Boston was joined at Faneuil Hall by delegates from the several towns of the counties of Worcester, Middlesex, and Essex; and on the next day, after calm consultation, they collectively denied the power of parliament to change the minutest tittle of their laws. As a consequence, they found that all appointments to the newly instituted council, and all authority exercised by the courts of justice, were unconstitutional; and therefore that the officers, should they attempt to act, would become "usurpers of power" and enemies to the province, even though they bore the commission of the king. The Boston port act they found to be a wicked violation of the rights to life, liberty, and the means of sustenance, which all men hold by the grace of heaven, irrespectively of the king's leave. The act of parliament removing from American courts the trials of officers who should take the lives of Americans they described as the extreme measure in the system of despotism.

For remedies, the convention proposed a provincial congress with large executive powers. In the mean time the unconstitutional courts were to be forbidden to proceed, and their