they despatched two envoys to Gage to plead for peace, yet to assure him of their most firm resolution to defend their rights to the last extremity and to aid their brethren. The mission was fruitless; but in the mean time the populous colony made ready to treat with sword in hand.

In the American camp there was no unity. At Roxbury, John Thomas had commanded, and received encomiums for the good order which prevailed in his division; but Ward, the general who was at Cambridge, had the virtues of a magistrate rather than of a soldier. He was old, unused to a separate military command, too infirm to appear on horseback, and wanting in "quick decision and activity." The troops from other colonies, under leaders of their own, did not as yet form an integral part of one "grand American" army.

Of the Massachusetts volunteers, the number varied from day to day. Many of them returned home almost as soon as they came, for want of provisions or clothes, or from the pressure of affairs which they had left so suddenly. Of those who enlisted in the Massachusetts army, a very large number absented themselves on furlough. Ward feared that he should be left alone. Of artillery, there were no more than six threepounders and one six-pounder in Cambridge, besides sixteen pieces in Watertown, of different sizes, some of them good for nothing. There was no ammunition but for the six threepounders, and very little even for them. After scouring five principal counties, the whole amount of powder that could be found was less than sixty-eight barrels. The other colonies were equally unprovided. In the colony of New York there were not more than one hundred pounds of powder for sale.

Notwithstanding these obstacles, the scheming genius of New England was in the highest activity. While the expedition against Ticonderoga was sanctioned by a commission granted to Benedict Arnold, the Massachusetts congress, which was then sitting in Watertown, received from Jonathan Brewer, of Waltham, a proposition to march with a body of five hundred volunteers to Quebec, by way of the rivers Kennebec and Chaudière, in order to draw the governor of Canada, with his troops, into that quarter, and thus secure the northern and western frontiers from inroads. He was sure it "could be

executed with all the facility imaginable." The design did not pass out of mind.

Next to the want of military stores, the poverty of the Massachusetts treasury, which during the winter had received scarcely five thousand pounds of currency to meet all expenses, gave just cause for apprehension. For more than twenty years she had endeavored by legislative penalties to exclude the paper currency of other provinces, and had issued no notes of her own but certificates of debt, in advance of the revenue. These certificates were for sums of six pounds and upward, bearing interest; they had no forced circulation, and were kept at par by the high condition of her credit and her general prosperity. The co-operation of neighboring colonies compelled her congress, in May, to legalize the paper money of Connecticut and Rhode Island, and to issue her own treasury notes. Of her first emission of one hundred thousand pounds, there were no notes under four pounds, and they all preserved the accustomed form of certificates of public debt, of which the use was not made compulsory. But, in less than three weeks, an emission of twenty-six thousand pounds was authorized for the advance pay to the soldiers; and these "soldiers' notes," of which the smallest was for one dollar, were made a legal tender "in all payments without discount or abatement." Rhode Island put out twenty thousand pounds in bills, of which the largest was for forty shillings, the smallest for sixpence.

On the fifth of May the provincial congress resolved "that General Gage had disqualified himself for serving the colony in any capacity; that no obedience was in future due to him; that he ought to be guarded against as an unnatural and inveterate enemy." To take up the powers of civil government was an instant necessity; but the patriots of the colony checked their eagerness to return to their ancient custom of annually electing their chief magistrate, and resolved to await "explicit advice" from the continental congress.

New Hampshire agreed to raise two thousand men, of whom perhaps twelve hundred reached the camp. Folsom was their brigadier, but John Stark was the most trusty officer. Connecticut offered six thousand men; and about twenty-three

hundred remained at Cambridge, with Spenser as their chief, and Putnam as second brigadier.

Rhode Island voted fifteen hundred men; and probably about a thousand of them appeared round Boston, under Nathaniel Greene. He was one of eight sons, born near the Narragansett bay in Warwick. In that quiet seclusion, Gorton and his followers, untaught of universities, had reasoned on the highest questions of being. They had held that in America Christ was coming to his temple; that outward ceremonies, baptism and the eucharist, and also kings and lords, bishops and chaplains, were but carnal ordinances, sure to have an end; that humanity must construct its church by "the voice of the Son of God," the voice of reason and love. The father of Greene, descended from ancestry of this school, was at once an anchor-smith, a miller, a farmer, and, like Gorton, a preacher. The son excelled in diligence and in manly sports. None of his age could wrestle or skate or run better than he, or stand before him as a neat ploughman and a skilful mechanic.

Aided by intelligent men of his own village or of Newport, he read Euclid, and learned to apply geometry to surveying and navigation; he studied Watts's Logic, Locke on the Human Understanding, pored over English versions of the Lives of Plutarch, the Commentaries of Cæsar, and became familiar with some of the best English classics, especially Shakespeare and Milton.

When the stamp act was resisted, he and his brothers rallied at the drum-beat. Simple in his tastes, temperate as a Spartan, and a lover of order, he was indefatigable at study or at work. He married, and his home became the abode of peace and hospitality. His neighbors looked up to him as an extraordinary man, and from 1770 he was their representative in the colonial legislature. In 1773, he rode to Plainfield, in Connecticut, to witness a grand military parade; and the spectacle was for him a good commentary on Sharp's Military Guide. In 1774, in a coat and hat of the Quaker fashion, he was seen watching the exercise and manœuvres of the British troops at Boston, where he bought of Henry Knox, a bookseller, treatises on the art of war.

On the day of Lexington, Greene, who was then a captain, started to share in the conflict; but, being met by tidings of the retreat of the British, he went back to take his seat in the Rhode Island legislature. He served as a commissioner to concert military plans with Connecticut; and, when in May the Rhode Island brigade of fifteen hundred men was enlisted, he was elected its general. None murmured at the advancement, which was due to his ability.

On the twenty-third of April, the day after the dissolution of the provincial congress of New York, the news from Lexington burst upon the city. Though it was Sunday, the inhabitants speedily unloaded two sloops which lay at the wharfs, laden with flour and supplies for the British at Boston, of the value of eighty thousand pounds. The next day Dartmouth's despatches arrived with Lord North's conciliatory resolve, and with lavish promises of favor. But the royal government lay hopelessly prostrate. Isaac Sears concerted with John Lamb to stop all vessels going to Quebec, Newfoundland, Georgia, or Boston, where British authority was still supreme. The people shut up the custom-house, and the merchants whose vessels were cleared out dared not let them sail.

In the following days the military stores of the city of New York were secured, and volunteer companies paraded in the streets. Small cannon were hauled from the city to King's Bridge; churchmen as well as Presbyterians took up arms. As the old committee of fifty-one lagged behind the zeal of the multitude, on the first of May the people, at the usual places of election, chose for the city and county a new general committee of one hundred, who "resolved in the most explicit manner to stand or fall with the liberty of the continent." All parts of the colony were summoned to send delegates to a provincial convention, to which the city and county of New York deputed one-and-twenty as their representatives.

Eighty-three members of the new general committee met as soon as they were chosen; and, on the motion of John Morin Scott, seconded by Alexander Macdougall, an association was set on foot, engaging, by all the ties of religion, honor, and love of country, to submit to committees and to congress, to withhold supplies from British troops, and at the risk of lives and

fortunes to repel every attempt at enforcing taxation by parliament. Fourteen members of the New York assembly, most of them supporters of the ministry, entreated General Gage to cease hostilities till fresh orders could be received from the king, and especially to land no military force in New York. The royal council despatched two agents to represent to the ministry how severely the rash conduct of the army at Boston had injured the friends of the king, while the New York committee thus addressed the lord mayor and corporation of London, and through them the people of Great Britain :

"Born to the bright inheritance of English freedom, the inhabitants of this extensive continent can never submit to slavery. The disposal of their own property with perfect spontaneity is their indefeasible birthright. This they are determined to defend with their blood, and transfer to their posterity. The present machinations of arbitrary power, if unremittedly pursued, will, by a fatal necessity, terminate in a dissolution of the empire. This country will not be deceived by measures conciliatory in appearance. We cheerfully submit to a regulation of commerce by the legislature of the parent state, excluding in its nature every idea of taxation. When our unexampled grievances are redressed, our prince will find his American subjects testifying, by as ample aids as their circumstances will permit, the most unshaken fidelity to their sovereign. America is grown so irritable by oppression that the least shock in any part is, by the most powerful sympathetic affection, instantaneously felt through the whole continent. This city is as one man in the cause of liberty. We speak the real sentiments of the confederated colonies, from Nova Scotia to Georgia, when we declare that all the horrors of civil war will never compel America to submit to taxation by authority of parliament." The letter was signed by the chairman and eighty-eight others of the committee, of whom the first was John Jay.

On the sixth the delegates to the continental congress from Massachusetts and Connecticut drew near. Along roads which were crowded as if the whole city had come out to meet them, they made their entry amid loud acclamations, the ringing of bells and every demonstration of sympathy.

VOL. IV.-12