and, finding several officers of the squadron on shore, seized them as hostages for their imprisoned fellow-townsmen. Surrounding the town-house, where the General Court was in session, they demanded redress. After a vain attempt to appease the tumult, Shirley called out the militia; but they were very slow to obey. Doubtful of his own safety, he retired to the castle, whence he wrote to Knowles, representing the confusion he had caused, and urging the discharge of the persons he had impressed. Knowles offered a body of marines to sustain the governor's authority, and threatened to bombard the town unless his officers were released. The mob, on the other hand, began to question whether the governor's retirement to the castle did not amount to an abdication. Matters assumed a very serious aspect; and those influential persons who had countenanced the tumult, now thought it time to interfere for its suppression. The House of Representatives resolved to stand by the governor "with their lives and fortunes." The council ordered the release of the officers. The inhabitants of Boston, at a town meeting, shifted off the credit of the riot upon "negroes and persons of vile condition." The governor was escorted back by the militia; Knowles discharged the greater part of the impressed men, and presently departed with his squadron. No allusion was made, in the course of this affair, to the statute of Anne, prohibiting impressments in America. That act, indeed, according to the opinion of several English crown lawyers, had expired with Queen Anne's war. Shirley, in his letters to the Board of Trade, on the subject of this "rebellious insurrection," ascribes "the mobbish turn of a town of twenty thousand persons" to its constitution, which devolved the management of its affairs on "the populace, assembled in town meetings." Boston had already attained an amount of population at which it remained stationary for the next fifty years. (1747.)

The towns of Suffield, Somers, Enfield, and Woodstock, originally settled under Massachusetts grants, and assigned to that province in 1713, by the boundary convention with Connecticut, finding the rate of taxation in Massachussetts enhanced by the late military expenses, applied to Connecticut to take them into her jurisdiction. They claimed to be within the Connecticut charter. They alleged that the

former agreement had never been ratified by the crown, and that Connecticut had received no equivalent for her surrender of jurisdiction. This application was listened to with favor. Some show, indeed, was made of asking the consent of Massachusetts; but, when that consent was refused, the towns were received by Connecticut without it, and to that province they have ever since belonged. Massachusetts threatened an appeal to the king in council, but hesitated to prosecute it, lest she might lose, as in her former controversy with New Hampshire, not only the towns in dispute, but other territory also.

Some liberated prisoners from Martinique, a great resort for French cruisers, brought a report to Philadelphia that a fleet of privateers, knowing the unfortified state of that city, and trusting that the Quakers would not fight, intended to make a combined expedition up the Delaware. In consequence of this alarm, fortifications were erected and a military organization adopted in Pennsylvania. The Assembly still refused to do anything; but an associated volunteer militia, ten thousand strong, was organized and equipped. Money was also raised by lottery to erect batteries for the defense of the Delaware, toward which the proprietaries contributed twelve pieces of cannon. "Plain Truth," a little pamphlet written by Franklin, greatly contributed to these movements. By twenty years of diligent labor as a printer, newspaper publisher and editor, Franklin had acquired a handsome property; and, at the age of forty, he now began to take an active part in the political affairs of the province, being chosen a member of the Assembly, of which, for ten years previous, he had acted as clerk.

A portion of the Quakers were inclined to justify defensive war. Chew, chief justice of Delaware, had been disowned by the yearly meeting for avowing that opinion, but it still continued to gain ground. The now venerable Logan, who, indeed, had never been much of a Quaker, entertained the same views; but increased age and infirmities had withdrawn him, for some time, from active participation in affairs.

The war so inconsiderately begun, through the resolution of the British merchants to force a trade with Spanish America, after spreading, first to Europe and then to India, and adding $144,000,000, (£30,000,000,) to the British

national debt, was at last brought to a close by the peace of Aix la Chapelle. (Oct. 8, 1748.) Notwithstanding a former emphatic declaration of the British government, that peace never should be made unless the right to navigate the Spanish-American seas free from search were conceded, that claim, the original pretense for the war, was not even alluded to in the treaty. The St. Mary's was fixed as the boundary of Florida. Much to the mortification of the people of New England, Cape Breton and the conquered fortress of Louisburg were restored to the French, who obtained, in addition, the little islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, on the south coast of Newfoundland, as stations for their fishermen. A new commission was also agreed to for the settlement of French and English boundaries in America-a matter left unsettled since the treaty of Ryswick.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Commencement of the final struggle between the French and English for the country on the great Lakes and the Mississippi-Fourth Intercolonial War.

WE come now to the fourth intercolonial war, in which Washington, the first incarnation of Sam in moderate earthly mould, makes his appearance upon a stage, the drama of which is to fill the eye of the world—a drama, of which he is to be the central figure.

We must again own our obligation to our admirable American historian for the narrative of this war.

Dr. Thomas Walker, of the council of Virginia, penetrating through the mountainous south-eastern regions of that province, had reached and crossed the ridge which separates the valley of the Tennessee from the head waters of the more northerly tributaries of the Ohio. To that ridge he gave the name of Cumberland Mountains, after the Duke of Cumberland, of the English blood royal, just then very famous by his victory over the Pretender, at Culloden. The name of Cumberland was also given to one of the rivers flowing down the western slope of that ridge. A more northerly stream, called by Walker the Louisa, still preserves its aboriginal appellation of Kentucky, not, however, without conformity to the English idiom in a retraction of the accent from the last to the second syllable. The region entered by Walker, full of abrupt and barren mountains, attracted little attention. The country about the head of the Ohio seemed much more inviting.

An association of London merchants and Virginia land speculators, known as the Ohio Company, obtained in England,

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shortly after the peace, a grant of six hundred thousand acres of land on the east bank of that river, with exclusive privileges of Indian traffic-a grant esteemed an encroachment by the French, who claimed as theirs, by right of discovery and occupation, the whole region watered by the tributaries of the Mississippi. (1749.) A counter claim, indeed, was set up by the English, in the name of the Six Nations, recognized by the treaties of Utrecht and Aix la Chapelle as under British protection, whose empire, it was pretended, had formerly been carried by conquest over the whole eastern portion of the Mississippi Valley, and the basin, also, of the lower lakes. In maintenance of these pretensions, Colden's History of the Five Nations" had recently been published. The French, in reply, pointed to their posts, many of them of considerable antiquity, more than sixty in number, along the great lakes and the waters of the Mississippi. The missions had declined, but the Indian trade continued to flourish. At the principal posts were regular garrisons, relieved once in six years. Such of the disbanded soldiers as chose to remain, beside a grant of land, received a cow and a calf, a cock and five hens, an ax, a hoe, a gun, with powder and shot, grain for seed, and rations for three years. Wives were sent out to them from France, or they intermarried with the Indians. The boats from the Illinois country, descending annually to New Orleans, carried flour, Indian corn, bacon, both of hog and bear, beef and pork, buffalo robes, hides and tallow. The downward voyage was made in December; in February the boat returned with European goods for consumption and Indian traffic. The Indians north west of the Ohio, including the remains of the tribes whom the Iroquois had formerly driven from their homes on the Ottawa, the Hurons or Wyandots, the Miamies, the Illinois, all rejoiced in the alliance, or recognized the authority of the French. As respected the country on the upper lakes, the Mississipi, the Illinois, and the Wabash, the French title, according to European usage, was complete.

The country immediately south of Lake Erie, covered with dense forests, and with few Indian inhabitants, had hitherto, in a great measure, been neglected. But the Count de la Galissonniere, shortly after assuming office as governorgeneral, had sent De Celeron, with three hundred men, to