had been present at the Albany Congress, and afterward at the military convention at Alexandria. Though he had received some favors from Shirley, he joined the party against him, and, having gone to England, had obtained there the government of Massachusetts. Pownall had hardly reached the province, the administration of which for four months past had been in the hands of the council, by the death of Lieutenant-governor Phipps, when an express arrived from Fort Edward with alarming news of a French invasion.

The British army drawn aside for the futile attack on Louisburg, Montcalm, with eight thousand men, including the garrisons of Crown Point and Ticonderoga, ascended Lake George, landed at its southern extremity, and laid siege to Fort William Henry. Colonel Monroe, the English officer in command, had a garrison of two thousand men. General Webb lay at Fort Edward, only fourteen miles distant, with four thousand troops. Montcalm pressed the attack with vigor. No movement was made from Fort Edward for Monroe's relief. His ammunition was exhausted; and, after a six days' siege, he found himself obliged to capitulate. The garrison were to march out with the honors of war, and were to be protected, with their baggage, as far as Fort Edward. Montcalm's Indian allies, dissatisfied with these terms, and greedy for plunder, fell upon the retreating and disarmed troops. Monroe, with the greater part of the men, fell back to the French camp to demand protection. About six hundred fled into the woods, and the first who reached Fort Edward reported the massacre of the others. Some few were killed or never heard of; the rest came in one after another, many having lost their way and suffered extreme hardships. Frye, the commander of the Massachusetts forces, after wandering about some days, reached Fort Edward with no clothes but his shirt.

The fall of Fort William Henry occasioned even greater alarm than the loss of Oswego the year before. Pownall appointed Sir William Pepperell lieutenant general of Massachusetts. Orders were issued for calling out the militia, and twenty thousand men were assembled in arms. Satisfied with having caused so much terror and expense, Montcalm, without attempting any thing further, retired again to Canada.

The arrival of Pownall made a considerable change in the politics of Massachusetts. By taking Otis, of Barnstable, speaker of the House, and other opponents of Shirley, into favor, according to Hutchinson, who was presently appointed lieutenant governor, he disgusted the old friends of government, and greatly weakened the government party. Otis was promised a seat on the bench of the Supreme Court; his son, a young lawyer of shining abilities, was appointed advocate of the Admiralty. Though Pownall's habits were rather freer than suited the New England standard, these concessions to the opposition, his frank manners, and liberal political views, served to make him very popular.

On the death of the aged Belcher, Pownall went to New Jersey to assume authority as lieutenant governor. But he found it impracticable to govern both provinces at the same time. The government of New Jersey, after remaining some months in the hands of the president and council, was transferred to Francis Bernard, a practitioner in the English ecclesiastical courts.

The Massachusetts General Court had provided barracks at the castle, for such British troops as might be sent to the province. But some officers on the recruiting service, finding the distance inconvenient, demanded to be quartered in the town. They insisted on the provisions of the Mutiny Act; but the magistrates to whom they applied denied that act to be in force in the colonies. Loudon warmly espoused the cause of his officers; he declared "that in time of war the rules and customs of war must govern," and threatened to send troops to Boston to enforce the demand, if not granted within forty-eight hours. To avoid this extremity, the General Court passed a law of their own, enacting some of the principal provisions of the Mutiny Act; and Loudon, through Pownall's persuasions, reluctantly consented to accept this partial concession. The General Court did not deny the power of Parliament to quarter troops in America. Their ground was, that the act, in its terms, did not extend to the colonies. A similar dispute occurred in South Carolina, where great difficulty was encountered in finding winter quarters for the Royal Americans.

The first royal governor of Georgia, and his secretary, William Little, having involved themselves in a violent

controversy with the Assembly, Reynolds had been superseded by Henry Ellis, a protégé of the Earl of Halifax, the head of an expedition, some nine years before, for the discovery of a northwest passage. The population of Georgia now amounted to six thousand. On the breaking out of the war, Reynolds had enlisted twenty rangers, but the quarrel with the Assembly prevented any provision for paying them. After Ellis's arrival, the Assembly voted money for erecting log forts at Savannah, Augusta, Ogeechee, Midway, and New Inverness. Ellis applied himself to the preservation of a good understanding with the neighboring Creeks and the Spanish governor of Florida. The rangers were taken into the king's pay, and Ellis obtained from Colonel Bouquet, commanding in South Carolina, a hundred provincial troops of Virginia, to be quartered in Savannah. A solemn council was presently held with the Creeks, and a new treaty of peace entered into with that powerful confederacy. A long dispute had been pending, in which the Creeks took a deep interest, growing out of the claims of Mary, the Indian interpreter, of whose services Oglethorpe had availed himself on his first arrival in Savannah. After the death of her first husband, she had married a second white man, and upon his death, a third-no less a person than Thomas Bosomworth, who had first been Oglethorpe's agent for Indian affairs, but afterward had gone to England, had obtained holy orders, and returned to Georgia as the successor of the Wesleys and Whitfield. The Creeks had made a conveyance to Mary, of their reservation of the islands on the coast, and the tract just above Savannah. She also claimed a large amount as arrears of her salary, as colonial interpreter. After a twelve years' controversy, which at times had threatened an Indian war, the matter was finally settled by a compromise, securing to Mary and her husband the title to the island of St. Catharine's and the payment of £2000 arrears, out of the sales of the other reserved lands. Another thing accomplished by Ellis was the division of the colony into eight parishes, and the establishment of the Church of England by law, with a salary of £25 to each parish minister. (1658.)

To the war in America, and the simultaneous contest between the English and French East India Companies on the other side of the globe, had been added a military struggle

the greatest the world had yet seen, carried on in the heart of Europe. France and Austria, forgetting their ancient rivalries, and supported by Russia and most of the Germanic States, had united against Prussia and Hanover. The Hanoverian army had submitted to the disgraceful capitulation of Closter-Seven; that principality had been occupied by the French; and it required all the energy and military genius of Frederic of Prussia, to save him from a similar fate.

In America, after three campaigns, and extraordinary efforts on the part of the English, the French still held possession of almost all the territory in dispute. They had been expelled, indeed, from the Bay of Fundy; but Louisburg, commanding the entrance of the St. Lawrence, Crown Point and Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain, Frontenac and Niagara on Lake Ontario, Presque Isle on Lake Erie, and the chain of posts thence to the head of the Ohio, were still in their hands. They had expelled the English from their ancient post of Oswego, had driven them from Lake George, and had compelled the Six Nations to a treaty of neutrality. A devastating Indian war was raging along the whole northwestern frontier of the British colonies. A line from the mouth of the Kennebec, across the Merrimac and Connecticut to Fort Edward on the Hudson, and thence across the Mohawk, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna, to Fort Frederic on the Potomac, marked the exterior limit of the settlements; but Indian scalping parties penetrated into the very center of Massachusetts, approached within a short distance of Philadelphia, and kept Maryland and Virginia in constant alarm.

CHAPTER XXX.

Hildreth's account of the Progress and Conclusion of the Fourth Intercolonial War-Accession of George III-The English masters of the continent, north of the Gulf of Mexico, and east of the Mississippi.

WILLIAM PITT, afterward Earl of Chatham, took adroit advantage of the popular discontent at the ill success of the war, to force himself to a chief seat in the British cabineta station which he owed more to his energy and eloquence than to court favor, or to the influence of family or party connections, hitherto, in England, the chief avenues to power. Leaving to Newcastle, who still acted as nominal head of the ministry, the details of the domestic administration, Pitt, as secretary of state, with the cipher, Holderness, as his colleague in that department, assumed to himself the control of foreign and colonial affairs, and the entire management of the war. (1757.)

Determined on a vigorous campaign in America, he addressed a circular to the colonies, in which he called for twenty thousand men, and as many more as could be furnished. The crown would provide arms, ammunition, tents, and provisions; the colonies were to raise, clothe, and pay the levies; but for all these expenses, Pitt promised a parliamentary reimbursement-a promise which acted like magic. Massachusetts voted seven thousand men, beside six hundred maintained for frontier defense. To fill up this quota, soldiers were drafted from the militia and obliged to serve. The advances of Massachusetts during the year, were not less than a million of dollars. Individual Boston merchants paid taxes to the amount of $2,000. The tax on real estate amounted to two-thirds the income. The insolvencies