XLVII. her intercourse with all her subjects was marked by CHAP mildness and incomparable grace; and she made almost incredible exertions as a monarch to be useful 1775. Aug. even to the meanest, to benefit the future as well as the present age. Tragedy, comedy, music wearied her; she had no taste but to build, or to regulate her court; no passion but to rule and to make a great name; and this led her to undertake too much herself without sufficient aid from her ministers. In the crowd of the ambitious, who were all eager for advancement and favor, she compared herself to a hare worried by many hounds; and among an unscrupulous nobility in a land which was not that of her birth, she was haunted by a feeling of insecurity, and revealed a secret unrest and discontent of soul. But those around her were not offended at the completeness with which she belonged to a century representing the supremacy of the senses; the spiritual life that diffused itself over her form was a refinement of delight in physical pleasures; the blandishments of her manner, the smiles on her face, the flowers on her breast, covered fiery passions that coursed riotously through her veins. Her first minister was Panin, without whom no council was held, no decision taken in foreign or domestic affairs. He alone could effectually promote her schemes of administrative greatness; though he was guided by experience rather than comprehensive views. With the faults of pride, inflexibility, and dilatoriness, he also had incorruptness; and he was acknowledged to be the fittest man for his post. At home his political principles led him to desire some limitation of the power of the sovereign by a CHAP. Council of nobles; towards foreign powers he was XLVII. free from rancor. It had been the policy of France 1775. to save Poland by stirring up Sweden and Turkey Aug. against Russia; yet Panin did not misjudge the relations of Russia to France. Nor was he blinded by love for England; he wanted no treaty with her except with stipulations for aid in the contingency of a war with the Ottoman Porte, and as that condition could not be obtained, he always declined her alliance. His weak side was vanity, and Frederic of Prussia was said to have chained him to his interests by frequent presents of small value, and autograph letters filled with delicate flatteries. But Panin was thoroughly a Russian statesman, and to win his favor Frederic submitted to promise subsidies against Turkey. The British minister relied on the good-will of Alexis Orloff, who had been a principal person in raising Catharine to the throne; but his influence was on the wane, and his brother, who remained for about ten years her favorite concubine, had been recently superseded and dismissed from the court. His successor was Potemkin, who, to the person of a Titan joined a resolute ambition, and a commanding will, that became terrible to the empress herself; so that when she dismissed him from her bed, she found herself more and more subject to his control in the administration. Never did a favorite rise so rapidly, but at this time he cultivated the greatest intimacy with Panin, whose opinion he pro fessed to follow. The indifference of the king of Prussia on the relation of England to her colonies, extended to the XLVII. Aug. court of Moscow, and the Russian ministers never CHAP. spoke of the strife but as likely to end in American independence. Yet this coolness was not perceived 1775. by the British minister. One day Panin inquired of him the news; remembering his instructions, Gunning seized the moment to answer, that the measures in progress would shortly end the rebellion in America; then, as if hurried by excess of zeal to utter an idle, unauthorized speculation of his own, he asked leave to acquaint his king, that "in case the circumstances of affairs should render any foreign forces necessary, he might reckon upon a body of her imperial majesty's infantry." On the morning of the eighth of August, Panin reported the answer of the empress. Nothing was said specifically about troops; still less of placing Russian battalions under the command of a British general, or despatching them across the Atlantic; but she gave the strongest assurance of her entire readi ness, from gratitude for favors received from England during her last war, upon this and upon every other occasion, to give the British king assistance, in whatever manner he thought proper. She charged Panin to repeat her very words, that "she found in herself an innate affection for the British nation which she should always cherish." The unobserving envoy drank in the words with delight; and interpreted a woman's lavish sentimentality as a promise of twenty thousand men to be forwarded from Asia and Eastern Europe to America. He flattered himself that he had conducted the negotiation with delicacy and success, and that the proposal, which was flying on the winds to other courts, was a secret to everybody but Panin and the empress. XLVII. CHAP. The reply to Bunker Hill from England reached Washington before the end of September; and the 1775. manifest determination of the ministers to push the Sept. war by sea and land with the utmost vigor, removed from his mind every doubt of the necessity of independence. Such, also, was the conclusion of Greene; and the army was impatient when any of the chaplains prayed for the king. The general congress had less sagacity. It should have assembled on the fifth of September; but for eight days more there were too few delegates for the transaction of business. The whole province of Georgia was now represented, and henceforward the confederacy never embraced less than thirteen members. The war developed the germ of a state that was to include both slopes of the Green Mountains, whose people fought with the army of the continent under officers of their own election; but the pretensions of New York to jurisdiction over their territory forbade as yet their recognition as a separate political body. From the new commonwealth which was rising on the west of Virginia, an agent soon presented himself. The adventurers in that region spread the fame of the healthfulness of its climate, the wonderful goodness of its ranges for all kinds of game, and the seemingly miraculous fertility of the soil where it was underlaid by limestone; and they already foretold the great city that was to rise at the falls of the Ohio. Their representative discussed in private the foundation on which the swiftly growing settlements of Kentucky should rest; and received advice from their northern well-wishers to reserve that "most agreeable country" exclusively for the free. The ter XLVII. ritorial claim of Virginia barred against him the doors CHAP. of congress, but the affection of the West flowed in a full current towards the Union. The "inexpressibly distressing" situation of Washington demanded instant and earnest attention; but the bias of the continental congress was to inactivity. The intercepted letters of John Adams, in which he had freely unbosomed his complaints of its tardiness, and had justly thrown blame on "the piddling genius," as he phrased it, of Dickinson, were approved by many; but Dickinson himself was unforgiving; wounded in his self-love and vexed by the ridicule thrown on his system, from this time he resisted independence with a morbid fixedness. He brushed past John Adams in the street without returning his salutation; and the New England statesman encountered also the hostility of the proprietary party and of social opinion in Philadelphia, and the distrust even of some of the delegates from the South. At times, an “unhappy jealousy of New England" broke forth; but when a member insinuated distrust of its people, as artful and designing men, altogether pursuing selfish purposes," Gadsden, of South Carolina, said in their defence: "I only wish we would imitate, instead of abusing, them. I thank God we have such a systematic body of men, as an asylum that honest men may resort to in the time of their last distress, if driven out of their own states; so far from being under any apprehensions, I bless God there is such a people in America." 66 Harmony was maintained only by acquiescence in the policy of Dickinson. From Pittsburg, Lewis Morris of New York and James Wilson of Penn 1775 Sept. |