colonies. The command in chief was given to William Pepperill, a native of Maine, a wealthy merchant, who had inherited and augmented a large fortune acquired by his father in the fisheries; a popular, enterprising, sagacious man, noted for his universal good fortune, but unacquainted with military affairs, except as a militia officer. Whitfield, then preaching on his third tour throughout the colonies, gave his influence in favor of the expedition by suggesting, as a motto for the flag of the New Hampshire regiment, "Nil desperandum Christo duce"-"Nothing is to be despaired of with Christ for a leader." The enterprise, under such auspices, assumed something of the character of an anti-Catholic crusade.

of the chaplains, a disciple of Whitfield, carried a hatchet, specially provided to hew down the images in the French churches.

Eleven days after embarking at Boston, the Massachusetts armament assembled at Casco, to wait there the arrival of the Connecticut and Rhode Island quotas, and the melting of the ice by which Cape Breton was environed. The New Hampshire troops were already there; those from Connecticut came a few days after. Notice having been sent to England and the West Indies of the intended expedition, Captain Warren presently arrived with four ships of war, and, cruising before Louisburg, captured several vessels bound thither with supplies. Already, before his arrival, the New England cruisers had prevented the entry of a French thirty-gun ship. As soon as the ice permitted, the troops landed and commenced the siege, but not with much skill, for they had no engineers. The artillery was commanded by Gridley, who served thirty years after in the same capacity in the first Massachusetts revolutionary army. Cannon and provisions had to be drawn on sledges, by human strength, over morasses and rocky hills. Five unsuccessful attacks were made, one after another, upon an island battery which protected the harbor. In that cold, foggy climate, the troops, very imperfectly provided with tents, suffered severely from sickness, and more than a third were unfit for duty. But the French garrison was feeble and mutinous, and when the commander found that his supplies had been captured, he relieved the embarrassment of the besiegers by offering to capitulate. The capitulation included six hundred and fifty regular

soldiers, and near thirteen hundred effective inhabitants of the town, all of whom were to be shipped to France. The Island of St. John's presently submitted on the same terms. The loss during the siege was less than a hundred and fifty, but among those reluctantly detained to garrison the conquered fortress ten times as many perished afterward by sickness. In the expedition of Vernon and this against Louisburg, perished a large number of the remaining Indians of New England, persuaded to enlist as soldiers in the colonial regiments.

Some dispute arose as to the relative merits of the land and the naval forces, which had been joined during the siege by additional ships from England. Pepperell, however, was made a baronet, and both he and Shirley were commissioned as colonels in the British army. Warren was promoted to the rank of rear admiral. The capture of this strong fortress, effected in the face of many strong obstacles, shed, indeed, a momentary luster over one of the most unsuccessful wars in which Britain was ever engaged. It attracted, also, special attention to the growing strength and enterprise of the people of New England, represented by Warren, in his communications to the ministry, as having "the highest notions of the rights and liberties of Englishmen; and, indeed, as almost Levelers."

The French, on their side, were not idle. The garrison of Crown Point sent out a detachment, which took the Massachusetts fort at Hoosick, now Williamstown, and presently surprised and ravaged the settlement recently established at Saratoga. Even the counties of Ulster and Orange, on the lower Hudson, struck with panic, expected the speedy arrival of Canadian and Indian invaders.

The easy conquest of Louisburg revived the often disappointed hope of the conquest of Canada. Shirley submitted to Newcastle a plan for a colonial army to undertake this enterprise. But the Duke of Bedford, then at the head of the British marine, took alarm at the idea of "the independence it might create in those provinces, when they shall see within themselves so great an army, possessed of so great a country by right of conquest." The old plan was therefore preferred, of sending a fleet and army from England to capture Quebec, to be joined at Louisburg by the New England levies, while

the forces of other colonies operated in the rear, against Montreal.

Orders were accordingly sent to the colonies to raise troops, which the king would pay. Hardly were these orders across the Atlantic, when the ministers changed their mind; but, before the countermand arrived, the colonial levies were already on foot. In spite of the mortality at Louisburg, Massachusetts raised three thousand five hundred men, Connecticut raised a thousand, New Hampshire five hundred, Rhode Island three hundred. The province of New York voted sixteen hundred men, New Jersey five hundred, Maryland three hundred, Virginia one hundred. Money was voted by the Pennsylvania Assembly for enlisting four hundred men. The troops from the southern colonies, and those also from Connecticut, assembled at Albany. The command, declined by Governor Gouch, of Virginia, was assumed by Clinton, of New York. Not only was Clinton involved in a violent controversy with the Assembly, but a majority of the Council, headed by Delancey, the Chief Justice, continued to sit at New York during the Governor's absence at Albany, and to dispute with him the administration of the province. His military command was not less embarrassing. The corporation of Albany refused to provide quarters for the soldiers; the bills drawn by Clinton on the British treasury failed to purchase provisions; impressment was resorted to, but it was not without difficulty that the troops were subsisted.

The office of agent for the Five Nations, hitherto held by Major Shuyler's son, had been taken from him by Clinton and given to William Johnston, who led a party of Mohawks, destined to act in front of the main army. Of Scotch-Irish descent, Johnston had established himself some ten or twelve years previously on the Mohawk river, thirty miles west of Albany, at the head of a new frontier settlement, undertaken on behalf of his uncle, Admiral Warren, who had married in New York, and had thus been led to engage in colonial land speculations. A man of coarse but vigorous mind, and great bodily strength, Johnston carefully cultivated the good will of the Mohawks, with whom he carried on a lucrative traffic. He had an Indian wife, or mistress, sister of the afterward celebrated Brant; he acknowledged as his own, several

half-breed children; and already had attained, by conformity to their customs and by natural aptitude, the same influence over the Mohawks possessed in the previous generation by Major Schuyler.

As the British fleet did not make its appearance, fifteen hundred of the Massachusetts troops were marched to Albany to join Clinton. But attention was soon drawn to matters nearer home. Instead of the expected English squadron, a French fleet of forty ships of war, with three thousand veteran troops on board, had sailed for the American coast, exciting a greater alarm throughout New England than had been felt since the threatened invasion of 1697. This alarm, the non-appearance of the British fleet, and the various difficulties encountered on the march, put a stop to the advance on Montreal. A body of troops from Canada appeared at the head of the Bay of Fundy, and, being joined by the French inhabitants there, threatened an attack on Annapolis. Boston was thought to be the great object of the enemy. To defend it, some ten thousand militia were collected, and such addditions were made to the fort, on Castle Island, as to render it the strongest British fortress in America. The French fleet, shattered by storms and decimated by a pestilential fever, effected nothing beyond alarm. The admiral died, the vice-admiral committed suicide. The command then devolved on La Jonquiere, appointed Governor-General of New France as successor to Beauharnois, who had held that office for the last twenty years. A second storm dispersed the ships, which returned singly to France. After the capture of Jonquiere in a second attempt to reach Canada, the office of Governor-General devolved on La Galissionniere.

Parliament subsequently reimbursed to the colonies the expenses of their futile preparations against Canada, amounting to £235,000, or upward of a million of dollars.

Indian parties from Canada severely harassed the frontier of New England. Even the presence of a British squadron on the coast was not without embarrassments. Commodore Knowles, while lying in Boston harbor, finding himself short of men, sent a press-gang one morning, into the town, which seized and carried off several of the inhabitants.

as this violence became known, an infuriated mob assembled,

!

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