governor of the colony, in office when the charter was abrogated, Simon Bradstreet, glorious with the dignity of fourscore years and seven, one of the early emigrants, a magistrate in 1630, whose experience connected the oldest generation with the new, drew near the town-house, and was received by a great shout from the freemen. The old magistrates were reinstated, as a council of safety; the town rose in arms, "with the most unanimous resolution that ever inspired a people;" and a declaration read from the balcony defended the insurrection as a duty to God and the country. "We commit our enterprise," it was added, "to Him who hears the cry of the oppressed, and advise all our neighbors, for whom we have thus ventured ourselves, to joyn with us in prayers and all just actions for the defence of the land."

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On Charlestown side, a thousand soldiers crowded together; and there would have been more of them if needed. The governor, vainly attempting to escape to the frigate, was, with his creatures, compelled to seek protection by submission; through the streets where he had first 1689. displayed his scarlet coat and arbitrary commission, Apr. 19. he and his fellows were marched to the town-house, and thence to prison.

On the next day, the country people came swarming across the Charlestown and Chelsea ferries, headed by Shepherd, a schoolmaster of Lynn. All the cry was against Andros and Randolph. The castle was taken; the frigate was mastered; the fortifications were occupied.

How should a new government be instituted? Townmeetings, before news had arrived of the proclamation of William and Mary, were held throughout the colony. Of fifty-four towns, forty certainly, probably more, voted to

reassume the old charter. Representatives were May 22. chosen; and once more Massachusetts assembled in general court.

It is but a short ride from Boston to Plymouth. Apr. 22. Already on the twenty-second of April, Nathaniel Clark, the agent of Andros, was in jail; Hinckley resumed the government, and the children of the pilgrims

renewed the constitution which had been unanimously signed in the "Mayflower." But not one of the fathers of the old colony remained alive. John Alden, the last survivor of the signers, famed for his frugal habits, and an arm before which forests had bowed, had been gathered in death.

1689.

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May 1.

The royalists had pretended that "the Quaker grandees of Rhode Island had imbibed nothing of Quakerisin but its indifference to forms, and did not even desire a restoration of the charter. On May-day, their usual election day, the inhabitants and freemen poured into Newport; and the "democracie" published to the world their gratitude" to the good providence of God, which had wonderfully supported their predecessors and themselves through more than ordinary difficulties and hardships.” "We take it to be our duty," thus they continue, "to lay hold of our former gracious privileges, in our charter contained." And, by a unanimous vote, the officers, whom Andros had displaced, were confirmed. But Walter Clarke wavered. For nine months there was no acknowledged chief magistrate. The assembly, accepting Clarke's disclaimer, elected Almy. Again excuse was made. Did no one dare to assume responsibility? All eyes turned to one of the old Antinomian exiles, the more than octogenarian, Henry Bull; and the fearless Quaker, true to the light within, employed the last glimmerings of life to restore the democratic charter of Rhode Island. Once more its free government is organized: its seal is renewed; the symbol, an anchor; the motto, HOPE.

1690.

Feb. 26.

Massachusetts rose in arms, and perfected its revolution without concert; "the amazing news did soon fly like lightning;" and the people of Connecticut spurned the government, which Andros had appointed, and which they had always feared it was a sin to obey. The charter was resumed; an assembly was convened; and, in spite May 9. of the FINIS of Andros, new chapters were begun in the records of freedom. Suffolk county, on Long Island, rejoined Connecticut.

New York shared the impulse, but with less unanimity. "The Dutch plot" was matured by Jacob Leisler, a man of

energy, but passionate and ill-educated, and not possessed of that happy natural sagacity which elicits a rule of action from its own instincts. But the common people among the Dutch, led by Leisler, who was himself a native of the republic of Frankfort-on-the-Main, and by his son-in-law Milborne, insisted on proclaiming the stadholder king of England.

1689.

In New Jersey there was no insurrection. The inhabitants were unwilling to invoke the interference of the proprietaries. There is no reason to doubt that, in the several towns, officers were chosen, as before, by the inhabitants themselves, to regulate all local affairs; while the provincial government, as established by James II., fell with Andros. We have already seen that Maryland had perfected a revolution, in which Protestant intolerance, as well as popular liberty, had acted its part. The passions of the Mohawks, also, were kindled by the certain prospect of an ally; they chanted their loudest war-song, and prepared to descend on Montreal.

Thus did a popular insurrection, beginning at Boston, extend to the Chesapeake and to the wilderness. This New England revolution "made a great noise in the world." Its object was Protestant liberty; and William and Mary, the Protestant sovereigns, were proclaimed with rejoicings such as America had never before known in its intercourse with England.

Could it be that America was deceived in her confidence; that she had but substituted the absolute sovereignty of parliament, which to her would prove the sovereignty of a commercial as well as a landed aristocracy, for the despotism of the Stuarts? Boston was the centre of the revolution which now spread to the Chesapeake; in less than a century, it will commence a revolution for humanity, and rouse a spirit of power to emancipate the world.

CHAPTER XXVII.

THE RESULT THUS FAR.

THUS have we traced, almost exclusively from contemporary documents and records, the colonization of the twelve oldest states of our Union. At the period of the great European Revolution of 1688, they contained not very many beyond two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom MASSACHUSETTS, with Plymouth and Maine, may have had forty-four thousand; NEW HAMPSHIRE and RHODE ISLAND, with Providence, each six thousand; CONNECTICUT, from seventeen to twenty thousand; that is, all New England, seventy-five thousand souls; NEW YORK, not less than twenty thousand; NEW JERSEY, half as many; PENNSYL VANIA and DELAWARE, perhaps twelve thousand; MARYLAND, twenty-five thousand; VIRGINIA, fifty thousand, or more; and the two CAROLINAS, which then included the soil of Georgia, probably not less than eight thousand souls.

The emigration of the fathers of these twelve commonwealths, with the planting of the principles on which they rested, though, like the introduction of Christianity into Rome, but little regarded by contemporary writers, was the most momentous event of the seventeenth century. The elements of our country, such as she exists to-day, were already there.

Of the institutions of the Old World, monarchy had no motive to emigrate, and was present only by its shadow; in the proprietary governments, by the shadow of a shadow. The feudal aristocracy had accomplished its mission in Europe; it could not gain new life among the equal conditions of the wilderness; in at least four of the twelve colonies, it did not originally exist at all, and, in the rest, had scarcely a monument except in the forms of holding

property. Priestcraft did not emigrate; by the steadfast attraction of interest, it was retained in the Old World; to the forests of America, religion came as a companion; the American mind never bowed to an idolatry of forms; and there was not a prelate in the whole English part of the continent. The municipal corporations of the European commercial world, the close intrenchments of burghers against the landed aristocracy, could not be transferred to our shores, where no baronial castles demanded the concerted opposition of guilds. Nothing came from Europe but a free people. The people, separating itself from all other elements of previous civilization; the people, selfconfiding and industrious; the people, wise by all traditions that favored popular happiness, the people alone broke away from European influence, and in the New World laid the foundations of our republic;

Plebeian, though ingenuous the stock

From which her graces and her honors sprung. The people alone were present in power. Like Moses, as they said of themselves, they had escaped from Egyptian bondage to the wilderness, that God might there give them the pattern of the tabernacle. Like the favored evangelist, the exiles, in their western Patmos, listened to the angel that dictated the new gospel of freedom. Overwhelmed in Europe, popular liberty, like the fabled fountain of the sacred Arethusa, gushed forth profusely in remoter fields.

Of the nations of the European world, the chief emigration was from that Germanic race most famed for the love of personal independence. The immense majority of American families were not of "the high folk of Normandie," but were of "the low men," who were Saxons. This is true of New England; it is true of the south. The Virginians were Anglo-Saxons in the woods again, with the inherited culture and intelligence of the seventeenth century. "The major part of the house of burgesses now consisted of Virginians that never saw a town." The Anglo-Saxon mind, in its serenest nationality, neither distorted by fanaticism, nor subdued by superstition, nor wounded by persecution, nor excited by new ideas, but