1736. May 4-25. about twelve hundred; and the whole party slowly sounded its way up the windings of the Tombigbee to the point where Cotton Gin Port now stands, and which was but about twenty-one miles south-east of the great village of the Chickasaws. There the artillery was deposited in a temporary fortification; and the forests and prairies between the head-sources of the Tombigbee and the Tallahatchie were disturbed by the march of the army towards the long house of their enemy. After the manner of Indian warfare, they encamped, on the evening of the twenty-fifth of May, at the distance of a May 25. league from the village. In the morning, before day, they advanced to surprise the Chickasaws. In vain. The brave warriors, whom they had come to destroy, were on the watch; their intrenchments were strong; English flags waved over their fort; English traders had assisted them in preparing defence. Twice, during the day, an attempt was made to storm their log citadel; and twice the French were repelled, with a loss of thirty killed, of whom four were officers. The next day saw skirmishes between parties of Choctaws and Chickasaws. On the twenty-ninth, the final retreat began; on the thirty-first of May, Bienville dismissed the Choctaws, having satisfied them with presents, and, throwing his cannon into the Tombigbee, his party ingloriously floated down the river. In the last days of June, he landed on the banks of the bayou St. John. But where was D'Artaguette, the brave commander in the Illinois, the pride of Canada? And where the gallant Vincennes, whose name is borne by the oldest settlement of Indiana? The young D'Artaguette had gained glory in the war against the Natchez, braving death under every form. Advanced to the command in the Illinois, he obeyed the summons of Bienville; and, with an army of about fifty French soldiers and more than a thousand red men, accompanied by Father Senat and by the Canadian De Vincennes, the careful hero stole cautiously and unobserved into the country of the Chickasaws, and, on the evening before May 9. the appointed day, encamped near the rendezvous 1736. among the sources of the Yalabusha. But the expected army from below did not arrive. For ten days he retained his impatient allies in the vicinity of their enemy; at May 20. last, as they menaced desertion, he consented to an attack. His measures were wisely arranged. One fort was carried, and the Chickasaws driven from the cabins which it protected; at the second, the intrepid youth was equally successful; on attacking the third fort, he received one wound, and then another, and in the moment of victory was disabled. The red men from Illinois, dismayed at the check, fled precipitately. Voisin, a lad of but sixteen years, conducted the retreat of the French, having the enemy at his heels for five-and-twenty leagues, marching forty-five leagues without food, while his men carried with them such of the wounded as could bear the fatigue. The unhappy D'Artaguette was left weltering in his blood, and by his side lay others of his bravest troops. The Jesuit Senat might have fled: he remained to receive the last sigh of the wounded, regardless of danger, mindful only of duty. Vincennes, too, the Canadian, refused to fly, and shared the captivity of his gallant leader. After the Indian custom, their wounds were stanched; they were received into the cabins of the Chickasaws, and feasted bountifully. At last, when Bienville had retreated, the captives were brought into a field; and, while one was spared to relate the deed, the adventurous D'Artaguette, the faithful Senat, true to his mission, Vincennes, whose name will be perpetuated as long as the Wabash shall flow by the dwellings of civilized man, these, with the rest of the captives, were bound to the stake, and neither valor nor piety could save them from death by slow torments and fire. Such is the early history of the state of Mississippi. 1737. Ill success did but increase the disposition to continue the war. To advance the colony, a royal edict of 1737 permitted a ten years' freedom of commerce between the West India Islands and Louisiana; while a new expedition against the Chickasaws, receiving aid not from Illinois only, but even from Montreal and 1739. Quebec, and from France, made its rendezvous in Arkansas, on the St. Francis River. In the last of June, the whole army, composed of twelve hundred whites and twice that number of red and black men, took up its quarters in Fort Assumption, on the bluff of Memphis. But the recruits from France and the Canadians languished in the climate. When in March, 1740, a small detachment proceeded towards the Chickasaw country, they were met by messengers, who supplicated for peace; and Bienville gladly accepted the calumet. The fort at Memphis was razed; the troops from Illinois and from Canada drew back; the fort on the St. Francis was dismantled; and Bienville returned, to conceal his shame under false pretences. Peace, it was said, was established between France and the Chickasaws; but the settlements between lower Louisiana and the Illinois were interrupted. From Kaskaskia to Baton Rouge was a wilderness, in which the jurisdiction of France was but a name. The French were kept out of the country of the Chickasaws by that nation itself; red men protected the English settlements on the west. The population of Louisiana, more than a half-century after the first attempt at colonization by La Salle, may have been five thousand whites and half that number of blacks. Louis XIV. had fostered it with pride and liberal expenditures; an opulent merchant, famed for his successful enterprise, assumed its direction; the company of the Mississippi, aided by boundless but transient credit, had made it the foundation of their hopes; and, again, Fleury and Louis XV. had sought to advance its fortunes. Priests and friars, dispersed through nations from Biloxi to the Dakotas, propitiated the favor of the savages. Yet all its patrons, though among them it counted kings and ministers of state, had not brought to it a tithe of the prosperity which, within the same period, grew out of the benevolence of William Penn to the peaceful settlers on the Delaware. CHAPTER XLI. TWENTY-SIX YEARS OF COLONIAL ADMINISTRATION UNDER THE HOUSE OF HANOVER. 1714. AT the accession of George I., the continental colonies counted three hundred and seventy-five thousand seven hundred and fifty white inhabitants, and fiftyeight thousand eight hundred and fifty black,— in all, four hundred and thirty-four thousand six hundred souls; and were increasing with unexampled rapidity. The value of their imports from England, on an average of the first three years of George I., was a little less than two millions of dollars; of their exports, a little less than seventeen hundred thousand dollars; their domestic commerce equalled that with England; their trade with the British and foreign West Indies, the Azores, and the continent of Europe, exceeded both. They had founded institutions like those at home; and the house of Hanover was to them the symbol and the guarantee of liberty. The menacing mandates of the last reign had but increased the ill-humor of New York. The first assembly elected under the new dynasty accepted a compromise. The government was provided with a revenue for a period of five years; in return, the governor, disregarding the prerogative and his instructions, assented to a general act of naturalization, às well as to imposts on negroes and on British goods; and came to an agreement with them on the salaries of the officers of the crown. The English lawyers of that day had no doubt of the power of parliament to tax America. The first ministry of George I. inquired into the expense of the cruisers which defended American commerce, being disposed to transfer the burden of their support to America. "The plantation duties," as they were called, fruits of the tax imposed in 1672 on the intercolonial trade, and which during the war had yielded an annual average of a thousand pounds, having been appropriated as a fund for borrowing, were ordered to be paid into the exchequer; while the income from the post-office was applied "towards the support of the dignity of the crown.' 1714 to 1718. The king could urge the governors to prevent "illegal trade with the French settlements; " but when it was proposed to check "the mischief" of the proprietary gov ernments, "their charters," said the attorney-general, Sir Edward Northey, in strict conformity to the doctrines of the Revolution of 1688, "their charters cannot be regulated but by an act of the supreme legislature." Such regulation was the settled policy of the board of trade; men high in office insisted that colonial charters were not irrevocable compacts, but affairs of state, subject to the will of parliament; and, early in the session of 1715, a bill for their change was proposed in the house of commons. The agent of Massachusetts remonstrated; but, in that colony, youthful republicanism was already eager to try the strength of its wing; and despising the guileless imbecility of Shute, its royal governor, it counteracted the commercial monopoly of England, and encroached steadily on the prerogative. In 1716, against the royal intention, a new emission of paper bills, to be loaned through the counties, depreciated the currency. The pine-trees in the forests of Maine were claimed to belong to the colony, under the purchase from Gorges, which was older than the new charter; and when in November, 1717, the decisive statutes of Queen Anne were cited to the representatives of Massachusetts, "acts of parliament," it was promptly answered in public debates, are of no force with us, as we have a charter." English lawyers reasoned differently; and the board of trade advised "a scire facias to be brought against the Massachusetts patent." In May, 1718, the same province imposed a duty on English manufactures, and, as its own citizens built six thousand tons of shipping 66 1718. |