dom for many years, only to secure an increase of fortune to a few ship-masters of New England. I shall greatly regret, on account of the Americans, should Spain enter into the war without a convention with them."

The interview lasted from eight o'clock in the evening till an hour after midnight; but Jay and his friends would not themselves undertake to change the opinion of congress; and the result was a new interview on the twelfth of July between Gerard and members of congress in committee of the whole. Of the committee on foreign affairs, eight accepted the French policy. Jay, with other members, gained over votes from the "Anti-Gallican" side; and, after long debates and many divisions, the proposition to stipulate a right to the fisheries in the treaty of peace was indefinitely postponed by the votes of eight states against New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, Georgia alone being absent.

As to the future boundaries of the United States, Spain passionately desired to recover the Floridas so as to have the whole shore of the Gulf of Mexico. The United States had no traditional wish for their acquisition, and from the military point of view Washington preferred that Spain should possess them rather than Great Britain. Here, therefore, no serious difficulty arose; but Spain dreaded the extension of the United States to the Mississippi. The Quebec act had transferred to Canada the territory west and north-west of the Ohio. Spain indulged the hope that England would insist on its right to that region; but as to the Americans, their backwoodsmen were already settled in the country, and it would have been easier to extirpate the game in its forests than to drive the American settlers from their homes. Spain, with the support of France, wished that the country north-west of the Ohio river should be guaranteed to Great Britain; but such a proposition could never gain a hearing in congress. France, renouncing for herself all pretensions to Canada and Nova. Scotia, joined Spain in opposing every wish of the Americans to acquire them. In this congress acquiesced.

The French minister desired to persuade congress to be willing to end the war by a truce, after the precedents of the Swiss cantons and the United Netherlands. Burke of North

Carolina, seconded by Duane of New York, wished no more than that independence should be tacitly acknowledged; but congress required that, previous to any treaty of peace, the independence of the United States should, on the part of Great Britain, be "assured."

Further, Gerard wished America to bring about the accession of Spain to the alliance by trusting implicitly to the magnanimity of the Spanish king; otherwise, he said, "you will prevent his Catholic majesty from joining in our common cause, and from completing the intended triumvirate." Congress escaped from an immediate decision by resolving to send a plenipotentiary of its own to Spain.

The minister to be chosen to negotiate a peace was, by a unanimous vote, directed to require "Great Britain to treat with the United States as sovereign, free, and independent," and the independence was to be confirmed by the treaty. Nova Scotia was desired; but the negotiator might leave the northeastern boundary "to be adjusted by commissioners after the peace." The guarantee of an equal common right to the fisheries was declared to be of the utmost importance, but was not made an ultimatum, except in the instructions for the treaty of commerce with England. At the same time, the American minister at the court of France was directed to concert with that power a mutual guarantee of their rights in the fisheries as enjoyed before the war.

The plan for a treaty with the king of Spain lingered a month longer. On the seventeenth of September congress offered to guarantee to him the Floridas, if they should fall into his power, "provided always that the United States should enjoy the free navigation of the Mississippi into and from the sea." The great financial distress of the states was to be made known to him, in the hope of a subsidy or a guarantee of a loan to the amount of five millions of dollars.

On the twenty-sixth, congress proceeded to ballot for the minister to negotiate peace, John Adams being nominated by Laurens of South Carolina, while Smith of Virginia proposed Jay who was favored by the French minister. On two ballots no election was made. A compromise reconciled the rivalry; Jay, on the twenty-seventh, was elected envoy to

Spain. The formally civil letter in which Vergennes bade farewell to John Adams on his retiring from Paris was read in congress in proof that he would be most acceptable to the French ministry; and, directly contrary to its wishes, he was chosen to negotiate the treaty of peace as well as an eventual treaty of commerce with Great Britain.

In December 1778, Marie Antoinette, after many years of an unfruitful marriage, gave birth to a daughter. Congress, in June 1779, congratulating the king of France on the event, asked for "the portraits of himself and his royal consort, to be placed in their council chamber." This was not an act of adulation. The Americans took part in the happiness of Louis XVI. An honest impulse of gratitude gave his name to the city which overlooks the falls of the Ohio; and when, in 1781, a son was born to him, Pennsylvania commemorated the event in the name of one of its counties.

The compulsory inactivity of the British army at the north encouraged discontent and intrigues. There rose up in rivalry with Clinton a body styling themselves "the loyal associated refugees," who were impatient to obtain an independent organization under Tryon and William Franklin. They insisted that more alertness would crush the rebellion; they loved to recommend the employment of savages, the confiscation of the property of wealthy rebels, and even their execution or exile.

The Virginians, since the expulsion of Lord Dunmore, free from war within their own borders, were enriching themselves by the unmolested culture of tobacco, which was exported through the Chesapeake; or, when that highway was unsafe, by a short land carriage to Albemarle sound. On the ninth of May two thousand men under General Matthew, with five hundred marines, anchored in Hampton Roads. The next day, after occupying Portsmouth and Norfolk, they burned every house but one in Suffolk county, and seized or ruined all perishable property. Parties from a sloop-of-war and privateers entered the principal waters of the Chesapeake, carried off or wasted stores of tobacco heaped on their banks, and burned the dwellings of the planters. Before the end of the month the predatory expedition, having destroyed more

than a hundred vessels, arrived at New York with seventeen prizes and three thousand hogsheads of tobacco.

The legislature of Virginia, which was in session at Williamsburg during the invasion, retaliated by confiscating the property of British subjects within the commonwealth. An act of a previous session had directed debts due to British subjects to be paid into the loan-office of the state. To meet the public exigencies, a heavy poll-tax was laid on all servants or slaves, as well as a tax payable in cereals, hemp, inspected tobacco, or the like commodities; and the issue of one million pounds in paper money was authorized. Every one who would serve at home or in the continental army during the war was promised a bounty of seven hundred and fifty dollars, an annual supply of clothing, and one hundred acres of land at the end of the war; pensions were promised to disabled soldiers and to the widows of those who should find their death in the service; half-pay for life was voted to the officers. Each division of the militia was required to furnish for the service one able-bodied man out of every twenty-five, to be drafted by fair and impartial lot.

The code in which Jefferson, Wythe, and Pendleton adapted the laws of Virginia to reason, the welfare of the whole people, and the republican form of government, was laid before the legislature. The law of descents abolished the rights of primogeniture, and distributed real as well as personal property equally among brothers and sisters. The punishment of death was forbidden, except for treason and murder. A bill was brought in to organize schools in every county, at the expense of its inhabitants, in proportion to the general tax-rates; but in time of war, and in the scattered state of the inhabitants, it was not possible to introduce a thorough system of universal education.

The preamble to the bill for establishing religious freedom, written by Jefferson, declared "that belief depends not on will, but follows evidence; that God hath created the mind free; that temporal punishment or civil incapacitations only beget hypocrisy and meanness; that the impious endeavor of fallible legislators and rulers to impose their own opinions on others hath established and maintained false religions; that to suffer

the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion destroys all religious liberty; that truth is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has nothing to fear from the conflict, unless by human interposition disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is permitted freely to contradict them."

It was therefore proposed to be enacted by the general assembly: "No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry, nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burthened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his belief; but all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion; and the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge, or affect their civil capacities. And we do declare that the rights hereby asserted are of the natural rights of mankind."

These words of Jefferson on the freedom of conscience expressed the forming convictions of the people of the United States; the enactment was delayed that the great decree, which made the leap from an established church to the largest liberty of faith and public worship, might be adopted after calm de liberation and with popular approval. Virginia used its right of original and complete legislation to abolish the privileges of primogeniture, cut off entails, forbid the slave-trade, and establish the principle of freedom in religion as the inherent and inalienable possession of spiritual being.

The British expedition to the Chesapeake, after its return to New York, joined a detachment conducted by Clinton himself forty miles up the Hudson to gain possession of Stony Point and Verplanck's Point. The garrison withdrew from their unfinished work at Stony Point. The commander at Verplanck's Point, waiting to be closely invested by water, on the second of June made an inglorious surrender. The two posts commanded King's ferry; the British fortified and garrisoned them, and so left the Americans no line of communication between New York and New Jersey south of the highlands.

A pillaging expedition, sent to punish the patriotism of Connecticut, was intrusted to Tryon. The fleet and transports