twenty-four pounders. "Thank God," reasoned John Adams, "the glory is not immediately due to the commander-in-chief, or idolatry and adulation would have been so excessive as to endanger our liberties."

The Hessians, by their own account, lost in the assault four hundred and two in killed and wounded, of whom twenty-six were officers. Two colonels gave up their lives. Donop, whose thigh was shattered, lingered for three days; to Mauduit Duplessis, who watched over his death-bed, he said: “It is finishing a noble career early; I die the victim of my ambition and of the avarice of my sovereign." This was the moment chosen by Howe to complain of Lord George Germain; to ask the king's leave to resign his command; and to report that there was no prospect of terminating the war without another campaign, nor then, unless large reinforcements should be sent from Europe.

On Burgoyne's surrender, Gates should instantly have detached reinforcements to Washington; but even the corps of Morgan was not returned. The commander-in-chief, therefore, near the end of October, despatched Alexander Hamilton, with authority to demand them. Putnam for a while disregarded the orders borne by Hamilton. Gates detained a very large part of his army in idleness at Albany, under the pretext of an expedition against Ticonderoga, which he did not mean to attack and which the British of themselves abandoned; he neglected to announce his victory to the commander-in-chief. Instead of chiding the insubordination, congress appointed him to regain the forts and passes on the Hudson river. Now Washington had himself recovered these forts and passes by pressing Howe so closely as to compel him to order their evacuation; yet congress forbade Washington to detach from the northern army more than twenty-five hundred men, including the corps of Morgan, without first consulting General Gates and the governor of New York. It was even moved that he should not detach any troops except after consultation with Gates and Clinton; and Samuel Adams, John Adams and Gerry of Massachusetts, with Marchant of Rhode Island, voted for that restriction. Time was wasted by this interference. Besides, while the northern army had been borne on

ward to victory by the rising of the people, Washington encountered in Pennsylvania internal feuds, and a religious sect which forbade to its members the use of arms.

By the tenth of November the British had completed their batteries on the reedy morass of Province Island, five hundred yards from the American fort on Mud Island, and began an incessant fire from four batteries of heavy artillery. Smith gave the opinion that the garrison could not repel a storming party; but Major Fleury, the French engineer, reported the place to be still defensible. On the eleventh, Smith, having received a slight hurt, passed immediately to Red-bank; the next in rank desired to be recalled; and early on the thirteenth the brave garrison of but two hundred and eighty-six fresh men and twenty artillerists was confided to Major Simeon Thayer of Rhode Island, who had distinguished himself in the expedition against Quebec, and who now volunteered to take the desperate command. Directed by Thayer and Fleury, the garrison held out during an incessant bombardment and cannonade. On the fifteenth, the wind proving fair, the Vigilant carrying sixteen twenty-four pounders, and the hulk of a large Indiaman with three twenty-four pounders, aided by the tide, were warped through an inner channel which the obstructions in the river had deepened, and anchored so near the American fort that they could send into it hand-grenades, and marksmen from the mast of the Vigilant could pick off men from its platform. Five large British ships-of-war, which drew near the chevaux-de-frise, kept off the American flotilla, and sometimes fired on the unprotected side of the fort. The land batteries, now five in number, played from thirty pieces at short distances. The ramparts and block-houses on Mud Island were honeycombed, their cannon nearly silenced. A storming party was got ready; but Sir William Howe, who on the fifteenth was present with his brother, gave orders to keep up the fire all night through. In the evening Thayer sent all the garrison but forty men over to Red-bank, and after midnight followed with the rest. When, on the sixteenth, the British troops entered the fort, they found nearly every one of its cannon stained with blood. Never were orders to defend a place to the last extremity more faithfully executed.

Thayer was reported to Washington as an officer of the highest merit; Fleury won well-deserved promotion from congress.

Cornwallis was next sent by way of Chester to Billingsport with a strong body of troops to clear the left bank of the Delaware. A division under Greene was promptly despatched across the river to give him battle. Cornwallis was joined by five British battalions from New York, while the American reinforcements from the northern army were still kept back. It therefore became necessary to evacuate Redbank. Cornwallis, having levelled its ramparts, returned to Philadelphia, and Green rejoined Washington; but not till Lafayette, who attended the expedition as a volunteer, had secured the applause of congress by routing a party of Hessians. For all the seeming success, many officers in the British camp expressed the opinion that the states could not be subjugated.

From day to day the want of a general government was more keenly felt. While the winter-quarters of the British in Philadelphia were rendered secure by the possession of the river Delaware, congress, which was scoffed at in the British house of lords as a "vagrant" horde, resumed at Yorktown the work of confederation. Of the committee who, in June 1776, had been appointed to prepare the plan, Samuel Adams alone remained a member; and even he was absent when, on the fifteenth of November 1777, "articles of confederation and perpetual union" were adopted, to be submitted for approbation to the several states.

The present is always the lineal descendant of the past. A new form of political life never appears but as a growth out of its antecedents. In civil affairs, as much as in husbandry, seed-time goes before the harvest, and the harvest may be seen in the seed, the seed in the harvest. According to the American theory, the unity of the colonies had, before the declaration of independence, resided in the British king. The congress of the United States was the king's successor, and it inherited only the powers which the colonies themselves acknowledged to have belonged to the crown.

The instincts of local attachment had been strengthened by time and by the excellence of the local governments. Affection could not twine itself round a continental domain of

which the greater part was a wilderness, associated with no recollections. The confederacy was formed under the influence of political ideas which had been developed by a contest of centuries for individual and local liberties against an irresponsible central authority. Now that power had passed to the people, new institutions were required strong enough to protect the union, yet without impairing the liberties of the state or the individual. But America, misled by what belonged to the past, took for her organizing force the principle of resistance to power, which in all the thirteen colonies had been hardened into stubbornness by resistance to oppression.

During the sixteen months that followed the introduction of the plan for confederation prepared by Dickinson, the spirit of separation, fostered by uncontrolled indulgence, and by opposing interests and institutions, visibly increased in congress; and every change in his draft, which of itself proposed only a league of states, diminished the energetic authority which is the first guarantee of liberty.

The United States of America included within their jurisdiction all the territory that had belonged to the old thirteen colonies; and, if Canada would so choose, they were ready to annex Canada.

In the republics of Greece, citizenship had in theory been confined to a body of kindred families, which formed an hereditary caste, a multitudinous aristocracy. Such a system could have no permanent vitality; and the Greek republics, as the Italian republics in after-ages, died out for want of citizens. America adopted the principle of the all-embracing unity of society. As the American territory was that of the old thirteen colonies, so the free people residing upon it formed the free people of the United States. Subject and citizen were correlative terms; subjects of the monarchy became citizens of the republic. He that had owed primary allegiance to the king of England now owed primary allegiance to united America; yet, as the republic was the sudden birth of a revolution, the moderation of congress did not name it treason for the former subjects of the king to adhere to his government; only it was held that whoever chose to remain on the soil, by residence accepted protection and owed allegiance. This is the reason

why, for twelve years, free inhabitants and citizens were in American state papers convertible terms, sometimes used one for the other, and sometimes, for the sake of perspicuity, redundantly joined together.

The king of England claimed as his subjects all persons born within his dominions: in like manner, every one who first saw the light on the American soil was a natural-born American citizen; but the power of naturalization, which, under the king, each colony had claimed to regulate by its own laws, remained under the confederacy with the separate states.

The king had extended protection to every one of his lieges in every one of the thirteen colonies; now that congress was the successor of the king in America, the right to equal protection was continued to every free inhabitant in whatever state he might sojourn or dwell.

It had been held under the monarchy that each American colony was as independent of England as the electorate of Hanover; in the confederacy of "the United States of America," each state was to remain an independent sovereign, and the union was to be no more than an alliance. This theory decided the manner in which congress should vote. Pennsylvania and Virginia asked that, while each state might have at least one delegate, the rule should be one for every fifty thousand inhabitants; but the amendment was rejected by nine states against two, Delaware being absent and North Carolina divided. Virginia would have allowed to each state one member of congress for every thirty thousand of its inhabitants, and in this she was supported by John Adams; but his colleagues cast the vote of Massachusetts against it, and Virginia was left alone, North Carolina as before being equally divided. Virginia, again supported by John Adams, desired that the representation for each state should be in proportion to its contribution to the public treasury; but this was opposed by every other state, including North Carolina and Massachusetts. At last, with only one state divided and no negative voice but that of Virginia, an equal vote in congress was acknowledged to belong to each sovereign state. The number of delegates to give that vote might be not less than two nor more than seven for each state. The remedy for this inequality en