there was no force in America competent to restore it. In the chief towns the stir of military preparation was incessant. When Franklin attended the Congress at Philadelphia in the September of 1775, he found companies of provincial soldiers drilled twice a day in the square of the Quaker capital, and the fortifications along the Delaware were rapidly advancing. Six powder mills were already designed, and two were just about to open. A manufactory of muskets had been established which was expected to complete twenty-five muskets a day. Suspected persons were constantly arrested, and the letter-bags systematically examined. Tories were either tarred and feathered or compelled to mount a cart and ask pardon of the crowd, and the ladies of the town were busily employed in scraping lint or making bandages for the wounded.'

Over the inland districts the revolutionary party was as yet supreme, but the whole coast was exposed, almost without defence, to the attacks of English ships of war, and all the chief towns in America were seaport. The Americans possessed a large population of seafaring men who were eminently fitted for maritime warfare, but they had as yet not a single ship of war. The Government made large offers to gunsmiths to induce them to abandon America for England. The manufacture of gunpowder was only slowly organised, and for many months the colonial forces were often in extreme danger in consequence of the scantiness of their supply. It was wisely determined to pay the provincial troops and to pay them well; but as all foreign commerce was arrested, and as most forms of industry were dislocated, there was very little money

Parton's Life of Franklin, H. 100.

See a letter of Governor

Tryon, Documents relating to the Colonial History of Ne York, viii. 647.

NEGROES AND INDIANS.

219

in the country, and paper was speedily depreciated. Some of the necessaries of life had hitherto been imported from England, and the great want of native woollen goods was especially felt in the rigour of the first winter of the war.

1

Though the negroes, who were so numerous in the Southern States, were a cause of great anxiety to the colonists, they remained at this time, with few exceptions, perfectly passive; but one of the first consequences of the appeal to arms was to bring Indian tribes into the field. In the great French war they had been constantly employed by the French and fre quently by the English, and it was not likely that so formidable a weapon would be long unused. Neither side, it is true, desired a general Indian rising. Neither side can be justly accused of the great crime of inciting the Indians to indiscriminate massacre or plunder, but both sides were ready to employ them as auxiliaries. Before the battle of Lexington the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts formed a company out of Stockbridge Indians residing in the colony. In the beginning of April 1775 they issued an address to the Mohawk Indians exhorting them to whet the hatchet' for war against the English, and Indians were, as we have seen, employed by the Provincials in their invasion of

3

Thus J. Adams in 1775 gives an account of an interview with some gentlemen from Georgia. 'These gentlemen give a melancholy account of the State of Georgia and South Carolina. They say that if 1,000 regular troops should land in Georgia, and their commander be provided with arms and clothes enough, and proclaim freedom to all the negroes who would join his camp, 20,000 negroes would

join it from the two provinces in a fortnight. . . . Their only security is that all the King's friends and tools of Government have large plantations and property in negroes, so that the slaves of the Tories would be lost as well as those of the Whigs.'-Adams' Works, ii. 428. 2 Washington's Works, iii. 175.

Force's American Archives (4th series), L 1349, 1350.

Canada. In March 1775 Mr. Stuart, who managed Indian affairs for the English Government in the Southern colonies, reported that General Gage had informed him that ill-affected people in those parts had been endeavouring to poison the minds of the Indians of the six nations and other tribes with jealousies, in order to alienate their affection from his Majesty,'' and New England missionaries appear to have been in this respect especially active. Up to the middle of this year the English professed great reluctance to make use of savages. In July, Stuart wrote very emphatically to the Revolutionary Committee of Intelligence at Charleston, which had expressed suspicions on this subject: I never have received any orders from my superiors which by the most tortured construction could be interpreted to spirit up or employ the Indians to fall upon the frontier inhabitants, or to take any part in the disputes between Great Britain and her colonies,'' and both English and colonists exhorted the Indians as a body to remain neutral. It is, however, certain that

' March 28, 1775. MSS. Record Office (Plantations, General).

Documents relating to the Colonial History of New York, viii. 656, 657. See, too, a letter of the Provincial Congress, dated April 4, 1775, to a New England missionary, urging him to use his influence to make the Indians take up arms against the English. Washington's Works, iii. 495

July 18, 1775. MSS. Record Office.

In a speech to the Indians, August 80, 1775, Stuart said: There is a difference between the white people of England and the white people of America ; this is a matter which does not

concern you, they will decide it among themselves.'-MSS. Record Office (Plantations, General). In August 1775 the commissioners sent by the twelve colonies had a long interview with the chiefs of the six nations, and gave them an elaborate account of the motives which had united them against England. They added, however: 'This is a family quarrel between us and Old England. You Indians are not concerned in it. We do not wish you to take up the hatchet against the King's troops. We desire you to remain at home and not join either side, but keep the hatchet buried deep.'-Documents relating to the Colonial

INDIANS CALLED TO ARMS.

in the beginning of June 1775 Colonel Guy Johnson, who had succeeded Sir William Johnson in the direction of one great department of Indian affairs, had, in obedience to secret instructions from General Gage, induced a large body of Indians to undertake to assist his Majesty's troops in their operations in Canada,'' and in July this policy was openly avowed by Lord Dartmouth. It was defended on the ground that the Americans had themselves adopted it."

Few things were more terrible to the Americans

than the scourge of Indian war. As it had generally been the function of the Government to protect the Bavages against the rapacity and violence of the colonists, England could count largely upon their gratitude, and the horrors which never failed to multiply in their track gave a darker hue of animosity to the struggle.

But the greatest danger to the colonial cause was the half-heartedness of its supporters. It is difficult or impossible to form any safe conjecture of the number of real loyalists in America, but it is certain that it was very considerable. John Adams, who would naturally be inclined to overrate the preponderance in favour of independence, declared at the end of the war his belief that a third part of the whole population, more than a third part of the principal persons in America, were throughout opposed to the Revolution. Massachusetts was of all the provinces the most revolutionary, but when General Gage evacuated Boston in 1776 he was accompanied by more than 1,000 loyalists of that town and of the neighbouring country. Two-thirds of the property of New York was supposed to belong to Tories, and except in the city there appears to have been no serious disaffection. In some of the Southern colonies loyalists probably formed half the population, and there was no colony in which they were not largely represented.

There were also great multitudes who, though they would never take up arms for the King, though they perhaps agreed with the constitutional doctrines of the Revolutionists, dissented on grounds of principle, policy, or interest from the course which they were adopting. There were those who wished to wait till

Adams' Works, x. 87. Many particulars about the strength of the loyalist party will be found in Mr. Sabine's very interesting book, The Loyalists of America.

2 Parl. Hist. xviii. 123–129. Sparks' Life of Washington. Force's American Archives (4th series), i. 773, 957.