University of Virginia Library

I

THE year 1776 is not, as centuries are reckoned,
very far away, still less, as the steps
of Liberty are reckoned, was it distant from the
date when Liberty was a poor and puny thing;
walking with painful steps along the paths
which often led to the dungeon or the scaffold,
liable to be cut off forever by the mailed hand
of a King's Pretorian guard.

The year 1776, however, may be almost taken
as the birth year of Liberty as we know it; of true
Liberty which can never be slain except by her
own hand. Events have followed each other so
rapidly in the last century—the current has
swept us so swiftly from the old moorings that
the time appears longer than it is.

A number of persons still survive who remember
some of the participants in the drama
of 1776.

In the year 1776 the American colonies, instead

of being one of the great Powers of the
world, possibly the strongest, and certainly the
wealthiest and the best able to sustain itself independently
of the rest of the world, were a very
insignificant and poor collection of dependent
colonies hugging the sea-coast from Mount
Desert Island to the northern line of Florida.
It was a long line, covering some two thousand
miles, with many a break of wilderness
stretching between the settlements, with their
back to the vast wilderness, peopled with
savages, ready to crouch and spring at the first
opportunity; and with their eyes turned in
continual appeal to the mother country, which
many still called "home." The population
numbered something like three millions, about
as many as are now embraced in the City of
New York, and half as many again as are now
within the borders of Virginia. They were
mainly of English descent; though a small
proportion were French Huguenots, a sturdy
stock, and about fifteen per cent. were Negroes
and slaves. The frontier, which until about
fifty years before had been the Allegheny
Mountains, had within a generation been pushed
by hardy and adventurous settlers to the western
lakes and to the banks of the Ohio. Beyond,
to the north and to the west, lay the boundless
forests of France, and to the south lay Spain,
while savage Indians ever lurked along the
border ready to invade and slay almost with
impunity.

As few in number as they appeared to be,
they were rendered by their distant separation
even more feeble, more insignificant than their
numbers would seem to indicate. They were
not united by the ordinary bonds of a common
religion and a common interest. The major
portion of them, it is true, were Protestants,
but even they were divided. New England was
almost entirely of the dissenting faith, a people
filled with the spirit of Puritanism, who saw
but one side, reckoned a Churchman little better
than a papist, and classed both with the Devil;
her history was the history of opposition. While,
on the other hand, Virginia and the other Southern
colonies were mainly of the Established
Church, and the laws of intolerance yet stood on
the statute books or had been but lately expunged.

Considered by classes we find them equally
divided. Class distinctions had been largely
destroyed in the major part of New England,
but in Virginia and in some other colonies they
yet existed, and a class of large landowners gave
themselves the airs and filled, with reasonable
success, the position of an aristocracy.

Even the common interest of commerce was
lacking. All were dependent on England, and
in trade, such as existed, the colonies were
rivals rather than sisters.

If we look at the settlements we find them
strangely small and insignificant. Philadelphia,
Boston, Newport, New York, Portsmouth,
York, Baltimore, Hampton, St. Mary's, Alexandria,
Norfolk, Charleston, were, perhaps,
the only considerable towns in the country.

On the other hand, England was almost at
the zenith of her power, if not her glory, at home
and abroad. Less than a hundred years before
she had fought out her Revolution and
established her charter of liberty, her bill of
rights. Since that time she had conquered and
laid the ghost of the Stuart invasion; she had
defeated her hereditary enemy, France, both by
sea and land; had forced her from the Low
Countries; had wrested from her grasp India
and the East; had reduced her fleets from the
first to the second place, and now within ten
years, with the aid of her colonists, had torn
from her her northernmost American colony
and had driven her from the Atlantic seaboard.

It was the same at home. With Peace,
her internal affairs appeared to have advanced

with a bound. Her commerce suddenly
swelled to an unprecedented volume. Wealth
beyond the dream of avarice poured into her
coffers.

In Letters—even in Art—she was on the topmost
wave of her glory. Hume, Gibbon and
Robertson were her historians. Goldsmith and
Gray were among her poets, and Reynolds,
Gainsborough and Romney were among her
painters. Her greatest chancellor had but
lately retired from the woolsack, while Lord
Mansfield was yet her chief justice. Her statesmen—Chatham,
Burke, North, Fox and others
—were not esteemed second to any whom she
had ever had on her long roll of great men
who had guided and maintained her destinies
throughout her period of glory.

It must, indeed, have appeared to an onlooker,
as it appeared to the Home Government, as
though the colonies were mad to defy her to the
point of war. Nor were the Americans ignorant
of her power. They kept in close touch with
her. They dealt with her constantly; sending
her the product of their forests and plantations,
and bringing from her warehouses almost every
comfort and convenience of life.

They knew that in the time of their grandfathers
her navies had swept the seas, and her

soldiery had humbled the vast power of the
Grand Monarch. They knew that but a few
years before, at the end of the Seven Years' War,
she had wrested from France her most cherished
Western possession. They had felt the thrill
of all this as Englishmen in blood, and as
Englishmen they had contributed their part
towards its accomplishment. Among them
were the descendants of that gallant officer
who was knighted for bearing to England the
dispatches announcing the victory of Blenheim,
and among them was the young officer
who had saved the remnant of Braddock's ill-starred
force.

They fed on her Literature, sent their sons to
her schools, and kept time with her progress.

To what, then, was the Revolution due? To
one sole cause: to the invasion of the rights of
English citizens—in other words, to the spirit
of Liberty that animated the souls of those who
had struck their roots deep into the American
soil: to the spirit of Free institutions which
flamed in every colony and in every class. From
northern Maine to southern Georgia, gentle and
simple; churchman and dissenter alike cherished
it.

To get at the reason for it we must go a long
way back. Traditions count for much, especially

among a rural people. And the people
who settled America had been bred on traditions
of Liberty. From the time of Alfred down
throughout the long struggle, at first of Baron
against King, and then of Commoner against
King and Baron, their history had been the history
of wresting Liberty from Tyranny. At
Runnymede the Barons had been strong because
their retainers were at their back. In Westminster
the Commons had been brave because
the shires were behind them. At Edgehill and
Naseby, at Worcester and Boyne-water Cromwell
and William had won because the people
were fighting for their English liberties. In
Virginia, especially, tradition had the weight of
unwritten law. When they came across the
water they had brought their Liberties with them
as the Children of Israel bore the Ark of the
Covenant in their midst. And whenever the
occasion arose the Ark was borne before them.

Often it appeared to be in danger of abandonment,
but at need the cry was always heard: "To
your tents, O Israel," and heard, it was obeyed.

All through their history on this side they had
stood for their Liberties as English citizens.

Within five years after the assembling of their
first House of Burgesses in 1619, and ten years
before any other colony had an assembly, the

Virginia Assembly declared that "The Governor
shall not lay any tax or impositions upon
the Colony, their lands or commodities, otherway
than by the authority of the General Assembly,
to be levied and employed as the said
Assembly shall appoynt."[1]

Subservient as they may have appeared at
times to the Crown as represented by the royal
governors, addressing petitions with a humility
of phrase which sounds strangely fulsome to
modern republican ears, there were certain
Rights which neither King nor Parliament could
touch without arousing a resentment which both
had been wont to heed. They called them the
Inalienable Rights of Citizens. And they knew,
as we know to-day, that they had been won by
hard fighting.

A hundred years before 1776 Revolution had
flamed through Virginia, kindled by the invasion
of the right of self-protection, and her capital
had been laid in ashes. It had been stamped
out in blood; but the blood of Patriots is the
seed of Liberty. And Liberty is the inalienable
heritage of the Anglo-Saxon. Its flame is the
divine fire which, ever burning in his breast, distinguishes
him from all other men.

From this time on they had ever stood for

their rights as free citizens, and the hundred
years which had passed had been spent in the
assertion and, whenever necessary, the maintenance
of those rights. As universally happens
under government by alien governors, the results
reflected largely the personal character of the individuals
who held the office of governor. Under
a Spotswood or a Botetourt, the people had
clemency and consideration, if not justice, and
felt that they were understood and befriended
by their governors. Under a Harvey, a Berkeley
or a Dunmore, they felt that they were misunderstood
and were treated with hostility. It
is the essential and inherent vice of governing by
absentee rulers, and the inherent weakness of
it is that the ruling power, however strong, does
not know the depth and the strength of the
feeling within, which may be pent up until it
bursts forth in Revolution.

Too often the only contact with the Home
Government had resulted in ignominious treatment
and sometimes in galling insult. The
conduct of that Government was the oft-repeated
story of self-centred phariseeism, thinking
that it knows the problems of another region
better than those know them to whom they are
as vital as the breath they breathe. And as in
such cases always, the result was a fiasco.

"Damn your souls! raise tobacco!" flared out
Seymour to Parson Blair, the esteemed commissary
of the old College of William and Mary.
As if the people were not raising tobacco.

These things had sunk deep into their hearts.

But deeper yet were the real grievances.

As in most instances, we find that the violation
of rights also affected their interests.

The Acts in the Restraint of Trade had touched
the pocket of every man in the Colonies. That
England should regulate their commerce and
not only fix the prices for their products, but
refuse to permit them to trade elsewhere except
through her ports, was a real grievance. In the
same way, that she should not permit them to
exclude the further introduction of slaves within
their borders was a grievance—how real some
of us can form an opinion on to-day after nearly
two hundred years.

When to these was added the assertion by
England of the right to bind by law without giving
Representation, and to withdraw the protection
of the great Writs of privilege, the injury
was very real indeed. To yield would have
been to surrender themselves as slaves.

Remonstrance after remonstrance had been
addressed to the Crown, each one couched in
terms respectful enough, but each firmer than

its predecessor in tone and assertion. This
humility of expression had begun to gall the
withers that had been so long wrung.

It appears as though Providence, watching
over the growth of Liberty, had so set her immutable
laws that at this juncture all things
conspired to establish her in her home, with
foundations laid deep in this broad Western
world. Had but reasonable consideration been
shown on the other side, this Nation might never
have come into being.

But, "the Monarch was mad and the Minister
blind."

And though every effort was made on the
part of the colonists to settle the differences on
grounds consistent with their Liberties, they were
unavailing. Submission but brought forth only
truculence. "They must either triumph or submit,"
said George III. "I am unalterably determined,"
he wrote to Lord North on August
18, 1775, "at every hazard and at the risk of
every consequence to compel the Colonies to
absolute submission."

"I remember," said Jefferson, speaking of
Franklin's minutes of the negotiations between
him and Lord North to prevent the contest of
arms which followed,—"I remember that Lord
North's answers were dry, unyielding, in the

spirit of unconditional submission and betrayed
an absolute indifference to the occurrence of a
rupture, and he said to the mediators distinctly
at last that a rebellion was not to be deprecated
on the part of Great Britain, and that the confiscations
would provide for many of their
friends."[2]

"George, be King," used to say his silly
mother to him. And George was trying to be
king and was making a mess of it.

The only answer to subservience was a kick.

"The Governor dissolved us as usual," says
Jefferson, speaking of the dissolution that followed
the appointment by the Virginia House of
Burgesses of a day of fasting and prayer, for the
purpose of showing their deep feeling over the
shutting up of the port of Boston.

A dissolution at that time was a serious matter.
Every member had come on horseback
from his home through forests and often through
almost trackless wilderness. Some had come
from far beyond the mountains in remote Augusta
and Transylvania, the present State of
Kentucky.

The day of subservience had, however, passed
away; the answer to the dissolution of an Assembly
was now a Convention.

In fact, the colonists knew that however their
grants might run in terms, however dependent
on the Crown they appeared by their phraseology,
they had themselves wrested their holdings
from the Savage and the Wild; had themselves
builded and maintained their homes in what had
once been the untenable wilderness and had
themselves established their governments. There
was not an acre that had not been cleared and
fought for; there was not a house that had not
been built by arduous toil; there was not a right
that had not been won at the end of a struggle
and at the expense of fortitude.

Happily for the colonists, they had friends on
the other side. And happily for England, the
assumption of arbitrary power had sent a thrill
of fear through her as well as through the colonies.
The issue of General Warrants had been
fought out in the Wilkes case in 1765, at the
very time when America was in the throes of
her Stamp Act revolution, and as a sequel, that
foundation-stone of Liberty, that mightiest engine
for her preservation, the Freedom of the
Press, had been established.

Pitt, that "trumpet of sedition," as George

called him, with those who were wise enough to
see it, recognized that America was fighting their
battle no less than her own. "He gloried in the
resistance which was denounced in Parliament
as rebellion. `In my opinion,' he said, `this
kingdom has no right to lay a tax on the colonies.
. . . America is obstinate; America is almost in
open rebellion. Sir, I rejoice that America has
resisted. Three millions of people so dead to
all the feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit
to be slaves would have been fit instruments to
make slaves of the rest.' "

The difficulty was to secure the united action
of the colonies, and without union the chance of
success was hopeless. Happily, George gave
the occasion for union by proving its necessity.
"George was, in fact," says Green, the historian,
"sole Minister during the fifteen years which followed,
and the shame of the darkest hour of
English history lies wholly at his door."[3]

The value of union among the colonists was
well understood, and had been the subject of
discussion and the subject of solicitude among
the leaders.

The idea of union for defence was almost as
old as the earliest wars in which the colonists
engaged. It had nearly taken shape in June,

1754, when commissioners from seven of the
colonies met in convention at Albany for the
purpose of strengthening their treaties with the
Indians, and for devising a plan of union. Indeed,
they recommended a plan of union drawn
up by Franklin, which contained the germinal
ideas of the American union. But it fell
through.

Now the necessity of union was more pressing
than ever.

"We must all hang together," said one, as
they stood about the desk signing the Declaration
of Independence.

"Yes," answered Franklin, "or we shall all
hang separately."

The utmost care was used by the leaders to
so direct public events that they should meet with
the approval and secure the co-operation of all
the colonists. The Committees of Public Safety,
and the Committees of Correspondence were composed
of the best men in the colonies, and they
gave their utmost energies to raising and welding
together the sympathies of all the colonies.

The importance of the Stamp Act in the
history of the movement is that it affected the
interests of every one and thus made a common
cause for which every one would stand.

When the Stamp Act was passed and the attempt

was made to enforce it in 1765, the colonies
made common cause. When the Stamp
Act was repealed and only enough of the law
was left by the tax on tea to maintain the right
of Great Britain to tax her colonies by her laws
without giving them representation they still
stood together. When the right was asserted in
Rhode Island, that "little acre of freedom," by
Great Britain to send Americans to England to
be tried for offences committed in America, it
awakened the colonies to the imperative necessity
of united opposition.

"We were all sensible," said Jefferson afterwards,[4]
speaking of the action of the Virginia
Assembly in 1773, "that the most urgent of all
measures was that of coming to an understanding
with all the other colonies to consider the
British claims as a common cause to all and to
produce a unity of action."

It was to forward this that Committees of Correspondence
between the colonies were formed.

In this measure, as in many others, though the
honor has been claimed by our younger sister,
Massachusetts, the great weight of authority
goes to show that, while Massachusetts first
started Committees of Correspondence in the
several cities of that colony, the Colony of Virginia

started the idea of correspondence between
the several colonies, looking to a confederation
of the colonies, and finally leading to a union.

Says Jefferson, "Mr. Marshall in his history
of General Washington, Chapter 3, speaking of
this proposition for Committees of Correspondence
and for a General Congress, says, `this
measure had already been proposed in town
meeting in Boston,' and some pages before he
had said that, `At a session of the General Court
of Massachusetts in September, 1770, that
Court in pursuance of a favorite idea of uniting
all the Colonies in one system of measures,
elected a Committee of Correspondence to communicate
with such Committees as might be appointed
by the other Colonies.' This is an
error. The Committees of Correspondence
elected by Massachusetts were expressly for a
correspondence among the several towns of that
province only. Besides the text of their proceedings,
his own note X., proves this. The
first proposition for a general correspondence between
the several States and for a General Congress
was made by our meeting of May, 1774.
Botta, copying Marshall, has repeated his error;
so it will be handed on from copyist to copyist,
ad infinitum."

The correction of this error is due to Virginia.

But, unequal as the struggle between England
and her colonies might appear on the surface,
there were conditions which tended to make it
more even.

Their life had fitted the Americans for such a
struggle. It is possible that throughout the
colonies there was not a person who was not inured
to hardship and ready to bear his part in
whatever came. Men and women alike faced
the conditions with undaunted hearts. Hall
and farm-house and mountain cabin all held
intrepid souls. The very boys were ready to
enlist and fight as men.

Nature, moving with resistless step, had
throughout the long years been training the
people for just this crisis. For generations they
had been inured to fighting Indians. They had
fought the French on the north and northwest
and the Spaniards on the south. Andrew
Lewis, with his brave frontiersmen, had crushed
the Indian power at the Great Kenawha. And
now, just at the crucial moment, they had had
an opportunity to witness and judge from personal
observation the fighting qualities of the
far-famed English regulars. Washington, a
young and untried officer, had fought the French
and Indians at Great Meadows and, though
forced to capitulate, had marched out with the

honors of war, and the next year Braddock, with
picked regiments of regulars, had been defeated
and routed disastrously. His troops had been
saved from annihilation only by the courage and
the wisdom of the young American volunteer.
By this test the prestige of the redoubted regulars
had been lowered, and America had found out,
after all, that on her own soil, man for man, she
was better than they. Better than they, not because
braver than they, for, indeed, they were
brave enough and to spare. But better because,
while the British, animated by physical courage,
fought for duty or for fame, the Americans, inspired
by the spirit of free institutions, and thus
thrice armed, fought for Home and Liberty.

So, Fate, with sure and steady hand, was
leading them along the path to the heights
where Liberty with her torch lighted the way to
Freedom.

In fact, war, though not declared, was really
on them.

In April, 1775, the embattled farmers and
minute men of Massahusetts had "fired the
shot heard 'round the world." The Virginia
uprising had proved less bloody; for when
Virginia flamed and Patrick Henry led his
"gentlemen independents of Hanover" and his
Caroline men to Williamsburg to demand restitution

of the powder taken by night from Virginia's
magazine, Dunmore, at Peyton Randolph's
instance, had placated them by paying
for it. England was now massing her troops
about Boston; and her war-vessels were cruising
in every bay along the coast. Dunmore had
abandoned the capital of Virginia, and, after
taking refuge on a warship, was ravaging Virginia's
seaboard, arming her slaves, and threatening
her Convention, even in their assembly-hall.

The colonies were arming with all haste.
Virginia had sent her Washington, her best
tried soldier, to command the Continental
forces in the distant colony of Massachusetts.

"It was easy to distinguish him from all the
rest," says Thatcher of him, on his first appearance
as he rode into Cambridge.

It is still easy, after a hundred and thirty
years, to distinguish him from all the rest.
Sprung from Virginia's soil, compact of the elements
that have given distinction to the character
that bears her stamp; country-bred; levelheaded
rather than clever; direct and straight-forward
rather than astute or keen; inspired
by her traditions; tempered on the anvil of
adversity to be the truest instrument that
Providence had ever fashioned to its hand; following
with divine patience and divine humility

the call of Duty, that lordly Virginian rides
down the years, still easily distinguished from
all the rest. And the only one of all the company
who bears a close resemblance to him
was, like him, a Virginian also.