It is always difficult in history to mark the beginning and end of a period. Events keep rushing on and do not pause to be divided into chapters; or, in other words, in the history which really takes place, a new chapter is always beginning long before the old one is ended. The divisions we make when we try to describe it are merely marks that we make for our own convenience. In telling the story of the American Revolution we must stop somewhere, and the inauguration of President Washington is a very proper place. We must also begin somewhere, but it is quite clear that it will not do to begin with the Declaration of Independence in July, 1776, or even with the midnight ride of Paul Revere in April, 1775. For if we ask what caused that "hurry of hoofs in a village street," and what brought together those five-and-fifty statesmen at Philadelphia, we are not simply led back to the Boston Tea-Party, and still further to the Stamp Act, but we find it necessary to refer to events that happened more than a century before the Revolution can properly be said to have begun. Indeed, if we were going to take a very wide view of the situation, and try to point out its relations to the general history of mankind, we should have to go back many hundreds of years and not only cross the ocean to the England of King Alfred, but keep on still further to the ancient market-places of Rome and Athens, and even to the pyramids of Egypt; and in all this long journey through the ages we should not be merely gratifying an idle curiosity, but at every step of the way could gather sound practical lessons, useful in helping us to vote intelligently at the next election for mayor of the city in which we live or for president of the United States.

We are not now, however, about to start on any such long journey. It is a much nearer and narrower view of the American Revolution that we wish to get. There are many points from which we might start, but we must at any rate choose a point several years earlier than the Declaration of Independence. People are very apt to leave out of sight the "good old colony times" and speak of our country as scarcely more than a hundred years old. Sometimes we hear the presidency of George Washington spoken of as part of "early American history;" but we ought not to forget that when Washington was born the commonwealth of Virginia was already one hundred and twenty-five years old. The first governor of Massachusetts was born three centuries ago, in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada. Suppose we take the period of 282 years between the English settlement The half-way station in American history. of Virginia and the inauguration of President Benjamin Harrison, and divide it in the middle. That gives us the year 1748 as the half-way station in the history of the American people. There were just as many years of continuous American history before 1748 as there have been since that date. That year was famous for the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which put an end to a war between England and France that had lasted five years. That war had been waged in America as well as in Europe, and American troops had played a brilliant part in it. There was now a brief lull, soon to be followed by another and greater war between the two mighty rivals, and it was in the course of this latter war that some of the questions were raised which presently led to the American Revolution. Let us take the occasion of this lull in the storm to look over the American world and see what were the circumstances likely to lead to the throwing off of the British government by the thirteen colonies, and to their union under a federal government of their own making.

In the middle of the eighteenth century there were four New England colonies. Massachusetts extended her sway over Maine, and the Green Mountain territory was an uninhabited wilderness, to which New York and New Hampshire alike laid claim. The four commonwealths of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had all been in existence, under one form or another, for more than a century. The men who were in The four New England colonies. the prime of life there in 1750 were the great-grandsons and great-great-grandsons of the men who crossed the ocean between 1620 and 1640 and settled New England. Scarcely two men in a hundred were of other than English blood. About one in a hundred could say that his family came from Scotland or the north of Ireland; one in five hundred may have been the grandchild of a Huguenot. Upon religious and political questions these people thought very much alike. Extreme poverty was almost unknown, and there were but few who could not read and write. As a rule every head of a family owned the house in which he lived and the land which supported him. There were no cities; and from Boston, which was a town with 16,000 inhabitants, down to the smallest settlement in the White Mountains, the government was carried on by town-meetings at which, almost any grown-up man could be present and speak and vote. Except upon the sea-coast nearly all the people lived upon farms; but all along the coast were many who lived by fishing and by building ships, and in the towns dwelt many merchants grown rich by foreign trade. In those days Massachusetts was the richest of the thirteen colonies, and had a larger population than any other except Virginia. Connecticut was then more populous than New York; and when the four New England commonwealths acted together—as was likely to be the case in time of danger—they formed the strongest military power on the American continent.

Among what we now call southern states there were two that in 1750 were more than a hundred years old. These were Virginia and Maryland. The people of these commonwealths, like those of New England, had lived together in America long enough to become distinctively Americans. Both New Englander and Virginian had had time to forget their family Virginia and Maryland. relationships with the kindred left behind so long ago in England; though there were many who did not forget it, and in our time scholars have by research recovered many of the links that had been lost from memory. The white people of Virginia were as purely English as those of Connecticut or Massachusetts. But society in Virginia was very different from society in New England. The wealth of Virginia consisted chiefly of tobacco, which was raised by negro slaves. People lived far apart from each other on great plantations, usually situated near the navigable streams of which that country has so many. Most of the great planters had easy access to private wharves, where their crops could be loaded on ships and sent directly to England in exchange for all sorts of goods. Accordingly it was but seldom that towns grew up as centres of trade. Each plantation was a kind of little world in itself. There were no town-meetings, as the smallest political division was the division into counties; but there were county-meetings quite vigorous with political life. Of the leading county families a great many were descended from able and distinguished Cavaliers or King's-men who had come over from England during the ascendency of Oliver Cromwell. Skill in the management of public affairs was hereditary in such families, and during our revolutionary period Virginia produced more great leaders than any of the other colonies.

There were yet two other American commonwealths that in 1750 were more than a hundred years old. These were New York and little Delaware, which for some time was a kind of appendage, first to New York, afterward to Pennsylvania. But there was one important respect in which these two colonies were different alike from New England and from Virginia. Their population was far from being purely English. Delaware had been first settled by Swedes, New York by Dutchmen; and the latter colony had drawn its settlers from almost every part of western and central Europe. A man might travel from Penobscot bay to the Harlem river without hearing a syllable in any other tongue than English; but in crossing Manhattan New York and Delaware. island he could listen, if he chose, to more than a dozen languages. There was almost as much diversity in opinions about religious and political matters as there was in the languages in which they were expressed. New York was an English community in so far as it had been for more than eighty years under an English government, but hardly in any other sense. Accordingly we shall find New York in the revolutionary period less prompt and decided in action than Massachusetts and Virginia. In population New York ranked only seventh among the thirteen colonies; but in its geographical position it was the most important of all. It was important commercially because the Mohawk and Hudson rivers formed a direct avenue for the fur-trade from the region of the great lakes to the finest harbour on all the Atlantic coast. In a military sense it was important for two reasons; first, because the Mohawk valley was the home of the most powerful confederacy of Indians on the continent, the steady allies of the English and deadly foes of the French; secondly, because the centre of the French power was at Montreal and Quebec, and from those points the route by which the English colonies could be most easily invaded was formed by Lake Champlain and the Hudson river. New York was completely interposed between New England and the rest of the English colonies, so that an enemy holding possession of it would virtually cut the Atlantic sea-board in two. For these reasons the political action of New York was of most critical importance.

Of the other colonies in 1750, the two Carolinas and New Jersey were rather more than eighty years old, while Pennsylvania had been settled scarcely seventy years. But the growth of these younger colonies had The two Carolinas and Georgia; New Jersey and Pennsylvania.been rapid, especially in the case of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, which in populousness ranked third and fourth among the thirteen. This rapid increase was mainly due to a large immigration from Europe kept up during the first half of the eighteenth century, so that a large proportion of the people had either been born in Europe, or were the children of people born in Europe. In 1750 these colonies had not had time enough to become so intensely American as Virginia and the New England colonies. In Georgia, which had been settled only seventeen years, people had had barely time to get used to this new home on the wild frontier.

The population of these younger colonies was very much mixed. In South Carolina, as in New York, probably less than half were English. In both Carolinas there were a great many Huguenots from France, and immigrants from Germany and Scotland and the north of Ireland were still pouring in. Pennsylvania had many Germans and Irish, and settlers from other parts of Europe, besides its English Quakers. With all this diversity of race there was a great diversity of opinions about political questions, as about other matters.

We are now beginning to see why it was that Massachusetts and Virginia took the lead in bringing on the revolutionary war. Not only were these two the largest colonies, but their people had become much more Why Massachusetts and Virginia took the lead. thoroughly welded together in their thoughts and habits and associations than was as yet possible with the people of the younger colonies. When the revolutionary war came, there were very few Tories in the New England colonies and very few in Virginia; but there were a great many in New York and Pennsylvania and the two Carolinas, so that the action of these commonwealths was often slow and undecided, and sometimes there was bitter and bloody fighting between men of opposite opinions, especially in New York and South Carolina.

If we look at the governments of the thirteen colonies in the middle of the eighteenth century, we shall observe some interesting facts. All the colonies had legislative assemblies elected by the people, and these assemblies levied the taxes and made the laws. So far as the legislatures were concerned, therefore, all the colonies governed themselves. But with regard to the executive department of the The two republics; Connecticut and Rhode Island. government, there were very important differences. Only two of the colonies, Connecticut and Rhode Island, had governors elected by the people. These two colonies were completely self-governing. In almost everything but name they were independent of Great Britain, and this was so true that at the time of the revolutionary war they did not need to make any new constitutions for themselves, but continued to live on under their old charters for many years,—Connecticut until 1818, Rhode Island until 1843. Before the revolution these two colonies had comparatively few direct grievances to complain of at the hands of Great Britain; but as they were next neighbours to Massachusetts and closely connected with its history, they were likely to sympathize promptly with the kind of grievances by which Massachusetts was disturbed.

Three of the colonies, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland, had a peculiar kind of government, known as proprietary government. Their The proprietary governments: Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. territories had originally been granted by the crown to a person known as the Lord Proprietary, and the lord-proprietorship descended from father to son like a kingdom. In Maryland it was the Calvert family that reigned for six generations as lords proprietary. Pennsylvania and Delaware had each its own separate legislature, but over both colonies reigned the same lord proprietary, who was a member of the Penn family. These colonies were thus like little hereditary monarchies, and they had but few direct dealings with the British government. For them the lords proprietary stood in the place of the king, and appointed the governors. In Maryland this system ran smoothly. In Pennsylvania there was a good deal of dissatisfaction, but it generally assumed the form of a wish to get rid of the lords proprietary and have the governors appointed by the king; for as this was something they had not tried they were not prepared to appreciate its evils.

In the other eight colonies—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia—the governors were appointed by the king, and were commonly known as "royal governors." The crown colonies, and their royal governors. They were sometimes natives of the colonies over which they were appointed, as Dudley and Hutchinson of Massachusetts, and others; but were more often sent over from England. Some of them, as Pownall of Massachusetts and Spotswood of Virginia, were men of marked ability. Some were honest gentlemen, who felt a real interest in the welfare of the people they came to help govern; some were unprincipled adventurers, who came to make money by fair means or foul. Their position was one of much dignity, and they behaved themselves like lesser kings. What with their crimson velvets and fine laces and stately coaches, they made much more of a show than any president of the United States would think of making to-day. They had no fixed terms of office, but remained at their posts as long as the king, or the king's colonial secretary, saw fit to keep them there.

Now it was generally true of the royal governors that, whether they were natives of America or sent over from England, and whether they were good men or bad, they were very apt to make themselves disliked by the people, and they were almost always quarrelling with their legislative assemblies. Questions were always coming up about which the governor and the legislature could not agree, because the legislature represented the The question as to salaries. views of the people who had chosen it, while the governor represented his own views or the views which prevailed three thousand miles away among the king's ministers, who very often knew little about America and cared less. One of these disputed questions related to the governor's salary. It was natural that the governor should wish to have a salary of fixed amount, so that he might know from year to year what he was going to receive. But the people were afraid that if this were to be done the governor might become too independent. They preferred that the legislature should each year make a grant of money such as it should deem suitable for the governor's expenses, and this sum it might increase or diminish according to its own good pleasure. This would keep the governor properly subservient to the legislature. Before 1750 there had been much bitter wrangling over this question in several of the colonies, and the governors had one after another been obliged to submit, though with very ill grace.

Sometimes the thoughts of the royal governors and their friends went beyond this immediate question. Since the legislatures were so froward and so niggardly, what an admirable plan it would be to have the governors paid out of the royal treasury and thus made comparatively independent of the legislatures! The judges, too, who were quite poorly paid, might fare much better if remunerated by the crown, and the same might be said of some other public officers. But if the British government were to undertake to pay the salaries of its officials in America, it must raise a revenue for the purpose; and it would naturally raise such a revenue by levying taxes in America rather than in England. People in England felt that they were already taxed as heavily as they could bear, in order to pay the expenses of their own government. They could not be expected to submit to further taxation for the sake of paying the expenses of governing the American colonies. If further taxes were to be laid for such a purpose, they must in fairness be laid upon Americans, not upon Englishmen in the old country.

Such was the view which people in England would naturally be expected to take, and such was the view which they generally did take. But there was another side to the question which was very clearly seen by most people in America. If the royal governors were to be paid by the crown and thus made independent of their legislatures, there would be danger of their becoming petty tyrants and interfering in many ways with the liberties of the people. Still greater would be the danger if the judges were to be paid by the crown, for then they would feel themselves responsible to the king or to the royal governor, rather than to their fellow-citizens; and it would be easy for the governors, by appointing corrupt men as judges, to prevent the proper administration of justice by the courts, and thus to make men's lives and property insecure. Most Americans in 1750 felt this danger very keenly. They had not forgotten how, in the times of their grandfathers, two of the noblest of Englishmen, Lord William Russell and Colonel Algernon Sidney, had been murdered by the iniquitous sentence of time-serving judges. They had not forgotten the ruffian George Jeffreys and his "bloody assizes" of 1685. They well remembered how their kinsmen in England had driven into exile the Stuart family of kings, who were even yet, in 1745, making efforts to recover their lost throne. They remembered how the beginnings of New England had been made by stout-hearted men who could not endure the tyranny of these same Stuarts; and they knew well that one of the worst of the evils upon which Stuart tyranny had fattened had been the corruption of the courts of justice. The Americans believed with some reason, that even now, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the administration of justice in their own commonwealths was decidedly better than in Great Britain; and they had no mind to have it disturbed.

But worse than all, if the expenses of governing America were to be paid by taxes levied upon Americans and collected from them by king or parliament or any power whatsoever residing in Great Britain, then the inhabitants of the thirteen American colonies would at once cease to be "No taxation without representation." free people. A free country is one in which the government cannot take away people's money, in the shape of taxes, except for strictly public purposes and with the consent of the people themselves, as expressed by some body of representatives whom the people have chosen. If people's money can be taken from them without their consent, no matter how small the amount, even if it be less than one dollar out of every thousand, then they are not politically free. They do not govern, but the power that thus takes their money without their consent is the power that governs; and there is nothing to prevent such a power from using the money thus obtained to strengthen itself until it can trample upon people's rights in every direction, and rob them of their homes and lives as well as of their money. If the British government could tax the Americans without their consent, it might use the money for supporting a British army in America, and such an army might be employed in intimidating the legislatures, in dispersing town-meetings, in destroying newspaper-offices, or in other acts of tyranny.

The Americans in the middle of the eighteenth century well understood that the principle of "no taxation without representation" is the fundamental principle of free government. It was the principle for which It was the fundamental principle of English liberty. their forefathers had contended again and again in England, and upon which the noble edifice of English liberty had been raised and consolidated since the grand struggle between king and barons in the thirteenth century. It had passed into a tradition, both in England and in America, that in order to prevent the crown from becoming despotic, it was necessary that it should only wield such revenues as the representatives of the people might be pleased to grant it. In England the body which represented the people was the House of Commons, in each of the American colonies it was the colonial legislature; and in dealing with the royal governors, the legislatures acted upon the same general principles as the House of Commons in dealing with the king.

It was not until some time after 1750 that any grand assault was made upon the principle of "no taxation without representation," but the frequent disputes with the royal governors were such as to keep people from losing sight of this principle, and to make them sensitive about acts that might lead to violations of it. In the particular disputes the governors were sometimes clearly right and the people wrong. One of the Sometimes the royal governors were in the right, as to the particular question. principal objects, as we shall presently see, for which the governors wanted money, was to maintain troops for defence against the French and the Indians; and the legislatures were apt to be short-sighted and unreasonably stingy about such matters. Again, the people were sometimes seized with a silly craze for "paper money" and "wild-cat banks"—devices for making money out of nothing—and sometimes the governors were sensible enough to oppose such delusions but not altogether sensible in their manner of doing it. Thus in 1740 there was fierce excitement in Massachusetts over a quarrel between the governor and the legislature about the famous "silver bank" and "land bank." These institutions were a public nuisance and deserved to be suppressed, but the governor was obliged to appeal to parliament in order to succeed in doing it. This led many people to ask, "What business has a parliament sitting the other side of the ocean to be making laws for us?" and the grumbling was loud and bitter enough to show that this was a very dangerous question to raise.

It was in the eight colonies which had royal governors that troubles of a revolutionary character were more likely to arise than in the other five, but there were special reasons, besides those already mentioned, why Massachusetts and Virginia should prove more refractory than any of Bitter memories; in Virginia. the others. Both these great commonwealths had bitter memories. Things had happened in both which might serve as a warning, and which some of the old men still living in 1750 could distinctly remember. In Virginia the misgovernment of the royal governor Sir William Berkeley had led in 1675 to the famous rebellion headed by Nathaniel Bacon, and this rebellion had been suppressed with much harshness. Many leading citizens had been sent to the gallows and their estates had been confiscated. In Massachusetts, though there were no such scenes of cruelty to remember, the grievance was much more deep-seated and enduring.

Massachusetts had not been originally a royal province, with its governors appointed by the king. At first it had been a republic, such as Connecticut and Rhode Island now were, with governors chosen by the people. From its foundation in 1629 down to 1684 the commonwealth of Massachusetts had managed its own affairs at its own good pleasure. Practically it had been not only self-governing but almost independent. That was because affairs in England were in such confusion that until after 1660 comparatively little attention was paid to what was going on in America, and the liberties of Massachusetts prospered through the neglect of what was then called the "home government." After Charles II. came to the throne in 1660 he began to interfere with the affairs of Massachusetts, and so the very first generation of men that had been And in Massachusetts. born on the soil of that commonwealth were engaged in a long struggle against the British king for the right of managing their own affairs. After more than twenty years of this struggle, which by 1675 had come to be quite bitter, the charter of Massachusetts was annulled in 1684 and its free government was for the moment destroyed. Presently a viceroy was sent over from England, to govern Massachusetts (as well as several other northern colonies) despotically. This viceroy, Sir Edmund Andros, seems to have been a fairly well meaning man. He was not especially harsh or cruel, but his rule was a despotism, because he was not responsible to the people for what he did, but only to the king. In point of fact the two-and-a-half years of his administration were characterized by arbitrary arrests and by interference with private property and with the freedom of the press. It was so vexatious that early in 1689, taking advantage of the Revolution then going on in England, the people of Boston rose in rebellion, seized Andros and threw him into jail, and set up for themselves a provisional government. When the affairs of New England were settled after the accession of William and Mary to the throne, Connecticut and Rhode Island were allowed to keep their old governments; but Massachusetts in 1693 was obliged to take a new charter instead of her old one, and although this new charter revived the election of legislatures by the people, it left the governors henceforth to be appointed by the king.

In the political controversies of Massachusetts, therefore, in the eighteenth century, the people were animated by the recollection of what they had lost. They were somewhat less free and independent than their grandfathers had been, and they had learned what it was to have an irresponsible ruler sitting at his desk in Boston and signing warrants for the arrest of loved and respected citizens who dared criticise his sayings and doings. "Taxation without representation" was not for them a mere abstract theory; they knew what it meant. It was as near to them as the presidency of Andrew Jackson is to us; there had not been time enough to forget it. In every contest between the popular legislature and the royal governor there was some broad principle involved which there were plenty of well-remembered facts to illustrate.

These contests also helped to arouse a strong sympathy between the popular leaders in Massachusetts and in Virginia. Between the people of the two colonies there was not much real sympathy, because there was a good deal of difference between their ways of life and their opinions about things; and people, unless they are unusually wise and generous of nature, are apt to dislike and despise those who differ from them in Grounds of sympathy between Massachusetts and Virginia. opinions and habits. So there was little cordiality of feeling between the people of Massachusetts and the people of Virginia, but in spite of this there was a great and growing political sympathy. This was because, ever since 1693, they had been obliged to deal with the same kind of political questions. It became intensely interesting to a Virginian to watch the progress of a dispute between the governor and legislature of Massachusetts, because whatever principle might be victorious in the course of such a dispute, it was sure soon to find a practical application in Virginia. Hence by the middle of the eighteenth century the two colonies were keenly observant of each other, and either one was exceedingly prompt in taking its cue from the other. It is worth while to remember this fact, for without it there would doubtless have been rebellions or revolutions of American colonies, but there would hardly have been one American Revolution, ending in a grand American Union.