supper being ended, and musicke-bookes, according to the custome, being brought to the table, the mistresse of the house presented mee with a part, earnestly requesting mee to sing. But when, after manie excuses, I protested unfainedly that I could not, euerie one began to wonder. Yea, some whispered unto others, demanding how I was brought up. So that, upon shame of mine ignorance, I go now to seek out mine old friende master Gnorimus, to make myselfe his schollar.
supper being ended, and musicke-bookes, according to the custome, being brought to the table, the mistresse of the house presented mee with a part, earnestly requesting mee to sing. But when, after manie excuses, I protested unfainedly that I could not, euerie one began to wonder. Yea, some whispered unto others, demanding how I was brought up. So that, upon shame of mine ignorance, I go now to seek out mine old friende master Gnorimus, to make myselfe his schollar.
In those days a person who could not sing, and sing well, was regarded as a freak, and was required to fit himself to join in the universal diversion.If we had not turned over our music making to professionals it would be so now. Instead of going to the concert or the opera after the evening meal, or playing bridge or talking scandal, people would have participated in the singing of madrigals, glees or whatever other sort of popular spontaneous music had been developed, and all would have been sustained and uplifted by the exalted joy that comes from joining with others in the production of good music.
The people would have been joyously and heartily musical. Their taste would not have been degraded to the point where it is gratified, as in the graphophone, with a complicated succession of flat and strident sounds unmusical in themselves.
When Philip the Second, son of the great emperor Charles V, came to the throne of Spain, that country had become the greatest cosmopolitan empire in the world. The throne of Castile, at one time or another during Philip's reign, was the throne not only of Spain and Portugal, but of the Netherlands and Burgundy, the Sicilies, Sardinia, Milan, Cuba, Hispaniola, Florida, Mexico, California, nearly all of South America, and the Philippine Islands. The Spanish monarch was the eldest son of the church; and Philip, strong, ambitious, bigoted and insolent, expected,as he laid the foundations of his glorious palace, the Escorial, the eighth wonder of the world, to become master of France and Britain, and to bequeath to his son the vastest empire that the sun had ever shone upon.
By his marriage with Queen Mary he acquired the nominal title of king of England, though he was never crowned. But his grudge rose against England after Mary's death and Elizabeth's accession. The country proved itself a thorn in his side, helping the Dutch rebels and undoing at home the persecuting work of his late spouse. Philip formed a great project for the invasion of the country.
Spain was supreme then on the sea. The English navy had greatly declined. In 1575 it had but twenty-four vessels of all classes on the water. Philip knew the cleverness of the English with their ships, however, and inplanning this invasion he proposed to be invincible. Invincible he sought to make the Armada, or fleet, that he sent against the country, and invincible not only he, but all Europe, believed it to be, when, in January of the year 1588, the great flotilla was ready to sail.
It consisted of about one hundred and thirty ships, of which sixty-two were over three hundred tons burden. It was commanded by a brave and skillful sea fighter, Santa Cruz. The English had bettered their conditions of seven years before very greatly, but they were at this moment absolutely unprepared to meet a foreign fleet. Their ships were scattered far and wide, and many were unequipped. If the Armada had sailed at that moment it would have found no force ready to meet it. And it would have escaped the storms that later befell.
Butmañanais the curse of all Spain's projects. The Armada lingered. Santa Cruz, its chief, sickenedin port and died. Very likely if he had sailed no such fate would have overtaken him. This was the first of the big fleet's misfortunes. Philip looked about for another commander. By a fatuous favoritism his choice fell upon the Duke of Medina Sidonia, who was utterly incompetent.
The months flew past. Meantime the English, fully apprised of the king's intentions, were getting a fleet together. In those days it was not necessary to wait five years for a battleship to be constructed. Almost any big ship could be turned into a fighting craft. In particular, the English were well off in guns, and the delay of the Armada gave them a chance to get their artillery on board.
When—nombre de Dios!—does the reader suppose that this invincible fleet, ready in January, really set sail from Coruña? On the 12th day of July! It had already been scattered and weakened by a storm off Lisbon. On the 21st of July Medina Sidoniasailed into Drake's and Hawkins's "line ahead" formation in the English channel as Rojestvensky sailed into Togo's lair off Tsu-Shima in 1905, and the result to him somewhat resembled the subsequent fate of the Russian fleet in the Sea of Japan. It was not, however, so bad. If Medina Sidonia had gone, with his surviving ships, after the first onset, to Denmark, and refitted, he might yet have embarrassed the British. But he sought to make the passage around the north of Scotland, and a succession of storms wrecked his whole remaining fleet.
All authorities agree that in January, 1588, no English force existed which could have hoped to check Santa Cruz as things then stood. What if he had come on and landed an army of trained veterans upon England's undefended shores? He must have won. Queen Elizabeth must have been overthrown. Ireland would have gladly joined Philip.England was almost half Catholic, and the people of that faith might eventually have become reconciled to the foreigner. Philip might have made himself another Norman William. The Spanish culture would have been imposed upon the English nation. But unlike William of Normandy, who transferred his power to Britain, Philip would have remained a Spanish sovereign, and London would have been ruled from Madrid.
Philip would never have temporized with English Protestantism. The chances are that he would have stamped it out utterly and at the start, as he sought, too late, to do in the Netherlands. If he might have worked his will, he would also have suppressed English learning and literature. William Shakespeare, who had just come up to London, had never produced a play when the Armada sailed, and probably he never would have produced one if it had conquered. The glorious Elizabethanculture would have been nipped in the bud.
All Britain's possessions in the new world, already existent or to be, would have fallen to Spain or France if Philip had overthrown Elizabeth—doubtless to Spain, for Philip's ambition to seize the French throne would have been furthered by his conquest of England. Spanish viceroys would have borne sway for centuries over all North America. A hybrid Indian-Latin race would have arisen here, as in Mexico and Peru. Lacking the inspiration of North American freedom, all Spanish America to the southward would have remained to this day under the dons.
Castilian speech, Castilian cultivation, Castilian manners, the Castilian faith, might have reigned supreme over a dusky race from the St. Lawrence to the Straits of Magellan.
On the 18th of July, in the year 1605, Samuel de Champlain, in command of a ship of the King of France, and engaged in the search for an eligible site for a great settlement, anchored in the harbor which was afterward to be known as the harbor of Plymouth, in New England. Two days before, he had been in Boston Bay. He mapped both these havens, and expressed his approval of the physical resources, and also the native Indian peoples, of the region.
At that time the coast of NewEngland was really unappropriated, though soon after it was claimed by both France and England. It was merely a question which power should first seriously undertake the settlement of the country. If France planted her colony here, the land was destined to be French. If England hers, it would be English.
Champlain carefully studied the advantages of Boston and Plymouth. That he thought favorably of the latter place is proved by the very decent map, still extant, which he made of Plymouth and Duxbury waters. "Port St. Louis," he called the place, after the patron saint of France, and after his royal master. It looked very much as if he hoped that the spot he so honored would be made the seat of the French empire in the western world.
But Champlain sailed away, bearing with him the blessing of the thickly settled and sedentary native people. He passed around Cape Cod,and went westward as far as Nauset harbor, near New Bedford. And then, in due time, he sailed for France. When, in 1608, he finally laid the foundations of the city which was to be the capital of France in the new world, he did not lay them at Plymouth or Boston, but at Quebec, on the St. Lawrence.
Why was his choice thus made? Largely, no doubt, because Champlain, whose accurate information and seemingly always wise observation were greatly trusted by the King of France, was infatuated with the noble aspect and vast proportions of the gulf and river of St. Lawrence. He was first of all a sailor, and he had seen nothing to compare with the magnificence of this greatembouchure. Here were scope and refuge for the greatest of navies! Here, it seemed, was a place designed by the Almighty to be the seat of an empire!
Champlain had an excellent eye for harbors, but not so good an eyeof prophecy for the grand constructive events that were to be. He left the Massachusetts coast unappropriated. First its native inhabitants, so numerous, so gentle, so industrious, were decimated by a plague that came to them from the white men. Only a remnant survived. And when, in 1620, their sachem, Samoset, shouted "Welcome, Englishmen!" to the men of the Mayflower, the Indian king hailed, unconsciously, the advent of an empire which was to cast the domain of New France into a cold and waning shadow. For Quebec was too far north, and its hinterland too poor and restricted, ever to nurse an imperial race.
What if Champlain had been more sagacious, and had made his stand on the coast of Massachusetts? In all probability the settlement would have been definitive. The Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Puritans of Boston, finding no place for their settlement in the north, would, in 1620,have gone to Virginia or Georgia. The steely Yankee wedge which, on one side, was to force the Dutch out of New Amsterdam, and on the other the French out of Port Royal and Acadia, would never have been driven. New England would have been French forever, and New York Dutch.
The principle of the hinterland was asserted so successfully in our early history that Massachusetts and Connecticut were able to claim territory as far west as the Mississippi River. It was by means of this hinterland claim that the young American republic succeeded in rounding out its northwestern possessions, after the War of the Revolution, and obtaining Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois. All these would have been French if Champlain had made New England French; and the English colonies, if they had ever become strong enough to throw off the British yoke, would have consistedof a restricted section in the Southeast.
Indeed, without Sam Adams, Otis, Warren, and Israel Putnam, without the revolt against the Stamp Act, and without Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill, it is impossible to conceive of the American republic at all.
Supposing it to have been constituted notwithstanding, it would have had to do without the influence of the New England town meeting, the New England common free school, the New England college, and the congregational system of church organization. It would have been deprived of the work of Franklin, Hancock, the Adamses, Webster, Sumner, Garrison, Phillips, Grant and the Shermans, in its affairs, and of Longfellow, Emerson, Holmes, Lowell, Whittier, Hawthorne and Parkman in its intellectual life.
What would the New England country and the people have been like, if Champlain had never turnedback from Plymouth Bay? We know from Benjamin Franklin's account what the progeny of the English settlers had become even as long ago as 1772. "I thought often," he wrote in that year, "of the happiness of New England, where every man is a freeholder, has a vote in public affairs, lives in a tidy, warm house, has plenty of good food and fuel, with whole clothes from head to foot, the manufacture perhaps of his own family. Long may they continue in this situation!" What the Canadian habitant is to-day, we know. Very often he is unable to read or write, and his material and moral condition very low. Even as late as 1837 the Canadian provinces were still arbitrarily ruled by royal governors, with appointed councils or upper houses which had a veto on all legislation. There was no self-rule, and the mass of the French people were illiterate and miserably poor.
Sieur Samuel de Champlain did agood day's work for English-speaking America, and the great free republic that was to be, when he pointed his prow northward and sailed away, out of sight of Cape Cod, in the summer of 1605.
Once at least the New World has furnished to the Old World a reigning, actual king; once, for thirteen years, a monarch, sitting on a throne in America, ruled thence an ancient kingdom in Europe. And twice this singular thing might have happened, with this time an enthroned sovereign on the banks of the James instead of on the shore of a Brazilian bay, if a certain king's son and king-to-be had been of a somewhat more venturing and less indolent disposition.
The occasion when the thing reallyhappened was when Don John VI, King of Portugal, removed his royal throne and all the paraphernalia of government from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, in 1807 (being impelled thereto by an intrusive movement on the part of one Napoleon Bonaparte), and turned Portugal (after the withdrawal of the French) into an actual dependency of Brazil. This it remained until King John recrossed the Atlantic in 1820. Throughout that period the scepter bore sway from west to east, from America Europe-ward.
Very much the same thing would have occurred further north in the contingency to which I have referred; and if it had, a royalist or monarchist influence might have been laid upon the English colonies in America which would have colored their history and institutions in a marked degree, even if their destiny had not been permanently affected.
When Charles I, King of England,was arrested, imprisoned, and put to death by the Parliament party in 1649, Virginia experienced a shock of shame and indignation. That colony had absolutely no sympathy with Cromwell and his party. It was in no sense or part Puritan. The Cavalier sentiment dominated it completely; for though the bulk of its inhabitants came out very poor, and were as far as possible from being "gentlemen," they were not at all of the material of which Roundheads were made; nor had they any influence in the government of the Province. The General Assembly represented the gentlemen of the colony, who were royalists to a man.
It is not surprising, therefore, that upon the receipt of the news of the execution of Charles I, the General Assembly of Virginia lost no time in meeting and passing an act in which the dead king's son, Charles II, was recognized as the rightful and reigning sovereign. Legal processes, andthe machinery of the provincial government, continued to run in the king's name. In England, Cromwell was installed as Lord Protector. But Virginia refused to recognize him or his title. At least one county of Virginia formally proclaimed Charles king, requiring "all his majesty's liege people to pray God to bless Charles the Second, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland, Virginia, New England and the Caribda Islands." This, I believe, was the first appearance of the term "King of Virginia," a title which was destined to be heard again somewhat later.
Nor did the people content themselves with proclaiming Charles king. In 1650, Governor Berkeley sent Colonel Norwood to Holland to invite the prince to become the ruling sovereign of what Raleigh had called "the newe Inglishe Nation" on this side the water. Charles did not accept. Nor did he frankly refuse. He hadnot the boldness to go to Virginia, but he was delighted with the chance to put on for a moment the manner and authority of a ruler. He sent Berkeley a new commission as governor, signed by himself as king, and gave Colonel Norwood a commission as treasurer of the colony. Both commissions were honored in Virginia.
The colony, indeed, with Barbadoes in the West Indies, virtually constituted itself the Dominion of King Charles the Second; and it is in memory of that assumption of the whole kingdom's prerogative, as the Virginians believe, that the state is called the Old Dominion to-day.
Nor did the people propose that their allegiance should remain merely nominal. They essayed actually to cut the connection with Cromwell's Commonwealth and maintain themselves as the sovereign remainder of the English realm. They succeeded in maintaining this position for a considerable time—until, that is, 1651,when Cromwell's government sent three ships of war to reduce the Virginians to submission. As all the principal settlements were within easy reach of navigable water, and had not developed sufficient back territory by means of which to support themselves, it was impracticable for them to hold out long; they were obliged to submit. Cromwell treated the province oppressively, and forbade the other colonies to trade with it.
It is not at all surprising that Virginia, which in the meantime had become the place of refuge of many more royalists, took steps to throw off the Puritan allegiance as soon as possible after Cromwell's death, and sought to anticipate the restoration of the Stuarts. Sir William Berkeley, whom Cromwell had displaced with a Roundhead governor, was again called to the head of things by the people. He refused to assume the governorship at their mandate unlessthey gave him their solemn and formal promise to venture their lives and fortunes for King Charles II. This promise was given him by the unanimous voice of the electors. Berkeley then proceeded to proclaim Charles "King of England, Scotland, France, Ireland and Virginia." Virginia was once more the sole existing segment of the king's dominion. In Virginia, and in Virginia only, processes and documents were issued in his name.
Charles was therefore really king in Virginia, though in very fact he was still living a lazy and rather low life in the Dutch towns, or eating, as a guest, the bread of the French and Spanish nobility. The Virginians, however, were not at all content with having set up a mere paper sovereignty for him. Berkeley had kept in touch, by letter and through messengers, with Charles, and had sent word to him, in Holland, before the Commonwealth had fallen, that hewould raise his standard in Virginia if the king would give his consent. Once more he offered him a Virginian crown. Richard Lee was sent to Holland with a proposition from Berkeley to take the field for the king. It was even proposed that Charles should come to Virginia and set up his throne there.
The king once more sent cordial thanks to the Virginians. But he did not accept their proposition. We can imagine that along one side of his nature it appealed to him, and on the other and commanding side it was quite unwelcome; that is to say, while it must have inflamed somewhat his ambition to be king once more and have done with the eating of the bread of others, it was quite in conflict with his natural indolence and moral cowardice. His first attempt to assert his kingship, when, on the field of Worcester, he was ignominiously defeated by Cromwell, had sickened him with all proceedings having the stamp of energy uponthem. As a matter of fact, it would have been perfectly safe for him to raise his standard and set up his throne in Virginia. But he would not venture it. He would remain on the Continent and await the turn of events.
Ere long events made him king in England. The Commonwealth fell to pieces when there was no longer a strong hand to guide it. Charles landed shabbily, even squalidly, at Dover, almost sneaking into the country, instead of coming in triumph from Virginia, with a kingly New World in his hand, as he might have done if he had accepted Berkeley's invitation.
If, after his defeat at Worcester, he had taken advantage of Virginia's first proffer and of French assistance, and raised his flag in America, Charles might have affected the world's history very materially. There was no time when the Puritanswere not in a minority in England. They held down the majority for a time because they had developed a superior military capacity, and had a splendid, resolute army. But to the nucleus of a brilliant Cavalier command in the New World, the more vigorous English royalists might have rallied. A court at Williamsburg, which was then and for a long time afterward the capital of Virginia, would have meant a royal court in London much sooner than it really arrived, and would have caused the Commonwealth to leave a fainter and narrower mark upon the history of England than in the event it did leave.
Meantime, what a brilliant court would have assembled around the gay and talkative monarch at Williamsburg! Already the Lees, the Washingtons, the Berkeleys, and many others of the "first families," were established in Virginia. Charles would probably have been happy in the easy, light-hearted atmosphereof the plantations. There were no Puritans there to bother him. Virginia had made its own laws against Puritan practices—and enforced them.
Never was a monarch who would have been better pleased with having about him actual slaves—men and women whose bodies he would have owned. His sway must have spread northward as far as the border of the French possessions, for though New England was Puritan, it bent reluctantly to the sway of the Commonwealth, seeming to scent in the Roundhead sovereignty a kind of rival that threatened to take over its half-won autonomy. A kingship exercised in America would probably have suited the men of New England very well.
In all likelihood the throne would in due time have been transferred to the mother country. But its erection here, even for a few years, must have infused into the character of theAmericans generally a larger element of monarchicalism than fell to their lot as it was. Virginia would hardly have fallen off so readily into colonial republicanism as it did in 1774-1776. English neglect of a really royalist Virginia sowed the seed of Virginian rebellion. If Virginia had not supported Massachusetts, shoulder to shoulder, there could not have been an American Revolution. Charles did not know how far he let Virginia go when he rebuffed Berkeley's emissaries.
The sentiment of personal loyalty to the crown remained strong in the colonies up to the very outburst of the Revolution. The Americans dissolved the relation of subject and sovereign with regret. If they had ever had a king whom they could call their own, the interest enkindled and perpetuated by his presence might very well have turned the scale in 1776 and prevented the withdrawal of the colonies.
When an English father, irascible and opinionated, disowns and turns out of doors a son who has not only disobeyed him but proved false to the traditions and obvious interests of the family, he is very apt to adhere to his action. A very great deal turned upon a case, once, in which an English father, after making a very firm show of disowning his son, at last relented and took him back to his heart.
Pennsylvania, to wit, turned upon it; and all the amazing success of William Penn's great experiment incolonization. There has never been anything quite like that success in the world's history, for the great trek of the already established American population in the nineteenth century was a readjustment, an extension, rather than a colonization in the true sense. The planting of Pennsylvania was a true colonization. Not only did it amount to the creation of a great and model commonwealth, full-fledged, with a composite new-world population, in twenty or even ten years' time, but it furnished the keystone to the arch of states that constituted the American republic in the next century after Penn's settlement.
Philadelphia led the American towns in the seven years of the Revolution. It was their capital commercially as well as politically. It supplied most of the sinews of war. Without Robert Morris's $1,400,000, all of which came from Philadelphia, the final and crucial campaign ofthe war could not have been fought. More than that, without just the sort of commonwealth that Pennsylvania had already become, standing in the center of things—cosmopolitan, independent of royalist or aristocratic influence, populous, well-to-do, democratic, steady—it is hard to see how the Revolution could have been undertaken at all.
But for the incident which permitted Penn's settlement, the vast territory which afterward constituted Pennsylvania would have become merely an extension of New York, or of New Jersey, or of Maryland, or of Virginia, or of all of them. The chances are that its resources would have been exploited by slave labor. The greater part of the state might have remained slave territory up to 1861. In any case its development would have been much more slow, its peopling much less rapid. Not only must Indian wars have checked growth, but the spectacle ofthe arrival of five hundred thousand stalwart Germans, the creation of the largest city in the colonies within fifty years, and the upbuilding, in that time, of a trade from the Delaware River that employed more than five hundred ships and seven thousand sailors, could never have been presented.
The part which Pennsylvania began to play from the moment of Penn's arrival, and which it still plays, in American affairs, was directly dependent upon Penn's character and genius, and, for a long time, upon his wealth and social position. Without the wealth which William Penn inherited from his father, Admiral Sir William Penn, he could not have organized his Pennsylvania Society, nor bought the site of Philadelphia. Without the position, as well as the wealth, which he inherited, he could not, in the first place, have aspired to the acquaintance with and confidence of King Charles II; and thesewere absolutely essential to the extraordinary charter, in behalf of a despised and distrusted people, which Penn received at the king's hands.
Had Penn always been in this favorable position? We shall see. The admiral, his father, was a good churchman and a conservative man. King Charles held him in very high estimation. The son was brilliant, and of noble character. He was sent to Oxford University; and what was the father's astonishment, after the boy had been there some little time, to hear that he had joined the despised and persecuted sect of the Quakers! This was very much as if, at the present day, the son and heir of a great multi-millionaire should join, not merely the Socialists, but the Anarchists at Paterson!
Sir William raved and scolded. The son only grew more firm in the faith. Sir William endured much; but finding the young man actually inclined to address the king as"thou," he told him that if he committed this impropriety, or "thee-ed" and "thoued" either him, the admiral, or the Duke of York, he would disown him, and cut him off without a shilling. On the very first opportunity after this, young William addressed King Charles as "thou!" The king, having a more than royal sense of humor, made a jest of the matter, but Sir William did not. He was as good as his word. He turned his son out of doors, and bade him begone. The youth went abroad, and took up for a time a very much discredited existence. He had already been expelled from the university.
Here, for a time, the fate of Pennsylvania certainly trembled in the balance. It was quite within the outraged admiral's power to make the ban permanent. If he had done so, there would never have been a Quaker-German commonwealth in America.
It is known that the son acceptedhis banishment as permanent. But his mother did not. She pleaded with the father for his forgiveness. She reminded him of the boy's great natural goodness, his brilliancy, his affectionateness. He would, Lady Penn maintained, recover from his distemper of Quakerism. She begged her husband, before it was too late, to relent and recall him.
At length, moved by this appeal and the promptings of his own heart, the admiral called the young man home. Once or twice afterwards he was on the point of a more radical banishment of him. But, fortunately for the New World, Sir William's heart was soft after all. The son was reëstablished in his good graces. After the admiral's death, in 1670, it was found that he had bequeathed all his wealth to the son, and, owing to the son's influence, the Quakers improved their position not a little, and in due time Penn organized and put through the Pennsylvaniaexperiment. But King Charles took good care to inform him that the name "Pennsylvania," officially bestowed on the colony, was not in honor of the founder, but in compliment to the admiral, his father.
Narrow as this contingency may have been, since so great an event depended on the impulse of one man, it was after all a moral contingency, and not due of physical accident, as so many others have been. It is the more impressive for this reason. It is good to know that a few heartbeats the more, in the breast of a man who can be kind as well as hot-tempered, may create a mighty empire.
One summer day, in 1746, a British ship of war lay in the Potomac River below the place where the city of Washington now stands. The officers of the ship had been visiting at Mount Vernon, which was the residence of Major Lawrence Washington, adjutant-general of Virginia.
No vessel of the royal navy entered the Potomac River without a visit on the part of its officers to Major Washington's house. He had been in the king's service at the siege of Cartagena and elsewhere. Admiral Vernonwas his friend; Major Washington's estate on the Potomac had been named after the admiral. Lawrence Washington's acquaintance with the men of both army and navy was wide, and his popularity among them great. A visit to his hospitable residence, where he entertained them with true Virginian lavishness, was always a bright spot in any naval officer's life at that day.
At Lawrence Washington's table, for two or three years prior to 1746, had sat his younger brother, George by name. This lad, who was a gentleman and a soldier in miniature, had often listened to stories of the exploits of the navy—of the capture of Porto Bello, of the bombardment of Cartagena, and of cruisings and battles along the Spanish Main. These stories and personal contact with their heroes had inspired him with an eager desire to enter the naval service. His father was dead, and his brother, who had virtuallytaken the father's place, favored the boy's design. His mother had opposed it. But at last she had been induced to give her consent. A midshipman's warrant was obtained for young George Washington, and on the summer day in 1746 of which we have spoken his luggage had actually been sent on board the ship lying in the river.
But at the last moment Mary Washington flatly rebelled. She could not bear the thought of her boy's going to sea. She foresaw a time when she would need him at home. She withdrew her consent; and as her signature was necessary to his enlistment, it was impossible for him to join the ship, and his luggage was sent back to Mount Vernon.
So thus it happened that George Washington did not, at the age of fourteen, enter the British navy, and embark upon a career which would probably have held him fast all the rest of his life.
It was a real contingency—that of the possible commitment of George Washington to the royal cause. Every influence that bore upon him, up to the date of his brother Lawrence's death, in 1752, was royalist. This brother was married to the daughter of George William Fairfax, cousin and manager of the great American estates of Lord Fairfax. Lord Fairfax himself, removing to Virginia, became the patron, friend and mentor of young George Washington. The young man was in constant association with Englishmen, and always more or less under official influence.
The Fairfaxes remained loyal to the British power when the war of independence was declared. If Lawrence Washington had lived it is quite conceivable—aye, probable—that he would have gone with them. If George Washington had not been thrown much into contact after that with his Virginian neighbors, amongwhom the spirit of rebellion had been propagated from Massachusetts—if he had not himself become a colonial soldier and commander—there can be little question that he would have clung to the English side.
In the meantime, undoubtedly, he would have been advanced to rather high rank in the naval service, if he had joined it. The years between 1746, when the midshipman's warrant was obtained for Washington, and 1774, when the colonies began to flame up into revolt, had been of great activity at sea.
The young officer might have participated in the destruction of the French fleet at Cape Finisterre; in the victory off Lagos; in the great decisive combat in Quiberon Bay; in the capture of Havana, and in many other sea fights. He would have fought by the side of Boscawen, Sir Edward Hawke, Lord Howe, Duff and Rodney, and very likely have won laurels such as theirs. Nothingcolonial could have separated him from the flag which he had thus served, any more than the influence of his native state could have separated Farragut from the Stars and Stripes in 1861.
Is it too much to say that the American republic would have been fatherless without Washington? Perhaps an arm might have been found—though that is doubtful—that could have wielded his sword. But where was the brain, the patience, the tact, the determination, that would have composed the differences in the American councils, and have kept the discordant colonies and the jealous commanders together?
That another man, that any combination of men, could have done what he did, is inconceivable. In the grandeur of his character and in the genius with which he accomplished a tremendous work, he is uncompanioned not only in America, but in the history of the world. Withouthis steadying hand in the war, the American army would have followed a devious course to death, and the young republic one to its destruction.
As to the decisive part which he played in the formation of the union of the States after the war, the word of his companions in the Federal Constituent Convention is conclusive. "Were it not for one great character in America," said Grayson of Virginia, referring to Washington, "so many men would not be for this government; we do not fear while he lives, but who besides him can concentrate the confidence and affection of all Americans?" No one else ever could have concentrated them. Monroe reported to Jefferson, "Be assured Washington's influence carried this government." And Bancroft has put this judgment on record: "The country was an instrument with thirteen strings, and the only master who could bring out all their harmonious thought was Washington.Had the idea prevailed that he would not accept the Presidency, it would have proved fatal."
Washington was the pivot upon which all things turned. Lacking such a pivot, the machinery of the American republic would have tumbled into ruin. Happy the choice of the Virginian mother who could not spare her boy on that summer day, and sent aboard the man-of-war in Potomac's stream for his dunnage!
"He thought out the Constitution of the United States and the details of the government of the Union; and out of the chaos that existed after the Revolution raised a fabric every part of which is instinct with his thought." So said one of his contemporaries, Ambrose Spencer, of Alexander Hamilton; and another said: "He did the thinking of his time." The thinking that Hamilton did for the young American republic was of the most tremendous and vital importance to it. His services as afinancier were not merely of a negative or saving character—they were positively constructive and permanently enduring; he "created a public credit and brought the resources of the country into active efficiency." It was Hamilton who founded the American system of business and finance.
Yet it is altogether likely that but for an accidental circumstance or two Alexander Hamilton would never have come to the continental colonies. He was born on the Island of Nevis, in the West Indies, and upon that island, and upon St. Christopher and St. Croix, neighboring islands, his life up to the age of fifteen was spent. His father, James Hamilton, had proved "feckless and unfortunate," as a British biographer of Hamilton expresses it, and early ceased to provide for the boy, or, apparently, to take any interest in his education or welfare. His mother died early, and left him to the chargeof her relatives, and as she bequeathed to them several other children, they had little thought about Alexander except to make him of some use and lighten their own burden. He was sent to school scarcely at all, and at the age of twelve was put into the shop or store of Nicholas Cruger, a general dealer at St. Croix, to earn his living as a clerk.
There he remained for about three years. He has often been described as phenomenally precocious, and he certainly was, in the sense that his mind ripened early. But there was nothing of the quality of smart, self-satisfied immaturity about his genius. He read much, studied deeply, and received some good training at the hands of Rev. Hugh Knox, a Presbyterian minister.
But all at once there occurred the accident which resulted in his going to the continental colonies. In the late summer of 1772 a fearful hurricane swept over the Leeward Islands.The boy Hamilton, then fifteen years old, had his full share in the adventures attending this calamity, and wrote a long and vivid account of it for a newspaper published at St. Christopher. By this brilliant piece of news work the entire West Indies were electrified. The people there had had plenty of hurricanes before, but none of them had ever been adequately "written up." Young Hamilton awoke one morning to find himself in the enjoyment of a fame which extended all the way from Jamaica to Trinidad.
The immediate result of this notoriety was to convince Alexander's relatives that they possessed in him a prodigy, and to stimulate them to find means to educate him. They raised a fund forthwith without any particular difficulty, and shipped him, armed with a letter of introduction from Rev. Mr. Knox, to Boston, en route to New York. Lacking this assistance, it is unlikely that the youthwould have found his way to our shores. Perhaps he would, in spite of everything, have risen to eminence in the West Indies. Very likely he would one day have drifted to Scotland or England, and he might have become a famous man there. But America would have lost him.
There is still another and vital contingency associated with Hamilton's removal to the American continent. On its way to Boston, while in the open ocean, the ship on which he had sailed took fire. For some time it was in danger of destruction. But with great difficulty the flames were extinguished. If they had prevailed, the career of the West Indian genius would doubtless have been cut short by death.
Thus, by the aid, first, of a tropical hurricane, and, second, through the efforts of the crew of the ship that bore him, in stifling a fire in the hold, Alexander Hamilton reached the American colonies just in time to beswept into the current of the movement for independence; to be made over anew into an ardent American, and to put his stamp forever upon the young nation which arose from the smoke of Bunker Hill. The dark-skinned, dark-eyed, exotic-looking student at King's College, whom the citizens of New York at first looked at askance as a very "queer West Indian," became a great leader, a commander, a guide, a magnificent constructive as well as restraining force.
What this country would have been without him, or rather, what it must forever have failed to be, may be inferred from the things which it became that were owed to him. He was the inventor of American protection. American industry was founded upon his "report on manufactures." As the first and greatest of Federalists, he saved the confederation from disruption by supplying the idea of central authority. Others might laborfor freedom—he labored for security. He put reason at the bottom of our commonwealth. Without his principles, the republic would have lacked a balance wheel. The States' rights would have been everything—the nation's rights nothing.
All our national expansion was wrapped up in Hamilton's views. McKinley and Roosevelt have been his continuators. The sentiment which governs our republic to-day is Hamiltonian; and the war and discord that have afflicted us, as the result of the looseness of our confederation, must long since have wrecked the nation but for the balance wheel with which he supplied us.
In every age of the world, and in every place, one voice has always commanded in the affairs of nations, peoples and communities. If oligarchies, legislatures, groups or cabals have seemed to bear sway, it has nevertheless been true that in each of these groups, from time to time, the influence of some individual has been preponderant. The freest republics are an organization of this principle—a willing submission of the many to the leadership of chosen men.
In times of stress and strife and change it is impossible that strongmen should not seize the reins of power, no matter what political system exists, no matter what anarchy tends to prevail. Change, indeed, makes the opportunity of the strong; and the fate of nations and continents depends upon the character of the strong man who is brought forth. If he is good, as Washington was good, his fellow-countrymen derive lasting and unmeasured benefit from his grasping of his opportunity. If he is bad, as Napoleon Bonaparte was bad, the evil harvest of his vices may be reaped through generations and centuries, as France has reaped, and is now reaping, an inheritance of strife and national decline.
When the Revolution of 1789 came to France there were many people, of all parties and conditions, who believed that the country had its Washington. He was to be found, they thought, in the person of the Marquis de La Fayette. This man was Washington's friend. He had successfullycopied many of his virtues. He was unselfishly patriotic. He believed in the liberty of the people, and wished to see them govern themselves. Though himself a nobleman, he believed in the abolition of titles of nobility. In his room, and afterward in his office as a public servant, he kept two frames hanging on the wall. In one frame was a copy of the American Declaration of Independence. The other frame was empty, but it bore the legend, "This space awaits the French Declaration of Independence."
When the Revolution broke out, La Fayette was called by the people to the center of real power—the command of the troops in Paris. Both king and people trusted him. His power for good was almost absolute. He prevented anarchy and restored order in Paris after the overthrow of the Bastile. He gave the country a Bill of Rights and a Constitution founded on the American models.The quarrels of the warring factions were stayed by his hand. The mob dared not turn the king out. La Fayette's moderating influence was the ballast that kept the French nation, in spite of certain excesses, on a steady keel.
Even when the Girondists and Jacobins rose and were ready to fly at one another's throats, the fear of La Fayette kept these factions from violence. If he had maintained this influence—if he had preserved the sagacity and boldness to side with the people and lead them—the French nation might have been saved from anarchy, reaction, the tyrannies of emperors and of mobs, and the slow degeneration that has followed its long diet of gunpowder.
But in the test La Fayette did not exhibit this power. In 1792 he was in the field, in command of an army, resisting the Prussian invasion. The nation, aroused, was equal to the task of repelling foreign attack. But inParis events were marching. The people rose and overthrew the throne and the royalist Constitution which La Fayette had made. But they turned still to La Fayette. They offered him the chief executive power in the new government.
This was his opportunity to save France. He was not equal to it. He did not rise to the emergency. He not only refused the offer of power, but made his troops renew their oaths of fidelity to the king. Then the Assembly declared him a traitor; and La Fayette, taking with him a few followers, deserted his command, made his way to Bouillon, on the frontier, and rode out of France into a foreign land!
No man can imagine Washington taking such a step as that. La Fayette suffered from it, and he afterwards served his country nobly. But the eternal mischief of his weakness had been done. Girondists and Jacobins, relieved from the fear of him,turned to mutual destruction and murder. The Reign of Terror was on. The nation was plunged in an orgy of blood. Four hundred thousand men and women were put to death. Liberty in France was assassinated in the house of its friends.
One man, I have said, always comes to the top of things. With La Fayette gone, Robespierre, the man of blood, prevailed. Robespierre was the Terror. And after him, the Terror having appeased its fearful thirst, and Robespierre's head having gone into the basket with his victims', there came another man to take advantage of the paralysis the perverted Revolution had inflicted upon France. That man was Napoleon Bonaparte.
Bonaparte freed La Fayette from captivity. Bonaparte held him in contempt, calling him a "noodle." It was not so bad as that. But Napoleon despised a man who had had his chance and failed to grasp it.
Had La Fayette proved equal tothat opportunity, France would have been organized as a constitutional republic. The Terror would not have been. Napoleon's ambition might have been held in check. The balance in Europe would have been maintained, but the leadership of France would have been consolidated and become immortal. The nations would have followed her example. Monarchy would have died of dry rot. The dream of a United States of Europe might have been realized—perhaps with a city of La Fayette, the capital of the vast confederation, the European equivalent city of Washington, smiling down, it may be, from the neutral shores of the Lake of Constance to east, to west, to north, to south, with a benediction of peace.
How many Americans of the present day realize that the State of New York, at the time of the adoption of the national Constitution, was radically and overwhelmingly opposed to entrance into the Union which the Constitution proposed, and was at last forced into the league of States only by the demonstration that the State would be isolated and cut off from its neighbor States if it did not join, with a tariff wall raised against it? It is indeed hard for New Yorkers to realize, asthey live to-day under the Stars and Stripes, having forgotten what their State flag is, and being among the most zealous supporters of the Union, that their State led the opposition to the Constitution, and that but for the influence of a very few men in two other States, New York might have prevented the consummation of that "more perfect union."
The contingency that prevented the State from dismembering the Union at its start was a narrow one, but it had been provided for. Hamilton and the Federalists had laid their plans well. They first furnished the Southern States, and the smallest States in the North, with an interested reason for joining the Union. They gave the men of the South representation on their slaves. They made the little States equal with the great States in the Senate. Then they provided that when nine States had ratified the Constitution it should become effective, and a confederationshould be formed by those nine States, if there were no others.
Then the ratifications began. The game was to get nine States. Little Delaware said "Yes" first. Franklin and Wilson had a firm hold upon Pennsylvania, and that State entered next under the pressure they exerted. New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland and South Carolina followed. This made eight States. Then things stuck fast. Would there be a ninth?
Two thirds of the delegates in the convention of New York were firmly opposed to ratification. They believed the Constitution meant an end of the liberties of the States. They saw a royal throne looming up for America. They feared, they said, a great central power which should oppress and overtax the people of the States. Governor Clinton led the opposition to ratification. Hamilton's able arguments had no effect. New York would not come in.
All the remaining States were believed to be also opposed. New Hampshire had refused to comply with the requisitions of the Confederation; why should it look with more favor on the Constitution? In Virginia, Patrick Henry led the opposition to ratification with impassioned eloquence. Richard Henry Lee, William Grayson, George Mason and James Monroe, all great men in the State, were unalterably opposed to ratification. It certainly looked black for the Union.
But in this moment of apparent triumph, while the New York convention was in session, Governor Clinton and his party in the convention heard surprising news. New Hampshire, under the influence of Massachusetts and of the wiser counsels of some of its own leaders, ratified the Constitution on the 21st of June, 1788—more than nine months after the adoption of the instrument by theConstitutional Convention at Philadelphia.
This event put a new face on the situation in New York. The Union was now decreed. If New York did not enter it, she must be prepared to stand alone, as an independent nation. Could she do that? The new Confederation would hem her in on both sides. To it would belong New Jersey, which flanked her only seaport on the west, and Connecticut and Massachusetts, which walled her in on the east. The shape of the State adapted it very badly indeed for an independent position. Moreover, influences were known to be at work which would precipitate a hostile tariff against the States which remained out of the Union. A few months later such a tariff was actually adopted against Rhode Island, which was treated as a foreign country in the levying of duties on imports.
New York could not stand that. Gilbert Livingston and a few otherschanged their votes under a distinct announcement that the pressure of "sister States" had made it impracticable to continue the opposition. But even at the last, the Constitution was ratified by a majority of only two in a vote of sixty! Gilbert Livingston held the fate of the State in his hands, and he, though pledged against the Union, put New York into the Union by his vote.
One vote would have kept New York out.
We have noted the fact that New York's position was unfavorable for an attempt at independence. But the fact that the voice of but one man prevented the attempt shows that the other opposing delegates were not much afraid of making the leap. Supposing Gilbert Livingston had voted the other way, and the vote had been thirty-one to twenty-nine against ratification, instead of the same figure in its favor? What would have resulted?
Let us see. Two other States were radically opposed to the Constitution—Rhode Island and North Carolina. Very likely they would have been glad to form a defensive alliance with New York. Virginia ratified a few days after New Hampshire, but she might easily have retracted her ratification, for she had no heart in it. With Virginia, the malcontent States would have had (census of 1790) a population of 1,550,306, against 2,378,908 for the remaining colonies, including Vermont, which was not yet in. This would not have been an utterly hopeless foundation for a new league, constituted on the easy terms upon which, and upon which only, these States were willing to enter the Union. The want of contiguity of territory would have been the worst objection to the formation of the league.
But the real effect of New York's self-exclusion, so narrowly prevented, would have been a negative one. It would have prevented all cohesionin the new Union. It would have driven a wedge straight through the new republic, from west to east. Worse, it would have erected secession into a principle from the start. Ere long we should have had at least three republics instead of one, and probably more. Politically we should have been what Central and South America are now. Real progress would have been barred. Wars would have been probable between the States. European political influences would have penetrated the weaker States, or alliances of States.
In short, the "American idea," government of the people by the people and for the people, would probably have been stillborn. By his change of vote, Gilbert Livingston signed the death warrant of the principle of secession. Not only did he set going the unifying influences which prevailed over State sovereignty, but he decreed the Empire State, destined to be a bulwark against disunion.
After the battle of New Orleans, on the 8th of January, 1814, General Andrew Jackson, the victorious commander, called before him a certain officer, of dashing and Frenchy appearance, and publicly thanked him for the important part which he had borne in the battle. To judge from the signal honor done to this man, the credit for the victory was in no inconsiderable part due to him. And, indeed, this was the case.
The man to whom the victor's thanks had been thus conspicuously awarded was Jean Lafitte, the Baratarianpirate. That the success of Jackson in defeating and virtually destroying the army of Pakenham, consisting of the very flower of the Duke of Wellington's soldiery, hinged, in an important sense, upon this extraordinary corsair and buccaneer, has never been adequately acknowledged in American history.
Jean Lafitte, the foremost of the three pirate brothers of Barataria, was a man of extraordinary influence and popularity among the French and other Latin inhabitants of Louisiana and New Orleans. He was a native of France, and a brave and chivalrous corsair, as corsairs go. A price had already been put upon his head by the American governor, Claiborne. But so secure was Lafitte in the affections of the Creole people, whom he served in many ways, that he frequently attended parties and receptions in New Orleans. Arriving, on such occasions, in the full splendor of his outlaw state, and bringing joyto the heart of every lady in the room by his attractive manners as well as by his fame, the pirate chief would practically defy the authorities to lay a hand upon him. If agents of the law were sent to arrest him, he knew of it, through a hundred spies, long before they reached the place, and withdrew at once to some near-by hiding place which was well known to him. In New Orleans he had a hundred safe places of refuge.
Under his command was a force of pirates who were many or few, according to the exigencies of the moment; for they could masquerade as peaceful fishermen if necessary, or they could, upon occasion, muster a force of several hundred at a word's notice—always perfectly armed, perfectly drilled, thoroughly redoubtable.
Lafitte preyed impartially upon all the commerce of the Gulf of Mexico, and, when pursued, ran into one of the numerous mouths of the Mississippior some inlet of the Gulf—into Barataria Lake, into Bayou Lafourche, or into Bayou Teche. There it was vain to follow him, for the intricacies of these passages were known only to his men or to the dwellers along their shores, who were in sympathy with him.
When the British descended upon New Orleans in the autumn of 1813, they offered Jean Lafitte a captain's commission in the British naval service, thirty thousand dollars in money, a full pardon for past offenses and rewards in money and lands for his followers if he would join them in making war on the Americans. He could easily have done so. The French people of Louisiana had no keen loyalty for the Stars and Stripes at that time. As Lafitte went they might have gone. The British knew this, and made their bait a rich one.
But Lafitte, although Claiborne's price was on his head, and his brother Pierre in prison in New Orleans, refusedthe offer. Instead, he sent the letters from Captain Lockyer, of the British navy, making this proposition, to the Louisiana legislature. Later, after Pierre had escaped, he actually joined General Jackson's nondescript army with a force of riflemen. He seems to have acted from a very honest love for the young American republic.
Jackson, at first, under a misapprehension of the circumstances, had refused to accept the aid of these "hellish banditti," as he had called Lafitte's men in a proclamation on his arrival. But when he found that the British were upon him, and that a considerable proportion of his poorly equipped militia were without flints for their muskets, he not only accepted the flints that Lafitte sent him, but gave the pirate an important command on his right wing. There Jean and his men performed signal service.
If Lafitte had joined the Britishwith his men and ships, there is little likelihood that the Americans would have had in this fight the powerful aid of the vessels of warCarolinaandLouisiana, on the river. Nor is it likely that they would have had the passive support of the French population. Nor that they would have found any substitute for the flints with which Lafitte supplied them. And it is very likely that the British assault upon Jackson's intrenchments would have been attended with a different result.
Jackson, indeed, might have been crushed very much as Windsor had been crushed at Washington, not long before.
Such a result at New Orleans would not have affected the outcome of the war, for a peace favorable to the American arms had already been declared at Ghent. But how profoundly a defeat would have influenced the personal and political fortunes of Andrew Jackson and all theevents in American history which hung upon his subsequent career!
General Jackson won the presidency in 1828 because he was the military hero of the day. His popularity was due to the brilliant victory that he won at New Orleans. After his defeat in 1824, a spectacular visit which he made to the field of the 1814 battle renewed the souvenirs of the great fight and intensified his popularity; and in 1828 he was triumphantly elected. If he had been defeated in battle by Pakenham, and New Orleans had been taken, his fame would have been extinguished then and there.
And without Jackson—should we ever have had machine politics? It was he who introduced these into our government. He was the inventor and discoverer of the spoils system. "To the victors belong the spoils" was the maxim of his lieutenant, Marcy, and his own principle of action. We have never been able quiteto shake off the system which he fastened upon the country. Patronage has been the curse of our politics from that day to this.
Then there was his determined and disastrous assault on the United States Bank. Upon this institution, which was founded by Alexander Hamilton, and whose position somewhat resembled the present position of the Bank of England, the financial system of the country depended. Jackson attacked it as a "wicked monopoly," as a concrete expression of the "money power." He succeeded in wrecking the bank, in bringing on the panic of 1837, which wrought untold ruin and disaster to the people, and in inaugurating in its place the system of wildcat State banks and currency chaos which lasted up to the Civil War.
But Jackson attacked more than the United States Bank and the principle that public office is a public trust. He attacked nullification.Nullification meant that the States could refuse to recognize or obey the laws of the United States. He struck that dictum hard, when it made its appearance in South Carolina, and paralyzed it to such an extent that the portion of the nation which did not believe in secession was able to get its preponderant growth, and organize its strength, and prevent disunion, when the test finally came.
Jackson saved the Union by stunning the nullification snake until the republic was big enough and strong enough to trample it under foot. And that, no doubt, was the greatest event that hung on the contingency of Lafitte's choice of sides at New Orleans.