or hardly contested sea fight than that of the Monmouth and Foudroyant was never fought."28

Whether this was our well-commemorated Duquesne's last fight or not is not known. Certainly thereafter history is silent concerning him; else Sargent, wonderful delver, had unearthed more.

A recent historian, William Bennett Munro, pointedly says:

New France was born and nutured in an atmosphere of religious devotion. To the habitant the Church was everything-his school, his counselor, his almsgiver, his newspaper, his philosopher of things present and of things to come. To him it was the source of all knowledge, experience, and inspiration, and to it he never faltered, in ungrudging loyalty. The church made the colony a spiritual unit and kept it so, undefiled by any taint of heresy. It furnished the one strong, well-disciplined organization that New France possessed, and its missionaries blazed the way for both yeoman and trader wherever they went.29

The people of the colony in his studies of it appealed to Munro. He finds words of praise for them, thus:

To speak of the inhabitants of New France as downtrodden or oppressed, dispirited or despairing, like the peasantry of the old land in the days before the Revolution, as some historians have done, is not to speak truthfully. These people were neither serfs nor peons. The habitant, as Charlevoix puts it, "breathed from his birth the air of liberty;" he had his rights and he maintained them. Shut off from the rest of the world, knowing only what the Church and civil government allowed him to know, he became provincial in his habits of mind. The paternal policy of the authorities sapped his initiative and left him little scope for personal enterprise, so that he passed for being a dull fellow. Yet the annals of forest trade and Indian diplomacy prove that the New World possessed no sharper wits than his. Beneath a somewhat ungainly exterior the yeoman and the trader of New France concealed qualities of cunning, tact, and quick judgment to a surprising degree.

These various types in the population of New France, officials, missionaries, seigneurs, voyageurs, habitants, were all the scions of a proud race, admirably fitted to form the rank and file in a great crusade. It was not their fault that France failed to dominate the Western hemisphere.30

Some French views of the state of public feeling of those years are obtainable from the introduction to Pouchot's Memoire:

Notwithstanding a century and a half of possession the French never derived any profit from the vast region of North America known as Canada. The Colony so planted was, so to speak, still in its infancy when it passed under a foreign yoke. They might have doubtless come out from this state of weakness, rather of non-existence, and have become in time very useful to the mother country had they been better known and had we not been so often deceived by those who should have enlightened us. We had in France such false ideas of this country that it was deemed valuable only for the fur trade and it was believed there was no distinction between the colonists proper and the Indians. Ignorance and blindness finally went so far as to cause congratulations at its loss.

In the succeeding paragraph there comes the oft reiterated charge that England to prevent her rival from opening her eyes to the advantages of Canada meditated an invasion of the territory in time of peace. England, said Pouchot's original editor, soon after the peace of Aixla-Chapelle formed the project to appropriate Canada, or New France,

28 See "Braddock's Expedition;" Sargeant, pp. 31-32. 29"Crusaders of New France;" p. 225.

30"Crusaders of New France:" W. B. Monro, p. 226.

which came to be regarded as the most solid bulwark then opposed to her enterprises. It was from the first the object of the French to carry upon the St. Lawrence the establishment which they had early formed on the borders of Acadia and those they had projected on the side of Hudson's Bay as beyond the Alleghenies toward the Ohio river, or upon the banks of Lakes Ontario and Erie where they were not limited by boundaries. The editor thought from this plan the result would be that whatever remained to France would be useless to her since the English could hold the entrance. Louis XV. earnestly desired peace. England sought to destroy the commerce of France whose progress had aroused her hatred and excited her jealousy. The advantageous propositions of the Court of Versailles were met with no response from that of St. James, or with inadmissible demands. England pretended to negotiate a peace but they had no other object than to concentrate their enterprises and to inspire France with a security which prevented her from preparing for war by calling out her full forces.

There were philosophers, Pouchot's editor said, who were obstinate in misconceiving the true causes of the war. They repeated to their shame that France had exposed herself to great reverses and had shed much blood only for the possession of some tracts of ice and savage countries or worthless deserts. Better informed persons had not brought so much reproach upon France, but they had accused her commissaries. of incapacity and passion and her ministers of ambition, and of not having sincerely desired peace. Pouchot's editor admits that Pouchot had some prejudices, but assures the readers of his Memoire that there can be found in the manifestoes of France numerous and incontestible proofs that "the pretensions of England towards Canada were not the cause but the pretext of the late war."31

Craig says of conditions during the years of French triumph:

The war between Great Britain and France up to the end of the year 1757, had been an unfortunate and disgraceful one to the former power. On the Ohio, British power and trade were extinct; while the incursions of the French and their savage Allies extended almost to the site of the present seat of our State Government. In the East Indies British power was almost annihilated and British subjects were cruelly sacrificed in the black hole at Calcutta. In the Mediterranean, whither the Marquis De La Galissoniere had gone from Canada, Admiral Byng was foiled and Minorca taken, and in Germany thirty thousand Hanoverian troops, under the command of the brother of George the 2d, had been disgracefully surrendered as prisoners to the French commandant there.

Some of the wisest men of England were greatly discouraged. Horace Walpole in a letter said, "it is time for England to slip her cables and float away into some unknown ocean," and Lord Chesterfield wrote, "whoever is in, or whoever is out, I am sure we are undone both at home and abroad; at home, by our increasing debt and expenses, abroad by our incapacity and ill luck. I never yet saw so dreadful a prospect."

Such were the opinions of some of the most eminent persons of England, when that extraordinary man from whom our city received its name was called upon to direct affairs of Government. Three years of disaster, disgrace and despondency, were succeeded by years of triumph and success.

In America, the commander-in-chief, the Earl of Loudon, a bustling do-nothing, 31 Introduction "Late War in America;" M. Pouchot, pp. 12-14, Hough Edition, 1866.

of whom it was wittily remarked, "he reminds me of St. George, on a sign; he is always on horseback but never advances," was succeeded by General Amherst, under whom were Wolfe and Forbes.32

This substantial agreement of the Colonial governors that the presence of the French on the Colonial borders compelled federation of the varying interests of the several English colonies, kept them pinned in between the mountains and the sea until there was developed some degree of solidarity; some ability to act together, and then by the sudden withdrawal of pressure, not only allowed their expansion but relieved them of all need of help from England and so of dependence upon her. The "substantial agreement" was the result of the Albany convention of 1754. The alarmed Iroquois sent word by some of their people that if the English did not take up arms against the French the latter would drive every Englishman out of the country. Franklin was the delegate from Pennsylvania. His appeal in his paper, the "Pennsylvania Gazette," was potent with his rude but celebrated wood cut showing ten colonies as several parts of a severed snake under which was the words: "Unite or die." Franklin's plan of binding the Colonies together failed of acceptance. An American Union appeared to the English authorities as the Keystone of Independence. There came a day soon after Braddock's battle when Franklin's dictum changed to "Fight or die."

32"History of Pittsburgh;" pp. 57-58, Edition 1917.

CHAPTER XIX.

John Forbes and James Grant.

The defeat of Braddock and the flight of Dunbar left all the English frontiers open to the incursions of the Indians in alliance with the French, and most mercilessly they pressed the advantage. Though a chain of forts was built along the the frontiers of Pennsylvania they were inadequate, too few in number and too far apart, hence easily avoided. The Delawares under Shingiss and Capt. Jacobs from Kittanning were the worst, if such could be, of all the demons that ravished the Province. Col. John Armstrong, to punish these miscreants, marched from Fort Shirley, now Shirleysburg, in Huntingdon county, August 29, 1756, and reached Kittanning with his little force of 300 men September 7th at night. The town consisted of forty log cabins. A furious attack was made by Armstrong at daybreak, but the Indians fought with great desperation and maintained their position until Armstrong had the buildings set on fire. The whole town was destroyed and many Indians killed, including Capt. Jacobs and his family, and a large amount of provisions and ammunition furnished by the French was consumed. Eleven English prisoners were released. Armstrong lost sixteen killed, twelve wounded and eighteen missing. Capt. Hugh Mercer was among the wounded and left behind, and as from Braddock's battle was obliged to make his way back to the settlements. He lived to return with Forbes two years later.

Some accounts of these years of terror are to be found in the Pennsylvania Archives and Colonial Records. Thus Rupp gives us this

matter:

At a council held at Carlisle, January 16-19, 1756, attended by Governor Morris, James Hamilton, Wm. Logan, Richard Peters, Joseph Fox, Esq., Commissioners; George Croghan and Conrad Weiser, Interpreters, and the Indians, Belt, Seneca George, New Castle, David, Iagrea, Silver Heels, Isaac and others, Mr. Croghan was called on to make some statements touching his Indian agency.

Mr. Croghan informed the Governor and Council that he had sent a Delaware Indian, called Jo Hickman, to the Ohio for intelligence, who returned to him the day before he came away. That he went to Kittanning, an Indian Delaware town, on the Ohio, (Allegheny) forty miles above Fort Duquesne the residence of Shingass and Capt. Jacobs, where he found one hundred and forty men, chiefly Delawares and Shawanese, who had there with them, above one hundred English prisoners, big and little, taken from Virginia and Pennsylvania.

That then the Beaver, brother of Shingass, told him that the Governor of Fort Duquesne had often offered the French hatchet to the Shawanese and Delawares, who had as often refused it, declaring that they would do as they should be advised by the Six Nations, but that in April or May last (1755) a party of Six Nation warriors in company with some Caghnawagos and Adirondacks, called at the French fort in their going to war against the Southern Indians, and on these the Governor of Fort Duquesne prevailed to offer the French hatchet to the Delawares and Shawanese, who received it from them and went directly against Virginia. That neither Beaver nor several others of the Shawanese and Delawares, approved of this measure, nor had taken up the hatchet; and the Beaver believed some of those who had, were very

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