His temper was conciliatory. He steered clear of personal feuds. His soft answers turned away wrath. His readiness to submit to correction disarmed malice. He made no parade of his learning. He did not sulk in his tent because his own papers were cast aside, and his own plans condemned. Even John Adams loved him. And between Jefferson and Samuel Adams, true democrats both, the relations were so cordial, based upon such harmony of conviction, that there never was a rupture between them.

"In May, 1775, George Washington, on his way to Congress, met the Rev. Jonathan Boucher, in the middle of the Potomac. While their boats paused, the clergyman warned his friend that the path on which he was entering might lead to a separation from England.'"

Washington's answer to the preacher was in temper and substance, "Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing?"

John Jay is quoted as having solemnly declared that prior to that second Petition of the Congress of 1775, he had never heard of anybody mentioning such a word as Independence, contemplating such a thing as separation from Great Britain.

Yet the truth is that in 1775 there was, and had long been, a party in the colonies which was aweary

of British insolence, British greed, and British encroachments.

Southern planters were tired of being robbed by English tariffs and English factors. Northern merchants were tired of Navigation Acts which drove all their goods, ships, and profits to London and Liverpool. The manner in which Great Britain had interfered to destroy the local currency of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts was resented; the arrogant tone of superiority in which Tory leaders in Parliament had spoken of the colonists individually and collectively was resented; the plain purpose which England showed of reducing the Americans to submission and taxing them at will was resented. And when she struck at Rhode Island with High Commissions backed by Admirals and Generals; when she threatened to take away trial by jury and deport prisoners to England; when she threw the penalty of death around brass buttons, tar-buckets, rope-ends, and water-barrels belonging to her men-of-war, she aroused bitter enmity in the breast of every American Whig who could read or think or feel.

When she garrisoned Boston with red-coats, when she struck at the Massachusetts Charter, when she stretched the boundary line of Canada hundreds of miles southward, when she closed the Boston port and began to wreak vengeance upon a thousand innocent persons in order to punish one

culprit, every colony was alarmed, indignant, resentful, swept into the current of a common

cause.

All this was prior to May, 1775.

No talk of Independence until after that second Petition of the second Congress? Nobody dreaming of separation then?

Had not the Boston Gazette been advocating separation for several years? Had not Samuel Adams been talking it all over the town?

On October 11, 1773, this bold democrat discussed in the Gazette the plan of " An Independent State," an "American Commonwealth," as a suggestion that had often been made. He did not even claim that he was the originator of the idea. He spoke of it as common property, something which had been often mentioned and frequently discussed.

The Rev. John Wesley declared that so far back as 1737 the leading people of the colonies were crying out for Independence; and in another English pamphlet the statement was made that the author had been personally acquainted with the colonies for forty years, and Independence had been the talk all the time. When the mother country was toasted, as patriots lifted glasses to drink, the hearty sentiment was, "Damn the old bitch!"

Yet Benjamin Franklin sat down before Lord Chatham, looked that eagle-beaked Englishman in the eye, and told him that nobody in America, drunk

or sober, had ever hinted at such a thing as Independence!

On the night of the 5th of June, some young men, entering the Old Magazine to seize arms, were wounded by a spring-gun planted there. The rage which this incident excited filled the streets with a crowd which was loud in its threats and curses. Dunmore fled in the night to a British man-of-war at Yorktown. That was the last of the governor at Williamsburg. Henceforth between him and the people of Virginia there was to be war.

The Assembly adjourned, after having called a meeting of the Convention for July.

Standing on the porch of the Old Capitol, Richard Henry Lee wrote on one of the pillars:

When shall we three meet again?

In thunder, lightning, and in rain?
When the hurly-burly's done,
When the battle's lost and won.

CHAPTER X

AFFAIRS IN GEORGIA

GEORGIA was the weakest of all the colonies, and had less to complain of; for she had been the object of royal bounty to the amount of nearly a million dollars.

Her interior settlements were scattering, and there were several tribes of Indians which still continued to make strenuous objection, with rifle and tomahawk, to the manner in which the whites robbed them of their lands.

Indian wars were constant and bloody-a fact which Georgians had to consider before they rushed into trouble with Great Britain, for there were only about twenty-five thousand white people in Georgia. Besides, the king was represented in this little colony by a man of tact, force of character, and courage. Governor Wright wielded a powerful influence; and in Savannah, where he lived, the Tory element naturally had its strength.

Nevertheless, he found it to be the hardest kind of work to keep down rebellion; and in 1775 there was intercepted at Charleston a letter in which Governor Wright called upon General Gage to send troops to Georgia.