Scarcely were they free from the incubus of France when the British provinces showed symptoms of revolt. The measures on the part of the mother-country which roused their resentment, far from being oppressive, were less burdensome than the navigation laws to which they had long submitted; and they resisted taxation by Parliament simply because it was in principle opposed to their rights as freemen. They did not, like the American provinces of Spain at a later day, sunder themselves from a parent fallen into decrepitude; but with astonishing audacity they affronted the wrath of England in the hour of her triumph, forgot their jealousies and quarrels, joined hands in the common cause, fought, endured, and won. The disunited colonies became the United States. The string of discordant communities along the Atlantic coast has grown to a mighty people, joined in a union which the earthquake of civil war served only to compact and consolidate. Those who in the weakness of their dissensions needed help from England against the savage on their borders have become a nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous of all foes, herself, destined to a majestic future if she will shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great, prate less about the enemies of the past and strive more against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King, rally her powers from the race for gold and the delirium of prosperity to make firm the foundations on which that prosperity rests, and turn some fair proportion of her vast mental forces to other objects than material progress and the game of party politics. She has tamed the savage continent, peopled the solitude, gathered wealth untold, waxed potent, imposing, redoubtable; and now it remains for her to prove, if she can, that the rule of the masses is consistent with the highest growth of the individual; that democracy can give the world a civilization as mature and pregnant, ideas as energetic and vitalizing, and types of manhood as lofty and strong, as any of the systems which it boasts to supplant.
Chapter 3. Conflict for the West
Piquet and his War-Party.—“Ce parti [de guerre] pour lequel M. le General a donne son consentement, sera de plus de 3,800 hommes.... 500 hommes de nos domicilies, 700 des Cinq nations a l’exclusion des Agniers [Mohawks] qui ne sont plus regardes que comme des anglais, 600 tant Iroquois que d’autres nations le long de la Belle Riviere d’ou ils esperent chasser les anglais qui y formentu des Etablissemens contraires au bien des guerriers, 2,000 hommes qu’ils doivent prendre aux tetes plates [Choctaws] ou ils s’arresteront, c’est la ou les deux chefs de guerre doivent proposer a l’armee l’expedition des Miamis au retour de celle contre la Nation du Chien [Cherokees]. Un vieux levain, quelques anciennes querelles leur feront tout entreprendre contre les anglais de la Virginie s’ils donnent encore quelques secours a cette derniere nation, ce qui ne manquera pas d’arriver....”