1764. These regulations, in view of the problems of the present Federal Government with illicit trade, were remarkably successful; but they bore with excessive severity on the merchants and shipowners of the northern colonies, where trade was already slack, and the silver required for the new duties, hard to come by.1 The Instructions, however, do not mention the Iron Act of 1750, the Currency Act of 1764, nor the fact that Parliament had practically abolished drawbacks on foreign goods re-exported to the colonies, and levied export duties on English textiles.2 On the other hand, Parliament aided the readjustment of American commerce by removing the English import duties on colonial corn and whale fins, and granting bounties on colonial flax, hemp, and timber.3

To oppose the Townshend Acts, a new formulation of the colonial relationship was necessary-Daniel Dulany had admitted too much. John Dickinson, a country gentleman who had read law at the Temple, and practised it in Philadelphia, filled the need with his Farmer's Letters (pp. 34-54). Their influence was great, for they caught the contradictory spirit of the period: loyalty to King and Empire, but growing American unity; dislike of mob violence, but determination to pay no tax levied by Parliament, in whatever form.

William Knox wrote the most effective reply to the Pennsylvania Farmer '.4

The agitation that followed was marked by less violence than the period of the Stamp Act, except in Boston. Domestic manufactures were encouraged, and merchants combined with

1 See Callender, 63-8, 140; Becker, Political Parties in New York, chapter iii; Publications Colonial Society of Mass., xix. 181-91. Cf. Burke, Speeches on American Affairs, 29.

2 G. L. Beer, op. cit., 179–88, 282; 23 Geo. II, c. 29; 4 Geo. III, c. 34; 6 Geo. III, c. 52.

3 4 Geo. III, c. 26, 29; 5 Geo. III, c. 45; 6 Geo. III, c. 3; 7 Geo. III, c. 4. The old naval stores and indigo bounties remained, somewhat reduced in amount. 3 Geo. III, c. 25.

The Controversy Reviewed (London, 1769); reprinted in Old South Leaflets, No. 210.

politicians in an agreement not to import the taxed articles from England.1 Although little enforced in certain places, this non-importation agreement' caused English exports to the colonies to fall off almost one-half by 1769. In 1770 the North ministry, concluding that colonial duties on English manufactures were preposterous, repealed all the Townshend duties except that on tea; but all other duties and the commissioners of the customs remained. Radical leaders wished to continue the boycott, but the merchants were sick of it, and refused to do so. Colonial trade promptly adjusted itself to the new regulations; prosperity returned; and by the end of 1770 there was apparently a complete reconciliation between England and the colonies-except in Boston.

II. The Western Problem, 1763-88.2

The Western problem, the problem of the unsettled parts of the North American continent, with their aboriginal inhabitants and white invaders, is as old as European colonization in America. It may be likened to a rope of many strands, now twisted in a regular pattern, but more often tangled with each other and with strands from other ropes, or tortured into

1 A. M. Schlesinger, Colonial Merchants and the American Revolution (New York: Longmans; London: P. S. King, 1918).

2 Four works of great value and interest deal with the Western problem in whole or in part. F. J. Turner, Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt, 1921), is a collection of Professor Turner's essays, which have established the frontier as the central force in American history. The first essay, at least, should be read by every student of American history. For the facts in this Introduction I am chiefly indebted to C. W. Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics (2 vols., Cleveland: A. H. Clark, 1917); the well-presented results of deep research on the efforts of the British Government to solve the Western problem. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West (6 vols., Putnam's, 1889, and many later editions), is a picturesque and fairly accurate history mainly of the combative aspects of the Westward movement from 1760 to 1807. Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac (2 vols., Boston, 1851, and many later editions), is classic. These two works have a quality that no subsequent work can have; they were written by men of keen observation and historical imagination, who had actually lived with Indians and frontiersmen.

Gordian knots which only war could sever. Of these strands we may distinguish :

(a) The International problem: whether the North American West would be won by France, Spain, the British Empire, or the United States, or be partitioned among them. The Peace of 1763 was an important stage in this problem, eliminating France from the contest (save as a diplomatic factor), and dividing the West, by the Mississippi river, between the British and the Spanish empires. Her new acquisitions brought Britain face to face with other aspects of the Western problem, which are closely interwoven.1

(b) The problem of Indian v. Backwoodsman. Should the Indian hunting grounds be reserved for them in the interest of humanity and the fur trade; or should the advance of the white frontier be favoured at the Indians' expense? And how were the Indians, or the frontiersmen, to be protected in their rights? This is really the great Western problem which met the English-speaking colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth rock. Given the conditions of American society, the problem could hardly have been solved otherwise than by gradually eliminating the Indians. As Roosevelt says, the sole alternative was to keep that ' vast continent as a game preserve for squalid savages'. That was the real reason why the new British policy of 1763, illustrated in our documents, was doomed to failure, apart from the conditions of British politics; and why the later efforts of the United States Government failed, in the long run, to protect the aborigines.

Students are advised to read at least the first volume of Roosevelt's work, for a brilliant exposition of the elements in the struggle, a sympathetic presentation of the pioneer's viewpoint, and an unconscious reflection of the author's character.

The same applies to Spain, which acquired the trans-Mississippi West from France. But Spain was an old hand at the Western problem. What Spain did to meet her new responsibilities is outside the scope of this book, though by no means outside the scope of the history of the United States, which later reaped the harvest of Spain's Western policies. The reader is referred, in the first instance, to H. E. Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands ( Chronicles of America', v. 23).

With the different conditions that obtained in Canada-a strong government, a powerful fur-trading interest, a small white population, and autocratic traditions-the Indians might have been exterminated in a more kindly fashion, and the whites less brutalized in the process.

(c) The fur trade was a problem in itself. Should it be regulated, and if so by what authority, imperial, federal, or local; or should the Indians be left to the mercy of the traders? (d) The public land problem. How should land acquired from the Indians be disposed of, and by what authority?

(e) The political problem. What degree of self-government should be allowed to the new settlements, and what should be their relationship to the older colonies, the Empire, and (after 1775) to the United States? We may subdivide this problem into distinct strands for most of the Thirteen Colonies and States: the internal problem of adjustment between an oldsettled, aristocratic, and creditor seaboard, and a new-settled, democratic, and debtor interior. This sectional issue flared into armed conflict in the Carolinas before the Revolution, and in New England after it; combined with the public land problem it has permanently influenced the history of the United States.

In the years 1763-5 these diverse strands of the Western problem were mixed with the general colonial problem, and until 1775 with English politics; after 1775 they enter into the web of American development.

In 1754, when the Seven Years' War was imminent, the British Government endeavoured to induce the Thirteen Colonies to form a union for the purpose of defence, and directing Indian relations. These had been dangerously mismanaged by individual colonies. This effort came to naught through colonial particularism.1 But the British Government,

1 G. L. Beer, British Colonial Policy, 1754-65, chapter ii. The text of the Albany Plan of Union may be found in William Macdonald, Select Charters, 253.

as a war measure, placed Indian political relations within the competence of its commander-in-chief in America, General Braddock. That ill-starred soldier laid the foundations for an imperial western policy, in 1756, by appointing two highly capable colonists, Sir William Johnson, and later, John Stuart, as Superintendents of the northern and southern Indians.

This good beginning was largely undone by the tactlessness of General Amherst, who cut off the usual presents to the north-western Indians after victory seemed secure, by the trickery of private traders, and the aggressiveness of frontiersmen. In May 1763 came a serious Indian uprising under Pontiac. Colonel Bouquet's expedition broke the back of the rebellion that summer, but the Algonkian tribes between the Great Lakes and the Ohio river were not fairly pacified before 1766.

Pontiac's rebellion proved that something must be done about the Western problem. And in the meantime the ministry had decided to retain Canada and the Floridas instead of Guadeloupe and Havana.

The Royal Proclamation of 7 October 1763 (p. 1) was the announcement of a provisional Western policy, in order to placate the Indians. Even the boundaries of the three new provinces, Canada and the Floridas, were determined with a view to keeping settlers and Indians apart. The line of demarcation, as Mr. Alvord has proved, was not intended as a permanent barrier to Westward expansion. The colonists, apparently, understood this.1 It was not until some years had elapsed, and the Proclamation had been deliberately distorted by the Grafton ministry into a permanent barrier (p. 70), that it helped to inflame colonial sentiment against the Government.

In the Declaration' preceding the Remonstrance' (p. 9) of the Pennsylvania frontiersmen, on their colony's handling of the Pontiac rebellion, they state that the standing of the frontier settlements depended, under God, on the almost despaired of success of His Majesty's little army, whose valour the whole frontiers acknowledge with gratitude' -whilst no mention is made of the Proclamation of 1763.