similar in tone and general argument to those of the Stamp Act Congress, but containing a significant admission of the right of Parliament to regulate the external trade of the colonies, provided the aim were regulation and not taxation. A petition to the king and an address to the inhabitants of Canada, both drafted by Dickinson, were also adopted, together with a memorial to the inhabitants of British America, drawn by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, and an eloquent address to the people of Great Britain, the work of John Jay of New York, later the first chief-justice of the United States Supreme Court. An agreement known as the "Association" pledged the people of the colonies to commercial non-intercourse with Great Britain, and to the encouragement of industry, economy, and neighbourly kindness. Copies of these various state papers were separately printed and widely circulated.

The passage of the coercive acts, and the assembling of a Congress to consider plans of united resistance, stirred anew the fires of literary controversy. In May, 1774, the same month that saw the arrival of Gage and the British troops at Boston, Josiah Quincy published at that place his Observations on the Act of Parliament, commonly called the Boston Port-Bill; with Thoughts on Civil Society and Standing Armies. Quincy was a brilliant young lawyer, who, in company with John Adams, had chivalrously defended the British soldiers indicted for participation in the Boston Massacre, in 1770. A competent critic' has suggested that the larger part of the pamphlet, dealing with "civil society and standing armies," had been carefully prepared some time before, advantage being taken of the Port Act to publish the work with an expanded title. Quincy's pamphlet was shortly followed by James Wilson's Considerations on the Nature and the Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament, an ingenious rejection of such authority in favour of allegiance to the king alone. The writer, a young lawyer of Philadelphia, was later to contribute powerfully to the acceptance of the Federal Constitution by Pennsylvania.

Not all who entered the lists, however, agreed so unreservedly with the sentiments of Congress or of the patriot

Text in W. MacDonald. Select Charters, 362–367.

Tyler, Literary History of the American Revolution, 1, 272 note.

leaders. A series of papers in The Pennsylvania Packet, reprinted in a pamphlet with the title A Few Political Reflections Submitted to the Consideration of the British Colonies, by a Citizen of Philadelphia, and attributed to Richard Wells, urged compensation for the tea and the abandonment of violent protest, at the same time arguing for united rejection of the claim to taxation on the ground that the colonies were too old and too strong to be kept in leading-strings. An anonymous Letter from a Virginian, addressed to the Congress at Philadelphia, went further and frankly questioned the constitutional soundness and political wisdom of the arguments put forth by the Congress.

No history of the American Revolution, or of the political literature to which it gave birth, would be complete without consideration of the loyalists. That independence was in fact the work of a minority, and that the methods by which the loyal majority was overawed and, in part, expelled were as highhanded and cruel as they were active and vigorous, must be freely conceded. Weighty as was the colonial argument, force and violence were freely employed to give effect to it. But the great loyalist party, numbering among its leaders many of the ablest, most devoted, and wealthiest men in colonial life, was not crushed without a struggle; and the arguments with which its adherents defended their cause and sought to defeat that of their opponents were not less ably put or trenchantly phrased than those of the patriots themselves.

Soon after the "Association" agreement of the Continental Congress was adopted (October, 1774), there was published in New York the first of four pamphlets by a "Westchester Farmer." The author was the Rev. Samuel Seabury, then and for some time rector of St. Peter's Church, Westchester, and later, by time's curious working, first bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States. The four pamphlets, entitled respectively Free Thoughts on the Proceedings of the Continental Congress, The Congress Canvassed, A View of the Controversy between Great-Britain and her Colonies, and An Alarm to the Legislature of the Province of New-York, were a powerful attack upon the aims and policy of the Congress and the patriot leaders, and a plea for such adjustment as would assure to the colonies local self-government, on the one hand,

with full recognition of parliamentary authority on the other. For writing the pamphlets Seabury was mobbed, imprisoned, and hounded until in 1776 he took refuge within the British lines.

It was in reply to the first of Seabury's pamphlets that Alexander Hamilton, then a college student of seventeen, made anonymously his first essay in authorship with A Full Vindication of the Measures of the Congress, from the Calumnies of their Enemies (1774) and A Farmer Refuted (1775). None of the pamphleteers of the Revolutionary period excels Hamilton in the logical acumen and expository power which he here displays, and none approached him in his clear discernment of the theatre and character of the war, if war must be. Yet even Hamilton, with all his precocious intellectual power, failed to point out beyond peradventure how union with the Empire under allegiance to the king comported with a denial of the legislative power of Parliament. The only outcome for the colonies was independence, and independence was the word which, as yet, most colonial leaders appeared anxious to avoid. Before the attacks of the "Westchester Farmer" had ceased, Daniel Leonard, a Boston lawyer of social prominence, began the publication in a loyalist newspaper, over the pen-name of "Massachusettensis," of a series of seventeen letters, To the Inhabitants of the Province of the Massachusetts-Bay (1774-75). Seabury had emphasized the impracticability and political unwisdom of the recommendations of the Congress. Leonard assailed the unconstitutional arguments of the patriots, and the revolutionary character of their attacks upon parliamentary enactments and crown officers.

The task of combating the influence of "Massachusettensis" was undertaken by John Adams, who, early in 1775, published in the Boston Gazette, over the signature of "Novanglus, a series of letters traversing Leonard's argument. Twelve articles had appeared when the battle of Lexington (19 April, 1775) intervened. Adams did not lack legal knowledge or logical proficiency, but he was no match for Leonard in debate, nor could he keep to the point; and although the republication of the letters in London, and a reprint many years later in the United States, gave some vogue to the name "Novanglus," the essays won no permanent distinction either

for themselves or for their author. It was as a hard-working member of the Continental Congress, and not as a writer or political philosopher, that Adams made his worthiest contribution to the American cause.

To a different class belong the numerous writings of Joseph Galloway, a delegate from Pennsylvania to the first Continental Congress. Already prominent in the politics of his colony, Galloway submitted to the Congress a Plan of a Proposed Union between Great Britain and the Colonies. Read in the light of the present day, the scheme seems like a suggestive anticipation of later British colonial policy; but the Congress, after debating it at length, and rejecting it by the narrow majority of a single vote, trampled it under foot, and ordered all reference to it expunged from the printed journal. Galloway later published the plan in A Candid Examination of the Mutual Claims of Great Britain and the Colonies (New York, 1775). In 1778, after two years spent with the British forces, Galloway went to England, where he was thought sufficiently important to be examined before the House of Commons, and where he continued to publish pamphlets on America until the end of the

war.

Another New York loyalist, President Myles Cooper of King's College (now Columbia), gifted with wit and sarcasm above most of his fellows, entered the lists in 1774 with two anonymous pamphlets-The American Querist: or, Some Questions Proposed relative to the Present Disputes between Great Britain and her American Colonies, and A Friendly Address to all Reasonable Americans. In August, 1775, a mob stripped and mutilated him, but he contrived to escape to a British ship-ofwar, and thence to England, where he obtained ecclesiastical preferment. Charles Lee, soon to be numbered among the renegades and traitors, but at the moment in the enjoyment of a repute as a military expert which he had done little to earn, replied to Cooper with some cleverness in Strictures on a Pamphlet, entitled a 'Friendly Address to all Reasonable Americans' (1775)—the only contribution of Lee's to the patriot cause for which he may be appreciatively remembered.

Although not published until 1797, by which time the author had been for more than twenty years resident in England, Jonathan Boucher's A View of the Causes and Consequences

of the American Revolution may perhaps be included in our enumeration of loyalist writings. From 1762 to 1775 Boucher was rector of parishes in Maryland and Virginia, finding time, however, to take an active part in colonial politics. The volume referred to, dedicated to Washington and prefaced by an extended introduction, consists of thirteen sermons preached to his American congregations, and forms as a whole the best presentation of the loyalist cause as embraced and championed by an Anglican minister. For his boldness, however, his parishioners drove him into exile, in common with many another clergyman who held similar views.

Mention should also be made here of the poems of Philip Freneau and John Trumbull, although the fuller discussion of their literary significance belongs elsewhere in this work.' The first of Freneau's poems of the Revolution, On the Conqueror of America Shut up in Boston and General Gage's Soliloquy, were published in the summer of 1775, while the siege of Boston was in progress. Trumbull, whose muse had already responded to some of the earlier incidents of the war, published the first canto of McFingal in January, 1776. Grounded, as were the writings of both of these authors, in a clear, popular understanding of the points at issue, and foreshadowing, in Freneau's case, the ultimate attainment of independence, the satirical humour of the poems confirmed the faithful and strengthened the wavering quite as effectively as state papers or pamphlet treatises.

The great influence of Benjamin Franklin, covering the entire period of the revolutionary struggle, was exerted chiefly through the customary channels of diplomacy, and in a voluminous correspondence with friends and public men on both sides of the Atlantic; and his contemporary publications, comparatively few in number, carried weight because of their directness and sturdy common sense, and of the fame of their writer as a scientist or as the author of Poor Richard's Almanac or as the skilful champion of the colonial cause in England, rather than because of their literary merit or their substantive contribution to the American argument. The report of his Examination before the House of Commons (1766), while the repeal of the Stamp Act was under discussion, showed a statesSee Book I, Chap. IX. * Writings, ed. Smyth, IV, 412-448.