Basing chiefly on this, and on other hasty and ill-considered statements of a like tenor, made at about the same time, New England's historians, as a rule, have since accepted as final and authoritative this claim of her foremost Revolutionary statesman as to the beginnings in America of resistance to the repressive measures of Great Britain; and with one voice they ascribe to Massachusetts, and to Massachusetts alone, the inauguration of the movement which led to final independence.

That the deliberate judgment of Adams did not confirm the drawing of such a broad conclusion from the statement first put forth by himself under the impulse of feelings aroused by wounded State pride, may be reasonably demonstrated by an examination of some of his later writings.

As tending to show this more impartial attitude on the part of the amiable and impulsive Adams, his correspondence with Madison in the same year may be cited, in which some observations of the latter afford a convincing proof, as well of Adams's ultimately just conception as of the insufficiency of any view of the matter in which the range is limited to individuals. Madison's letter to Adams of August 7, 1818, is in part as follows':

Your remark is very just on the subject of Independence. It was not the offspring of a particular man or a particular moment. Our forefathers brought with them the germ of Independence in the principle of self-taxation. Circumstances unfolded and perfected it.

The first occasion which aroused this principle was, if I can trust my recollection, the projected union at Albany in 1754, when the proposal of the British Government to reimburse its advances for the colonies by a parliamentary tax on them was met by the letter from Dr. Franklin to Governor Shirley, pointing out the unconstitutionality, the injustice, and the impolicy of such a tax.

The opposition and discussions produced by the Stamp and subsequent Acts of Parliament, made another stage in the growth of Independence. . .

Franklin's letters to Governor Shirley written in December, 1754, to which reference is made by Madison, contain such expressions as these":

I apprehend that excluding the people of the colonies from all share in the choice of the grand council will give extreme dissatisfaction, as well as the taxing them by act of Parliament, where they have no representation.

That it is supposed an undoubted right of Englishmen not to be taxed but by their own consent, given through their representatives.

That the colonies have no representatives in Parliament.

That to propose taxing them by Parliament, and refuse them the liberty of choosing a representative council to meet in the colonies and consider and judge of the necessity of any general tax and the quantum, shows a suspicion of their loyalty to the Crown, or of their regard for their country, or of their common sense and understanding which they have not deserved.

In Pennsylvania, the matter of taxation had been a constant source of dispute between the Assembly and the Proprietary government for many years prior to 1760. In that State, more than ten years before the battle of

Lexington, an armed uprising took place on the part of the Scotch-Irish against the principle of taxation without representation or protection.

The inciting causes of this hostile demonstration against the provincial government of Pennsylvania grew out of the continued and studied neglect, by the Quaker oligarchy then controlling the Pennsylvania Assembly, of that primary essential of all organized governments, namely, the ability and disposition to defend its citizens against the murderous invasions of an armed foe. The Quaker government not only failed to furnish protection to its citizens, but made a virtue of its own shortcomings in that respect.

Along the thinly settled borders, in 1762-63, two thousand persons had been killed or carried off, and nearly an equal number of families driven from their homes. "The frontier people of Pennsylvania," says Parkman, goaded to desperation by long-continued suffering, were divided between. rage against the Indians, and resentment against the Quakers, who had yielded them cold sympathy and inefficient aid. The horror and fear, grief and fury, with which these men looked upon the mangled remains of friends and relatives, set language at defiance." On one occasion, the frontiersmen sent to Philadelphia a wagon laden with the mangled corpses of their friends and relatives, who had fallen by Indian butchery. These were carried along the streets, with many people following, cursing the Indians, and also the Quakers because they would not join in war for the destruction of the savages. But the hideous spectacle failed of the intended effect, and the Assembly still turned a deaf ear to all entreaties for more effective aid. The Scotch-Irish of the frontier were the chief sufferers from the depredations of the Indians. They were of a rude and hardy stamp,-hunters, scouts, rangers, Indian traders, and backwoods farmers,-who had grown up with arms in their hands, and been trained under all the influences of the warlike frontier. They fiercely complained that they were interposed as a barrier between the rest of the province and a ferocious enemy, and that they were sacrificed to the safety of men who looked with indifference on their miseries, and lost no opportunity to extenuate and smooth away the cruelties of their destroyers.

Along the western frontiers of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia, in the summer of 1763, terror reigned supreme. Indian scalping parties were ranging everywhere, laying waste the settlements, destroying the harvests, and butchering men, women, and children, with ruthless fury. Many hundreds of wretched fugitives flocked for refuge to Carlisle and the other towns of the border, bringing tales of inconceivable horror. Strong parties of armed men, who went out to reconnoitre the country, found every habitation reduced to cinders, and the half-burned bodies of the inmates lying among the smouldering ruins; while here and there was seen some miserable wretch, scalped and tomahawked, but still alive and conscious. As the summer passed, the frontiers of Cumberland County were completely abandoned by the Scotch-Irish settlers, many of whom, not content with seeking

refuge at Carlisle, continued their flight to the eastward, and pushed on to Lancaster and Philadelphia. Carlisle presented a most deplorable spectacle. A multitude of the refugees, unable to find shelter in the town, had encamped in the woods, or on the adjacent fields, erecting huts of branches. and bark, and living on such charity as the slender means of the townspeople could supply. The following is an extract from a letter dated at Carlisle, July 5, 1763 (Hazard's Pennsylvania Register, iv., 390):

Nothing could exceed the terror which prevailed from house to house, from town to town. The road was near covered with women and children flying to Lancaster and Philadelphia. The pastor of the Episcopal Church went at the head of his congregation, to protect and encourage them on the way. A few retired to the breastworks for safety. The alarm once given could not be appeased.

The letter from which the following extract is taken appears in the Pennsylvania Gazette, No. 1804, the letter being dated at Carlisle, July 12, 1763:

I embrace this first leisure since yesterday morning to transmit you a brief account of our present state of affairs here, which indeed is very distressing; every day, almost, affording some fresh object to awaken the compassion, alarm the fears, or kindle into resentment and vengeance every sensible breast, while flying families, obliged to abandon house and possessions, to save their lives by an hasty escape; mourning widows, bewailing their husbands surprised and massacred by savage rage; tender parents, lamenting the fruits of their own bodies, cropt in the very bloom of youth by a barbarous hand; with relations and acquaintances pouring out sorrow for murdered neighbors and friends, present a varied scene of mingled distress.

To-day a British vengeance begins to arise in the breasts of our men. One of them that fell from among the twelve, as he was just expiring, said to one of his fellows, "Here, take my gun, and kill the first Indian you see, and all shall be well."

In October, 1763, several companies of Rangers were formed by the Scotch-Irish in Lancaster and Cumberland counties, for the purpose of patrolling the borders and giving such protection as they were able to the scattered inhabitants. One of these companies, starting from Paxtang in Lancaster County, marched to the relief of the Connecticut settlers at Wyoming, but arrived two days after that settlement had been burned, and its inhabitants killed, imprisoned, or driven off by the Indians. They buried the dead bodies of those who had fallen in the massacre, and returned to the southern settlements. The Quakers, who seemed resolved that they would neither defend the people of the frontier nor allow them to defend themselves, vehemently inveighed against the several expeditions up the Susquehanna, and denounced them as seditious and murderous. "Urged by their blind prejudice in favor of the Indians," says Parkman, "they insisted that the bands of the Upper Susquehanna were friendly to the English; whereas, with the single exception of a few Moravian converts near Wyoming, who had not been molested by the whites, there could be no

rational doubt that these savages nourished a rancorous and malignant hatred against the province. But the Quakers, removed by their situation from all fear of the tomahawk, securely vented their spite against the borderers, and doggedly closed their ears to the truth." Meanwhile, the people of the frontier besieged the Assembly with petitions for relief; but little heed was given to their complaints.

At this time, the provincial government had the custody of some twenty Iroquois Indians, who were seated on Conestoga Manor, in Lancaster County, not far from the Susquehanna. The men spent part of their time in hunting, and lounged away the rest of it in idleness and dissipation. They lived by beggary, and the sale of brooms, baskets, and wooden ladles, made by the women. In the immediate vicinity they were commonly regarded as vagabonds, but in the neighboring settlements they were looked upon as secretly abetting the enemy, acting as spies, giving shelter to scalping parties, and aiding them in their depredations. Their chief had repeatedly threatened to kill various white men and women of the neighborhood.

About the middle of December, word was brought to the settlers living at Paxtang (now Harrisburg), that an Indian, known to have committed depredations in the vicinity, had been traced to Conestoga. Matthew Smith, a man of influence and popularity among his associates, called together a number of the Paxtang Rangers, and led them to the Conestoga settlement. One of the men saw an Indian issuing from a house, and thought that he recognized him as the savage who had killed his own mother. Firing his rifle, he brought the Indian down. Then, with a loud shout, the furious mob rushed into the cabins, and killed all the Indians whom they found there, some six in number. Fourteen of the Conestogas managed to escape, and, fleeing to Lancaster, were given a place of refuge in the county jail. While there, word was again carried to the Paxtang men that an Indian, known to have murdered the relatives of one of their number, was among those who had received the protection of the Lancaster magistrates. This again aroused a feeling of rage and resentment amongst the Rangers. On December 27th some fifty of them, under the leadership of Lazarus Stewart, marched to Lancaster, broke open the jail, and with the fury of a mob massacred every Indian contained therein, man, woman, and child.

This is said by some to have been the first instance of the operation of lynch law in America; and many blame the Scotch-Irish for its introduction. Doubtless the odium is merited; as a similar incident occurred nearly twenty years later, when some of the Scotch-Irish of Washington County, Pennsylvania, under far less extenuating circumstances, murdered in cold blood upwards of ninety men, women, and children of the community of Moravian Indians at Gnadenhutten, west of the Ohio. This atavistic tendency is further illustrated in our own day by the lynching of negroes in the South, the frequency of which is probably due to the fact that the southern white population is chiefly of Scotch-Irish descent; these examples

of perverted administration of justice finding many parallels in the annals of medieval Scotland. The family feuds of Kentucky, which for the most part seem peculiar to families bearing Scottish names, may also be cited as examples and counterparts in America of the clan and family feuds formerly so common in Scotland. The case of the Regulators of North Carolina is another well-known instance in American history of the Scotch-Irish backwoodsmen taking the administration of justice into their own hands, when their rulers had failed to provide for them a safe government.

But the uprising of the "Paxtang Boys" was more than that of a mere lynching mob, bent on the immediate extermination of all redskins who came within its reach. It was a protest, bloody and atrocious, it is true, made by the harassed frontiersmen against the cowardly policy of the Quaker government. The Scotch-Irish had suffered grievously from the Indian outrages, caused in a great measure by the neglect of that government to provide adequately for the defence of the province. They had repeatedly appealed to the Assembly, and their petitions for help had been rejected with contempt. They were unable to bring about a change for the better, as all the political power was in the hands of a small number of people. They determined finally to appeal to force, and, in doing so, thought in their first blind rage that they might strike a blow at the Quakers, and at the same. time rid themselves of probable enemies, by killing the Quakers' wards. The Assembly, they argued, had shown infinitely more consideration for the feelings of the Indians than it had for the wounds of the Scotch-Irish. It had voted the savages large sums of money as presents, and indirectly enabled them to carry on an exterminating warfare against the whites; while at the same time it refused to make any proper defence of the province against the marauders. If the Quakers were unmoved by the killing of hundreds of their Scotch-Irish fellow citizens, whom they hated, perhaps they could be made to realize the condition of the frontiers by the killing of their own Indian wards, whom they loved and cherished.

The Paxtang Rangers, in their bitter resentment against the government, lost sight of the fact that it is better for twenty guilty men to escape than for one innocent man to suffer. Their own miseries made them believe in all sincerity that the only good Indian is a dead one; and that they themselves were the agents appointed of Providence to make all Indians good. The Reverend John Elder was captain of the Paxtang Rangers, and minister of Paxtang and Derry congregations, from which the Rangers were enlisted. He tried in vain to dissuade his men from going to Conestoga on their bloody errand, and desisted only after they had broken away from him in anger. On the 27th December, 1763, the reverend captain wrote to Governor Penn as follows:

The storm which had been so long gathering, has at length exploded. Had Government removed the Indians from Conestoga, as was frequently urged without success, this painful catastrophe might have been avoided.