George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 4, 15th edition.

[345] Charleston; asked aid of the governors of Georgia

chap. XV.} 1759.

and North Carolina; invited Virginia to send reinfor cements and supplies to Fort Loudoun by the road from that province; sought the active alliance of the Chickasaws as ancient enemies to the French;¹ of the Catawbas, the Tuscaroras, and even the Creeks, whose hostility he pretended to have feared;² and then convening the legislature, on the fifth of October sent a message to the Assembly for supplies. Aware of his intentions to make a declaration of war, they addressed him against so precipitate a measure, ‘unanimously desiring him to defer it.’ He readily consented,³ promising that ‘he would do nothing to prevent an accommodation,’ on which the Assembly made grants of money and provided for calling fifteen hundred men into service, if necessary. The perfidious governor reproved them for the scantiness of the supply; and breaking his promise, not yet a day old, he added that ‘he should persevere in his intended measures.’⁴

On the twelfth of October, he ordered the alarm to be fired in all parts of the province, where it had not been before; and ‘one half of the militia was draughted to be in readiness to repel any invasion, or suppress any insurrection that might happen during his absence.’

But hardly had the word been spoken when, on the seventeenth of October, a great deputation from the Upper and Lower Towns, Oconostata the great warrior himself, with thirty other of the most honored