chap. XV.} 1759. |
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only mode of getting rich; for they were ‘quartered
upon’ by their English patrons for more than the amount of all their honest perquisites.1 Townshend returned home, to advocate governing America by concentrating power in England; and like Braddock, Sharpe, Shirley, Abercrombie, Loudoun, Gage, and so many more of his profession, to look upon taxation of the colonies by the metropolis as the exercise of a necessary duty.
In Georgia, Ellis, the able governor, who had great influence in the public offices, was studying how the colonies could be administered by the central authority.
In South Carolina Lyttleton persuaded himself that he had restored the royal sway.
Yet the fruits of his administration were distrust and discontent.
The arbitrary manner in which he had suspended a councillor, had even made it a matter of pride with the planters of Carolina not to accept appointments to the royal council;2 and their confiding loyalty was requited by contemptuous insolence, more difficult to be endured than oppression.
While victory protected the northern frontiers of America, the South would have enjoyed unbroken repose but for the pride of Lyttleton, who at once contended with South Carolina, ‘to regain the powers of government which his predecessors,’ as he said, ‘had unfaithfully given away,’3 and awakened an Indian war by his zeal for reducing the native mountaineers to his own criminal code.
He could not discern
1 See their own statement to Hutchinson, in the Hutchinson Correspondence.
2 Lieut. Gov. Bull to Secretary of State.
3 Chalmers's History of the Revolt of the Colonies, II. 794.
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