George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 6, 10th edition.

[439]

On Monday, the twenty-eighth of December,

Chap. XLVIII.} 1772. Dec.

towns were in session from the Banks of the Kennebec¹ to Buzzard's Bay.² The people of Charlestown beheld their own welfare ‘and the fate of unborn millions in suspense.’ ‘It will not be long,’ said Rochester, ‘before our assembling for the cause of liberty will be determined to be riotous, and every attempt to prevent the flood of despotism from overflowing our land will be deemed open rebellion.’ Woolwich, ‘an infant people in an infant country,’ did not ‘think their answer perfect in spelling or the words placed,’ yet hearty good feeling got the better of their false shame.³ Does any one ask who had precedence in proposing a Union of the Colonies, and a war for Independence? The thoughts were the offspring of the time; and were in every patriot's breast. It were as well to ask which tree in the forest is the earliest to feel the genial influence of the reviving year. The first official utterance of revolution did not spring from a Congress of the Colonies, or the future chiefs of the Republic; from the rich who falter, or the learned who weigh and debate. The people of the little interior town of Pembroke in Plymouth county, unpretending husbandmen, full of the glory of their descent from the Pilgrims, concluded a clear statement of their grievances with the prediction, that ‘if the measures so justly complained of were persisted in and enforced by fleets and armies, they must, they will, in a little time issue in the total dissolution ’