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

‘ [267] British government upon this continent.’¹ Pownall

chap. XI.} 1757.

ordered the inhabitants west of Connecticut River to destroy their wheel-carriages and drive in their cattle. Loudoun proposed to encamp on Long Island, for the defence of the continent. Every day it was said, ‘My Lord Loudoun goes soon to Albany,’ and still each day found him at New York. ‘We have a great number of troops,’ said even royalists, ‘but the inhabitants on the frontier will not be one jot the safer for them.’

The English had been driven from every cabin in the basin of the Ohio; Montcalm had destroyed every vestige of their power within that of the St. Lawrence. France had her posts on each side of the Lakes, and at Detroit, at Mackinaw, at Kaskaskia, and at New Orleans. The two great valleys of the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence were connected chiefly by three well known routes,—by way of Waterford to Fort Duquesne, by way of the Maumee to the Wabash, and by way of Chicago to the Illinois. Of the North American continent, the French claimed, and seemed to possess, twenty parts in twenty-five, leaving four only to Spain, and but one to Britain. Their territory exceeded that of the English twenty-fold. As the men composing the garrison at Fort Loudoun, in Tennessee, were but so many hostages in the hands of the Cherokees, the claim of France to the valleys of the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence seemed established by possession.

America and England were humiliated. They longed to avenge themselves; yet, Sharpe, of Maryland, made the apology of the ‘viceroy,’ approved