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

[145] and the Connecticut, and extended into unmea-

chap. VI.} 1754.

sured distances in the west. Within its bosom, at Onondaga, burned the council-fire of the Six Nations, whose irregular bands had seated themselves near Montreal, on the northern shore of Ontario, and on the Ohio; whose hunters roamed over the Northwest and the West; whose war-parties had for ages strolled to Carolina. Here were concentrated by far the most important Indian relations, round which the great idea of a general union was shaping itself into a reality. It was to still the hereditary warfare of the Six Nations with the Southern Indians, that South Carolina and Massachusetts first met at Albany; it was to confirm friendship with them and their allies, that New England, and all the Central States but New Jersey, had assembled in congress. But a higher principle was needed to blend the several colonies under one sovereignty; that principle also existed on the banks of the Hudson, and the statesmen of New York clung perseveringly and without wavering to faith in a united American empire.

England never possessed the affection of the country which it had acquired by conquest. British officials sent home complaints of ‘the Dutch republicans’ as disloyal. The descendants of the Huguenot refugees were taunted with their origin, and invited to accept English liberties gratefully as a boon. Nowhere was the collision between the royal governor and the colonial Assembly so violent or so inveterate. Nowhere had the legislature, by its method of granting money, so nearly exhausted and appropriated to itself all executive authority. Nowhere had the relations of the province to Great Britain been more