The militia officers threw up their commissions from the royal governor, and submitted to the orders of congress. A council of safety was charged with executive powers. In the midst of these proceedings Lord William Campbell, their new governor, arrived, and the provincial congress thus addressed him: "No lust of independence has had the least influence upon our counsels; no subjects more sincerely desire to testify their loyalty and affection. We deplore the measures, which, if persisted in, must rend the British empire. Trusting the event to Providence, we prefer death to slavery." "The people of Charleston are as mad as they are here in Boston," was the testimony of Gage.

The skirmish at Lexington became known in Savannah on the tenth of May, and added Georgia to the union. At that time she had about seventeen thousand white inhabitants and fifteen thousand Africans. Her militia was not less than three thousand. Her frontier, which extended from Augusta to St. Mary's, was threatened by the Creeks, with four thousand warriors; the Chickasas, with four hundred and fifty; the Cherokees, with three thousand; the Choctas, with twenty-five hundred. But danger could not make her people hesitate. On the night of the eleventh, Noble Wimberley Jones, Joseph Habersham, Edward Telfair, and others, broke open the king's magazine in the eastern part of the city, and took from it over five hundred pounds of powder. To the Boston wanderers they sent sixty-three barrels of rice and one hundred and twenty-two pounds in specie; and they kept the king's birthday by raising a liberty-pole. "A general rebellion throughout America is coming on suddenly and swiftly," reported Sir James Wright, the governor; "matters will go to the utmost extremity."

The great deed, which in the mean time was achieved in the North, was planned in Connecticut, and executed at her cost. Parsons, of that colony, on his way to Hartford, crossing Arnold, who was bound for Massachusetts, obtained of him an account of the state of Ticonderoga, and the great number of its brass cannon. At Hartford, on the twenty-seventh of April, Parsons, taking as his advisers Samuel Wyllys and Silas Deane, with the assistance of three others projected the capture of the

fort; and, without formally consulting the assembly or the governor and council, they, on their own receipts, obtained money from the public treasury, and on the twenty-eighth sent forward Noah Phelps and Bernard Romans. The next day Captain Edward Mott, of Preston, chairman of the Connecticut committee, followed with five associates. Ethan Allen was encouraged by an express messenger to raise men chiefly in the New Hampshire Grants. On the morning of the first of May the party, which had grown to the number of sixteen, left Salisbury. At Pittsfield, in Massachusetts, the Connecticut party were joined by John Brown, the young lawyer of that village, by Colonel James Easton, and by volunteers from Berkshire. At Bennington they found Ethan Allen, who sent the alarm through the hills and valleys of Vermont; and on Sunday, the seventh of May, about one hundred Green Mountain Boys and near fifty soldiers from Massachusetts, under the command of Easton, rallied at Castleton. Just then arrived Arnold, with only one attendant. He brought a commission from the Massachusetts committee of safety, which was disregarded; and the men unanimously elected Ethan Allen their chief.

On the ninth the party arrived at Orwell. With the utmost difficulty, a few boats were brought together; and eightythree men, crossing the lake with Allen, landed near Ticonderoga. The boats were sent back for Seth Warner and the rear-guard; but, if they were to be waited for, there could be no surprise. The men were therefore at once drawn up in three ranks; and, as the first beams of morning broke upon. the mountain peaks, Allen addressed them: "Friends and fellow-soldiers, we must this morning quit our pretensions to valor, or possess ourselves of this fortress; and, inasmuch as it is a desperate attempt, I do not urge it on, contrary to will. You that will undertake voluntarily, poise your firelock."

At the word, every firelock was poised. "Face to the right!" cried Allen; and, placing himself at the head of the centre file, Arnold keeping emulously at his side, he marched to the gate. It was shut, but the wicket was open. The sentry snapped a fusil at him. The Americans rushed into the fort, darted upon the guards, and, raising the Indian war-whoop, such as had not been heard there since the days of Montcalm,

formed on the parade in hollow square, to face each of the barracks. One of the sentries, after wounding an officer, and being slightly wounded himself, cried out for quarter, and showed the way to the apartment of the commander. "Come forth instantly, or I will sacrifice the whole garrison,” cried Ethan Allen as he reached the door. At this, Delaplace, the commander, came out undressed, with his breeches in his hand. "Deliver to me the fort instantly," said Allen. "By what authority?" asked Delaplace. "In the name of the great Jehovah, and the continental congress!" answered Allen. Delaplace began to speak again, but was peremptorily interrupted; and, at sight of Allen's drawn sword near his head, he gave up the garrison, ordering his men to be paraded without arms. Thus Ticonderoga, which cost the British nation eight millions sterling, a succession of campaigns, and many lives, was won in ten minutes by a few undisciplined volunteers, without the loss of life or limb.

The Americans took with the fortress nearly fifty prisoners, who, as of right, were sent to Connecticut; and they gained one thirteen-inch mortar, more than a hundred pieces of cannon, swivels, stores, and small arms. To a detachment under Seth Warner, Crown Point, with its garrison of twelve men, surrendered upon the first summons. Another party succeeded in making a prisoner of Skene, a dangerous British agent; and in getting possession of Skenesborough, now known as Whitehall.

John Brown, of Pittsfield, was charged to carry to the continental congress the account of the great acquisition which inaugurated the day of its assembling. Meantime, until its advice could be known, the legislature of Massachusetts, considering that the expedition began in Connecticut, requested the legislature of that colony to take the conquest under their sole direction and care.

The movement extended itself eastward to the borders of New England. The Canceaux, a king's ship, lay at anchor in Portland harbor; on the eleventh of May a party of sixty men from Georgetown, too feeble to take the vessel, seized Mowat, its captain, and two of his officers, who chanced to be with him on shore. The officer left in command of the ship

threatened and even began a bombardment of the town.

At a

late hour Mowat was released for the night. The desire for revenge rankled in his veins, and infected the admiral of the station.

To the harbor of Machias a king's cutter, the Margaretta, convoyed two sloops, to be freighted with lumber for the army at Boston. On Sunday, the eleventh of June, the patriots of the town, aided by volunteers from Mispecka and Pleasant River, seized the captain of the sloops "in the meeting-house," and afterward got possession of his vessels. The Margaretta did not fire on the town, but in the dusk of the evening fell down the harbor, and the next morning proceeded on her voyage. She was pursued by Captain Jeremiah O'Brien and forty men in one of the captured sloops, and by twenty others from Machias in a schooner; and, being a dull sailer, she was soon overtaken. An obstinate sea-fight took place; the captain of the cutter was mortally wounded and six of his men were hurt, when, after an hour's resistance, the British flag was struck, for the first time on the ocean, to Americans.

The extension of hostilities to the sea had, on the seventh of June, been discussed in the congress of Massachusetts; but it was difficult for the colony to conceive itself in a state of war with Great Britain. "A war has begun," wrote Joseph Warren, from the Massachusetts congress; "but I hope Britain, after a full conviction both of our ability and resolution to maintain our right, will act with wisdom; this I most heartily wish, as I feel a warm affection still for the parent state."

CHAPTER XII.

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION EMANATES FROM THE PEOPLE.

MAY-JULY 1775.

THE Massachusetts congress, by a swift ship, sent to England a calm and accurate statement of the events of the nineteenth of April, fortified by depositions, with a charge to Arthur Lee, their agent, to give it the widest circulation. These were their words to the inhabitants of Britain: "Brethren, we profess to be loyal and dutiful subjects, and, so hardly dealt with as we have been, are still ready, with our lives and fortunes, to defend the person, family, crown, and dignity of our royal sovereign. Nevertheless, to the persecution and tyranny of his cruel ministry we will not submit; appealing to heaven for the justice of our cause, we determine to die or be free."

The news from Lexington and Concord surprised London in the last days of May. The people of England were saddened at the conflict, which they had been told never would come; and were irresolute between national pride and sympathy with the struggle for English liberties. "The effects of General Gage's attempt at Concord are fatal," said Dartmouth; "the happy moment of advantage is lost." The condemnation of Gage was universal. Hutchinson, the chief misleader of the government, vainly strove to hide his dejection. He ceased to be consulted and sunk into insignificance.

The French legation in London took notice that the resistance of the nineteenth of April was made with a full knowledge of the king's answer to the address of the two houses of parliament, pledging lives and fortunes for the reduction of America. "The Americans," wrote Garnier to Vergennes,