THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. lYT 



tan clergy who went to Virginia were ejected for non-conformity; and 

 it was only about twenty years before William Penn obtained the char- 

 ter for Pennsylvania, and came with his Quaker followers, that the 

 '■^ Friend s^^ who ventured into New England were scourged under the 

 law against " vagabond Quakers," and the sterner penalty of death 

 inflicted. 



If at an early period sectarian animosity was burning lines of division 

 between the colonists, the now tolerant Christianity of a later time con- 

 tributed largely to the more accordant results of blending the commu- 

 nities together. Each christian society was at length enabled peace- 

 fully to commune with its own brotherhood in other sections of the 

 country, and thus ecclesiastical s^'mpath}' became one of the means by 

 which the way was prepared for civil and political sympathies. The 

 inhabitants of different and distant colonies became members of one 

 household in their faith, thus learning, perhaps, how they might become 

 members of one political family. Among the churches of the chui'ch 

 of England in the colonies, no ecclesiastical union in one collective 

 representative assembly was formed until after the peace of 1783. 

 The Presbyterians, feeling the want of ecclesiastical combination, as 

 appears from a circular letter of the ministers and elders at Philadelphia, 

 began in 1764 to take measures to elfect a union of their scattered forces. 



I turn now to another and very dif^ln^ent influence of union, which is 

 to be discovered in the military colonial combinations. On repeated 

 occasions the authorities of the colonies — governors and commissioners — 

 were brought into connexion for conference respectiiig hostilities, offen- 

 sive as well as defensive. It was upon such an occasion, in 1690, at 

 New York, that the word " Congress''' first has a place in our history. 

 But, besides such occasional conferences, the colonists were brought to- 

 gether in joint military service, to know each other the better thereb}^ 

 This kind of association may be traced as an influence of union, more 

 or less operative on different occasions from the times of what were 

 called " King William's war," and " Queen Anne's war," at the close 

 of the seventeenth and at the beginning of the eighteenth century, down 

 to the peace of Paris, in 1763, at the end of the old French war. The 

 colonies contributed their respective sums of money to the general cost 

 of the war, and troops levied in the different colonies served together 

 in the several early attempts on Canada, in the expedition against Cape 

 Breton and the capture of Louisburg, and upon what was the first 

 foreign service of the colonists, (I mean foreign beyond the continent,) 

 Vernon's disastrous expeditions against Carthagena and Cuba. The 

 associated service in the old French war was the latest discipline of 

 the kind to prepare the colonies fi^r the war of the revolution. 



While such" influences and others of a more imperceptible nature, 

 which I cannot now pause to discuss, were working propitiously for 

 union, there was a counter-agency produced by the indications of a de- 

 sire on the part ol" the British government to adopt a different colonial 

 policy, to substitute for "that wise and salutary neglect," which Mr. 

 Burke afterwards commended, a more active control. In carr3'ing out 

 such a pohcy there would be needed more of union, not spontaneous, 

 voluntary colonial union, but compulsory union, b}- the imperial power 

 on the other side of the Atlantic. It was at the close of the seventeenth 

 Mis. Doc. 24 12 



