80 ORIGINAL TERRITORY OF THE UNITED STATES 



toward independence which culminated in the Declaration of 

 1776. The King and the Parliament, unmindful of the great 

 services of the colonies in the destruction of the power of France, 

 chose to regard them as mere sources of revenue for extinguish- 

 ing the enormous debt which Great Britain had incurred in ex- 

 tending her colonial empire. The British theory was that the 

 colonies should pay the cost of the war. The latter, on the other 

 hand, had made great sacrifices for the public good. The war 

 had involved them in a large expenditure of life and money. 

 Thirty thousand men had been killed in battle, and many of 

 the colonies had incurred considerable debts. The imposition 

 of special taxes upon them they considered not only unjust in 

 principle but unwarranted by their conduct toward the British 

 Crown, for whose glory they had bravely fought. When, in 1774, 

 the estrangement of the colonies toward England had reached 

 a crisis, they were thirteen separate communities, with different 

 laws and political organizations, possessing little in common ex- 

 cept the general use of the English language, allegiance to the 

 same King, and the memories of fellowship in the French and 

 Indian wars. Twenty years earlier Franklin had proposed a 

 union for the common defense, and his telling figure of the snake 

 severed into thirteen parts, representing the colonies, over the 

 legend, "Join or die," in the days of the Albany convention, 

 made an indelible impression on the popular mind. The Union, 

 however, had never been consummated, for it was rejected by the 

 colonial assemblies, who feared they might create a new master, 

 and not acceptable to the English Board of Trade, because the idea 

 was too democratic. But Franklin, who was then in England as 

 the agent of several colonies, had written an official letter to the 

 Massachusetts Assembly, in which he said : " The strength of an 

 empire depends not only on the union of its parts, but on their 

 readiness for the united exertion of their common force ; " and, 

 to secure this end, he proposed that a general congress be as- 

 sembled to make a solemn assertion of the rights of the colonies 

 and to engage them with each other never to grant aid to the 

 Crown in any general war till those rights were recognized by 

 the King and both houses of Parliament. 



Accordingly a Congress, styling itself " the delegates appointed 

 by the good people of these colonies" assembled at Philadelphia on 

 the 5th of September, 1774. There was no law or precedent for 

 such a union, and it was not even pretended that the colonial 

 assemblies had the legal right to unite without the consent of 



