Washington Leads Troops to Recover It

Franklin's plan proposed a grand council or congress of forty-eight members, chosen by the several assemblies, the representatives of each colony to be, in number, in proportion to the contribution of each to the general treasury; that the congress should choose their own speaker and have the general management of all civil and military affairs, and to enact general laws in conformity to the British constitution and not in contravention of acts of the imperial parliament; to have a President-General (with Philadelphia the seat of government) appointed and paid by the crown, who should bear a negative or veto power on all acts of the congress, and to have, with the advice and consent of the congress, the appointment of all military officers and the entire management of Indian affairs, the civil officers to be appointed by the congress with the approval of the President-General. This plan of government was similar, in its leading features, to our National Constitution, in the framing of which Dr. Franklin bore a conspicuous part more than thirty years after the convention at Albany.

Franklin's thoughts had been occupied with the topic of union for some time. Several weeks before, he had published the following paragraph in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gasette, in an account of the seizure, by the French, of the position at the Forks of the Ohio: "The confidence of the French in this undertaking seems well-grounded in the present disunited state of the British colonies, and the extreme difficulty of bringing so many different governments and assemblies to agree in any speedy and effectual measures for our common defence and security; while our enemies have the very great advantage of being under one direction, with one council and one purse." At the close of the article was a rude wood-cut representing a serpent, the ancient emblem of vigor, separated into as many parts as there were English-American colonies, and under it, in large letters, the words JOIN or DIE. This significant device, which seems to have been first used by Franklin, figured conspicuously at the opening of the Revolution twenty years afterward.

The Plan of Union adopted by the convention was submitted to the Lords of Trade and Plantations. That body did not approve of it, nor even recommend it to the consideration of the king. Neither was it favorably received by the assemblies, partly because the royal governors at first warmly recommended it. In endeavors to please both royalists and republicans, the convention utterly failed. Franklin wrote: "The assemblies all thought there was too much prerogative in it, and in England it was thought to have too much of the democratic," and it was rejected.

When intelligence of the expulsion of the English from the Ohio Valley reached the royal cabinet, measures were taken for the recovery of what had been lost, and for the creation of a new colony west of the Alleghany Mountains for its security in the future. The Earl of Albemarle was then governor-in-chief of Virginia, with Dinwiddie as his lieutenant. He instructed the latter to grant lands to any persons desiring to settle in the Ohio region, not more than a thousand acres to each. So it was that Virginia became the pioneer in the extension of the colonies westward, and the mother of States in the great basins of the Ohio. At the same time the ministry were eager to regain, by military power, what had been lost. They could not wait for the slow process of colonization. Indeed the exigencies of the case would not permit. The direction of American affairs was left to the warlike Duke of Cumberland, then captain-general of the British army, and by his orders Dinwiddie prepared for a winter campaign against the French. He ordered Washington to join his regiment at Alexandria, to fill up the companies by enlistments, and to hasten to Will's Creek, where Colonel Innis was building Fort Cumberland, and with his own troops, and the remnants of companies from other colonies, march over the Alleghany Mountains and drive the French from Fort Du Quesne. It was so late in the year that the mountains would be impassable on account of snow-drifts by an army inadequately supplied with food, clothing, and transportation. Washington knew this; and in a letter to one of the governor's council, he vehemently remonstrated. His words were heeded, and the mad scheme was abandoned.

Meanwhile French emissaries were busy among the savage tribes west of the mountains, inciting them to a war of extermination against the English. The same influence had caused a murderous Indian raid upon the frontiers of New England; and yet, in full view of the impending danger, some of the colonies were strangely apathetic. Governor Shirley put forth energetic efforts in Massachusetts to avert the evil. New York subscribed twenty-five thousand dollars for military service, and Maryland thirty thousand dollars for the same. The British government sent over fifty thousand dollars to aid the colonists, and Virginia made an appropriation of the same amount.