XI. 1769. Daniel BOOK In the following year, it was again visited and explored by James Knox and forty other Virginian hunters. The first permanent settlement in Kentucky was made by Boon and his family, accompanied by some of their Virginian and Carolinian friends, in the year 1773. This occupation was reckoned an infringement of the rights of the Cherokee Indians, whose claim to the territory had been recently recognised in a treaty between them and the British government; but it was legitimated about two years afterwards, by an extensive purchase of the land adjacent to Kentucky river, which was transacted with the Cherokees by Richard Henderson of Virginia. The colonization of the new territory was gradually extended by the resort of emigrants to it from several of the American states. Of all the early settlers the most renowned was Daniel Boon, whom we have already particularized. He was a native of Virginia, and a very remarkable specimen of human character and taste; contemplative, sagacious, and though little conversant, yet not wholly untinctured with letters;1 ardent and enterprising, yet enamoured of solitude; and no less distinguished by the strength and vigour of his frame, and the courage and constancy of his soul, than by the tenderness of his heart and the mildness of his manners. He had first removed from his native province to a desert part of North Carolina: and thence, accompanied by a small band of friends who shared his tastes and depended on his genius, he made his more famous emigration to Kentucky. These adventurers, attached to hunting and solitude, served as an advanced guard or body of pioneers to a race of more stationary colonists: commencing settlements at a great variety of spots, which they successively abandoned to other emigrants, from whose approaches and vicinity they receded. Bravely persisting in a course of life fraught with labour and danger, and yet attended with health, strength, and happiness unstained by All the accounts of him that I have seen, agree in representing him as wholly illiterate; and yet, many years after this period, he wrote an interesting and even elegant narrative of his early adventures in Kentucky, which is published in Imlay's Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, and also prefixed to Metcalf's Collection of Narratives of Indian Warfare in the West. II. guilt,' they laid the foundation of a great and flourish- CHA P. ing state, which, only fifteen years after its colonization first began, contained a population of more than eighty thousand 1769. souls.2 1 See Note XIV. at the end of the volume. Humphry Marshall's History of Kentucky. Narrative of the Adventures of Daniel Boon, from his first arrival in Kentucky in 1769, to the end of the year 1782. Holmes. Warden. XI. 1769. of the British mea sures. CHAPTER III. Impolicy of the British Measures.-Affray between the Troops and the People of BOOK NOTHING could be more unwise or illiberal than the plan-if plan it may be called-of policy pursued by the British government in the controversy with America. It was varied only Impolicy by alternations of unjust encroachment, haughty menace, and concession so tardily accorded, and so insolently expressed, as to be always inefficacious and frequently affronting. Where it announced vigour, it served to rouse and exasperate the Americans: where it affected lenity, it encouraged without conciliating them.1 Its illiberality arose from the character of the king, and the temper of the British parliament and nation its incoherence and imbecility may be traced partly to the composition and partly to the fluctuations in the British cabinet. Each successive administration, inheriting the spirit : 1 Shortly after the present period, a party of English noblemen and gentlemen, travelling in Germany, were entertained at Potsdam by Frederick (styled the Great), king of Prussia, who took occasion to turn the discourse on the controversy between Britain and America. He said that it was a difficult thing to govern men by force at such a distance; that if the Americans should be beaten, which appeared a little problematical, still it would be next to impossible to draw a revenue from them by taxation; that if the English intended conciliation, their measures were too rough"; and if subjugation, they were too gentle. 2 The frequent changes of administration in the commencement of the reign of George the Third, have been ascribed with much show of reason, by Edmund Burke, to a design cherished at court, of destroying, by deceiving, disuniting, and disgracing the heads of the Whiggish aristocracy of England. See Burke's Thoughts on the Causes of the existing Discontents. III. 1769. of its predecessors, or controlled by the temper of the court or CHAP. nation, but regardless of the credit of the measures of former cabinets, and willing to evade any share of their un popularity, repealed them with a readiness that inspirited, and yet with an insolence that provoked the colonists; assigning as the sole reasons of repeal motives of English interest and convenience, which arraigned the wisdom of the authors of those measures, saved the dignity of the repealing cabinet, and soothed the pride of the nation. The lessons so plainly taught by the introduction and the repeal of the Stamp Act, instead of operating as a warning were perversely used as a model, to which the British government, with steadfast pride, continued ever after to accommodate its policy. It seemed as if the first false step made by Grenville had pledged his country to persist in a dangerous experiment, in which the chances of success were additionally diminished by frequent changes in the instrumental process, arising mainly from the fluctuating composition of the cabinet. Those changes, it is true, were promoted in some degree by the violent resistance of the Americans to every form in which the overture of bereaving them of their liberties was repeated: but this circumstance was either never clearly perceived, or never justly appreciated by the British ministers, who, with amazing folly, believed that by abandoning an assault upon American liberty in one quarter, they would facilitate an attempt upon it in another. With strange disregard or misconception of the most notorious properties of human nature, they believed, or at least acted as if they believed, that all the indignant and courageous spirit provoked in a brave and free people by an obnoxious measure, must be instantly dissipated by its repeal; that provocations might be repeated without producing any increase or accumulation o hostile and impatient sentiment; and that it was always in their power by a change of policy, however tardy, however ungracious, however flattering to the efficacy of American resistance, at once to disband all the swelling host of angry passions from whose victorious energy they were compelled to retreat. Yet every observant man who has witnessed the fluctuations of a revolution, must have remarked that a nation excited to the point of violent resistance, is less gratified by immediate success than disquieted by a craving XI. BOOK demand for some object whereon to wreak its aroused energy and unexpended passion. The entire effect of a deliberate 1769. espousal and steady prosecution of lenient and liberal policy, it is impossible to define: but we may safely conclude that most probably it would have promoted the interest, and certainly it would not have impaired the honour and dignity of Great Britain. A uniform course of rigorous assertion of authority, on the other hand, would have accelerated a critical struggle, of which the retardation was highly favourable to the interests of American liberty. By the course (for truly it is an abuse of language to term it a plan) which was actually pursued, the Americans were thoroughly aroused by attacks on a great variety of points, animated by partial successes, strengthened by the lapse of time, and confirmed in obstinacy of purpose by protracted and indecisive contention. Every principle of good policy deducible from the issue of the Stamp Act, manifestly enjoined that Britain should either desist altogether from attempts to tax America, or at least should impose no tax obnoxious to the general opposition, or defeasible by the general resistance of the colonists. A second and similar failure in an experiment of such importance, was by all means to be avoided: and Townsend, indeed, had vainly imagined that by his Tea-duty Act, he at once asserted the authority of Britain, and obviated the scruples and objections of America. But with the present ministry, this measure possessed no claim of parental or kindly regard sufficient to counterbalance the difficulties occasioned by the vehement opposition of the Americans, and the petitions of the British merchants who suffered from the non-importation agreements. Reckoning the authority which they administered defied, and actuated by a sense of offended dignity, they embraced vindictive measures against the colonists on account of the mode in which they had conducted their opposition to a statute for which the cabinet itself entertained little concern or respect. They even warmly opposed a proposition for the repeal of this statute, which, with strange inconsistency, was introduced in the close of the same session of parliament that had produced the violent address to the king against the province of Massachusetts. On this occasion, it was contended by the ministers and their friends, with sincere and exalted folly, that repeal |