American school-boys, beginning: "They planted by your care'! No! Your oppressions planted them in America." Francis Dana, afterwards Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and Jared Ingersoll, agent for Connecticut in London, heard the speech, and both sent home. reports and commendations of it. The bill was pending in the House between three and four weeks, at the end of which time it was passed, the largest number of votes which had been given against it in any stage of its progress not having amounted to fifty. It was concurred in by the House of Lords, where it appears to have March met no resistance, and in due course received the royal assent. No apprehension of consequences coun

1765.

selled a pause.

The Stamp Act as it has ever since been called by eminence - provided in sixty-three sections for the payment, by British subjects in America to the English Exchequer, of specified sums, greater and less, in consideration of obtaining validity for each of the common transactions of business. Deeds, bonds, notes of hand, indentures, insurance policies, leases, contracts of sale, were to have no legal value, and were not capable of being enforced by courts of justice, unless they were written on stamped paper bought of the officers of the Crown. Without stamped wills testamentary dispositions would be void. Without stamped receipts debts could not be acquitted. Vessels at sea, without clearances writ ten on stamped paper, were liable to seizure and confiscation if they fell in with a King's ship. Only stamped newspapers might be exposed for sale. Without stamped certificates marriages could not be lawfully contracted. Unstamped writs and executions had no force or meaning. In short, the American citizen must be daily paying

"The burden of the Stamp Act will certainly fall chiefly on the middling, more necessitous, and la

boring people. The widow, the orphan, and others who have few on earth to help or even pity them.

money into the British Treasury at its stamp office, or, in respect to much of the protection which society undertakes to afford, he was an outlaw.

1749. Nov.

CHAPTER IV.

WHEN the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle vainly promised tranquillity along the northern border of New England, attention was turned to that portion of the inviting country west of the river Connecticut which was still almost vacant of inhabitants, whether civilized or savage. Fort Dummer, built by Massachusetts a quarter of a century before, was still the only English post within that territory, and the subsequent extraordinary determination of the boundary between Massachusetts and New Hampshire had released it from the jurisdiction of the former Colony. The Governor of New Hampshire informed the Governor of New York that he was instructed to make grants of such lands west of the Connecticut as lay within his jurisdiction, and, to the end of avoiding mutual interference, he desired to be acquainted with the extent of the claims of New York in the debatable region. Meanwhile, assuming that New York could assert no title to a boundary farther eastward than was made by a protraction of the line of longitude, twenty miles east of Hudson River, which separated that Province from Connecticut and Massachusetts, Governor Wentworth made a grant of the parcel of land, since called Bennington, which lies six miles north of the northern boundary of Massachusetts, and somewhat more than twenty miles east of the Hudson; and within four years more, as he informed Lord Halifax, he had "granted thirty-three townships" in that quarter. The Governor

1750.

June.

of New York protested against this assignment, objecting that, by the patent of King Charles the Second to his brother, New York extended "from the west side of Connecticut River to the east side of Delaware Bay," and that, though later arrangements had pushed the boundary of Massachusetts and Connecticut as far west as to a line drawn north and south at a distance of twenty miles from the river Hudson, yet nothing had occurred to afford any foundation for such a claim on the part of New Hampshire, the original grant of which Province embraced no lands distant more than sixty miles from the sea.

1763.

The dispute, referred to the King for decision, remained unsettled when war again broke out. The cam- 1756paign on and about Lake George and Lake Champlain brought the intervening country into notice, and caused numerous applications for it when peace again approached. Governor Wentworth had a survey made of lands extending sixty miles along the Connecticut, and caused towns six miles square to be laid out in three tiers on both sides of that river. Of these, stimulated by an arrangement which reserved for his own property five hundred acres in each township, he at once made sixty grants on the west side of the river and eighteen on the east side. Two years later the number of the grants west of the river amounted to one hundred and thirtyeight, the western boundary, after passing the head waters of the Hudson, being continued by a line running northwardly twenty miles east of Lake Champlain.

The attraction of the newly granted lands, enhanced by the new peace along the border, drew into them numbers of settlers from Massachusetts and Connecticut.

1 In 1760 New Hampshire had already sixty-two taxable towns. (N. H. Prov. Papers, VI. 742.) About this time Governor Wentworth con

The

tracted the marriage which has been so gracefully commemorated by Longfellow. (Ibid., 856.)

Governor of New York issued a proclamation, claiming jurisdiction over the country north of Massachusetts and west of the river Connecticut. Governor Went

1764. worth made a counter-proclamation, and ordered his officers to arrest persons obstructing the administration of New Hampshire within the controverted limits. Wentworth wrote to Lord Halifax that, after the reduction of Canada, and the prospect there was of a peace, he "had the pleasure of settling on the east side of Connecticut River near a hundred towns, and about the same number on the west side," and that down to this year he "met with no opposition from New York; but now a number of armed men, attended by the Patroon and High Sheriff of Albany, seized upon and carried off from Pownall a justice of the peace, a captain of militia, a deputy sheriff who was executing a legal process, with one other principal inhabitant." The matter came before the Board of Trade, and through them before the Privy Council, who decided in favor of New York.' But there was an ambiguity in the language of the Council's decree, which was interpreted by one party as meaning that the disputed territory always had belonged of right to New York, and that accordingly the conveyances by the Governor of New Hampshire were void and of no effect, the other party construing the decree to mean merely that the lands were hereafter to be under the jurisdiction of New York, leaving the property undisturbed as belonging to the parties to whom the authorities of New Hampshire had conveyed it. The royal control over the territory ceased before the dispute was determined.2

1 July 20, 1764, in consequence of "a spurious petition" from New Hampshire, there was a royal decree in favor of New York, after which New Hampshire granted no more patents.

2 The "New Hampshire grants" (as they were called) west of the

Connecticut, with the addition of as much territory adjoining on the north as lay east of Lake Champlain, came to constitute, in 1777, the State of Vermont, and ultimately, in 1791, the fourteenth State of the American Union.