ur of the union of
the thirteen American colonies into a federal nation. The inhabitants
were all substantially one people. It is true that in some of the
colonies there were a good many persons not of English ancestry, but
the English type absorbed and assimilated everything else.

All spoke the English language, all had English institutions. Except
the development of the written constitution, every bit of civil
government described in the preceding pages came to America directly
from England, and not a bit of it from any other country, unless by
being first filtered through England. Our institutions were as English
as our speech. It was therefore comparatively easy for people in one
colony to understand people in another, not only as to their words but
as to their political ideas. Moreover, during the first half of the
eighteenth century, the common danger from the aggressive French
enemy on the north and west went far toward awakening in the thirteen
colonies a common interest. And after the French enemy had been
removed, the assertion by parliament of its alleged right to tax the
Americans threatened all the thirteen legislatures at once, and thus
in fact drove the colonies into a kind of federal union.

[Sidenote: The New England confederacy (1643-84).]
[Sidenote: Albany Congress(1754).]
[Sidenote: Stamp Act Congress (1765).]
Confederations among states have generally owed their origin, in
the first instance, to military necessities. The earliest league in
America, among white people at least, was the confederacy of New
England colonies formed in 1643, chiefly for defence against the
Indians. It was finally dissolved amid the troubles of 1684, when the
first government of Massachusetts was overthrown. Along the Atlantic
coast the northern and the southern colonies were for some time
distinct groups, separated by the unsettled portion of the central
zone. The settlement of Pennsylvania, beginning in 1681, filled this
gap and made the colonies continuous from the French frontier of
Canada to the Spanish frontier of Florida. The danger from France
began to be clearly apprehended after 1689, and in 1698 one of the
earliest plans of union was proposed by William Penn. In 1754, just
as the final struggle with France was about to begin, there came
Franklin's famous plan for a permanent federal union; and this plan
was laid before a congress assembled at Albany for renewing the
alliances with the Six Nations.[1] Only se