n were
carefully holding in joint trusteeship for the infant state he was to
nurse. The representative in the provincial legislature of a frontier
county stretching from the Potomac to the Ohio, we may fancy him
inspired, as he looked around from his post on the vertebral range of
the continent, with "something of prophetic strain." If so, he was
not long to have leisure for indulging it. Within eighteen months his
life's work was to summon him eastward to the sea-shore. The Dark and
Bloody Ground must wait. For its tillage other guess implements than
the plough were preparing--the same that beckoned him to Cambridge and
the new century.

The slender driblet of population which at this juncture flowed
toward the Lower Mississippi was due to the anxiety of Spain to get a
home-supply of wheat, hemp and such-like indispensables of temperate
extraction for her broad tropical empire. A newspaper of August 20,
1773 gives news from New York of the arrival at that port of "the
sloop Mississippi, Capt. Goodrich, with the Connecticut Military
Adventurers from the Mississippi, but last from Pensacola, the 16th
inst." They had "laid out twenty-three townships at the Natchez,"
where lands were in process of rapid occupation, the arrivals
numbering "above four hundred families within six weeks, down the Ohio
from Virginia and the Carolinas." The Connecticut men doubtless came
back prepared, a little later, to vindicate their martial cognomen;
and to aid them in that they were met by Transatlantic recruits in
unusual force. The same journal mentions the arrival at Philadelphia
of 1050 passengers in two ships from Londonderry; this valuable
infusion of Scotch-Irish brawn, moral, mental and muscular, being
farther supplemented by three hundred passengers and servants in the
ship Walworth from the same port for South Carolina. The cash value to
the country of immigrants was ascertainable by a much less circuitous
computation then than now; many of them being indentured for a term
of years at an annual rate that left a very fair sum for interest and
sinking fund on the one thousand dollars it is the practice of our
political economist of to-day to clap on each head that files
into Castle Garden. The German came with the Celt in almost equal
force--enough to more than balance their countrymen under Donop,
Riedesel and Knyphausen. The attention drawn to the colonies by the
ministerial aggressions thus contributed to strengthen them for the