ave been
violated, nay, taken away; administration has attempted to coerce them
by the most cruel and oppressive laws."]

[Footnote 385: Annual Register, Vol. XIX., Chap. ix., pp. 57, 58, 63,
69, 70, 74, 75.]

CHAPTER XXV.

THE ASSEMBLING OF CONGRESS, MAY 10TH, 1776, AND TRANSACTIONS UNTIL THE
DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE, THE 4TH OF JULY.

It was under the circumstances stated in the preceding chapter, the
General Congress, according to adjournment the previous October,
reassembled in Philadelphia the 10th of May, 1776. The colonies were
profoundly convulsed by the transactions which had taken place in
Massachusetts, Virginia, North and South Carolina, by the intelligence
from England, that Parliament had, the previous December, passed an Act
to increase the army, that the British Government had largely increased
both the army and navy, and on failure of obtaining sufficient recruits
in England, Scotland, and Ireland, had negotiated with German princes,
who traded in the blood of their down-trodden subjects, for seventeen
thousand Hanoverian and Hessian mercenaries, to aid in reducing the
American colonies to absolute submission to the will of the King and
Parliament of Great Britain. It was supposed in England that the
decisive Act of Parliament, the unbending and hostile attitude of the
British Ministry, the formidable amount of naval and land forces, would
awe the colonies into unresisting and immediate submission; but the
effect of all these formidable preparations on the part of the British
Government was to unite rather than divide the colonies, and render them
more determined and resolute than ever to defend and maintain their
sacred and inherited rights and liberties as British subjects.

The thirteen colonies were a unit as to what they understood and
contended for in regard to their British constitutional rights and
liberties--namely, the rights which they had enjoyed for more than a
century--the right of taxation by their own elected representatives
alone, the right of providing for the support of their own civil
government and its officers--rights far less extensive than those which
are and have long been enjoyed by the loyal provinces of the Canadian
Dominion. There were, indeed, the Governors and their officers, sent
from England--the favourites and needy dependents of the British
Ministry and Parliament, sent out to subsist upon the colonists, but
were not of them, had no sympathy with them,