irginia. Numbers will repair to
us for safety and we will then try a predatory war. If overpowered we
must cross the Allegheny mountains."

What do you think of that? What a wicked man he must have been. He
intended to abandon the seaboard colonies, taking with him all the
rebels who would follow him; and a great many including your ancestor
would have to follow him, for if they remained behind they would be
hung. He proposed a "grand trek" to get away from those British who are
said to govern so well, just as the Boers "treked" away from them into
the deserts of South Africa nearly a hundred years ago, because they did
not fancy what they had experienced of that supposed excellent
government.

Having secured a refuge for the rebel congress and his followers on the
edge of what was then the Western Wilderness, Washington proposes to
maintain himself there by what he calls "predatory war," and I suppose
you know what that is. If unsuccessful in that, he intended to cross the
Allegheny mountains and plunge into that vast unknown region with the
Indians and the buffaloes, which stretched away 3,000 miles to the
Pacific ocean. There, assisted by the great distances he could play
havoc with an invading British force; cut their slender communications
and their cordons of blockhouses as the Boers are doing to-day in South
Africa.

This last resort of the rebel colonists was so obvious that it was often
discussed not only in the colonies but in England. It was greatly feared
by the tory ministry, because it might indefinitely prolong the war. The
whigs prophesied disaster from it; and Burke in one of his speeches
refers to it in an eloquent passage in which he describes the rebel
colonists retreating to that vast interior of fertile plains where they
would grow into marvels of hardihood and desperation; how they would
become myriads of American Tartars and pour down a fierce and
irresistible cavalry upon the narrow strip of sea coast, sweeping before
them "your governors, your councillors, your collectors and comptrollers
and all the slaves that adhere to them."

In other words the tories dreaded what not so very long afterwards they
accomplished in South Africa. They forced the Boers out of Cape Colony
and they went by the grand trek into the interior plains where they
founded two fierce and free republics, such as Washington might very
readily have founded west of the Alleghenies. A turn of the hand, the
failure of the F