CHAPTER VI
THE EVE OF THE CRISIS
Congress The general agreement of American authors has attached °f 1 754 - g rea t importance to the Congress of representatives from the different Colonies which met at Albany in 1754- Even so cool and cautious a writer as Mr Weeden remarks , 1 “ a larger organism of state, a better co-operation and autonomy, which should articulate into itself the town or parish meeting and the rude Colonial assembly, began to work in the minds of men. This sentiment found its first political expression in the assembly in 1754.” But, in fact, this assembly was suggested and directed by the English Government, and, although its conclusions were arrived at with tolerable unanimity, it was at the same time generally recognised that the mutual jealousies of the various Colonial Assemblies would prevent those conclusions from being generally accepted. The evil to be met was of course an old one. 1746. During the last war, Shirley had called serious attention to “the difficulty of uniting five or six different Governments 1754- in acting for their common safety and interest.” * In the very year of the Congress we find him writing that it would be impossible to obtain proper contributions from the different Colonies unless the English Government gave peremptory 1754. directions. De Lancey bore similar testimony . 3 “ A general union becomes every day more necessary, the necessity more visible, for in the present disjointed way in which the Colonies act, and some will not act at all, nothing is done.” At the same time De Lancey clearly recognised that such union could never take effect except by interposition of the British Parliament “to oblige the Colonies.” Dinwiddie from Virginia is found 4 advising an Act of Parliament to compel each Colony to raise a proportional quota for a general fund,
1 Vol. II. p. 668. 2 P.R.O. Am. and W. Indies Col. Corr., N. England, 4.
i N.Y. Docs., Vol. VI. 4 Dinwiddie Papers, Virg. Hist. So., Vols. III. and IV.
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