with bayonet and scalping knife. Not a generation passed without a baptism of fire—without giving the colonists experience in the use of that unanswerable argument of sovereignty, military force.
War also taught the colonies, so diverse in their interests and so hostile to one another in religion and politics, the art of coöperation. It was the common deadly fear of the Indians that brought into being the New England Confederation of 1643, uniting Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven for twenty years or more in a league of offense, defense, and mutual service. It was also the Indian menace, years afterward, that put the militiamen of Virginia and the Carolinas under arms in a mutual enterprise. It was to prepare the Americans for general defense and for the impending struggle with France that the famous colonial conference was held in Albany in 1754, attended by representatives of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Although the plan of union there discussed was never adopted, Franklin, who drew it, lived to serve as a member of the convention which drafted the Constitution of the United States. The Albany conference failed, but the French and Indian war that broke out three years later drove the colonies into coöperation on a continental scale.
As events proved, that was the last phase in the mighty contest for the heart of North America. The French, who had established themselves at Quebec in 1608, one year after the founding of Jamestown, and at New Orleans in 1718, fourteen years before the settlement of Georgia, had planted post after post in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys and had served notice that English enterprise was to be confined to the coast line. When in 1753 the soldiers of King Louis raised their flag over Fort Duquesne on the headwaters of the Ohio, they flung out a challenge which even the most pacific Quaker in Philadelphia had to heed. And the gesture was quickly answered. George Washington, a young militia officer of Virginia, was sent
