putes, loud and long, as Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards lashed sinners or parsons of the Church of England sought to extend their authority over all the king's subjects; flashes of intolerance flaming out against Catholics, Jews, and the holders of novel ideas; dramatic struggles over freedom of the press whenever royal agents laid heavy hands on the engines of public opinion; angry controversies between governors and popular assemblies ending sometimes in the expulsion of the king's officers; epidemics of smallpox sending terror through widespread communities; plagues of popular frenzy such as the execution of witches in New England and massacres of Negroes in New York; patient experiments in agricultural improvements; and the ceaseless pageant of common humanity engrossed in the routine of labor from sun to sun.
And yet from our vantage point we can now see, beneath the apparently driftless whirl of events, deep currents setting in toward independence. Crashing axes and cracking rifles on the Western frontier marked the inexorable advance of the American empire. The ceaseless coming and going of ships meant more hands to labor and more wealth for private chests. Stern old gentlemen, in ruffles and knee breeches, bending over their accounts, were swelling the patrimonies that were to give leisure and power to the Gadsdens, Pinckneys, Morrises, Washingtons, Jeffersons, and Adamses of the American Revolution. Quarrels in colonial assemblies were teaching sons of yeomen and merchants how to draw resolutions, frame declarations, manage finances, make constitutions, and carry on the warfare of the public forum.
In meeting houses, clerical studies, college classrooms, and petty editorial chambers, active minds were gathering the knowledge with which to freight their arguments and give point to their appeals directed to a somnolent, yet potential, nation unfolding into sovereignty. Campaigns against the Indians and the French showed provincials how to organize, supply, and direct that indispensable branch of
