colonies, along the margin of the shore of the North American
continent; contiguously situated, but chartered by adventurers of
characters variously diversified, including sectarians, religious
and political, of all the classes which for the two preceding
centuries had agitated and divided the people of the British islands
--and with them were intermingled the descendants of Hollanders,
Swedes, Germans, and French fugitives from the persecution of the
revoker of the Edict of Nantes.

In the bosoms of this people, thus heterogeneously composed, there
was burning, kindled at different furnaces, but all furnaces of
affliction, one clear, steady flame of liberty. Bold and daring
enterprise, stubborn endurance of privation, unflinching intrepidity
in facing danger, and inflexible adherence to conscientious
principle, had steeled to energetic and unyielding hardihood the
characters of the primitive settlers of all these colonies. Since
that time two or three generations of men had passed away, but they
had increased and multiplied with unexampled rapidity; and the land
itself had been the recent theatre of a ferocious and bloody
seven-years' war between the two most powerful and most civilized
nations of Europe contending for the possession of this continent.

Of that strife the victorious combatant had been Britain. She had
conquered the provinces of France. She had expelled her rival
totally from the continent, over which, bounding herself by the
Mississippi, she was thenceforth to hold divided empire only with
Spain. She had acquired undisputed control over the Indian tribes
still tenanting the forests unexplored by the European man. She had
established an uncontested monopoly of the commerce of all her
colonies. But forgetting all the warnings of preceding ages--