Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/199

] treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle; which excited very considerably the indignation of the New Englanders. Parliament subsequently reimbursed the colonies, for the expenses incurred in their efforts against the French, to the amount of upwards of a million of dollars.

As an illustration of the spirit of the Bostonians in all matters where they conceived their liberties entrenched upon, it deserves to be noted how they served Commodore Knowles and his attempts to impress men for his ships. One morning in November he sent a press-gang on shore who seized and carried off several of the inhabitants. So soon as the outrage was known the whole city was alive with excitement. A mob of several thousand people immediately collected, and besieged the town-house, where the Conned was then in session, with a storm of stones and brickbats. In vain did Governor Shirley come forth upon the balcony, and with a disavowal of the outrage, and a promise to obtain redress, endeavor to calm the exasperated feelings of the populace; they seized upon the officers of the ship, who happened to be on shore at the time, and detained them as hostages for the ransom of their fellow citizens. The governor earnestly entreated Knowles to give up the impressed seamen, in reply to which he offered to land a body of marines to support the governor, and threatened to bombard the town unless the tumult was appeased. The excitement kept on increasing, and the militia, who were called out next day, evincing a sympathy with the mob, Shirley, considering himself in personal danger, retired from the town to the castle, situated on an island in the neighboring bay, a retreat which the more zealous of the mob began to consider equal to an abdication. As matters had now reached an alarming pitch, the leading members of society, who had fully concurred in the movement, began to think that it was time to check it, and assembling in town meeting, declared their intention, at the same time that they yielded to none in a sense of the outrage committed by Knowles, to stand by the governor and executive, and to suppress this threatening tumult, which they very conveniently attributed to "negroes and persons of vile condition." Meanwhile Knowles, at the earnest solicitation of the governor, consented to return most of the men he had impressed, and shortly afterwards departed with his fleet, while Shirley, returning to Boston, was escorted to his house by the same militia who but a day or two before had refused to obey his instructions. In his letters to the Board of Trade on the subject of this "rebellious insurrection," Shirley ascribes the "mobbish turn of a town inhabited by twenty thousand people," to its constitution, by which the management of it devolves on "the populace assembled in their town meetings."

The war was brought to a conclusion by the treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, October, 1748, a war on the whole very unsatisfactory and adding largely to the national debt of England. For the present the struggle between the French and English in America was terminated; but it was by no means finally settled. The