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SAMUEL ADAMS

From the painting by the early American artist, J. S. Copley.

SOCIAL AND COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION

When Rip Van Winkle came back home he found a new set of neighbors who scoffed at good King George. The Americans lived in a changed world. In the South most of the political leaders who were not Englishmen took the patriots’ side,—the Randolphs, and the Peytons, and the Carrolls, and the Rutledges, and the Pinckneys, and the Haynes,—and when the war was over the wheel had revolved under them, but left them still at the top. In the North there was a greater change,—Sam Adams, the untitled leader of the Boston town meeting, became leader of Massachusetts; John Hancock, the merchant accused of smuggling, was governor; John Adams, the struggling lawyer, was minister to England. Where were the rich and fashionable people who lived in the fine colonial mansions and drank too much Madeira? Hundreds of them gone, exiled, driven forth, farming in the eastern townships of Canada, waiting in the antechambers of the great in London.

PARSON CLARK’S HOUSE, LEXINGTON

Here Samuel Adams and John Hancock were sleeping when aroused by Paul Revere on his famous ride on April 19, 1775.

JOHN HANCOCK’S HOUSE IN BOSTON

Interesting not only in its historic associations, but as an attractive example of colonial architecture.

EFFECTS OF THE WAR

That was a revolution that reached the wives and daughters, and the handsome sons who inherited their fathers’ silken suits and had expected to inherit their dignities. It took the Americans thirty years to find out how great a revolution they had undergone in business; for when the war was over they had an unpatriotic hankering for the broadcloths and kerseymeres of old England. For their women folk, dealers still bought calimancos, and paduasoys, and oznabrig linens, and India muslins, through reliable English houses. Again Great Britain made the mistake of undervaluing the Americans; and when they became independent told them to be independent—and suffer for it. Now that the United States of America was a separate nation, let it keep its vessels out of the trade with the former sister colonies! It took long years to open up other avenues of trade.

REVOLUTION IN THE WEST

Within the military and civic Revolution arose another territorial revolution. When in 1778 George Rogers Clark with his few score frontiersmen slipped down the Ohio River and picked up the little British towns of Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes, he was blazing the trail into the West, and opening that vast country to millions of Americans still to be born or adopted, till they would in the end rule the republic. Because of Rogers Clark, or rather of the westward vision of the great men of that time, Great Britain gave up the Northwest, and then yielded the Southwest. With all its boldness and courage, the Revolution did not make a complete nation: to become a world power, it was necessary to cross the mountains and bind the Mississippi to the sea. And the man of that time, who was at the same time eastern and western, who fought the French and took up lands and planned roads and canals beyond the mountains, was George Washington, the greatest soldier, best statesman, and most clear-sighted business man of the Revolution.