As we have seen, the conflict between the home country and the colonies commenced long before there was any actual outbreak.  As Mr. Thomas Wentworth Higginson so graphically expresses it, the surrender of Canada to England by France in 1763 suddenly opened men’s eyes to the fact that British America had become a country so large as to make England seem ridiculously small.  Even the cool-headed Dr. Franklin, writing that same year to Mary Stevenson in London, spoke of England as “that stone in a brook, scarce enough of it above water to keep one’s shoes dry.”  A far-seeing French statesman of the period looked at the matter in the same way.  Choiseul, the Prime Minister who ceded Canada, claimed afterwards that he had done it in order to destroy the British nation by creating for it a rival.  This assertion was not made till ten years later, and may very likely have been an afterthought, but it was destined to be confirmed by the facts.

We have now to deal with the outbreak of a contest which was, according to the greatest of the English statesmen of the period, “a most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and diabolical war.”  No American writer ever employed to describe it a combination of adjectives so vigorous as those brought together by the elder Pitt, afterwards Lord Chatham.  The rights for which Americans fought seemed to him to be the common rights of Englishmen, and many Englishmen thought the same.

On the other hand, we are now able to do justice to those American Loyalists who honestly believed that the attempt at independence was a mad one, and who sacrificed all they had rather than rebel against their King.  Massachusettensis, the well-known Tory pamphleteer, wrote that the annals of the world had not been deformed with a single instance of so unnatural, so causeless, so wanton, so wicked a rebellion.

These strong epithets used on both sides show how strangely opinions were divided as to the rebellion and its causes.  Some of the first statesmen of England defended the colonists, and some of the best known men in the colonies defended England.

The City of Boston at this time had a population of about seventeen thousand, as compared with some half a million to-day.  In its garrison there were three thousand British troops, and the laws of Parliament were enforced rigidly.  The city suffered temporary commercial death in consequence, and there were the most vigorous efforts made to prevent an open outbreak of hostilities.  In January, 1775, a conflict was barely averted at Marshfield, and in the following month the situation was so strained at Salem that nothing but great forbearance and presence of mind on the part of the colonists prevented bloodshed.  The Boston massacre of less than five years before was still uppermost in men’s thoughts, and it was determined that the responsibility of the first shot in the war, if war there must be, should rest with the Royal troops.