The transports bringing the two regiments from Ireland all arrived safely at Hampton, and were ordered to proceed up the Potomac to Alexandria, where a camp was to be formed.  Thither, towards the end of March, went Braddock himself, along with Keppel and Dinwiddie, in the Governor’s coach; while his aide-de-camp, Orme, his secretary, Shirley, and the servants of the party followed on horseback.  Braddock had sent for the elder Shirley and other provincial governors to meet him in council; and on the fourteenth of April they assembled in a tent of the newly formed encampment.  Here was Dinwiddie, who thought his troubles at an end, and saw in the red-coated soldiery the near fruition of his hopes.  Here, too, was his friend and ally, Dobbs of North Carolina; with Morris of Pennsylvania, fresh from Assembly quarrels; Sharpe of Maryland, who, having once been a soldier, had been made a sort of provisional commander-in-chief before the arrival of Braddock; and the ambitious Delancey of New York, who had lately led the opposition against the Governor of that province, and now filled the office himself,—­a position that needed all his manifold adroitness.  But, next to Braddock, the most noteworthy man present was Shirley, governor of Massachusetts.  There was a fountain of youth in this old lawyer.  A few years before, when he was boundary commissioner in Paris, he had had the indiscretion to marry a young Catholic French girl, the daughter of his landlord; and now, when more than sixty years old, he thirsted for military honors, and delighted in contriving operations of war.  He was one of a very few in the colonies who at this time entertained the idea of expelling the French from the continent.  He held that Carthage must be destroyed; and, in spite of his Parisian marriage, was the foremost advocate of the root-and-branch policy.  He and Lawrence, governor of Nova Scotia, had concerted an attack on the French fort of Beausejour; and, jointly with others in New England, he had planned the capture of Crown Point, the key of Lake Champlain.  By these two strokes and by fortifying the portage between the Kennebec and the Chaudiere, he thought that the northern colonies would be saved from invasion, and placed in a position to become themselves invaders.  Then, by driving the enemy from Niagara, securing that important pass, and thus cutting off the communication between Canada and her interior dependencies, all the French posts in the West would die of inanition.[197] In order to commend these schemes to the Home Government, he had painted in gloomy colors the dangers that beset the British colonies.  Our Indians, he said, will all desert us if we submit to French encroachment.  Some of the provinces are full of negro slaves, ready to rise against their masters, and of Roman Catholics, Jacobites, indented servants, and other dangerous persons, who would aid the French in raising a servile insurrection.  Pennsylvania is in the hands of Quakers, who will not fight, and of Germans, who are likely enough to join the enemy.  The Dutch of Albany would do anything to save their trade.  A strong force of French regulars might occupy that place without resistance, then descend the Hudson, and, with the help of a naval force, capture New York and cut the British colonies asunder.[198]