swept away; and at the same time the "vast domains of the Crown" were vested in the hands of the state legislatures to be dedicated to the uses of their constituents.

Secondly, the quitrents paid to the king and to proprietary families, the Penns and the Baltimores, by farmers and planters according to their acreage were simply abolished, relieving Americans of an annual charge approximating a hundred thousand dollars a year. Thirdly, the rule and the practice of reserving for the royal navy white pine trees suitable for masts were abrogated without ceremony, releasing landowners from an irksome restriction. In the fourth place, there was a smashing confiscation of Tory estates, including Sir William Pepperell's Maine holdings extending thirty miles along the coast, the Phillipse heritage in New York embracing about three hundred square miles, the property of the Penn family worth in round numbers five million dollars, and the Fairfax estate in Virginia stretching out like a province. All in all, the Tories reckoned their losses at no less than forty million dollars and the British Parliament, after scaling their demands to the minimum, granted the claimants fifteen million dollars by way of compensation.

In harmony with their principles, the Revolutionists who made this huge sequestration of property distributed the land by sales in small lots on generous terms to enterprising farmers. The principality of Roger Morris in New York, for example, was divided into no less than two hundred and fifty parcels, while a still larger number of farms was created out of the confiscated holdings of James De Lancey.

Finally, among the effects of the Revolution on agricultural economy, must be reckoned the abolition of the system of entails and primogeniture. Whereas it took a century of debate and then the corroding taxes of a World War to drive a wedge into the concentrated land monopoly of England, the American Revolutionists brought many an ancient structure to earth by swift and telling blows. Three months after he penned the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson

opened a war on the entailed estates of the Old Dominion, to the horror of the best people; and before the lapse of a year he pushed through the legislature an act which accomplished his radical design, releasing from entail "at least half, and possibly three-quarters of the entire 'seated' area of Virginia." Within ten years "every state had abolished entails excepting two, and those were two in which entails. were rare. In fifteen years every state, without exception, abolished primogeniture"-all save four placing daughters on an equality with sons in the distribution of landed inheritances.

Considered relatively, therefore, the destruction of landed privilege in America by the forces unchained in the War for Independence was perhaps as great and as significant as the change wrought in the economic status of the clergy and nobility during the holocaust of the French Revolution. As in France country lawyers and newly rich merchants swarmed over the seats of the once proud aristocracy, so in the United States during and after the cataclysm a host of groundlings fresh from the plow and counting house surged over the domains of the Jessups, De Lanceys, and Morrises. When members of the best families of France turned to tutoring and translating in London for a livelihood or to teaching dancing and manners in America, in the days of Danton, Marat, and Robespierre, they found ladies and gentlemen who sighed for good old colonial days ready to join them in cursing the rights of man.

The clergy as well as the landed gentry felt the shocks of the American Revolution. When the crisis opened, nine of the thirteen colonies had established churches. In New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut it was the Congregationalists that enjoyed this legal privilege, while in Virginia, Maryland, New York, the Carolinas, and Georgia it was the Episcopalians who claimed a monopoly on religion supported by taxes. Before the echoes of Lexington and Concord had died away, an attack on ecclesiastical establishments was launched, and in five of the states.

where the Anglican clergy possessed privileges and immunities under the law the dissenters, outnumbering their opponents, were quickly victorious. In Virginia, however, where the Anglican party was strong, and in New England, where the Congregationalists enjoyed a supremacy, every clerical redoubt was stubbornly defended.

It took a struggle of more than half a century in the mother country to win political equality for Catholics and Dissenters, and to sweep away tithes for the support of an official religion. The twentieth century opened before France, going beyond England in her evolution, could put asunder Church and State. Only ten years sufficed to carry through the legislature Jefferson's "Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom," and before the nineteenth century had far advanced, the Congregationalists were finally disestablished-in New Hampshire in 1817, in Connecticut the following year, and in Massachusetts in 1833. So before Jefferson's death Episcopalians could enjoy in Connecticut liberties they had once withheld in Virginia.

In law as in religion the light of reason was being turned on ancient customs. During this stirring period of intel lectual and spiritual awakening, the British government was making its penal code more and more savage; when George III came to the throne in 1760 there were about one hundred and sixty offenses for which men, women, and children were put to death; before the end of his reign nearly one hundred new offenses were added to this appal ling list.

Although the American colonists had never been so sweeping in their vengeful passions as English lawmakers, they too had adopted penal codes of shocking brutalitycodes that loomed black and ominous against the new faith in the common run of mankind. Deeply moved by this incongruity, the impetuous Jefferson, to whom at least his Declaration was no mere mass of glittering generalities, hastened away from Philadelphia soon after independence to start the revolution in the legal system of Virginia. On

his arrival he announced that the law must be reformed root and branch "with a single eye to reason and the good of those for whose government it was framed," so alarming the bench and bar by his rashness that it took him twenty years to gain his principal points. In the other states a similar campaign was waged against the barbarities of the statute books, now swiftly, now tardily casting into oblivion great fragments of the cruel heritage. Even at the worst the emancipated colonists were in most matters respecting criminal legislation half a century ahead of the mother country.

Indeed, in nearly every branch of enlightened activity, in every sphere of liberal thought, the American Revolution marked the opening of a new humane epoch. Slavery, of course, afforded a glaring contrast to the grand doctrines of the Revolution, but still it must be noted that Jefferson and his friends were painfully aware of the anachronism; that Virginia prohibited the slave trade in 1778-a measure which the British Crown had vetoed twenty years before; that a movement for the abolition of slavery appeared among the new social forces of the age; and that it was the lofty doctrines of the Revolution which were invoked by Lincoln when in the fullness of time chattel bondage was to be finally broken. If a balance sheet is struck and the rhetoric of the Fourth of July celebrations is discounted, if the externals of the conflict are given a proper perspective in the background, then it is seen that the American Revolution was more than a war on England. It was in truth an economic, social, and intellectual transformation of prime significance-the first of those modern world-shaking reconstructions in which mankind has sought to cut and fashion the tough and stubborn web of fact to fit the pattern of its dreams.

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CHAPTER VII

Populism and Reaction

EARLY nine years after the battle of Lexington, to be exact, on December 4, 1783, General Washing

ton bade farewell to his officers in the great room of Fraunces' Tavern in New York City. When the simple but moving ceremony was over, the Commander marched down the streets through files of soldiers and throngs of civilians to the barge at Whitehall Ferry that was to bear him across the Hudson on his way home to Mount Vernon. Cannon boomed, bells in the church steeples clashed, crowds cheered as the tall Virginia gentleman stood in the boat, bared his gray head, and bowed his final acknowledgments.

When his familiar form faded away on the Jersey shore, the multitudes in the city turned to celebrating the triumph of the Revolution. The last of the British soldiers had disappeared down the bay a few days before and the last symbols of British dominion, except in the distant frontier forts, had passed as in a dream. America was now an independent republic. Those who had assumed leadership in this stirring drama found themselves in a course far