The royal troops thought Massachusetts as easy to subdue as the South Carolinians affect to think, and expressed it in almost the same language:—­“Whenever it comes to blows, he that can run the fastest will think himself best off.”  The revolutionists admitted that “the people abroad have too generally got the idea that the Americans are all cowards and poltroons.”  A single regiment, it was generally asserted, could march triumphant through New England.  The people took no pains to deny it.  The guard in Boston captured thirteen thousand cartridges at a stroke.  The people did not prevent it.  A citizen was tarred and feathered in the streets by the royal soldiery, while the band played “Yankee Doodle.”  The people did not interfere.  “John Adams writes, there is a great spirit in the Congress, and that we must furnish ourselves with artillery and arms and ammunition, but avoid war, if possible,—­if possible.”  At last, one day, these deliberate people finally made up their minds that it was time to rise,—­and when they rose, everything else fell.  In less than a year afterwards, Boston being finally evacuated, one of General Howe’s mortified officers wrote home to England, in words which might form a Complete Letter-Writer for every army-officer who has turned traitor, from Beauregard downward,—­“Bad times, my dear friend.  The displeasure I feel in the small share I have in our present insignificancy is so great, that I do not know the thing so desperate I would not undertake, in order to change our situation.”

It is fortunate that the impending general contest has also been recently preceded by a local one, which, though waged under circumstances far less favorable to the North, yet afforded important hints by its results.  It was worth all the cost of Kansas to have the lesson she taught, in passing through her ordeal.  It was not the Emigrant Aid Society which gave peace at last to her borders, nor was it her shifting panorama of evanescent governors; it was the sheer physical superiority of her Free-State emigrants, after they took up arms.  Kansas afforded the important discovery, as some Southern officers once naively owned at Lecompton, that “Yankees would fight.”  Patient to the verge of humiliation, the settlers rose at last only to achieve a victory so absurdly rapid that it was almost a new disappointment; the contest was not so much a series of battles as a succession of steeplechases, of efforts to get within shot,—­Missouri, Virginia, and South Carolina invariably disappearing over one prairie-swell, precisely as the Sharp’s rifles of the emigrants appeared on the verge of the next.  The slaveholders had immense advantages:  many of the settlers were in league with them to drive out the remainder; they had the General Government always aiding them, more or less openly, with money, arms, provisions, horses, men, and leaders; they had always the Missouri border to retreat upon, and the Missouri River to blockade.