with the Five Nations, and employed agents of his own to deal with them.  These agents were persons obnoxious to Johnson, being allied with the clique of Dutch traders at Albany, who hated him because he had supplanted them in the direction of Indian affairs; and in a violent letter to the Lords of Trade, he inveighs against their “licentious and abandoned proceedings,” “villanous conduct,” “scurrilous falsehoods,” and “base and insolent behavior."[328] “I am considerable enough,” he says, “to have enemies and to be envied;"[329] and he declares he has proof that Shirley told the Mohawks that he, Johnson, was an upstart of his creating, whom he had set up and could pull down.  Again, he charges Shirley’s agents with trying to “debauch the Indians from joining him;” while Shirley, on his side, retorts the same complaint against his accuser.[330] When, by the death of Braddock, Shirley became commander-in-chief, Johnson grew so restive at being subject to his instructions that he declined to hold the management of Indian affairs unless it was made independent of his rival.  The dispute became mingled with the teapot-tempest of New York provincial politics.  The Lieutenant-Governor, Delancey, a politician of restless ambition and consummate dexterity, had taken umbrage at Shirley, of whose rising honors, not borne with remarkable humility, he appears to have been jealous.  Delancey had hitherto favored the Dutch faction in the Assembly, hostile to Johnson; but he now changed attitude, and joined hands with him against the object of their common dislike.  The one was strong in the prestige of a loudly-trumpeted victory, and the other had means of influence over the Ministry.  Their coalition boded ill to Shirley, and he soon felt its effects.[331]

[Footnote 328:  Johnson to the Lords of Trade, 3 Sept. 1755.]

[Footnote 329:  Johnson to the Lords of Trade, 17 Jan. 1756.]

[Footnote 330:  John Shirley to Governor Morris, 12 Aug. 1755.]

[Footnote 331:  On this affair, see various papers in N.Y.  Col.  Docs., VI., VII.  Smith, Hist.  New York, Part II., Chaps.  IV.  V. Review of Military Operations in North America.  Both Smith and Livingston, the author of the Review, were personally cognizant of the course of the dispute.]

The campaign was now closed,—­a sufficiently active one, seeing that the two nations were nominally at peace.  A disastrous rout on the Monongahela, failure at Niagara, a barren victory at Lake George, and three forts captured in Acadia, were the disappointing results on the part of England.  Nor had her enemies cause to boast.  The Indians, it is true, had won a battle for them:  but they had suffered mortifying defeat from a raw militia; their general was a prisoner; and they had lost Acadia past hope.