The common idea about the separation of the States from England, is simply that they resisted a stamp duty and a tax on tea; the fact is, as I have before hinted, that this was simply the last drop in the cup.  Previous to this period, the American colonies were simply considered as objects of English aggrandizement.  They were treated as states who only existed for the purpose of benefiting England.  The case was in fact parallel to the case of Ireland, and the results would probably have been similar, had Ireland been a little nearer to America, or a little further from England.  For many years the trade of America had been kept under the most vexatious restrictions.  The iron found there must be sent to England to be manufactured; the ships fitted out there must be at least partly built in England; no saw-mills could be erected, no colony could trade directly with another colony, nor with any nation except England.  This selfish, miserable policy met with a well-deserved fate.  Even Pitt exclaimed indignantly, in the House of Commons:  “We are told that America is obstinate—­that America is almost in open rebellion.  I rejoice that she has resisted.  Three millions of people, so dead to all sentiments of liberty as voluntarily to become slaves, would have been fit instruments to enslave their fellow-subjects.”

In 1765 an agitation was commenced in Philadelphia, by Mr. Charles Thompson, an Irishman, who, after ten years devoted to the cause of his adopted country, was appointed the Secretary of Congress.  It has been well remarked, that the Irish, and especially the Irish Catholics, were, of the three nationalities, the most devoted to forwarding the Revolution; and we cannot wonder that it was so, since the Government which had driven them from their native land, ceased not to persecute them in the land of their exile.[565] The first naval engagement was fought under the command of Jeremiah O’Brien, an Irishman.[566] John Barry, also an Irishman, took the command of one of the first American-built ships of war.  The first Continental Regiment was composed almost exclusively of Irish-born officers and men, and was the first Rifle Regiment ever organized in the world.  Thompson, its first, and Hand, its second colonel, were natives of Ireland.  At the siege of Boston the regiment was particularly dreaded by the British.

In 1764 Franklin came to England[567] for the second time, and was examined before the House of Commons on the subject of the Stamp Act.  He was treated with a contemptuous indifference, which he never forgot; but he kept his court suit, not without an object; and in 1783, when he signed the treaty of peace, which compelled England to grant humbly what she had refused haughtily, he wore the self-same attire.  Well might the immortal Washington say to Governor Trumbull:  “There was a day, sir, when this step from our then acknowledged parent state, would have been accepted with gratitude; but that day is irrevocably past.”