George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 6, 10th edition.

[317]

A general tendency to conciliation prevailed.

Chap XLII.} 1769. Dec.

Since the merchants of Philadelphia chose to confine their agreement for non-importation to the repeal of Townshend's Act,¹ the merchants of Boston for the sake of Union gave up their more extensive covenant, and reverted to their first stipulations.² The dispute about the Billeting Act had ceased in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; the Legislature of New-York, pleased with the permission to issue colonial bills of credit,³ disregarded the appeal from MacDougall, “to the betrayed inhabitants of the city and Colony, and sanctioned a compromise by a majority of one.”

South Carolina⁴ was commercially the most closely connected with England. A Colony of planters, it numbered about forty-five thousand whites; of negroes more than eighty thousand. The annual exports from Charleston reached in value about two and a quarter millions of dollars, of which three fourths went directly or indirectly to England. Unhappily its laws restraining the importation of negroes had expired on the first of January, and their renewal was prohibited. In consequence, five thousand five hundred negroes, chiefly adults, for immediate service, were sent there within eleven months, and, were sold upon an average at near forty pounds sterling each, amounting in the aggregate to a million of dollars. But however closely the ties of interest