Leaving out of view all obligations of the colonies to the mother country, there was still quite another class of very reasonable apprehensions which had a vast influence over the halting minds. What would be the relations of the severed and possibly contentious colonies to each other, with all their separate interests, rivalries, and jealousies? Might not anarchy and civil war make them rue the day when, in rejecting the tempered severity of the rule of a lawful monarch, they had forfeited the privilege of having an arbiter and a common friend?
Nor was this the only dread. The Indians were still a formidable foe on the frontiers. So far as they were held in check, it was largely by English arms and influence. Without anticipating the cruel and disgraceful complication of the trouble which was to come, and the aggravations of civil war, by the enlistment of these savages by England as her allies against her former subjects, it was enough for timid colonists looking into the future to realize the power of mischief which lurked with these wild men in the woods. Every further advance of the colonists beyond the boundaries already secured would provoke new hostilities, and remind the pioneers of the value to them of English armaments and reinforcements. And yet once more, those were by no means bugbear alarms which foreboded for the colonists, left to themselves, outrages from French and Spanish intrigue, ambition, and greed of territory. France and Spain had losses and insults to avenge against England, and might seek for reprisals on the undefended colonists. It needs only an intimation, without detail, of the apprehensions which either reason or imagination might conjure from this foreboding, to show how powerfully it might operate with prudent men in suspending their decision between rebellion and loyalty. All these considerations, taken separately and together, whether as resulting in slow and timid maturing of sentiment and of profession in Congress, or as influencing the judgment of patriot leaders, or as guiding the vacillating course of individuals and multitudes, may have given a seeming show of insincerity and duplicity to words contrasted with subsequent deeds. But a clear apprehension of all the alternatives which were then to be balanced will satisfy us that there was little room for hypocrisy to fill.