* it * if * * * A- * • I -^j^**S^r,ia^W 1^ A LITTLE HISTORY '']V' 1 1 m Class Book i_L^ K -^^ GopyiightN^ COPWIGHT DEPOSIT. OUR FIRST CENTURY £ o ': > W 31 Jtittic l^ijitorp of 2ilmerican Itife Our First Century By GEORGE GARY EGGLESTON Author of <«A CAPTAIN IN THE RANKS" "RUNNING THE RIVER," ETC. WITH MANY ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK %. ^. 25arne^ S. Companp 1905 UBBARY of CONGRESS two Coptes rttjcwvtso MAY 13 lyuD COPY B. Copyright igoj By a. S. BARNES & COMPANY Published May igoj INTRODUCTION IT is the purpose of this book to present, on the basis of a connected narrative, a picture of life in America during the seventeenth century. The text-books used in the schools must cover the entire history of our country within a very brief space. They must, therefore, confine themselves to a brief recital of facts, chiefly political and military. The larger his- tories, in which life, manners, customs and the conditions governing them are treated with admirable scholarship, must of necessity be too voluminous and too costly to be available for the use of busy readers. In the present work the author seeks to give a popular account of the hfe, manners and customs of those who first planted English colonies along the Atlantic coast, and laid the foundations of our country. The manner of men they were, the ideas they brought with them across the sea, the mistakes they made in entering upon a new life, under strange conditions, the means they adopted of adjusting themselves to their new environment, the forces that gave form to their systems of government, the occupations in which they engaged, their religious be- liefs, their amusements, the clothes they wore and the food they ate — all these phases of their social and eco- (V) vi INTRODUCTION nomic existence have seemed possible of popular presen- tation in a little history of colonial life. For a narrative written with this view, rather than in the older and more conventional way, there has seemed to be warrant in the increased interest felt in the life and customs of our ancestors, and in the abundance of new material furnished by the special students of the last fifteen years. Edward Eggleston, whose articles in the Century Mag- azine about twenty years ago showed the richness of the field, was perhaps the first of the modern American school of writers upon colonial history. Of the minute in- vestigation shown in his " The Beginners of a Nation " and " The Transit of Civilization," it is not necessary to speak. More recently Cheyney, Andrews, Tyler, Farrand, Bourne and the other scholars, who have contributed to Professor Hart's very notable history of " The American Nation," have made special studies of peculiar import- ance, and, during very recent years, a number of works of consequence have appeared, among them Bruce's '' Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century," and Professor Osgood's "American Colonies ill the Seventeenth Century." These exhaustive works have greatly enriched our knowledge of the early his- tory of Englishmen in America. We have had also many special studies of particular phases of colonial life, such as the admirably interesting books of Mrs. Alice Morse Earle, Miss Esther Singleton and others. INTRODUCTION vii The present work is intended to be a popular presenta- tion of the principal facts of early colonial life, concern- ing itself chiefly with the life of the people. In writing it the author has used historical events as landmarks, as- suming some knowledge of the principal facts of pubHc history on the part of the reader. He has not deemed it desirable to encumber the book with an account of the earlier Spanish and French occupations of this continent. His work properly begins with the story of the earliest permanent English .colonies whose settlement upon the Atlantic coast was in fact the founding of our nation. He has endeavored to trace the life story of the colonists during their first century of toil, hardship and conquest. In telling this story the author has been glad to sup- plement his narrative with pictorial accompaniments, most of which have been chosen with a view to the illus- tration of life. The author knows of no book written from precisely this point of view, and it is his hope that the human in- terest of the story may commend it to that large class of readers for whose use the small general histories are too compact and meagre, and the elaborate special works too comprehensive. For the general reader who is not a special student, and for school libraries, it is believed that a little history of colonial life may commend itself to acceptance. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE INTRODUCTION ..... V I. A STORY OF ACCIDENTS . . . .1 II. A COMPANY OF INCAPABLES . . . 21 III. JOHN SMITH ...... 30 IV. LIFE IN JAMESTOWN .... 3/ V. THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY . . . . 4 1 VI. THE FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES . 6 1 VIL MAINE AND NEW HAMPSHIRE SETTLEMENTS AND THE DUTCH COLONY OF NEW NETHER- LAND . . . . . . .82 VIII. MIGRATIONS FROM MASSACHUSETTS AND THE SETTLEMENT OF CONNECTICUT AND RHODE ISLAND ....... 89 IX. THE CONFEDERATION OF THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES ...... 96 X. THE CONQUEST OF NEW NETHERLAND . 1 01 XI. MARYLAND ...... I06 XII. KING Philip's war . . . . . ii i XIII. THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA . . . II 5 XIV. NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA . . 1 29 XV. EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT . . 1 39 XVI. THE FRENCH IN AMERICA . . . . 1 60 XVII. RAPINE, SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION . I /I (ix) X CONTENTS PAGE XVIII. EARLY COLONIAL INDUSTRY, AGRICULTURE, TRADE AND INTERCOURSE . , . 1 80 XIX. EARLY COLONIAL MANUFACTURES . . 1 8/ XX. EDUCATION, RELIGION AND MARRIAGES . 1 92 XXI. LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES . . . 2O4 XXIL WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY— THE SERVANT QUESTION SOME FEATURES OF DOMESTIC LIFE . . . . . . .219 XXIII. DRESS, SPORTS AND PUNISHMENTS — SUNDAY LAWS AND SUNDAY OBSERVANCES . 229 XXIV. SUPERSTITION AND WITCHCRAFT . . .239 XXV. COMMERCE, NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 243 XXVI. THE WORK OF OUR FIRST CENTURY . . 254 APPENDIX, TABLE OF IMPORTANT CONTEMPO- RANEOUS EVENTS PREPARED BY PROF. HERMAN V. AMES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. . . . . .257 INDEX 263 ILLUSTRATIONS Mansion built at Medford, Mass., in 1634, for Gov- ernor Cradock of the Massachusetts Company . Front Pikeman .......... Spanish explorations in North America to 1600 . Musketeer Arms in the first half of the 17th century English explorations in North America to 1607 First settlement in Virginia ..... Present appearance of Jamestown Indian houses in the Village of Secotan Capt. John Smith Indian kindling fire ...... Virginia by the charter of 1609 .... War Club Manner of boiling in an earthen pot . Indian manner of broiling ' . Pocahontas Puritan gentleman ...... Puritan lady New England by the patent of 1630 Chair of Carver, first governor of Plymouth Colony . The Myles Standish House, Duxbury, built by his son 1666 Sword of Myles Standish, of ancient Persian manufacture John Winthrop . . The Aborigines ....... New Netherland . . . The earliest picture of New Amsterdam, about 1650 . Dutch women of old times ...... (xi) Page ispiece 4 6 8 13 16 22 28 3-1 33 38 42 43 45 48 51 62 63 64 67 71 73 76 79 85 86 87 xii " ILLUSTRATIONS Page Puritan of the middle class 90 Puritan of the middle class ....... 92 New Amsterdam in Stuyvesant's time .... 96 Settlements on the coast of North America in the middle of the 17th century 98 Street in New Amsterdam 103 Peter Stuyvesant 104 Lord Baltimore . . . . . . . . .106 Lord Baltimore penny . . . ". . . . .107 Maryland by the original grant to Lord Baltimore . . 108 King Philip's samp bowl, and lock of gun with which he was killed . . . . . . . . . -113 Carolina by the grant of 1663 116 Carolina elephant piece 118 Seal of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina — reverse . . 120 Huguenot merchant . . . . . . . .122 Huguenot merchant's wife 126 William Penn . . . . . . . . .13- William Penn's chair, in Independence Hall, Philadel- pl^ia 134 Wampum belt, presented by Indians to William Penn . .136 Penn's house in Philadelphia . . . . . . 137 New England elephant piece . . . The Middle Colonies The Virginia penny . . . ' . Champlain French Coureur des Bois .... La Salle French gentleman ..... Matchlock gun and matchlock .... Colonial plow with wooden mold-board, 1706 French explorations in North America to 1700 Elder Brewster's chair ..... . 141 . 145 . 149 . 161 . 162 . . 165 . 168 174 . 177 179 . . 183 A chafing; dish . . . . . . . . .188 ILLUSTRATIONS Xlll 620 Silk winding A wedding in New Amsterdam John Eliot .... Armor worn by the Pilgrims in i Ancient handmade spade Sawmill ..... Wrought iron lamp and sadiron A Colonial flaxwheel Primitive mode of grinding corn Colonial loom ..... Watch and chain of the colonial period Costume of a burgomaster of New Amsterdam Costume from portrait of Major Robert Pike Costume from the portrait of Jonathan Mason Collar of Gov. John Endicott Collar of Gov. Edward Winslow Dutch costume ...... Captain Edward Teach .... The author and publishers wish to acknowledge the courtes) tury Company and the American Book Company in granting to use several of the illustrations luhich appear in this book. Page 190 197 199 206 209 211 215 223 226 229 230 232 233 234 235 236 237 . 251 0/ the C en- Permission OUR FIRST CENTURY CHAPTER I A STORY OF ACCIDENTS COLUMBUS discovered America by accident. He blundered upon the country while trying to make his way to the eastern coasts of Asia, and so long as he lived he did not know what he had found. He died at last in the belief that he had made his way across the ocean to the Indies. For a hundred years afterwards nearly everything done with respect to America was founded upon mis- conception, and everything well done was largely the result of accident. It was accident that gave the name America to the New World. It was by accident that Cabot and the rest discovered various parts of the North American mainland. They were searching for some- thing quite other than this. Little by little it had dawned upon their intelligence that America was not Asia, but was instead a new continent, hitherto unknown, obstructing the pathway from Europe to Asia by the A 1 2 OUR FIRST CENTURY westward route. This was clearly demonstrated when Balboa, in 15 13, saw the Pacific Ocean from a peak in Darien, and still more clearly when one of Magellan's ships ( 1 5 20) circumnavigated the globe, passing through the strait that bears that great navigator's name. But it was an age of credulous ignorance and greed, and for a long time Europeans persisted in the belief that there must be some water way through this conti- nent, by which ships could reach " The Indies," as all the Asiatic countries were then called in Europe. The universal desire in Europe at that time was for wealth, and in their eagerness to get the rich trade of the Orient, European men refused to believe that a great con- tinent stood obstinately in the way. Even after the Spanish explorer, De Soto, had marched for years over the country from Florida to what is now Arkansas, in 1539 and the succeeding years, thus get- ting some small notion of the vast expanse of the con- tinent, shipmasters and their merchant owners in Europe, refused to give up the notion that there was a water way through America at some point. This belief survived in some measure even to the end of the eight- eenth century. After exploration had conclusively proved that no such water way pierced the continent in its southern parts, imaginative geographers made maps showing that a little farther north the continent narrowed to nothing- ness, and was crossed by broad straits. Some of them A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 3 even represented it as ending- about where the northern boundary of the United States now hes, leaving an open ocean north of it. In those days the scientific habit of mind, which is common to all men now, did not exist. A man of mod- ern mind, upon seeing one of these maps, would in- stantly have asked for the facts upon which it rested. He would not have been content to take the mapmaker's word for the existence of the water ways shown in the charts. He would have insisted upon knowing how the mapmaker knew of their existence. " Have you been there to see for yourself .? " he would have asked. " Or has anybody else sailed over those waters, and brought back a trustworthy report about them .? " And, getting no satisfactory answer to these questions, the man of modern mind would have refused to invest his money and risk his ships and the lives of his men upon such geographical guesses. But in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries men's minds did not act as they do now, and it is necessary to bear that fact constantly in mind if we would understand what happened. The continent that Columbus found in his effort to make his way to the eastern shores of Asia by sailing westward was capable of producing food enough to feed all mankind, but very few people thought, for a hundred years and more, of cultivating that continent and making it feed anybody. For a hundred years and more very OUR FIRST CENTURY few of those who thought of America thought of anything in connection with this continent except to find a way through it in order to trade with the Indies, or else to find gold or silver somewhere within the newly discov- ered country. The Spaniards found the gold and silver in Mexico, and in Peru. They were also real colonizers in some degree, though their chief concern was for the discovery of gold and silver. That fact gave a new impetus to the idea that America was of compara- tively little worth except as a gold or silver mine. Everybody in Europe who in any way con- cerned himself with thoughts of America continued to hunt either for a passageway through the con- ^^^^ , .^-. tinent, to Asia, or for a region I /' f/--i''^' ^^^ which the precious metals ^^M^^ ^^^"' abounded. No attention what- ever was paid to the splendid productiveness of the American soil. Not an adequate thought was anywhere entertained, and especially in England, of the possibilities of wealth that lay in the cultivation of a country whose soil and climate were capable of producing more food stuffs for the consumption of mankind than had ever before been produced anywhere on earth. A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 5 It was a period of gross ignorance among the people generally, though a select few were learned according to the highest standards of that age. In order to under- stand how gross the popular ignorance was it is neces- sary to remember that the great majority of men did not travel in those days. There were no railroads, no steam- boats, no telegraphs, no telephones, no common schools, no newspapers, no magazines and very few books. There were only a few people who could read even such books as existed. The result of all this was that men knew almost noth- ing of the world beyond the hills that happened to bound their own horizon. It is difficult in our time of popular education, newspapers, railroads, telegraphs and cheap books to understand the condition of mind which then prevailed in Europe ; yet we must understand it if we would understand what happened in that time. The Spaniards conquered Mexico and Peru and made settlements at St. Augustine in Florida, at Sante Fe in New Mexico and elsewhere. But these settlements were all made with a primary view to the discovery of gold and the exploitation of the country for profit. There was nowhere any sufficient thought of settling the country and living in it, and cultivating it for the sake of what its soil could produce. The thought of homes in Amer- ica was not yet born. The English claimed practically all of Canada and all of what now constitutes the United States north of 6 OUR FIRST CENTURY Florida by virtue of the discoveries made by John Cabot and other English navigators of the early time. But for nearly a hundred years the English made no attempt to Spanish Explorations in North America to 1600. plant colonies here or turn to account in any way the splendid resources of the country they owned. There were several reasons for this. Some of those A STORY OF ACCIDP:NTS 7 reasons have been indicated already. Another was that the Spanish power was at that time dominant. Wh«i the French had made a settlement upon the southern Atlantic coast it had been promptly assailed and destroyed by the Spanish who claimed dominion over the entire continent, and who had power to enforce the claim. Then came a period of sea fighting in which at last the power of Spain was crippled, and England rose to a place among the nations of the first class. In that day ships at sea made war upon each other and captured each other with very little reference indeed to the question whether or not a state of war existed between the two nations whose flags the several ships carried at their mastheads. Spain and England were nominally at peace with each other but they were in fact enemies and if an English ship could capture at sea a Spanish galleon loaded with treasure she did so without hesitation, without a qualm of conscience and without the least fear on the part of her commander, of his being called to account by his sovereign. This was a species of piracy of course but it was piracy of a kind at that time recognized as legitimate. The profits of this sort of freebooting on the sea were so great that many daring English navigators engaged in the business, dividing the proceeds of it with the queen. Drake, Hawkins, Sir Humphrey Gilbert and the rest of the great English sea barons by their assaults upon Span- ish commerce greatly enriched themselves and their sov- ereign and greatly crippled Spain. 8 OUR FIRST CENTURY At last they succeeded in provoking open and declared war between Spain and England. Then came the Spanish Armada, called at that time the " Invincible Armada." This was a great collection of Spanish warships which were sent to conquer England and reduce that country to complete subjection to Spain. The ships were so many in number and so strong in their armament that it was believed that no fleet any- where could possibly hold them in check for one moment. Curiously enough the Armada was placed in command of a land soldier, who knew nothing of navigation, and who at sea was always so violently seasick as to be in- capable of directing the movements of his own fleet. Nevertheless, under this in- capable commander the Ar- mada sailed to attack the coasts of England and to conquer that country. In order to oppose it, the great English freebooting navigators lay in wait in the channel, intending to assail it with all their vigor when- ever it should appear. They were very ill equipped. Queen Elizabeth, who at that time reigned in England, was a miser, so stingy A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 9 that she refused even to let her sea captains provide their men with wholesome food and drink. Further than that, she limited them in their supplies of ammunition and brought her miserliness to bear in other ways that threatened to defeat their enterpri, ,e in defence of Eng- land. But these sea barons were men not easily daunted or discouraged. They knew tricks of seamanship that the Spaniards had never learned. They knew how to "tack " — or " beat " as we call it now — that is to say, how to sail upon a zigzag course against the wind. This gave them a very great advantage over the Spaniards, who knew only how to sail directly or very nearly before the wind. The result of all this was that the English navigators were able to keep out of the way of Spanish shot and shell whenever they chose, and to destroy the great Armada little by little at their leisure. They drove it up the channel, and destroyed ship after ship, until at last they forced the small remnant of the great Armada to flee northward around Scotland and Ireland where most of the ships were wrecked in storms with which the Spanish navigators did not know how to contend, and so the sea power of Spain was crippled. Hawkins and Drake and Gilbert, together with their kind, had made England instead of Spain the foremost maritime power in the world. Then it was that England's thought turned hopefully 10 OUR FIRST CENTURY for the first time to the colonization of America. For the first time it was thought that an EngHsh colony planted on this continent might be protected by English ships against Spanish assault. The story of it is familiar to most readers, but it must be briefly recounted here as a setting for the history of life conditions which it is the purpose of this book to trace. Throughout the book the chronicle of external events given in succinct form is necessary as showing forth the conditions that made life what it was, Raleigh was full of enthusiasm in this cause. The ca- reers of the sea barons, including his own half-brother. Sir Humphrey Gilbert, had filled his romantic mind and his courageous soul with the spirit of enterprise. It was a time of seething intellectual activity in the British capital, in spite of the dull stupor of unintelligence that afflicted England outside of London. There were no clubs then, and no newspapers and particularly there was no intellectual life outside of London. The rest of the country was given up to sordid considerations of crops and the like. But in London it was a time of unusual intellectual ferment. The theatre answered then all. the purposes that the newspapers and the magazines and cheap books do to-day, and Shakespeare himself was at the head of the theatre. He and Marlowe and Ben Jon- son and Greene used to meet in the coffeehouses with such men as Drake and Gilbert and Raleigh and others who had navigated the seas all over the earth and who A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 11 had brought back strangely interesting tales of that which they had seen and that which they had done and that which they had learned of other men's doings. Raleigh was Queen Elizabeth's favorite. That fact acted as a restraint upon him. He was ready not only to invest his money in lavish sums in order to colonize America, but also to go on his own account to the New World in order to build up colonies there which should add to the wealth of Great Britain, increase the power of that country and redound to its glory. If he had been permitted to go he would almost certainly have succeeded by virtue of his energy, his sense and his daring. But the queen said him nay. She would not allow him to ab- sent himself from the court and so all that was left for him to do was to send out colonies at his own expense and trust to others less capable than he for their man- agement. But it is not necessary to occupy space in telling the story of Sir Walter Raleigh's failures. One thing that for a long time prevented colonization from England was that the total population of that coun- try did not then exceed five million souls. In other words, there were fewer people in all England then than there are now in London alone — scarcely more than dwell now in New York City and its New Jersey environs. During a considerable part of the time before the people of England seriously considered these colonizing enter- prizes there was no surplus population in that country seeking a colonial outlet in any direction. Now, how- 12 OUR FIRST CENTURY ever, a change in conditions had created such a popula- tion though it was of the most undesirable sort. The great importation of gold and silver into Europe had re- duced the purchasing power of money and correspond- ingly raised the cost of living in the Old World. The result of this was that many people who had before found it easy enough to support themselves now found it im- possible to do so by their unskilled labor. A little earlier another change in English industrial conditions had occurred. The profits of sheep raising became so much greater than those of plough farming that great areas which had previously been cultivated in grain and the like were laid down in pasture lands. In- asmuch as only one man was needed to attend a flock of sheep, grazing upon great stretches of pasture, where ten men had before been required to cultivate the land, great numbers of people were thrown out of employment. These it must be borne in mind were people belonging to the lowest classes of the population. They had no skill except the rude ability to hold the handle of a plough. They had no reserves of money anywhere, no savings, no mechanical ability, and no resources of any sort. The result of all this was that a multitude of half starved men were thrown upon the community, destitute of the means of support. As they were equally destitute of moral character they quickly became beggars, thieves and out- casts. When the time came for earnest efforts to be made to A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 13 colonize America this, chiefly, was the source of human supply to be drawn upon. It was about as unfit for the Arms in the first half of the 17th century. (From " Hewett's Armor," by permission.) 1. Musketier and caliver-man. 2. Musket caliver and bandaliers. 3. Pikeman. 4. Wheel-lock pistol and matchlock of a muscpiet, i6th century. (From examples in the Tower of London.) 5. Musquetier. 14 OUR FIRST CENTURY purpose of colonizing as any population ever was any- where in the world. There was in addition a still more worthless class of young "gentlemen" — that is to say, young men who had been brought up to regard work as unworthy of them, but who had no money and no skill in earning money. These also were available as emigrants, but their worthlessness for the colonization of a wilder- ness was even greater than that of the humbler unem- ployed. These were the conditions in which the first success- ful effort to plant an English colony in America was made. The fundamental error was that all such efforts were made not in behalf of the colonists and not in be- half of America, but in behalf of speculative companies in England. Out of that fact chiefly came all the failures. Because of that fact mainiy, the successes achieved were slow of accomplishment and narrowly missed failure. King James, who had succeeded Elizabeth on the throne, chartered two companies to colonize what was then called Virginia — that is to say the region lying be- tween the mouth of the Cape Fear River in North Car- ohna on the south and Newfoundland on the north. These companies were composed of merchants, specula- tors and adventurers. Their charters gave them per- mission to plant colonies anywhere they pleased within the territory indicated, subject only to certain limitations designed to prevent them from trespassing upon each other. The London Company was authorized to plant A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 15 colonies anywhere between 34 and 41 degrees of north latitude, and the Plymouth Company anywhere between 38 and 45 degrees. But in order to avoid conflict in their overlapping grants each company was forbidden to plant a colony within 100 miles of one already established by the other company. Spain claimed all of that territory and in spite of the crippling of Spain'» power, one of the elements of diffi- culty in planting colonies was still the problem of pro- tecting them against Spanish assault and destruction. But the " Sea Barons " of England had by this time pretty effectually checked and curbed the naval power of Spain and so the problems involved in colonizing were somewhat simplified. Several abortive attempts were made to plant colonies under these and other charters. In 1602 a shipload of people were landed on the Massachusetts coast with in- tent "to leave them there and found a settlement, but the men who were assigned to be left revolted and went back to England on the ships that had brought them out. In another case — in 1607, the year in which James- town was settled — the Popham colony was established on the coasts of Maine and for a time it seemed to give promise of permanency. But in the end that enterprize also was abandoned and so it was the settlement at James- town, in 1607, that constituted the first permanent Eng- lish colony on these shores. Near the end of 1606 the so-called London Company, 16 OUR FIRST CENTURY otherwise known as the Virginia Company, seriously set to work to plant a colony in America. It sent out a company, numbering, by different accounts, from 105 to 120 or more men, without a woman among them. And these men were wholly unskilled in the work they were sent out to do. Five-sixths of them were English Explorations in North America to 1607. men without any skill in any sort of labor, or any experi- ence in work. The other sixth included a few me- chanics, a barber, and some other people of possible use- fulness in the colony. But there were no farmers, no enterprizing seekers after fortunes that might be won A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 17 in a rational way and no persons who were fit to render the services needed by way of building up an empire in the wilderness. It seems inconceivable to us now that such a company should have been sent out upon such a mission. The one problem presented to these men was to fell trees, open lands, plough fields and grow crops in a rich soil and a peculiarly favorable climate. A company of a little over one hundred fit men intent upon such pur- poses as these would quickly have made a prosperous settlement in that James River country in which the first permanent English colony in America was planted. But these were not the sort of men to achieve anything of that kind. They were idlers for the most part, men alto- gether unaccustomed to work, and for the rest they were the failures and the offscourings of the turbulent times in Britain. Some of them were criminals. They came to these shores filled with absurd dreams of the quick accumulation of gold. They had been told, upon what they accepted as authority, that in this western land gold was so plentiful that even kitchen utensils were made of it and they had not sense enough to understand that if such had been the case gold would have been of no more value than any base metal. Nothing was further from their minds than the doing of that one thing which it was necessary to do under the cir- cumstances ; the idea of work in the fields was not in their minds, while it was only by work in the fields B 18 OUR FIRST CENTURY that there could be hope of building up here a prosper- ous community. If anything had been necessary to increase and em- phasize the conditions of failure in connection with such an expedition it was furnished by the scheme of govern- ment provided for the colonists. To begin with, in setting out to build up a civilization in a wilderness the colonists brought no wives or children with them. The whole idea of home making was excluded from their program. They were adven- turers pure and simple, crossing the ocean with the single thought of finding gold somewhere, filling their pockets with it, and going back to England to spend it in riotous living. The company which sent them out had as clearly absurd a purpose. Its first thought was to enrich itself by whatever might be found of value in America, and incidentally to build up a trade here as the East India Company had done in India. Under the scheme of government planned for the colony the king in England was in the last resort the sole legislator. The council of the company in Lon- don — subject only to the veto of the king — was abso- lute in its authority over the colony. The colony itself was to be directly governed by an entirely arbitrary commission appointed by the council of the company in London. N(^ provision whatever was made that any man should own the land he tilled or A STORY OF ACCIDENTS 19 anything else. Nothing whatever was done to induce men to work. Nothing was done to call into play that personal endeavor for personal benefit which lies at the base of all human activity and all human prosperity. It was decreed that all the lands and all the proceeds of them and of labor on them should be held by the company in London, and that every man should be sup- ported out of a common fund. The result was that from the beginning there was no adequate common fund because no man cared to work to create it. Not many men will work under such con- ditions ; certainly not many of such men as were sent out to plant the earliest permanent English colony in America. But one good thing, of lasting advantage, was done in sending out the earliest colonists to America. In the first charters, those of Gilbert and Raleigh, and in the later Virginia Company's charter there was written a stipulation that the colonists should have all " the privi- leges of free citizens and persons native of England, in such ample manner as if they were born and personally resident in our said realm of England." That stipulation proved ultimately to be the great charter of American liberty. It was to that, from be- ginning to end, that the colonists appealed in all their struggles against oppression. It was on that basis, two centuries later, that the men of Massachusetts, and the men of New York, and the men of Virginia, revolted 20 OUR FIRST CENTURY and made war. It .was in memory of that, that the Declaration of Independence was written. It was out of that principle that the American colonies grew at last into a nation. Ideas rule the world. Principles govern always in the end — the decrees of despots, dictators and parlia- ments to the contrary notwithstanding. This clause was hghtly written into Sir Humphrey Gilbert's first charter by a queen who would have over- ridden it, as jauntily as she prescribed the dress of men and women at her court, if occasion to override it had arisen. But as such occasion did not arise during her reign or during that of her immediate successors the principle survived, took root and grew. When the time came for American men to assert that principle, it was of far too vigorous a growth to be uprooted by any royal decree, or by any act of any par- liament on earth. CHAPTER II A COMPANY OF INCAPABLES THE colony which was destined to make the first permanent Enghsh settlement in America, sailed from London in December, 1606, in three little ships, not one of which would now be regarded as fit to cross the Atlantic, especially during the tempestuous winter months. They were so unfit indeed, that it took them six weeks to get beyond sight of the English coast, and during those six weeks of course the colonists were eating up the provisions which were intended to feed them after their landing in America. They made this matter worse by going far out of their way after the foolish fashion of that time. Instead of sailing straight across the ocean, they went down to the Canary Islands, and thence by way of the West Indies, thus wasting time and needlessly consuming their sup- plies. These were blunders of course, but they were small blunders in comparison with others that were made in those times in the conduct of every enterprize of mo- ment. Instead of organizing the expedition before it set out 21 22 OUR FIRST CENTURY and placing it from the first under the control of the men who were to govern the colony, the company in London sent the motley crew to sea with a sealed box which con- tained the names of the counselors or governors, but which they were under orders not to open until they should land in Virginia. Thus absolutely nothing could be done during the long voyage in the way of or- ganizing the col- ony, assigning each man to his duty, or making preparations for success after landing. Even the cap- tains of the ships that carried the company, did not know on what part of the coast they were to land. They had a vague notion of Roanoke First settlement in Virginia. A COMPANY OF INCAPABLES 23 Island — the locality of Raleigh's unsuccessful efforts — as a proper destination, but they sailed along up the coast, missing that part of it, and at last passing into the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Thence they pushed their way past Old Point Com- fort, through Hampton Roads, and up the James River. It was spring now and all nature was abloom. The supplies of food which the ships carried had been very seriously depleted during the voyage, and it would take a very long time for the ships to go back to England and bring over a fresh supply. Obviously the thing now to be done was to go ashore somewhere as quickly as possible and plant a food crop before it should be too late. The Indians had corn and peas and beans and squashes and pumpkins growing in all their fields along the rivers, and the sight of those fields should at once have suggested planting to the colonists. They need not have waited to select a per- manent site for their colony. All they had to do was to find a spot where they could land and plant corn ; the work of exploration could wait. They did nothing of the kind. They wasted all that was left of the already belated seedtime in voyages up and down the many rivers of that region, and, finally, when it was too late in the year to plant a crop with any hope of its ripening before the autumn frosts, they selected for their landing place almost the worst spot in all that region. It was a low-lying peninsula, connected 24 OUR FIRST CENTURY with the mainland by a still lower-lying isthmus which has since been washed away, leaving the site an island. The spot was malarious in the extreme, as unhealthful a place as could have been found in eastern Virginia, and as quinine was then unknown, the colonists had no means of combating the fevers of the swamp in which they had ignorantly established themselves. There were only two things to be said in favor of the site on which the colonists landed and founded James- town. One was that the place was easily defensible against possible enemies ; the other was that the water along the shores was deep enough to permit the ships to come up to the land and be tied there to trees. This last was the lazy man's argument ; it spared some trouble ; otherwise it was utterly unimportant. The other reason counted for little. There was no real occasion to fear Spanish attacks. The Indians in that region showed no signs of hostility at first, and even had they done so, the windings of those rivers afforded many more healthful sites than that of Jamestown, which were quite as easily defensible as that. In the end indeed, the site of Jamestown became a point pecul- iarly hard to defend, by reason of its woodlands, afford- ing cover to an enemy, and still more by reason of its miasms which laid low the men depended upon for its defence. At one time almost all the men of the colony were prostrated by swamp fevers and it was impossible to maintain an efficient guard. A COMPANY OF INCAPABLES 25 When the colonists at last settled there, too late in the year to plant a crop for their own sustenance, there was nothing left to them except to hope that Captain Newport, who had brought them out, might be able to go to London again with his ships and bring back a supply of provisions in time to save them from starv- ing to death. Newport reckoned that he might, with good luck, be back again within about twenty weeks. But the food supplies of the colonists were barely enough to support them for fourteen weeks. The six weeks extra time promised to be amply sufficient for the star- vation of the whole company. Without doubt that is what would have happened but for John Smith. Whatever other doubts skeptical his- torians may entertain concerning that wonderful man's career, there is nowhere any question that he saved the Jamestown colony from a fate like that which had pre- viously blotted out the colony on Roanoke Island. In that sealed box which contained the names of the men who were to rule the colony, John Smith's name appeared as one of the chosen. But during the voyage and long before the box was opened, a quarrel arose between Smith and the others and Smith was even put into irons as a malefactor. So when the colony landed and the sealed box was opened, the others refused to let Smith take any part in their counsels. After a while he compelled them to give him a hearing before a jury, and as he was promptly acquitted of all the charges 26 OUR FIRST CENTURY against him, he took his place as one of the men set to rule the colony. This was fortunate for the colony. Smith was the only man there who had sense enough to manage affairs well, the only man of them all who could have prevented the entire company from starving to death. As soon as he came into his share of authority he wisely usurped pretty nearly the complete control and nothing could have been better for the common interest. There was not food enough to last, on short allow- ance, till the ships could go to England and bring out further supplies. The colonists had planted no crops. They had set up a church and they had made a bowling green in the center of their little town for their amuse- ment, but they had done absolutely nothing in the way of providing food for their coming necessities. They had not even begun to clear the land. They recklessly traded away to the Indians such farming implements as they owned, and they remained as absolutely idle as if there had been a beneficent government behind them, able and willing to supply all their wants without any effort on their part. Smith alone seems to have foreseen the result of all this. He set to work to get food from the Indians, and he got it. He took great risks in his explorations, and often his life was in serious danger. But he knew how to deal with savages and other strange people, and with almost nothinjr to offer them in exchange for their grain A COMPANY OF INCAPABLES 27 he managed to get enough corn to keep the colonists alive. All this is a surprising story. What did these men expect.-^ Why did they not realize their perilous con- dition ? Why did they not set to work with energy and courage, as men so placed usually do, to avert the fear- ful danger that menaced them ? Another thing, why should men starve in such a region .? They had wasted the seedtime, it is true ; they had planted no corn ; but the woods in Virginia were full of game and the waters full of edible fish, oysters, crabs and the like, while every bay and inlet was covered at certain seasons by vast flocks of waterfowl. Why did not these men — to use a biblical phrase — "arise, slay, and eat .? " Even now, after nearly three hundred years of agricul- ture in those regions, no man of ordinary energy need starve there, even though he have no crop of any kind to depend upon. In the early part of the seventeenth century the woods abounded in deer, wild turkeys, squirrels, opos- sums, raccoons and innumerable hares. The bays were full of ducks and other waterfowl. The marshes were populous with wild birds of a score of varieties, all easily taken by the rudest kind of trapping. In the waters there were mountainous banks of oysters, with fish in such abundance that the Indians were accustomed to gather and dry a whole year's food supply in the spring. This was the fishing season, too, when the Indians were taking great numbers of shad and gigantic sturgeon and 28 OUR FIRST CENTURY limitless supplies of lesser fish. It was the season, also, when soft crabs abounded and were easily taken by the very rudest appliances. Later in the year — in September — came the sora in such multitudes, and so helpless from their excessive fat- ness that they might be knocked down with sticks or paddles. Yet in the midst of such abundance this strangely unfit col- ony, crippled by their inexperience in colonizing and by their ignorance of the land they had been sent out to settle, sat down to await the uncer- tain coming of food ships from London, and even after two other planting seasons had gone by they actually starved. They did indeed at one time of severe starvation exile a part of the company to the oyster banks for suste- nance but at no time do they appear to have made any Present appearance of Jamestown. A COMPANY OF INCAPABLES 29 systematic and well-ordered efforts to use the food that lay so abundantly at hand. So long as John Smith remained in control they had food. For Smith went among the Indians and bought corn. But when at last Smith returned to England, there was nobody in the colony with sense enough and energy enough to do this, and the " starving time " came. The story of that belongs to a later chapter. But why the colonists did not feed fat from the forest and the stream in a land of such abundance, must always remain a problem of history. CHAPTER III JOHN SMITH IT must be borne in mind that the Indians with whom the Jamestown colonists at first came into relations were not at all such savages as those encountered by later colonists in other parts of the country. Indeed they were not savages at all in any just sense of the term. They had an orderly life of their own. They were un- der government. They clothed themselves, so far at least as decency required. Up to the age of twelve years the children went naked. After that they wore clothes. These Indians provided for their necessities in per- fectly orderly ways, and far more discreetly than the colonists did. They cultivated fields. Having killed the trees of a forest by cutting a girdle in the bark of each, they stirred up the earth with such rude tools as they possessed, and planted corn, beans, peas, squashes, pumpkins and the like in great abundance. The Indians were so far savages that they left all this work to their womenkind — their squaws. But they were so far civ- ilized that their necessities were met by agricultural work. 30 JOHN SMITH 31 Indian Houses in the Village of Secotan. (From the original drawing by John White, artist to the Raleigh Expedition.) 32 OUR FIRST CENTURY While the squaws were thus tilHng the ground the Indian men fished the streams and laid by a great store of dried fish to furnish food during the brief winter months of Virjjinia. o Once a year, also, the tribes — men, women and chil- dren — went away to the woodland on the annual hunting expedition, from which they brought back abundant sup- plies of provisions — deer meat, bear meat, the dried flesh of opossums, raccoons, squirrels, wild turkeys and the like. Land was abundant and superabundant in Virginia. Not only so, but land prepared for cultivation might have been had by the colonists in exchange for a few trinkets. The Indians had opened many fields on the margins of all the rivers by girdling the trees in the way already described. Many of these fields were not in use when the colonists landed. If the men of Jamestown had been governed by ordinary common sense they would have hired some of the unused fields, planted crops there and fared abundantly. In brief, in a remarkably fertile country, these peo- ple idly waited for a company in London to send them something to eat across three thousand miles of tempes- tuous sea, at a time when sailing ships alone existed, and when the knowledge of the navigators was so meager and defective that it was never certain that they would reach the coast within a hundred miles of the point intended, or that they would know where they were when they did make land. JOHN SMITH 33 As there were no women or children in Jamestown, there was of course no home Hfe there. The company in London owned everything, inchiding the proceeds of every man's labor. No man was permitted — for some years at least — to own the land he tilled or even the crop that he might produce. Consequently no man had any inducement to work, and in fact no man worked. Why should he .? Having no family to provide for, having no property of his own to improve, having no future of betterment to look for, why should any man in the colony — most of them unused to work at any time — exert himself to produce crops that he could not own or to create a prosperity which he could not share ? Why not play at bowls instead and idle away the time in a delicious climate, trusting John Smith to get him some- thing to eat by trading with the Indians ? John Smith did this in a masterly manner. He was a young man of extraordinary vigor and unusual sagacity. He had been an adventurer in many parts of the world. His personal history was so wonderful that many histo- c Capt. John Smith. 34 OUR FIRST CENTURY rians in our time are disposed to doubt its more adven- turous details. But in view of what he certainly did for the Jamestown colony, and in view of his really remark- able explorations in America, which extended even to New England, the better opinion seems to be that in the main John Smith's story of his own life was true. Professor John Fiske has pointed out that the strangest and least credible of Smith's previous adventures in for- eign countries were first reported not by himself but by others, in official records and in books written by those who knew the facts, for circulation in countries with which Smith had no relations whatsoever. Doubtless John Smith was something of a braggart. Doubtless he liked to make his stories of adventure as striking and as dramatic as he could. But there is at least room for the opinion that his account of himself, of his adventures, and of his deeds of prowess, is substan- tially true. Very certainly he saved the first English colony in America by his energy, his daring and his sa- gacity, and nothing worse ever happened to that colony than the physical injury to him by an accidental explosion of gunpowder, which compelled him to return to Eng- land. Fortunately that did not happen till the colony had passed its first state of greatest danger and difficulty. It is not too much to say that English civilization and the English power were first planted on this continent by the genius, the courage and the abounding energy of Captain John Smith. JOHN SMITH 35 His passion for exploration was limitless. His mind was a very corkscrew in its search for information. His resourcefulness was extraordinary. In all times of danger he knew' what to do. His tact was illimit- able. His persuasiveness overcame all difficulties, con- quered all hatreds and secured to him whatever he wanted. His first task upon coming into authority in Virginia was to reduce the colonists to something like discipline. His next endeavor was to procure food for them from the Indians. After that, or incidentally to it, he gave himself up to the work of exploring the land in which he lived. In an open boat he sailed up and down all the multitudinous waterways of that region — the Chesapeake, the James River, the York, the Pamunkey, the Chicka- hominy, the Appomattox, the Potomac, the Rappahan- nock, the Rapidan and all the rest. Afterwards he sailed northward, exploring the coast all the way to the neigh- borhood of the mouth of the St. Lawrence. Now suppose this wonderful man did He a little, or exaggerate a little in telling of his early adventures in slaying Turks, or in describing his experiences in the serv- itude into which he certainly was sold as a captive. There is absolutely no proof that he told anything but the truth on those subjects. But even if his tales of ad- venture were all fabrications there remains the fact that he, first of all men, made the English colonization of these shores a fact, and he alone explored and mapped 36 OUR FIRST CENTURY the coast in a way to render future and further settle- ment possible. In spite of all criticism and all detraction, the fame of John Smith endures as that of the man who did more than any other one man to make English colonization in America possible. CHAPTER IV LIFE IN JAMESTOWN HALF the Jamestown colonists died during that first year, and no wonder. They lived in unwholesome hovels, some of them in holes dug in the ground. They had utterly insufficient food, until Smith came into control, and the only wonder is that any of them lived through that terrible time. One of Smith's first services was in teaching them how to build healthful dwelling places for themselves. His second service was in procuring food for them, as we have seen. This he did at great personal risk, sailing up into the Indian country even after the colonists had needlessly offended the Indians and made enemies of them. There he exchanged trinkets for corn with which to keep the colonists alive. At one time he was made prisoner and condemned to death by the great chief, Powhatan. But by mingled boldness and persuasiveness he had won such favor with the Indians, in spite of the wrongs done them by the Jamestown colonists, that he was at last released. A long time afterward he told the story that Pocahontas, an Indian girl, the daughter of Powhatan, had savpd his 37 38 OUR FIRST CENTURY life by throwing her arms about his neck at the moment when the fatal blow was about to descend upon his head. Some historians have doubted the truth of this story be- cause Captain Smith did not tell it for some years after- ward. But in the same way he did not tell the story of his three encounters with Turks, or of his romantic escape from Turkish slavery until long after other and quite disinterested men had related the facts in printed books with which he had nothing whatever to do. Moreover it is not certain that Captain John Smith did not tell the story in the first book he wrote about Virginia, called " True Relation." That book was edited in London on behalf of the com- pany, and it is defi- nitely known that the work as published did not include all that Captain Smith wrote into it. The company in London was at that time, as we know, exceedingly anxious to publish nothing that might tend to discourage emigration to Virginia. It is altogether reasonable to suppose that the story of Smith's Indian kindling fire. LIFE IN JAMESTOWN 39 capture and condemnation to death was cut out of the book as something that might discourage men from emi- grating to the colony. There is certainly no absolutely necessary or conclusive reason for discrediting a romantic legend which perfectly accords with Indian custom, and which some at least of our later historians have accepted as fact. In the spring of 1608 — a year after the founding of the colony, and again in the autumn of that year, ships ar- rived from England, bringing food supplies and more colonists, mainly of the same sort as those that had come out in the first instance. In 1609 still more colonists were sent out in nine ships. The men they brought to Virginia were in large part artisans, and fit colonists. Others of them, a minority perhaps, were thieves, vaga- bonds, broken-down ''gentlemen," footpads, worthless idlers who must be fed but who would not work. Two women, the first in the colony, came out in 1608. Strangely enough the ships brought out very little in the way of farm implements that could aid the colonists in growing food for themselves. There was not a plough in all America then. There is no trustworthy evidence that there was a hoe or a spade. Certainly there were no horses, no oxen, no cows, no hogs, no sheep, no goats, no domestic animals of any kind until more than a year after the first settlement was made. Even yet the colonists had not awakened to the obvious fact that by cultivating the rich soil of the country to 40 OUR FIRST CENTURY which they had come they might provide themselves with all the food they needed and to spare. They let a second and a third seedtime go by almost unimproved, while they attended church and played bowls upon the green. Meanwhile they had found in the river sands a multitude of glittering mica scales which they mistook for gold. In our time a few ounces of such sand would be sent to a chemist for analysis. Within a few days the chemist would report that these glittering scales were nothing more than mica. But in the early part of the seventeenth century there was no such science as chemistry known in all the New World. There was no possible way in which the colonists at Jamestown could find out that the glittering particles they found in their river sands were not gold but fragments of mica slate. So the colonists, instead of growing golden grain that would have fed and rapidly enriched them, spent their time in freighting ships with a wholly worthless sand that glittered but was not gold. CHAPTER V THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY THE expedition sent out to reinforce the colony in 1609 was commanded by Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers. Two of the nine ships com- posing the flotilla were wrecked in the Bermudas and when the rest of the fleet went on, both Gates and Som- ers, with a large number of the emigrants, remained be- hind in those islands until spring. This was unfortunate for the colony in several ways, for both Somers and Gates had a certain capacity to command and were possessed, at least, of moderate com- mon sense, while those who went forward were led by old enemies of Captain John Smith who were disposed to give him all the trouble they could in the colony. Unfortu- nately for the enterprise. Smith was presently so severely injured by an accident that he had to return to England, and, in the absence of Gates and Somers, there was no leader at Jamestown capable of providing food and pre- serving the integrity of the colony. The first necessity under such circumstances was to keep on good terms with the Indians, but instead of that 41 42 OUR FIRST CENTURY the new leaders established the worst possible relations, driving the Indians into active hostility. The result was that Jamestown was kept continually in a state of siege, the savages lying in ambush near the settlement and kill- ing every colonist who ventured to show himself beyond the limits of the little town. The supply of corn was cut off of course and in the spring famine set in. Still worse, the men of Jamestown, already ague smitten, had to pass their nights _____^ out of doors on Virginia by the charter of 1609. P"uard in a DCS- tilential atmosphere. Most of them fell hopelessly ill, and the colony was reduced to the sorest straits. Jamestown had no resources of its own. Its people had even yet grown no grain of consequence. They had planted no fields and they had alienated the only people who could afford them succor. In their starving condition they killed and ate the few dogs, horses and brood animals that had at last been THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 43 brought out from England and they were finally com- pelled to eat rats, mice and snakes by way of keeping themselves alive. They turned cannibals sometimes and ate dead Indians and even each other. Some of them escaped in a little boat and made their way back to Eng- land. Some were killed by the Indians ; still more of them perished by starvation and disease. There had been nearly five hundred men in the colony in the autumn of 1609. In May of 1 6 10, only sixty of them remained alive ; fever, Indians and starvation had de- stroyed the rest. But in May, Gates and Somers arrived with a supply of provisions brought from the Bermudas in two little boats which they had built there. These provisions consisted of salt pork, and dried birds, and turtles, but they were so scant in quantity that they could not be expected to feed the colony for more than a few weeks and now that War Club. the hostility of the Indians had been completely aroused there was no hope of any food supply from that source. The colonists had been at Jamestown for three full years. For three full years they had dwelt in a region fruitful in an extraordinary degree, and yet they had done absolutely nothing by way of growing food supplies for themselves or taking care of themselves. The situation was critical in the extreme, and Gates 44 OUR FIRST CENTURY decided that the only way out of it was to embark all the people of the colony upon his little ships and endeavor to make his way to the fishing banks off Newfoundland, where English vessels lay, from which he hoped to ob- tain supplies of food. With the clumsy appliances of navigation then in use it was by no means certain that he could reach the Newfoundland banks before the people in his charge should starve to death. He decided upon this attempt, however, as the only thing that could be done with even a remote hope of rescuing the colo- nists. He had only four little pinnaces — mere open boats — and into these he crowded all the people and set sail, abandoning the settlement. This was in June, 1610. But before the little fleet had made its way down the river and through Hampton Roads to the sea, Lord De la Warr, who had been appointed governor of the colony, arrived at the mouth of the river just in time to prevent the final abandonment of the enterprise. In constant fear of an attack by the Spanish the colo- nists kept men posted at various points down the river to serve as lookouts. From these men De la Warr learned of the proposed abandonment of Jamestown, and he instantly set himself to prevent it. He sent a boat up the river and ordered the colonists back to James- town. A little later he reached that point himself with supplies of provisions, of which he had an abundance. Better still, so far as the colony was concerned, he had THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 45 the royal authority to declare martial law and to rule the settlement with an iron hand. He pointed out to the people their folly in not having cultivated the soil in order to provide themselves with food, and showed them that all their sufferings and star- vation were the result of their own idleness and their neglect of easy and obvious opportunities. But starvation, and expo- .. ^ sure, and malaria, had so far I fastened themselves upon the ' people that the illness and the deaths continued. Un- happily De la Warr himself was poisoned by the miasms of the unfit place. He fell ill and was compelled to re- turn to England. After his departure things went about as they had gone before, until the next year Sir Thomas Dale was sent over to take control. He was a man of strong arm and resolute mind. He ruled without mercy for the idle, without pity for the weak, without tolerance for any form of laziness and without any very great concern for the happiness of the people. He ruled the men of James- town as a master rules his slaves. It was his purpose to make the colony profitable to the company in London, Manner of boiling in an earthen pot. 46 OUR FIRST CENTURY which had planted it as an investment for the sake of the money returns that might be squeezed out of it. But at any rate his rule was wholesome for the colony in cer- tain ways. He did not let the people starve and he compelled them to work — the one thing which they had neglected to do before, and their neglect of which was the chief cause of their misfortunes. But if we remember what sort of men composed the colony it is not difficult to understand that the tyranny of such a man as Dale drove many of the people to de- spair. Some of them fled to the woods, preferring to take their chances among the Indians rather than remain under so rigorous a government. When such runaways were caught Dale burned them at the stake or subjected them to other cruel forms of death. Others made efforts, some successful and some unsuccessful, to escape from the country in little boats. Dale's tyranny was the more intolerable for the reason that many men of fortune and gentle breeding had by this time come out to the colony. These were reduced to the com^mon slavery. At the bottom of all this trouble was the blunder of the Virginia Company in London in the original organiza- tion of the colony. If these people had been farmers, sent out to Virginia with their wives and children to make homes for themselves, and had been permitted to own their lands and their labor, to work for themselves and for the betterment of their condition, none of these troubles would have ensued. There were women in the THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 47 colony after 1 609, but they were very few. The colonists had been promised indeed that after five years of work for the common fund they should be permitted to own their own lands and work for themselves ; but after seven years had passed this promise was still unfulfilled. It was still the fact that the industrious man had no ad- vantage over the idler and that no man had any induce- ment to work. The colonists were in fact in a condition of serfdom or worse. They were scarcely better than so many coolies working for a company without compensa- tion. Dale seems to have had some glimmering notion at least of the evil effects of this system, and in 16 14 he selected those of the colonists who had been longest in Virginia, and gave to each of them the use of three acres of land to be cultivated on private account. He gave them also the privilege of devoting thirty days in the year to the cultivation of their private crops, exacting in return eleven months of work at their hands for the "common stock." To a few he gave also one day in the week, from seedtime till harvest, for the tilling of their own little fields. But in making this small concession to the natural human impulse of personal possession and endeavor, he offset it by requiring these men to support themselves by their thirty days' work on three acres of land, without assistance from that common stock for which they were required to work eleven months out of every twelve, and 48 OUR FIRST CENTURY of those to whom he allowed the one day a week he ex- acted a well-nigh ruinous rental of two and a half barrels of corn to the acre. It seems incredible that men who had hands, and fists, and brains, should have submitted to such a rule as this. The only explanation is found in the character of those men who were first sent out to Virginia, and in the spirit of submission to arbitrary authority which at that time strangely dominated the minds of men everywhere. Under similar circumstances in our time there would be a quick revolt and a successful one. Mod- ern men so placed and so oppressed would reason that the wilder- ness in which they lived belonged to them for use and they would seize upon it and use it for their own in spite of any and all orders that might come from across the sea. Nothing so sharply emphasizes the defective character of the men of Jamestown, and indeed all other men of that time, as does their submission to a tyranny so arbi- trary and so unjust under circumstances which they might so easily have controlled. Indian manner of broiling. THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY . 49 Even this little concession, however, of three acres and thirty days in the year, improved the condition of the colony. At last men had some small interest and ownership in their own labor. Nevertheless the con- ditions of life were of the very worst, if we consider them with reference to any hope of the ultimate establishment and prosperity of the colony. There were still only a few women there. No man had a home of his own in which dwelt his wife and his little children. The blight of communism was over it all. Men did not own their fields, or control their labor, or reap the profits of it. They were simply slaves working for the company and under orders of a master. About this time another blunder was committed. To- bacco had become a peculiarly valuable commodity in Europe and the supply of it, up to this time, had come mainly from the West India Islands. The soil and cli- mate of Virginia were peculiarly well adapted to the profitable cultivation of that plant, and John Rolfe — the man who afterward married Pocahontas — saw it growing in the Indian fields. It occurred to him that there might be profit for the colony in growing it in the fields culti- vated for the company, and in private fields, for private ownership of the land was by that time extending. Its cultivation was introduced and rapidly increased. The yield was enormous and the prices high, while the price of grain was fixed by law — an error which gov- erning men had not at that time learned to avoid. It D 50 OUR FIRST CENTURY presently happened therefore that all the labor of the colony was devoted to the cultivation of tobacco for shipment to England where it sold at high rates. The cornfields were abandoned and practically nothing was done to grow food for the colonists. In 1617 even the streets in Jamestown were planted with tobacco and every field that should have been bearing grain was de- voted instead to this money-yielding crop. The result of all this was that another starving time came — one scarcely less severe than that from which the colonists had already suffered. Another thing that stimulated the cultivation of to- bacco was that it passed current as money. As it was forbidden to carry gold and silver coin away from Eng- land, there was almost no money at all in the colony, and tobacco took its place — a currency uncertain of value, but at least possessed of great purchasing power. It was three or four years earlier than this that one Captain Argall bribed some Indians to deliver Poca- hontas, the daughter of Powhatan, into his hande. His thought was that if the colony could get possession of Powhatan's daughter the fact would serve as a basis of ne- gotiation with the Indians and might in that way allay somewhat the hostility of the red men. Pocahontas was probably a willing enough captive ; she had played among the whites in Jamestown in her childhood and had acquired a fondness for their life. She was now a young woman, reputed to be beautiful. THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 51 After a little while she consented to marry John Rolfe. She was first converted into a Christian by baptism and became the Lady Rebecca. Pocahontas. ( From engraving in first edition of John Smith's General History.) Her marriage took place in 1614 and two years later she went to England with her husband, and was received at court as a princess, though her husband was for a time threatened with pains and penalties for having mar- 52 OUR FIRST CENTURY ried a royal princess — he being a commoner — without the permission of the sovereign. Pocahontas died in England leaving one son, a half- breed, from whom some of the greatest families in Vir- ginia are proud to claim their lineage. By this time the colony was slowly extending itself and receiving new immigrants of a better class than the first settlers. New fields were opened and cultivated outside of Jamestown and new settlements were made in various parts of the region round about. More important still the personal ownership of land had been by this time greatly extended so that industry was stimulated by the prospect of personal advantage from it. Even yet however the home-making instinct, which is common to all men, had not been permitted to exercise itself in any adequate way. There were still very few women in the colony and almost no children. After five years of Dale's government Captain Argall succeeded to the control of the colony. He was a man of enterprise and ability, and he had no conscience what- ever. He robbed the colony right and left, and defrauded the London Company in every way in which it was pos- sible to do so. He governed for his own profit exclu- sively and his government very nearly ruined the colony. His exactions were so great that men cultivating fields could not comply with them without suffering impover- ishment. But relief was coming. In 1618 the company in Eng- THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 53 land which had control of this colony began to manifest an appreciation of its conditions. They organized aux- iliary societies to make settlements in Virginia. Within a year, under the auspices of those auxiliary societies, the white population in Virginia increased from less than four hundred to more than a thousand men. At the same time the Virginia Company in London granted to the colonists a charter which proved ultimately to be the foundation of American liberty. This document was called the " Great Charter." It decreed that there should be a governor and a council of state to be appointed by the company in England, but it provided also that there should be in Virginia a general assembly representing the people. It provided that each of the several settlements which had now been formed should elect two representatives, or burgesses as they were called, to represent it in this general assembly and that the assembly should enact all laws for the gov- ernance of the colony, subject only to the veto of the company. More important still the Great Charter provided for the general and complete private ownership of land. The company had at last come to understand that men could not be expected to cultivate fields if the produce of their labor at the end of the year was not to belong to them. It had at last come to understand that com- munism is and must be always and everywhere a failure. It had come to understand that personal interest and 54 OUR FIRST CENTURY personal ambition are the moving forces of human en- deavor, and that the family is the foundation of all civili- zation — the unit of society. This Great Charter was the beginning of prosperity to English colonists in America. For the first time, and after eleven years of blundering experimentation, the facts of human nature were recognized and a common sense system was adopted. It was on July 30, 16 19, that the first General As- sembly met in the little church at Jamestown. This was the beginning of free, representative government in America. When other colonies were planted a little later, particularly in Massachusetts, this principle of local self-government by representation was fully recognized and out of it has grown, as we shall see in following the history of the colonies, all that we now know of " govern- ment of the people by the people for the people." By this time there had been a considerable importation of agricultural implements, which simplified the toil of the colonists and increased the productiveness of their fields. There had also been a considerable importation of farm animals — horses, cows and hogs. The forests of the country were so rich in mast that the hogs were able from the first to support themselves in the woodlands. They multiplied rapidly and vast numbers of them went wild in the swamps and other unoccupied lands, develop- ing presently into a new breed of swine which even to this time survives as the " razor-back " hog of Virginia THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 55 from which comes a ham especially esteemed in our clay. These hogs lived healthfully in the woods upon nuts and roots, and their flesh attained a perfection of flavor which has been equalled nowhere else in the world. There was still one thing lacking in the Virginia col- ony. There were still very few women there. Conse- quently there were no homes and nothing to bind men to the soil by the love of family. In 1619 somebody connected with the London Com- pany had sense enough to see this defect in the system and to plan a way to correct it. He understood that men sent into the wilderness to build up a community there must have wives and homes of their own. He un- derstood that women only can make homes anywhere. This genius, whoever he was — and unfortunately his name is not recorded in history — suggested that a company of women should be sent out to Virginia to become wives to the men already settled there. The plan adopted was a simple one and entirely prac- ticable. Ninety young women of good character were induced to go out to the colony. They paid no fare for their transportation and they undertook no obligation whatsoever to marry anybody after they got there. The natural inclination of women toward men and of men to- ward women was trusted to arrange the rest of the pro- gram. It was planned that when these young women should land, the men of the colony should be free to 56 OUR FIRST CENTURY woo them at their will. If any man secured the consent of any young woman to become his wife he was expected to pay the company in tobacco, as the currency of the country, the cost of her transportation across the ocean. Beyond that there was no charge and no obligation. Most of the ninety young women were quickly mated and the experiment was so successful that other importa- tions of women followed in rapid succession at a much higher rate of passage charge, and they found husbands anxious to pay the price and secure them as home makers in this American wilderness. The result of this experi- ment was to make permanent a colony which had before been of uncertain tenure, and to build up on these shores a state founded upon the natural relations of men and women. Now for the first time the Virginians came to feel that they had a country of their own to dwell in, and a life of their own to live. They had fields of their own to cultivate, with the assurance that the produce of them should redound to their own advantage and enrich them. They had homes of their own to love and to be happy in. They had wives and children of their own to pro- vide for by their industry and thrift. And now for the first time the colony in Virginia began to exist as an in- dependent community, relying upon itself for its own support and dependent upon its own exertions fcr its future welfare and happiness. For the first time in the history of this colony the fundamental forces of human THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 57 nature were brought to bear to create prosperity and to insure success. It was at about this time that the great curse of America was born. In 1619 a Dutch ship entered the river carrying a few negro slaves who had been bought in the West Indies. The ship was short of food, and when its captain was forbidden to land he threatened to throw the negro slaves overboard rather than feed them. In order to prevent that inhumanity the Jamestown au- thorities agreed to buy these negroes. Let us understand this thing clearly. At that time the negro was nowhere regarded as the white man's brother. He was held to be merely a beast of burden capable of performing certain work and subject to pur- chase and sale as any other beast of burden might be. The people at Jamestown had not desired to. purchase negro slaves, but at the same time it did not come into the mind of any of them that the purchase or sale of negroes was in any wise a trespass upon the rights of humanity. It was very many years afterwards that this thought found a lodgment in the consciences of men. By this time the colony occupied with its plantations most of the peninsula between the James and the York Rivers and most of the region on the southern bank of the James River up to the present site of Richmond, and a greatly better class of men had come out to live in Virginia. Since the marriage of Pocahontas with John Rolfe the 5S OUR FIRST CENTURY Indians had been in the main friendly and no serious troubles with them had occurred ; but about this time the Indian Emperor, Powhatan, who ruled over thirty tribes, died. His brother succeeded him as emperor and he was far less disposed than Powhatan had been to be friendly with the Englishmen. He was especially annoyed by the encroachments of EngHsh plantations upon territory which had been previously the hunting ground of his people. Presently a quarrel arose between one of the settlers and an Indian. Out of it almost instantly grew an attack upon all the settlements by all the Indians. This was in 1622. The attack was made without warning and many of the white men were killed in their fields, brained with their own implements of industry. The butchery included men, women and children, and in a single day nearly one-tenth of all the colonists were slaughtered. A bloody war ensued which ended at last in the com- plete subjugation of the savages. For twenty years after that there was no further trouble between the Indians and the white men. It was not the king in England who granted the great charter of 1618 to Virginia but the company, which, under the king's authority had a right to grant it. But in 1624, the king quarreled with the company and appealed to the courts to annul its own charter. This was done. But the annulment of the company's THE SEEDS OF LIBERTY 59 charter, the Virginians contended, did not invahdate the charter granted by it to the Virginia colony while its authority still existed. A little later the king sent out commissioners to Vir- ginia to inquire as to the affairs of the colony, but the assembly resolutely refused to permit his agents to ex- amine their records, and when the clerk of the house of burgesses permitted the commissioners to see them, he was sentenced to stand in the pillory and to have a part of his ears cut off as a penalty. Thus early in the history of the colony did the colonists assert their rights as Englishmen and combat the king himself in that behalf. In addition they adopted a resolution that no taxes should ever be levied upon the colony, or the people of the colony, without the consent of the people's own representatives. This was in effect the early beginning of that revolution which ultimately made of the colonies free and independent states. It was the assertion of the exclusive right of EngUshmen in America to tax themselves and it was in assertion of that right chiefly that the revolutionary war was waged a century and a half later. It is to be borne in mind, as has been said earlier in this volume, that ideas govern the world, and this idea that taxation of the colonies by any author- ity outside of the colonists themselves could be, should be, and must be resisted and resented, was born as early as 1624 in the Virginia plantations. It was a seed 60 OUR FIRST CENTURY planted in fertile soil, and it was destined to bear rich fruit. In the next year King James died and was succeeded by Charles I. The colonists, who hoped if possible to live on good terms with the English government, sent ex-Governor Yeardley to England with assurances of their loyalty and with protestations that they desired no change in their government as it then existed. The king made a knight of Yeardley and sent him back in 1626 as the royal governor, at the same time recog- nizing the right of the people to make their own laws through their house of burgesses and themselves alone to determine what taxes should be levied upon them. If we are to understand the origin and the birth of American liberty and of our own system of government as it exists to-day we must bear these facts in mind. They were the seeds from which our liberty has grown. CHAPTER VI THE FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES IT was about fourteen years after the settlement at Jamestown was made that the first permanent New England colony was planted at Plymouth in Massa- chusetts. The circumstances which gave birth to that settlement were totally different from those that had in- spired the Virginia enterprise, and the settlement was made under much more hopeful conditions. The Ply- mouth colony was not a body of men sent out to exploit the country in the interest of an English company but was instead a body of earnest men and women who came to this country of their own accord in order that they might better themselves. At that time religious persecution was common every- where in a degree which we in our more enlightened time can scarcely at all understand. Men of each faith thought it entirely right and proper to persecute, even unto death, the men who differed with them in religious belief. Roman Catholics persecuted all Protestants and Protestants, wherever they were in control of the gov- ernment, persecuted all Roman Catholics. More than 61 62 OUR FIRST CENTURY this, Protestants of one kind persecuted Protestants of another kind, while all of them persecuted Jews, Quakers, Baptists and all unbelievers. The general thought seems to have been that the man whose belief differed from that of the dominant party was a man to be outlawed or destroyed. In our day it is difficult to understand all this and yet it must be understood if we would read aright the history of that time. In England there were many people who objected to the forms and ceremonies of the state church and who ob- jected also to its methods of church government. These people wished to reform the ceremonies, to change some- what the teachings of the estabhshed church and gener- ally to alter church methods. They held that the ceremonies of the church had become too formal and mean- ingless and that personal religion played too small a part in the worship. They wanted to get rid of formalism, and to introduce what they regarded as a more vital, more exacting and more personal interest in religion in Puritan Gentleman. j^g stead. These people were called Puritans. It was not their purpose to withdraw from the established church. They desired only to reform it, to change its methods, to mod- ify its ceremonies, and to introduce into it ideas of their own. In all this they were stoutly resisted and in con- FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 63 sequence they were subjected to a certain measure of persecution. There was another group of men and women who went much further than this in their opposition to what they beheved to be wrong in the estabhshed church. These people withdrew from the church itself and set up a church of their own in antagonism to it. They were called Separatists, because they had separated themselves from the Church of England. At the little town of Scrooby in the north of England there was a very ear- nest and active congregation of these Separatists. They presently found themselves subject to so much perse- cution for their religion that they de- cided to leave the country, in search of a place where they might worship God in their own way without incurring pains and penalties of any kind. They emi- grated in a body to Leyden in Holland. There they lived for a little more than a dozen years, enjoying perfect freedom of conscience and an absolute liberty to worship as they pleased and to teach their doc- trines without interference. At the end of that time, however, they had begun to see what must happen to them. They were still stoutly loyal to their English birthright and were in no way dis- posed to surrender it. They began to understand by Puritan Lady. 64 OUR FIRST CENTURY that time that if they were to remain in Holland their children and their grandchildren would not be English- men but Dutchmen and they were very unwilling that this should occur. Their desire was to settle themselves somewhere in English territory where they might be free to hold their own religious views, at the same time main- taining their status as Englishmen. New England by the patent of 1630. (Vicinity of Boston.) It was in pursuit of this object that they made up their minds at last to emigrate to America. They went first to England where many others of their faith joined them and where they secured the privilege of settling within the FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 65 American domain of the Virginia Company. They then set sail in the ship Mayflower and after a long and tem- pestuous voyage landed on the shores of Massachusetts. Like almost everything else that happened in connec- tion with the early colonies, their landing place was probably a blunder, though there is some authority for believing that the master of their ship had been bribed by men hostile to the Virginia Company to make this blunder. At any rate their landing place lay far north of the domain of the Virginia Company, in which alone they had Ucense to settle, and was in a region to which they had no charter right or title whatsoever. Never- theless they determined to land there, being ship weary and uncertain as to what might happen should they pro- long their voyage by running on down the coast into the region to which they had been assigned. There were one hundred and two persons in the emi- grant company all told. Most of these were Separatists but some of them were not. When it was decided to land on the New England coast outside the domain of Virginia, those who were not Separatists, but who had joined themselves to the colonists for purposes of their own, threatened that upon landing they would obey no rule in the absence of any right on the part of the colony to estabhsh laws and rules. In order to meet this situ- ation the Pilgrims gathered together before landing and drew up a compact. In this compact they agreed that they would enact from time to time such laws " as shall E 66 OUR FIRST CENTURY be thought meet and convenient for the general good of the colony." Before landing they required that every- body on board should subscribe to this compact agreeing to give to the laws of the colony '' due submission and obedience." The point at which the Pilgrims landed had been dis- covered and named Plymouth by Captain John Smith of Virginia in one of his indefatigable voyages of discovery up and down the American coast. The Pilgrims ac- cepted and retained the name as it was recorded in Smith's rough map of the Cape Cod region. The climate of Massachusetts of course was far less malarious than that of Virginia, but in winter it was ex- cessively cold and the Pilgrims knew as little as the Vir- ginia colonists had known of how to meet the climatic conditions of America and how to live healthfully in the midst of them. The long confinement on board the little ship had of course weakened many constitutions and as the landing- was made in December there was a long winter to be endured by these weakened ones. Their hastily con- structed habitations were utterly unfit to resist the rigors of a New England winter, and some of them continued to live on board the ship. Nearly all of the colonists fell ill during that season and before the end of it came, forty-four out of the one hundred and two were dead. Six more died soon after- ward, among them the governor, John Carver. FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 67 Another difficulty encountered by the Plymouth col^ onists was the intense hostility of the Indians near them. This hostility was due mainly to the fact that, a little while before, an English ship captain had captured and carried to England a number of the savages. The first Virginia colonists had landed in the spring- Chair of Carver, first governor of Plymouth Colony, time when it was possible to plant crops with the hope of an early harvest — an opportunity which they fool- ishly neglected. The Pilgrims landed instead in De- cember and many months must elapse before they could even make a beginning of cultivation. They were com- pelled to live during all those weary weeks of winter upon 68 OUR FIRST CENTURY such food stuffs as they had brought with them in the good ship Mayflower except that they secured some small supplies of corn in addition and did some fishing. In order to understand how meager these food stuffs must have been we must remember that there was at that time no such thing as a refrigerator for the preserva- tion of meats ; that the art of preserving fruits, and veg- etables, and meats in tin or glass cans was wholly un- known ; and that provisions preserved for a long voyage consisted solely of salted meats, hardened in brine until they were almost inedible, and of such vegetable products as dried beans and the like. Upon such food sup- plies as these the Pilgrims must live not only during the winter but during all those months of spring and summer which must elapse before their crops, planted in the spring, should bear fruit. Such living was exceedingly hard and in many ways unwholesome. They had no fresh meats, no vegetables, no fruits. They must simply subsist as best they could upon stale and unwholesome ship stores. In the spring two friendly Indians came into the set- tlement and took up their abode with the Englishmen. They knew how to live in that region and climate as the settlers did not and one of them taught the English- men many useful lessons. He taught them, among other things, how to catch fish in the bays round about. He taught them also what use to make of fish as ferti- lizers. He showed them how the Indians, when they FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 69 planted corn in the rather thin soil of New England, enriched their fields by burying one or two or three dead fish in each corn hill as a means of stimulating the growth of the crops. In dealing with the Indians a little farther away the Pilgrims were very fortunate. These Indians belonged to the tribe called Wampanoags who were under the rule of Massasoit. Massasoit was from the first disposed to be friendly with the European newcomers. He made a treaty with them which secured peace during the next fifty-four years. This second successful EngHsh colony in America had one great advantage over the first. The men who came out with it had their wives with them. It was from the first a colony founded upon the home making idea. But those who governed it made the same fundamental mis- take that had been made in Virginia. They provided that all the colonists should work for a common fund and re- ceive their living from it. This paralyzed industry in Mass- achusetts precisely as it had paralyzed it in Virginia and as it must always paralyze it everywhere in the world where the communistic system is adopted. It resulted in Massachusetts, as it had resulted in Virginia, in fre- quent periods of famine. But the Massachusetts colo- nists were quicker than their Virginia predecessors to discover the cause of the dif^culty and in 1624 they allotted land to each of the colonists to be cultivated on his own account. From that time there was no further 70 OUR FIRST CENTURY distress. As soon as every man knew that he must depend for his subsistence upon the labor of his own hands, every man worked with a will and the results were satisfactory. In the meanwhile other colonists were coming out from Holland and from England and in spite of the great mortality of that first winter, during which almost exactly one-half of the original settlers died, there were one hundred and eighty persons in the Plymouth colony in 1624. After their settlement was made these colonists had received a patent from the council for New England, under which they had a title to live in the region in which they had established themselves, and under which they were granted lands to the extent of one hundred acres for each colonist settled there, and fifteen hundred acres of common lands for the public use, all rent free. Notwithstanding the treaty with Massasoit the Pil- grims had more or less trouble with the Indians round about them during all these years of the early colonial history. When they went to church they carried their firearms with them and at all times they were compelled to stand upon the defensive. They built a fort near their settlement, armed it with cannon and manned it daily and nightly as a defensive measure against possible Indian attacks. This constant necessity of standing on the defensive, was one of the reasons that led the New England colonists to live together in villages instead of FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 71 living on widely separated farms, as the Virginians early began to do. The military commander at Plymouth was Captain Myles Standish. He was not an adherent of the religion of the colonists, but he personally liked the people and he took charge of their military operations with a thor- oughly good will. It is a curious fact that in a time when religion determined everything else this choice of The Myles Standish House, Duxbury, built by his son in 1666. a military leader was made without reference to religion and even in antagonism to the prevalent belief. Myles Standish knew how to do things and the colonists wanted things done. During the first half year, as we have seen, Governor Carver died and William Bradford, a young man only thirty-two years old, succeeded him. He governed so well that for the rest of his life he was always re-elected 72 OUR FIRST CENTURY governor except upon one or two occasions when he re- fused to accept the office. The soil and cHmate of New England were totally different from those of Virginia. The woods in Massa- chusetts offered somewhat less in the way of game or food of any kind ready to man's use than did the forests in Virginia and by reason of Indian hostility hunting and trapping were more difficult. But fish were plenty and easily caught. The climate of New England was hostile and the soil irresponsive to easy cultivation. The colonists were able to grow corn, but their fields yielded but one bushel where the Virginia fields produced ten or more with even less attention to the crop. When hogs came into the colony they could not feed themselves as they did in Virginia, while running wild in the woods. The winters were long and severe. The summers were far less fruitful than in the southern climate. But the people of Plymouth were tirelessly industrious and by their industry they made good the difference between their sterile soil and their hostile climate on the one side and the more generous gifts of nature on the other. After the stupid communistic system was abandoned in Plymouth in 1624 there was enough to eat in every house, and little by little the people learned so to build and equip their houses as to make them habitable during the long and rigorous winters though, as there were then no stoves, it was impossible to make them comfortable. FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 73 About this time another colony was attempted on the coast of New England. One John White, a Puritan minister in England, found his con- science greatly disturbed by the fact that many hundreds of men were going on fishing and trading vessels to New England and were left for many moons at a time without church privileges of any kind. In that age the question of church privileges was deemed one of vital importance. It was an age in which men, and especially Puritan men, were thinking far more of the life after death than of the life that now is. John White had learned that of the men sent out to fish on the coasts of Newfoundland and New England only a few were necessary to bring the cargoes back to Eng- land. The rest of them were free to remain on the coast and employ themselves during the winter in hunting, trapping, cutting timber and the like, while in the spring they might plant corn and cultivate crops until the fishing season should return again Sword of Myles Stan- dish, of ancient Persian manufacture. (In Pil- grim Hall, Plymouth, Mass.) It 74 OUR FIRST CENTURY was John White's plan to establish a colony of these men on the New England coast, and place a minister among them to care for their souls. He interested the shipowners in his plan, and in 1625 a little colony was estabhshed on Cape Ann. The ef- fort was a failure and three years later the last trace of the colony was obliterated. Most of the men had gone back to England aud the rest of them had settled at Naumkeag — afterwards called Salem. During all this time Puritanism had been spreading in England and at the same time Charles I, had come to the throne. Charles dickered with all religious factions, but he married a Catholic princess. He was in all ways a despot. Many things were done that offended the Puri- tans beyond endurance. Outraged in their tenderest religious sentiments these people by hundreds and almost by thousands went out to the Pilgrim colony rather than remain longer in England. In 1628 a new colony was formed for the further settlement of Massachusetts. This colony was sent out by what was later named the Massachusetts Bay Com- pany. That company bought land from the council for New England which was the successor of the Plymouth Company. The Massachusetts Bay Company was com- posed of shareholders and it received from the council for New England a grant of all the land between the Merrimac and the Charles Rivers and for three miles beyond each river with a westerly extension to the Pa- FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 75 cific Ocean. In that time no one knew where the Pacific Ocean lay and it was the custom to grant lands from sea to sea, with a reckless indifference to future consequences, some of which ultimately proved to be serious. A few of John White's colonists still remained at the settlement of Naumkeag, or Salem, and thither the Mas- sachusetts Bay colonists went. The persecutions in England still continued and as a result of them the colony continued to increase in numbers by the coming out of new emigrants. In 1629 this Massachusetts Bay Company secured a charter from the king, giving it a right to govern any and all colonies that it might plant in America. There was nothing in this charter to secure free popular repre- sentative government to the people who should settle in America under its auspices, except a guarantee of their rights as Englishmen, which might be construed to give them a voice in their own government, but the Puritans in England were not satisfied that the seat of colonial government should be in the mother country. They therefore set their shrewd heads to work to turn the charter to account in behalf of free popular govern- ment. The charter stipulated that the company, which was supposed to reside in England, should govern the colonies planted by it, but there was absolutely nothing in the document to provide that the company should have its residence in England. In view of this the com- 76 OUR FIRST CENTURY pany decided to change its place of meeting from Lon- don to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and to admit the people of the colony, in so far as they were members of the Puritan church, to membership in it. Thus the charter was transferred to America and became a char- ter of local self-government as the king had never in- tended that it should be. The peoj^le having become members of the com- pany had a right under the charter to govern the colony, that is to say, they thus acquired an absolute right of self-government. John Winthrop brought out the char- ter in 1630 and with it he brought a thousand John Winthrop. the colony. This was called the Great Mi- fifration. It was, in fact, only the beginning of the great immigration, for during the next ten years the population of the colony was swelled by not less than twenty thousand people who had fled from persecution in England to find liberty on this side of the ocean. The first site chosen for settlement was at Charles- FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 77 town, where the water was shoal and where other incon- veniences existed. A clergyman named Blackstone was living at the time upon the present site of Boston where the water was deep, the harbor good, and where all other conditions favored the establishment of a prosper- ous colony. Upon his invitation the colonists removed from Charlestown and established themselves at Boston. Life in the colonies that now constitute Massachu- setts was still not at all what we should nowadays imagine. Crops were grown from the first and except for the little communistic experiment at Plymouth men in both the Massachusetts colonies were permitted from the beginning to own their own lands and to cultivate them for their own private use. But farm life had not yet taken on any of those features which became fa- miliar to the farm Hfe of New England at a later time. There were at first no hogs, no cattle, no horses, and no sheep. It is not possible now to determine at what period in the early colonial history domestic animals were first introduced. But cattle seem to have been imported before any horses wefe brought over. In a letter to the author of this book Mr. Longfellow wrote that the rea- son Priscilla rode on a white bull on her wedding day was that there was no horse in the colony at that time. As there were no roads and no bridges across streams the only way of going about was in small boats. For this reason all the early settlements, not only in Massa- 78 OUR FIRST CENTURY chusetts but in Virginia also, were made as near to the water as possible. As time went on rude trails were broken through the forest, and trees, felled across streams, served the purpose of footbridges. When horses came into use they were employed as pack animals and thus little by little lands somewhat farther from the water came under cultivation. After a while wheeled vehicles slowly came into use. They were usually light " shays," drawn by one or two horses, and when these had to cross streams they were taken apart and packed in small boats, in which the passengers were ferried, leading their swimming horses along the side of the boat. But so far as the records show there were no wheeled vehicles of any kind in New England until near the end of the first century and no stately carriages of the kind then called coaches, until the eighteenth century was well advanced. When men travelled, at an earlier time, they walked, rode on horse- back, or went about in boats. The people who settled Massachusetts were mainly plain men and women belonging to what was known as the lower middle class in England. But in the Massa- chusetts Bay colony there were many men of the better sort — men of brains and character who were destined to found there some of the most distinguished families of America. There were among them none of those off- scourings of English society who constituted so large a proportion of the very earliest Virginia colonists. FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 79 ~y The aborigines. (From the original dravring made by John White, By permission of the British Museum.) 80 OUR FIRST CENTURY These people upon establishing themselves in the New World set to work to meet conditions as they found them, and little by little to better themselves. The church was everywhere dominant and the Puritan church had a habit of enforcing its edicts in every house and upon every family. The young people were held rigidly in leash and were brought up " in the nurture and admonition of the Lord." All conduct on the part of the old and young, men and women alike, was subject to clerical criticism and, upon occasion, to churchly discipline. These people had come out to the New World in search of liberty of conscience. But they had not learned from their own sufferings under persecution to deal gen- erously with those who differed with them in religious opinion. They made severe laws for the repression of all who might undertake to teach other doctrines than those of the accepted faith. When at last a number of Friends, or Quakers, settled in Massachusetts and undertook to teach their doctrines they were punished by a whipping at the cart -tail and by banishment from the colony with a warning not to return. Some of them disregarded this warning and came back. Four of them, including one woman, were hanged for this offence. The majority of the people of Massachusetts were opposed to this hanging but the governor, Endicott, a reckless and intolerant bigot, or- dered it in defiance of public opinion. In 1 66 1 King Charles II, who was then reigning in FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 81 England, forbade all further persecution of the sort, but his prohibition, while it prevented further hangings, did not secure to the poor Quakers a much larger liberty of conscience than before. Other persecutions for religion's sake occurred later. F CHAPTER VII MAINE AND NEW HAMPSHIRE SETTLEMENTS, AND THE DUTCH COLONY OF NEW NETHERLAND THE reader will remember that about the time of. the planting of the Jamestown colony in Virginia an unsuccessful attempt was made by Captain George Popham to establish a settlement near the Kennebec River in what is now the state of Maine. That region was a tempting one because of its fishing, because of the abundance of game in its woodlands, and because of its timber. It was quite natural therefore that other efforts should be made to settle there. In 1623 a fisherman named David Thompson estab- lished himself on the Piscataqua River near its mouth. This was one of the first known settlements within what is now called the state of New Hampshire. Another settlement was made at Pemaquid, in Maine, in 1625. In the meanwhile Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason received a grant of all the region between the Merrimac and Kennebec Rivers under the general name of Maine. A few years later, in 1629 Gorges and Mason received also a private grant of all the lands about Lake 82 MAINE AND NEW HAMPSHIRE 83 George and Lake Champlain. They called the region Laconia and sent out a trading company with settlers in 1630 to occupy and possess the region. So indefinite was geographical knowledge at that time that during a three years' diligent search these people failed to find either Lake George or Lake Champlain. But in the meanwhile they established little stations on the Piscata- qua River which have grown to be the towns of Dover and Portsmouth in New Hampshire. Then Gorges and Mason divided their Maine grant, Gorges taking the portion east of the Piscataqua which was some years later organized as the province of Maine, while Mason took to himself the region now called New Hampshire. Near the end of the century the province of Maine was, after several annexations and severances, permanently annexed to Massachusetts and in the mean- while New Hampshire was several times joined to Mas- sachusetts but was finally separated from it in 1692, though one governor presided over both until 1741. During the years that had elapsed between the settle- ment at Jamestown and the planting of colonies in Mas- sachusetts, another very important settlement had been made on the American coast. It was not a settlement by Englishmen, but as it afterward became English it must be considered here as a part of the English settle- ment of America. John Smith, as we have seen, had made exploring voyages from Virginia to the north and had been persis- 84 OUR FIRST CENTURY tent in his efforts to find that northwest passage through the continent of which all men at that time dreamed. He had heard from the Indians that there was such a passage into the Pacific Ocean somewhere north of Ches- apeake Bay. He had somewhere secured a map showing that passage a little to the north of Virginia. John Smith was a friend of Henry Hudson, the bold- est of English navigators, who was at that time in the service of the Dutch. Smith sent the map to Hudson with suggestions as to where the passageway would most probably be found. About that time Hudson was or- dered by his Dutch employers to make an effort to find a way to Asia by sailing around the north coast of Europe. He was specially instructed not to go to America, but finding his way blocked by ice on the north coast of Europe he studied John Smith's map and made up his mind to go to America in spite of orders, and search there for the desired passageway to the Indies. He struck the coast near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Thence he went northward, examining every inlet and every river mouth. He went into the Delaware Bay and up the river to about the present site of Philadelphia. Finding no throughfare in that direction he returned to the sea and presently went into what is now New York Harbor. He entered that harbor in the year 1609. ^^ fol- lowed the river as far up as the present site of Albany, and thence he sent an open boat still farther up the MAINE AND NEW HAMPSHIRE 85 stream, satisfying himself at last that no route to China existed in that direction. But if he had not found a water way through the con- tinent he had found a region rich in furs, whose native inhabitants were eager to trade with the Dutch for such wares as they had to offer. Immediately the Dutch traders in whose service he had made the voyage sent out agents whose business it was to buy furs of the In- dians for such trinkets as these savages desired. The traffic was enormously profitable from the beginning and the merchants en- gaged in it were eager to monopo- lize it. They secured a charter from the Dutch government which gave them a monopoly of it for three years and they sent out many traders to secure furs and pelts. In 1621 the Dutch government chartered what was ATLANTIC OCEAN SCALE OF MILES New Netherland. called the Dutch West India Company, giving it a permanent monopoly of this trade and a right to govern the regions thus possessed. The Dutch named this region New Netherland. They landed where the city of New York now stands and there they established their principal trading post. They pushed on up the river, establishing posts at different points and particularly on the spot where Albany now is. 86 OUR FIRST CENTURY In 1 6 14, or perhaps a year or two earlier, the Dutch built a fort at what is now^ the Battery in New York, and called it ^\)rt Amsterdam. And as traders and settlers afterward came out they built a little town around that fort, thus making the beginning of New York — the largest city in America, and the second largest in the world. At first the Dutch sent out nobody but traders. It was not until- 1622 or 1623 — two or three years after the establishment of the Plymouth colony, that they be- gan sending out permanent colonists. They settled some of them at Fort Orange — now Albany — and others at the Wallabout, in what is now the borough of Brooklyn in New York City. It was not until 1626 that the Dutch sent out Peter Minuit as governor of New Netherland. As yet the Dutch traders had no title to Manhattan Island on which they had located their fort and on which New York City NlEUV,- AMSTERDAM The earliest picture of New Amsterdam, aljout 1650. (From an origi- nal copy of Van der Dunck's map.) now stands. Peter Minuit bought the island from the Indians for twenty-four dollars' worth of trinkets. The Dutch were enterprising traders and having es- MAINE AND NEW HAMPSHIRE S7 tablished themselves in America, with no other claim to possession there than that which rested upon the explo- rations of Henry Hudson, an Englishman temporarily in their employ, they set themselves to work to build up a permanent colony in the New World. As an inducement to this the Dutch West India Com- pany established the system of patroons. It decreed that spe- cial privileges should be given to every Dutchman who should plant settlements in America at his own expense. It was ordered that every member of the Dutch West India Company who should take fifty persons, above fifteen years of age, to America to set- Dutch women of old times. tie there should become the proprietor of a tract of land extending for sixteen miles along the river front, if lo- cated upon only one side of the river, or for eight miles on each side if the river divided the possession. It was further provided that over this domain the patroon should exercise the authority of a lord proprietor. He was re- quired to provide his colonists with all materials necessary for farming, exacting rent and certain feudal services of them in return. These patroons were common-place people in their home country — shopkeepers or merchants who had made money. In America, by reason of the possessions granted 8S OUR FIRST CENTURY to them, they became great lords of the soil and their de- scendants even unto this day proudly trace their lineage from them as a heritage which they would not exchange for any wealth, although many of them are broken in fortune. The Dutchmen settled upon the Hudson claiming the territory east of them as far as the western bank of the Connecticut River and in 1633 they bought a part of that territory from the Indians. They so far occupied it as to set up a trading post where the city of Hartford now stands. This claim of theirs conflicted with the claim of the Massachusetts colonists to dominion from sea to sea, and out of it grew many perplexities as we shall see in the sequel. CHAPTER VIII MIGRATIONS FROM MASSACHUSETTS AND THE SETTLE- MENT OF CONNECTICUT AND RHODE ISLAND THE Connecticut valley was richer than the region east of it both in its fur-trading possibilities and in its agricultural fruitfulness. Little by httle the people of Plymouth became familiar with the fact that a far better region than their own lay to the west of them and presently they seriously contemplated the idea of re- moving themselves and all their possessions into the Connecticut River country. As a beginning of that enterprise in 1633 they sent out a vessel to the Connecticut River and built a house where the town of Windsor now stands. The Dutch threatened them but did not attack them, and in 1635 the younger John Winthrop, a son of the governor of Massachusetts, went into that region with a commission to build a fort at the mouth of the Connecticut River and to drive off all intruders. About this time there arose a considerable controversy among the Puritans in Massachusetts as to the constitu- tion of their government. Under that government in which, as we have seen, the church was dominant from 89 90 OUR FIRST CENTURY the first, nobody was allowed a voice or a vote except members of the Puritan church. Many of the colonists resented this and insisted that every man in the com- munity should have a vote whether he was a church member or not. There was an additional discontent in the Massachu- setts colonies because of the infertility of their lands, and especially because of the lack of pasturage for the cows, of which they now had considerable numbers. In 1635, therefore, and after- wards, a considerable number of these people, mostly from Dorchester and Wa- tertown, removed to what is now Connec- ticut and began little settlements at what w^e now know as Wcthersfield and Wind- sor. In the early summer of the next year, 1636, there was a very considerable mi- gration from Newtown, now known as Cambridge, in Massachusetts, to the Connecticut River valley. There were new immigrants coming in all the time from England and to these the people in Newtown sold their houses and lands and themselves set out under the leadership of their pastor, Thomas Hooker, fo*!- the new and more fruitful country. The distance was small — not more than a hundred miles or so — but the wilderness lay in the way, through which the people had to cut a road for the passage of their cattle and the Puritan of the middle class. MIGRATIONS FROM MASSACHUSETTS 91 transportation of their goods by such means as they had. We gain some idea of the difficulty of travel across country in those days from the fact that it took these people more than two weeks to make this short trip. These people settled where Hartford now is and soon afterwards the greater part of the people who had before occupied Dorchester removed to Windsor in Connecti- cut while those who had lived at Watertown removed to Wethersfield. All these changes of residence were prompted in part, of course, by considerations of material benefit ; but in still larger part they were prompted by the conscientious scruples of the people concerned in them as to the method of government adopted by the church in Massa- chusetts. Two or three years later — in 1639 — these towns united themselves into a single government under the first written constitution that was ever adopted in America. This constitution expressed and formulated into funda- mental law the ideas which had prompted these people to quit their comfortable homes and move westward into a wilderness in search of liberty. It guaranteed to every freeman a right to vote, and an equal voice in the government, without any reference whatever to his reli- gion or his church relation. So well was this constitution adapted to the conceptions of the popular mind that for no less than one hundred and eighty years afterwards it 92 OUR FIRST CENTURY endured as the fundamental law, first of the colony, and afterwards of the state into which the colony grew by virtue of the Revolution. But here it is necessary to make no mistake. Perfect religious liberty had not yet been born even in Connect- icut. While no man's right to a voice in the govern- ment of the community was denied by reason of his religious views or his lack of church membership, there was still intolerance particularly in the matter of a rigid Sab- batarianism. There had gradually come however a new and a nobler movement toward per- fect religious liberty. The Rev. Roger Williams was pastor of the church in Salem, Massachusetts. He was a man of broad and most liberal mind and of the utmost daring in the assertion of his thought. He preached — first of all men — that every man born into this world has a right to worship any God he pleases in any way that shall seem good to him. He contended that no man had, or could have, a right to limit this liberty of worship. He protested that no gov- ernment on earth could justly restrict men in this be- half. This doctrine, which Roger Williams afterwards called " soul liberty," was deemed by the authorities of Massa- chusetts exceedingly revolutionary and dangerous. In all Puritan of the middle class. MIGRATIONS FROM MASSACHUSETTS 93 ages of the world authority has been quick to scent dan- ger in any preachment of hberty. Roger WilHams went even further than this and taught that this country belonged to the Indians and that no discovery by John Cabot or anybody else could give to any English king the right to give away lands here that did not belong to him. These were exceedingly revolutionary doctrines and in that time it was not the custom to let men alone who taught revolutionary doctrines. It was the custom in- stead to suppress them or to drive them out of the community whose institutions their teachings assailed. Accordingly in 1636 the authorities of Massachusetts ordered Roger Williams — greatly good and pious man that he was — to quit the colony and return to England at once. He quitted the colony but he did not return to England. Instead of that, at risk of his life, and with a certainty of encountering fearful hardship, he set off through the wintry wilderness to make a new home for himself on the waters of Narragansett Bay. After much suffering he reached that region and took refuge with Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoags. Obeying his own conscience he asked no king, and no council, and no English authority anywhere, to give him the lands he needed for settlement. Instead of that he recognized the rightfulness of the Indians' title and he honestly se- cured what lands he needed from the Indian chief. There were others in the colonies of Massachusetts 94 OUR FIRST CENTURY who sympathized with Roger Wilhams's ideas and these, little hy little, emigrated to his settlement of Providence. There for the first time in the entire history of this world of ours there was founded a community upon the prin- ciple of absolute, unquestioned, human and religious lib- erty. To Roger Williams above all men who have lived is due the credit of having first conceived and, as a states- man, acted upon the idea that every man born into the world has an absolute right to believe, to worship, and to do as he pleases, so long as in doing so he does not in- terfere with the equal right of any other human being to believe, to worship, and to do as he pleases. There was in Massachusetts at this time a very able and courageous woman named Anne Hutchinson. This woman had a gift of teaching and she taught. She had the instinct of both human and religious liberty and she preached that doctrine with all of fervor that was in her great nature. Her meetings were attended by pretty nearly all the influential women in Boston and upon their minds she made an impression so great that the narrow- minded ecclesiastics of that time became alarmed for their authority. She believed in liberty of conscience, in liberty of worship and in liberty of human thought. It was a time in which such teachings as these were regarded as dangerous to the foundations of society and so the good gentlemen who presided over churchly, and, in effect, over secular, affairs in Boston, excommunicated her fn^m the church and ordered her into banishment. Taking a party MIGRATIONS FROM MASSACHUSETTS 95 of friends with her she removed to the island of Rhode Is- land, then known as Aquidneck. There certain of her friends had already founded a little town called Portsmouth and other exiles for conscience's sake joined her from time to time in that and neighboring settlements. After a time these settlements, made in behalf of liberty, and sympathizing with each other in all their ideas, were united into a single colony which afterwards became the state of Rhode Island. Territorially Rhode Island is the smallest state in the union. Historically it is scarcely too much to say that in one respect at least it is the greatest, inasmuch as it first gave birth to the thought of absolute political and religious liberty as a human right, and inasmuch as within its dominions, first of all places on earth, the idea of such Hberty was enacted into law. CHAPTER IX THE CONFEDERATION OF THE NEW ENGLAND COLONIES THE fertility of the Connecticut River country con- tinued to tempt immigrants and in spite of the Dutch claims, a company of Puritans from Eng- land, after tarrying awhile in Boston, established a colony thirty miles west of the Connecticut River, at the point New Amsterdam in Stuyvesant's time. where the city of New Haven now stands, in 1638. These immigrants were even more intolerant in religious and political beliefs than were those of Plymouth or Massachusetts Bay. About a quarter of a century later this colony, and the settlements surrounding it, were 96 NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERATION 97 united with the other colonies in that region and were called Connecticut. The Dutch in New Amsterdam still claimed the region west of the Connecticut River and by way of supporting their claim they bought lands there from the Pequot Indians. The Pequots seem to have had no good title to these lands. They had acquired them by force, driv- ing away another tribe which had previously owned the region. The English settlers, therefore, disputed the validity of the Dutch title thus obtained from the Pe- quots. They induced the Indians whom the Pequots had driven away to come back again and they supported them in their resumed possession of the lands by building, and arming, and manning a fort for their protection. There- upon the Pequots made war upon the English. The English accepted the challenge thus given and made war in return with the result that the Pequots were exterminated. This was the age of settlement. It must be borne in mind that as there were no railroads, no telegraphs, no mails, no country roads even, and no bridges over streams, the people who had settled in different parts of America were well-nigh as remote from each other in effect as if they had lived upon different continents. The settlements in Massachusetts were closely allied to each other and in close communication with their offshoot colonies in Connecticut. But the Dutch in New Am- sterdam were foreign and hostile to them. The Virgin- G 98 OUR FIRST CENTURY SettI ements on the coast of Nonh America in the n.iddle of century. the 17th NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERATION 99 ians were so far away and so inaccessible under the con- ditions of that time that very nearly nothing was known in the northern colonies of what might be happening down South and equally little was known down South of what was happening in New England. It is necessary to bear these facts in mind if we would understand the conditions of that time. And these facts were important in other ways. The peculiar isolation of the several colonies prompted the people of each of them to develop their own institutions each independently of all the others. There was only one thing which they possessed in common and that was a jealousy of their rights as Eng- lishmen. However conditions might differ in the sev- eral colonies and however men's views might vary, there was common to all of them a jealous insistence upon the fact that they were Englishmen entitled to govern themselves. Upon that as a foundation they built their political institutions. These varied in many details, but in substance they were the same at the North and at the South. In the same way while climatic and other condi- tions caused variance in ways of living, a common inherit- ance of English ideas and customs did much to create similarity. For the sake of mutual protection four of the New England Colonies — Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Con- necticut and New Haven formed a rather loosely con- structed confederation as early as 1643. This confed- 100 OUR FIRST CENTURY eration had for its sole purpose the common defence. In other words the four colonies agreed to act together against any enemy that might attack them, Indians, Dutch or what not. Roger Williams's colony in Rhode Island and the people in the settlements on the Maine coast had a common interest in this defence and they wanted to join the little confederation. But in that day, differences of religious belief were not lightly regarded, and, because of their lack of orthodoxy from the New England point of view, Rhode Island and Maine were denied admission to the little confederation which was, in a way, the be- ginning of that great nation that we call the United States of America. In our day it seems. incredible that the small difference in religious opinion between Roger Williams, for exam- ple, and the Puritan preachers of Massachusetts should thus in effect interfere with an obviously desirable union of colonies for defence against a common and a savage enemy. But these are the facts of history. CHAPTER X THE CONQUEST OF NEW NETHERLAND DURING the sixty or seventy years in which Vir- ginia and Massachusetts were securely establishing themselves as colonies and during which their set- tlements were spreading over the land, the work of Eng- lish colonization went on elsewhere in important ways. As we have seen, the Dutch settled in New Amster- dam and built up thriving trading posts and agricultural settlements there. During this same time — about 1638 — a company of Swedes settled in Delaware near the site of the present city of Wilmington, They came over under a charter from Sweden. Sweden had no rights in America of any kind. She had not even a shadow of claim to any American lands by virtue of discovery or of exploration or of anything else. Nevertheless the gov- ernment of that country assumed authority to give a permit for this Swedish colony, which was called New Sweden. The permit was a fairly liberal one for that bigoted time. That is to say, it authorized Protestants of any nation to be shareholders in the company. This of course excluded Catholics and Jews, and everybody else who 101 102 OUR FIRST CENTURY did not belong to some Protestant church. In our day we should think this an exceedingly illiberal government, but in that time it was quite as Hberal as any other ex- isting on this continent, or anywhere else in the world, with the exceptions of Roger Williams's colony in Rhode Island and the Connecticut colony. Peter Minuit, who had been governor of the Dutch of New Netherland, went over to the Swedes and be- came the head of their settlement. For a time there was something like war between the Swedes in Dela- ware and the Dutch in New Netherland, a condition of affairs which was ended at last by an expedition sent out by Peter Stuyvesant, the Dutch governor, to. take pos- session of the Delaware region and to make an end of the Swedish authority there. At the beginning the Dutch in New Netherland, who were traders above everything else, managed to get on very well with the Indians. They wanted to trade and so did the Indians. They therefore established amicable relations and built up a fairly rich commerce. But in 1642, about thirty years after the first Dutch settlements were made, the Indians of Long Island and those of the Hudson River region became provoked by wrongs of many kinds and declared war upon the Dutch. The Dutch were not much given to war and they were peculiarly unskilled in carrying on warfare with the red men. They were distinctly a peaceful folk, entirely dif- ferent in temper from the settlers in New England and CONQUEST OF NEW NETHERLAND 103 in Virginia. Upon the outbreak of war therefore many of them fled from New Amsterdam — the present New York — to Fort Orange, now Albany, while still more of them took ship and went back to Holland. After the war had lasted for two years at cost of the lives of about Street in New Amsterdam. sixteen hundred Indians, the friendly Iroquois tribes in northern New York, concluded to take part in it on the side of the Dutch. The Iroquois had from the first driven a thriving trade with the Dutchmen and this war seriously interfered with it. Their strength was vastly greater than 104 OUR FIRST CENTURY that of the tribes engaged in the war and so their inter- ference proved effective. It quickly brought about peace. During all this time the English had never relinquished their claim to the territory which lay between Virginia and Massachusetts. That claim rested upon the discov- ery of this coast by John Cabot almost an age before and upon later explorations. When the English asserted their claim to New Netherland the Dutch were practi- cally powerless to resist it. Not only was the Dutch nation weaker than Great Britain on the seas, and else- where, but the Dutch colonists were scattered over so vast an area of territory that they found it impossible to defend themselves. Another element of weakness on their part was that a great number of Englishmen had settled within the Dutch territory, and in a contest between the Dutch and English for possession, they were naturally disposed to side with the English. There was no formal war in existence between Hol- land and England. But in that ill- ordered time a fact of that sort made little difference. So in 1664 an Eng- lish fleet sailed into the harbor of New Amsterdam and without any excuse, except that of the high hand, demanded the surrender of the forts and the city. Teter Stuyvesant. At that time Peter Stuyvesant was governor, and it was his desire to resist the English de- mand. But the impossibility of doing so successfully CONQUEST OF NEW NETHERLAND 105 was so apparent that the people under his control suc- ceeded in curbing his ardor and in compeUing him to sur- render the city and the colony to the English. The name of the city was changed from New Amster- dam to New York and that of the territory tributary to it, which had hitherto been called New Netherland be- came also New York, a name given to it in honor of James, the Duke of York, to whom the whole province had been given by his brother, King Charles II of Eng- land, who, without any very well-defined right, assumed to own it. Nine years later the Dutch recaptured the colony but they were unable to hold it against the English power and so after a year they gave it up again. From that hour forward all of what we now know as New York State, together with all the settlements in the New Jer- sey province on the other side of the Hudson River, be- came English possessions. CHAPTER XI MARYLAND DURING all this while the impulse of English settle- ment in America was manifesting itself by the founding of colonies on many parts of the coast. During the early part of that century of settlement there was planted a new colony in what we now call Maryland, under peculiar auspices. George Calvert was a member of the original Virginia Company and was a man near and dear to King James I, who later made him one of the councilors for New England. A little later still King James raised him to the Irish peerage as Lord Balti- more. Baltimore had become a CathoHc in religion, and Catholics were at that time sorely persecuted in England. He planned, therefore, to plant a colony in America where men of that faith should be permitted to worship in their own way without state or other interfer- ence. The king granted to Baltimore the privilege of establishing such a colony and Lord Baltimore sent out for that purpose a considerable company of men of the 106 Lord Baltimore. MARYLAND 107 Catholic faith and undertook to settle them in New- foundland. He named his colony Avalon — a pretty- name, but one which did not overcome the rigors of the climate of Newfoundland or render the sterile soil of that region more fruitful. Realizing the inhospitality of the climate in which he had settled his people, Lord Baltimore wisely sought a grant of land in some more habitable part of America. He fixed upon Virginia as a region suited to his purpose. He wrote to King Charles asking him for a grant of land there, and the king was disposed to make it. But the Virginians objected on account of Lord Baltimore's acceptance of the Catholic faith and also because they did not want any of their lands alienated. At that time the test be- Lord Baltimore penny. tween Catholics and Protestants in England was the ques- tion of who was head of the church. Since the time of Henry VHI the Protestants had contended that the king occupied that position in England while the Catholics had as stoutly held that the Pope filled it in all parts of the world. The Virginians demanded that before Baltimore should be permitted to settle his colonists within what was then a Virginian domain he should take an oath recognizing the king as the head of the church. As a devout Catho- 108 OUR FIRST CENTURY lie, Baltimore could not do this and so he was forbidden to plant his colony in Virginia. Returning to England he secured from King Charles permission to settle in that part of Virginia which lay north of the Potomac River, and to establish there a separate colony called Maryland. Before this permission was issued to him, however, he died and a charter was given instead to his son, Cecil Cal- vert, the second Lord Baltimore. The permission carried with it practically all the rights of sover- Maryland by the original grant to Lord Baltimore. eignty — the right to coin money, to declare war, to make peace, to enact laws, and to do whatever else a sovereign may. No other grant of lands in America carried with it so much of sovereignty as this one did. Two years later, in 1634, Lord Baltimore's colonists landed near the mouth of the Potomac River. There was an Lidian village there with cornfields round about it. Lord Baltimore's brother, Leonard Calvert, who was in charge of the colonists, bought the village and the corn- MARYLAND 109 fields and from the first lived on good terms with the Indians. The company consisted of about three hundred men, mostly laborers and servants, with only twenty '* gentlemen " added to their number. It was the inten- tion that the colony should be a Catholic one, and par- ticularly that it should be a refuge for Catholics perse- cuted in England and elsewhere for their religion. But, from the first, Lord Baltimore decreed that all forms of the Christian religion should be tolerated in the colony and that there should be no persecution of any Christian man because of his faith. Here again we have a comparatively liberal provision for liberty in religious belief, but again we find that toleration was confined rigidly to Christians. No pro- vision was made for the Jew or for the Unitarian, or for the unbeliever. The fact still remained that in Rhode Island alone, of all the American colonies, " soul liberty " was recognized and respected of the law, with the Northern Connecticut colony closely following. The New Haven colony was illiberal in an extreme degree. There were many persons in Virginia who resented and resisted the authority of Lord Baltimore in his Maryland colony. Chief among these was William Claibourne who had made a settlement within the domain granted to Lord Baltimore and who refused to submit himself to the authority of the new colony or its proprietor. Claibourne was a stubborn and cantankerous person and he made much trouble for the colony, but after a no OUR FIRST CENTURY while he was driven away and the colony rested in peace. At this time there were a great many Puritans in Vir- ginia, where, under the law, the religion of the Church of England was established. After the manner of that time these Puritans were socially ostracized and even legally persecuted for their beliefs, and many of them removed from Virginia to Maryland in order to enjoy the tolerance granted by the Catholic colony the like of which they had not found in Virginia. There were so many of these Puritans that at last they outnumbered the Catholics in the Maryland colony and siezed upon the reins of government. Their first act was to abrogate the rule of tolerance established by Lord Baltimore and to pass a law in antagonism to the Catholic belief. It is hard for us in our time to understand an ingratitude of this character. But in those days the spirit of intolerance was dominant in a degree which we can scarcely imagine. Men sincerely thought their in- tolerance an act of service to God. Three years later Lord Baltimore again secured con- trol in Maryland and held it until the reign of William and Mary in England, when Maryland became Protestant again and the English church was established, though with a certain measure of toleration for the Catholics who at that time numbered about one-twelfth of the popula- tion. CHAPTER XII KING PHILIP S WAR MASSASOIT resolutely maintained peace with the Plymouth colonists so long as he lived. When he died his son, Philip — known in history as King Philip — succeeded him in authority over those In- dians with whom the Plymouth colonist came most di- rectly into contact. Philip cherished a double grievance against the whites. In the first place, as their numbers multiplied and their settlements expanded, they more and more encroached upon what had been the hunting grounds of his tribe, and that off ence was a greater one than it is easy for civilized people to understand. To the civilized man, land means merely an opportunity of cultivation. An acre or a few acres under tillage will produce food enough for a family. But to the savage who does not cultivate in any orderly way, but who depends for his living upon the spontaneous products of the soil, and still more upon the free spoil of the woods, multitudinous acres are necessary for the support of a very small population. The constantly in- creasing occupation by the English of what had previously 111 112 OUR FIRST CENTURY been hunting grounds of the Indians therefore was a menace to the prosperity of King PhiHp and his people. Another ground of offence against the EngUshmen was that they had converted many of the Indians to Christianity. These << praying Indians," as they were called, separated themselves from their fellows and lived under tutelage of the pious English colonists. To this extent King Philip lost control of his subjects and he very naturally resented the fact. In 1675 his resentment led to a war with the whites. The Indians seem in this case to have been the aggressors. They took several villages of the Plymouth colony, destroyed them by fire, and killed or captured many of their inhabitants. All this was the work of the Wampanoags who had hitherto been friendly, but the Narragansetts who had also pro- fessed the most devoted friendship for the whites, secretly aided their Indian allies and in war they were promptly recognized as enemies. The Narragansetts were fortified on a piece of high land in the midst of a swamp — now called Mt. Hope. There the whites attacked them in December, 1675, burned their village and destroyed many lives. The fight was a severe one in which the whites lost no less than two hundred men. Worse still, so far as they were concerned, was the result of their victory. It converted all of the savages into open ene- mies and it scattered them, like firebrands, all over the region roundabout. Wherever they found white people they killed them. Wherever there were towns they KING PHILIP'S WAR 113 burned them. Wherever there were women and children they slaughtered them. The whites were slain by scores and hundreds and it was not until a year later that they learned how to fight the wily Indians. These white men had come out from Europe with European ideas of warfare. At the first they clad them- selves in armor so heavy as to render their movements slow and clumsy. After a while they learned that if they were to fight Indians successfully they must strip off those encumbrances and render themselves as lithe and as quick in movement as the Indians themselves King Philip's samp bowl, and lock of gun with which he was killed. (From the cabinet of the Massachusetts Historical Society.) were. They learned also the Indian tricks of ambush. They learned how to walk in Indian file each man tread- ing in the tracks of the man in front of him so that no ingenuity of observation could make so much as a guess as to the number of men who had passed over a particu- lar path. They learned how a man set to observe the movements of an enemy might so clothe himself in H 114 OUR FIRST CENTURY leaves and twigs as to stand unobserved among the bushes and safely watch and count an enemy's forces passing by. Having learned the art of fighting Indians the white men finally drove them into a swamp where the red men supposed that they had a secure hiding place. But one of the Indians betrayed the secret of their refuge and one Captain Benjamin Church promptly surrounded and massacred the whole company killing Philip himself in the action. Thus in 1676 ended a war which had cost the Massa- chusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies the destruction of more than half their towns and the slaughter of more than one-tenth of all their men of military age. On the other hand, it had resulted in the death of more than two thousand Indians and the capture of many more who were sold into West Indian slavery. CHAPTER XIII THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA FROM 1634, when Lord Baltimore's Maryland colony- was established, until 1663 — a period of about thirty years — there was almost nothing done in the way of the further colonizing of America except in strength- ening the colonies already existing. This was because of the troublous times in England. There was a great contest in that country between the king, representing his claim to absolute authority, and the parliament, rep- resenting the claim of the people to a share in the gov- ernment. It was a time of acrimonious disputes between religious denominations. There were arrests and execu- tions, and at last, in 1642 an open civil war began. Seven years later that war ended in the dethronement and be- heading of the king, Charles I. Then Oliver Cromwell became Protector of the Com- monwealth, for England no longer had a king, and Crom- well by virtue of his victories had become supreme. In 1660 the monarchy was restored and Charles II became king. During the Commonwealth period the immigration of the cavaliers who were adherents of the royal cause had swelled the population of Virgina from 115 116 OUR FIRST CENTURY about seven thousand five hundred souls to more than thirty thousand. But apart, from that, there had been almost no emigration to the colonies. Englishmen had quite enough to occupy them at home. Soon after the reign of Charles II began, a new effort was made to extend the British occupation of America. By the king's decree the southern part of what was V I R G \n~-^t\k\r-\Bav^ QVLF OF^ a>2 hexico Carolina by the grant of 1663. then called Virginia was cut off from the colony in the year 1663, and was granted to eight courtiers and favorites of the king. In honor of their sovereign and benefactor they adopted for the region given to them the name Car- olina, which the French had already bestowed upon it. The territory thus granted included practically the whole of the present states of North and South Carolina THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 117 with indefinite extensions westward. It was a vast region extending from the sea on the east, across the mountains, and far into the west. Its soil was rich and its cHmate favorable in different parts to every form of agricul- ture. Except for one little settlement in the extreme north- eastern corner of that territory, on Albemarle Sound, this region was wholly uninhabited except by the Indians. This one little colony was an offshoot from Virginia. It consisted of a company of men and women led thither by a preacher named Roger Green. Roger Green seems to have been a man of vigor and a great deal of sense, and his settlement flourished from the begin- ning. It was a very small colony but it managed to open fields and to support itself from the first. It was promiptly adopted, therefore, by the speculative Lords Proprietors in England, as a beginning of the settlement of their domain and in honor of the Duke of Albemarle, who w^as one of them, they named it the Albemarle col- ony. Among all the blunders made in P^ngland in planning the settlement of America there was none so ridiculous perhaps as that which was made in the case of this Caro- lina country. With the exception of the little colony on Albemarle Sound and of another which was presently planted (1663) on Cape Fear River, near the spot where Wilmington now stands, and which was soon broken up and scattered, the whole region was a wilderness of forest 118 OUR FIRST CENTURY and swamp, infested by Indians more or less disposed to be hostile. The problem of the Lords Proprietors was to get industrious men to settle there, cut down the for- ests, open fields, make homes, defend themselves against the Indians and the Spanish and find out how to turn the productiveness of that most favorable soil and climate to profitable account. But in those days it was the custom of men everywhere, as has been pointed out earlier in this book, to do their thinking without much reference to facts or conditions. So the Lords Proprietors in England put their heads together, employed the philosopher, John Locke, to aid them, and decided to build up in the Caro- linas a great aristocratic government with an arbitrary class system. Carolina elephant piece. Under this constitution there were to be landgraves and caciques, and every other sort of big and little nabobs to rule the people and to hold complex tenures of the lands, exploiting them all for the enrichment of the Lords Proprietors in England. For in that day whoever in England secured a grant of land in America and under- THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 119 took to colonize it did so chiefly for his own enrichment and with little or no concern for the welfare of the people who were to do the colonizing, encounter the risks, brave the dangers, and endure the hardships of settlement in America. It is possible that such a constitution as that which John Locke and the Lords Proprietors devised and sought to enforce upon the log cabin settlements in the Carolinas, might have worked fairly well in some old country where conditions of society were already settled and where class distinctions were fixed. But in the swamps and forests of the Carolinas, where every man stood upon his own merits, its absurd unfitness for exist- ing conditions was manifest from the first to those who lived in the midst of those conditions. In the Carolinas this scheme of government failed from the beginning. The sturdy fellows who came out and settled the wilder- ness utterly disregarded it and after a time it became apparent even to the Lords Proprietors in England that it would not work. The people in America were in revolt against it early in the history of the colony. They saw in it first of all a scheme for giving to the Lords Proprietors practically all the profits of the industry of those who had been sent out to settle the Carolinas ; and secondly they saw in it a scheme to make of the colonists a species of serfs in a land where all the conditions, and indeed the very atmos- phere, prompted men to thoughts of human equaHty of 120 OUR FIRST CENTURY right. In face of such revolt the proprietors of the col- ony presently abandoned their scheme of government. Men were found, however, to come out as colonists with very little thought perhaps on their part of submit- ting themselves to the elaborate aristocratic system which the Lords Proprietors had imposed upon the colony, and which they, the settlers, when once established here felt themselves entirely free to cast aside, as so much legal rubbish. In 1670 the first suc- cessful colony made under the auspices of the Lords Proprietors was sent out under one William Sayle. It settled at first at Port Royal in South Carolina. So far as agricultural pos- sibilities were concerned there could hardly have been a better locality than this for the estabUshment of a colony that intended to cultivate the soil. But the harbor of Port Royal is a wide one at its mouth, and one easily penetrable by an enemy. In those days the cannon in use were small and very short in their ranges. They could not defend such a harbor as that of Port Royal if it should be attacked by Spanish ships from Florida, as it was liable to be at any time. It was soon decided Seal of the Lords Proprietors of Carolina — reverse. (From an im- pression in the English State Paper Office.) THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 121 therefore, to remove the colony to a more defensible lo- cality. That locality was found near the peninsula upon which the city of Charleston now stands. There the harbor mouth was comparatively narrow and land de- fence was easy. The harbor at that point is formed by the junction of two rivers — the Ashley and the Cooper — one of which washes the southern and the other the northern side of the peninsula upon which the city of Charleston now stands. But at first the colonists seem not to have realized the advantage of settling on the present site of Charleston. Instead of that they located themselves on the southern bank of the Ashley River near where Wappoo Cut separates James Island from the mainland. That locality proved to be exceedingly unwholesome, besides being in other ways far less desirable than the point of land between the Ashley and the Cooper Rivers, and so, ten years after the settlement there, the whole colony was removed across the river and a town was built, called Charles Town. This was destined to be- come the principal city in the Carolinas and it retained its name of Charles Town until the end of the Ameri- can Revolution when the state of South Carolina, moved by a patriotic impulse, changed it to Charleston. Up to this time all of the settlements in America, or nearly all of them, had been built up slowly by emigra- tion from Europe ; there were now and then small mi- 122 OUR FIRST CENTURY grations from one colony to another, as in 1665 when some of the New Haven colonists went to New Jersey. But about 1674 a considerable secondary migration began — that is to say — the migration of men and women from some of the colonies to others. The Dutch colony of New Netherland, as we know, had been seized by the British ten years before. In 1673 the Dutch had retaken it temporarily, but in the next year it had become English again. The unsettled con- dition of affairs in what was now the colony of. New York, and other considerations, led at that time to a very considerable migration from that region into the enticing Carolina country. This migration helped in the upbuilding of the Carolinas. But still more important was another source of human supply. This was the incoming of French Huguenots, driven out of their own country by persecution, who settled in considerable numbers along the Carolina coasts, especially oc- cupying those " sea islands " which have since become so famous for their enor- mous productiveness of cotton, rice and other crops. These French Huguenots constituted a most desirable population. There were many culti- vated people among them and they brought with them the instincts and the aspirations of culture. Their de- Huguenot mer- chant. THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 123 scendants became the foremost people in all that region — the people who best represented education, enlighten- ment of life and high character. Their French family names — greatly perverted now in many cases, so far as pronunciation is concerned — are still the names best known in the low countries of that part of the state. They became the founders of families which have ever since exercised influence for good in the land — families commonly spoken of as aristocratic because of their wealth and their culture. Their purity of character, and their interest in the public welfare have made them lead- ers among men in that region. Still it has never been their habit or their purpose to assume to themselves an attitude of superiority to their neighbors. During the earlier years of the Carolina settlements the people who were making homes there labored under the same difficulty that had confronted the Virginians and the New England people, in not knowing what crops could be most successfully cultivated in a climate and a soil with which they were unfamiliar. Cotton, it must be remembered, was not at that time, or for many years afterwards, a profitable crop to cultivate. Not until near the end of the eighteenth century was the cotton gin invented by Eli Whitney, and until that time the cultivation of cotton was unprofitable by reason of the enormous amount of labor necessary to separate the seed from the fiber of the plant. The soil of the Carolinas was rich enough to produce 124 OUR FIRST CENTURY anything in the way of plant hfe that might be seeded there. But what to grow and how to grow it the people at first did not know. The colonists grew corn of course, especially in the northern part of Carolina, and they grew wheat with only moderate success, the climate being rather too warm for the best results to be achieved in the cultiv-u-cion of that grain. Among the people who tilled plantations, especially in the southern parts of the Carolinas, there was, therefore, a long period of experimentation before at last they learned how best to make their fields fruitful. It was not until near the end of the seventeenth century — about 1696 — that a man named Thomas Smith found out how richly the South Carolina marshes would yield, if planted and intelligently cultivated in rice. It was not until nearly fifty years later that Eliza Lucas, a girl of sixteen who managed three plantations, while studying music, entertaining her friends, and in other ways playing the part of a great lady, introduced, by her own exertions, the successful cultivation of in- digo. But the story of all this belongs to a later time. In the meanwhile the Carolinians went on growing grains with which they were acquainted ; multiplying their herds of hogs and cattle and prospering as best they could in a country whose climate and soil were strange to them. During the first thirty years of Carolina colonization there was only one Indian war of consequence and that THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 125 occurred about the time when the settlement was made. This was an attack by the Westoes which very nearly destroyed the settlement. The Westoes were beaten off at last and it was not until the early years of the next century that the Carolinas were again menaced with destruction by the Indians. The Carolinas had every physical advanta^ tending to make of them successful and prosperous colonies. Along the coasts, especially in the southern part of Caro- lina, the soil was incredibly rich and fruitful. It lay very low, so low indeed that much of it was marsh. Just west of this great strip of fertile marsh lay a little higher ground from which the drainage flows into these swamps. In later days, when the cultivation of rice and Sea Island cotton was developed, the lowlands became perhaps the most fruitful that existed anywhere in the world, if we meas- ure fruitfulness by the pecuniary returns of agriculture. The islands that bordered that coast lay about on a level with the mainland from which they were separated by sloughs, inlets and streams. Their adaptation to the growth of that finest of all vegetable fibers, the Sea Is- land cotton, was perfect, and it was destined to make the people of that region rich beyond their utmost de- sires. The lower mainlands were almost perfectly level and were easily susceptible, when rice culture came, of such arrangement, by dams, and ditches, and flood gates, that they could be alternately flooded and drained at will in accordance with the needs of rice cultivation. 126 OUR FIRST CENTURY The result has been that between Sea Island cotton cultivation and the growing of rice, this coast region af- terward became the very richest of all agricultural coun- tries. But this form of cultivation required large capital on the part of those who followed it and so there was slowly built up there a company of great planters with magnif- icent plantation houses — some of the planters owning five or six such country seats — and all of them men of great and rapidly increasing wealth. All this came much later, however, and there was only a beginning of the rice culture near the end of the century of which this volume treats. Further north, in that part of the re- gion which we now know as North Caro- lina, another great source of wealth ex- isted in the coast country, but it was not greatly developed until after the year 1700 or a little later, when bounties brought the manufacture of naval stores into abundant prosperity. There were in that region tracts of sandy soil studded so thickly with enormous forest pines that the sunlight itself had difficulty in sifting through their foliage and shining upon the ground. Here early beginnings were made in the industry of manufacturing turpentine, rosin tar, pitch and lampblack. It was the practice to strip away the bark of the great Huguenot mer- chant's wife. THE PEOPLING OF CAROLINA 127 trees in sections, leaving other sections, between these, untouched, so that the sap might flow and the tree con- tinue to live. From those parts of the tree which were thus denuded of their bark there exuded a vastly abun- dant supply of resin. This resin was put through a proc- ess of distillation which produced turpentine as a direct product and rosin as an indirect one. So long as the tree continued to live it was cherished and its annual product of resin was manufactured into the articles al- ready mentioned. When at last the tree died it was cut down and its fat resinous wood was split into suitable sizes and roasted in a tar kiln. From it came a rich supply of tar while the smoke from its roasting was caught above upon screens of wire, as lampblack. As there were no ashes from this combustion and as only the bark of the trees was used for fuel under the tar kilns there was next to no waste whatever. In our day of course more economical methods pre- vail, and with an advanced chemistry many precious prod- ucts are extracted from the tar which were unknown in the time of the colonists. In both the southern and the northern parts of the Carolinas the land rose as it stretched westward, until at last the Appalachian Mountains were reached and the valley that lay beyond them. In these parts corn and wheat and the ordinary products of agriculture were ca- pable of abundant production but the region was not oc- cupied to any considerable extent until the next century. 128 OUR FIRST CENTURY Up to the end of the seventeenth century the two Caro- Hnas, though they were in fact separately governed, were regarded and treated by the Lords Proprietors in London as a single colony. They were governed in the interest of the proprietors and they were governed exceedingly badly, so far as the interests of the colony, and the col- onists were concerned. Up to the end of that period with which the present volume deals they remained a proprietary colony — that is to say — a colony owned by a company of men in London and governed in the interest and for the enrichment of that company. CHAPTER XIV NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA THE Dutch in New Amsterdam had scarcely at all occupied the region west and southwest of the mouth of the Hudson River, now known as New Jersey. The English, who succeeded the Dutch in con- trol of New York, in 1664 soon saw the advantage of colonizing that region, where only a very few Swedes and Dutch were at that time settled. Accordingly the new proprietor gave the eastern part of the practically unoccupied country — that is to say the part of it which lay east of the Delaware River — to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, who named it New Jersey. Here again was dominant the English notion of that time that the only use to make of American lands was to people them with colonists whose labor should enrich proprietors in England. In pursuit of that policy Philip Carteret was appointed Governor of New Jersey and in 1665 he landed at Elizabethtown with thirty colonists. In order to attract settlers he promised liberty of con- science to all and guaranteed a generously free govern- ment. In response to these promises a considerable I 129 130 OUR FIRST CENTURY number of people settled in New Jersey, some of them coming directly from England and some from the New Haven colony where religious intolerance had bred a good deal of discontent. Ten or a dozen years later a half interest in the New Jersey colony was purchased by William Penn and some other Quakers in England and the province was divided. Under the division, the western part of it, then known as West Jersey, passed under control of Penn and his friends while the eastern part remained the property of Sir George Carteret. Even in our day we often hear New Jersey spoken of in the plural as " The Jerseys." This is a historical memory of the fact that at one time there were two provinces there. East and West Jersey. A few years later, namely, in 1682, William Penn, who already controlled West Jersey, secured control also of East Jersey, with a number of associates at his back. The management of the eastern colony was exces- sively bad from the first and in 1702 it became neces- sary to make New Jersey a royal province, taking it away from the proprietors and placing it under the direct government of the king. West of the Delaware River lay a vast region, now known as Pennsylvania. It was unoccupied even well into the reign of Charles II, and it had up to that time not been granted to proprietors of any kind. It was a rich region, as we now know, but for some reason it NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA 131 seems not to have appealed to the cupidity of royal favorites up to that time — perhaps because they were weak in their geography. The man who was destined to possess it lived still in England. He was William Penn, the same who had for a time owned the greater part of New Jersey. He had never been in America and he knew comparatively little about this country. But he was a man of large mind and great enterprise. He was the son of Admiral William Penn, who had greatly distinguished himself as an officer of the British Navy. William Penn the younger, during his course at one of the great English universities had fallen under the influence of George Fox, the founder of the sect known as Friends, or Quakers, and had become a devotee of their religion. His father, who had been a fighter all his life, was profoundly disgusted with his son's adoption of a religion which condemned all fighting, and conse- quently for a time the father and son were at outs with each other. After a time however they became recon- ciled, and the elder Penn at his death left to his son his great properties, including a vast debt owed to him by the King of England. In 1 68 1, Charles II agreed to pay this debt to William Penn the younger, by giving him a grant of forty thou- sand square miles of land in America, lying west of the Delaware River — substantially the region now known as the state of Pennsylvania. That name the king gave 132 OUR FIRST CENTURY to it in honor, not of the Wilham Penn to whom he granted it, but of the elder, the Admiral William Penn, who had served England so well in her wars. William Penn immediately sent out some emigrants to take pos- session of the country and they landed where Philadel- phia now stands. William Penn. The region was a fertile and fruitful one, and tempt- ing to the mind even at that time, though its vast mineral wealth in coal and iron was not then dreamed of. It had no sea coast, however, and no secure outlet to the sea. To provide against this difficulty Penn bought from the Duke of York the little strip of co^mtry NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA 133 along the Delaware River, which is now a part of the state of Delaware, thus securing an ocean outlet for his colony. During the next year after Penn's first colonists had settled themselves at Philadelphia he, himself, came out to take possession there and to become, as he was called in that time, the Quaker King. The people of his faith were subjected at that time to much persecution in England, and it was his purpose to provide for them in America a refuge where they might preach and practice their religion without let or hin- drance. When Penn landed in the colony, he had a hundred of his adherents with him and others rapidly followed, planted themselves on various rivers and bays, and speedily built up, by their thrift and energy, a number of prosperous settlements. The formal transfer of the control of Delaware from the agents of the Duke of York, to William Penn, its new proprietor, involved much of picturesque symbolism. When William Penn landed on the shore, the agents of the Duke of York formally delivered to him the key to the fort. With it he unlocked the door, entered, and locked the door again on the inside. That was to signify that he was master there. Presently he unlocked the door and came out again. That was to signify that the whole domain, outside the fort, as well as within it, be- longed to him. Next there was brought to him a piece 134 OUR FIRST CENTURY of sod with a twig implanted in it, and a dish filled with water from the river. These things were given to him and accepted by him to indicate that all the land, with its forests, its fields and its streams, were thus transferred to his control. It was Penn's plan to found his colony upon a basis of complete religious hberty, as he understood it. He called together a legislature repre- sentative of the people, and organized a government. This body decreed that every man in the colony — whether English or foreign fborn — should be entitled to vote in all its elections so long as he paid his taxes. It further decreed that all Christians of whatsoever denomination should be en- titled to hold public office upon election by their fel- low citizens. In that time such a government as this was thought to be extremely liberal, for in that day it had scarcely occurred to any man outside of Rhode Island that Jews and unbelievers, and other persons who were not classed as Christians, were entitled, or could be entitled, to equal rights with their fellow men even in a liberal Quaker commonwealth. William Penn's chair, in Inde- pendence Hall, Philadelphia. NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA 135 The fact still remained that the little colony of Rhode Island was the only region on this great continent where any such things as real and unrestrained religious liberty, and the absolute equality of men before the law, as we now understand these things, were fully recognized, though Connecticut was a close rival of Rhode Island in liberality. Nevertheless the liberality of Penn's govern- ment was so much greater than that which existed in most of the colonies that immigrants rapidly flowed into Pennsylvania not only from Europe but from the other colonies and speedily built it up into one of the most populous of the provinces. It was William Penn's policy from the first to make and keep peace with the Indians round about him. This policy was in strict accordance with his religion, which taught that all war is wrong and wicked. But it was also good poHcy from the point of view of business in- terests. It is always and everywhere much cheaper to deal fairly with men and to keep the peace with them than it is to fight them. Accordingly one of William Penn's earliest proceedings, after his settlement in the colony, was to invite the chiefs of the Indians, who lived near at hand, to meet him for the purpose of making a treaty. He frankly recognized their right to the country which had been granted to him by an English king who did not own it, and he pro- posed to purchase from them, as other colonists had now and then done, all the lands that this English king had 136 OUR FIRST CENTURY given to him. The purchase of course involved the expenditure of very little money, as the Indians held their lands cheap, and it secured peace as well as posses- sion. •Penn explained to the Indians the principles of his re- ligion and asked them to live with him and his colonists Wampum belt, presented by Indians to William Penn. (By permission of the Library Company of Philadelphia.) upon those terms of friendship which were the bases of that religion. The Indians, who were friendlier than those in most other colonies had been, were glad enough to do this. They took the price that he offered them for their lands, and they promised " to live in love with William Penn and his children," "while grass grows and water runs." That \vas the Indian equivalent of the abstract word " forever." It is a fact illustrating the good faith of the Indians, that so long as William Penn lived, no Indian ever killed a Quaker. Thus between 1607, when the first permanent English colony was planted at Jamestown in Virginia, and the mid- dle of that century, English adventurers of various sorts NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA 137 had possessed themselves of the country from Maine on the north to the Savannah River on the south. In every part of that region thriving settlements had been built up, farms had been established, plantations had been opened, the forests had been invaded and the plough and the hoe had begun to do their work of cultivation and civilization. In the absence of railways, and steamboats, and steam- Penn's house in Philadelphia. ships, and telegraphs, and even of mails, or country roads and bridges across streams, there was slow and very in- frequent communication between one and another of the colonies. But all of them were occupied by English- men, inspired by the English love of liberty and the En- glish conception of the natural rights of man. In all of 138 OUR FIRST CENTURY them, except Pennsylvania, the colonists were guaran- teed, by their charters or grants of other kinds, those fundamental rights which from the time of Magna Charta had belonged to Englishmen. In all of them — not even excepting Pennsylvania — conditions had tended to develop a certain jealousy of such rights, a jealousy which was destined, more than a hundred years later, to unite them in a common struggle for independence of British rule. In the meanwhile they had encountered dangers and difficulties which had served to strengthen the manhood of their people, and to develop among them a spirit of self-reliance which was destined to play a great part in world history at a later time. Of these difficulties and contests of the early days of the colonies an account will be given in another chapter. CHAPTER XV EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT SO far as the relations of the colonies with British au- thority were concerned Virginia and Massachusetts were from first to last the representatives and leaders of all the rest. They were the strongest of the colonies and by all odds the most independent in spirit. Their age as colonies was in their favor, and during long periods, es- pecially during the time of the Civil War and the Com- monwealth in England, they had been largely left to their own devices so far as their government was concerned. These two colonies had, therefore, acquired the habit of independence and self-government, and that habit clung to them closely. This is a fact of great importance to a just understanding of American history. In New England for example, during the twenty years or so of the Civil War and the Puritan ascendency in Eng- land — that is to say, from about 1640 to about 1660, when Charles II came back to the throne — the colonies were left free to carry on their own affairs in their own way, without much of interference from England. Those colonies had a sturdy, independent and resolute people 139 140 OUR FIRST CENTURY for their population and such a people were not inclined to surrender liberty and self-government, after having enjoyed and exercised them for so long a period. In Massachusetts particularly the spirit of independ- ence had grown so great that the people of that colony were not disposed in any way to recognize an authority without themselves. They were a brave, hard-headed, resolute sort of men, those men of Massachusetts, and they very reasonably thought that they knew better than anybody in England could know what was good for their common weal. They were men also accustomed, through generations, to look out for themselves, and there was no spirit of tameness in them when they were called upon to submit to dictation from any source. The Virginians of that better class which had become dominant there, were of similar spirit as the result of a like experience. When Charles II came to the throne in England he resented the attitude of the people of the colonies and especially that of the people of Massachusetts. In order to curb it and to assert his absolute authority, he sent commissioners to that colony with authority to in- quire into its conditions and to govern it. It was easy to send them, but it was by no means so easy to support them in their authority against the, resolute protests of an energetic and spiritually independent people. Those people resisted. The king decided, therefore, to annul the charter they held and to leave the people of the colony with no rights whatever, except such as he might EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 141 grant them of his own good pleasure. That charter, as has been related before, was granted in 1629 and was intended to be a grant of privilege to a company in England. But, as we have also seen, the Puritans had transferred it and the seat of its government to Massa- chusetts, making the people of that colony members of the company, and thus securing to them all the authority that the charter was intended to grant to a company in England. Subservient courts in England yielded to King Charles's will and granted his request for an annulment of the charter. The people of Massachusetts resolutely declined to accept the judgment of those courts or in any other way to surrender their rights under the char- New England elephant piece. ter. Their charter was annulled, but they continued to regard themselves possessed of all the liberties it had guaranteed to them in perpetuity. They were perfectly right in this. It was under the guarantees of personal liberty and self-government which that charter gave them — not temporarily but for all 142 OUR FIRST CENTURY time — that they had crossed a tempestuous sea and taken upon themselves the risks, the dangers and the hardships of colonists in order to build up an English nation on these shores. They had fulfilled, and more than fulfilled, their part of the contract. They were entirely right, therefore, in declining to recognize a decree depriving them of their liberties. Such annul- ment of their charter robbed them of their share of the contract benefits, while leaving the king and the English government in full enjoyment of all that they had gained from the endeavors, the endurance and the suffering of the men and women of Massachusetts. These men thus early asserted a doctrine now firmly fixed in law that a charter is a contract and that when one party to it has rendered benefits, the other cannot annul it. In the year 1685 King Charles II died, and his brother became king, as James II. He decided at once to carry out the policy of centralizing the colonies and ruling them in accordance with his own arbitrary will. He therefore appointed Sir Edmund Andros, who had before been governor of New York, to be governor of New York, New Jersey and all of New England. Andros was a zealous despot, loyal to the king and disposed slavishly to do his will, but without sense enough to see or to understand the conditions that pre- vailed in the country he had been sent out to govern. He therefore ruled in the sole interest of his master, as any other such despot might have done, levying taxes EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 143 without warrant, and interfering in a hundred annoying ways with the chartered and traditional Uberties of the people. By the king's command he was fully author- ized to do all that he did, but he was none the less fool- ish to do it, in view of the fact that the people in America objected to it and that they had the physical power to enforce their objection, so far at least as he was personally concerned. Among other things that he did, by way of establish- ing a centralized despotism, Andros undertook to secure possession of the charters of Connecticut and Rhode Island. But the charter of Rhode Island was resolutely withheld from his grasp by a devoted people and when he went before the general assembly of Connecticut and demanded the surrender of the charter of that colony, the debate on the subject was purposely pro- longed until late in the evening. Presently some one blew out all the candles in the assembly chamber and when they were rekindled the charter had disappeared. It was hidden, as we now know, by some one connected with the assembly, in the hollow of a decaying oak tree which was thereafter known and honored as the '' Charter Oak " of Connecticut. A little later a revolution occurred in England and the king, James II, was driven from the throne into exile. Even before news of this event reached New England the people of Massachusetts made up their minds that they would no longer tolerate the despotism of 144 OUR FIRST CENTURY Andros. They arrested him, imprisoned him, and pres- ently sent him back to England, there to mind his own business. During all this time influences of a like kind had been at work in the other colonies. Under James II all the ofificeholders in New York were rich and aristocratic personages, disposed to trample upon the feelings of the plainer people of that colony. The people resented this, and the troubles in England presently gave them op- portunity to express their opinions in a vigorous fashion. For a prolonged period the question of succession to the throne in England had been complicated by a great religious controversy involving much of persecution and still more of disturbance of the public mind. Since the days when Henry VIII had declared himself the head of the church and made England Protestant, there had been a succession of changes which involved a grievous disturbance of the nation and at times the sore affliction of the people. Edward VI, Henry's son, who succeeded him on the throne in 1547, was a Protestant. Henry VIII's daughter, Mary, who became queen in 1553, was a Catholic and a person of intolerant mind. At the end of her reign, Henry's other daughter, Elizabeth, came to the throne, in 1558. She was a Protestant and quite as intolerant in opinion on her side of the controversy as her sister Mary had been on the other, though she was less severe in her dealings with her opponents. Elizabeth reigned long and the result of her reign was pretty firmly EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 145 to establish Protestant doctrines in England. Then had followed James I, and Charles I, under whom the country was continually vexed by religious controversy. Then came the Commonwealth in 1649 which was not only Protestant but Puritan in its religion. After that there was the Restoration in 1660 with Charles II and James II The Middle Colonies. following as kings, under whom the most grievous of- fence was given to the Protestant and especially to the Puritan sentiment of the realm. All these things had tended to arouse in England a bitter religious controversy involving the confiscation of J 146 OUR FIRST CENTURY estates, the chopping off of the heads of men and women, and other scarcely less disagreeable consequences. The people had in the main become Protestant and in order to prevent a further religious controversy between Cath- olics and Protestants the English people, when James II was driven into exile, decided to call Queen Mary, and her husband, William of Orange — both Protestants — to the throne. They decreed also that thereafter no Cath- olic should be king of England, however legitimately his birth might entitle him to the succession. Without waiting to find out what the policy of Wil- liam and Mary in the colonies might be the people of New York rose in rebellion against all that had been done under King James and especially against the Catho- lic influence. They armed themselves and gathered as a mob in the streets resolved to overthrow the colonial government under which they were living. There was at that time in New York one Jacob Leis- ler. Leisler was a patriot and a born leader of men, though at times reckless and intemperate in his acts. The people called upon him to become their chieftain and under his command they seized upon Fort James, which dominated the city, attacked the theater as the pleasure house of their oppressors and organized a new government with Leisler at its head. All this was irregular of course and even revolutionary, but the colonists at this exciting time did not pay a great deal of attention to regularity or to legal technicalities. EARLY REBELLION FOR TPIE RIGHT 147 They had notions of their own with regard to their rights of self-government. They decided therefore that their new government should continue in New York until some intimation should come from the new king and queen in England as to what their will might be with regard to the colony. Leisler was a good man and a patriot but he was in many ways indiscreet, arbitrary and arrogant. He pro- claimed himself the lieutenant governor, but the new king and queen in England refused to recognize his au- thority. They therefore sent out a new royal governor to take his place. Had Leisler been a prudent man he would have recognized the new royal governor as his successor, holding that he had himself held the reins of government only temporarily and until his successor should be appointed. But Leisler had had a taste of power and was disposed to continue in authority. He therefore resisted the new governor by force of arms. He was at once arrested and tried on a charge of treason. He was convicted and hanged by order of the governor when the governor was drunk. Leisler was afterwards honored by a monument. In Virginia a good deal had been occurring during this period. That colony had grown mightily and pros- pered in all its industries. It had extended its planta- tions in every direction, and had built up a material prosperity which made of its government a prize worth even a king's seeking. There had come to it year by 148 OUR FIRST CENTURY year a large migration composed in the main of far better men than those who had originally settled the colony. Especially there had come to it, between 1 649 and 1 660 — the period of Puritan domination in England — a con- siderable company of the men called " Cavaliers " — the adherents of the king, who were driven out of England by Puritan oppression there. Thus as the Puritans had before been compelled to emigrate to America in order to escape persecution for conscience's sake, so now the opponents of Puritanism, driven out of England by Puritan oppression, sought liberty of life and conscience in this land of refuge. The fact is interesting as showing how confidently all men, of every faith, looked to America in that time as a coun- try in which liberty was a thing of native and spontaneous growth. This Cavalier immigration gave character to Virginia and determined the traditions of that colony for a century or more afterwards. The Cavaliers were men of gallant thought and life. They were brave, self-sacrificing, men whose controlling impulse was the sentiment of unflinching courage and uncompromising honor. Their numbers were sufficient to give an impress of their spirit and principles of con- duct to the colony, and later to the state that the colony became in the American union. By this time, and under impulse of this immigration of well to do men, great plantations had been opened all over the settled region and even far to the west. Men EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 149 of capacity and distinction — some of them even men of wealth — had become the proprietors of these planta- tions. It was reported by an English writer of the time, who knew Virginia well, that there were many planters there who lived in greater state than men in England could who had incomes of four thousand pounds a year. Under that form of local self-government which had been conceded to the colony in the Great Charter, it *had developed a company of statesmen as abundantly capable as those of Massachusetts had proved themselves The Virginia penny. to be, of governing the colony wisely and well. They had made peace with the Indians and they had kept that peace. Little by little the fruitful lands of the upper as well as the lower James River regions had been brought under cultivation and the colony had be- come, as that of Massachusetts had, a self-sustaining commonwealth capable of caring for its own interests in a wise and resolute way, without any assistance from king or company. As early as 1624 the Virginia colony had been taken out of the control of its London proprietors and placed 150 OUR FIRST CENTURY directly under the authority of the king of England. In 1629 the king, Charles I, sent out Sir John Harvey to act as royal governor of Virginia. He was in many ways a person objectionable to the colonists. He ruled arbitra- rily and he had no conception of the spirit in which the Virginians insisted upon their rights as Englishmen. Worse still he totally failed to understand the conditions and needs of the colony. After a little while the Virginia legislative council sent him back to England, and preferred charges of mis- government against him there. This act of theirs proved to be offensive to the arrogant king, whose disposition it was to resent any assertion of independent right or privilege on the part of the colonists. He held his own will to be supreme, and it angered him that the colonists should venture to question the authority of a man chosen by him to govern them. Here again, as in the case of Andros in New England, there was involved the ques- tion whether these Englishmen in America should gov- ern themselves — as by agreement they were privileged to do — or whether they should be governed arbitrarily by some agent of the king of a country which they had come to regard as in a measure foreign to themselves. All these things were leading up slowly but certainly to that American Revolution which more than a hundred years later created this great republic of ours. Resenting the act of the Virginians, King Charles sent Harvey back to Virginia in the next year with au- EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 151 thority to govern that colony practically as he pleased. He encountered much difficulty in doing so, but he succeeded in retaining his office for three years, when the king, beginning to realize the mistake he had made, called him back to England In 1642 the king sent out Sir William Berkeley to be governor of Virginia. During this, his first term of office, Berkeley seems to have ruled sufficiently well to win the favor of the Virginians. He continued to rule the colony until 1649, when Cromwell's Commonwealth was estabHshed in England and permitted almost entire self- government to the Virginians. The Virginians thought so well of Berkeley that when the restoration of the Stuarts to the English throne occurred, eleven years later, they elected Berkeley their governor by vote of their assembly, and Charles II, who about that time be- came king in England, commissioned him as such. Berkeley, who had ruled fairly well before, ruled very ill at this time. The greed of gain had taken possession of him, and he set to work to make his own fortune at the expense of the welfare of the colonists. He entered largely into the fur trade as a personal speculation and made large profits from it, sometimes in legal, and some- times in illegal ways. The continuance of the fur trade of course depended upon the maintenance of peace with the Indians, and so Berkeley made up his mind to pre- serve that peace at all hazards and at all costs to the colonists, in the interest of his own profits. 152 OUR FIRST CENTURY By this time the Virginians had opened plantations far up James River, and elsewhere in the interior, remote from the center of the colony and exposed of course to Indian depredations should trouble arise. There had come into the colony many men who had means enough to build mansions for themselves and with the aid of the negro and white slaves who had multiplied in the colony, to make of themselves a sort of Lords of the Manor liv- ing in luxury and exercising an influence like that of a great English estate owner. Among these great planters was a young man named Nathaniel Bacon. He was a man of good English family who had come out to Vir- ginia and estabished a large plantation on the upper part of James River. He had been thoroughly educated ; he had high character ; and he had become a man of recog- nized importance in the colony. He had gained great popularity by his winning manners and by his eloquence in speech. He had therefore been made a member of the council of the governor in 1672 and had become one of its most influential members, not only by reason of his character, his education and his wealth, but still more by reason of the popular favor which he enjoyed. His plantation lay well forward on the frontier and it was one of the first of those which the Indians, when they became hostile, attacked. This outbreak of the Indians was one that had not been foreseen and the colonists, who had established plantations in every direction in full faith that the EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 153 Indians would not break the peace which had so long existed, found their interests and their hves, and even the lives of their women and children imperiled. They appealed at once to Governor Berkeley, whose reactionary policy had caused great discontent, to or- ganize a military force for their protection. But Gov- ernor Berkeley was so deeply interested in the illicit profits of his fur trade with the Indians that he refused even to organize the colony for self-defence. By this time however the Virginians — like the men of Mas- sachusetts — had learned to take care of themselves. Ac- cordingly when their royal governor refused to them the protection which the colony was amply able to afford, they decided to protect themselves. They or- ganized a little army, but they had no leader for it. They called upon Bacon to assume the leadership, but he, being a member of the governor's council, felt that it would be improper for him to do so without the authority of the governor. He therefore asked Gov- ernor Berkeley for a commission to command this army and to defend the borders against the Indians. This the governor, in pursuit of his selfish financial ends, refused. But Bacon was persuaded at last to visit the camp of the little colonial army. When he did so the whole body of men rose in enthusiasm and fairly com- pelled him to become their leader. He took command at once and proceeded to defeat the Indians. This was a criminal offence in the eyes of Governor 154 OUR FIRST CENTURY Berkeley, and that official immediately denounced Bacon in a public proclamation as a rebel against the royal authority in the colony. Berkeley even went further than this. He sent out a force to fight Bacon and cap- ture him. Bacon promptly surrendered to these officers, feeling that he was justified in all his actions, if not by virtue of English authority, at least by virtue of the suf- frages of his fellow men in the colony. He was tried as a rebel and acquitted of all charges. He was restored to his seat in the governor's council, by verdict of his fellow colonists in authority, and Berkeley promised him a commission as general in command of the forces raised to resist the Indians. The governor, however, arbitrarily refused to obey the decree of the court which had been summoned to try Bacon as a rebel or to fulfill his own promise with respect to the commission. In the meanwhile the rigors of Governor Berkeley's rule had angered all of the colonists. He had raised the rates of taxation. He had attempted to curtail the franchise, putting out from it many men who were entitled to it by the fundamental law of the land. He had done many other things that angered the populace and, above all, his refusal to organize the col- ony for defence against Indian outbreaks had rendered him obnoxious to all the colonists. There was such an uprising of the people that even Governor Berkeley, with all his arrogance, dared not resist it. He yielded to it at last and issued a commission as a general to Nathan- EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 155 iel Bacon, authorizing him to protect the borders of the Virginia colony against all Indian aggressions. Bacon immediately marched against the Indians and overcame them, but at every point he was interfered with by Governor Berkeley who had tried in every way he could to withhold from the defender the forces necessary to his work. Berkeley had from the first regarded and treated Bacon as a rebel in arms, in spite of the fact that the young colonist bore a commission signed by the gov- ernor himself. Now let us understand. The colony was threatened with destruction at the hands of the Indians. The people of the colony must either defend themselves or surrender their settlements, abandon their plantations and withdraw from the country after a period of slaughter including women and children. Governor Berkeley held his office as the guardian and protector of this colony. For the sake of his own interests and his own pecuniary gain he had utterly failed to discharge his duties as governor. After the growing manner of that time the people had taken the question of self-defence into their own hands. They had organized an army of their own and by their unanimous choice they had made Nathaniel Bacon the commander of that army. The governor had contended that in accepting such command Bacon had made of himself a rebel. Upon that issue Bacon had surrendered himself to the authorities and had submitted to a trial on the false charges brought against him by the royal gov- 156 OUR FIRST CENTURY ernor. He had been unanimously acquitted. He had then received from the governor himself, under compulsion of public sentiment, a commission to command the colo- nial army in defence of the colony and he had done so successfully. He had marched all the way from the region below Richmond to the Roanoke River and had there met and crushed the Indian power. When he re- turned he found himself again denounced as a rebel by this extraordinary governor and deposed from his place as a member of the governor's council. At last, in despair, and realizing that he represented the authority of the people as against the arbitrary rule of a selfish royal governor whose authority was completely foreign to the colony. Bacon turned upon Berkeley and assailed Jamestown itself, the capital of the colony. He drove Berkeley down the river and across Chesapeake Bay to Accomac on the eastern shore of Virginia. When Berkeley returned a month later, still in unyielding mood. Bacon again captured Jamestown and burned the place after driving Berkeley to his ships in the river. This was in fact a premature but actual beginning of the American Revolution. It occurred almost exactly a hundred years before its time, but it was precisely the same expression of the American sentiment in behalf of independence and self-government which later found ex- pression at Lexington and Concord and in all the war that followed. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately, inasmuch as EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 157 the colonies were not then strong enough to contend suc- cessfully against the English power — Bacon fell ill about this time and died. As there was no other leader ca- pable of carrying out his work, his rebellion came to noth- ing. The governor proceeded to enrich himself enor- mously by confiscating the estates of those who had served with Bacon, and to gratify his bloodthirsty revengefulness by hanging no less than twenty-three of them — some of whom were the flower of the colony. At this point Charles II interposed with an authoritative command that the confiscations and the executions should cease. He called attention to the fact that for this little, and thoroughly justified, rebellion in Virginia, more men had been hanged than he had himself sent to the block for the dethronement and decapitation of his father. Berkeley was recalled in disgrace and for a time thereafter the Virginians enjoyed a considerable meas- ure of self-government. The Virginians were by this time living very comfort- ably. The rich men among them, as we have seen, had become great lords of the soil, living in luxury and state. The merely well to do had estabHshed plantations and homes, opened fields and begun to grow rich by their in- dustry. Even those who were less prosperous lived in comfort on smaller but still sufficient plantations. Apart from the white and black slaves, there were scarcely any people in the colony who could be called poor. There were among them men of high spirit 158 OUR FIRST CENTURY whose code of conduct was of the best and whose influ- ence served to impress that code of conduct upon all other men in the colony at that time. To pay one's debts, to fulfill one's obligations of every kind, and to be hospitable to all comers, were fundamental articles in their creed of conduct. Their soil was rich, their cli- mate was altogether favorable and under these condi- tions they were speedily making themselves as com- pletely independent and as completely masters of their own surroundings, as if their estates had been ancestral domains in England. They were a proud race, loving liberty, and determined to maintain it at all costs and at all hazards. No great baron in all England, no lord of the manor, no owner of half an English shire, had ever enjoyed a greater inde- pendence, or indeed so great an independence, as these men did in the execution of their will. The era of gen- tlemen's rule had come in Virginia and it proved to be an important factor in the later history of the colo- nies and of their relations with Great Britain. The conditions in Virginia were altogether different from those that prevailed in Massachusetts at that time, but they tended to like results whenever there should come a controversy between the mother country and the colonies. Underlying the conditions in both colonies was the resolute sentiment of independence which had taken root in all the colonies, the conviction of the right of men and of communities to govern themselves, the EARLY REBELLION FOR THE RIGHT 159 feeling that any government from the outside of them- selves was an impertinence to be resented and resisted without much regard to consequences. Thus the two colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts, developed under totally different conditions of climate, soil and government, had reached the common conclu- sion, even a hundred years before the outbreak of the American Revolution, that nobody on the face of the earth had or could have a right to govern them with- out their own consent, and when the time for resolute resistance came, these two colonies, with all that lay be- tween them, united in a manful struggle to assert this doctrine, and they asserted it successfully. CHAPTER XVI THE FRENCH IN AMERICA WHILE the English were making all these settle- ments and building up all these colonies within what is now the United States, the French were establishing themselves north of the English colonies, and their settlements there were destined later to influ- ence in important ways the development of English power on this continent, and ultimately the upbuilding of these United States of ours. As early as 1603 — four years before the landing at Jamestown — the French explorer Champlain, sailed up the St. Lawrence to what is now the site of Montreal, and explored the country north and south of that region. In the year 1608 — a year after Jamestown was colonized — he founded a settlement at Quebec which proved ul- timately to be the beginning of the French power in America and the beginning of a long series of events which involved the American colonies in wars and troubles of every kind. For twenty-seven years after the founding of Quebec, Champlain continued to be the governor of the F'rench in America. The French who came over with him and 160 THE FRENCH IN AMERICA 161 those who followed him into that region were in the main not settlers or farmers, or colonizers, but traders and priests. The traders came out to buy furs from the Indians in exchange for trinkets, and the priests came out with the religious purpose of converting the Indians to Christianity. Wherever the trader went the priest went also, and often the priest went where the trader dared not go. The French traders were an ac- commodating sort of people who dwelt among the Indians without objecting in any way to their dirt or their uncomfortable ways of liv- ing. They made friends with the Indians from the beginning. The priests were even more accommodating. They were a brave company of devoted men who were ready, in pur- suit of their religious purpose, to endure any hardship, encounter any danger, and put aside all thoughts of the disagreeable, in order that they might rescue the souls of the Indians from such damnation as heathenism, in their belief, implied. Many of them lived among the In- dians in the Indian ways, adopting even the most dis- agreeable of the Indian practices and devoting themselves solely to the salvation of the Indians' souls. The Frenchmen at first did almost nothing toward establishing farming settlements. This was due in large part to the inhospitality of the cHmate and soil of Canada. Champlain. 162 OUR FIRST CENTURY But it was due in still larger part to the fact that the French traders were bent upon immediate gain rather than upon ultimate profit from settlement. These Frenchmen, traders and priests alike, rapidly pushed their explorations up the. St. Lawrence, through the Great Lakes, and onward to the Mississippi itself. They preached and traded as they went, but they were moved in part by the hope of finding somewhere that water way through America to Asia which had been the lure of all other adventurers ever since Columbus had found a continent standing in the way. They did not find that water way of course, for the simple rea- son that it did not exist. But they did find a vast and fertile territory west of the Alleghenies which they later took possession of as a French domain. Had they been able permanently to hold that great valley of the Mississippi and its tributaries, the English colonies in America, all of which lay mainly east of the Allegheny Mountains, could never have built up on this continent the great republic of which we are all proud to be citizens. The story of the French expulsion from the Mississippi valley belongs to a later period of history. Another thing that the French were doing all this French Coureur des Bois. THE FRENCH IN AMERICA 163 time was fishing on the banks of Newfoundland and in the waters east of the English colonies. The people of New England also employed themselves largely in fish- ing. Their climate and soil did not greatly tempt men to farming or stock raising, and so the men of that re- gion, as we have seen in a former chapter, with shrewd intelligence, began to build ships and to man them for use in the profitable industry of fishing for cod and mackerel in those seas in which such fish abound. This circumstance led ultimately to important consequences, as we shall see later. For one thing it prompted New England carpenters to learn how to build stout and fleet ships out of the superb timber which abounded in their country, and it prompted the young men of New Eng- land to become expert sailors, skilled in all the arts of navigation, and as bold upon the sea as ever the vikings of Scandinavia had been. These circumstances, unimportant as they may seem upon this simple statement, were destined to bring rich historical fruits at a later day. It was out of this train- ing of the New England shipbuilders and the sturdy young New England sailors that later came a great com- merce which enriched the country. It was out of the same influence that still later came the building up of an improvised American navy which was able to hold its own, and more than its own, against the sea power of the greatest maritime nation in the world. The Yankee boys of that time began their sea careers 164 OUR FIRST CENTURY so early and brought to bear upon their art so great a shrewdness that they were able in many cases to com- mand ships and sail them profitably all over the world before the young captains on the poop deck had attained even the age of twenty years. It is recorded of one of them, R. J. Cleveland, that he was a ship captain at eighteen and that he went in command of his ship, with not a man on board who had passed his twentieth year, to the Orient, to South Africa, to the west coast o'f South America and elsewhere, at a time when pirates infested the seas and when international complications were such as to require of every ship- master the utmost ingenuity in order to avoid the seiz- ure and condemnation of his ship and cargo. It was from such a company of very young men, trained from childhood to the service of the sea, and trained also in resolution, ingenuity and resourcefulness, that both our mercantile marine and our navy were recruited in times of need. All this is getting far ahead of our story. It was the purpose of the French traders and mission- aries to push their posts far into the interior, slowly building them up into a chain without a missing link. They passed through all the great lakes and made their way west as far as what is now Wisconsin, establishing posts as they went, each of which could communicate with those in rear and those in front of it. Among the French explorers were two who especially THE FRENCH IN AMERICA 165 distinguished themselves by their discoveries. One of these was JoUet, a trader, and the other, Father Marquette, a priest and missionary. The Indians had told the French of a great river that lay far to the west and Joliet and Marquette were sent to find it. They passed down the Wisconsin River in birch bark canoes and reached the mouth of that stream where it enters the Mississippi in June, 1673. Thence they went on down the great river until they believed they were nearing its mouth in the Gulf of Mexico. They knew that there was serious dan- ger of encountering hostile Spaniards at the mouth of the river and so they decided to turn back. They had in fact gone only to the neighborhood of the mouth of the Arkansas River, several hundred miles north of the Gulf of Mexico. This was the first exploration ever made by white men of that greatest of rivers, the Mississippi. Joliet and Marquette toil- somely paddled their canoes back again against the strong current of the Mississippi, and four months after the beginning of their explorations they again reached Lake Michi- gan. About seven years earlier than this, however, in 1 666, a young Frenchman, La Salle, had arrived in Canada and after learning something of the methods of French ex- La Salle. 166 OUR FIRST CENTURY I^loration he set out, in 1669, on a voyage of discovery made at his own expense. He, too, had heard of the great river that lay to the west, but he took a different route by way of finding it. Instead of going westward, as JoHet and Marquette did later, he directed his steps southward until he reached the Ohio, at what point we do not know. From that point, whatever it may have been, he de- scended the river as far as the falls at Louisville. When his journey was done, he had not discovered the Missis- sippi, but he had at least traversed the upper waters of its greatest eastern affluent, and he was enthusiastic in his determination to make his way further, and to plant the flag of France at the very mouth of the Mississippi it- self. Accordingly he started again by the Ohio River route in 1681 and during the next year succeeded in reaching the mouth of the Mississippi. There he took possession in the name of the French king, Louis XIV, planted a column to testify to his discovery and in behalf of the king he claimed dominion over all the region watered by the Mississippi River and its tributaries. That region includes all the country that lies between the Allegheny Mountains on the east, the Rocky Moun- tains on the west, the Great Lakes on the north, and the Gulf of Mexico on the south. There was at that time nowhere in the world an empire so vast, or one so rich and varied in soil and climate, or in its undiscovered mineral wealth, as was this region of which La Salle made his king the proprietor. THE FRENCH IN AMERICA 167 La Salle named the region Louisiana, in honor of his king, Louis XIV. In the meanwhile a French Cath- olic missionary. Father Hennepin, had completed the work of Mississippi River discovery by exploring the upper waters of the river as far north as the spot on which Minneapolis now stands. It has already been explained that in the main the French made friends with the Indians, lived among them, and traded with them upon the most amicable terms. Many of the French traders married Indian squaws and from these unions came a multitude of half- breeds who were equally French and Indian. The French priests were everywhere recognized by the In- dians as their friends and everywhere their influence over the Indians was supreme. This was in part due to the kindness of the priests toward the savages, but perhaps in still larger part it was due to the fact that the Indians recognized and honored the courage of these priests, who, without arms in their hands or any kind of defence, boldly went into the remotest Indian countries and there preached their gospel of good will among men. Whatever other good or bad qualities the Indians may have had they were brave almost to a fault and they honored courage wherever they saw it. These French priests had a courage such as the Indians had never else- where seen among white men and so they honored the priests and accepted their ministry in a degree in which 168 OUR FIRST CENTURY they had never accepted any other interference with their affairs on the part of the white men. There was one important exception to all this, how- ever. When Champlain, in 1608, settled Quebec and made friends with the Indians about him, he found those Indians at war with the Mohawks in what is now New York state. He made the mistake of aiding with French soldiery these Indian allies of his in their war against the Mohawks. The French and Indians succeeded in defeating the Mohawks in a battle fought near Lake Champlain. But the Mohawks were one of the " Five Nations " — of which the Iroquois confederacy, the most powerful league of Indians ever formed — was composed. Champlain' s unwise in- terference in this quarrel of the In- dians converted the whole Iroquois French gentleman. confederacy into enemies of the French and strengthened the friendship that already ex- isted between the Iroquois tribes, who occupied central New York, and the Dutch, and afterwards the English colonists of the Hudson River country. This quarrel, unfortunately for the French, created a permanent hostility which was destined to bear bitter fruit in the future. It was the custom of the Iroquois to carry all their furs and skins to Albany and there to trade them for such goods as they wanted to the THE FRENCH IN AMERICA 169 English and Dutch traders of that region. This trade was profitable to both parties, but after a while the Iro- quois found that their territory did not yield them as many beaver skins and other furs as they desired, and so in 1680 — still cherishing their old enmity to the French, which had had its origin about seventy years before, they decided to conquer the richer fur-bearing regions to the north and west of them, which were pos- sessed by Indians allied with the French. From that time forward the French were continually vexed by attacks from the powerful Iroquois and by their inva- sions of the territory that had previously been wholly tributary to French trade. Almost from the beginning the English colonists, and especially those of New York and New England, had regarded the French in Canada as enemies. There was a never ending quarrel between the two over questions relating to the fur trade and, as it went on, over ques- tions relating to the possession of the region west of the AUeghenies and south of the Great Lakes. In addition to these causes of quarrel there were others respecting land claims and still others of an even more acrimonious sort concerning the fisheries. In brief, there was a con- dition of feeling amounting almost to open warfare be- tween the Enghsh colonies on the south and the French colonies north of the dividing line. In the end these causes of quarrel led to some of the most important events in American history. They led at 170 OUR FIRST CENTURY last to the conquest by the English colonists of all Canada and all that fruitful region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi which now includes the states of Ohio, In- diana, lUinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Tennes- see, Alabama and Mississippi. The French held all of that great river valley then — near the end of the seven- teenth century. They continued to hold it and to de- fend it for many years afterward, but in the end they lost it all in a contest with the obstinate persistency of the Englishmen of the colonies, and still later they lost all Canada to the English. Those events, however, belong to a later period of history. CHAPTER XVII RAPINE, SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION THE contest between the English and the French colonists in America was embarrassed at every point by the fact that England and France equally regarded colonial interests as of no particular consequence. Those two European nations were sometimes at war and sometimes at peace with each other. When they were at war the colonists of the one and of the other nation were permitted to fight each other as freely as they pleased. But when the two European nations concluded to make peace with each other they forbade their colonists to continue the war on this side of the ocean, and usually each of them completely neglected to include colonial interests in the terms of such settlements as they made. That is to say, they made their own peace with sole reference to European interests and each of them freely gave up everything that the colonists on this side of the ocean might feel to be of vital interest to their own welfare. The time had not yet arrived when the states- men of England and France could understand that great nations were building themselves up in America and that their rights and interests were as important as those ^ 171 172 OUR FIRST CENTURY which were in controversy between England and France in Europe. But while the Englishmen in New York and New England and the Frenchmen in Canada, in all times of peace between England and France, were forbidden by their home governments to carry on war in behalf of their own rights and interests, the enmity between them continued, and the contest was carried on by the Indians allied with the one or with the other. It was marked by massacre and every species of horror. Behind these Indian incursions and massacres of the settlers on either side, there was always the hatred on the part of the whites, as an instigation to such savage warfare. Presently, however, there came open war again between England and France. When James II was driven from the throne of England his cause was championed by Louis XIV of France. War ensued, of course, between the two great European powers and their colonies in America were again permitted to fight each other on this side of the ocean. This was in 1 689 and the struggle is known in history as King William's war. The French king sent out Count Frontenac, one of the greatest soldiers of his time, to be governor of the French possessions in America. It was his task to fight the Enghsh and the Iroquois who were in alliance with the English, and to recover for France the fur trade which it had largely lost. His operations began in midwinter, or, to be more SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION 173 exact, in February, when all the conditions were unfa- vorable to campaigning. But Count Frontenac was a bold soldier who paid little attention to conditions and none at all to difficulties, except to meet and overcome them. He therefore proceeded at once to send out three expeditions against the English and their Indian allies. The first of these expeditions set out in 1690 from Montreal with orders to force its way to Albany and to take that town and the forts that protected it. The commander of the expedition was far less resolute and courageous than Count Frontenac and so he hes- itated to assail the strong post at Albany. Instead of that he diverted his march toward Schenectady, a few miles northwest of Albany, fell upon that village in a night attack, and committed a butchery there which included men, women and children, without discrimina- tion. A little later Count Frontenac sent out other parties, of what in our day we should call raiders, to assail and destroy the settlements in New England ; and a little later still he sent out his third party, which united with the second one and worked havoc in various settlements in New Hampshire and in Maine. The methods of warfare at that time were based upon the idea of pure butchery and unlimited destruction. Consequently when a village was overcome its houses were burned, its people of both sexes and all ages were slaughtered, and those who were spared were carried away 174 OUR FIRST CENTURY into a captivity which was scarcely less terrible than the butchery itself. In the meanwhile the English colonists were not idle, though they had no commander fit to cope with such a soldier as Frontenac. In May, 1690, a congress of the English colonists was held in New York and it ordered attacks upon Montreal and Quebec, but these operations came to little because of incapable leadership. The ex- pedition against Montreal, after attacking some French settlements, retired without accomplishing anything of consequence. The movement upon Quebec was com- manded by no less a person than Sir William Phips, who Matchlock gun and matchlock, had a little while before captured Port Royal and the province of Acadia. Sir William succeeded in taking his ships to Quebec but he failed in his effort to capture that stronghold. During the next year an expedition was sent out from SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION 175 Albany, under the leadership of Peter Schuyler, to ravage French settlements. But Schuyler failed of his purpose and escaped destruction only by accident and by desper- ate fighting. Thus for eight years King William's war continued with ravage and slaughter as its incidents in every direction. At Schenectady, for example, about sixty people were killed including men, women and children, indiscrimi- nately, for at that time neither the Indians nor many of their Canadian French allies had become sufficiently gal- lant soldiers to refuse to make war upon women and chil- dren. Worse still, many of the people of Schenectady, including women and children, were carried off into cap- tivity, some of them into Indian captivity, a fate deemed by the colonists to be more horrible than any massacre could be. A little later a party of French and Indians, sent out by Count Frontenac, assailed Salmon Falls, in New Hampshire, killed and captured nearly all of its inhabit- ants and burned the little town to ashes. A little later still, the French and Indians destroyed a small settle- ment called Fort Loyal, in Maine, with a like butchery of its people. It must be borne in mind, if the reader would under- stand these things, that the settlements of the English were usually very small and widely separated — too small to defend themselves successfully against such assaults as these, and too widely separated to co-operate with each 176 OUR FIRST CENTURY other for a common defence. It was butchery, plain and smiple, and all of the colonists had been schooled by ex- perience to live in constant dread of such assaults from their French and Indian enemies. How brave they were and how enduring, to live in such conditions as these ! And how greatly we should honor the courage of the men, the women and the children who faced such dan- gers in the hope of building up here in America a coun- try of their own, and of planting here that liberty which they had crossed the ocean to seek. Not only had they come across the seas to better them- selves, to secure liberty of conscience, and to build up homes for their children and grandchildren after them, but after they had landed they had had resolution enough, and courage enough, and endurance enough to separate themselves in little bodies from the more de- fensible colonial settlements, and to go off into the wilderness, usually under the leadership of their pastors, and there to risk destruction in an endeavor to estab- lish homes for themselves and for those who should come after them. Among these straggling and undefended settlements was the village of York in Maine. There the people were attacked during the winter of 1692 by the French and Indians, and desolation ensued. More than half the people were either killed or taken into captivity. All the houses were burned, and all the farms lying round about were destroyed. The farm dwellings were reduced SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION 177 to ashes, the barns with their precious contents were looted, and all the agricultural implements in use in the fields were destroyed. Two years later the Indians, with French ofificers lead- ing them, attacked the little village of Durham in New Hampshire, but they were successfully beaten off so far as the village itself was concerned, for the reason that the people there had built palisades around their homes Colonial plow with wooden mold-board, 1706. (Agricultural Museum, Albany, N. Y.) and were prepared to defend themselves resolutely. But all around the village, as was usual at that time, there were scattered farmsteads where single families dwelt with only such defence as their owners, and the sons of their owners, could provide, with the assistance of their wives and daughters — for women, as well as men, in those days knew how to use a gun and were valiant in their use of it for self-defence. These farmsteads resisted with all their might, but that might was insufficient to prevent L 178 OUR FIRST CENTURY their destruction and desolation. The men, women and children occupying them were massacred or carried off into captivity. Let us not forget, as we enjoy the freedom and security of that land which these pioneers built up for us — let us never forget the dangers and the hardships they en- countered in creating it, or the superb courage they dis- played in doing so. Thus for eight years the people of New England bravely faced a merciless foe and defended their homes as best they could against an enemy who recognized no distinction of age or sex, who made war equally upon men with arms in their hands and upon helpless women and children and sick persons — an enemy whose sole conception of war was indiscriminate slaughter, an enemy to whom arson and rapine seemed legitimate incidents of a struggle for political supremacy. At last, in 1697, England and France, on the other side of the ocean, made peace with each other. In doing so the English government jauntily gave up all that the colonists in America had won by hard fighting during the struggle. Things like this continued to happen throughout further colonial history, as we shall see in later volumes of this series. The colonies were still regarded by the English government as mere feeders of English prosper- ity, and their interests were always and everywhere treated with neglect and contempt. As we go on with this history we shall come to understand how grievously SLAUGHTER AND DESTRUCTION 179 the colonists felt this wrong and how ready they were, when they grew strong enough, to resent and resist it. The seventeenth century ended with peace between England and France, but with only a nominal and un- certain peace between the colonists of the two nations in America and with no provision for the restraining of savage Indian warfare upon the settlements on either side. p A c French Explorations in North America to 1700. CHAPTER XVIII EARLY COLONIAL INDUSTRY, AGRICULTURE, TRADE AND INTERCOURSE KING WILLIAM'S war ended precisely ninety years after the first permanent English settlement in America was made at Jamestown in Virginia. During that time a great work of colonization had been effected. From Maine to the Savannah River the whole coast had been occupied, and in some degree brought under cultivation. Throughout all that region the brave and energetic colonists had established them- selves firmly, had opened farms and plantations, had learned how to take care of themselves, and had pros- pered greatly in their affairs. At the beginning their ignorance of the climate, the soil, and the conditions of life in America had led them into many mistakes. Still further they had been led astray by the delusion that a passage existed some- where through America by which the Pacific Ocean, and Asia beyond it, might be reached by ships. They had wasted much time at the beginning in a fruitless search for gold, and, in New England especially, they had wasted 180 EARLY COLONIAL INDUSTRY 181 much endeavor in attempts to raise crops for which the climate of that region was wholly unfit. But they had conquered their own mistakes as well as the wilderness in which they dwelt. They had learned that so far as the greater part of the country they occu- pied was concerned, corn was the natural and necessary source of food supply. They had learned from the In- dians how to cultivate that grain and how to use it as food. They had learned too its value in the fattening of such animals as yield food to men. They had suffered terribly from Indian assaults and still worse toward the latter end of that period, from the more skillfully directed assaults of the French and In- dians in Canada. Nevertheless, with stout hearts, strong arms, and full faith in themselves, they had so far held their own that no part of the country they had occupied had been conquered, no part of it wrested from their con- trol. Wherever they had settled themselves they con- tinued to live. In all the colonies domestic animals — horses, cattle, sheep and hogs — had steadily grown more and more numerous under careful management. None of these animals were native to America. The Indians had none of them and the first herds of each were imported from Europe. But the conditions that prevailed in the col- onies strongly favored their multiplication — particularly that of hogs — and so, by the end of that ninety years' period of settlement, all the colonists were well supplied 182 OUR FIRST CENTURY with flocks and herds, and, so far as a food supply was concerned, all of them were quite independent of assis- tance from Europe. The middle colonies were well adapted to the cultiva- tion of wheat as well as corn and that species of farming had become richly profitable to the settlers there by the end of the seventeenth century. Maryland and Virginia also successfully cultivated wheat as well as corn and to these sources of wealth the people there had added the more important one of tobacco. In the Carolinas to- bacco was somewhat grown, but as yet neither cotton, rice nor indigo had become a crop of general culture. The Carolinians at the end of our first century were still in a state of experimentation to learn what it was best to do with their fruitful climate, their fertile soil and their limitless opportunities. In New England every effort to find a satisfactory staple crop had failed. But the shrewd colonists there had found something else — two other things indeed — that answered their pur- pose quite as well as any food crop could. The seas off their coasts and north of them were alive with fish of a kind that could be cured and marketed and so the en- ergies of the New Englanders were largely directed to fishing as a source of wealth not inferior to that of farm- ing in the more favorable climates of the colonies south of them. In order to fish upon the seas it was neces- sary for them to build ships and their carpenters speedily EARLY COLONIAL INDUSTRY 183 became expert in that art, while their young men, be- ginning as boys, became more than expert in the saiUng and management of such ships as they could build. All this was done at first in a desultory way, but about twenty years after the landing of the Pilgrims, circumstances led to the development of shipbuilding as Elder Brewster's chair. (In Pilgrim Hall.) an important New England industry. The way of it was this : When the Puritans came into power in England about that time, there was no longer any great inducement for men of that faith to migrate to America and so the immigration rapidly fell off, and the increase 184 OUR FIRST CENTURY in the population of New England ceased. The farmers who were engaged in growing such food crops as New England produced, found their market failing them. Provisions fell in price until their sale no longer re- warded the people who grew them for their labor. Ob- viously the men of New England must engage largely in something else than farming if they were to thrive as they hoped to do. At this time one Hugh Peters, the pastor of the church at Salem and a born leader of men, began to urge his flock to engage in shipbuilding as a definite pursuit. In that time and country the pastors of churches were by odds the best educated, the ablest and the most sagacious men in the community, and their in- fluence was well-nigh unbounded. Accordingly, the Rev- erend Hugh Peters' s advice was promply taken and the people, both of Salem and of Boston, set to work building ships, not for fishing purposes only but for use in commerce all over the world. The ships they built went out first on voyages along the coast and to the West Indies, and afterwards to England and to the Mediter- ranean. Gradually they extended their voyages to all other parts of the world, seeking trade wherever it could be found. These ships, and others built in Philadelphia, where a like industry had sprung up, carried on a thriv- ing trade among the colonies all along the coast, and between them and foreign ports. Some important results flowed from this change. EARLY COLONIAL INDUSTRY 185 First of all, the trade up and down the coast brought the several widely separated colonies into closer communica- tion with each other and laid the foundation for that community of purpose and action among them which in the next century was destined to make success in the War of Independence possible. There were no mails at that time passing from one colony to another. There were no means of communication by land between the people of the northern and the people of the southern col- onies. Even the most important happenings in one settlement had hitherto remained unknown to the people of the other colonies until long after the event, when some adventurous traveler might carry inadequate and untrustworthy news of them. But when ships from New England and Philadelphia began sailing up and down the coast and to foreign lands they carried news of inter- est and in some respects their news was more impor- tant even than their cargoes. Other effects of smaller consequence, but still of con- sequence, flowed from this change in colonial industries. The ships that sailed out of Boston, or Salem, and traded with the West Indies brought back sugar and rum in large quantities, not only to Boston and to Salem, but to other parts of the country as well. As a consequence the use of both sugar and rum became gen- eral in New England, and somewhat less so in the other colonies. In those days our present notions of what constitutes 186 OUR FIRST CENTURY temperance were not dreamed of. Pretty nearly every- body drank rum upon all festive occasions, and most men drank it quite freely. Even clergymen deemed it en- tirely fit and proper that they should brace themselves for duties to be done, or recuperate themselves after duty done, by alcoholic stimulation. Old records show- that on every occasion where grave men came together to consider and to act upon affairs of church or state, a supply of rum for their drinking was deemed as necessary as a supply of pens, ink and paper. These men were all stern moralists who condemned drunkenness where- ever they saw it, but it had not yet occurred to their minds that their own example in this more moderate use of alcoholic liquor tended to breed drunkenness among men of feebler character, and to excuse it there. In addition to rum which was imported from the West Indies, there was a native drink in New England which every farmer could produce for himself at practi- cally no cost at all. This was hard cider — a most se- ductive and deceptive beverage — which was freely used in almost every family and which was consumed in great quantities at every time of feasting and even on the solemn occasion of funerals. The ships that sailed to remoter parts of the world brought tea and coffee into the colonies, and so by the end of the century, those beverages had come into well- nigh universal use. CHAPTER XIX EARLY COLONIAL MANUFACTURES AS the colonies in America had been planted from England, not for the benefit of the colonists but at first for the enrichment of companies in England, and later for the general English benefit, the laws of Eng- land from the first, tended to discourage all manufacturing in America. It was intended that the colonists should till the soil, produce whatever they could of value in that way, send it to England, and buy in return such articles of use as were made by English manufacturers. If the colonists were to be permitted to make things for them- selves, of course the American market for English manufactures must be impaired. That was the argument. But the colonists were, almost from the first, a people disposed to consider their own interests as superior to any British enactment that might interfere with them, and so, early in the seven- teenth century the people in Massachusetts and New Jersey and other colonies began to make iron of an inferior quality, out of such ores as they had, and a little later they very naturally began to work this iron into such 187 188 OUR FIRST CENTURY things as they needed — pots, pans, kettles, skillets, and- irons, and the like. At that time, even in England, there was no machin- ery for making nails, and of course in the building of wooden houses in the colonies nails were a constant necessity. Accordingly the colonists set to work to make nails for themselves, forging them by hand and hammering them out on an anvil. There were no nail factories set up, but in many families, men, women, boys and girls, devoted their leisure hours to such work. Nails were so scarce and so valuable at that time that in Pennsylvania and some other colonies it became the custom to burn all abandoned buildings in order to collect and use again the nails that had been employed in their construction. In the period, from 1640 to 1660, when the migration to New England fell off and the farmers in that region, by reason of a lack of markets for their products, found themselves without means to buy English made goods, they took to the making of cloth for themseh^es. They had sheep that yielded wool. They had flax, and they had hemp, and they knew how to handle those things. In Virginia they raised silk worms and made silk. A chafing dish, (New York State Cabi- net of Natural History.) EARLY COLONIAL MANUFACTURES 189 They had even a little cotton, which was brought from the Barbadoes, for the cultivation of cotton in the south- ern colonies had not yet become an industry of any im- portance, because of the difficulty of separating the cotton from its seed. They had spinning wheels in every house, and they had looms which they skillfully knew how to use. They knew how to spin and how to weave, and they set to work to supply themselves with clothing by their own exertions. Until nearly the end of the seventeenth century the inattentive English government did not seriously inter- fere with such industries as these, but about that time the Enghsh manufacturers began to see that if such work should be allowed to go on in America their own market must be injured, and so a demand was made that authority should stop all colonial manufacturing. The effort was not successful. The colonists were three thousand miles away from English supervision, and so they went on making clothes for themselves with a jaunty indifference to any paper prohibition that might be sent from the other side. A little later than this, one town in Connecticut paid all its public expenses by maintaining a flock of two thousand sheep upon its com- mon lands, and selling the wool to its people, who freely converted it into cloth and clothing, quite regardless of English laws forbidding such manufacture. In short, it proved to be impossible for any British law to prevent the men who had settled in America from 190 OUR FIRST CENTURY doing the best they could for themselves. They were brave, free men. They had come out to America at risk of their lives and their fortunes. They had pos- sessed themselves of the country at cost of enormous toil, suffering, hardship and danger. They had fought against Indians and French, for the right to live their own lives in their own way. No " bull against a comet " could ever have been more utterly futile than a law Silk winding. (Facsimile of a picture in Edward Williams's " Virginia truly valued," 1650.) passed in England to prevent such men as these from utilizing the opportunities that presented themselves in the country they had conquered, or from making for themselves such articles of use as they could fabricate more cheaply than they could buy them from the Eng- EARLY COLONIAL MANUFACTURES 191 lish manufacturers. They even made laws of their own to encourage colonial manufacturing. Massachusetts in 1656 and Virginia in 1662 made statutes directly designed to encourage textile manufactures, and other colonies followed this example. Among other forbidden things that the colonists be- gan early to do was to tan leather for their own use from the hides of the cattle they killed. Under EngHsh law these hides should have been sent to England and there tanned and manufactured into shoes and other things, and sent back for sale to the colonists who, in this way, would have paid tribute to the English manufacturer. But there were men among the colonists who knew how to convert hides into leather and they were men of too sturdy a common sense to see the necessity of sending their hides across three thousand miles of ocean, when they could tan and manufacture them for themselves. A printing press was established at Cambridge in Mas- sachusetts as early as 1639, but until after the end of the seventeenth century printing was very slightly developed in this country. The first paper mill was established near German- town, Pennsylvania, near the end of the century. Thus, little by little, and acting upon conditions as they found them, the colonists made such beginnings of manufact- ure as were necessary to answer their needs. CHAPTER XX EDUCATION, RELIGION AND MARRIAGES THERE was very little of education in any of the colonies during the seventeenth century. The colonists were too busy indeed to attend to the schooling of their children, and in such communities as they had established, education seemed to many men to be rather a superfluity than a necessity. Many of the boys were not taught at all. Those who were taught learned only reading, writing and the rudiments of arith- metic. For girls it was deemed suflficient if they could write their names and do needlework. But the needle- work was of a superior quality and specimens of it are cherished even unto this day in museums and private houses, as illustrative of the dexterity, the skill and the patience of colonial dames and damsels. At the beginning, of course, there were no newspapers in the country and no books except such as a few clergy- men and other educated colonists had brought with them from England. Therefore the lack of a general capacity to read was of less consequence than it would have been in a community supplied with literature. But the impulse toward education and reading was 192 EDUCATION, RELIGION, MARRIAGES 19^ early developed in the colonies. The printing press es- tablished at Cambridge in 1639, was followed by the set- ting up of others in different parts of the country, par- ticularly in Boston and Philadelphia. They printed mainly pamphlets and a little later they began to publish newspapers. But that was not until the next century. In the early days of the seventeenth century there were no free schools anywhere and the pay schools that existed were few, ill equipped, badly taught, and generally inefh- cient. The earliest movement that was made in any of the colonies which looked to a broader and more general system of popular education was made in Massachusetts, where in 1647 ^ ^^.w was enacted that every town which had fifty householders in it should maintain a school for teaching the English branches. For a consid- erable time after that this law was very imperfectly en- forced but little by little schools multipHed. It was at a very much later date that the free school system was established in this country. To the more cultivated men of that time the general education of the people seemed a far less important ob- ject than the higher education of a few men destined to become clergymen, and, as such, instructors and leaders of the people. So long before anything like a common school system was established, either in Massachusetts, or in any other of the colonies. Harvard College was set up at Cambridge in 1636. It was the purpose of that college chiefly to educate men for the ministry. Near M 194 OUR FIRST CENTURY the end of the seventeenth century another college was established, this time in Virginia, and called William and Mary. The underlying purpose in the setting up of that institution was the hope of educating and civilizing the Indians. The very earliest colonists brought with them to America a spirit of religious intolerance. Those of Massachusetts and many others removed to America, as we know, in order to escape such intolerance in England, and so, also, did the Quakers in Pennsylvania, the Catho- lics of Maryland, the Huguenots of New York and South Carolina, and many others. Yet it seems never to have occurred to some of them at least, that having thus es- caped from persecution for conscience's sake, it might be wrong for them to practice a similar persecution in their turn in an effort to regulate the religious beliefs of men and women who differed with them in opinion. It will not do, however, to judge men of that time by the standards which we accept to-day. It would be grossly wrong to hold them responsible for their intolerance in the same measure in which we should hold intolerant men or states responsible in our time. But the fact of their intolerance was one which played a considerable part in the history of the colonies and it must be con- sidered ill connection with other facts of their lives. At first in Virginia no form of worship was allowed except that of the Church of England. A little later the incoming of Puritans, Baptists, and others led, among that EDUCATION, RELIGION, MARRIAGES 195 easy-going people, to a larger tolerance in practice if not in law. In Massachusetts, as we have already seen, the Puritan religion was insisted upon with a rigor which drove out the Baptists, Quakers and others who differed in opinion with the majority, including among those ban- ished no less personages than Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. This, as we know, led to the establishment of the Rhode Island colony, absolutely the only one in which perfect religious liberty existed even up to the time of the Revolution. For while Maryland prided it- self upon its tolerance, it restricted that tolerance rigidly to those who accepted Christianity. In Pennsylvania full liberty of belief and worship was granted, and the right to vote was not restricted by any religious test. But even in Pennsylvania no man was allowed to hold office unless he believed in the godhood of Jesus. The Puritan colonies of New England were in effect hier- archies, in which the church was the ruling power and the parson was paramount. The authority of the church was intermeddlingly active in every relation of life. It as- serted itself in every man's home. It regulated conduct everywhere. It controlled all the affairs of life from the cradle to the grave. Everybody, old and young, must go to church, and in church everybody must patiently endure. The meeting- houses were not warmed, even in zero weather, and the sermons and prayers and psalm singing endured often for three hours or more. Yet every babe on the first 196 OUR FIRST CENTURY Sunday after its birth — even though it were born on a Saturday night — must be taken to church to be bap- tized. It must be kept in the cold there for all the hours that the precentor and the parson might see fit to occupy, and then, in some cases at least, it must be immersed in the water of a font from which the icy surface had just been broken away. It has been suggested that a great many New England babies were thus prematurely baptized into heaven — in other words, that the infant mortality of that time, which was well-nigh frightful, may have been due in consider- able part to the church exaction of prompt baptism un- der unfavorable conditions. There were other causes of infant mortality however, in the imperfect heating of houses, in the unwise drugging that prevailed, in the lack of drainage and proper ventilation, and in other con- ditions of life in the New England of that time. And there was compensation for the excessive infant mortality in the equally excessive birth rate. The men of Puritan New England were accustomed to marry early and often. Bridegrooms at the time of their first mar- riages were usually under twenty years of age, and if they were widowed they were never long, as the old records show, in taking new partners to themselves. Twelve or fifteen children constituted an ordinary family. Fifteen or twenty children were not unusual. Families of from twenty to twenty-five children were so frequent as not to excite any wondering remark, and EDUCATION, RELIGION, MARRIAGES 197 there are records showing even thirty or more children as the sheaf of a single father and mother. In New A wedding in New Amsterdam. York families were scarcely so large as in New England, but men and women in that colony married early, and family life was honored as the only fit condition. 198 OUR FIRST CENTURY The psalm singing of that time was a very dismal and soul-wearying performance. We know because both the words and the "music" survive to us in trustworthy rec- ords. The sermonizing was even dryer and drearier. We know for the reason that all the printing presses of New England were chiefly employed, for a hundred years and more, in printing sermons, and hundreds of those discourses survive on the remoter shelves of our great libraries. They dealt almost entirely with matters of theological doctrine, scarcely at all with matters of right living. The parsons and the magistrates regulated con- duct much more directly than by sermonizing. They had the law for their weapon in such matters. It is easy to suppose that the sturdy, healthy New England boys and girls were the greatest sufferers from the religious intolerance and the all-embracing religious interference of the time. Their sports and pastimes were relentlessly kept within narrow bounds by an authority that had no hesitation in invading the home itself and prescribing rules for every act of life— rules chiefly de- signed to prohibit the indulgence of natural instincts and to forbid enjoyment. The Puritan boys and girls must all go to church, where they were herded together under the eyes of the stern tithing man, and compelled, not only to sit out the two or three hour long sermons, but to keep awake under all that soporific infliction. Worse still their young souls were tortured almost from infancy by concern for salvation and fear of damna- EDUCATION, RELIGION, MARRIAGES 199 John Eliot. (By permission from a portrait in the possession of the family of the late William Whiting, Esq.) 200 OUR FIRST CENTURY tion. Unhappily for them, they beheved in the gloomy Calvinistic doctrines preached to them from the pulpit and taught to them in their homes. Their minds were constantly directed to the fact that they were in immi- nent danger of dying and going to hell. They were taught that some are born to be saved and some are born to be dammed, both by eternal decrees, made ''before ever the foundations of the world were laid," and that the number of those born to the one fate or the other " is so fixed and limited that it can neither be added to nor taken from." Old records and diaries show us that even in tender infancy, little children of three or four years of age were taught these doctrines in ways that might well have driven them into convulsions or made raving maniacs of them. Judge Sewell, whose diary is perhaps the best mirror of that time, tells us how he used to " labor " with his little four year old child, praying with her, read- ing sermons and psalms to her, and the like, until the little girl lost all interest in everything except the problem- atical saving of her poor, innocent soul, which, she feared, a jealous God might have foreordained to eternal dam- nation for no fault of her own but because of the diso- bedience of Adam and Eve. Let us not judge these people too harshly. Let us not measure their conduct or their attitude of mind by the standards of a more enlightened age. We must bear in mind that they sincerely believed in these doctrines, EDUCATION, RELIGION, MARRIAGES 201 so sincerely indeed that no question of their truth ever entered their minds. They were sure that these were the direct and unquestionable teachings of God himself, which it would have been blasphemy even to doubt. They regarded this life as nothing more than a prepara- tory school for the life that is to come. Therefore they cared nothing for any consideration of happiness or com- fort in this life if the future life and the soul's welfare were involved. They loved their children, and they be- lieved those children to be in imminent danger of hell. They thought it no harm, but altogether a duty, there- fore, to subject their little ones to these afflictions of the spirit by way of saving their souls. Marriage in the Puritan colonies was a very practical affair, with an eye to the main chance always. There was sentiment underlying courtship, without doubt, but very little of that sentiment appears in such records as we have of the times. It was the custom when a man of means proposed marriage to a woman of means, par- ticularly if she happened to be a widow possessed of property left to her by her first husband, for the suitor to dicker with his inamorata as to how much money or property she should leave to him by will, in the event of her dying before he did. And the ladies in the case were equally exigent, though, as the records show, they usually got the worse of the bargain. At first, and for long afterwards, the ministers took no part in the solemnization of marriages. This was 202 OUR FIRST CENTURY because of their sleepless abhorrence of " popish " prac- tices. They feared to perform marriage services in re- ligious ways, lest they should be thought to sanction the Catholic doctrine that marriage is a sacrament. Widows marrying again, often wore no clothes except their shifts at the ceremony. This was to signify that they brought no property to their new husbands, who were thus exempted from all obligation to pay any debts their brides might have inherited from their first spouses. In New York there was a like attention to the ^' tem- poralities " in marriage, but as the Dutch vrauws of that region were as alert and intelligent traders as their hus- bands were, there was far less inequality in the bargain- ing. In Virginia, Maryland and the southern colonies, sentiment seems to have played a larger part in matri- monial alliances. The widow was usually left in posses- sion of everything, as the custodian of the children, and in the making of marriages this seems to have been as- sumed as a matter of course. As we have seen, there was more or less of religious intolerance in all the colonies, except Rhode Island, but nowhere was it so painfully manifest as in the Puritan colonies of New England. Virginia did indeed decree the banishment of dissenters from the established reli- gion, but the decree was never very rigorously enforced. In none of the other colonies did religion so dominate the minds of men or so control their social relations as it did in the Puritan commonwealths. EDUCATION, RELIGION, MARRIAGES 203 In New York the Dutch Reformed church was dom- inant, and its doctrines were Calvinistic, but its domi- nance was at no time complete — either during the Dutch days or afterwards, when the Enghsh were in control. New York had the early advantage of being a commercial company's trading post rather than the seat of a propa- gandist colony. CHAPTER XXI LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES UP to the end of the seventeenth century, Hfe and manners in all the colonies were exceedingly simple. Even the families of those who were best to do lived in a fashion far ruder and simpler than that which pre- vails in our time in the remotest farming districts. They had horses and cattle now with many a flock of sheep, but as they had no roads much better than woodland trails, the settlements still clung closely to the coasts and the water courses which furnished convenient high- ways. Because of the lack of land highways, and especially of bridges across streams, there were scarcely any vehi- cles of any kind in use in the colonies until nearly the end of that century. When a few light carriages did at last come into use they had to be taken to pieces every time a stream was to be crossed. The separate parts were then packed into the rowboats that carried the passengers, while the horses swam at the side or behind the boats. 204 LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 205 The 'problem of the colonists still was to produce grain enough and meat enough to live upon, and so farming was the chief industry of all the colonies, except that in New England fishing, shipbuilding and commerce over sea supplemented it. The farming implements of that time were of the very rudest character, and most of them were imported at high cost from Europe. The firearms of the colonists were rude and clumsy. They were such as we should now deem unfit for use, either in attack or defence. Most of the guns in use were matchlocks. That is to say, they were guns which could be shot off only by touching a coal of fire to the powder in what was called the pan of the gun. Such a gun could be fired only once in a minute or two and not that often if the soldier's fuse happened to burn out. For in that case he must run to the nearest fire and re- light it before he could again discharge his matchlock. Moreover the gun itself, instead of being brought to the shoulder as guns are nowadays, was rested in some crotched sticks, and was fired with far greater slowness and difficulty than even large cannon are to-day. After a while a new kind of gun came into use which was distinctly superior to the matchlock. This was a gun in which there was a spring lock armed with a flint so placed that when the trigger was pulled the flint scraped down over a piece of roughened steel, created a shower of sparks, and ignited the powder in the gun. These flintlock guns continued in use until well into the 206 OUR FIRST CENTURY Armor worn by the Pilgrims in 1620. LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 207 nineteenth century. The American Revokition and the war of 1 812 were fought with flintlocks. But even such weapons as these were costly and very scarce among the colonists. A good deal of their fight- ing was therefore done with pikes and half-pikes, two forms of spear that were effective only at close quarters. Such weapons were the less effective in fighting Indians for the reason that the Indians rarely allowed themselves to be brought into close quarters. Even in our own day it is the habit of the Indians to fight from a distance, to retreat firing when pressed and never for one moment to come into hand to hand conflict if it is possible to avoid it. Of course the advantage of the colonists in having firearms while the Indians had only bows, arrows, spears, tomahawks and battle-axes, was soon lost to them. Laws were made forbidding the sale of firearms to the Indians, but everwhere in the world the greed of gain has always overridden the most wholesome and neces- sary laws, wherever profit might result from their viola- tion. Even in a time when the very life of the colonists hung in the balance of Indian warfare, there were base traders who gladly made money by selling to the In- dians the weapons they needed for the slaughter of the whites — men, women and children. Among the Indians it was the custom to regard the tribe rather than the individual as the unit of society. If any man of one tribe injured any man of any other tribe the injured man's tribe felt that it had a right to 208 OUR FIRST CENTURY hold that other tribe responsible for the wrong. The Indians applied this rule in their dealings with white men. If a white man cheated an Indian, or killed an Indian, or wronged him in any way, the Indian idea was not to hunt out the offender and punish him or ask the white man to hunt him out and punish him, but to make the wrong a cause for war between the tribe to which the injured Indian belonged and all the white men in the region roundabout. It is this pecuHarity of the Indian point of view which chiefly accounts for the fre- quency of Indian wars in those earlier times and for their merciless savagery. Under such conditions it was necessary for the Eng- lishmen in America to stand always upon their defence. They carried their guns with them always and they forti- fied fheir settlements with palisades and in other ways. Among these other methods of defence was the building of what were called blockhouses. These were made of hewn logs laid closely together and built up in such fashion that the upper story projected beyond the plumb line of the lower by a foot or two. This prevented scal- ing by those who might assault the blockhouse. In times of trouble all the settlers gathered in these blockhouses and used them as fortifications from which to fight off the Indian attacks by firing from slits in the walls. If the Indians had been determined war makers of course no blockhouse could long have stood their assault. They might have forced their way up to LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 209 it, and built fires around its base, thus driving its oc- cupants out of it into the open where they might be slaughtered without difficulty. But at no time in Ameri- can history have the Indians shown themselves to be de- termined fighters. Their method of warfare has always been to make a dash. If the dash were successful they slaughtered their victims ; if it were unsuccessful they re- tired and gave up the fight. The colonists early learned this by experience, and they ^^. arranged their defensive works in full recognition of the Indian habit of mind. One other gr^at difficulty that the early colonists en- countered was their total lack of knowledge concern- 'ing the cHmate and soil of the regions in which they had settled. After they had quit hunting for gold and for a northwest passage through the continent, they at last set themselves to farming. They did so however with a de- gree of ignorance which in many cases proved disastrous. They did not know what crops could be successfully cul- tivated in this country and so they tried practically everything of which they had ever heard — but chiefly such crops as grow only in warm climates. In New Eng- land they could grow corn, potatoes, turnips, pumpkins, N Ancient handmade spade. (State Agricultural Museum, Al- bany, N. Y.) 210 OUR FIRST CENTURY squashes, beans, peas, and the hke, but instead of that they tried the cultivation of silk, wine, madder, olives, tea, coffee, ■ cacao — the bean from which chocolate and cocoa arc prepared — and many, other things that can be grown only in tropical or low subtropical regions. These attempts of course resulted in failures and sometimes even in the impoverishment of those who made them. It was only little by little that such mis- takes w^ere corrected and that the colonists learned what crops they could grow with profit upon such lands and in such climates as they had. Little by little at the same time they learned how to live in their new surroundings. The New Englanders learned the use of sleds in winter and of snowshoes. Both they and the Virginians learnc: .ow to make the abundant game and fish a profitable food supply. In the meanwdiile all the colonists learned much that aided them to live comfortably in the regions in which they had settled. One important thing that they had learned by the middle of the century was how to build houses somewhat though not very well suited to the conditions in which they were living. At first they had put up bush shelters or dug holes in the ground. A little later they had built bark wigwams which did not and could not keep out the cold of winter. A little later still they learned how to build log cabins which they could chink and daub wdth mud so as to make them fairly comfortable habitations. LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 211 There were few sawmills in America in those days. Boards and planks were therefore exceedingly scarce and costly. Yet with growing prosperity the colonists Sawmill. (Facsimile, from " Virginia truly valued," by Edward Williams, 1650.) desired something better than logs with which to build their houses. They had acquired expertness in hewing out planks with a broadax and still more in riving out shingles and clapboards with a frow. Many of their houses, therefore, were built of these rough hewn planks 212 OUR FIRST CENTURY and still more of them — some of which are standing even unto this day — were covered with shingles. About the middle of the century they began to saw out boards and planks with what were known as whip- saws. In order to do this they placed a log upon two high trestles and with one man standing on top and one below they sawed out such lumber as they needed. It was a slow and costly method of manufacture but it was the best and cheapest then known. There was no such thing as a stove in existence at that time, and of course there was no such thing as a furnace or a steam radiator with which to warm houses. The use of coal as fuel had not yet begun. The only means of domestic heating, and even of cooking, was the great cavernous fireplace into which large backlogs were rolled and fires built upon and in front of them. These fireplaces were often so large as to admit of settles being placed within them at the sides of the fire for the sake of greater warmth and comfort. In each of them there was hung a crane. This was a bar, sometimes of green wood and sometimes of iron, hung upon hinges, which could be swung outward and inward at pleasure. Pots and kettles were hung upon it over the fire by hooks of varying lengths, while skillets, ovens, and the like were set upon the vast hearth where live coals were shoveled under them and upon their lids for purposes of baking. Frying pans were used simply by setting them upon hot coals in front of the fire. Coffee pots and the like were LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 213 set upon little three-legged iron rings called trivets, under which coals were placed. In some houses the fireplaces were built without jambs. There was simply a wall with a broad hearth in front, over which was a hood, leading to the chimney above. Fire was built upon the hearth and settles surrounded it. The fire was a fierce one, for wood was plentiful, but it did not warm the room except for a few feet in front of it. There were two reasons for this : First of all, the houses were so ill built as to let the wintry blasts into them freely ; in the second place, the chimneys them- selves had upward openings so vast that the cold air came down them as fast as the hot air rose. As a consequence of these conditions water froze even near the fire, and we have records showing that distinguished New England divines sometimes had to suspend the writing of their sermons because the ink froze in their pens, even when they sat within the fireplace. As another consequence, all the beds of that time were closely and unwholesomely curtained to keep out draughts, as was the case in England also, and every bed was warmed before use by passing a warming-pan filled with hot coals between the sheets. This necessity en- dured in England till the middle of the nineteenth cen- tury, as we learn from Dickens' account of the trial of Bar- dell V. Pickwick. Roasting was done in two ways. Sometimes the fowl or the pig or the cut of meat to be roasted was thrust 214 OUR FIRST CENTURY through with an iron rod, called a spit, so arranged that it could be turned by a crank. A reflector was placed behind it on the side opposite the fire so as to keep all of the heat within. Another, a simpler and a more generally employed way of roasting, was by hanging the meats to strings which depended from the ceiling. Under each roast a dripping pan was placed, and it was usually the task of the boys and girls of the household to twist the strings so that the roasts should continually revolve. The boys and girls were also required to baste the meats as they cooked, with the juices that fell from them into the drip- ping pans. Many houses of that time in New England consisted only of a kitchen, which served also as a living room, with some sleeping rooms above it, and in practically all the houses the large kitchen was the family room for all purposes. In Virginia the kitchen was always in a de- tached building and was occupied by negro servants. Lack of spaciousness in the rude dwellings of that time led to the invention of devices for making the most of such room as was available. The beds for grown people were raised on long legs, high above the floor, and under each there was a little trundle bed, on wheels, which could be drawn out at night for the use of the children. There were also beds that folded up against the wall when not in use. For light, the best of all appliances in use at that time LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 215 was the ordinary tallow candle of domestic manufacture. In Virginia and the region south of that, torches were often used, made of fat pine sticks which were set up in iron frames or sconces. In New Amsterdam, later New York, many of the chimneys were built of sticks and mud, and the result was that many fires occurred, until at last this source of dan- ger was removed by an ordinance forbidding the use of wood in the construction of chim- neys. Another precaution against fire in the towns was the employment of chimney sweeps ; with- out their services, which were compelled by law in New York, there was always danger of a con- flagration resulting from the ignition of the soot in chim- neys. In New England and Virginia this danger was often averted by another and simpler device. When the roofs were deeply covered with snow, or when a drench- ing rain was falling, great sheaves of straw were thrust Wrought iron lamp and sadiron. (New York State Cabinet of Natural History, Albany.) 216 OUR FIRST CENTURY up the chimney and set on fire. Thus the accumulated soot in the flues was safely burned away. But in New York and in Charleston, South Carolina, chimneys were swept at regular intervals by those who made a business of the matter. In Charleston, even up to the time of the civil war of 1 861-1865, the little negro chimney sweep, with his brooms and bags, was seen and his musical cry was heard in all the streets. As there were no such things as friction matches in those days, or for two centuries later, the keeping of " seed fire," by covering the coals with ashes was an important concern, and when by any accident the seed fire was lost, colonial boys were sent to the nearest neighbor's house — often many miles distant — to borrow a brand with which to rekindle the hearth. There were very few blankets, such as we now use, in those days. Quilts, stuffed with moss, tow, wool or whatever else might be available, were generally used instead. Everybody slept upon feather beds, and the Dutch in New Netherland also used lighter feather beds for a covering, precisely as many French and German people do to this day. In all the colonies there was a certain kindly neighbor- liness which in many ways ameliorated and improved the conditions of life. If there was illness in any house the neighbors volunteered to sit up with the ill person. If there was a death, the neighbors came in, not only to " sit up with the corpse," but to provide a cofiin and to LIFE IN THE EARLY COLONIES 217 take off the shoulders of the stricken family the work of arranging for the funeral. Kindly women went into the house and took charge of all the housekeeping affairs. Kindly men looked after the cattle and horses and did the woodchopping and whatever else there was to be done. In other and less distressing affairs of life, a like spirit of neighborly kindliness lent cheer to existence. If a man was building a house or a barn, he got the timbers ready, and then his neighbors came to help him in the " raising " of the framework. If he had cut the timber from a piece of ground that he wished to culti- vate, his neighbors all came to help him burn the brush and the logs. If a woman had painfully sewed scraps of cloth to- gether to make a quilt all the women of the neighborhood came joyously to her to help in the " quilting." When the farmer had gathered in his corn, he gave a " husk- ing bee," and all his neighbors worked by torchlight at the corn pile until the last ear was husked. All these neighborly co-operations were made the oc- casions of social frolics. When night came after the women had finished the quilting, the beaus came also. There was a supper and a dance. Kissing games were played and the jollity was unembarrassed by any foolish conventionality. When the time of the corn husking came, the women as well as the men took part and whenever a red ear 218 OUR FIRST CENTURY was found the finder — woman or man — was entitled to a kiss from the nearest one of the opposite sex. The com pile was carefully divided into two equal parts. There was a " choosing up" between two chiefs so that the number of buskers on the two sides should be equal. Then there was a race to see which side should first finish the husking of its share of the corn. The struggle was often exciting and always interesting. After it was over, there was a supper, and after that a dance. There were apt to be plentiful potations of hard cider or something stronger as an accompaniment to these frolics. In these and a score of other ways, there was neigh- borly co-operation, which at once eased the work of the colonists and gave to them the advantage of an enjoyable social intercourse. CHAPTER XXII WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY THE SERVANT QUESTION SOME FEATURES OF DOMESTIC LIFE THE purchase, early in the century, of a few kid- napped negro slaves, from a Dutch skipper, by the colonists at Jamestown was in fact the beginning of negro slavery in America. But it was a beginning which did not lead to much until nearly a century later. Now and then a negro slave was brought into the colo- nies and sold. At that time there was nowhere a thought that it could be wrong for white men to enslave negroes from Africa. In the first place these negroes were heathen men and pagans. In the second place they differed so radically from white men in their color, and otherwise, that nobody in that day regarded them as human beings akin to our own race. But no consider- able demand arose in any of the colonies for negro slaves during a long time after that first purchase of Africans. And so the number of such slaves increased very slowly. Negro slavery played a very small part indeed in colonial life during the greater part of that first period of ninety years. There was another sort of slavery, however, which 219 220 OUR FIRST CENTURY brought great numbers of men to the colonies and for the better part of a century these men were relied upon to do, as bond servants, the rougher duties of life. These white slaves were of several classes. The best of them were those who had sold themselves into slavery for a limited term of years by way of escaping from im- prisonment for debt in England. In England at that time it was the inhuman practice to condemn men who owed money that they could not pay, to loathsome pris- ons, thus robbing them of all opportunity to pay off their debts by industry or to earn a living for themselves. In order to escape from this inhumanity many of these poor debtors agreed with their creditors to come out to America as bondsmen for a term of years, the creditors to receive whatever compensation they could get from the sale of their debtors as servants. At the end of their term of service these men became free again in a new country where, if they were energetic, they could begin life anew with at least the hope of earning a living. Each of them, when released at the end of his term of servitude, was permitted to take with him one hoe, one ax, and one suit of clothes. The same rules applied to another class of white bond servants who came out in considerable numbers at that time. These were men who, finding themselves abjectly poor in England, and hopeless of bettering themselves there, voluntarily went out to America under contract with shipmasters and other speculators, to serve as bonds- men for a given number of years, after which they should WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY 221 be free. They were sold for their terms of service by those who had paid their passage to America. Some of them, being men of education and capacity, ultimately rose to positions of prominence in America, while a good many of them, without rising into prominence, managed to establish themselves in comfort in the new land and to build up moderate fortunes for their famiHes after them. But like all other traffic in human beings this one was attended by much of wrong and cruelty. The English authorities rid themselves of the care of many of their paupers and criminals by forcibly sending them out and selling them as bond servants in the colonies. Many in- dentured servants in England were in like manner shipped to the colonies by their masters and sold for the period of their apprenticeship, which usually ran from four to ten years. Orphaned children, left without means of support, and therefore liable to become a charge upon their parishes in England, were sent away and sold in like manner. Worst of all, this traffic in white slaves became profit- able and gangs of unscrupulous men were organized in England who deliberately kidnapped men and boys and sold them into this species of slavery. Sometimes they got their victims drunk and removed them, while in that state, to the deck of a ship. When the victims came to their senses they were far out at sea and were informed that they had signed an agreement to be sold as bond 222 OUR FIRST CENTURY servants in America. Sometimes men were seized by simple violence, without the preliminary formality of making them drunk, and carried by force into slavery. llie system was a cruel one and one founded upon the greatest wrong. Nevertheless in very many cases it served to benefit its victims, precisely as negro slavery has incidentally educated savage Africans into civilized citizens of a great free nation. In neither case can the result be said to justify the means, but history can deal only with the facts. The colonists in the first century thus had four kinds of servants — negro slaves, white slaves, captured Indians and hired heljD. Yet the " servant question," especially in New England, was as vexed and as vexatious then as it ever has been since. In the letters and other rec- ords that remain to us from that early time, we find the woes of housekeepers recorded in even bitterer words than those that mark the feminine conversations of our time. Mrs. Alice Morse Earle quotes from a letter written by the Reverend Ezekiel Rogers in 1659 ^s follows : " Much ado have I with ni}^ own family, hard to get a servant glad of catechising or family duties. . . . The young brood doth much afflict me." Many letters remain to us in which the heads of the best households in New England complain that they are reduced as to servants to one wild Indian girl who knocks the babies over the head and must be " beaten to a pur- WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY 223 pose," in order to secure better behavior. Many letters were written beseeching friends to buy servants for the writer from newly arrived cargoes of white slaves. The matter grew even worse after the seventeenth century ended, but it was so bad in the seventeenth cen- tury as to make a distinct and lasting impression upon A colonial flaxwheel. colonial life in New England. Finding it impossible to secure servants, the New Englanders — men, women and children alike — were forced to do everything for themselves, and practice made them perfect, the men in all sorts of outdoor work, and the women in every art of the cook, the housekeeper and the nurse. And to the work of the women in cooking and house- 224 OUR FIRST CENTURY keeping, there was another burden added which is quite unknown in our day, even among the less well to do. The women of every family must make with their own hands all the clothing worn by men and women folk alike — outer and under garments, coats and gowns, shirts, drawers and everything else. They must knit all the stockings and socks needed by the family, and they must color all of them in domestic dye pots. In most cases they must first make the cloths used in cutting out cloth- ing, washing and carding the wool, rotting and hackling the flax, spinning the one into yarn and the other into thread, weaving and dyeing the cloth, and even manu- facturing the thread with which to sew garments to- gether by hand, for the sewing machine was not dreamed of until two centuries later. Surely no women ever needed competent servants more than did these good colonial dames, and no women ever had less of such service at command. There was good to come out of even such conditions. Not only was skilled and tireless industry bred in all New England homes, leaving no time for languishing and morbid introspection, but a spirit of mutual helpfulness was born which undoubtedly did much for the develop- ment of sturdy character among the men and women of the time. Each family felt itself to be a unit. In each every member contributed what he could of service in aid of the general welfare. It was not thought at all unbecoming for the boys to help the girls with the fam- WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY 225 ily washing, the milking, the butter making, the sweep- ing and scrubbing, or even with the cooking. And the girls in their turn thought nothing of going into the fields to help in hoeing corn or planting or digging pota- toes, when the crops needed their services. A spirit of mutual helpfulness was bred by these conditions which has contributed far more than we can easily realize to the subsequent prosperity of this country of ours and to the character of its people. Much of the work was done in the spirit of frolic. When the time came for drying apples or making apple butter, or pressing cider, or killing hogs and converting them into a year's supply of meat, every member of the family old enough to walk took part in what all regarded as a jollification. The boys thought it ** great fun " to hitch a horse to a sled, go into the teeming orchards, load their sled with apples and haul them to the cider press or to the house, accordingly as they were to be pressed into cider or dried for winter use. When evening came the whole family gathered before the " great bearded fire " in the vast kitchen, and all set to work to " peel, quarter and core " multitudinous apples for the morrow's drying or for the apple butter kettles. Corn cutting and shocking, and later the husking of corn in the field shocks, were done in a like joyous spirit of frolic at work. Hog killing time was a festival. Beginning before dayhght, great fires were kindled into which stones were o 226 OUR FIRST CENTURY thrown — this especially in Virginia where the number of hogs grown on every plantation was great. When the stones were at white heat, they were lifted out of the fire with tongs and plunged into hogsheads of water, Primitive mode of grinding corn. half buried slantwise, in the ground. When the water boiled and bubbled, the freshly slaughtered hogs were plunged into it and the men in charge scraped off the hair and bristles and dressed the carcasses ready to be cut up and cured. They also cut off the tails and gave them to the children, who roasted them in the bonfires and ate them without bread, generally devouring them WHITE AND BLACK SLAVERY 227 half cooked, to their souls' delight. In the evening came sausage chopping, souse making and a dozen other de- lights that counted for more with the boys and girls of that time than we can imagine now. With all their hardships and with all the crudity of their lives, we have no occasion to pity those happy colonial boys and girls who became our great grandfathers and great grand- mothers. One custom, which is now slowly passing away, but very slowly, was born of the conditions described in this chapter. The practice of giving all of Saturday in each week as a school holiday — a practice until recently well- nigh universal in America — seems to have originated in the circumstances of colonial life herein set forth. As there were no competent servants available, every family in that time must do its own work — outdoor and indoor. As Sunday was very rigidly observed as a sabbath, and as all work was forbidden on that day, the boys of every family were needed on Saturday to cut and split the Sunday's supply of wood, and to do such other things as might serve to spare work on Sunday. The girls were needed to roast meats, bake beans, make pies, and in other ways to provide supplies that might carry the fam- ily over Sunday without the necessity of cooking. As a necessary consequence, schools were closed on Saturday in order that the boys and girls might help in the neces- sary preparation for the sabbath, and although the con- ditions which gave birth to the practice have long since 228 OUR FIRST CENTURY passed away, the practice itself survives in most schools, even unto this clay, as practices and customs that have their origin in necessity usually long survive the neces- sity that gave them birth. So far as the records that remain to us show, the '< servant problem " was never so acutely felt in the other colonies as it was in New England. There are several suggestions of reasons for this. For one thing the other colonies were more abundantly supplied with the neces- saries and luxuries of life than the New England set- tlements were. For another the colonists, outside of New England, led a more generous, a less exacting and a more entertaining life than did the New Englanders. There was less of insistence upon prayers and thanks- givings and fasts and church attendance to afflict the servant class. But chiefly the difference probably lay in the fact that white and black servants were much more plentiful in the other colonies than they were in New England, and in slavery the negro especially is a much more docile servitor than any white person ever is. CHAPTER XXIII DRESS, SPORTS AND PUNISHMENTS SUNDAY LAWS AND SUNDAY OBSERVANCES THE dress and manners of the colonists in that early first century of American settlement were rude, of course, if judged by the standards of our time. The farmers and other workingmen of the poorer class wore breeches made of leather. Those of the better to Colonial loom. do classes used such cloths as they could get. The breeches of all classes ended at the knee, below which were stockings with stout high shoes or boots for the feet. 229 230 OUR FIRST CENTURY The first cloth made in the colonies was woven of tow — which consists of the refuse fibers of the hemp. The outer clothing of women was made chiefly of what was known as linsey-woolsey or more commonly simply as linsey. It was a domestic cloth woven in home looms with cotton or hemp threads running in one di- rection and woolen threads running in the other. In the remoter districts many of the men who were engaged in lumbering and other such occupations clad themselves chiefly in the skins of animals, wild and domestic, and in leather. The early colonists, before a better to do class came out, particularly those in Virginia, had been rude, sport loving people in England and had lived more or less roughly there. In coming to America they had brought their manners and customs with them. In Virginia the people rejoiced in cockfighting, horse rac- ing and other sports which involved more or less of risk and brutality. They were especially fond also of hunting and shoot- ing. For this they had abundant oppor- tunity. There was not only the native wild game, from deer and black bears, to turkeys and partridges and squir- W at ch and chain of the colo- nial period, in possession of Charles Dray- ton, of Drayton Hall, S. C. SPORTS AND PUNISHMENTS 231 rels, for them to shoot but a more exciting sport was open to them. In the very earhest days after cattle, hogs and horses were imported, many of these animals strayed away into the vast swamps and forests, running wild there. In the course of a few years they developed breeds as untamed as those of the native wild animals themselves. To hunt these fierce wild cattle and still fiercer wild hogs, having cruel tusks four or five inches long and skill in using them, was a sport that es- pecially appealed to the rough but sturdy manhood of those early Virginians. There was excitement in the sport and quite enough of danger in it to give it zest in the minds of such open-air men as they were. In New England there was far less of the sporting impulse. The Puritans who first settled New England were men of exceedingly sedate minds. They were little given to sports or to enjoyment of any kind. They took life very seriously indeed, regarding this life in fact as nothing more than a period of probation for a life to come. It is true that in their industries and in their dealings they shrewdly took care of them- selves in all pecuniary ways but they were not given to frivolity of any sort, and except in so far as the chase might minister to the support of their families they in- dulged in it far less than did the lighter hearted Virgin- ians. There was one great day in New England for the assembling of the people and that was called muster day. 232 OUR FIRST CENTURY It was the day on which all the men of military age were summoned to receive that amomit of instruction in the military art which was deemed necessary to render them fit for the soldierly duty of defending the colony against its enemies. Muster day was a day of universal frolic and enjoyment. On that day everybody drank hard cider in unlimited quantities, while those who had acquired a taste for it drank Ja- maica rum. It was on muster day that men who had offended against the law or against jDublic senti- ment, as represented by the church, were stood in the stocks or placed in pillory. It was the privilege of all those other men who had been drink- ing hard cider or Jamaica rum as the case might be, to pelt these unfortunates with clods or stale eggs, or whatever else in the way of a missile might be handy. Muster day and other days of public gather- ing were selected for the punishment of these men in order that they might be thus shamed into a better life, and in order that others might be deterred from offences Costume of a burgomaster of New Amsterdam. (From a portrait in the New York Historical Society.) SPORTS AND PUNISHMENTS 233 Costume from portrait of Major Robert Pike (1690). such as they had committed, by seeing the severity of their punishment. In all of the colonies there were special efforts made to curb the tongues of scolding women. In Virginia, and in some others of the colonies, an old English law was revived and enforced for the punishment of " common scolds." Women convicted of this offence were fastened into a seat at the end of a swinging pole hanging over the water of a pond and were forcibly ducked again and again until half exhausted by the experience. The apparatus used for this purpose was called a ducking stool and the punishment seems to us, in our time at least, a cruel one. In Massachusetts and some other colonies a different method, but one scarcely less severe, was employed. There every woman who was convicted of scolding was gagged, bound in a chair, and placed at her own front door where all passers-by might see and jeer at her. It is not recorded in the annals of that time that any law against scolding was enforced in the case of men who indulged in that vice. To us it would .seem that men, if they had been generous, ought freely to have granted to women the small privilege of scolding, which was almost the only form of protest they could make against the oppression of their lives — for in that hard 234 OUR FIRST CENTURY time the lives of women were indeed sorely oppressed. After all, the revolt of the colonies against English op- pression, which much later developed into revolution, was for a long time nothing more than an indulgence in scolding. But in that day women were held to a much severer discipline than men thought it necessary to im- pose upon themselves. The authority of the church, as we have seen, was dominant in New England communities, and so all profane swearing was regarded and treated as an offence against the law. Such swearing was punished Costume from the portrait of Jonathan by the pmchmg of the tongue with Mason (1695). a split stick and by the exaction of a fine in addition. It was an era in which it was thought possible to make men and women moral by legal enact- ments and to compel good behavior by fear of punish- ment. In order to accomplish that result, which has been impossible in all history, the law in most of the col- onies prescribed for certain offences that men should be whipped on the bare back or burned with a hot iron, or, in extreme cases, that their ears should be cut off. For the very gravest offences it was prescribed that men and women should be burned alive or hanged in chains. These extreme penalties, however, were very rarely in- flicted. There were other punishments which must have been SPORTS AND PUNISHMENTS 235 scarcely less grievous to those who suffered them and these were frequently prescribed. Common as it was to drink rum and hard cider, and familiar as the people of that time must have been with the sight of men under the influence of alcohol, the law drew a rigid line at ha- bitual drunkenness. A Httle spree on muster day or at other times of festivity was lightly regarded, but habitual drunkenness was treated as a crime to be rigorously pun- ished. A part of the punishment con- sisted in compelling the offender to wear upon his breast a big letter " D," the presence of which should proclaim and advertise his shame to all his neigh- bors. Those who have read Haw- collar of Gov. thorne's superb romance of "The John Endicott Scarlet Letter," know that for offences against chastity on the part of women a like terrible punishment was inflicted. A woman found guilty by the church or by the law — for the two were substantially the same in that time — was compelled to advertise her own shame by wearing always upon her chest the scarlet let- ter "A." In the colonies, as everywhere else, laws and severe punishments utterly failed to make men and women more moral than they were naturally inclined to be. In spite of laws, drunkenness was far more common then than now, while heavy drinking, falhng jus* short of drunk- enness was well nigh universal, even ministers indulging 236 OUR FIRST CENTURY freely. As for chastity, the records show that there was a very high percentage of illegitimacy at that period. The Puritans brought with them to this country a fixed idea that the first day of the week, or Sunday, should be observed as a Sabbath, not only with all the rigor of the Mosaic law of Sabbaths, but with even more of restric- tion upon men's liberty to do as they pleased. Even in Virginia, where the people were easy-going, and far less in- Collarof Gov clined than men in more rigorous climates Edward Wins- were to cnforcc their views upon other '^ people, there were rigid Sunday laws which, if they had been enforced, would have interfered seriously with the comfort and freedom of the people. Fortunately for the people of Virginia they were never enforced. It was the custom of everybody in that colony to go to church, if for no other reason, because at church every man met his neighbors and could there talk over such matters of common concern as might be of interest. Usually the gentlemen of Virginia, having gone to church and having greeted the gentlewomen as they alighted from their carriages at the door of the sanctuary, went off into the groves nearby and there, sitting under the trees, discussed matters of common concern while the gentlewomen within the church listened to the services and made the responses prescribed by the liturgy. Be- yond that, Sunday laws were never rigidly enforced, either in Virginia or in the colonies lying farther to the SPORTS AND PUNISHMENTS 237 south. A fervent sun seems always, in every land, to be antagonistic to rigidity in such matters as these. In colder New England the Sunday laws were enforced to the letter. pA^erybody in those colonies was required to go to church or to furnish a sufficient reason for having Dutch costume. (From an engraving on the tankard presented to Sarah Rapelje, the first white person born in New Netherland.) stayed away. In Massachusetts the law provided that no person should be permitted to walk in the streets on Sunday except in reverently going to church or return- 233 OUR FIRST CENTURY ing from the services. In those parts of the Massachu- setts colonies in which the seashore lay near, it was especially forbidden that people should wander to the beaches, even though, upon reaching them, they should sit down and reverently contemplate God's work in creat- ing the ocean whose surf beat at their feet. Both at the North and at the South, it was the cus- tom to have two or three religious services during a sin- gle Sunday, with a long intermission at noon for lunch- eon. In New England and some of the other colonies, there were little houses or shanties built near the meet- ing house, so that the people might be kept warm and dry during this dinner recess. These were called " noon houses." Sometimes, instead of several small noon houses, one large one was built to serve all the people at once. The churches were not warmed at all, so that between services often lasting for many hours at a time, the comfort of the noon houses was exceedingly wel- come. In the Southern colonies neighboring planters entertained the congregation at their homes during the noon hour. In one recorded case a single planter of great wealth and liberality, always did this for all comers. CHAPTER XXIV SUPERSTITION AND WITCHCRAFT THE people of that time were not only deeply reli- gious. They were also profoundly superstitious. They believed in all kinds of " signs and omens." Lovelorn girls would swallow chickens' hearts whole, and wish for the favor of their lovers while doing so, and they were confident that such a charm would " work." When peeling apples it was their custom, if they man- aged to make a single peeling of a whole apple, to throw it over their shoulders, wishing at the moment, and then to decipher from its sprawling position on the floor some letter which might be the initial of a desired lover's name. When the thrifty housewife was churning if the butter was slow to " come " the good woman always concluded that there were witches in the churn, and by way of exorcis- ing them she would drop red-hot horse shoes into the milk. When pigs grew sick it was promptly assumed that somebody had bewitched them and by way of re- moving the spell the farmer cut off the ears and the tails of the animals and burned them in a fire, uttering well- understood incantations. At that period in the world's history the belief in 239 240 OUR FIRST CENTURY witchcraft was general, not only in the colonies in America but equally in England. Even Sir Matthew Hale in England, great jurist that he was, sat upon the bench, conducted trials for witchcraft and condemned men and women to be put to death for that crime. It is not a matter of wonder therefore that among the colonists who were far less well educated than the ju- diciary of England, the behef in witchcraft was general. In almost every colony there were witchcraft trials from time to time and it was only when this belief became epidemic at Salem, and resulted in some excesses there, that it was driven out of the minds of the people. The way of it was this. Near the end of the seven- teenth century certain girls in Salem, who were probably suffering from the malady known as hysteria, insisted that they had been bewitched. They charged certain persons in the community with the crime of having be- witched them. They offered no proof of this, but the courts accepted their testimony and condemned the people whom they accused to suffer the pains and penal- ties imposed by the law upon those who practiced witch- craft. In our day, even if witchcraft were believed in, the courts would insist that in the case of any accused person, the charge that he or she had practiced that art should be proved beyond peradventure. But in the seventeenth century these things were largely taken for granted, and the accusations made were in many cases deemed conclusive in themselves. One hundred and SUPERSTITION AND WITCHCRAFT 241 fifty persons first and last were arrested upon the charges of these girls, and twenty of them were put to death under judicial authority. Every delusion of that kind grows by what it feeds upon, and so, as one after another of the accused persons was executed, the girls raised their standards of accusa- tion. They had begun by laying their charges against poor and ignorant old women, but little by little they ad- vanced until at last they brought their accusations against persons of the very highest standing in the church and the community. This made the matter serious. To hang or burn a poor old crone for witchcraft was one thing, but it was quite another to hang or burn a man or woman who stood high in the community and whose character was recognized as above impeachment. Even the loose-going courts of that time recognized this distinction, and pres- ently the prosecutions were halted, and reason again asserted itself. The belief in witchcraft waned, and still more the people and the courts ceased to regard with credence the accusations of these hysterical girls. Indeed there was a pronounced reaction from this craze. The very jurymen who had condemned witches to death, publicly begged pardon of their neighbors for having done so, and at least one of the judges, who had sentenced persons to death on charges of witch- craft, not only apologized for his offence, but volun- tarily subjected himself to a rigorous fast once a year P 242 OUR FIRST CENTURY so long as he should live, as an act of penance for his crime. From that day till this the belief in witchcraft has never manifested itself in this country in a grievous way. There are some even now who believe in such things, but their beliefs are not accepted by intelligent people and nothing could be more impossible than the thought that any court in our country should now con- demn a man or woman to suffer death or even any lighter penalty on a charge of that kind. CHAPTER XXV COMMERCE, NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY WHEN the people of Salem, Boston and Philadel- phia began building ships some new conditions were created out of which a good deal of history was destined to grow. The young sailors of the colonies set forth in these ships to seek their fortunes. They quickly built up a profitable trade along the coast, exchanging the prod- ucts of the northern and southern colonies to the very great advantage of both. More important still, they traded to the West Indies, to the " Spanish Main " — as the coasts of central and South America were called — and to the Mediterranean. As a consequence of this trade the colonists began to grow rich and prosperous. They were trading their wheat, corn, tobacco, lumber, furs, skins, mackerel, cod, tar, pitch and turpentine, and whatever else they could produce, to the people of foreign lands for goods that were wanted in the colonies. But, as we know, these colonies had not been estab- lished for the benefit of the colonists. They had been planted with an eye single to the profit of English manu- 243 244 OUR FIRST CENTURY facturers and speculators. It did not please those Eng- lish manufacturers and speculators that the colonists should sell their wheat, corn, lumber, tobacco, fish, furs, and the like to other than English buyers, or that they 'should take in exchange other than English goods or goods imported into England to be exported to the colo- nies at a large profit. The age was an arbitrary one, in which it was assumed that trade ought to be controlled by legal enactments, and that the natural instinct of men to better themselves by commerce should be restrained and regulated by statutes. The English notion was that the colonies existed solely for the benefit of English traders and manufacturers, and that any attempt on the part of the colonists to trade on better terms with other nations was an endeavor to rob the English traders of their rightful tribute. The colonists did not accept this view of the situation. They were, by their toil and their energy, producing valuable commodities. They were building and sailing ships to carry those commodities to market. They nat- urally sent them to the best markets they could find — the markets in which they could get the best prices for their commodities, while buying there the goods they wanted at the lowest prices. Accordingly they traded with the Spanish West Indies and with the Mediterra- nean countries, and through Spain with the far East, rather than with England. In order to check this the English government in NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 245 165 I enacted a law which was intended to compel the English colonies in America to trade with England alone. This was called the Navigation Act. It prescribed that all the products of the colonies, in excess of their own needs, should be sent to England, or to England's col- onies, for sale. It provided further that all the goods l^roduced elsewhere in the world, which the colonists might wish to buy, should be bought only of English merchants. Now it so happened that the trading ships from the colonies could buy tea, for example, much more cheaply in Spain than they could in England, while at the same time they could sell colonial products — wheat, corn, fish, lumber, tobacco, hemp, wool, rosin and the like — for bet- ter prices in Spain than those which English buyers were willing to pay. In the same way the Yankee ships found it much more profitable to trade with the Spanish Main and the Spanish West Indies — exchanging their fish, grain, etc., for sugar, molasses, coffee, dyestuffs, spices and rum — than to carry on a like trade with those of the West India Islands which were held by the British. Accordingly the colonial shipowners and shipmasters refused from the first to obey that English Navigation Act which forbade them to trade with other countries than England and England's dependencies. They saw no justice in a law which sought to compel them to sell their colonial products in England for less than they 246 OUR FIRST CENTURY could get for them in other countries, and to buy in Eng- land the goods they wanted at higher prices than those that were asked for the like goods in other countries. The colonists were altogether right in holding this law to be unjust. It was a law enacted by a government foreign to themselves for the sole purpose of compelling them to pay a money tribute to men in England who had done nothing whatever for the colonies. It was rob- bery, pure and simple, under the forms of law. For three-quarters of a century afterwards, similar laws were from time to time enacted in England with the sole purpose of compelling the colonists to sacrifice their earnings for the enrichment of men who had no claim whatever upon them. As we shall see in the next volume of this history, it was this spirit of resentment and resistance to injustice, chiefly, that led late in the next century to the Revolutionary War. It was too soon yet for such a revolt to occur, though Bacon's Rebellion, in 1676, strongly foreshadowed its coming. In the meanwhile this unjust Navigation Act, made into law in 165 1, had immediate and im- portant consequences. Colonial shipowners and ship- masters, feeling its injustice to be extreme, simply re- fused to obey it. They traded whithersoever they pleased, and depended upon their sagacity to evade the law on their return voyages. They bribed customs ofificers when that was necessary. They ran their ships into obscure and unguarded creek mouths — especially in NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 247 the southern colonies where the whole coast is a tangled network of deep, half hidden water ways — and there unloaded them. But in the main it was not necessary to resort to these devices of concealment. PubHc sentiment in the colo- nies was so strongly in sympathy with the shipmasters in their determination to oppose, evade and defeat an un- just law, that nobody objected and nobody gave informa- tion, when ships that had traded with other countries than England, moored themselves to colonial wharfs without disguise or concealment, and there unloaded their cargoes. A sentiment of justice underlay all this. But the violation of law, even when the law is an unjust one, tends to breed in the mind a dangerously lawless senti- ment, and it proved to be so in this case. Smugghng and illicit trade were lawless of course. But even the best and most righteous men in the colonies consented to them, because of the law's injustice. The lawless spirit thus nurtured, after a while manifested itself in more dangerous ways. From smuggling, the minds of many shipmasters after a while reconciled themselves to piracy, and toward the end of the seventeenth century the seas east and south of the English colonies in America became infested with pirate ships, the more because the growing commerce of the colonies offered many and very rich prizes for the pirate crews to capture. 248 OUR FIRST CENTURY. The distinction between smuggling and piracy is a broad one of course. The smuggler is one who brings forbidden goods into a port, or who evades the payment of the customs duties that the law requires him to pay upon goods not forbidden. The pirate is one who roams the seas, seizing such ships as he can capture, robbing them of their cargoes, and putting their crews to a cruel death. But this distinction was not always clearly recognized at the time when piracy began to be prevalent in the seas east and south of the English colonies in America. In all of the colonies, except Virginia and Massachusetts, there was, at first, a sentiment of toleration for the pi- rates so long at least as they preyed only upon Spanish ships, letting American vessels alone. They were re- garded as scarcely more than smugglers of a larger growth who had found and adopted new and more effi- cient means of opposing and defeating the unjust English trade laws. These pirates, who became abundant a little before the end of the seventeenth century, practiced robbery on a large scale. They seized ships on the high seas, robbed them of their cargoes and compelled the people on board of them to walk the plank into the sea. They made de- scents upon the coasts of Central and South America — the region then known as " The Spanish Main " — and committed depredations there of the most outrageous sort. Sometimes they descended upon our own coasts NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 249 and made havoc there. Presently also they began seiz- ing Yankee ships as well as Spanish ones. In the main they were men of desperate character — the offscourings of the earth. But they had among them many men who had once been of a better kind. For one thing, it was their practice to recruit their depleted crews by seizing upon ships that were bringing out car- goes of white slaves from England. Very many of these men who were being carried out to serve in bondage preferred to join the pirates rather than be sold into servitude. Very many others, of tamer temper, preferred to become members of a piratical crew rather than "walk the plank " into the sea, which was the alternative offered them. But so lightly was piracy regarded in that time, that in some cases at least, men of high repute in church and in society, deliberately engaged in the nefarious busi- ness. Two of the colonies, Virginia and Massachusetts, from the very beginning set their faces sternly against piracy. The other colonies, confounding it with smuggling and with still more justifiable means of resisting an unwise law, for a time lent more or less countenance to the evil thing. In the end, however, all the colonies came to understand how much of evil and crime piracy involved, and all of them joined in efforts to suppress it as a menace to their trade by sea. Near the end of the century (1696) the merchants of Plymouth, in England, whose ships in large numbers had 250 OUR FIRST CENTURY been captured by the pirates, armed a vessel and placed one Captain Kidd, of New York, in command of it. They sent him out to make war upon these freeboot- ers of the seas. But instead of fulfilling his mission, he turned pirate himself, and with the lavishly equipped vessel which the merchants had given him, he presently became one of the fiercest scourges of the ocean. He ravaged the seas near the American coast and boldly sailed up many of the American rivers and inlets. Even to this day deluded men are frequently engaged in dig- ging here and there for the treasures which Captain Kidd is reported to have buried somewhere on our coasts. Kidd was caught at last and hanged for murder, as were also nearly all the other leaders of piratical en- terprises in that time. They were pursued and caught at first by the determined efforts of Virginia and Massa- chusetts ; a little later by those of the South Carolina authorities who practically made an end of the nefarious business. This extirpation of piracy was not completed until the eighteenth century was well into its teens, or even later, but it seems best thus briefly to tell the whole story here, rather than leave the conclusion of it to another volume. A shipmaster of Boston, who turned pirate, was caught and hanged in chains, and left hanging till the carrion crows picked his bones. This was done, as was pro- claimed at the time, in order that his punishment might " be a spectacle and so a warning to others." NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 251 > Captain Edward Teach, commonly called Blackbeard, as represented in the History of the Pyrates, by Captain Charles Johnson, 1734. 252 OUR FIRST CENTURY One of the most desperate and most terrible of the pirates, was a man who was known as " Blackbeard," because he wore a long beard which he pleated into awe- inspiring braids. Many of the Massachusetts and Vir- ginia expeditions that were sent out against the pirates, chased this peculiarly bloodthirsty desperado in vain. At last, in the early part of the eighteenth century, news of Blackbeard' s presence in an inlet on the coast of North Carolina reached the governor of Virginia. He promptly sent Lieutenant Maynard to the pirate's hid- ing place, with orders to take him and his crew, dead or alive. Blackbeard gave desperate battle of course. Among other precautions he stationed one of his men near his ship's powder magazine with orders to blow up the ship if by any chance Maynard should capture it. The battle that ensued was long and fierce, for May- nard and his Virginians were as resolute and as desper- ate in their courage as the pirate crew itself. Finally Blackbeard was killed, and when he was no longer alive to terrorize his men, Maynard succeeded in boarding and capturing his ship, and in making their possession of it complete before the men of the crew could carry out their dead leader's command to blow up the vessel with themselves and their conquerors on board. Maynard promptly cut off Blackbeard's head, hanging it to the bowsprit of the captured pirate ship, and sailed back to Virginia, where all his captives were promptly hanged for their crimes. NAVIGATION LAWS AND PIRACY 253 In the meanwhile Stede Bonnet, who had been a rep- utable gentleman and a dignitary in the church before he took to piracy, had made himself scarcely less a terror of the seas than Blackbeard was. Learning that he, too, was lurking somewhere on the North Carolina coast the South Carolina authorities sent Colonel Rhett to capture him. Colonel Rhett was a determined and a sagacious person. He found Bonnet in Cape Fear River, fought him, overcame him, and carried him with all his crew to Charles Town, where the whole company of them were hanged. A little later the governor of South Carolina captured two more pirate ships, whose captains and crews he hanged. These events, with other similar happenings and hangings, made a practical end of piracy in the seas east and south of the colonies. I CHAPTER XXVI THE WORK OF OUR FIRST CENTURY THUS at the end of the seventeenth century — a Ut- tle less than a hundred years after the first suc- cessful attempt was made to plant English colonies in America — twelve of the original thirteen colonies had been firmly estabhshed and built up into more or less prosperous communities by the courage, the endurance, the faith and the pluck of those who had come out to America to plant them. The thirteenth colony, Georgia, was not founded until the early part of the next cen- tury. The men who had begun this work at Jamestown were mainly unfit for it, but a better class had come to them and helped them. These, and the men who a little later settled in what is now Massachusetts, were the un- conscious founders of a nation. They did not know or dream what seed they were planting or what growths were to come of it. They were for the most part com- monplace, unimaginative people, living in their present and laying no large plans of nation building, but they were inspired in all the colonies by a courageous love of liberty and a resolute determination to maintain what 254 WORK OF OUR FIRST CENTURY 255 they considered their rights at all hazards and against all encroachments. Their work was hard, their dangers great and their hardships almost unbearable. They conquered the wild- erness, they subdued the forests, they reduced the land to fruitful subjection. Under circumstances harder than any that we can now conceive they established English colonies on these coasts, colonies which were destined to grow into the greatest republic of all time. More important still, they planted here a sentiment of liberty and a determination of self-government which has grown and ripened and borne fruit throughout the world. It is not too much to say that every civilized nation has benefited by the teaching of American prin- ciples, all of which were fixed in the minds of those colonists who insisted upon governing themselves as a matter of natural right. It is not too much to say that every nation in Europe has been made freer and better by reason of this planting of the seeds of liberty in the American wilderness. In the next volume of this series we shall see how liberty, born of this seed, developed, and grew into proportions so great that the doctrine and practice of despotism became no longer possible as the fundamental principle of government in any really civilized country. THE END. APPENDIX TABLE OF IMPORTANT CONTEMPO^ RANEOUS EVENTS The Old World. Svend's (Danish King) conquest of England, 1002-14. Gradual closing of the trade routes to the East, 1400-1525. Capture of Constantinople, 1453. Search for new (outside) routes : Portuguese voyages along the Af- rican coast, 1 4 20- 1 498, Diaz reaches Cape of Good Hope, i486. Ferdinand, 1479-1516, and Isabella of Spain, (d. 1504). Henry VH of England, 1485-1509. Vasco da Gama (?) reaches India, 1497-98. The Nezv World. Norse discovery, about 1000. Other possible voyages to 1347. Columbus's (S ') ist voyage, 1492- 93- Papal Demarcation Line, 1493. Columbus's (S) 2d voyage, 1493. John Cabot's (E) voyages, 1497, 1498. Columbus's (S) 2d voyage, 1498- 1500. (S. America.) Amerigo Vespucci (S) ist voyage, 1499 (?), with Hojeda. Cabral (P) (S. Amer,), 1500, Cortereal (P) (N. Amer.), 1500, 1501. Columbus's (S) 4th voyage, 1502-04. Amerigo Vespucci (S & P), 2d, 3d and 4th voyages (S. Amer.), 1500- 1503- First use of name America, 1507. Ponce da Leon (S), 1513, 1521. Balboa (S), 15 13. (S) Spanish; (E) English; (P) Portuguese; (D) Dutch voyages. 257 258 APPENDIX The Old World. Frances I of France, 15 15-1547, Wars of the Huguenots in France, 1 562-1 598. Queen Elizabeth of England, 155S- 1603. Philip II of Spain, 1 556-1 59S. Defeat of Spanish Armada, 1588. Henry IVof France, 1589-1610. Edict of Nantes, 1598. The New World. Magellan's (S) expedition circum- navigates the globe, 1519-21. Cortez's (S) conquest of Mexico, 1519-21. Verrazano (F), 1524. Gomez (S), 1524-25. De Ayllon (S), 1525. Narvaez (S), 1528 (De Vaca). Cartier (F), 1534-35, i54i- De Soto (S), 1539-42. Coronado (S), 1540-42. French (Huguenots) and Spanish in Florida, 1562-1567. St. Augustine (S), 1565. Frobisher (E), three voyages to N. Amer., 1 576-1578. Drake's (E) voyage around the world, 1 577-1 580. Raleigh's (E) expeditions, 1584- 1590. APPENDIX 259 ENGLAND. NEW ENGLAND. MIDDLE COLONIES. SOUTHERN COLONIES. FRENCH COLONIES. Voyages of — Gosnold, 1602. James I, 1603- Pring, 1603. D e M o n t s' 1625. grant, 1603. Ham p t o n Court Coufer- Weyrao'th,1605. Port Roy '1,1604. euce, 1604. Grant to the Grant to the C h a m p 1 a i n on coast, 1604. Plymo'thCo., 1606. London Co., 1606. Popliam Col- Jamestown Col- ony, 1G07. ony, 1607. Separatists; Pilgrims go to Quebec estb., 1608. Holland, 1608. Hudson's (D) John Smith's explorations, 1607-09. Lake Cham- Voyage, 1609. plain, 1609. Montreal estb., 1611. John Smith ex- Second (1609) and Third plores coast. 1614. Dutch establish C barters! trading posts on Hudson, (1612) of Vir-|L a k e Huron, ginia. discovered, 1613-1615. 1615. Lake Ontario, Grant to Coun- Representative 1615, cil of New Assembly in Engl'nd, 1620. Va., 1619. Slaves intro- Pilgrims sail, Plymouth, duced, 1619. 1620. 1620. Parliamentary Grants to Gor- Dutch West In- Indian massa- Protestation, ges and Ma- dia Co. estb.. cre, 1623. 1621. son, 1622, 1621. First Colo- nists, 1624. Manhattan isl. settled, 1626. Virginia a Roy- al Provincie, 1624. Charles I, 1625- 1649. Struggle btw. King and Par- Endicott's Col- liament, 16 25- ony at Salem, 1629. 1628. King rules Mass. Bay Co. Patroon sys- Quebec cap- without Parlia- c h a r t ered, tem, 1629. tured by Eng- ment, 1629-1640. 1629. Pviritan exo- dus to, 1629- 1640. New Ham'sh're lish, 1629. Re t u rned, 1630. Dutch on Dela- Lake Superior settlements, ware, 1631. d iscovered 1628-30. 1629. 260 APPENDIX ENGLAND. NEW ENGLAND. MIDDLE COLONIES. SOUTHERN FRENCH COLONIES. COLONIES. Govern iug Representative Board for Colo- system estb. nies estb., 1634. in Mass., 1634. Attack on Mass. Charter, 1635. C o n necticut tounded,1635- 36. Roger Williams founds Provi- dence, 1636. Harvard Col- lege, 1636. Hampden Case. "Ship Mon- ey," 1637. Long Farlia- ment and the Civil War, 1640-1019. "The Grand Remonstra'ce," 1641. Outbreak of Civil War, 1642, Charles I, Exe- cution, 1649. Com 'onwe'th and Protector- ate (1649-1660). NavigationAct. 1651. Rhode Island settled, 1638. New Haven set- tled, 1638. " Fundamental Orders" of Conn., 1639. Gorges' Royal Charter to Maine, 1639. .Mass. "Body of Li berties," 1641. N e w England Confederat'n, 1643. Roger Williams secures Char- ter from Par- liament, 1643. Federation of New Haven towns, 1643. Union of Rhode Island towns, 1647. New ICngland maintains its independence of Parli'me't, etc., to 1660. Swedish Colony on the J Dela- ware, 1638. New Haven's attempt to colonize on Del. 1641. Indian troubles in New Neth- erland, 1643- 45. S t u y vesant. Gov. of New Nether hind, 1647-1664. Dutch establ'sh Fort Casiniir on Delaware, 1651. Dutch capture "New Swe- den," 1655. Maryl'nd grant. Lake Michigan, 1632. Colony 1634. estb., 1634. Rebellion in Virginia vs. Gov. Harvey, 1635. Champlain's death, 1635. Gov. Berkeley's lirst admr. in Virginia, 1642- 52. Toleration Act, Mary land, 1649. Cavalier migra- tion to Vir- g i n i a, 1649- 1660. VMrginia recog- nizes Com- monwealth, 1652. Virginia a self- governi'g col- ony, 1 652-1 ()00. Civil War in Md., 1654-57. Explorations of the Northwest as far Wisconsin, 1640—1660. Lake Erie dis- covered. APPENDIX 261 ENGLAND. NEW ENGLAND. :\IIDDLE COLONIES. SOUTHERN COLONIES. FRENCH COLONIES. The Restora- Gov. Berkeley's tion—Charles second admr. French TI, 1660-85. in Virginia, Council of 1660-1677. Trade estb., 1660. Long Assembly exploration NewNavigati'n i n ^'irginia, Acts, 1660, 1661-1676. and 1661. Roj^al Charter to Connecti- cut, 1662. New Haven an- nexed. colonization C o nv cuticle Roval Charter continues. Act, 1664. to 'Rhode Is- land, 1663. Grant to the Charters of the Royal Commis- Duke of Yorli C a r o Unas, War with Hol- sion in Mass. of New Yorlv 1663, 1665. 1 a n d, 1664- 1667. Bay, 1664. 1664. Siirrender of New Nether- land, 1604. Grant of New Jersey to Berkeley and Carteret, 1664. "p]ast Jersey" settled, 1665- "The Funda- 67. mental Con- stitution" of C a r o linas, 1669. Berkeley sells C h a r 1 e ston his share of founded, 1670. F r o n t e n ac, New Naviga- New Jersey (lov. of New tion Act, 1672. to Quakers, 1672. Recouquestand Restor'tionof France, 1672- 82. Marquette and War with Hol- New York and Joliet on the land, 1672-74. Jerseys, 1673- 74. West Jersey colonized by Bacon's Rebel- lion in Vir- JNIississippi, 1673. King Philip's Quak'rs, 1675- ginia, 1676. War, 1675-76. 77. Mission of Ran- Rebellion in dolphtoMass. Andros,Gov. of M a r y land, Bay, 1676-81. N. Y., 1674-83. Grants to Wm. Penn of Pa. and Del., 1681- 82. 1676. Hennepin on New Ham'sh're P ennsylvania t h e Upper a Royal Prov- settled, 1682. Lord Culpeper, 31iss., 1680. ince, 1679-85. Dongan, Gov. of N. Y.,1683- 88. Gov. of Vir- ginia, 1679-84. La Salle ex- Mass. Bay Char- Joint Indian plores Miss. ter annulled, Treatv at Al- Valley to the 1684. bany,"l684. Gulf, 1679-82. 262 APPENDIX ENGLAND. NEW ENGLAND. MIDDLE COLONIES. SOUTHERN COLONIES. FRENCH COLONIES. Duke of York New York be- Huguenot (•(•Io- nization, lol- Fort St. Louis becomes King comes a Roy- estb., 1682. James II, al Province, lowing rev- 1685-89. 1685. ocation of Edict of I n a ugurates Andros, Gov. of Nantes, 1685. neAv colonial New Engla'd, P r oceedings Spanish destroy policy. 1686-89. against New Jersey Char- ter, 1686-88. Andros, (lOV. also of New York andNew Jersev, 1688- 89. Port Royal, S. C, 1686. De Nonville. Gov. of New France, 1685- 89. English Revo- Revolution Leisler's Revo- Coode's Rebel- lution, 1688- against An- lution inNcAV lion in IMarv- Frontenac,G'v. 89. dros' govern- ment, 1689. York, 1689. land, 1689. second time, 1689-98. William and Mary su'c'ed, 1689-1702. Bill of Rights, 1689. War with Louis XIV of France, 1689- French and In- Destruction of Sir Wm. Pliips 97. dian incur- Schenectady, (E.) captures sions, 1690. 1690. Port Roval , ^Massachusetts Leisler's Con- 1690. New Charter. vention at Al- M a r y land a Recaptured bv 1691, Plym- bany, 1690. Royal Prov. the French', outh, Maine Leisler execut- ince, 1691. 1691. and Nova Sco- ed, 1691. tia annexed. Salem witch- craft delu- sion. 169'J. Rhode Island and Conn, re- Andros, Gov. of tain their Virginia, 1692. Charters, College of Wil- 1692. liam and :\Ia- ry founded Pennsylvania, a 1693. Ft. Kaskaskia Royal Prov- estb. in Miss. ince, 1693-94. valley, 1695. Res t ored to New Found- Penn, 1694. land captured b V French, Andover, Mass. 1696. Board of Trade sacked by Peace of Rvs- estab., 1G9G. French, 1697. New Ham'shire a Royal Prov- ince,' 1698. wick, 1697. Iberville fo'nds French colo- ny i n Louisi- ana, 1699. INDEX Accidents in discovery, i. Adultery, punishment of, 235. Agriculture, Colonial, iSo, et seq. Albemarle Colony, 117, Andros, Governor of New Jersey, New York and New England, 142, et seq. ; his despotic rule, 143 ; arrested and banished by Massachusetts, 144. AvALON, Baltimore's first colony, 107. B Bacon, Nathaniel, 152; commands Virginia Army, 153; proclaimed and arrested, acquitted, 153, 154 ; driven into rebellion, 156; burns Jamestown, death, 157. Baltimore, Lord, 106, Berkeley, Governor of Virginia, 151, et seq.; arrests Bacon, 154; confiscates estates and hangs twenty-three colonists, 157 ; re- called in disgrace by the King, 157- Blackbeard, the pirate, 252. Blockhouses, 208. Bonnet, Stede, pirate, 253. Bradford, Wilham, 71. C Calvert, George, 106; Cecil, 108. Cannibalism at Jamestown, 43. Carolina, Grant of, 116; absurd constitution of, 118; Constitu- tion abandoned, i 20 ; Port Royal settlement, 120; removed to Ashley River, 121 ; Charles Town founded, 121 ; Huguenot im- migration, 122; crop problems, 123; rice, 124; indigo, 124; Indian war in Carolina, 125; soil, climate and physical ad- vantages, 125 ; planters' houses, 126; naval stores, 126. Carver, John, first governor of Plymouth, 66. Cavaliers, immigration of, to Virginia, 115, 148; their char- acter and standards of conduct, 148. CiiAMPLAiN founds New France, 160. Charles, II, his effort to reduce colonies to subjection, 140 ; an- nulment of charters, 141. Charter, the Great, of Virginia. 54 ; its grant of the rights of Englishmen and private owner- ship of land, 54 ; declaration of rights, 59. Churchgoing, in Virginia, 236; in New England, 237 ; double services, 238 ; noon houses and dinner entertainment, 238, 230. Claiborne, William, rebels against Baltimore, 109. Cloth making in the colonies, 188. Coffee and Tea, in the colonies, 263 264 INDEX i86 ; attempts to grow in New England, i8o, et seq. Colleges, earliest in America — Harvard and William and Mary, 193- Colonies, earliest one planted under London and Plymouth Companies' charters, failed, 15. Colonists, character of earliest, 15, 16, 21. Colony, first English, planted at Jamestown, 15, 21; absence of women, 18; governmental mis- takes, 18; guarantee of rights, 18; idleness of the people, 26; neglect of opportunities, 27, 28, 32 ; two women arrive in 1608, 39 ; first New England planted at Plymouth, 60 ; early chfficulties, 69; prosperity, 70 ; John White's 73 ; Massachusetts Bay founded, 74 ; its charter, 75. Commerce, Navigation Laws AND Piracy, chapter on, 243, et seq. Communism, in Virginia, iS, 19, 2;^, 49 ; at Plymouth, 69. Conditions in England that led to colonizing, 11, et seq. Confederation of New England colonies, first, 99, 100. Connecticut, migrations to, from Massachusetts, 89, et seq. ; union of Connecticut colonies, 91 ; first constitution, 91. Constitution, fiist written in America, 91. Crops, in the colonies, 180, et seq. D Dale's Government in Virginia, 45- De la Warr, saves Virginia colony, 44. Domestic Animals in the colo- nies, 184, 185. Dress of the colonists, 229, et seq. Drinking in the colonies, 186. Drunkenness, punishment of, 235- Dutch, in New Netherland, 85, et seq. E Education, Religion & Mar- riage, chapter on, 192, et seq lack of education, 192 ; no free schools and few of any kind 193 ; early educational move ment in Massachusetts, 193. Endicott, Governor of Massa chusetts, bigot and persecutor. 80. Error, fundamental, in sending out colonies, 14, et seq. F Failures of early colonies, 15. Families, large in New England, 196, 197. Farm Implements, traded to Indians at Jamestown, 26; scarcity of, in all colonies in early years, 39; become plentiful, 54; rudeness of, 205. Farm Animals, 54; run wild in Virginia, 54, 231, et seq. Firearms of the colonists, 205, et seq. First Century, work of, iSo, et seq. ; general review cf, 254, et seq. Fisheries, New England engaged in, 163, 182. French in America, 160; Quebec founded by Champlain, 160; priests and traders, 161, 162 ; extensive explorations made by, 162 ; relations with Indians, 168; quarrel with the Iroquois, 168; French & English hostility, 172; King William's war, 172, et seq. Frontenac, 172. G Gates and vSomers, expedition, 41, et seq. INDEX 265 Gorges & Mason, grants and set- tlements, 82, 83. Green, Roger, plants first settle- ment in the Carolinas, 117. H Harvey, Governor of Virginia, 150, 151. Hennepin, explorations of, 167, Hooker, Thomas, pioneer in Con- necticut, 90. Hudson, Henry, discoveries, 84. Huguenots, in CaroHna, 122. Hutchinson, Anne, banished from Massachusetts and flees to Rhode Island, 94, 95. Ignorance, and credulity in 14th and 15th centuries, 3, 5. Independence, Spirit of, in the colonies, 159. Indians, in Virginia, peaceful at first, 30 ; partially civilized, 30 ; outbreak of, in 1622, 58; hostil- ity at Plymouth, 67 ; relations with the Dutch, 102, 103, 104 ; with the French, 16S; King Philip's War, iii; in Carolina, 1 25 ; massacre and war in Vir- ginia, 152; modes of warfare, 207, 209 ; sources of trouble, 208 ; horrors of Indian war, 176. Industries in the colonies, 180, 185. Infant Mortality, excessive in New England, causes of, 196. Intercourse, lack of, between early colonies, 97 ; effect on de- velopment of institutions, 99; shipping and commerce as agents of closer intercourse, 99, et seq. Iron, early production of, 187, 188. J Jamestown settlement, 23 ; char- acter of site, 24 ; colony aban- doned and reestablished, 44 ; town captured and burned by Bacon, 156. JoLiET and Marquette, explora- tions of, 165. K Kidd, Captain, turns pirate, 249, 250. King Philip's War, in, et seq. King William's War, 172, et seq. La Salle, explorations of, 165, 166. Leather, manufacture of, 191. Leisler, Jacob, leads rebellion in New York, 146; hanged, but afterwards honored, 147 ; char- acter of, 147. Life in the Early Colonies; chap- ter on, 204 ; conditions of, at first, 77, 78 ; roads, bridges, horses and vehicles, 78, 204, 205 ; religious interference in domestic life, 198 ; P^irearms. 205, et seq. ; Pikes and half pikes, 207 ; Indian troubles, 207, 208 ; Indian dan- ger as affecting life conditions, 207,208, 209; blockhouses, 208 ; farming mistakes, 209, 210; ef- forts to grow tropical crops, 180, 186, 209, 210; Sawmills, whip saws, etc., 211; absence of stoves, 212; imperfect heating, 212; no coal used, 212; fireplaces, cook- ing utensils, cranes and trivets, 212; cold houses, bed curtains, feather beds and warming pans, 213, 214; methods of cooking, 213, 214 ; kitchens, 214; candles and torches, 215 ; mud and stick chimneys, 215 ; chimney sweeps, 215, 216; method of keeping fire, 216 ; beds and bedding, 216; neighborly habits, 216, 217; house raisings, quiltings, log roll- ings and corn huskings, 217, 218 ; white and black slaves, 219, et seq. ; the vexed servant question, 266 INDEX 219, et seq. ; -women's -work, 224 ; moral influence of hard life conditions, 224, 225 ; the frolic ^ element in work, 225 ; hog killing and other occasions, 226. London Company's Charter, 14. M Maine & New Hampshire, settle- ments in, 82, et seq. Manufactures in early colonies, chapter on, 187, et seq.; discour- aged and forbidden by English law 187; efforts to stop, 189; colonial laws to encourage 190, 191. Maryland, founded 106. et seq. ; powers of colony, 108. Mason & Gorges, grants to, 82, 83- Marquette and Joliet, explora- tions of, 165. Massachusetts Bay colony founded, 74 ; charter, 75 ; great migration to, 76 ; early Ufe con- ditions, 77, 78 ; character of early colonists, 78 ; migrations from, 89 et seq. ; religious dis- content in, 89, 90 ; confederation with other colonies, 99, 100 ; an- nulment of charter, 141, 142; Andros made governor of New York, New Jersey, and New England, 142 ; despotic proceed- ings, 143 ; arrested and exiled by Massachusetts, 144 ; early educa- tional effort in Massachusetts, 193- Marriages, early age of in New England, 196; practical character of, 201; dickers for property con- siderations, 201 ; ministers did not officiate at first, 201 ; widows married in their shifts, 202. Migrations, within the colonies, 122. Minuit, Peter, buys Manhattan, 86 ; governor of New Sweden, 102. Mississippi River, first explora- tions of, 165, 166. Mortality, of infants, excessive in New England, 196. Muster day in New England, customs of, 231, 232. N Nails, scarcity of, 188 ; buildings burned for their nails, 188; do- mestic manufacture of, 188. Navigation Act, terms of, 245 ; resistance to, 245, 246 ; conse- quences of, 246, 247. New Amsterdam, founded, 86; seized by English, 104, 105 ; name changed to New York, 105. New England, first colony at Plymouth, 60 ; character of New England colonists, 78 ; union of New England colonies, 99; King Philip's war, iii et seq. ; troubles under Charles II and James II, 142 ; Charter annulments and consolidation under Andros, 141, 142 et seq. ; Andros banished, 144 ; settlement of Rhode Island, 95 ; migrations into Connecticut and settlements there, 89, 91 ; see also under names of individ- \ial colonies, shipbuilding, com- merce, Puritanism, etc. New Hampshire, 82, et seq., see Gorges & Mason. New Haven, Colony founded, 96 ; intolerance, 96 ; merged into Connecticut, 97, New Jersey, 129, et seq. ; grant to Berkeley & Carteret, 129; Eng- lish settlements in, 130; half of, sold to Penn and province di- vided, 130; Penn secures the whole, 130; converted into royal province, 130. New Netherland founded, 85, 86; seized by English, 104, 105; name changed to New York, 105. INDEX 267 New Sweden founded, loi ; seized by New Netherland, 102. New York, seized by English, 105 ; political disturbances in William and Mary's time, 146; Leisler's rebellion, 146, 147 ; church not dominant in, 202, 203. Noon Houses, for churchgoers, 238, 239. Paper Mill, first in America, 191 Passage, Northwest, persistent be- | lief in, 2, et seq. j Patroons, grants to and powers of, I 87. I Penn, William, 131, et seq. ; see Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania, 129, et seq. ; Penn's grant, 131 ; Delaware purchase, 132, 133; Penn's landing, 133; plan of colony, 134; liberality, 134; rapid settlement, 135; treaty with the Indians, 135, 136. Pe<,)Uot War, account of, 97. Piracy, 247, 248; sentiment con- cerning, 248, 249 ; who the pi- rates were, 249, 250; Captain Kidd, 249, 250; Blackbeard, 252 ; Stede Bonnet, 253 ; exter- mination of piracy, 253. Plymouth, settlement, 61 ; char- acter of colonists, 69, 72, 78 ; hardships of first year, 66 ; home- making people with wives and children, 69 ; communism, 69 ; chartered, 70 ; prosperity, 70 ; Bradford, William, governor, 71 ; soil and climate, 72 ; large im- migration during Charles I's time, 74 ; King Philip's war, in; confederation with other New England colonies, 99, 100. Pocahontas, story of, 2)7'> 50) 5i> PoPHAM, colony, 15. Printing Press, first in America, 191. Profanity, punishment of, 234. Punishments, 229, et seq. ; ex- treme severity of, 234, 235. Puritans, in England, 62 ; in Vir- ginia and Maryland, no ; in New England, see Plymouth, Massa- chusetts Bay, Connecticut, etc. Q Quakers, persecuted in Massa- chusetts, 80; settle Pennsylva- nia. See Pennsylvania. Quebec founded, 160, R Raleigh, as a colonist, 10, et seq. Religion, dominance of in early New England, 80 ; rigidity of discipline, 80 ; intolerance, 80, 194; requirements relaxed in Connecticut, 91 ; influence of, on colonial life, 194, et seq. ; bap- tisms, psalmody and sermons, 196, 197, 198; effect on child life, 198, 199; greater tolerance in other colonies, 202. Remoteness of colonies from each other, and its effects, 97. Rhode Island, birthplace of ab- solute religious and personal Ub- erty, 95. Rum, use of in New England, 185, 186. Salem, witchcraft at, 240, 241. Saturday, origin of holiday, 227. Sawmills, whip saws, etc., 211. Schools, lack of, 193; first school law, 193. Scolds, punishment of, 233. Self-Goveknment, beginning of in America, 54 ; during the Eng- lish Commonwealth period, 139, 140; spirit of, in Massachusetts and Virginia, 140; Charles sec- ond's effort to repress, 140. Separatists, in England, 63. 268 INDEX Shipbuilding, in New England, 163; effects of, 163, 164, 182, 183, 184. Silk, in Virginia, 188, 189. Slaves, first negro, 57 ; white and black, 219, et seq. ; few negroes during first half century, 219; white slaves, facts respecting, 220, et seq. ; iniquities of the traf- fic, 221 ; servant question in early New England, 222, 223 ; in Virginia and other colonies, 228. Smith, John, 25 ; saves Jamestown colony, 26 ; character and achievements, ^3^ et seq. ; his gov- ernment and explorations, 35 ; story of Pocahontas, 37, et seq. ; sends map to Hudson, 84. Spanish Armada, story of, 7, et seq. Spanish explorations and settle- ments, 4. »-^S ports, colonial, 229, et seq. Standish, Myles, captain of Ply- mouth, 71. Stocks and pillory, 232. Stuyvesant, Peter, 102 ; conquers New Sweden, 102 ; surrenders New Amsterdam, 105. Sunday, laws and observances in New P2ngland, 236, 237, 238; in Southern colonies, 236. Superstition and Witchcraft, chapter on, 239, et seq. ; see Salem, and Witchcraft. Tanning, in the colonies, 191. Tea and Coffee, in the colonies, 186. Tobacco, first culture of in Vir- ginia, 49 ; used as money, 50. Virginia, colony planted at James- town, 23 ; starvation, fever, etc., 42 ; cannibalism, 43 ; settlement abandoned and re-established, 44 ; Dale's government, 45 ; private land ownership begun, 47 ; to- bacco introduced, 49 ; used as money, 50 ; extension of settle- ments and land ownership, 52 ; Argall's tyranny, 52 ; great charter, 53 ; provisions of, 54 ; importa- tion of women, 55 ; negro slaves introduced, 57 ; declaration of rights, 59 ; cavalier immigration, 115, 148; wealth and luxury, 149 ; rebelhon against Harvey's government, 150; Berkeley's government, 151 ; Indian out- break and massacre, 152 ; Bac- on's rebellion, 156; Berkeley's revenge, 157 ; prosperity, 157, 158; high standards of conduct, 158. Virginia Companies, chartered as London and Plym.outh com- panies, 14. Virginia Colonists, character of first, 15, et seq.; later arrivals and their character, 39 ; life of, 42, et seq. ; first two women, 39; neglect of opportunities, 40. W White, John, attempts colony and fails, 73, 74. Wild Hogs and cattle in Virginia, 231. Williams, Roger, 92, et seq.; first established absolute liberty and equality of men in his Rhode Island colony, 94. Winthrop, John, governor, 76. Witchcraft and superstition, chapter on, 239, et seq. ; outbreak at Salem, story, 240. Women, absence of in Jamestown colony, 1 8 ; first two arrive in 1608, 39; importation of wives, 55- LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 011 697 464 2