colonies and have been assumed far too easily to have been Roman
Catholics. While it is extremely difficult to arrive at exact figures
on this point, there is some reason to believe that the number of
Protestant English in the east of Ireland during the seventeenth
century was as large as the number of Protestant Scotch in the north,
and this former group contributed its quota of English population to
the colonies. It was this group which imposed the English language on
the Irish. Until the later 1840's the Leinster Protestants and the
Ulster Presbyterians were practically the only immigrants from Ireland
to this country.
The great movement of Ulster Scots to America, although of an entirely
different degree of magnitude, has been perhaps second only to that
from the English counties in its influence on the subsequent history
of the Continent. It began in the latter part of the seventeenth
century but did not reach its height until the first quarter of the
eighteenth. Five shiploads arrived in the summer of 1718, giving Cotton
Mather the chance to note in his diary with anticipatory pleasure the
merit that would accrue to him from showing "kindness to ye indigent."
Thereafter, one finds in most histories such items as "In 1719 there
came one hundred and twenty Presbyterian families from the north of
Ireland who settled in Massachusetts" or "In the years 1719 and 1720
more than one hundred Presbyterian families came from the north of
Ireland and settled at Londonderry in New Hampshire," and so on.
The Congregationalists of the seaboard were not too hospitable to
these Presbyterians, and forced them to move inland in almost every
case, away from the long-settled territory over which the Boston
theocracy attempted to maintain its rule, and mostly to New Hampshire
and Connecticut. Londonderry recalls its origin by its name and the
Scotch who settled it not only introduced their manufactures into
New Hampshire but brought along with them a still more valuable
importation, the so-called Irish potato, which, having been taken
from South America to Ireland long before, had, in this round-about
way, been brought back to its own hemisphere. Other groups went to
Worcester, to Pelham, to Palmer, to Andover, and to other communities
in small numbers; while many others went to Maine. The total numbers,
however, were very small.
Massachusetts had a definite policy at this time of encouraging, if not
requiring, immigrants of this sort to settle on the frontiers. They
furnished less competition in this way and played a useful part in
keeping off the Indians.
The emigration of the Scotch and North English who had been in Ulster
for a generation or two or at the most for three generations, was
due to discontent with their situation there. They had built up an
important manufacture of woollens and linens which has ever since
been famous throughout the world; but in 1698 the jealousy of rival
industrialists in England led to Parliamentary legislation which
crippled the industries in Ulster and threw many men out of employment.
In 1704 and the following years a religious persecution of these
Presbyterians was also carried on. These economic and religious
handicaps were so great that after a few years of patient waiting the
population gave up hope, and within half a century about half of the
entire number had moved to the New World. The most important stream
went into the middle and southern colonies and will be traced later.
This exodus was a cause of alarm in the old country as well as in the
new. "The rumour [of going to America] has spread like a contagious
distemper," laments an Irish letter writer in 1728; "and the worst is
that it affects only Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the North";
while another laments that "there are now seven ships at Belfast, that
are carrying off about 1000 passengers thither; and if we knew how to
stop them, as most of them can get neither victuals nor work at home,
it would be cruel to do it."
Reference will recur frequently to this immigration of Ulster Scots.
At this point it is necessary to emphasize in the first place that it
was little different in racial background from the preceding English
settlement, both groups being definitely Nordic in their make-up. In
the second place it was a valuable addition to the colonies in the
quality and energy of its members. In the third place it was always
small in proportion to the English element.
New England in 1790, regardless of numerous non-English groups, many of
them of good individual quality though insignificant in total numbers,
is to be considered definitely as a transplanted English population,
most of which had been settled in North America so long that its
habits of thought and action had become differentiated--one might say
definitely American rather than English.
A third source of New England settlers during this period, small in
numbers but valuable in quality, is represented by the French Huguenots
who arrived for the most part in the decade or two following the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The Huguenot migration to America falls in two general epochs. From
1555, when Admiral Coligny had a vision of a Protestant France in the
New World, to the Revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, the French
charter of Protestant liberty, is the first epoch, during which the
immigration was scattering. From 1685 up to about 1750 is the second
epoch, when the Huguenots, fleeing from oppression and death, sought
refuge in many countries. During this period their immigration to North
America reached considerable proportions. Providence and Boston were
points of entry for many, though more went to the Southern colonies,
and to them many an American family of the present day is proud to
trace its ancestry.
These French Huguenots seem to have come pre-dominantly from the middle
class or artisan stratum of the population with a mixture of the lesser
gentry. But their energy, ability, and character earned for them an
important rôle in their adopted country, out of proportion to their
small numbers. Unlike some of the other non-English groups they did not
tend to establish colonies or settlements of their own, but scattered
widely and merged freely into the general population. This was the less
difficult in that they came from the most Nordic parts of France and in
racial composition are scarcely to be distinguished from the English.
In the same way those northern and eastern counties of England, which
supplied a large part of the migration to America, had, during the
preceding century, received a continuous infusion of continental
Huguenots to a total sometimes estimated as high as 250,000, who there
also became by admixture and hereditary similitude indistinguishable
from their neighbors.
The Indian population of New England though never great was largely
exterminated by war, disease, whiskey, and the breaking up of their
cultural and economic background. In the century before the settlement
of Plymouth, smallpox, introduced from the Spanish Main, had flickered
up and down the New England coast and had so decimated the natives that
only a weakened remnant remained to oppose the Whites.
In contrast, in the eleventh century the Norsemen who attempted
to found settlements on the New England coast had met with savage
resistance from the natives, whom they called Skrellings.
Intermarriage between Whites and Indians was almost unknown save in the
occasional case in which a colonist was carried into captivity. The
antipathy of the English settlers to the Indians was far too great to
lead to the sort of miscegenation which was encouraged by the French in
their part of the continent, and to which reference will be made later.
In the British colonies the half-breed was looked upon as an Indian,
whereas in the French colonies, as generally in all Colonial countries
that had the Roman imperial tradition and the Roman Catholic religion,
the half-breed was assimilated to the European group. Some of the
remaining Indians along the Atlantic coast mixed with the runaway Negro
slaves, but few of them contributed to the white population, and the
term "half-breed" was in general a term of contempt. It was not until
within the life-time of those now living that an infusion of Indian
blood became a subject of pride, particularly in Oklahoma, unless
one makes exception for such isolated tales as the somewhat grotesque
Pocahontas tradition in Virginia.
The predominant influence of Massachusetts at the time of the
Revolution is easy to understand. It possessed, to an unusual degree,
unity in the various fields in which unity is most valuable to a
nation--unity of race, unity of language, unity of culture, unity
of religion, unity of institutions--and, more than anywhere else in
the United States, its unity was attained through a long-continued,
independent growth on American soil.
The French and Indian menace held back the rapidly multiplying
population of New England for at least a generation. The agricultural
areas were carrying more population than they could support, and
they were waiting for a favorable opportunity to spread out. This
opportunity came in the overthrow of Montcalm at Quebec in 1759.
The Peace of Paris in 1763 left the road open, and the New England
population began to push north, west, and south with a vigor that was
reflected in the activity of the communities at home. The succeeding
half-century is correctly regarded as the golden age of New England.
Its country districts were more densely populated when the first census
of the United States was taken in 1790 than they have been since. The
decline, which will be traced in the next section, then began and
decade after decade thereafter the New England towns and villages are
found in a surprisingly large percentage of cases either standing
still or actually declining in number of inhabitants.
The history of American colonization is usually written only in terms
of the additions to population. The subtractions from it may be no less
important. Subtractions by migration westward were less significant
because in many cases the frontier merely proliferated itself by
sending its surplus out without diminishing its own standards or
numbers.
The first national loss of population occurred after 1640 when the
changing political conditions in England, and the tyranny of the
Massachusetts Bay authorities, drove many people out of Massachusetts.
This loss, serious as it was, is insignificant compared with the
tremendous loss of superior stock at the time of the Revolution. The
Loyalists made up an undetermined part of the population, perhaps
as much as one-third. Those who had been most conspicuous or most
active were obliged in many cases to flee, and persecution with the
confiscation of their property was carried on even after the war.
Most of the Loyalists who left the colonies went either to Canada or
to the West Indies. Altogether the loss from this source may have
been as great as 100,000 people representing on the whole a superior
selection of the population. It is comparable in the racial damage done
the American population with the loss which France suffered from the
expulsion of the Huguenots.
By the Revolution, the colonizing impulse of New England had not
merely begun to fill up western New York, as will be described
shortly, but had led to the formation of speculative land companies
for settlement in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, and even on
the lower Mississippi. The hard times following the Revolution led
to a great increase in migration, which, in general, has been rapid
in hard times, slower in periods of prosperity. Vermont, as already
said, felt the impulse markedly. Maine also seems to have grown most
rapidly in the decade or two following the Declaration of Independence,
though Portland and Falmouth were the only towns worthy of the name.
New Hampshire, likewise, slower in its development than other parts
of New England, had begun to catch up by attracting those ready to
better themselves by a change of location. Connecticut had made a
steady growth and had fewer non-English elements than almost any other
of the New England colonies, small as these elements were everywhere.
The growth of Massachusetts had been largely in the interior, Boston
having made less progress than many other cities. People were moving
from Massachusetts to other colonies. Many were moving through Boston
but not staying there. Politically and culturally important, the Hub
of the Universe stagnated industrially until the beginning of the
manufacturing era.
VI
THE GATEWAYS TO THE WEST FROM NEW ENGLAND AND VIRGINIA
In 1609, the English navigator, Henry Hudson, had explored the river
which now bears his name, acting on behalf of the Dutch East India
Company. During the next decade, small Dutch settlements, trading
posts, were established along the river; but the first real settlement
is generally dated 1623 when thirty families of Walloons arrived. These
were people from northern France and the southern Netherlands who had
been driven into Holland by religious persecution and wanted to escape
from the unsympathetic treatment which they were receiving in the
southern part of Holland. Their language was not Dutch but French.
Speaking at large the Dutch settlement of New Netherland was, at the
beginning, a trading venture and was based on a stronghold at the
mouth of the river and another one at the head of navigation. For many
years the latter settlement, originally called Fort Orange and later
Albany, was much more important than the little town of New Amsterdam
on Manhattan Island.
Restrictions on land tenure held back colonization, and at no time
during the Dutch occupation did its reach extend much beyond the
fertile farm lands of the Hudson valley northerly to Fort Orange,
though an outpost to the west was established at Schenectady and
scattering settlements had also been made in New Jersey and on Long
Island.
In all these outlying regions, the pressure of New England migrants was
too strong for the scanty Dutch population to withstand, and even in
Manhattan the New Englanders had become early an important part of the
population.
The immigration of respectable Dutch families did not begin in general
until after 1638 when the monopoly of the West India Company was
abolished. Many of the families who became great land owners in the
northern part of the Hudson River valley were from Gelderland, east of
the Zuyder Zee, the town of Myjerka being one of the principal centers
of emigration. While many of these Dutch families were of excellent
mercantile stock, it is a mistake to suppose that they represented the
social élite of the home country.
Although the Dutch have left a permanent mark on the Hudson River
valley, the contribution which they made to the future population of
the State was small. When England captured the colony in 1664 and the
Dutch immigration ceased, there were probably not many more than 10,000
inhabitants in the whole region, and of these from a quarter to a third
were English.
Holland at the time was not at all a colonizing nation. Its overseas
ventures were for the purpose of trade, and it had not sufficient
surplus population to settle colonies permanently.
The amount of Dutch and Huguenot blood that was perpetuated in the
later history of the colonies was, therefore, small by comparison with
the English, but was for the most part of the same racial stock. Six or
seven thousand Dutch in the present State of New York in 1664 are to be
compared with 35,000 English in Virginia and 50,000 in New England at
the same date.
There was no further general and organized emigration from Holland
to America until the close of the Revolution. At that time some
of the Amsterdam bankers, who had loaned millions of dollars to
the Revolutionary government, decided to try to capitalize their
investments and bought nearly 4,000,000 acres of land in New York
and Pennsylvania. Most of the settlers on this tract were not Dutch;
and while Dutch names may still play an important part in the Social
Registers of New York and Albany, Dutch blood is insignificant in the
present make-up of the population of the United States.
The southerly tide of New Englanders, which washed over the Dutch
colony and others to the South, was in the first instance made up
largely of those who did not find the religious convictions of their
associates in Massachusetts and Connecticut to their liking.
The little "Forts" of the Dutch in the Connecticut valley were swamped
shortly after 1630, and by 1639 the Connecticut people of English
ancestry had established themselves at Greenwich within thirty miles
of New Amsterdam and in other towns even nearer. Long Island was
settled from the same source, and Thomas Belcher took up a tract upon
the present site of the City of Brooklyn in the same year in which the
English began to build at Greenwich. Brooklyn, until the twentieth
century, has been a typically New England community, entirely distinct
from the other boroughs of Greater New York. The eastern end of Long
Island was long separated from the western end and was settled directly
from Connecticut. The Hamptons are virtually still a part of New
England.
The development of the southern part of New York State, and
particularly of the Hudson River valley, was delayed indefinitely by
the great land holdings of the so-called "patroons" or great landlords.
New York City continued to be a cosmopolitan and nondescript town,
built up on commerce and trade and without any particular racial
complexion. Even at the time of the Revolution, it was inferior alike
in size and in influence to Philadelphia and Boston, and New York State
was but seventh in population among the thirteen colonies.
The real foundation of the greatness of the Empire State was the New
England colonization of northern and western New York, which created
a territory that was, and has ever since remained, quite distinct in
political complexion and economic and social interests from the Hudson
River valley and the metropolis at its mouth.
The commercial greatness of the City of New York dates from the opening
of the Erie Canal in 1825, which made New York the outlet of the lake
States. Meanwhile, however, several other foreign invasions had taken
place.
The French Huguenots, racially Nordic and almost identical with the
British, began to arrive in Colonial New York after 1685, founding the
town of New Rochelle to commemorate the French city from which so many
of them had come. Here, as elsewhere, their influence was far in excess
of their proportionately small number.
In 1711, Governor Hunter of New York became imbued with grandiose ideas
about developing the resources of his Province and began to look for a
source of cheap labor for its exploitation. He found this in the German
districts on the Rhine, broadly known as the Palatinate, where various
national elements, not merely German and Alsatian, but French, Swiss,
Moravian, and miscellaneous, were gathered, and where the religious
persecution to which they were subjected as Protestants, and the
excessive hardships which they were compelled to endure from invasions
of the armies of Louis XIV, had reduced them to great misery.
The population was ripe for emigration and furnished the only
substantial element of non-Nordic origin in the Colonial history of
America. It is not necessary to trace in detail the innumerable petty
sects and national elements, often two or three times removed from
their original home, of which this "Palatine" emigration was composed.
For the present purpose it was pre-dominantly German-speaking, and
largely of the round-headed Alpine stock in racial make-up.
About 1709, these Palatines began frantic efforts to escape from their
misfortunes, and within a few years some 30,000 had gone over into
Holland and even into England, where they were not welcome. The British
Government was only too glad to subsidize their further emigration, and
several thousand of them were transported to the Hudson River valley.
They soon became discontented there and were finally colonized on the
Schoharie River in New York. Here, in turn, they were ousted by what
they considered political jobbery and many of them moved on to the
Mohawk River, a tributary of the Hudson, while others continued down
the Susquehanna River to Pennsylvania. On the whole, therefore, the
Palatines are to be considered merely temporary inhabitants of New
York State. Although a good many of them remained, the reports they
sent out as to their treatment were so unsatisfactory that thenceforth
the Palatine immigration mostly avoided New York and landed in
Pennsylvania, where it will be encountered later.
The next influx, particularly after 1719, was of Ulster Scots,
similar to that already mentioned as invading New England. Much of
Orange County on the west of the Hudson River was settled by these
Ulstermen, beginning as early as 1729, and for the next half-century
the infiltration of this Nordic element was continuous, although more
of it came through New England than directly into New York harbor. By
the time of the Revolution the Ulster Scots had spread over much of the
eastern part of northern New York, having enough representatives in
Albany in 1760 to establish a Presbyterian church there.
At about the same time Sir William Johnson, who had received a grant
of 100,000 acres of land north of the Mohawk River for his valor in
defending the colonies against the French at Crown Point and Lake
George in 1755, began to look about for suitable tenants and hit upon
the idea of importing Scotch Highlanders of Roman Catholic faith. Some
hundreds of these arrived just before the Revolution, and like Sir
John Johnson, son of Sir William, espoused the cause of the Loyalists.
After the Revolution, they moved northward to Ontario where the town of
Glengarry recalls their earlier home in Inverness. There, such families
as the MacDonnells, McDougalls, Camerons, McIntyres, and Fergusons
became an important element of strength to Canada.
As noted, New York State at the time of the Revolution was still
distinctly an unimportant colony, and its greatness dates from the
invasion of New Englanders immediately after the war. Connecticut, by
virtue of its proximity, was the principal source of these settlers,
although almost every part of New England contributed. The crossing
over of the Ulster Scots has already been mentioned, but it must not
be inferred that that was the principal element in the settlement of
the State. The main immigration was of the old Puritan English stock
which still dominates all of upper New York, except where subsequent
colonies of recent immigrants in some of the larger industrial cities
have altered the local scene.
The western shores of Lake Champlain and some of the older towns of the
Hudson River valley could scarcely be recognized, after a few years, by
those who had known them previously. A mere Dutch farm in 1784 had been
changed in four years to the thriving city of Hudson, a typical New
England commercial town with warehouses, wharves, Yankee shipping, and
stores filled with Yankee notions.
A visitor to Whitesborough on the Mohawk River, in 1788, reported
that "settlers are continually pouring in from the Connecticut hive."
Binghamton was settled jointly by Connecticut and Massachusetts. The
same spirit caused a mixing up of the population within the limits
of New England so that, to take a single illustration, the men of
Middlefield, a small hill town in western Massachusetts, were found on
inquiry to come from nearly sixty different towns in Massachusetts and
Connecticut.