concerning Pennsylvania, because it was part of Pennsylvania during the
first period of colonization. Unimportant attempts had been made by
the Dutch and Swedes, of whom the Swedes are the best known, to settle
there but the population of the region when Penn arrived was mainly
composed of English who had moved in under the regime of the Duke of
York.
In 1633, an English nobleman, Lord Baltimore, who had for years been
seeking favor with the Stuart monarchy, announced that he had become a
convert to the papacy, and, with the zeal of a new convert, desired
to establish a colony in the New World where Catholics, then laboring
under heavy disabilities in Great Britain, could enjoy religious
freedom. He applied for, and Charles I granted, a charter for the
foundation of a semi-feudal proprietorship, with the stipulation that
freedom of worship should prevail.
If one stops to consider what a howl of outraged virtue would have been
raised by the people of Great Britain, and what a hurricane would have
descended upon the head of the monarch, had he granted the Catholics a
charter without stipulating for freedom of worship, it will be realized
that the much-vaunted "toleration" of Lord Baltimore's colony was
not entirely an evidence of his own broad-mindedness. However, this
toleration had its limits. Disbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity was
a capital offense.
In 1634, the little town of St. Mary was established as the center
for the new colony. Few Catholics of the home country seem to have
been anxious to take advantage of the opportunities offered, and Lord
Baltimore began to seek tenants elsewhere. As early as 1634, he was
writing to Boston and urging Massachusetts people to emigrate, but the
first great invasion of Puritans came in 1649.
Inspired by enthusiasm for the cause of the King, after he had lost his
head, the Virginians under the leadership of Governor Berkeley passed
ordinances expelling non-conformists from their colony, and a thousand
of these who had previously gone from New England to Virginia were
driven out and took refuge in Maryland, establishing the settlement
which later became Annapolis.
During the next generation most of the arrivals in Maryland were
either Puritans or Quakers. The policy of tolerance was not held to
apply to Quakers, who, by a law of 1659, were to be whipped out of any
town which they entered, but this measure does not seem to have been
enforced very long, and English Quakers from other colonies soon formed
an important part of the population.
In 1689, word reached the New World of the expulsion of James II, and
the occupation of the British throne by the uncompromisingly Protestant
House of Orange. While James II was on the throne a general alarm
had arisen throughout the colonies over the prospects of Catholic
aggression.
Many of the colonies contained a sprinkling of the Huguenot refugees
who had been driven out of France only a few years before because of
their Protestantism, and there were thus in every colony men who knew
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the terrible persecution
which followed. The tragedy of the Thirty Years War was also still
fresh in the minds of many.
There was no disposition in America, therefore, to look upon the
Catholics as a group who, if in power, would distinguish themselves
by a policy of broad toleration, and the one colony in which there
was any appreciable number of Catholics, namely, Maryland, naturally
felt the situation most keenly. The number of Catholics in the
colony at that time, however, even including Negroes, was only a few
thousand, and their capital of St. Mary was a hamlet of scarcely
sixty houses. Probably eleven-twelfths of the population of Maryland
were Protestants, and of them a majority were Puritans. These lost
no time in taking steps to protect their freedom which they knew the
Catholic church would never tolerate if able to do otherwise, and by
a homemade revolution turned out the proprietary government and set
up a staunch Protestant regime. Under this new rule, however, the few
Catholic residents were subjected to no harm, but were placed under
approximately the same disabilities as they had long lived under in
Great Britain. Thereupon the little Roman Catholic principality in the
United States was at an end, and the then Lord Baltimore, fourth of
that title, shortly conformed by returning to his ancestral Protestant
faith.
The Revolution of 1689 cost St. Mary its existence, for the Puritans
transferred the capital to their own town of Providence (rebaptized
Annapolis), and the headquarters of the Roman Catholics soon relapsed
into the wilderness.
Maryland continued to be almost wholly an English colony, with more
than its share of Negroes and transported convicts, and with a very
slight sprinkling of aliens, much as all the colonies had. When the
Acadians were transported from Nova Scotia in 1755, a considerable
number of them were landed in Maryland.
Baltimore, founded in 1729, languished for a quarter of a century, but
in the decade before the Revolution it began to grow with such rapidity
that in a few years it was one of the half dozen most considerable
towns of the continent.
The back country of Maryland was settled independently from
Pennsylvania, to a considerable extent by Ulster Scots and Palatines,
though there was also a steady encroachment on this cheap land by men
from the tidewater who could not get possession of farms in the more
expensive and fashionable as well as prosperous region.
By the Revolution, Maryland had reached a population of 250,000.
Perhaps one-seventh of this was in Frederick County, where Palatines
had begun to settle as early as 1710, and into which they began to
enter in large numbers after about 1730. Despite this back-country
element, Maryland must be recognized as being, at the time of the first
census, an Anglo-Saxon colony in culture, in traditions, in language,
and in population.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 7: He is writing of Pennsylvania.]
[Footnote 8: The French and Indian War.]
VII
VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBORS
The settlement of Virginia, beginning with Jamestown in 1607, was of
a different character from that of the northern and middle colonies.
It was not a colonization project undertaken by families, but an
exploitation by adventurers. In a sense it may be compared with the
Klondike Gold Rush at the end of the nineteenth century. Men went forth
seeking fortune and expecting to return in a few years with newly
acquired wealth. The motley array of colonists sent to Jamestown by the
Company during the first decade of activity seems to have been drawn
from every part of the British Isles and every stratum of society.
After ten or a dozen years, the proprietors recognized that the wealth
of their plantations would not consist in gold and pearls but that
they were facing an actual colonization project, which could only be
built upon the foundations of family life. An early recognition of
this fact has been one of the principal sources of strength in all
British colonization, and the proprietors of the Virginia colony, while
continuing to encourage men of all sorts to go to their settlement
on the James River, undertook one of the famous eugenic enterprises
of history by sending over several shiploads of young women to make
homes for their settlers. The undertaking seems to have been carried
out in good faith and with good judgment and the result was notably
successful. A little later, however, the continuing demand for wives
led to a sort of traffic that probably produced a less carefully
selected feminine population for the plantations. On the whole, it
would probably be fair to say that the "First Families of Virginia"
represented a higher social standard in the male than in the female
lines.
The year 1619 was racially eventful. It saw the arrival at Jamestown
both of the first shipload of "uncorrupt maydes for wives," and the
landing of the first cargo of Negroes. The next half-century brought
the development of the plantation system and the spread of Negro
slavery and the problem of miscegenation between Negro women and
the lowest and most unintelligent type of white servant came into
prominence. In this way originated the mulatto group which has ever
since been a characteristic feature of the Negroes in the United
States. Those admirers of the Mulatto who boast that he carries in his
veins the blue blood of the aristocratic families of the South, would
do well to read the actual records of Virginia and other colonies
during the seventeenth century and see what sort of white stock
actually formed the foundation of that half of this hybrid group.
The colony continued to grow for the first quarter of a century by
attracting voluntary adventurers from whom the rule of the survival of
the fittest exacted so heavy a toll that probably the survivors were
a fairly fit lot. The abandonment of the original proprietary company
in 1624 led to a marked change in the manner of populating the colony,
and for the next generation the bulk of the immigrants were assisted in
one way or another to get to Virginia and allowed to work out the money
advanced them by their labor after their arrival.
At its best, there was little difference in the colonization plans
that British colonies have always used to get desirable settlers from
"home." In the case of Virginia it brought a vigorous population of
all sorts, and the name of "indentured servant" covers not merely
the domestic in the kitchen and the laborer in the tobacco field
but artisans' apprentices and medical students. Under the extremely
trying conditions many of these immigrants were unable to survive.
Governor Berkeley asserted that four out of five died during the first
year of residence, while Evelyn, the diarist, declared that five out
of six succumbed. Such statements at least point to an excessively
high mortality which must have spared most frequently those who were
physically and mentally superior and well adapted to be among the
founders of a new colony. Hence it seems clear that the importance of
these indentured servants in the later development of Virginia, as of
other colonies, is not to be reckoned in proportion to the number who
arrived, but to be estimated upon the much smaller number who survived
and founded families.
Another type of assisted immigrant of which a great deal has been
heard was the deported convict. Some of these were evidently men who
had cheated the gallows, for the Virginians continually protested
against their arrival. Apparently much the larger number, however, were
men of superior quality in many respects. When nearly three hundred
offenses were punishable by the death penalty in England, many of those
convicted were not persons marked by great moral turpitude, and the
so-called "transported convict" might have been equally well a pirate,
or a preacher who persisted in expounding the gospel without proper
license from the ecclesiastical authorities so to do.
Large numbers were political prisoners who found themselves
temporarily on the losing side; still more were mere prisoners of
war. During the Protectorate, victories like Dunbar and Worcester
and the suppression of the Irish Rebellion by Cromwell in 1652 were
followed by deportations of prisoners of war to the colonies, and the
government felt fully justified in recovering part of the expense
of transportation by selling the services of these able-bodied and
intelligent men for seven years to the highest bidder. Unquestionably
most of the foundation stock of this kind that survived to perpetuate
itself would be entirely fit for colonization. During the same period
many cavaliers took refuge in Virginia.
When the royalists were again in power after 1660, a similar stream
of Commonwealth soldiers and non-conformists began to come into the
colonies. The Scotch Rebellion of 1670 brought another accession to
Virginia, and in 1685 many of the captives at the Battle of Sedgmoor
were exiled here. Such labor was welcomed by the Virginians in marked
distinction to the real criminals, of whom there were apparently only
a few thousand in all. After about 1700 the spread of Negro slavery
reduced the demand for white indentured labor and less of it arrived.
In the great diversity of men and women brought over in these and other
ways, there are some who figure in the ancestry of the best families of
Virginia at the present time, and others who, from the beginning, were
misfits in the colony. Such of the latter as survived the trying ordeal
of the tobacco fields either ran away, or, when their term of service
expired, drifted out to the borders of the settlement.
The Virginia holdings were large and far beyond the reach of an
ordinary man without capital, in marked contrast to conditions in
New England, where the great majority of the settlers were small
landowners. The freed bondsmen therefore had to go to the frontier or
drift down into North Carolina or some other region where they were
not handicapped by their lack of funds. The most shiftless and least
intelligent of them tended to collect in the less valuable lands at the
fringe of civilization, or to drift along to other similar settlements
farther west and south. In this way originated one of the peculiar
elements of the Southern population, the "poor white trash." Their
numbers were recruited generation after generation by others of the
same sort while the able, enterprising, and imaginative members were
continually drained off to the cities or sought better land elsewhere.
These "poor whites" in the Alleghanies and through the swamp lands
of North and South Carolina have been an interesting feature of the
population for three centuries. Largely of pure Nordic stock, they are
a striking example to the eugenist of the results of isolation and
undesirable selection.
During the Stuart period Virginia was the refuge of many Puritans. They
were, however, looked upon with disfavor by the prevailing royalist
sentiment and the activities of Sir William Berkeley as Governor
were such that not less than a thousand left the colony. Their place
was taken by Royalists, invited by the Governor to find a refuge in
Virginia as soon as news arrived of the execution of Charles I. Within
the next twelve months probably a thousand Royalists appeared bringing
many of the family names which have been conspicuous in the Old
Dominion ever since. Richard Lee came a little earlier, in 1642, but
it is after the death of Charles I that one begins to meet in Virginia
such names as Randolph, Cary, Parke, Robinson, Marshall, Washington,
and Ludwell.
The place of origin in Great Britain of most of the Royalists is
not so easily traced as is that of the Massachusetts Puritans who
came to America in groups, sometimes as entire congregations, but
random samples of families which afterwards furnished distinguished
leadership show that they came from practically all over England and
Scotland: Washingtons from Northamptonshire, Marshalls and Jeffersons
from Wales, Lees from the part of Shropshire adjoining Wales, and
Randolphs from Warwickshire. James Monroe's ancestors were Scotch
and Patrick Henry's father was born in Aberdeen. They had at least
one thing in common, that they were of English and Nordic stock.
Examination of lists in the land office at Richmond indicates that
fully 95 per cent of the names of landowners during the seventeenth
century were unmistakably Anglo-Saxon.
The tidewater population was fecund and spread steadily up to the
fall-line of the rivers, by its own multiplication. Men and women
married early. Colonel Byrd described his daughter, Evelyn, as an
"antique virgin" when she was twenty. "Either our young fellows are
not smart enough for her or she seems too smart for them," he moaned.
With a high death rate second marriages were common. It has been the
custom of late for sentimental feminists to refer to the large families
of the Colonial period as having been produced by husbands who thus
killed off one wife after another. Such nonsense is easily refuted by
an examination of genealogies and of tombstones. Many a husband had to
marry several wives because of the high death rate, but equally many
wives had to marry several husbands apiece for the same reason.
The toll taken by hard work, unhygienic conditions, and childbirth
without proper care among pioneer women, was no greater than the toll
taken by hard work, unhygienic conditions, and Indian warfare among the
men. If Colonel John Carter married five wives successively, in an age
when divorce was unknown, Elizabeth Mann married six husbands.
While a purely Nordic population was thus occupying tidewater Virginia
east of the Blue Ridge, another Nordic invasion from a wholly different
source was entering upland Virginia on the other side of the mountains.
The Shenandoah Valley is virtually an extension of the interior valleys
of Pennsylvania; and while an occasional pioneer pushed his way to it
through the mountains from the eastern front, the real settlement came
through the side door beginning about 1725 and reaching the proportions
of an invasion about 1732.
Ulster Scots coming down through Pennsylvania began that penetration
of the Piedmont from north to south which is such a striking feature
of the history of the South Atlantic coast during the next century.
With them were some Alpines, mostly Germans from the Palatine,
representative of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch stock.
When General Braddock, whose army was nearly wiped out by the French
and Indians in 1755, sighed, "Who would have thought it?" and expired,
he nevertheless had cleared a road for the rapid spread of this
immigration along the mountain valleys, not merely into Virginia but
on through the Carolinas and to Georgia. His road was followed a few
years later by General Forbes' road through the same country, and the
way was open.
The upland and mountain sections of Virginia therefore came to be
represented by a group with a very different outlook from those of the
tidewater, dominated as it was by large landholders. This diversity of
original settlement, which was of sufficient importance to effect in
the Civil War a cleavage of the State and establish West Virginia as
free soil, is still apparent and makes itself felt in the twentieth
century.
* * * * *
North Carolina represents an overflowing from Virginia to the South. It
was a frontier for the Old Dominion where landless men could find new
homes more easily than to the westward, where they encountered the Blue
Ridge. In 1653 a settlement was begun at Albemarle by Virginians who
were not in accord either with the established religion or else with
the political control of their colony. Most of these were Quakers.
By adopting a remarkably liberal code of laws, which welcomed insolvent
debtors by cancelling their indebtedness, this colony attracted an
element which the more conservative Virginians regarded with suspicion.
A continual infiltration of landseekers led to steady colonization,
and gradually the tidewater section of North Carolina developed as a
separate region, not very thickly settled, not very prosperous, not
very distinguished in any way. A few French Huguenots drifted in after
the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In 1710 a group of Palatines,
who had left their German homes because of religious persecution, and
had sought refuge in England, was passed on to North Carolina through
the enterprise of a couple of Swiss promoters who were looking for
colonists. As a courtesy to the promoters the settlement was given
the name of New Bern, which has led to a general supposition that the
population were Swiss. In fact, they were nearly all German Alpines.
Another immigration, this time of Nordics, began a few years later
when Scotch Highlanders, disappointed at the results of the 1715
uprising on behalf of the Old Pretender, fled the country and came to
North Carolina, starting a settlement on the Cape Fear River. Later,
following the collapse of the Young Pretender in 1745, the Highlanders
again found themselves in a bad situation at home. Shipload after
shipload landed at Wilmington in 1746 and 1747. This emigration of
Scotch Highlanders continued until the Revolution, during which time
they showed themselves, strangely enough, loyal to the Hanoverian
dynasty and mostly fought as Loyalists against the Continentals.
The general breakup of the clan system with the accompanying distress
in the Highlands caused most of this emigration, although some of the
Scots were deported as prisoners of war. Campbelltown was the centre
of their settlement, and it is unfortunate that its present name of
Fayetteville conceals its interesting history. Some of the Highlanders
are said to have brought cattle with them, and they pushed on into the
interior of the State because of the great areas of succulent grass and
peavine stretching toward the mountains which provided excellent fodder
for their herds.
The sympathetic patronage of Gabriel Johnston, the Governor of the
Province from 1734 to 1752, was largely responsible for the welcome
extended to these Highlanders. Himself a Scotchman, he was under
strong suspicion of not being too loyal to the Crown. At any rate, his
hospitality to the Highlanders brought to North Carolina the largest
group of Highland Scotch that came to the colonies. These men of the
purest Nordic blood form a selected group anthropologically. It is no
mere coincidence that the tallest average height of a population in the
United States at the present time is in these North Carolina counties
that were settled by the Scotch Highlanders after "Bonnie Prince
Charlie" ceased to be a political possibility.
While the back country of North Carolina was thus being penetrated from
the seacoast by the Highland Scots, the Lowland Scots were drifting
into it along the foot of the mountains from Pennsylvania and Maryland
through Virginia. This was the principal source of increase of the
population during the eighteenth century, and still gives to the State
its characteristic complexion. Along with the Ulster Scots came, as
said above, some of the German settlers, thus bringing a small Alpine
element to the State. The southern tidewater region also developed at
the same time as a northern extension of settlement from South Carolina.
* * * * *
South Carolina was settled only a little later than North Carolina by
the establishment of Old Charles Town in 1665. This settlement, shortly
moved across and up the river to a better location, prospered and
expanded until it became South Carolina.
Originally a sort of offshoot from the West Indies, this region caught
the attention of the Huguenot refugees a few years later, perhaps
because Coligny had marked it out a century before as a desirable home
for them. It attracted a larger proportion of the French refugees
than any other colony; and although they were unwelcome at first to
the English who were in possession, they soon assimilated themselves
to the Anglo-Saxon population with which they were racially identical
and became an important element in the upbuilding of the State.
In Colonial and Revolutionary times, Gendron, Huger, LeSerrurier,
deSaussure, Laurens, Lanier, Sevier, and Ravenel were all Huguenots who
distinguished themselves in the service of the State.
The establishment of large-scale agriculture with plantations devoted
to rice or indigo sharply limited the possibilities of settlement in
the tidewater region of South Carolina, and it became a country of
large holdings worked by Negro slaves in charge of overseers. Meanwhile
the owners largely made their homes in or near Charleston, and brought
it to the position of the fourth city of the colonies in importance.