THE AMERICAN PEOPLE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
_America is formed for happiness but not for empire._
RICHARD BURNABY.
_At length one mentioned me, with the observation that I was merely an
honest man, and of no sect at all, which prevailed with them to chuse
me._
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.
I
All accounts agree in celebrating the marvelous growth of the
continental colonies in the eighteenth century. When the Massachusetts
charter was recalled they were in fact British "plantations"; weak and
scattered coast settlements, hemmed in by hostile Indians, separated
from each other by long stretches of wilderness; without the inclination
or the opportunity for intercourse, they struggled in isolation, often
for bare existence. At the time of the passage of the Stamp Act they
were wealthy and stable communities, whose thrifty and venturesome
people had long since joined colony to colony all along the coast, and
were already pushing across the mountains to occupy the great interior
valleys. And with rapid material development there had come a confident
and aggressive spirit, a proud and intractable temper, a certain
self-righteous sense of separation from the Old World and its
traditions. The very rivalries between colony and colony were the
result of close contact and daily intercourse, their very jealousies
born of interrelated interests and the recognition of a common destiny.
In 1689 not more than 80,000 people lived in New England, a trifle more
in the Southern, and half as many in the Middle colonies. Seventy years
later, when all New France could not boast more than 80,000 people of
European birth or descent, New England alone had a population of
473,000, the Middle Colonies about 405,000, and the plantations south,
of Delaware 417,000, not including 300,000 negro slaves. Within three
quarters of a century the people of the continental colonies had
increased nearly eightfold--from 200,000 in 1689, to 1,500,000 in 1760.
And material prosperity had kept pace with the increase in population;
so that there was some truth, even if some exaggeration, in the
statement of Peter Kalm that "the English colonies in this part of the
world have increased so much in their numbers of inhabitants, and in
their riches, that they almost vie with Old England."
Of this rapid growth the colonists were well aware. They took to
themselves full credit, as their descendants have done ever since, for
having transformed a wilderness into a land of peace and plenty. With
Richard Burnaby they could quite agree that such a town as Philadelphia,
planted scarce eighty years, must be the "object of every one's wonder
and admiration." It was this sense of unparalleled achievement that gave
courageous conviction to the steady assertion of colonial rights. And
the form of government in the provinces was well suited to secure for
the colonists that independence which they claimed as a birthright, and
the practical achievement of which is the cardinal political fact of the
century. For it was no part of British policy to burden the English
exchequer with the maintenance of the colonial establishments. The
normal province was thought to be one in which legislation was entrusted
mainly to local assemblies elected by the colonists, while executive and
administrative authority rested mainly with a governor and council
responsible to the king. At the opening of the eighteenth century,
colonial governments mostly conformed to this model: in each colony the
owners of property regularly elected an assembly which levied taxes and
made laws; in each colony, except in Rhode Island and Connecticut, the
governor, and usually the council as well, were appointed by the Crown.
With authority thus divided, conflict was sure to arise. In theory, the
interests of colony and Crown may have been identical; in fact the
assemblies looked at the affairs of the colony from the point of view of
immediate local needs, while the governor was bound by his instructions
to regard his province as but one of many whose special interests must
be subordinated to the welfare of the whole empire. Of the assemblies'
many advantages in this perennial conflict, control of the purse was the
chief. "The governor," says a contemporary, "has two masters; one who
gives him his commission, and one who gives him his pay." It required no
little courage, and was likely to prove useless in the end, to ignore
the latter master in obedience to the former. Placemen were little
inclined to irritate those who paid them and were on the spot to watch
their every move; while even the ablest governors often found themselves
deserted by the Crown whose interests they attempted to defend. Before
the middle of the century ministers were generally indifferent to the
constitutional tendencies in the colonies; repeated recommendations of
the Board of Trade for an independent civil list went unheeded, and
governors, such as Spotswood, who stirred up trouble by endeavoring to
carry out their instructions, were likely to be replaced by others whose
adroit concessions to the assemblies created the illusion of a
successful administration.
The concrete disputes in which the persistent opposition of governor and
assembly found expression were many--quit-rents in Maryland, control of
the judges in New York, taxation of proprietor's estates in
Pennsylvania, and everywhere questions growing out of the problem of
defense and the demand for paper money. Instructed in English precedent,
the assemblies knew well how to condition the grant of salary or
necessary revenue upon the governor's surrender to their demands. But
more insidious and far-reaching in its constitutional effects was the
practice by which the governor's executive and administrative functions
were restricted. Money bills, even when unconnected with special riders,
were often made minutely specific, both in respect to the purposes for
which the money was to be used, and in respect to the officials by whom
it was to be expended. Even salaries in the army were sometimes granted
by individual appropriation. In many colonies, and notably in New York,
it was by the constant and excessive use of specific appropriations that
the governors were reduced to the level of executive figureheads--mere
agents of the colonial assembly rather than representatives of the Crown
exercising wise and effective administrative discretion. This process
was especially rapid during the French wars, when the assemblies were
enabled to exact tremendous concessions in return for indispensable aid
against the common enemy. "The New York Assembly," said Peter Kalm about
1750, "may be looked upon as a Parliament or Diet in miniature.
Everything relating to the good of the province is here debated." In
1763 he might have said the same, not of New York alone, but of
Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. And the
governors of these provinces could have told him, as they repeatedly
told the Board of Trade, that not only was everything debated there, but
there everything was finally decided.
The assemblies, which had thus so largely taken to themselves the
functions of government, claimed to declare the rights and defend the
interests of the people. But in fact they represented their colonies
very much as Parliament represented England. In every colony a property
test restricted the number of those who had a voice in the elections;
while political methods and the traditions of society united to place
effective control in the hands of the eminent few. No secret ballot or
Australian system guarded the independence of the voter. It was not an
age in which every individual was supposed to count for one and none
for more than one. The rigid maintenance of class distinctions, even in
New England, where students in Harvard College were seated according to
social rank and John Adams was but fourteenth in a class of twenty-four,
made it presumptuous for the ordinary man to dispute the opinion of his
betters or contest their right to leadership: to look up to his
superiors and take his cue from them was regarded as the sufficient
exercise of political liberty. The times were thought to be out of joint
when effective control of colonial politics rested not with a few men
who, through wealth or social standing, through official position,
through well-considered marriage connections, had built up the rival or
consolidated "interests" which played, each on its little stage, the
part of Bedford or Pelham or Yorke in Old England.
The foundation of this miniature aristocracy was wealth; wealth acquired
in the South mainly from the great plantations, in the North mainly from
commerce. In South Carolina the unhealthful swamp lands, driving the
planters to the coast during most of the year, made Charleston one of
the first commercial centers of America. Three hundred and sixty vessels
cleared from that port in 1764. Manigault and Mazyck, Laurens and
Rutledge, were therefore merchants of note as well as planters,
exporting provisions to the West Indies, the staples rice and indigo to
England or to the Continent south of Finisterre, and bringing back
slaves and English manufactures. In Virginia and Maryland, where there
were no cities of importance, the planters turned all their profits
into slaves and land. The second William Byrd, inheriting 26,000 acres,
left to his son 179,000 acres of the best land in Virginia, and the
right to represent his county in the assembly. All the great planters,
Ludlow and Carter, Randolph, Fairfax and Blair, lived on their estates,
and from their private wharves exported the tobacco which English
commission merchants sold in London, and for which they sent in return
such English commodities of all kinds as the planter might order. The
great estates along the Hudson, owned by men like Van Rensselaer, a
descendant of the old Dutch patroon, or Phillipse and Courtland and
Livingston, who had profited by the lavish grants of early English
governors, rivaled in extent the plantations of Virginia; and like the
planters of South Carolina their owners were often engaged in commerce,
and were connected, through business or marriage, with the wealthy
merchant families of New York City--the Van Dams, Crugers, Waltons, and
Ludlows.
Elsewhere in America there were not, as in these provinces, great
estates ranging from two hundred thousand to more than a million acres.
But the thrifty Quakers of eastern Pennsylvania, engaging in less
extensive enterprises, were less often in debt than the planters of the
South, and no less shrewd at a bargain than the Dutch merchants of New
York. Possessed of the best land in the province, or engaged at
Philadelphia in the export of provisions to the West Indies, they built
up many respectable estates among them, and by effective organization
the leaders of the sect controlled the colony for many decades in the
interest of a Quaker-merchant aristocracy inhabiting the three eastern
counties of the province. And even in New England material interests
were transforming the structure of society. Slave-owning planters of
Newport now dominated the little colony which Roger Williams had
established as an experiment in democracy and soul liberty. Boston
shared with New York and Philadelphia the export of provisions with
which the farms of the Middle and Northern colonies supplied the West
Indies. It was the chief center of the New England fisheries.
Shipbuilding was there, as at Newport, a great industry; and there, as
at Newport, rum was extensively distilled from molasses procured in the
sugar islands. The vessels of Boston and Newport merchants, loaded with
rum and fish and tropical products, traded in many European ports, in
the Azores, or on the African coast, returning with wine and slaves and
every kind of English manufacture. In this material atmosphere the old
Puritan spirit was being strangely subdued to the stuff it worked in.
Wealth and shrewdness were more effective than orthodoxy in achieving
social and political eminence. A few names familiar to the seventeenth
century are still to be met with in high places--Sewall, Dudley, Quincy,
Hutchinson; but in the middle of the eighteenth century the names of
repute in the Old Bay colony are mostly new--Oliver, Bowdoin, Boylston,
Cooper, Phillips, Cushing, Thatcher; names rescued from obscurity by men
who had won distinction in the pulpit or at the bar, or by men who had
made money in trade, and whose descendants, marrying with the old
clerical or official families, had pushed their way, in the second or
third generation, into the social and political aristocracy of the
province.
Such were the "men of considerable estates" in whose hands the English
Government was generally well content to leave the control of colonial
politics; and as they were the men who profited most by the connection
with England, they were the men whose outlook upon the world was least
provincial and most European. Planters and merchants of the South,
exporting their staples directly to England, were in constant
communication with their London agents. Business or politics had taken
many of them more than once across the ocean. Not a few had been sent in
their youth to be educated in England; and had resided there for some
years, forming acquaintance with prominent English families, listening
to debates in the Commons or to arguments in the courts of law,
diverting themselves in theaters and coffee-houses, acquiring the latest
modes and mannerisms, moulding themselves upon some favorite model of a
city magnate or country gentleman. In the Northern colonies, trade
relations with England were less direct. Business rarely called the
merchant to Europe; and Yale or Harvard was regarded as a satisfactory
substitute for Oxford or Cambridge. Yet the merchants of Boston and New
York had their agents in many European ports; kept informed of
conditions of trade and shipping throughout the world; and eagerly
scanned the foreign gazettes which recounted the political and social
happenings of Old England. In North and South, the well-to-do, as they
were able, built and furnished their houses upon English models, and
were not content with modes of dress which were known, twelve months
late, not to be the fashion abroad. Especially fortunate were those
whose wealth was dignified by distinction of birth, the walls of whose
houses were hung with oil portraits of eminent ancestors.
And the genuine colonial aristocrat, such as Colonel Byrd or Governor
Thomas Hutchinson, was proud to have it thought that his mind as well as
his house was furnished after the best English fashion. Even more than
others, those who were condemned to be provincials of the province
consciously endeavored, to avoid provincialism of the spirit; to be
mistaken in London for an English gentleman of parts was a much-sought
compensation for being, at Williamsburg or Boston, no more than the
first gentleman of America. In the middle of the eighteenth century,
eccentricity was not yet a mark of genius; and the "best people in the
colonies" learned from English authors what high intellectual merit
there was in being close to the center. "Your authors know but little of
the fame they have on this side of the ocean," Franklin assured William
Strahan when he wrote to order six sets of a new edition of Pope's
works. The four thousand volumes at Westover, or the books in Governor
Hutchinson's Boston house, would have given any cultivated Englishman a
reputation for good taste and discriminating judgment. Colonel Byrd
could as readily as Voltaire detect in the fantastic beliefs of an
American savage "the three great articles of Natural Religion." We find
the youthful Adams, who read Bolingbroke for his style and laboriously
copied out Berkeley and Tillotson, entering the lists of "moderns" to
defend the advantages of eighteenth-century Boston against those of Rome
in the age of Tully, renouncing, with the assurance of Locke, and with
some of his phrases, the outworn fallacy of innate ideas, and naïvely
confiding to his journal, after the manner of Diderot, that a man born
blind would have never a notion of color. Franklin was only the most
distinguished of those who read with pleasure the Queen Anne poets and
essayists, who learned in Tillotson that theology might be compatible
with reason and common sense, or in Shaftesbury that an enlightened
free-thinker might still be a gentleman and a man of virtue. Among the
cultivated and the well-bred it was no more than good form to open the
mind to all the tolerant liberalisms of the age; and no one in the
colonies lost caste who endeavored, in the manner if not in the
substance of his thinking, to achieve the polished urbanity of those
Englishmen who made a point of being scholars without a touch of
pedantry, and men of virtue without the taint of prejudice.
Yet few of these emancipated citizens of the world had permitted the
dissolvent philosophy of the century to enter the very pith and fiber of
their mental quality. For the rich and the well-born it was rather an
imported fashion, an attractive drapery laid over the surface of minds
that were conventional down to the ground, the modish mental recreation
of men who lived by custom and guided their steps in the well-worn paths
of precedent. In America, as in England, as in France, itself, the
formulæ of radicalism were well pronounced by many whose hearts grew
faint at the first rude contact with the thing itself. And of all the
phrases of that age, the ones best suited to the temper and purposes of
the colonial aristocracies, and understood by them with reservations the
most characteristically English, were those employed by Locke to justify
the natural right of Englishmen to become free while remaining unequal.
The colonials of substantial estates, long occupied in their assemblies
in resisting the governor's authority, thought of themselves often
enough as but rehearsing the traditional conflict between Crown and
Parliament. Like their prototypes they identified the rights of property
with natural right, and translated political liberty in terms of
prescriptive privilege. The rights of man and the rights of Englishmen
were thus thought to be synonymous terms: a happy confusion by which it
was possible for them to defend liberty against the encroachments of
their equals in England, without sharing it with their inferiors in the
colonies.
II
"My ancestors," says Devereaux Jarrett, who was born on a small
plantation in New Kent County, Virginia, about 1733, "had the character
of honesty and industry, by which they lived in credit among their
neighbors, free from real want, and above the frowns of the world. This
was also the habit in which my parents were. They always had plenty of
plain food and raiment, suitable to their humble station. We made no
use of tea or coffee; meat, bread, and milk was the ordinary food of all
my acquaintance. I suppose the richer sort might make use of those and
other luxuries, but to such people we had no access. We were accustomed
to look upon what were called _gentle folks_ as beings of a superior
order. For my part, I was quite shy of them, and kept off at a humble
distance. A periwig in those days, was a distinguishing badge of gentle
folk. Such ideas of the difference between gentle and simple, were, I
believe, universal among all my rank and age."
The distinction between gentle and simple was doubtless less absolute
than the disillusioned Jarrett represents it to have been. Even in the
South there were many gradations of wealth, and it was no uncommon thing
for a man to rise, as Jarrett did himself, from mean birth to a
considerable eminence. Yet in none of the colonies was the distinction
altogether unreal. The mass of the voters,--small freehold farmers in
the country and "freemen" in some of the towns,--holding themselves
superior to the unfranchised, yet not claiming equality with the favored
few; the tenant farmer or small shopkeeper, deferring to the freeholder
and the freeman, but aware that fortune had placed him above the artisan
and day laborer; the artisan and the day laborer, proud that none could
call them "servant":--these were the simple folk who in all the colonies
made the great majority of free citizens. Chiefly occupied with earning
daily bread by the labor of their hands, many were content to escape the
debtor's prison, the best well satisfied with a modest competence. They
heard of countries beyond sea, but their outlook was bounded by the
parish. The provincialism of their minds was not dispelled by communion
with the classics of all ages, and no cheap magazine or popular novel
came to dull the edge of native shrewdness or curiosity. They read not
at all, or they read the Bible, the _Paradise Lost_ or the _Pilgrim's
Progress_, or some chance book of sermons or of theology, or book of
English ballads. Periwigs and gold braid were not for them, nor was it
any part of their ambition to enter the charmed circle of polite
society, to associate on terms of equality with the "best people" in the
colony.
Yet with whatever semblance the older settlements might take on the
character of European civilization, America was bound to be the land of
opportunity so long as there was abundance of free land to entice the
ambitious and the dispossessed. Early in the century, as good land
became scarce in the older towns of New England, and proprietors began
to deny the commons to the landless, venturesome and discontented men,
accepting the challenge of a savage-infested wilderness, moved northward
along the rivers into Maine and New Hampshire, or beyond the original
Connecticut settlements into the valley of the Housatonic. Here land was
less often than formerly disposed of to groups of proprietors intent to
maintain the traditions of town and church; acquired by the older towns
or by land agents, it was more often sold to companies or to individuals
for the profit it would bring. The famous New Hampshire grants, one
hundred and thirty townships in the present State of Vermont, fell
mainly to speculators who sold to the highest bidder, covenanted and
uncovenanted alike, among the throng of home-seekers who pushed into
this western country in the seventh decade of the century. Long before
the Revolution opened, there thus existed in New England a fringe of
pioneer settlements--such as Vassalboro and Durham on the Androscoggin
and the Kennebec, Concord and Hinsdale on the Merrimac and the
Connecticut, Pittsfield and Great Barrington on the Housatonic--which
formed a newer New England, less lettered and scriptural than the old,
where class distinctions were little known, where contact with the
Indian and the wilderness had added a secular ruthlessness and ingenuity
to the harsh Puritan temper, and where the individual, freed from an
effective "village moral police," learned in the rough school of nature
a new kind of conformity unknown to the ancient Hebrew code.
In the Middle and Southern colonies, even more than in New England,
expansion of population into the interior was a notable feature of the
eighteenth century. In 1700 the estate of William Byrd at the James
River Falls was on the Indian frontier; North Carolina was unoccupied
south of Albemarle Sound or west of the Nottaway River; there were few
settlers in South Carolina north of the Santee, or south or west of it
except the Charleston planters who had appropriated all the land within
sixty miles of the coast and within twenty of every navigable river.
Sixty years later the unoccupied coast regions were settled, and the
surplus population of Virginia and Maryland, excluded from the
tide-water by the engrossers of great estates, or oppressed by its
restricted social conditions, had occupied the cheap lands of eastern
North Carolina, or, following the James and the Rappahannock, had
settled in the up-country between the "Fall Line" and the Blue Ridge.
Cattle-raisers, learning from Indian traders of the fertile interior,
followed the trails with their "cowpens," which in turn gave place to
permanent farms. In this back country, the great plantation was not
often found, and slavery played little part. There were few superiors
where farms were comparatively small, and where most men worked with
their hands and consumed provisions raised by their own labor. Of those
who came from the older settlements to occupy the up-country, many were
"such as have been transported hither as servants, and being out of
their time ... settle themselves where land is to be taken up that will
produce the necessities of life with little labor." William Byrd
described with engaging wit the ne'er-do-wells who maintained a
precarious existence below the Dividing Line; and Governor Spotswood
deplored the shiftless servants who lived on the Virginia frontier. Yet
we may suppose that freedom often transformed the idle bondsman into an
industrious freeholder. Nor were all the settlers of the Virginia back
country emancipated servants. In 1732 Peter Jefferson patented a
thousand acres at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was in this
frontier community above the Fall Line that Patrick Henry and Thomas
Jefferson were born; here they grew to manhood; here they were inspired
with those ideals of society so inimical alike to the imperial designs
of the British Government and to the complacent pretensions of the
slave-owning aristocracies of the tide-water.
Yet the first distinctive American frontier was not created alone by the
movement of population westward from the older settlements; like every
successive frontier in our history, it became the mecca of emigrants
from British and continental lands. Before 1700, exiled Huguenots and
refugees from the Palatinate began to seek the New World; and during the
eighteenth century men of non-English stock poured by the thousands into
the up-country of Pennsylvania and of the South. In 1700 the foreign
population in the colonies was slight; in 1775 it is estimated that
225,000 Germans and 385,000 Scotch-Irish, together nearly one fifth of
the entire population, lived within the provinces that won independence.
Persecution and the ravages of war, taxes that were heavy at any time
and intolerable in time of famine, were among the causes that disposed
many thousands of Protestant families from Ulster, and from the thickly
populated districts of Switzerland and the Rhine country, to seek new
homes in a land of better promise. To cross the ocean was no slight
undertaking for unlettered and home-keeping people. But since the
founding of Pennsylvania knowledge of America had spread among the
peasants of Germany, and there was no lack of "Neulanders"--the emigrant
agents of that day--who described the New World in glowing terms, and
stood ready for a consideration to carry any who wished to be
transported to its shores. And the way was facilitated by the English
and colonial Governments: to forestall the French in settling the
interior, secure the trade of the Indians in time of peace, and erect a
barrier against them in time of war, foreigners were accorded
naturalization, land was offered on easy terms, and toleration granted
to all Protestant sects.
Foreigners were not attracted to New England, where the Puritans
scrutinized all newcomers with a jealous eye; while New York was avoided
on account of the unhappy experience of Governor Hunter's Palatines and
the refusal of the great landowners along the Hudson to grant freehold
title. Most of the Germans, seeking homes in the best advertised and
most German of all the colonies, landed at the port of Philadelphia.
Germantown had been founded by Francis Daniel Pastorius in 1683, but it
was not until forty years later, after the devastating wars of the
Spanish Succession, that his countrymen occupied in force the
neighboring counties of Lancaster, Montgomery, and Bucks, pushed up into
Lehigh and Northampton, and across the Susquehanna into Cumberland and
Adams. Much to their surprise, doubtless, for it was scarcely the
business of the emigrant agent to inform them, they learned that land in
this German mecca sold for from £10 to £15 per hundred acres, and bore a
quit-rent of one halfpenny. Many occupied the land as squatters, and it
is estimated that 400,000 acres were settled without title between 1732
and 1740. But the newcomers or their children soon learned of better
opportunities to the south, where Maryland land sold for from £2 to £5
per hundred acres, and the up-country forestallers, such as Carter and
Beverley, under-sold the Pennsylvania land office in order to attract
settlers. As early as 1726 the stream of German migration began,
therefore, to move along the mountain slopes to the south and west.
During the middle decades of the century, they occupied in increasing
numbers the Piedmont of Virginia, crept southward along the west side of
the Blue Ridge in the Shenandoah Valley, and out into the up-country of
the Carolinas west of the great Pine Barrens.
[Illustration: Growth of English Settlements, 1700-1760.]
At the same time as the Germans, and in even greater numbers, came the
Scotch and Scotch-Irish, mostly disappointed settlers in Ulster who
found land titles insecure there and the promise of religious liberty
unfulfilled. A few, not easily discouraged, came to the Berkshires and
the New Hampshire hills; more occupied the Mohawk and Cherry Valleys of
New York; the great majority, like the Germans, settled in Pennsylvania
and the up-country of the South. In Pennsylvania, they went for the most
part beyond the German frontier, occupying the country from Lancaster to
Bedford, the Juniata Valley and the Redstone country, and in the decades
before the Revolution, attracted by free lands west of the Alleghanies,
as far as Pittsburg on the upper Ohio. Like the Germans they pushed
south into the Piedmont of Virginia, and along the Alleghany slope of
the Shenandoah, and into the Southern up-country as far as the Savannah
River. Sometimes mixing with the Germans, the main body of the
Scotch-Irish was everywhere farther west. Too martial to fear the
Indians, and too aggressive to live at peace with them, they were the
true borderers of the century, the frontier of the frontier, forming,
from Londonderry in New England to the Savannah, an outer bulwark,
behind which the older settlements, and even the peace-loving Germans
themselves, rested in some measure of security.
The German or Scotch-Irish immigrant was doubtless grateful to the
Government which offered him a refuge; but in the breast of neither was
there any sentimental loyalty to King George, or much sympathy with the
traditions of English society. Whether Mennonite or Moravian, German
Lutheran or Scotch Presbyterian, they were men whose manner of life
disposed them to an instinctive belief in equality of condition, whose
religion confirmed them in a democratic habit of mind. That every man
should labor as he was able; that no man should live by another's toil
or waste in luxurious living the hard-earned fruits of industry; that
all should live upright lives, eschewing the vanities of the world, and
worshiping God, neither with images nor vestments nor Romish ritual, but
in spirit and in truth:--these were the ideals which the foreign
Protestants brought as a heritage from Wittenberg and Geneva to their
new home in America. And if we may accept the impressions of an English
observer, life in the Shenandoah Valley was in happy accord, in the
middle of the century, with the arcadian simplicity of these ideals. "I
could not but reflect with pleasure on the situation of these people,"
says Richard Burnaby. "Far from the bustle of the world, they live in
the most delightful climate, and the richest soil imaginable; they are
everywhere surrounded with the most beautiful prospects and sylvan
scenes; ... they ... live in perfect liberty; they are ignorant of want,
and acquainted with but few vices. Their inexperience of the elegancies
of life precludes any regret that they possess not the means of enjoying
them; but they possess what many persons would give half their dominions
for, health, content, and tranquillity of mind."
[Illustration: Area of German Settlements and Frontier Line in 1775.]
The description does not lack truth, but perhaps it somewhat smacks of
fashionable eighteenth-century philosophy. And assuredly no region on
the frontier was more favored than the famous Shenandoah Valley. Little
question that conditions were less idyllic in other places. Missionaries
who preached the Great Awakening in western Pennsylvania and in the
Southern back country were often enough appalled by evidence of
ignorance and low morals. And on the far outer frontier at White Woman's
Creek, Mary Harris, still recalling after forty years' exile that "they
used to be very religious in New England," told Christopher Gist in 1751
that "she wondered how white men could be so wicked as she had seen them
in these woods." Neither the lyric phrase of Burnaby nor the harsh
verdict of Mary Harris fitly describes those interior communities that
stretched from Maine to Georgia. But there, as elsewhere, doubtless, the
practice of men's lives, even among the frontier Puritans of New
England, or the German Protestants and Scotch Presbyterians of the
Middle and Southern colonies, often fell short of their best ideals.
Leaving the sheltered existence of long-settled communities, set down on
a dangerous Indian frontier or at best in a virgin country, where
customary restraints were relaxed, where churches were few and schools
often unknown, where action more readily followed hard on desire and
men's will made all the majesty of the law, the aggressive primary
instincts had freer play, and society could not but take on a strain of
the primitive. Even more than the original colonists, these dwellers on
the second frontier caught something of the wild freedom of the
wilderness, something of the ruthlessness of nature, something also of
its self-sufficiency, something of its somber and emotional influence.
Between this primitive agricultural democracy of the interior and the
commercial and landed aristocracy of the coast, separated geographically
and differing widely in interests and ideals, conflict was inevitable.
When, in 1780, Thomas Jefferson said that "19,000 men below the Falls
give law to more than 30,000 living in other parts of the state," he was
proclaiming that opposition between the older and the newer America
which found expression in provincial politics from the middle of the
eighteenth century, which made a part of the Revolution, and which in
every period since has been so decisive a feature of our history. In the
eighteenth century the frontier was the home of a primitive radicalism.
Where offenses were elemental and easily detected, legal technicalities
and the chicanery of courts seemed but devices for the support of idle
lawyers; where debtors were most numerous and specie most scarce, few
could understand why paper money would not prove a panacea for poverty;
where every man earned his own bread and where submission to the
inevitable was the only kind of conformity that was deemed essential,
slavery and a state church were thought to be but the bulwark of class
privilege and the tyranny of kings. After the French wars the interior
communities of the Middle and Southern colonies, finding themselves
unfairly represented in the assemblies, were first made aware that their
interests were little likely to be seriously regarded either by the
king's ministers or the merchants and landlords who shaped legislation
at Williamsburg, Philadelphia, or New York. For defending the border in
the desolating war that drove the French out of America, it now seemed
that they were to be rewarded by land laws made for the rich, an
administration of justice burdensome for sparsely settled communities, a
money system that penalized them for being debtors, or taxes levied for
the support of a church which they never entered. And so, before the
Revolution opened, the Western imagination had conjured up the specter
of a corrupt and effete "East": land of money-changers and self-styled
aristocrats and a pliant clergy, the haunt of lawyers and hangers-on,
proper dwelling-place of "servants" and the beaten slave: a land of
cities, scorning the provincial West, and bent on exploiting its
laborious and upright people. And who could doubt that men who bought
their clothes in London would readily crook the knee to kings? Who could
question that special privilege in the colonies was fostered by the
laws of trade, or that aristocracy in America was the reward of
submission to England?
III
The appearance before the Revolution of class and sectional conflict
within the colonies was no more incompatible then than it has been since
with a growing sense of solidarity against the outside world. And in
developing this sense of Americanism, this national consciousness, the
frontier was itself an important influence. Physiographically separated
from the coast region, untouched by its social traditions, often hostile
to its political activities, the people of the back country had but
little of that pride of colony which made the Bostonian critical of the
New Yorker, or gave to the true Virginian a feeling of superiority to
the "zealots" of New England. To the Scotch-Irish or German dweller in
the Shenandoah Valley it mattered little whether he lived north or south
of an imaginary and disputed line that divided Maryland from
Pennsylvania. Political subjection to Virginia could not remove the Blue
Ridge Mountains which isolated him far more effectively from
Williamsburg than from Baltimore, or the racial and religious prejudice
that disposed him to give more credit to ministers trained at Princeton
than to clergymen ordained by the Bishop of London. In the back country,
lines of communication ran north and south, and men moved up and down
the valleys from Pennsylvania to Georgia, whether in search of homes or
in pursuit of trade or to spread the gospel, scarcely conscious of the
political boundaries which they crossed, and in crossing helped to
obliterate.
If the physiography of the back country cut across provincial
boundaries, the mingling of diverse races, in an environment which
constrained men to act along similar lines while leaving them free to
think much as they liked, could not but wear away the sharp edges of
warring creeds and divergent customs. The many Protestant sects,
differing widely in externals, were not far apart in fundamentals; and
as in leaving their European homes the chief causes of difference
disappeared, so life in America brought all the similarities into strong
relief. In this new country, where schools were few and great
universities inaccessible, the Presbyterian ideal of an educated clergy
could not be always maintained, while sects which in Europe had
professed to despise learning came to regard it more highly in a land
where the effects of ignorance were more apparent than the evils of
pedantry. No man could afford to be fastidious in any minor point of
religious practice when a good day's journey would no more than bring
him to the nearest church. Mr. Samuel Davies, one of the early
presidents of Princeton, and for some years a missionary on the Virginia
frontier, said that people in the up-country came twenty, thirty, and
even forty miles to hear him preach. In a letter to Mr. Bellamy, of
Bethlehem, he describes his labors, and asks for ministers to help him,
from "New England or elsewhere." So true is it, as Colonel Byrd had
observed in North Carolina, that "people uninstructed in any religion
are ready to embrace the first that offers."
Yet in many a community, on the frontier and in every part of the Middle
colonies, the mingling of races compelled men, however well instructed,
to ignore the minor points of their proper creeds. The Moravian
missionary Schnell, preaching at South Branch, Virginia, to an audience
of English, Germans, and Dutch, quite satisfied them all by discoursing
from the text, "If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink."
Although his principles forbade him to baptize the children which were
brought to him, they "liked Brother Schnell very much," and desired him
to remain with them. And communities there were where men had forgotten
the very names almost of Protestant sects. Some people in Hanover
County, assembling on Sundays to read a book of Whitefield's sermons
which by some chance had come their way, and being desired by the county
court to declare what religion they were of, found themselves at a loss
for a name, "as we knew but little of any denomination of Protestants,
except Quakers." But at length, "recollecting that Luther was a noted
reformer, and that his books had been of special service to us, we
declared ourselves Lutherans; and thus we continued until Providence
sent us the Rev. Mr. William Robinson." Aided by Luther and edified by
Whitefield, they were quite content to be further instructed and
"corrected" by Mr. Robinson, Presbyterian though he was, "being informed
that his method of preaching was awakening."
And, indeed, toward the middle of the century, the "awakening" preacher
was everywhere welcome. In America, as in England itself, a strange
lethargy had fallen on the churches in that interlude between the
Puritan régime and the Revolution. Dead literalism had crept into the
pulpits, and conventional conformity too often did duty for conviction
among the people. It was a condition which could not endure in
communities where religion was still the chief intellectual and
emotional refuge from the daily routine of commonplace duties. Thus it
happened that both in the older settlements, where for the unlettered
the dull round of life was rarely broken either by real or fictitious
adventure, and in those newer regions where primitive conditions brought
the primal passions readily to the surface, the burning words of the
revivalist met with ready and unprecedented response. Let him but preach
"vital" religion, and none questioned too closely into his formal
beliefs, or inquired of what nationality or province he might be. For
the preachers of "vital" religion--whether the Moravian Schnell or the
Methodist Whitefield, whether the Puritan Jonathan Edwards, profoundest
theologian of his generation, or the Presbyterian enthusiasts, such as
Gilbert Tennant and Mr. Davies, who went out from the little Log College
to carry the gospel to the mixed population of the Middle and Southern
colonies--all alike appealed to those instinctive emotions which make
men kin and from which every religion springs. In forming the new spirit
of Americanism, few events were more important than the Great Awakening.
During that sudden up-surging of religious emotionalism, which for a
decade rolled like a tidal wave over the colonies, provincial
boundaries and the distinctions of race and creed were in some measure
forgotten in a new sense of common nature and human brotherhood.
True it is that the Great Awakening was accompanied by no lack of acid
jealousies and unchristian recrimination. In almost every sect "New
Light" separated from "Old Light," "New Side" from "Old Side," in most
unfraternal division. Gilbert Tennant, imitating Whitefield and
out-heroding Herod, exhausted ecclesiastical billingsgate in quest of
terms to characterize those clergymen--Congregational or Presbyterian or
Anglican; those "letter-learned Pharisees," those "moral negroes," those
"plastered hypocrites"--who stood out in stiff-necked opposition to
revivalist methods of inculcating vital religion. Schism divided the
Presbyterians for more than a decade; many congregations in eastern
Connecticut, renouncing the Saybrook Platform and the Half-Way
Covenant, "separated" from the Association; and in Massachusetts the
quarrel between revivalists and anti-revivalists only accentuated the
breach between new and old Calvinists. And true it is that the flood
tide was followed by the ebb: the tremendous emotional upheaval, which
began with the Northampton sermons of Jonathan Edwards in 1734, seemed
to cease after 1744 as suddenly as it came. For more than a year
scarcely one person was converted in all Boston, said Thomas Prince in
1754. Jonathan Edwards waited in vain from 1744 to 1748 for a single
applicant for admission to the Northampton Church. And the great
Whitefield himself, returning to America in 1744, 1754, and 1764,
although always gladly heard by thousands, found that the old magic had
unaccountably lost its wonder-working power.
Yet division is sometimes the prelude to more effective union. It was
precisely in sowing dissension within the sects that the Great Awakening
broke down barriers between the sects; and by separating men in the same
locality it united men in different localities. The graduates of Log
College, a very seminary of revivalism, disowned by Philadelphia
Presbyterians, found encouragement among New Englanders of East Jersey
and New York Presbyterians who had been educated at New Haven. In 1746,
men from three colonies, whom the Great Awakening had brought in to
closer relations, founded the College of New Jersey, afterwards located
at Princeton. Although destined to become the intellectual citadel of a
new Presbyterianism, two of its first three presidents were born in New
England, two were graduates of Yale College, and one was a
Congregationalist, while Samuel Blair, an alumnus of the new
institution, was not thought unworthy to be minister of the Old South
Church of Boston. These are but isolated instances of the leveling of
religious barriers between Protestant sects in the Northern colonies. In
the decades following the Great Awakening New England religious
solidarity was already a thing of the past. While cultivated and
tolerant liberals of Boston, dallying with Arminian and Arian delusions
that were but the prelude to Unitarianism, departed from the old
Calvinism in one direction, Jonathan Edwards and his disciples were
formulating the "New England Theology" which enabled the clergy of
Connecticut and western Massachusetts to approach within hailing
distance of Scotch Presbyterianism. Ministers of "Consociated" churches
scrupled not, indeed, to call themselves Presbyterians. From 1766 to
1775, representatives from the Connecticut Association, and from the
Synods of New York and Philadelphia, snuffing on every tainted breeze
the danger of a prospective Anglican Episcopate, met annually in joint
convention; and a few years later it was without reproach that the
Connecticut Congregationalists could refer to the plan for a still more
intimate fellowship as "a Scheme for the Union of the Presbyterians of
America."
The fear of Anglicanism may remind us that the leveling of religious
barriers was in part brought about by the movement toward political
union. And in generating this new sense of solidarity, whether in
respect to religion or politics, better facilities for intercourse and
communication were not without importance. It is difficult for us,
living in an age when a man may breakfast in Philadelphia and dine the
same day in Boston, to remember that Franklin was "about a fortnight"
making the same distance in 1724. Yet a quarter of a century later, when
the means of travel were not much more expeditious even if they were
more certain, men journeyed continuously up and down the road that led
from Boston to New York and Philadelphia, and from Philadelphia out into
the back country and along the Shenandoah Valley. So much so, that the
inhabitants of the little town of New Brunswick, says Peter Kalm, "get
a considerable profit from the travellers who every hour pass through on
the high road." Communication by correspondence, immensely facilitated
after the establishment of the "General Post Office" by Parliament in
1710, served often to create cordial relations between men living in
different colonies; men who perhaps had never seen each other, and who
might have been, as the good John Adams sometimes was, disillusioned by
personal contact. Newspapers, long since established in Philadelphia and
Charleston, as well as in New York and Boston, regularly carrying the
latest intelligence from every colony into every other, wore away
provincial prejudice and strengthened intercolonial solidarity by
revealing the common character of governmental organization and of
political issues from Massachusetts to South Carolina. The assembly at
Williamsburg or at Philadelphia, guarding local privileges against the
encroachments of prerogative, was made aware that in fundamentals the
conflict was American rather than merely provincial, and proclaimed its
rights more stubbornly and with far greater confidence for knowing that
assemblies in New York and Boston were enlisted in the common cause.
In strengthening this sense of political solidarity, the last French
wars were of great importance. Aroused as never before to a realization
of the common danger, colonial Governments coöperated, imperfectly,
indeed, but on a scale and with a unanimity hitherto unknown, in an
undertaking which none could doubt was of momentous import to America
and to the world. Never before were so many men from different colonies
brought into personal contact with one another; never before had so many
Americans of all classes heard the speech and observed the manners of
Britons. It was an experience not to be forgotten. The Puritan recruit
from Massachusetts might write home lamenting the scandalous irreligion
that prevailed among the levies from other colonies; but the irritating
condescension of British regulars made him aware that he had after all
more in common with the most unregenerate American than with any
Englishman. The provincial, subtly conscious of his limitations when
brought into contact with more traveled and cosmopolitan men, endures
less readily than any other to be reminded of his inferiority. Who shall
estimate the effect upon the proud and self-contained Washington of
intercourse with supercilious British officers during the Braddock
expedition? In how many unrecorded instances did a similar experience
produce a similar effect? No bitterness endures like that of the
provincial despised because of his provincialism. He has no recourse but
to make a virtue of his defects, and prove himself superior by
condemning qualities which he may once have envied. And Americans were
the more confirmed in this attitude by the multiplied proofs of the
Englishman's real inferiority for the business in hand. Who were these
men from oversea to instruct natives in the art of frontier
warfare?--men who proclaimed their ignorance of the woods by standing
grouped and red-coated in the open to be shot down by Indians whom they
could not see! From the experience of the last French war there emerged
something of that sublime self-confidence which stamps the true
American. And in that war was generated a sense of spiritual separation
from England never quite felt before--something of the contempt of the
frontiersman for the tenderfoot who comes from the sheltered existence
of cities to instruct him in the refinements of life.
After the Peace of Paris provincial politics takes on, indeed, a certain
militant and perfervid character hitherto unknown, and not wholly due to
the restrictive measures of the Grenville Ministry. It was as if the
colonists, newly stirred by a naïve, primitive egoism, still harboring
the memory of unmerited slights, of services unappreciated even if paid
for, had carried over into secular activities some fanatical strain from
the Great Awakening, something of the intensity of deep-seated moral
convictions. And in no unreal sense this was so. The mantle of Samuel
Davies fell upon Patrick Henry. The flood tide of religious emotionalism
ebbed but to flow in other channels? and men who had been so profoundly
stirred by the revivalist were the more readily moved by the appeal of
the revolutionary orator.
In diverting the current of quickened religious feeling into political
channels, the influence of Princeton College was a memorable one.
Founded by Presbyterians less interested in creeds than in vital
religion, and barring no person on "account of any speculative
principles," the new institution furnished an education that was
"liberal" in the political as well as in the intellectual sense of the
term. From this center emanated a new leaven. Here young men came from
all the Middle and Southern country to receive the stamp of a new
Presbyterianism compounded of vital religion and the latter-day spirit
of Geneva. In this era, by such men as John Madison, Oliver Ellsworth,
and Luther Martin, were founded the two famous societies, _Cliosophic_
and _American Whig_, where the lively discussions were doubtless more
often concerned with history and politics than with the abstract points
of theology or religion. It was in 1768 that John Witherspoon, the very
personification of the new influence, became president of the college. A
Scotchman educated at Edinburgh, he became at once an ardent defender of
the colonial cause, as "high a Son of Liberty as any man in America,"
destined to be better known as a signer of the Declaration of
Independence than as a Presbyterian minister of the gospel. During
twenty years previous to the Revolution, many men went out from
Princeton to become powerful moulders of public opinion. Few were
counted as theologians of note; few were set down as British Loyalists.
But they were proud to be known as Americans and patriots: ministers who
from obscure pulpits proclaimed the blessings of political liberty;
laymen who professed politics with the fervor of religious conviction.
And the Puritan spirit, in like manner deserting the worn-out body of
old theologies, was reincarnated in secular forms, to become once more
the animating force of New England civic life. The fall of the Puritan
theocracy was followed, half a century later, by the rise of the Puritan
democracy. As the old intimacy between State and Church disappeared,
the churches turned to the people for that support which was no longer
accorded by government. Thus there came into general use the famous
Half-Way Covenant, a wide-open back door through which all men of
blameless lives and orthodox beliefs might press into the churches, a
kind of ecclesiastical manhood suffrage undermining the aristocracy of
the fully regenerate. As a partial remedy for the evils arising out of
this democratization of religion and church government, a closer union
of the churches under ministerial supervision was advocated, and finally
adopted in Connecticut under the name of "Consociation." But the scheme
was defeated in Massachusetts; and it is significant that the men who
defeated it, no friends, many of them, of the Half-Way Covenant,
appealed to that very democratic principle of which the Half-Way
Covenant was a practical application. It was a son of Cotton Mather who
warned the people of the churches never blindly to "resign themselves to
the direction of their ministers; but consider themselves, as men, as
Christians, as Protestants, obliged to act and judge for themselves in
all the weighty concernments of Religion." To resign themselves to their
ministers was thought, indeed, to be but the first step backward toward
Anglican oppression and Papal tyranny.
A far more profound opponent of ecclesiastical aristocracy was the
Reverend John Wise, of Ipswich. He belongs to that illustrious minority
which stood out against the witchcraft delusion. Fined and imprisoned
upon one occasion for leading his town to refuse the collection of
taxes not imposed by a representative assembly, he was a proper man to
declare that "power is originally in the people." As men are "all
naturally free and equal," civil government "is the effect of human
free-compacts and not of divine instigation." And "if Christ has settled
any form of power in his Church he has done it for the benefit of every
member. Then he must needs be presumed to have made choice of that
government as should least expose the people to hazard, either from
fraud, or arbitrary measures of particular men. And it is as plain as
daylight, there is no species of government like a democracy to attain
this end." So argued the Ipswich preacher in 1717. Fifty years later,
his _Vindication of the Government of the New England Churches_, too
radical for his own day, was seen to be the very thing needed; in 1772,
when "consociation" had broken down even in Connecticut, when
Anglicanism was associated in men's minds with royal oppression, and
when political and religious liberty seemed destined to stand or fall
together, then the work of John Wise was reprinted and two editions were
exhausted within the year.
Accompanying the endeavor to find a common theoretical basis for Church
and State was the disposition to apply a common test to public and
private conduct. Rousseau voiced one of the strongest convictions of his
age when he said that "those who would treat politics and morality apart
will never understand anything about either one or the other." With the
decay of creeds, true religion was thought by many to be inseparable
from civic virtue, while political philosophy, preaching the
regeneration of an "artificial" society by returning to the simple life
of nature, was often conceived with an emotional fervor which raised
civic duties to the level of religious rites. In America, long before
Rousseau startled the world with his paradoxes, men who could not agree
on creeds or forms of government found common ground in thinking that
the test of true religion was that it made good citizens, the test of
rightly ordered society that it made good men. In the early letters of
John Adams we may note how one man's mind was won to this new ideal.
"There is a story about town," he writes to Charles Cushing, "that I am
an Arminian." Time was when such a rumor would have been too serious to
be reported, without comment, in the postscript of a long letter. In
1756, even this young candidate for the ministry felt that such issues
were becoming remote and unreal. He but voiced the growing discontent
when he asked, "where do we find a precept in the gospel requiring
ecclesiastical synods, councils, creeds, oaths, subscriptions, and whole
cart-loads of other trumpery that we find religion encumbered with in
these days?" Independent thinking, fortified by the authority of Locke
and Sidney, Bacon and Tillotson, and the author of Cato's Letters,
enabled him to announce, in the very spirit and all but the very words
of Diderot and Rousseau, of whom he had never heard, that "the design of
Christianity was not to make good riddle-solvers or good
mystery-mongers, but good men, good magistrates, and good subjects." And
so he renounced the ministry in favor of "that science by which mankind
raise themselves from the forlorn, helpless state, in which nature
leaves them, to the full enjoyment of all the inestimable blessings of
social union."
It is but an evidence of the force of this new ideal that Benjamin
Franklin, in whose life and writings it finds best expression, became
the most influential American of his time and won in two continents the
veneration that men accord to saints and prophets. At the age of sixteen
some books against Deism came his way; but "the arguments of the Deists,
which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me to be stronger than the
refutations; [and] I soon became a thorough Deist." Yet experience
straightway led this original pragmatist to the conclusion that,
although a materialistic philosophy of life "might be true, it was not
very useful." Without faith in religions, yet unable to do without
religion, he set down the list of virtues which he thought might be of
benefit to himself and at the same time of service to his fellows;
qualities which all the sects might unite in proclaiming good, and which
any man might easily acquire by a little persistence in self-discipline.
Aiming to become himself "completely virtuous," he dreamed of some day
formulating the universal principles of the "Art of Virtue," and of
uniting all good men throughout the world in a society for promoting the
practice of it. And what was this Art of Virtue but a socialized
religion divested of doctrine and ritual? "I think vital religion has
always suffered when orthodoxy is more regarded than virtue; and the
Scriptures assure me that at the last day we shall not be examined what
we _thought_, but what we _did_; and our recommendation will be that we
did good to our fellow creatures." The evangelist Whitefield, when
Franklin once promised to do him a personal service, assured the
philosopher that if he made that kind offer for Christ's sake he should
not miss a reward. It was in the spirit of the new age speaking to the
old that the sage replied: "Don't let me be mistaken; it was not for
Christ's sake, but for yours."
Franklin spoke indeed for the new age and the New World. He was the
first American: the very personification of that native sense of destiny
and high mission in the world, and of that good-natured tolerance for
the half-spent peoples of Europe, which is the American spirit; a living
and vocal product, as it were, of all the material and spiritual forces
that were transforming the people of the British plantations into a new
nation. All racial and religious antagonisms, all sectional and
intercolonial jealousies, all class prejudice, were in some manner
comprehended and reconciled in Franklin. He was as old as the century
and touched it at every point. What an inclusive experience was that of
this self-made provincial who as a printer's boy heard Increase Mather
preach in Boston and in his old age stood with Voltaire in Paris to be
proclaimed the incomparable benefactor of mankind! Provincial! But was
this man provincial? Or was that, indeed, a province which produced such
men? Was that country rightly dependent and inferior where law and
custom were most in accord with the philosopher's ideal society? In
that transvaluation of old values effected by the intellectual
revolution of the century, it was the fortune of America to emerge as a
kind of concrete example of the imagined State of Nature. In contrast
with Europe, so "artificial," so oppressed with defenseless tyrannies
and useless inequalities, so encumbered with decayed superstitions and
the débris of worn-out institutions, how superior was this new land of
promise where the citizen was a free man, where the necessities of life
were the sure reward of industry, where manners were simple, where vice
was less prevalent than virtue and native incapacity the only effective
barrier to ambition! In those years when British statesmen were
endeavoring to reduce the "plantations" to a stricter obedience, some
quickening influence from this ideal of Old World philosophers came to
reinforce the determination of Americans to be masters of their own
destiny.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
For the constitutional and political tendencies in this period, see
Channing, _History of the United States_, II, chaps, X-XII; Greene,
_Provincial America_, chaps, V, XII; Andrews, _The Colonial
Period_, chap. VII. Economic, social, and intellectual
characteristics are well described in Channing, II, chaps, XV-XVII;
Greene, chaps, XVI-XVIII; Andrews, _The Colonial Period_, chaps,
III, IV. The best account of religious changes in the eighteenth
century is in Walker, _History of Congregationalism in America._
See also, Fiske, _New France and New England_, chap. VI. Of special
importance for the influence of Princeton College and for the
religious conditions in the up-country are _The Life of Devereaux
Jarrett_ (Baltimore, 1806); and Alexander, _Biographical Sketches
of the Founder and the Alumni of Log College_ (Princeton, 1845).
The expansion of population into the interior and the coming of the
Germans and Scotch-Irish are well described in Channing, II, chap,
XIV; and Greene, chap. XIV. For a full treatment of the German
migration see Faust, _The German Element in the United States_ (2
vols. 1909); for the Scotch-Irish see Hanna, _The Scotch-Irish_ (2
vols. 1902). The best account of the characteristics of frontier
society in this period is in Turner, _The Old West_, in
_Proceedings of the Wisconsin Historical Society_, 1908, p. 184. Of
considerable importance for understanding colonial society in this
period are the observations of foreign travelers, notably Kalm and
Burnaby whose narratives are printed in Pinkerton, _Voyages_
(London, 1808-14), vol. XIII. For understanding the temper and
ideals of America in the eighteenth century, no writings are of
equal importance with those of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin,
especially the _Diary_ of the former (_Works of John Adams_, 10
vols. Boston, 1856) and the _Autobiography_ of the latter, in his
collected works and separately printed in many editions. See
Bigelow edition. _The Life of Benjamin Franklin written by
Himself._