Produced by Don Kostuch
[Transcriber's Notes]
The appearance of the Word format closely approximates the original
text, except that sentence fragments are rejoined across page and
illustration boundaries. The HTML and TXT formats discard page
boundaries but retain the year references in square brackets. Thus
[1492-1495] indicate the following text covers this period, until the
next such appearance.
Where useful comparisons can be made, a few pictures and contemporary
maps from Google Earth (TM) have been inserted.
Several books on Columbus are available at Gutenberg.org, including "The
Life of Columbus" by Arthur Helps.
A pound sterling in 1600 is worth about 135 pounds or 235 Dollars US in
2006.
Here are some unfamiliar (to me) terms.
camlets
Rich cloth of Asian origin, made of camel's hair and silk and later
made of goat's hair and silk or other combinations. A garment made
from this cloth.
contumacy
Stubborn perverseness or rebelliousness; obstinate resistance to
authority.
druggets
Heavy felted fabric of wool or wool and cotton, used as a floor
covering.
escheated
Reversion of property to the state in the absence of legal heirs or
claimants.
fee simple
An estate of inheritance in land, either absolute and without
limitation to any particular class of heirs (fee simple) or limited to
a particular class of heirs (fee tail).
glebe
Plot of land yielding profit to an English parish church or an
ecclesiastical office.
Pascua Florida
Feast of flowers; Easter.
quit rent
A land tax imposed on freehold or leased land by a landowning
authority, freeing the tenant of a holding from other obligations.
New Style (dates)
Describing dates after the adoption of the Gregorian calendar. Various
nations adopted the Gregorian calendar between 1582 and 1752.
Old Style (dates)
Describing dates before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar.
pompion
Pumpkin.
sedulous
Diligent in application or attention; persevering.
settle
Long wooden bench with a high back, often including storage space
beneath the seat.
[End Transcriber's Notes.]
HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
[Illustration: Portrait of Columbus.]
Columbus
After a Portrait by Herrer.
HISTORY OF
THE UNITED STATES
FROM THE EARLIEST DISCOVERY OF
AMERICA TO THE PRESENT TIME
BY
E. BENJAMIN ANDREWS
CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA
FORMERLY PRESIDENT OF BROWN UNIVERSITY
With 650 Illustrations and Maps
VOLUME I.
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
1912
COPYRIGHT, 1894, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
[Illustration: Scribner logo.]
TO MY WIFE
PREFACE
Notwithstanding the number of United States histories already in
existence, and the excellence of many of them, I venture to think that
no apology is needed for bringing forward another.
1. The work now presented to the public is believed to utilize, more
than any of its predecessors, the many valuable researches of recent
years into the rich archives of this and other nations.
2. Most of the briefer treatments of the subject are manuals, intended
for pupils in schools, the conspicuous articulation so necessary for
this purpose greatly lessening their interest for the general reader.
The following narrative will be found continuous as well as of moderate
compass.
3. I have sought to make more prominent than popular histories have
usually done, at the same time the political evolution of our country on
the one hand, and the social culture, habits, and life of the people on
the other.
4. The work strives to observe scrupulous proportion in treating the
different parts and phases of our national career, neglecting none and
over-emphasizing none. Also, while pronouncedly national and patriotic,
it is careful to be perfectly fair and kind to the people of all
sections.
5. Effort has been made to present the matter in the most natural
periods and divisions, and to give such a title to each of these as to
render the table of contents a truthful and instructive epitome of our
national past.
6. With the same aim the Fore-history is exhibited in sharp separation
from the United States history proper, calling due attention to what is
too commonly missed, the truly epochal character of the adoption of our
present Constitution, in 1789.
7. Copious illustration has been employed, with diligent study to make
it for every reader in the highest degree an instrument of instruction,
delight, and cultivation in art.
8. No pains has been spared to secure perfect accuracy in all references
to dates, persons, and places, so that the volumes may be used with
confidence as a work of reference. I am persuaded that much success in
this has been attained, despite the uncertainty still attaching to many
matters of this sort in United States history, especially to dates.
BROWN UNIVERSITY, September 15. 1894.
PUBLISHERS' NOTE
The last edition of President Andrews's History was issued in 1905, in
five volumes, and brought the narrative down to the inauguration of
President Roosevelt in March of that year. In preparing the extension of
the work by the addition of a sixth volume, entrusted to the competent
hands of Professor James Alton James of Northwestern University, it has
been thought desirable to begin this final volume with the chapters
entitled "The Rise of Roosevelt" and "Mr. Roosevelt's Presidency." This
has involved some expansion and revision of these chapters as well as
the continuance of the History from 1905 to the present time. The
Appendices, which include public documents of fundamental importance and
the significant results in various fields of the Census of 1910, are an
additional feature of the new edition.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS
Age and Origin of Man in America.
Primordial Americans unlike Present Asiatics.
Resemblances between their Various Branches.
Two Great Types.
The Mound-builders' Age.
Design of the Mounds.
Different
Forms.
Towns and Cities.
Proofs of Culture.
Arts.
Fate of the
Mound-builders.
The Indians.
Their Number.
Degree of
Civilization.
Power of Endurance.
Religion.
The Various
Nations.
Original Brute Inhabitants of North America.
Plants, Fruits, and Trees.
Indian Agriculture.
Part First
THE FORE-HISTORY
PERIOD I
DISCOVERY AND SETTLEMENT
1492-1660
CHAPTER 1. COLUMBUS.
Bretons and Normans in the New World.
The Northmen Question.
Marco
Polo's Travels.
His Pictures of Eastern Asia.
Influence on
Columbus.
Early Life of Columbus.
His Cruises and Studies.
Asia to be Reached by Sailing West.
Appeals for Aid.
Rebuffs.
Success.
Sails from Palos.
The Voyage.
America Discovered.
Columbus's Later Voyages and Discoveries.
Illusion Respecting the New Land.
Amerigo Vespucci.
Rise of the Name "America."
CHAPTER II. EARLY SPANISH AMERICA.
Portugal and Spain Divide the Newly Discovered World.
Spain gets most of America.
Voyage of de Solis.
Balboa Discovers the Pacific.
Ponce de Leon on the Florida Coast.
Explorations by Grijalva.
Cortez Invades Mexico.
Subjugates the Country.
De Ayllon's Cruise.
Magellan Circumnavigates the Globe.
Narvaez's Expedition into Florida.
Its Sad Fate.
De Soto.
His March.
Hardships.
Discovers the Mississippi.
His Death.
End of his Expedition.
French Settlement in Florida.
St. Augustine.
French-Spanish Hostilities.
Reasons for Spain's Failure to Colonize far North.
Her Treatment of the Natives.
Tyranny over her own
Colonies.
CHAPTER III. EXPLORATION AND COLONIZATION BY THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH
Verrazano.
"New France."
Cartier Discovers St. Lawrence Gulf and River.
Second Voyage.-Montreal.-Third.-De Monts.
Champlain.
Founds Quebec.
Westward Explorations.
John Cabot, Discoverer of the North American Main.
Frobisher.
Tries for a Northwest Passage.
Second Expedition for Gold.
Third.
Eskimo Tradition of Frobisher's Visits.
Drake Sails round the World.
Cavendish Follows.
Raleigh's Scheme.
Colony at Roanoke Island.
"Virginia."
Second Colony.
Its Fate.
CHAPTER IV. THE PLANTING OF VIRGINIA
The Old Virginia Charter.
Jamestown Settled.
Company and Colony.
Character of Early Virginia Population.
Progress.
Products.
Slavery.
Agriculture the Dominant Industry.
No Town Life.
Hardships and Dissensions.
John Smith.
New Charter.
Delaware Governor.
The "Starving Time."
Severe Rule of Dale and Argall.
The Change of 1612.
Pocahontas.
Indian Hostilities.
First American Legislature.
Sir Thomas Wyatt.
Self Government.
Virginia Reflects English Political Progress.
Dissolution of the Company.
Charles I. and Virginia.
Harvey, Wyatt. Berkeley.
Virginia under Cromwell.
CHAPTER V. PILGRIM AND PURITAN AT THE NORTH
The first "Independents."
John Smyth's Church at Gainsborough.
The Scrooby Church.
Plymouth Colony.
Settles Plymouth.
Hardships.
Growth.
Cape Ann Settlement.
Massachusetts Bay.
Size.
Polity.
Roger Williams.
His Views.
His Exile.
Anne Hutchinson.
Rhode Island
Founded.
Settlement of Hartford, Windsor, Wethersfield.
Saybrook.
New Haven.
New Hampshire.
Maine.
New England Confederation.
Its Function.
Its Failure.
CHAPTER VI. BALTIMORE AND HIS MARYLAND
Sir George Calvert Plants at Newfoundland.
Is Ennobled.
Sails for Virginia.
Grant of Maryland.
Lord Baltimore Dies.
Succeeded by Cecil.
Government of Maryland.
Conflict with Virginia.
Baltimore comes to Maryland.
Religious Freedom in the Colony.
Clayborne's Rebellion.
First Maryland Assembly.
Anarchy.
Romanism Established.
Baltimore and Roger Williams.
Maryland during the Civil War in England.
Death of Baltimore.
Character.
Maryland under the Long Parliament.
Puritan Immigration.
Founds Annapolis.
Rebellion.
Clayborne again.
Maryland and the Commonwealth.
Deposition of Governor Stone.
Anti-Catholic Laws.
Baltimore Defied.
Sustained by Cromwell.
Fendall's Rebellion.
Fails.
Maryland at the Restoration.
CHAPTER VII. NEW NETHERLAND
Henry Hudson and his Explorations.
Enters Hudson River.
His Subsequent Career.
And his Fate.
Dutch Trade on the Hudson.
"New Netherland."
Dutch West India Company.
Albany Begun.
New Amsterdam.
Relations with Plymouth.
De Vries on the Delaware.
Dutch Fort at Hartford.
Conflict of Dutch with English.
Gustavus Adolphus.
Swedish Beginnings at Wilmington, Delaware.
Advent of Kieft.
Maltreats Indians.
New Netherland in 1647.
Stuyvesant's Excellent Rule.
Conquers New Sweden.
And the Indians.
Conquest of Dutch America by England.
"New York."
Persistence of Dutch Influence and Traits.
CHAPTER VIII. THE FIRST INDIAN WARS
Beginning of Indian Hostility.
Of Pequot War.
Mason's Strategy.
And Tactics.
Capture of Pequot Fort.
Back to Saybrook.
Extermination of Pequot Tribe.
Peace.
Miantonomoh and Uncas.
Dutch War with Indians.
Caused by Kieft's Impolicy.
Liquor.
Underhill Comes.
Mrs. Hutchinson's Fate.
Deborah Moody.
New Haven Refuses Aid.
Appeal to Holland.
Underhill's Exploits.
Kieft Removed.
Sad Plight of New Netherland.
Subsequent Hostilities and Final Peace.
PERIOD II
ENGLISH AMERICA TILL THE END OF THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
1660--1763
CHAPTER I. NEW ENGLAND UNDER THE LAST STUARTS.
Charles II. and Massachusetts.
Massachusetts about 1660.
Its View of its Political Rights.
The King's View.
And Commands.
Commission of 1664.
Why Vengeance was Delayed.
Boldness of the Colony.
It Buys Maine.
Fails to get New Hampshire.
The King's Rage.
The Charter Vacated.
Charles II. and Connecticut.
Prosperity of this Colony.
Rhode Island.
Boundary Disputes of Connecticut.
Of Rhode Island.
George Fox and Roger Williams.
James II. King.
Andros Governor.
Andros and Southern New England.
In Massachusetts.
Revolution of 1688.
New Charter for Massachusetts.
Defects and Merits.
CHAPTER II. KING PHILIP'S WAR.
Whites' Treatment of Red Men.
Indian Hatred.
Causes.
Alexander's Death.
Philip
King.
Scope of his Conspiracy.
Murders Sausaman.
War Begun.
Nipmucks take Part.
War in Connecticut Valley.
Bloody Brook.
The Swamp Fight at South Kingston, R. I.
Central Massachusetts Aflame.
The Rowlandson History.
Southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island again.
Connecticut Valley once more Invaded.
Turner's Falls.
Philip's Death.
Horrors of the War.
Philip's Character.
Fate of his Family.
CHAPTER III. THE SALEM WITCHCRAFT
New England Home Life.
Religion its Centre.
The Farmhouse.
Morning Devotions.
Farm Work.
Tools.
Diet.
Neighborliness.
New England Superstitions.
Not Peculiar to New England.
Sunday Laws.
Public Worship.
First Case of Sorcery.
The Witch Executed.
Cotton Mather.
His Experiments.
His Book.
The Parris Children Bewitched.
The Manifestations.
The Trial.
Executions.
George Burroughs.
Rebecca Nurse.
Reaction.
Forwardness of Clergy.
"Devil's Authority."
The End.
CHAPTER IV. THE MIDDLE COLONIES
English Conquest of New Netherland.
Duke of York's Government.
Andros.
Revolution of 1688.
Leisler.
Problems which Teased Royal Governors.
New Jersey.
Its Political Vicissitudes.
William Penn.
Character.
Liberality of Pennsylvania
Charter.
Penn and James II.
Penn's Services for his Colony.
Prosperity of the Latter.
Fletcher's Rule.
Gabriel Thomas's History of Pennsylvania.
Penn's Trials.
And Victory.
Delaware.
CHAPTER V. MARYLAND, VIRGINIA, CAROLINA
Maryland after the Stuart Restoration.
Navigation Act.
Boundary Disputes.
Liberality of Religion.
Agitation to Establish Anglicanism.
Maryland under William and Mary.
English Church Established.
Not Oppressive.
Fate of Virginia after the Restoration.
Virginia's Spirit, Numbers, Resources.
Causes of Bacon's Rebellion.
Evil of the Navigation Acts.
Worthless Officials.
Course of the Rebellion.
Result.
Dulness of the Subsequent History.
William and Mary College.
Governor Spotswood.
Blackbeard.
Carolina.
Its Constitution.
Conflict of Parties.
Georgia.
CHAPTER VI. GOVERNMENTAL INSTITUTIONS IN THE COLONIES.
Origin of American Political Institutions.
Local Self-Government.
Representation.
Relation of Colonies to England.
Classification of Colonies.
Changes.
Conflict of Legal Views.
Colonists' Contentions.
Taxation.
CHAPTER VII. SOCIAL CULTURE IN COLONIAL TIMES.
Population of the Colonies at Different Dates.
Differences according to Sections.
Intellectual Ability.
Free Thought.
Political Bent.
English Church in the Colonies.
Its Clergy.
In New York.
The New England Establishment.
Hatred to Episcopacy.
Counter-hatred.
Colleges and Schools.
Newspapers.
Libraries.
Postal System.
Learned Professions.
Epidemics.
Scholars and Artists.
Travelling.
Manufactures and
Commerce.
Houses.
Food and Dress.
Wigs.
Opposition to Them.
Social Cleavage.
Redemptioners.
Penal Legislation.
Philadelphia Leads in Social Science.
CHAPTER VIII. ENGLAND AND FRANCE IN AMERICA
The French in the Heart of the Continent.
Groseilliers, Radisson, La Salle.
Joliet and Marquette Reach the Mississippi.
Baudin and Du Lhut.
La Salle Descends to the Gulf.
"Chicago."
The Portages.
La Salle's Expedition from France to the Mississippi.
Its Fate.
French, Indians, and English.
France's Advantage.
Numbers of each Race in America.
Causes of England's Colonial Strength.
King William's War.
The Schenectady Massacre.
Other Atrocities.
Anne's War.
Deerfield.
Plans for Striking Back.
Second Capture of Port Royal.
Rasle's Settlement Raided.
George's War.
Capture of Louisburg.
Saratoga Destroyed.
Scheme to Retaliate.
Failure.
French Vigilance and Aggression.
CHAPTER IX. THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
Struggle Inevitable.
George Washington.
Fights at Great Meadows.
War Begun.
English Plans of Campaign.
Braddock's March.
Defeat and Death.
Prophecy Regarding Washington.
The "Evangeline" History.
Loudon's Incompetence.
Pitt at the Head of Affairs.
Will Take Canada.
Louisburg Recaptured.
"Pittsburgh."
Triple Movement upon Canada.
The Plains of Abraham.
Quebec Capitulates.
Peace of Paris.
Conspiracy of Pontiac.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
COLUMBUS. (After a portrait by Herrera) Frontispiece
TEMPLE MOUND IN MEXICO
BIG ELEPHANT MOUND, WISCONSIN
DIGHTON ROCK
THE OLD STONE MILL AT NEWPORT, R. I.
PRINCE HENRY OF PORTUGAL--"THE NAVIGATOR." (From an old print)
QUEEN ISABELLA OF SPAIN.
COLUMBUS BEGGING AT THE FRANCISCAN CONVENT
EMBARKATION OF CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AT PALOS. (From an old print)
AMERIGO VESPUCCI. (Fac-simile of an old print)
VASCO DA GAMA. (From an old print)
BALBOA DISCOVERING THE PACIFIC OCEAN
PONCE DE LEON
HERNANDO CORTES, (From an old print)
MONTEZUMA MORTALLY WOUNDED BY HIS OWN SUBJECTS
DEATH OF MAGELLAN
FERDINAND DE SOTO
A PALISADED INDIAN TOWN IN ALABAMA
BURIAL OF DE SOTO IN THE MISSISSIPPI AT NIGHT
FORT CAROLINA ON THE RIVER OF MAY
PEDRO MELENDEZ
INDIANS DEVOURED BY DOGS. (From an old print)
VERRAZANO, THE FLORENTINE NAVIGATOR
JACQUES CARTIER, (From an old print)
SEBASTIAN CABOT, (From an old print)
AN INDIAN VILLAGE AT THE ROANOKE SETTLEMENT
SIR HUMPHREY GILBERT
SIR WALTER RALEIGH
QUEEN ELIZABETH
KING JAMES I. (From Mr. Henry Irving's Collection)
TOBACCO PLANT.
CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH.
POCAHONTAS SAVING CAPTAIN SMITH'S LIFE. (From Smith's "General History ")
THE COUNCIL OF POWHATAN. (From Smith's "General History ")
POCAHONTAS.
SIGNATURE OF BERKELEY.
PLYMOUTH HARBOR, ENGLAND.
HARBOR OF PROVINCETOWN, CAPE COD, WHERE THE PILGRIMS LANDED.
THE LIFE OF THE COLONY AT CAPE COD.
SIGNATURES TO PLYMOUTH PATENT.
SITE OF FIRST CHURCH AND GOVERNOR BRADFORD'S HOUSE AT PLYMOUTH.
GOVERNOR WINTHROP.
FIRST CHURCH IN SALEM.
SEAL OF MASSACHUSETTS BAY COMPANY.
ROGER WILLIAMS' HOUSE AT SALEM.
EDWARD WINSLOW.
MARYLAND SHILLING.
HENRIETTA MARIA.
SUPPOSED PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM CLAYBORNE.
CLAYBORNE'S TRADING POST ON KENT ISLAND.
FIGHT BETWEEN CLAYBORNE AND THE ST. MARY'S SHIP.
OLIVER CROMWELL.
SEAL OF NEW AMSTERDAM.
PETER STUYVESANT.
SEAL OF NEW NETHERLAND.
EARLIEST PICTURE OF NEW AMSTERDAM.
DE VRIES.
COSTUMES OF SWEDES.
THE OLD STADT HUYS AT NEW AMSTERDAM.
NEW AMSTERDAM IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
THE DUKE OF YORK, AFTERWARDS JAMES II.
THE TOMB OF STUYVESANT.
ATTACK ON THE FORT OF THE PEQUOTS ON THE MYSTIC RIVER.
ATTACK ON THE PEQUOT FORT.
SIGNATURE OF MIANTONOMOH.
THE GRAVE OF MIANTONOMOH.
TOTEM OR TRIBE MARK OF THE FIVE NATIONS.
KING CHARLES II.
JOHN WINTHROP THE YOUNGER.
SIR EDMOND ANDROS.
THE CHARTER OAK AT HARTFORD.
BOX IN WHICH THE CONNECTICUT CHARTER WAS KEPT.
THE MONUMENT AT BLOODY BROOK.
GOFFE AT HADLEY.
INCREASE MATHER.
COTTON MATHER.
OLD TITUBA THE INDIAN.
LIEUTENANT-GOVERNOR STOUGHTON.
FAC-SIMILE OF SHERIFF'S RETURN OF AN EXECUTION.
SLOUGHTER SIGNING LEISLER'S DEATH WARRANT.
SEAL OF THE CARTERETS.
SEAL OF EAST JERSEY.
WAMPUM RECEIVED BY PENN IN COMMEMORATION OF THE INDIAN TREATY.
WILLIAM PENN.
THE TREATY MONUMENT, KENSINGTON.
THE PENN MANSION IN PHILADELPHIA.
CHARLES, SECOND LORD BALTIMORE.
REV, DR. BLAIR, FIRST PRESIDENT OF WILLIAM AND MARY COLLEGE.
GEORGE MONK, DUKE OF ALBEMARLE.
LORD SHAFTESBURY.
SEAL OF THE PROPRIETORS OF CAROLINA.
JOHN LOCKE.
SAVANNAH. (From a print of 1741)
JAMES OGLETHORPE.
COSTUMES ABOUT THE MIDDLE OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.
JAMES LOGAN.
KING WILLIAM.
QUEEN MARY
CHIEF JUSTICE SEWALL.
THE PILLORY.
SIGNATURE OF JOLLIET. (old spelling)
TOTEM OF THE SIOUX.
A SIOUX CHIEF.
TOTEM OF THE ILLINOIS.
THE RECEPTION OF JOLIET AND MARQUETTE BY THE ILLINOIS.
LOUIS XIV.
COINS STRUCK IN FRANCE FOR THE COLONIES.
ASSASSINATION OF LA SALLE.
NEW ORLEANS IN 1719.
SIGNATURE OF D'IBERVILLE.
THE ATTACK ON SCHENECTADY.
HANNAH DUSTIN'S ESCAPE.
QUEEN ANNE.
GOVERNOR SHIRLEY.
SIR WILLIAM PEPPERRELL
THE AMBUSCADE
THE DEATH OF BRADDOCK.
MONTCALM.
WILLIAM PITT.
GENERAL WOLFE.
LANDING OF WOLFE.
QUEBEC IN 1730. (From an old print)
BOUQUET'S REDOUBT AT PITTSBURGH.
LIST OF MAPS
GLOBUS MARTINI BEHAIM NARINBERGENSIS, 1492
EUROPEAN PROVINCES IN 1655.
MARQUETTE'S MAP.
PLAN OF PORT ROYAL, NOVA SCOTIA.
MAP SHOWING POSITION OF FRENCH AND ENGLISH FORTS AND SETTLEMENTS.
BRADDOCK'S ROUTE.
MAP OF BRADDOCK'S FIELD.
INTRODUCTION
AMERICA BEFORE COLUMBUS
Man made his appearance on the western continent unnumbered ages ago,
not unlikely before the close of the glacial period. It is possible that
human life began in Asia and western North America sooner than on either
shore of the Atlantic. Nothing wholly forbids the belief that America
was even the cradle of the race, or one of several cradles, though most
scientific writers prefer the view that our species came hither from
Asia. De Nadaillac judges it probable that the ocean was thus crossed
not at Behring Strait alone, but along a belt of equatorial islands as
well. We may think of successive waves of such immigration--perhaps the
easiest way to account for certain differences among American races.
It is, at any rate, an error to speak of the primordial Americans as
derived from any Asiatic stock at present existing or known to history.
The old Americans had scarcely an Asiatic feature. Their habits and
customs were emphatically peculiar to themselves. Those in which they
agreed with the trans-Pacific populations, such as fashion of weapons
and of fortifications, elements of folk-lore, religious ideas,
traditions of a flood, belief in the destruction of the world by fire,
and so on, are nearly all found the world over, the spontaneous
creations of our common human intelligence.
The original American peoples, various and unlike as they were, agreed
in four traits, three of them physical, one mental, which mark them off
as in all likelihood primarily of one stock after all, and as different
from any Old World men: (1) They had low, retreating foreheads. (2)
Their hair was black. (3) It was also of a peculiar texture, lank, and
cylindrical in section, never wavy. And (4) their languages were
polysynthetic, forming a class apart from all others in the world. The
peoples of America, if from Asia, must date back to a time when speech
itself was in its infancy.
[Illustration: Temple Mound In Mexico.]
The numerous varieties of ancient Americans reduce to two distinct types
--the Dolicocephalous or long-skulled, and the Brachycephalous or
short-skulled. Morton names these types respectively the Toltecan and
the American proper. The Toltecan type was represented by the primitive
inhabitants of Mexico and by the Mound-builders of our Mississippi
Valley; the American proper, by the Indians. The Toltecans made far the
closer approach to civilization, though the others possessed a much
greater susceptibility therefor than the modern Indians of our prairies
would indicate.
Of the Mound-builders painfully little is known. Many of their mounds
still remain, not less mysterious or interesting than the pyramids of
Egypt, perhaps almost equally ancient. The skeletons exhumed from them
often fly into dust as soon as exposed to air, a rare occurrence with
the oldest bones found in Europe. On the parapet-crest of the Old Fort
at Newark, 0., trees certainly five hundred years old have been cut, and
they could not have begun their growth till long after the earth-works
had been deserted. In some mounds, equally aged trees root in the
decayed trunks of a still anterior growth.
Much uncertainty continues to shroud the design of these mounds. Some
were for military defence, others for burial places, others for lookout
stations, others apparently for religious uses. Still others, it is
supposed, formed parts of human dwellings. That they proceeded from
intelligence and reflection is clear. Usually, whether they are squares
or circles, their construction betrays nice, mathematical exactness,
unattainable save by the use of instruments. Many constitute
effigies--of birds, fishes, quadrupeds, men. In Wisconsin is a mound 135
feet long and well proportioned, much resembling an elephant; in Adams
County, 0., a gracefully curved serpent, 1,000 feet long, with jaws
agape as if to swallow an egg-shaped figure in front; in Granville, in
the same State, one in the form of a huge crocodile; in Greenup County,
Ky., an image of a bear, which seems leaning forward in an attitude of
observation, measuring 53 feet from the top of the back to the end of
the foreleg, and 105-1/2 feet from the tip of the nose to the rear of
the hind foot.
[Illustration: Big Elephant Mound, Wisconsin.]
The sites of towns and cities were artfully selected, near navigable
rivers and their confluences, as at Marietta, Cincinnati, and in
Kentucky opposite the old mouth of the Scioto. Points for defence were
chosen and fortified with scientific precision. The labor expended upon
these multitudinous structures must have been enormous, implying a vast
population and extensive social, economic, and civil organization. The
Cahokia mound, opposite St. Louis, is 90 feet high and 900 feet long.
The Mound-builders made elegant pottery, of various design and accurate
shapes, worked bone and all sorts of stones, and even forged copper.
There are signs that they understood smelting this metal. They certainly
mined it in large quantities, and carried it down the Mississippi
hundreds of miles from its source on Lake Superior. They must have been
masters of river navigation, but their mode of conveying vast burdens
overland, destitute of efficient draft animals as they apparently were,
we can hardly even conjecture.
The Mound-builders, as we have said, were related to the antique
populations of Mexico and Central America, and the most probable
explanation of their departure from their Northern seats is that in face
of pestilence, or of some overpowering human foe, they retreated to the
Southwest, there to lay, under better auspices, the foundations of new
states, and to develop that higher civilization whose relics, too little
known, astound the student of the past, as greatly as do the stupendous
pillars of Carnac or the grotesque animal figures of Khorsabad and
Nimrud.
So much has been written about the American Indians that we need not
discuss them at length. They were misnamed Indians by Columbus, who
supposed the land he had discovered to be India. At the time of his
arrival not more than two hundred thousand of them lived east of the
Mississippi, though they were doubtless far more numerous West and
South. Whence they came, or whether, if this was a human deed at all,
they or another race now extinct drove out the Mound-builders, none can
tell.
Of arts the red man had but the rudest. He made wigwams, canoes, bone
fish-hooks with lines of hide or twisted bark, stone tomahawks,
arrow-heads and spears, clothing of skins, wooden bows, arrows, and
clubs. He loved fighting, finery, gambling, and the chase. He
domesticated no animals but the dog and possibly the hog. Sometimes
brave, he was oftener treacherous, cruel, revengeful. His power of
endurance on the trail or the warpath was incredible, and if captured,
he let himself be tortured to death without a quiver or a cry. Though
superstitious, he believed in a Great Spirit to be worshipped without
idols, and in a future life of happy hunting and feasting.
Whether, at the time of which we now speak, the Indians were an old
race, already beginning to decline, or a fresh race, which contact with
the whites balked of its development, it is difficult to say. Their
career since best accords with the former supposition. In either case we
may assume that their national groupings and habitats were nearly the
same in 1500 as later, when these became accurately known. In the
eighteenth century the Algonquins occupied all the East from Nova Scotia
to North Carolina, and stretched west to the Mississippi. At one time
they numbered ninety thousand. The Iroquois or Five Nations had their
seat in Central and Western New York. North and west of them lived the
Hurons or Wyandots. The Appalachians, embracing Cherokees, Creeks,
Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles and a number of lesser tribes, occupied
all the southeastern portion of what is now the United States. West of
the Mississippi were the Dakotas or Sioux.
Since the white man's arrival upon these shores, very few changes have
occurred among the brute inhabitants of North America. A few species, as
the Labrador duck and the great auk, have perished. America then
possessed but four animals which had appreciable economic value; the
dog, the reindeer at the north, which the Mound-builders used as a
draft animal but the Indians did not, and the llama and the paco south
of the equator. Every one of our present domestic animals originated
beyond the Atlantic, being imported hither by our ancestors. The Indians
of the lower Mississippi Valley, when De Soto came, had dogs, and also
what the Spaniards called hogs, perhaps peccaries, but neither brute was
of any breed now bred in the country. A certain kind of dogs were native
also to the Juan Fernandez and the Falkland Islands.
Mr. Edward John Payne is doubtless correct in maintaining, in his
"History of the New World called America," that the backwardness of the
American aborigines was largely due to their lack of animals suitable
for draft or travel or producing milk or flesh good for food. From the
remotest antiquity Asiatics had the horse, ass, ox and cow, camel and
goat--netting ten times the outfit in useful animals which the
Peruvians, Mexicans, or Indians enjoyed.
The vegetable kingdom of Old America was equally restricted, which also
helps explain its low civilization. At the advent of the Europeans the
continent was covered with forests. Then, though a few varieties may
have since given out and some imported ones run wild, the undomesticated
plants and trees were much as now. Not so the cultivated kinds. The
Indians were wretched husbandmen, nor had the Mound-builders at all the
diversity of agricultural products so familiar to us. Tobacco, Indian
corn, cocoa, sweet potatoes, potatoes, the custard apple, the Jerusalem
artichoke, the guava, the pumpkin and squash, the papaw and the
pineapple, indigenous to North America, had been under cultivation here
before Columbus came, the first four from most ancient times. The manioc
or tapioca-plant, the red-pepper plant, the marmalade plum, and the
tomato were raised in South America before 1500. The persimmon, the
cinchona tree, millet, the Virginia and the Chili strawberry are natives
of this continent, but have been brought under cultivation only within
the last three centuries.
The four great cereals, wheat, rye, oats, and rice, constituting all our
main food crops but corn, have come to us from Europe. So have cherries,
quinces, and pears, also hops, currants, chestnuts, and mushrooms. The
banana, regarded by von Humboldt as an original American fruit, modern
botanists derive from Asia. With reference to apples there may be some
question. Apples of a certain kind flourished in New England so early
after the landing of the Pilgrims that it is difficult to suppose the
fruit not to have been indigenous to this continent. Champlain, in
1605 or 1606, found the Indians about the present sites of Portland,
Boston, and Plymouth in considerable agricultural prosperity, with
fields of corn and tobacco, gardens rich in melons, squashes, pumpkins,
and beans, the culture of none of which had they apparently learned from
white men. Mr. Payne's generalization, that superior food-supply
occasioned the Old World's primacy in civilization, and also that of the
Mexicans and Peruvians here, seems too sweeping, yet it evidently
contains large truth.
PART FIRST
THE FORE-HISTORY
PERIOD I.
DISCOVERY AND SETTLEMENT
1492-1660
CHAPTER I.
COLUMBUS
[1000]
There is no end to the accounts of alleged discoveries of America before
Columbus. Most of these are fables. It is, indeed, nearly certain that
hardy Basque, Breton, and Norman fishermen, adventuring first far north,
then west, had sighted Greenland and Labrador and become well acquainted
with the rich fishing-grounds about Newfoundland and the Saint Lawrence
Gulf. Many early charts of these regions, without dates and hitherto
referred to Portuguese navigators of a time so late as 1500, are now
thought to be the work of these earlier voyagers. They found the New
World, but considered it a part of the Old.
Important, too, is the story of supposed Norse sea-rovers hither,
derived from certain Icelandic manuscripts of the fourteenth century. It
is a pleasing narrative, that of Lief Ericson's sail in 1000-1001 to
Helluland, Markland, and at last to Vineland, and of the subsequent
tours by Thorwald Ericson in 1002, Thorfinn Karlsefne, 1007-1009, and of
Helge and Finnborge in 1011, to points still farther away. Such voyages
probably occurred. As is well known, Helluland has been interpreted to
be Newfoundland; Markland, Nova Scotia; and Vineland, the country
bordering Mount Hope Bay in Bristol, R. I. These identifications are
possibly correct, and even if they are mistaken, Vineland may still have
been somewhere upon the coast of what is now the United States.
In the present condition of the evidence, however, we have to doubt
this. No scholar longer believes that the writing on Dighton Rock is
Norse, or that the celebrated Skeleton in Armor found at Fall River was
a Northman's, or that the old Stone Mill at Newport was constructed by
men from Iceland. Even if the manuscripts, composed between three and
four hundred years after the events which they are alleged to narrate,
are genuine, and if the statements contained in them are true, the
latter are far too indefinite to let us be sure that they are applicable
to United States localities.
[Illustration: Dighton Rock]
[l260]
But were we to go so far as to admit that the Northmen came here and
began the settlements ascribed to them, they certainly neither
appreciated nor published their exploits. Their colony, wherever it was,
endured but for a day, and it, with its locality, speedily passed from
knowledge in Scandinavia itself. America had not yet, in effect, been
discovered.
[Illustration: The Old Stone Mill at Newport, R. I.]
[1300]
We must remember that long anterior to Columbus's day unbiassed and
thoughtful men had come to believe the earth to be round. They also knew
that Europe constituted but a small part of it. In the year 1260 the
Venetian brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo made their way to China, the
first men from Western Europe ever to travel so far. They returned in
1269, but in 1271 set out again, accompanied by Niccolo's son, a youth
of seventeen. This son was the famous Marco Polo, whose work, "The
Wonders of the World," reciting his extended journeys through China and
the extreme east and southeast of Asia, and his eventful voyage home by
sea, ending in 1295, has come down to our time, one of the most
interesting volumes in the world. Friar Orderic's eastern travels in
1322-1330, as appropriated by Sir John Mandeville, were published before
1371.
Columbus knew these writings, and the reading and re-reading of them had
made him an enthusiast. In Polo's book he had learned of Mangi and Far
Cathay, with their thousands of gorgeous cities, the meanest finer than
any then in Europe; of their abounding mines pouring forth infinite
wealth, their noble rivers, happy populations, curious arts, and benign
government. Polo had told him of Cambalu (Peking), winter residence of
the Great Khan, Kublai--Cambalu with its palaces of marble,
golden-roofed, its guard of ten thousand soldiers, its imperial stables
containing five thousand elephants, its unnumbered army, navy, and
merchant marine; of oxen huge as elephants; of richest spices, nuts
large as melons, canes fifteen yards long, silks, cambrics, and the
choicest furs; and of magic Cipango (Japan), island of pearls, whose
streets were paved with gold.
[Illustration: Globus Martini Behaim Narinbergensis 1492.]
[1456]
Columbus believed all this, and it cooperated with his intense and even
bigoted religious faith to kindle in him an all-consuming ambition to
reach this distant Eden by sea, that he might carry the Gospel to those
opulent heathen and partake their unbounded temporal riches in return.
Poor specimen of a saint as Columbus is now known to have been, he
believed himself divinely called to this grand enterprise.
Christopher Columbus, or Christobal Colon, as he always signed himself
after he entered the service of Spain, was born in Genoa about 1456.
Little is certainly known of his early life. His father was a humble
wool-carder. The youth possessed but a sorry education, spite of his few
months at the University of Pavia. At the age of fourteen he became a
sailor, knocking about the world in the roughest manner, half the time
practically a pirate. In an all-day's sea fight, once, his ship took
fire and he had to leap overboard; but being a strong swimmer he swam,
aided by an oar, eight leagues to land.
[1470]
From 1470 to 1484 we find him in Portugal, the country most interested
and engaged then in ocean-going and discovery. Here he must have known
Martin Behem, author of the famous globe, finished in 1492, whereon Asia
is exhibited as reaching far into the same hemisphere with Europe.
Prince Henry of Portugal earnestly patronized all schemes for
exploration and discovery, and the daughter, Philippa, of one of his
captains, Perestrello, Columbus married. With her he lived at Porto
Santo in the Madeiras, where he became familiar with Correo, her
sister's husband, also a distinguished navigator. The islanders fully
believed in the existence of lands in the western Atlantic. West winds
had brought to them strange woods curiously carved, huge cane-brakes
like those of India described by Ptolemy, peculiarly fashioned canoes,
and corpses with skin of a hue unknown to Europe or Africa.
[Illustration: Prince Henry of Portugal--"The Navigator." From an old
print.]
[1475-1484]
Reflecting on these things, studying Perestrello's and Correo's charts
and accounts of their voyages, corresponding with Toscanelli and other
savans, himself an adept in drawing maps and sea-charts, for a time his
occupation in Lisbon, cruising here and there, once far northward to
Iceland, and talking with navigators from every Atlantic port, Columbus
became acquainted with the best geographical science of his time.
This had convinced him that India could be reached by sailing westward.
The theoretical possibility of so doing was of course admitted by all
who held the earth to be a sphere, but most regarded it practically
impossible, in the then condition of navigation, to sail the necessary
distance. Columbus considered the earth far smaller than was usually
thought, a belief which we find hinted at so early as 1447, upon the
famous mappe-Monde of the Pitti Palace in Florence, whereon Europe
appears projected far round to the northwest. Columbus seems to have
viewed this extension as a sort of yoke joining India to Scandinavia by
the north. He judged that Asia, or at least Cipango, stretched
two-thirds of the way to Europe, India being twice as near westward as
eastward. Thirty or forty days he deemed sufficient for making it.
Toscanelli and Behem as well as he held this belief; he dared boldly to
act upon it.
[Illustration: Queen Isabella of Spain.]
But to do so required resources. There are indications that Columbus at
some time, perhaps more than once, urged his scheme upon Genoa and
Venice. If so it was in vain. Nor can we tell whether such an attempt,
if made, was earlier or later than his plea before the court of
Portugal, for this cannot be dated. The latter was probably in 1484.
King John II. was impressed, and referred Columbus's scheme to a council
of his wisest advisers, who denounced it as visionary. Hence in 1485 or
1486 Columbus proceeded to Spain to lay his project before Ferdinand and
Isabella.
On the way he stopped at a Franciscan convent near Palos, begging bread
for himself and son. The Superior, Marchena, became interested in him,
and so did one of the Pinzons--famous navigators of Palos. The king and
queen were at the time holding court at Cordova, and thither Columbus
went, fortified with a recommendation from Marchena. The monarchs were
engrossed in the final conquest of Granada, and Columbus had to wait
through six weary and heart-sickening years before royal attention was
turned to his cause. It must have been during this delay that he
despatched his brother Bartholomew to England with an appeal to Henry
VII. Christopher had brought Alexander Geraldinus, the scholar, and also
the Archbishop of Toledo, to espouse his mission, and finally, at the
latter's instance, Ferdinand, as John of Portugal had done, went so far
as to convene, at Salamanca, a council of reputed scholars to pass
judgment upon Columbus and his proposition. By these, as by the
Portuguese, he was declared a misguided enthusiast. They were too much
behind the age even to admit the spherical figure of the earth.
According to Scripture, they said, the earth is flat, adding that it was
contrary to reason for men to walk heads downward, or snow and rain to
ascend, or trees to grow with their roots upward.
[Illustration: Columbus begging at the Franciscan Convent.]
[1484-1492]
The war for Granada ended, Santangel and others of his converts at court
secured Columbus an interview with Isabella, but his demands seeming to
her arrogant, he was dismissed. Nothing daunted, the hero had started
for France, there to plead as he had pleaded in Portugal and Spain
already, when to his joy a messenger overtook him with orders to come
once more before the queen.
Fuller thought and argument had convinced this eminent woman that the
experiment urged by Columbus ought to be tried and a contract was soon
concluded, by which, on condition that he should bear one-eighth the
expense of the expedition, the public chest of Castile was to furnish
the remainder. The story of the crown jewels having been pledged for
this purpose is now discredited. If such pledging occurred, it was
earlier, in prosecuting the war with the Moors. The whole sum needed for
the voyage was about fifty thousand dollars. Columbus was made admiral,
also viceroy of whatever lands should be discovered, and he was to have
ten per cent of all the revenues from such lands. For his contribution
to the outfit he was indebted to the Pinzons.
This arrangement was made in April or May, 1492, and on the third of the
next August, after the utmost difficulty in shipping crews for this sail
into the sea of darkness, Columbus put out from Palos with one hundred
and twenty men, on three ships. These were the Santa Maria, the Nina,
and the Pinta. The largest, the Santa Maria, was of not over one hundred
tons, having a deck-length of sixty-three feet, a keel of fifty-one
feet, a draft of ten feet six inches, and her mast-head sixty feet above
sea-level. She probably had four anchors, with hemp cables.
[Illustration: Embarkation of Christopher Columbus at Palos. From an old
print.]
From Palos they first bore southward to the Canary Islands, into the
track of the prevalent east winds, then headed west, for Cipango, as
Columbus supposed, but really toward the northern part of Florida. When
a little beyond what he regarded the longitude of Cipango, noticing the
flight of birds to the southwest, he was induced to follow these, which
accident made his landfall occur at Guanahani (San Salvador), in the
Bahamas, instead of the Florida coast.
Near midnight, between October 11th and 12th, Columbus, being on the
watch, descried a light ahead. About two o'clock on the morning of the
12th the lookout on the Pinta distinctly saw land through the moonlight.
When it was day they went on shore. The 12th of October, 1492,
therefore, was the date on which for the first time, so far as history
attests with assurance, a European foot pressed the soil of this
continent. Adding nine days to this to translate it into New Style, we
have October 21st as the day answering to that on which Columbus first
became sure that his long toil and watching had not been in vain.
[1493-1500]
The admiral having failed to note its latitude and longitude, it is not
known which of the Bahamas was the San Salvador of Columbus, whether
Grand Turk Island, Cat (the present San Salvador), Watling, Mariguana,
Acklin, or Samana, though the last named well corresponds with his
description. Mr. Justin Winsor, however, and with him a majority of the
latest critics, believes that Watling's Island was the place. Before
returning to Spain, Columbus discovered Cuba, and also Hayti or
Espagnola (Hispaniola), on the latter of which islands he built a fort.
In a second voyage, from Cadiz, 1493-1496, the great explorer discovered
the Lesser Antilles and Jamaica. In a third, 1498-1500, he came upon
Trinidad and the mainland of South America, at the mouth of the Orinoco.
This was later by thirteen months and a week than the Cabots' landfall
at Labrador or Nova Scotia, though a year before Amerigo Vespucci saw
the coast of Brazil. It was during this third absence that Columbus,
hated as an Italian and for his undeniable greed, was superseded by
Bobadilla, who sent him and his brother home in chains. Soon free again,
he sets off in 1502 upon a fourth cruise, in which he reaches the coast
of Honduras.
To the day of his death, however, the discoverer of America never
suspected that he had brought to light a new continent. Even during this
his last expedition he maintained that the coast he had touched was that
of Mangi, contiguous to Cathay, and that nineteen days of travel
overland would have taken him to the Ganges. He arrived in Spain on
September 12, 1504, and died at Segovia on May 20th of the next year.
His bones are believed to rest in the cathedral at Santo Domingo,
transported thither in 1541, the Columbus-remains till recently at
Havana being those of his son Diego. The latter, under the belief that
they were the father's, were transferred to Genoa in 1887, and deposited
there on July 2d of that year with the utmost ecclesiastical pomp.
[1500-1507]
As Columbus was ignorant of having found a new continent, so was he
denied the honor of giving it a name, this falling by accident, design,
or carelessness of truth, to Amerigo Vespucci, a native of Florence,
whose active years were spent in Spain and Portugal. Vespucci made three
voyages into the western seas. In the second, 1501, he visited the coast
of Brazil, and pushed farther south than any navigator had yet done,
probably so far as the island of South Georgia, in latitude 54 degrees.
His account of this voyage found its way into print in 1504, at
Augsburg, Germany, the first published narrative of any discovery of the
mainland. Although, as above noted, it was not the earliest discovery of
the main, it was widely regarded such, and caused Vespucci to be named
for many years as the peer, if not the superior of Columbus. The
publication ran through many editions. That of Strassburg, 1505,
mentioned Vespucci on its title-page as having discovered a new
"Southern Land." This is the earliest known utterance hinting at the
continental nature of the new discovery, as separate from Asia, an idea
which grew into a conviction only after Magellan's voyage, described in
the next chapter. In 1507 appeared at St. Die, near Strassburg, a
four-page pamphlet by one Lud, secretary to the Duke of Lorraine,
describing Vespucci's voyages and speaking of the Indians as the
"American race." This pamphlet came out the same year in another form,
as part of a book entitled "Introduction to Cosmography," prepared by
Martin Waldseemuller, under the nom de plume of "Hylacomylus." In this
book the new "part of the world" is distinctly called "THE LAND OF
AMERICUS, OR AMERICA," There is some evidence that Vespucci at least
connived at the misapprehension which brought him his renown--as
undeserved as it has become permanent--but this cannot be regarded as
proved.
[Illustration: Amerigo Vespucci. Fac-simile of an old print.]
CHAPTER II.
EARLY SPANISH AMERICA
[1498]
As we have seen, Spain by no means deserves the entire credit of
bringing the western continent to men's knowledge. Columbus himself was
an Italian. So was Marco Polo, his inspirer, and also Toscanelli, his
instructor, by whose chart he sailed his ever-memorable voyage. To
Portugal as well Columbus was much indebted, despite his rebuff there.
Portugal then led the world in the art of navigation and in enthusiasm
for discovery. Nor, probably, would Columbus have asked her aid in vain,
had she not previously committed herself to the enterprise of reaching
India eastward, a purpose brilliantly fulfilled when, in 1498, Vasco da
Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed to Calicut, on the coast
of Malabar. Already before this Spain and Portugal were rivals in the
search for new lands, and Pope Alexander VI. had had to be appealed to,
to fix their fields. By his bull of May 3, 4, 1493, he ordained as the
separating line the meridian passing through a point one hundred leagues
west of the Azores, where Columbus had observed the needle of his
compass to point without deflection toward the north star. Portugal
objecting to this boundary as excluding her from the longitude of the
newly found Indies, by the treaty of Tordesillas, June 7, 1494, the two
powers, with the Pope's assent, moved the line two hundred and seventy
leagues still farther west. At this time neither party dreamed of the
complications destined subsequently to arise in reference to the
position of this meridian on the other side of the globe.
[Illustration: Vasco da Gama; From an old print.]
The meridian of the Tordesillas convention had been supposed still to
give Spain all the American discoveries likely to be made, it being
ascertained only later that by it Portugal had obtained a considerable
part of the South American mainland Brazil, we know, was, till in 1822
it became independent, a Portuguese dependency. Spain, however, retained
both groups of the Antilles with the entire main about the Gulf of
Mexico, and became the earliest great principality in the western world.
[1506-1513]
Before the death of Columbus, Spain had taken firm possession of Cuba,
Porto Rico, and St. Domingo, and she stood ready to seize any of the
adjoining islands or lands so soon as gold, pearls, or aught else of
value should be found there. Cruises of discovery were made in every
direction, first, indeed, in Central and South America. In 1506 de Solis
sailed along the eastern coast of Yucatan. In 1513 the governor of a
colony on the Isthmus of Darien, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, from the top of
a lofty mountain on the isthmus, saw what is now called the Pacific
Ocean. He designated it the South Sea, a name which it habitually bore
till far into the eighteenth century. From this time the exploration and
settlement of the western coast, both up and down, went on with little
interruption, but this history, somewhat foreign to our theme, we cannot
detail.
[Illustration: Balboa discovering the Pacific Ocean.]
[Illustration: Ponce de Leon]
The same year, 1513, Ponce de Leon, an old Spanish soldier in the wars
with the Moors, a companion of Columbus in his second voyage, and till
now governor of Porto Rico, began exploration to the northward. Leaving
Porto Rico with three ships, he landed on the coast of an unknown
country, where he thought to find not only infinite gold but also the
much-talked-about fountain of perpetual youth. His landing occurred on
Easter Sunday, or Pascua Florida, March 27, 1513, and so he named the
country Florida. The place was a few miles north of the present town of
St. Augustine. Exploring the coast around the southern extremity of the
peninsula, he sailed among a group of islands, which he designated the
Tortugas. Returning to Porto Rico, he was appointed governor of the new
country. He made a second voyage, was attacked by the natives and
mortally wounded, and returned to Cuba to die.
[1518-1520]
Juan de Grijalva explored the south coast of the Gulf of Mexico, from
Yucatan toward the Panuco. Interest attaches to this enterprise mainly
because the treasure which Grijalva collected aroused the envy and greed
of the future conqueror of Mexico, Hernando Cortez.
In 1518, Velasquez, governor of Cuba, sends Cortez westward, with eleven
ships and over six hundred men, for the purpose of exploration. He
landed at Tabasco, thence proceeded to the Island of San Juan de Ulua,
nearly opposite Vera Cruz, where he received messengers and gifts from
the Emperor Montezuma. Ordered to leave the country, he destroyed his
ships and marched directly upon the capital. He seized Montezuma and
held him as a hostage for the peaceable conduct of his subjects. The
Mexicans took up arms, only to be defeated again and again by the
Spaniards. Montezuma became a vassal of the Spanish crown, and
covenanted to pay annual tribute. Attempting to reconcile his people to
this agreement he was himself assailed and wounded, and, refusing all
nourishment, soon after died. With re-enforcements, Cortez completed
the conquest of the country, and Mexico became a province of Spain.
[Illustration: Hernando Cortes. From an old print.]
Vasquez de Ayllon, one of the auditors of the Island of Santo Domingo,
sent two ships from that island to the Bahamas for Indians to be sold as
slaves. Driven from their course by the wind, they at length reached the
shore of South Carolina, at the mouth of the Wateree River, which they
named the Jordan, calling the country Chicora. Though kindly treated by
the natives, the ruthless adventurers carried away some seventy of
these. One ship was lost, and most of the captives on the others died
during the voyage. Vasquez was, by the Emperor Charles V., King of
Spain, made governor of this new province, and again set sail to take
possession. But the natives, in revenge for the cruel treatment which
they had previously received, made a furious attack upon the invaders.
The few survivors of the slaughter returned to Santo Domingo, and the
expedition was abandoned. These voyages were in 1520 and 1526.
In connection with the subject of Spanish voyages, a passing notice
should be given to one, who, though not of Spanish birth, yet did much
to further the progress of discovery on the part of his adopted country.
Magellan was a Portuguese navigator who had been a child when Columbus
came back in triumph from the West Indies. Refused consideration from
King Emmanuel, of Portugal, for a wound received under his flag during
the war against Morocco, he renounced his native land and offered his
services to the sagacious Charles V., of Spain, who gladly accepted
them, With a magnificent fleet, Magellan, in 1519, set sail from
Seville, cherishing Columbus's bold purpose, which no one had yet
realized, of reaching the East Indies by a westward voyage, After
touching at the Canaries, he explored the coast of South America, passed
through the strait now called by his name, discovered the Ladrone
Islands, and christened the circumjacent ocean the Pacific.
[Illustration: Montezuma mortally wounded by his own subjects.]
The illustrious navigator now sailed for the Philippine Islands, so
named from Philip, son of Charles V., who succeeded that monarch as
Philip II. By the Tordesillas division above described, the islands were
properly in the Portuguese hemisphere, but on the earliest maps, made by
Spaniards, they were placed twenty-five degrees too far east, and this
circumstance, whether accidental or designed, has preserved them to
Spain even to the present time. At the Philippine Islands Magellan was
killed in an affray with the natives. One of his ships, the Victoria,
after sailing around the Cape of Good Hope, arrived in Spain, having
been the first to circumnavigate the globe. The voyage had taken three
years and twenty-eight days.
[1528-1540]
The disastrous failure of the expedition of Vasquez de Ayllon to Florida
did not discourage attempts on the part of others in the same direction.
Velaspuez, governor of Cuba, jealous of the success of Cortez in Mexico,
had sent Pamphilo de Narvaez to arrest him. In this attempt Narvaez had
been defeated and taken prisoner. Undeterred by this failure he had
solicited and received of Charles V. the position of governor over
Florida, a territory at that time embracing the whole southern part of
what is now the United States, and reaching from Cape Sable to the
Panuco, or River of Palms, in Mexico. With three hundred men he, in
1528, landed near Appalachee Bay, and marched inland with the hope of
opening a country rich and populous. Bitterly was he disappointed.
Swamps and forests, wretched wigwams with their squalid inmates
everywhere met his view, but no gold was to be found. Discouraged, he
and his followers returned to the coast, where almost superhuman toil
and skill enabled them to build five boats, in which they hoped to work
westward to the Spanish settlements. Embarking, they stole cautiously
along the coast for some distance, but were at last driven by a storm
upon an island, perhaps Galveston, perhaps Santa Rosa, where Narvaez and
most of his men perished. Four of his followers survived to cross Texas
to the Gulf of California and reach the town of San Miguel on the west
coast of Mexico. Here they found their countrymen, searching as usual
for pearls, gold, and slaves, and by their help they made a speedy
return to Spain, heroes of as remarkable an adventure as history
records. These unfortunates were the first Europeans to visit New
Mexico. Their narrative led to the exploration of that country by
Coronado and others, and to the discoveries of Cortez in Lower
California.
[Illustration: Death of Magellan.]
[Illustration: Ferdinand de Soto.]
Ferdinand de Soto, eager to rival the exploits of Cortez in Mexico, and
of his former commander, Pizarro, in Peru, offered to conquer Florida at
his own expense. Appointed governor-general of Florida and of Cuba, he
sailed with seven large and three small vessels. From Espiritu Santo Bay
he, in 1539, marched with six hundred men into the country of the
Appalachians and discovered the harbor of Pensacola. After wintering at
Appalachee he set out into the interior, said to abound in gold and
silver. Penetrating northeasterly as far as the Savannah, he found only
copper and mica. From here he marched first northwest into northern
central Georgia, then southwest into Alabama. A battle was fought with
the natives at Mavila, or Mobile, in which the Spaniards suffered
serious loss. Ships that he had ordered arrived at Pensacola, but de
Soto determined not to embark until success should have crowned his
efforts. He turned back into the interior, into the country of the
Chickasaws, marched diagonally over the present State of Mississippi to
its northwest corner, and crossed the Mississippi River near the lowest
Chickasaw Bluff. From this point the general direction of the Spanish
progress was southwest, through what is now Arkansas, past the site of
Little Rock, till at last a river which seems to have been the Washita
was reached. Down this stream de Soto and his decimated force
floated--two hundred and fifty of his men had succumbed to the hardships
and perils of his march--arriving at the junction of the Red with the
Mississippi River on Sunday, April 17, 1542. At this point de Soto
sickened and died, turning over the command to Luis de Moscoso. Burying
their late leader's corpse at night deep in the bosom of the great
river, and constructing themselves boats, the survivors of this
ill-fated expedition, now reduced to three hundred and seventy-two
persons, made the best of their way down the Mississippi to the Gulf,
and along its coast, finally reaching the Spanish town near the mouth of
the Panuco in Mexico.
[Illustration: A Palisaded Indian Town in Alabama.]
[Illustration: Burial of de Soto in the Mississippi at night.]
[1562]
Thus no settlement had as yet been made in Florida by the Spanish. The
first occupation destined to be permanent was brought about through
religious jealousy inspired by the establishment of a French Protestant
(Huguenot) colony in the territory. Ribault, a French captain
commissioned by Charles IX., was put in command of an expedition by that
famous Huguenot, Admiral Coligny, and landed on the coast of Florida, at
the mouth of the St. John's, which he called the River of May. This was
in 1562. The name Carolina, which that section still bears, was given to
a fort at Port Royal, or St. Helena. Ribault returned to France, where
civil war was then raging between the Catholics and the Protestants or
Huguenots. His colony, waiting for promised aid and foolishly making no
attempt to cultivate the soil, soon languished. Dissensions arose, and
an effort was made to return home. Famine having carried off the greater
number, the colony came to an end. In 1564 Coligny sent out Laudonniere,
who built another fort, also named Carolina, on the River of May. Again
misfortunes gathered thickly about the settlers, when Ribault arrived
bringing supplies.
[Illustration: Fort Carolina on the River of May.]
[1565]
[Illustration: Pedro Melendez.]
But Spain claimed this territory, and Pedro Melendez a Spanish soldier,
was in 1565 sent by Philip II. to conquer it from the French, doubly
detested as Protestants. He landed in the harbor and at the mouth of the
river, to both of which he gave the name St. Augustine. Melendez lost no
time in attacking Fort Carolina, which he surprised, putting the
garrison mercilessly to the sword. The destruction of the French colony
was soon after avenged by Dominic de Gourgues, who sailed from France to
punish the enemies of his country. Having accomplished his purpose by
the slaughter of the Spanish garrison he returned home, but the French
Protestants made no further effort to colonize Florida.
Spain claimed the land by right of discovery, but, although maintaining
the feeble settlement at St. Augustine, did next to nothing after this
to explore or civilize this portion of America. The nation that had sent
out Columbus was not destined to be permanently the great power of the
New World. The hap of first landing upon the Antilles, and also the warm
climate and the peaceable nature of the aborigines, led Spain to fix her
settlements in latitudes that were too low for the best health and the
greatest energy. Most of the settlers were of a wretched class,
criminals and adventurers, and they soon mixed largely with the natives.
Spain herself greatly lacked in vigor, partly from national causes,
partly from those obscure general causes which even to this day keep
Latin Europe, in military power and political accomplishments, inferior
to Teutonic or Germanic Europe.
[Illustration: Indians devoured by dogs. From an old print.]
[1570]
Moreover, the Spaniards found their first American conquests too easy,
and the rewards of these too great. This prevented all thought of
developing the country through industry, concentrating expectation
solely upon waiting fortunes, to be had from the natives by the sword or
through forced labor in mines, Their treatment of the aborigines was
nothing short of diabolical. Well has it been said: "The Spaniards had
sown desolation, havoc, and misery in and around their track. They had
depopulated some of the best peopled of the islands and renewed them
with victims deported from others. They had inflicted upon hundreds of
thousands of the natives all the forms and agonies of fiendish cruelty,
driving them to self-starvation and suicide, as a way of mercy and
release from an utterly wretched existence. They had come to be viewed
by their victims as fiends of hate, malignity, and all dark and cruel
desperation and mercilessness in passion. The hell which they denounced
upon their victims was shorn of its worst terror by the assurance that
these tormentors were not to be there. Las Casas, the noble missionary,
the true soldier of the cross, and the few priests and monks who
sympathized with him, in vain protested against these cruelties."
To all these causes we must add the narrow colonial policy of Spain.
Imitating Venice and ancient Carthage instead of Greece, she held her
dependencies under the straitest servitude to herself as conquered
provinces, repressing all political or commercial independence. A
similar restrictive policy, indeed, hampered the colonies of other
nations, but it was nowhere else so irrational or blighting as in
Spanish America.
CHAPTER III.
EXPLORATION AND COLONIZATION BY THE FRENCH AND THE ENGLISH
[1534]
How the French fought for foothold in Florida and were routed by the
Spaniards has just been related. So early as 1504, and possibly much
earlier, before Cabot or Columbus, French sailors were familiar with the
fisheries of Newfoundland. To the Isle of Cape Breton they gave its name
in remembrance of their own Brittany. The attention of the French
Government was thus early directed toward America, and it at length
determined to share in the new discoveries along with the Spanish and
the English.
In 1524 Verrazano, a Florentine navigator, was sent by Francis I. on a
voyage of discovery to the New World. Sighting the shores of America
near the present Wilmington, North Carolina, he explored the coast of
New Jersey, touched land near New York Bay, and anchored a few days in
the harbor of Newport. In this vicinity he came upon an island, which
was probably Block Island. Sailing from here along the coast as far
north as Newfoundland, he named this vast territory New France.
[Illustration: Verrazano, the Florentine Navigator.]
[Illustration: Jacques Cartier. From an old print.]
[1540]
In 1534 Cartier, a noted voyager of St. Malo, coasted along the north of
Newfoundland, passed through the Straits of Belle Isle into the water
now known as St. Lawrence Gulf, and into the mouth of the St. Lawrence
River. Erecting a cross, he took possession of the shores in the name of
the king of France.
In the following year he made a second voyage, going up as far as the
mouth of a small river which the year before he had named St. John's. He
called the waters the Bay of St. Lawrence. Ascending this, he came to a
settlement of the natives near a certain hill, which he called Mont
Royal, now modified into "Montreal." Cartier returned to France in 1536,
only a few of his men having survived the winter.
In 1540 Lord Roberval fitted out a fleet, with Cartier as subordinate.
Cartier sailed at once--his third voyage--Roberval following the next
year. A fort was built near the present site of Quebec. Roberval and
Cartier disagreed and returned to France, leaving the real foundation of
Quebec to be laid by Champlain, much later.
In 1604 De Monts arrived on the coast of Nova Scotia and erected a fort
at the mouth of the St. Croix, New Brunswick. He also made a settlement
on the shore of the present harbor of Annapolis, naming it Port Royal,
and the country around it Acadia. De Monts is famous largely because
under him the Sieur de Champlain, the real father of French colonization
in America, began his illustrious career. He had entered the St.
Lawrence in 1603. In 1608 he founded Quebec, the first permanent colony
of New France. The next year he explored the lake which perpetuates his
name. In 1615 he saw Lake Huron, Le Caron, the Franciscan, preceding him
in this only by a few days. Fired with ardor for discovery, Champlain
joined the Hurons in an attack upon the Iroquois. This led him into what
is now New York State, but whether the Indian camp first attacked by him
was on Onondaga or on Canandaigua Lake is still in debate. These were
but the beginning of Champlain's travels, by which many other Frenchmen,
some as missionaries, some as traders, were inspired to press far out
into the then unknown West. We shall resume the narrative in Chapter VII
of the next period. Champlain died at Quebec in 1635.
Turn back now to Columbus's time. England, destined to dominate the
continent of North America, was also practically the discoverer of the
same. On St. John's day, June 24, 1497, thirteen months and a week
before Columbus saw South America, John Cabot, a Venetian in the service
of King Henry VII., from the deck of the good ship Matthew, of Bristol,
descried land somewhere on the coast either of Labrador or of Nova
Scotia. Cabot, of course, supposed this prima vista of his to belong to
Asia, and expected to reach Cipango next voyage. So late as 1543 Jean
Allefonsce, on reaching New England, took it for the border of Tartary.
Andre Thevet, in 1515, in a pretended voyage to Maine, places Cape
Breton on the west coast of Asia. This confusion probably explains the
tradition of Norumbega as a great city, and of other populous and
wealthy cities in the newly found land. Men transferred ideas of Eastern
Asia to this American shore.
[1516]
The subsequent year Cabot made a second voyage, inspecting the American
coast northward till icebergs were met, southward to the vicinity of
Albemarle Sound. Possibly in his first expedition, probably in the
second, John Cabot was accompanied by his more famous son, Sebastian.
For many years after the Cabots, England made little effort to explore
the New World. Henry VII. was a Catholic. He therefore submitted to the
Pope's bull which gave America to Spain. Henry VIII. had married
Catherine of Aragon. He allowed Ferdinand, her father, to employ the
skill and daring of Sebastian Cabot in behalf of Spain. It was reserved
for the splendid reign of Elizabeth to show what English courage and
endurance could accomplish in extending England's power.
[Illustration: Sebastian Cabot. From an old print.]
[1576]
Like those before him, Martin Frobisher was in earnest to find the
northwest passage, in whose existence all navigators then fully
believed. Like Columbus, he vainly sought friends to aid him. At last,
after he had waited fifteen years in vain, Dudley, the Earl of Warwick,
helped him to an outfit. His little fleet embraced the Gabriel, of
thirty-five tons, the Michael of thirty, and a pinnace of ten. As it
swept to sea past Greenwich, the Queen waved her hand in token of
good-will. Sailing northward near the Shetland Isles, Frobisher passed
the southern shore of Greenland and came in sight of Labrador, 1576.
He effected a landing at Hall's Island, at the mouth of the bay now
called by his name, but which he thought to be a strait, his discovery
thus strengthening his belief in the possibility of reaching Asia by
this westward course. He sailed up the bay as far as Butcher's Island,
where five of his men were taken prisoners by the natives. All effort to
rescue them was made, but to no purpose. Among the curiosities which he
brought home was a piece of stone, or black ore, which gave rise to the
belief that gold was to be found in this new country.
[1577]
A second and larger expedition sailed in 1577. The Queen gave 1,000
pounds and lent the royal ship Aid, of two hundred tons. The Gabriel and
the Michael of the former year were again made ready, besides smaller
craft. This voyage was to seek gold rather than to discover the
northwest passage. The fleet set sail May 27th, and on July 18th arrived
off North Foreland, or Hall's Island, so named for the man who had
brought away the piece of black earth. Search was made for this metal,
supposed to be so valuable, and large quantities were found. The fleet
sailed back to England with a heavy cargo of it.
In 1578 a third and the last voyage was made to this region, to which
the name meta incognita was given. Two large ships were furnished by the
Queen, and these were accompanied by thirteen smaller ones.
[1578-1580]
It was now the purpose to found a colony. The expedition set sail May
31st, going through the English Channel, and reaching the coast of
Greenland June 21st. Frobisher and a few of his sailors landed where,
perhaps, white men had never trodden before. As he came near the bay he
was driven south by stormy weather, and entered, not knowing his
whereabouts, the waters of Hudson's Straits, which he traversed a
distance of sixty miles. He succeeded at length in retracing his course,
and anchored on the southern shore of Frobisher's Bay, in the Countess
of Warwick's Sound. But the desire for gold, the bleak winds, barren
shores, and drifting icebergs, all combined to dispel the hopes of
making a successful settlement, and the adventurers turned their faces
homeward, carrying once more a cargo of ore, which proved, like the
first, to be of no value whatever.
Almost three hundred years later Captain Hall, the American explorer,
visited the Countess's Island and Sound. Among the Eskimos, from 1860 to
1862, he learned the tradition of Frobisher's visits, which had been
preserved and handed down. They knew the number of ships; they spoke of
the three times that white men had come; how five of these strangers had
been taken captive, and how, after remaining through the winter, they
had been allowed to build a boat, and to launch themselves upon the icy
seas, never to be heard of more. Captain Hall was shown many relics of
Frobisher's voyages, some of which he sent to the Royal Geographical
Society of London, a part to the Smithsonian Institute at Washington.
The small English house of lime and stone on this island was still
standing in good condition, and there was also a trench where they had
built their ill-fated boat.
[Illustration: An Indian Village at the Roanoke Settlement.]
A contemporary of Frobisher, Sir Francis Drake, also entertained the
idea of making the northwest passage. While engaged in privateering or
piratical expeditions against the Spanish, Drake landed on the Isthmus
of Panama, saw the Pacific for the first time, and determined to enter
it by the Straits of Magellan. In 1577 he made his way through the
straits, plundered the Spanish along the coast of Chili and Peru, and
sailed as far north as the 48th parallel, or Oregon, calling the country
New Albion. Steering homeward by the Cape of Good Hope, he arrived at
Plymouth, his starting-point, in 1580, having been absent about two
years and ten months.
[Illustration: Sir Humphrey Gilbert.]
Thomas Cavendish had been with Grenville in the voyage of 1585 to
Virginia. Frobisher's attempts inspired him with the ambition of the
age. In 1586 he, too, sailed through the Straits of Magellan, burning
and plundering Spanish ships, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and reached
Plymouth in 1588, having been gone about two years and fifty days.
[Illustration: Sir Walter Raleigh. From a portrait attributed to Zuccaro
in the National Portrait Gallery, London.]
[1584]
These half-piratical attempts against Spain led continually into
American waters, till the notion of forming a permanent outpost here as
base for such adventures suggested to Sir Humphrey Gilbert the plan,
which he failed to realize, of founding an American settlement. Gilbert
visited our shores in 1579, and again in 1583, but was lost on his
return from the latter voyage.
In 1584 Sir Walter Raleigh sent two captains, Amidas and Barlow, to
inspect the coast off what is now North Carolina. They reported so
favorably that he began, next year, a colony on Roanoke Island. England
was now a Protestant land, and no longer heeded Spanish claims to the
transatlantic continent, save so far as actual settlements had been
made.
[1586]
Sir Richard Grenville commanded this expedition, but was to return on
seeing the one hundred and eight colonists who accompanied him well
established. Queen Elizabeth gave the name VIRGINIA to the new country.
Drake, tending homeward from one of his raids on the Spanish coast, in
1586, offered the settlers supplies, but finding them wholly
discouraged, he carried them back to England.
[Illustration: Queen Elizabeth.]
[1587]
Determined to plant an agricultural community, Raleigh next time, l587,
sent men with their families. A daughter to one of these, named Dare,
was the first child of English parents born in America. Becoming
destitute, the colony despatched its governor home for supplies. He
returned to find the settlement deserted, and no tidings as to the fate
of the poor colonists have ever been heard from that day to our own. The
Jamestown settlers mentioned in the next chapter found among their
Indian neighbors a boy whose whitish complexion and wavy hair induced
the interesting suspicion that he was descended from some one of these
lost colonists of Roanoke.
Thus Sir Walter's enterprise had to be abandoned. In the 40,000 pounds
spent upon it his means were exhausted. Besides, England was now at war
with Spain, and the entire energies of the nation were in requisition
for the overthrow of the Spanish Armada.
CHAPTER IV.
THE PLANTING OF VIRGINIA
[1606]
We have now arrived at the seventeenth century. In 1606 King James I.
issued the first English colonial charter. It created a first and a
second Virginia Company, the one having its centre in London, and coming
to be known as the London Company; the other made up of Bristol, Exeter,
and Plymouth men, and gradually taking the title of the Plymouth
Company. This latter company, the second, or Plymouth Company,
authorized to plant between 38 degrees and 45 degrees north, effected a
settlement in 1607 at the mouth of the Kennebec River. Little came of it
but suffering, the colonists, after a severe winter, returning to
England.
[Illustration: King James I. Mr. Henry Irving's Collection.]
[1607]
A colony of one hundred and five planters sent out by the first or
London Company, proceeded, also in 1607, to Chesapeake Bay, entering
James River, to which they indeed gave this name, and planted upon its
banks Jamestown, the first permanent English colony on the continent.
This London Company consisted of a council in England, appointed by the
king, having the power to name the members of a local council which was
to govern the colony, the colonists themselves having no voice.
It is well known that the very earliest population of the Old Dominion
was not of the highest, but predominantly idle and thriftless. Vagabonds
and homeless children picked up in the streets of London, as well as
some convicts, were sent to the colony from England to be indented as
servants, permanently, or for a term of years. Persons of the better
class, to be sure, came as well, and the quality of the population, on
the whole, improved year by year. Settlement here followed a centrifugal
tendency, except as this was repressed by fear of the Indians. In 1616
the departments of Virginia were Henrico, up the James above the
Appomattox mouth, West and Shirley Hundreds, Jamestown, Kiquoton, and
King's Gift on the coast near Cape Charles--a wide reach of territory to
be covered by a total population of only three hundred and fifty.
[1608]
A little exporting was immediately begun. So early as May 20, 1608,
Jamestown sent to England a ship laden with iron ore, sassafras, cedar
posts, and walnut boards. Another followed on June 2d, with a cargo all
of cedar wood. This year or the next, small quantities of pitch, tar,
and glass were sent. From 1619 tobacco was so common as to be the
currency. About 1650 it was largely exported, a million and a half
pounds, on the average, yearly. The figure had risen to twelve million
pounds by 1670. At the middle of the century, corn, wheat, rice, hemp,
flax, and fifteen varieties of fruit, as well as excellent wine were
produced. A wind-mill was set up about 1620, the first in America. It
stood at Falling Creek on the James River. The pioneer iron works on the
continent were in this colony, hailing from about the date last named.
Community of property prevailed at Jamestown in all the earliest years,
as it did at Plymouth. After the event noted by John Rolfe: "about the
last of August [1619] came in a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty
Negars," slavery was a continual and increasing curse, as is attested
by the laws concerning slaves. It encouraged indolence and savagery of
habit and nature. Virginian slaves, however, were better treated than
those farther south. They were tolerably clothed, fed, and housed.
[Illustration: Tobacco Plant.]
[Illustration: Captain John Smith.]
There was in Virginia little of that healthful social and political
contact which did so much to develop civilization at the North. Of town
life there was practically nothing. Even so late as 1716 Jamestown had
only a sorry half-dozen structures, two of which were church and
court-house. Fifteen years later Fredericksburg had, besides the manor
house of Colonel Willis and its belongings, only a store, a tailor shop,
a blacksmith shop, a tavern or "ordinary," and a coffeehouse. Richmond
and Petersburg still existed only on paper, and if we come down to the
middle of the eighteenth century, Williamsburg, the capital of the
province, was nothing but a straggling village of two hundred houses,
without a single paved street. Only the College and the governor's
"palace" were of brick. The county-seats were mostly mere glades in the
woods, containing each its court-house, prison, whipping-post, pillory,
and ducking-stool, besides the wretched tavern where court and
attendants put up, and possibly a church. Hardships and dissensions
marked the whole early history of this infant state. At one time only
forty settlers remained alive, at another meal and water were the sole
diet. Hoping for instant riches in gold, poor gentlemen and vagabonds
had come, too much to the exclusion of mechanics and laborers. For
relief from the turbulence and external dangers of this period, the
colony owed much to Captain John Smith, who, after all allowance for his
boasting, certainly displayed great courage and energy in emergencies.
He, too, it was who did most to explore the country up the James and
upon Chesapeake Bay.
[Illustration: "King Powhatan commands C:Smith to be flayne his daughter
Pokahontas beggs his life his thankfullness and how he subiecled 39 of
their kings reade ye history" Pocahontas saving Captain Smith's
Life. From Smith's "General History."]
[1609-1610]
A new charter was granted in 1609, the council in England being now
appointed by the stockholders instead of the king, and the governor of
the colony being named by this council. Lord Delaware was made Governor
and Captain-General of Virginia, and many more colonists sent out. By a
wreck of two of the vessels there was delay in the arrival of the newly
chosen officers. Smith, then Percy, meantime continued to exercise
authority. This, again, was a critical period. Indians were troublesome.
Tillage having been neglected from the first, provisions became
exhausted, and a crisis long referred to as "the starving time" ensued.
The colony had actually abandoned Jamestown and shipped for England,
when met in James River by Lord Delaware, coming with relief. They at
once returned, and an era of hope dawned. This was in June, 1610. One
hundred and fifty new settlers accompanied Delaware. Planting was
vigorously prosecuted, the Indians placated, and still further
accessions of people and cattle secured from England.
[1612]
Delaware's brief, mild sway was always a benediction, in pleasing
contrast with the severities of Dale and Argall, who successively
governed after his departure. Under Dale, death was the penalty for
slaughtering cattle, even one's own, except with the Governor's leave,
also of exporting goods without permission. A baker giving short weight
was to lose his ears, and on second repetition to suffer death. A
laundress purloining linen was to be flogged. Martial law alone
prevailed; even capital punishment was ordained without jury. Such
arbitrary rule was perhaps necessary, so lawless were the mass of the
population. It at any rate had the excellent effect of rousing the
Virginians to political thought and to the assertion of their rights. In
1612 a change took place in the Company's methods of governing its
colony. The superior council was abolished, its authority transferred to
the corporation as a whole, which met as an assembly to elect officers
and enact laws for the colony. The government thus became more
democratic in form and spirit.
[Illustration: "POWHATAN Held this state & fashion when Capt.' Smith was
delivered to him prisoner. 1607"
The Council of Powhatan. From Smith's "General History,"]
[1614-1619]
The year 1614 was distinguished by the marriage of Pocahontas, daughter
of the native chief Powhatan, to the English colonist Rolfe. With him
she visited England, dying there a few years later. The alliance secured
the valuable friendship of Powhatan and his subjects--only till
Powhatan's death, however. Thenceforth savage hostilities occurred at
frequent intervals. In 1622 they were peculiarly severe, over three
hundred settlers losing their lives through them. Another outbreak took
place about 1650, this time more quickly suppressed. We shall see in a
later chapter how Bacon's Rebellion was occasioned by Indian troubles.
As James I. broke with Parliament, a majority of the Virginia
shareholders proved Liberals, and they wrought with signal purpose and
effect to realize their ideas in their colony. To this political
complexion of the Virginia Company not only Virginia itself, but, in a
way, all America is indebted for a start toward free institutions.
During the governorship of George Yeardley, was summoned an assembly of
burgesses, consisting of two representatives, elected by the
inhabitants, from each of the eleven boroughs or districts which the
colony had by this time come to embrace. It met on June 10, 1619, the
earliest legislative body in the New World. This was the dawn of another
new era in the colony's history.
[Illustration: Pocahantas]
[1622-1625]
In 1622 arrived Sir Thomas Wyatt, bringing a written constitution from
the Company, which confirmed to the colony representative government and
trial by jury. The assembly was given authority to make laws, subject
only to the Governor's veto. This enlargement of political rights was
due to the growth of the sentiment of popular liberty in England. In the
meetings of the London Company debates were frequent and spirited
between the court faction and the supporters of the political rights of
the colonists. James I., dissatisfied with the authority which he had
himself granted, appointed a commission to inquire into the Company's
management, and also into the circumstances of the colony. A change was
recommended, the courts decided as the king wished, and the Company was
dissolved, The colony, while still allowed to govern itself by means of
its popular assembly, was thus brought directly under the supervision of
the Crown. Charles I., coming to the throne in 1625, gave heed to the
affairs of the colony only so far as necessary to secure for himself the
profits of the tobacco trade, It was doubtless owing to his indifference
that the colony continued to enjoy civil freedom. He again appointed
Yeardley Governor, a choice agreeable to the people; and in 1628, by
asking that the assembly be called in order to vote him a monopoly of
the coveted trade, he explicitly recognized the legitimacy and authority
of that body.
[1642]
Yeardley was succeeded by Harvey, who rendered himself unpopular by
defending in all land disputes the claims arising under royal grant
against those based upon occupancy. Difficulties of this sort pervaded
all colonial history.
In 1639 Wyatt held the office, succeeded in 1642 by Berkeley, during
whose administration the colony attained its highest prosperity.
Virginians now possessed constitutional rights and privileges in even a
higher degree than Englishmen in the northern colonies. The colonists
were most loyal to the king, and were let alone. They were also attached
to the Church of England, ever manifesting toward those of a different
faith the spirit of intolerance characteristic of the age.
[1650]
During the civil war in England, Virginia, of course, sided with the
king. When Cromwell had assumed the reins of government he sent an
expedition to require the submission of the colony. An agreement was
made by which the authority of Parliament was acknowledged, while the
colony in return was left unmolested in the management of its own
affairs.
[Illustration: Signature of Berkeley.]
CHAPTER V.
PILGRIM AND PURITAN AT THE NORTH
[1612]
The Pilgrims who settled New England were Independents, peculiar in
their ecclesiastical tenet that the single congregation of godly
persons, however few or humble, regularly organized for Christ's work,
is of right, by divine appointment, the highest ecclesiastical authority
on earth. A church of this order existed in London by 1568; another,
possibly more than one, the "Brownists," by 1580. Barrowe and Greenwood
began a third in 1588, which, its founders being executed, went exiled
to Amsterdam in 1593, subsequently uniting with the Presbyterians there.
These churches, though independent, were not strictly democratic, like
those next to be named.
Soon after 1600 John Smyth gathered a church at Gainsborough in
Lincolnshire, England, which persecution likewise drove to Amsterdam.
Here Smyth seceded and founded a Baptist church, which, returning to
London in 1611 or 1612, became the first church of its kind known to
have existed in England. From Smyth's church at Gainsborough sprang one
at Scrooby, in Nottinghamshire, and this, too, exiled like its parent,
crossed to Holland, finding home in Leyden in 1607 and 1608. Of this
church John Robinson was pastor, and from its bosom came the Plymouth
Colony to New England.
[Illustration: Plymouth Harbor, England.]
[Illustration: Harbor of Provincetown, Cape Cod, where the Pilgrims
landed.]
[1620]
This little band set out for America with a patent from the Virginia
Company, according to James I.'s charter of 1606, but actually began
here as labor-share holders in a sub-corporation of a new organization,
the Plymouth Company, chartered in 1620. Launching in the Mayflower from
Plymouth, where they had paused in their way hither from Holland, they
arrived off the coast of Cape Cod in 1620, December 11th Old Style,
December 21st New Style, and began a settlement, to which they gave the
name Plymouth. Before landing they had formed themselves into a
political body, a government of the people with "just and equal laws."
[Illustration: The Life of the Colony at Cape Cod.]
They based their civil authority upon this Mayflower compact,
practically ignoring England. Carver was the first governor, Bradford
the second. The colony was named Plymouth in memory of hospitalities
which its members had received at Plymouth, England, the name having no
connection with the "Plymouth" of the Plymouth Company. The members of
the Plymouth Company had none but a mercantile interest in the
adventure, merely fitting out the colonists and bearing the expense of
the passage for all but the first. On the other hand, the stock was not
all retained in England. Shares were allotted to the Pilgrims as well,
one to each emigrant with or without means, and one for every 10 pounds
invested.
Plymouth early made a treaty with Massasoit, the chief of the
neighboring Wampanoags, the peace lasting with benign effects to both
parties for fifty years, or till the outbreak of Philip's War, discussed
in a later chapter. The first winter in Plymouth was one of dreadful
hardships, of famine, disease and death, which spring relieved but in
part. Yet Plymouth grew, surely if slowly. It acquired rights on the
Kennebec, on the Connecticut, at Cape Ann. It was at first a pure
democracy, its laws all made in mass-meetings of the entire body of
male inhabitants; nor was it till 1639 that increase of numbers forced
resort to the principle of representation. In 1643 the population was
about three thousand.
[Illustration: Signatures to Plymouth Patent.
/In witnes whereof the said President & Counsell haue to the one pt of
this pute Indenture sett their seales* And to th'other pt hereof the
said John Peirce in the name of himself and his said Associate haue sett
to his seale geven the day and yeeres first aboue written/]
[1626-1630]
Between 1620 and 1630 there were isolated settlers along the whole New
England coast. White, a minister from Dorchester, England, founded a
colony near Cape Ann, which removed to Salem in 1626. The Plymouth
Company granted them a patent, which Endicott, in charge of more
emigrants, brought over in 1628. It gave title to all land between the
Merrimac and Charles Rivers, also to all within three miles beyond each.
These men formed the nucleus of the colony to which in 1629 Charles I.
granted a royal charter, styling the proprietors "the Governor and
Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England." Boston was made the
capital. Soon more emigrants came, and Charlestown was settled.
[Illustration: Site of First Church and Governor Bradford's House at
Plymouth.]
It was a momentous step when the government of this colony was
transferred to New England. Winthrop was chosen Governor, others of the
Company elected to minor offices, and they, with no fewer than one
thousand new colonists, sailed for this side the Atlantic. In
Massachusetts, therefore, a trading company did not beget, as elsewhere,
but literally became a political state. Many of the Massachusetts men,
in contrast with those of Plymouth, had enjoyed high consideration at
home. Yet democracy prevailed here too. The Governor and his eighteen
assistants were chosen by the freemen, and were both legislature and
court. As population increased and scattered in towns, these chose
deputies to represent them, and a lower house element was added to the
General Court, though assistants and deputies did not sit separately
till 1644.
[Illustration: Governor Winthrop.]
[1631]
At this time Massachusetts had a population of about 15,000. To all New
England 21,200 emigrants came between 1628 and 1643, the total white
population at the latter date being about 24,000.
[Illustration: First Church in Salem.]
So early as 1631 this colony decreed to admit none as freemen who were
not also church members. Thus Church and State were made one, the
government a theocracy. The Massachusetts settlers, though in many
things less extreme than the Pilgrims, were decided Puritans, sincere
but formal, precise, narrow, and very superstitious. They did not,
however, on coming hither, affect or wish to separate from the Church of
England, earnestly as they deprecated retaining the sign of the cross in
baptism, the surplice, marriage with ring, and kneeling at communion.
Yet soon they in effect became Separatists as well as Puritans, building
independent churches, like those at Plymouth, and repudiating episcopacy
utterly.
[Illustration: Seal of Massachusetts Bay Company.]
[1635]
Much as these Puritans professed and tried to exalt reason in certain
matters, in civil and religious affairs, where they took the Old
Testament as affording literal and minute directions for all sorts of
human actions for all time, they could allow little liberty of opinion.
This was apparent when into this theocratic state came Roger Williams,
afterward the founder of Rhode Island. Born in London, England, about
1607, of good family, he was placed by his patron, Coke, at the Charter
House School. From there he went to Pembroke College, Cambridge. In 1631
he arrived in Boston. Somewhat finical in his political, moral, and
religious ideas, he found it impossible, having separated from the
Church of England, in which he had been reared, to harmonize here with
those still favoring that communion. At Salem he was invited by a little
company of Separatists to become their teacher. His views soon offended
the authorities. He declared that the king's patent could confer no
title to lands possessed by Indians. He denied the right of magistrates
to punish heresy, or to enforce attendance upon religious services. "The
magistrate's power," he said, "extends only to the bodies, goods, and
outward state of men."
Alarmed at his bold utterances, the General Court of Massachusetts,
September 2, 1635, decreed his banishment for "new and dangerous
opinions, against the authority of magistrates." His fate was not,
therefore, merely because of his religious views. The exile sought
refuge at Seekonk, but this being within the Plymouth jurisdiction, he,
on Governor Winslow's admonition, moved farther into the wilderness,
settling at Providence. He purchased land of the natives, and, joined by
others, set up a pure democracy, instituting as a part thereof the
"lively experiment," for which ages had waited, of perfect liberty in
matters of religious belief. Not for the first time in history, but more
clearly, earnestly, and consistently than it had ever been done before,
he maintained for every man the right of absolute freedom in matters of
conscience, for all forms of faith equal toleration.
[Illustration: Roger Williams' House at Salem.]
[1638]
[Illustration: Edward Winslow.]
Some friends of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson established a colony on Aquidneck,
the Indian name for Rhode Island. Williams went to England and secured
from Parliament a patent which united that plantation with his in one
government. Charles II.'s charter of 1663 added Warwick to the first two
settlements, renewing and enlarging the patent, and giving freest scope
for government according to Williams' ideas. Mrs. Hutchinson, a woman of
rare intellect and eloquence, who maintained the right of private
judgment and pretended to an infallible inner light of revelation, was,
like Williams, a victim of Puritan intolerance. She and her followers
were banished, and some of them, returning, put to death, 1659-60. She
came to Providence, then went to Aquidneck, where her husband died in
1642. She next settled near Hurl Gate, within the Dutch limits, where
herself and almost her entire family were butchered by the Indians in
1643.
In 1633 the Dutch erected a fort where Hartford now is, but some English
emigrants from Plymouth Colony, in defiance of a threatened cannonade,
sailed past and built a trading-house at Windsor, where, joined by
colonists, from about Boston, they soon effected a settlement.
Wethersfield and Hartford were presently founded. In 1630 the Plymouth
Company had granted Connecticut to the Earl of Warwick, who turned it
over to Lord Brooke, Lord Say-and-Seal, and others. Winthrop the
Younger, son of Governor Winthrop, of Massachusetts, commissioned by
these last, built a fort at Saybrook. Till the expiration of his
commission the towns immediately upon the Connecticut were under the
government of Massachusetts. Their population in 1643 was three
thousand. A convention of these towns met at Hartford, January 14, 1639,
and formed a constitution, like that of Massachusetts Bay, thoroughly
republican in nature. Connecticut breathed a freer spirit than either
Massachusetts or New Haven, being in this respect the peer of Plymouth.
At Hartford Roger Williams was always welcome.
Meantime, in 1638, having touched at Boston the year before, Davenport,
Eaton, and others from London began planting at New Haven. The Bible was
adopted as their guide in both civil and religious affairs, and a
government organized in which only church members could vote or be
elected to the General Court. The colony flourished, branching out into
several towns. In 1643 it numbered twenty five hundred inhabitants.
As early as 1622, Mason and Gorges were granted land partly in what is
now Maine, partly in what is now New Hampshire; and in 1623 Dover and
Portsmouth were settled. Wheelwright, a brother-in-law of Mrs.
Hutchinson, with others, purchased of the natives the southeast part of
New Hampshire, between the Merrimac and the Piscataqua, and in 1638
Exeter was founded. In the same year with Wheelwright's purchase, Mason
obtained from the council of the Plymouth Company a patent to this same
section, and the tract was called New Hampshire. These conflicting
claims paved the way for future controversies and lawsuits. The settlers
here were not Puritans, nor were they obliged to be church members in
order to be deputies or freemen.
The settlement of Maine goes back to 1626, when the Plymouth Company
granted lands there both to Alexander and to Gorges. In 1639 Gorges
secured a royal charter to re-enforce his claim. Large freedom, civil
and religious, was allowed. For many years the Maine settlements were
small and scattered, made up mostly of such as came to hunt and fish for
a season only.
[1650]
From 1643 to 1684 Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Haven
formed a confederation under the style of the United Colonies of New
England. Maine, Providence, and Rhode Island sought membership, but were
refused as being civilly and religiously out of harmony with the
colonies named. Connecticut, offensive to the Dutch, and exposed to
hostilities from them, was the most earnest for the union, while at the
same time the most conservative as to its form. It was a loose league,
leaving each colony independent save as to war and peace, Indian
affairs, alliances and boundaries. Questions pertaining to these were to
be settled by a commission of two delegates from each of the four
colonies, meeting yearly, voting man by man, six out of the eight votes
being necessary to bind.
The confederacy settled a boundary dispute between New Haven and New
Netherland in 1650. It received and disbursed moneys, amounting some
years to 600 pounds, for the propagation of the gospel in New England,
sent over by the society which Parliament incorporated for that purpose
in 1649. It was also of more or less service in securing united action
against the savages in Philip's War. The union was, however, of little
immediate service, useful rather as an example for the far future. Its
failure was due partly to the distance of the colonies apart, and to the
strength of the instinct for local self-government, a distinguishing
political trait of New England till our day. Its main weakness, however,
was the overbearing power and manner of Massachusetts, especially after
her assumption of Maine in 1652. In 1653 the Plymouth, New Haven, and
Connecticut commissioners earnestly wished war with New Netherland, but
Massachusetts proudly forbade--a plain violation of the articles. After
this there was not much heart in the alliance. The last meeting of the
commissioners occurred at Hartford, September 5, 1684.
CHAPTER VI.
BALTIMORE AND HIS MARYLAND
[1630]
[Illustration: Maryland Shilling.]
The very year that witnessed the landing of the Pilgrims records the
beginning of another attempt to colonize the New World. While Secretary
of State, having been appointed in 1619, Sir George Calvert, a member of
the Virginia Company from 1609 until its dissolution in 1624, determined
to plant a colony for himself. In the memorable year 1620 he bought of
Lord Vaughan the patent to the south-eastern peninsula of Newfoundland,
the next he sent colonists thither with a generous supply of money for
their support. In 1623 King James gave him a patent, making him
proprietary of this region. In 1625 Calvert boldly declared himself a
Catholic, and resigned his office of Secretary. Spite of this he was
soon afterwards ennobled, and his new title of Lord Baltimore is the
name by which he is best known. Visiting his little settlement in 1627
he quickly came to the conclusion that the severity of the climate would
make its failure certain. He therefore gave up this enterprise, but
determined to repeat the attempt on the more favorable soil of Virginia.
Confident of the goodwill of Charles I., to whom he had written for a
grant of land there, he did not await a reply, but sailed for Virginia,
where he arrived in 1629. In 1632 the king issued a patent granting to
Baltimore and his heirs a territory north and east of the Potomac,
comprising what we now call Maryland, all Delaware, and a part of
Pennsylvania. The name Maryland was given it by the king in, honor of
his queen, Henrietta Maria. But before this charter had received royal
signature Lord Baltimore had breathed his last, and his son Cecil
succeeded to his honors and possessions.
[Illustration: Henrietta Maria.]
The Maryland charter made the proprietary the absolute lord of the soil.
He was merely to acknowledge fealty by the delivery of two Indian arrows
yearly to the king at Windsor. He could make laws with the consent of
the citizens, declare war or peace, appoint officers of government; in
fact, in most respects he had regal power. The colonists were, however,
to remain English subjects, with all the privileges of such. If they
were not represented in Parliament, neither were they taxed by the
Crown. If the proprietary made laws for them, these must not be contrary
to the laws of England. And they were to enjoy freedom of trade, not
only with England but with foreign countries.
[1634-1635]
This charter, as will be readily seen, could not please the Virginians,
since the entire territory conveyed by it was part of the grant of 1609
to the London Company for Virginia. But as this and subsequent charters
had been annulled in 1624, the new colony was held by the Privy Council
to have the law on its side, and Lord Baltimore was left to make his
preparations undisturbed. He fitted out two vessels, the Ark and the
Dove, and sent them on their voyage of colonization. They went by the
way of the West Indies, arriving off Point Comfort in 1634. Sailing up
the Potomac, they landed on the island of St. Clement's, and took formal
possession of their new home. Calvert explored a river, now called the
St. Mary's, a tributary of the Potomac, and being pleased with the spot
began a settlement. He gained the friendship of the natives by
purchasing the land and by treating them justly and humanely.
[Illustration: Supposed Portrait of William Clayborne.]
[Illustration: Clayborne's Trading Post on Kent Island.]
The proprietary was a Catholic, yet, whether or not by an agreement
between him and the king, as Gardiner supposes, did not use either his
influence or his authority to distress adherents of the Church of
England. The two creeds stood practically upon an equality. But if
religious troubles were avoided, difficulties of another sort were not
slow in arising. About the year 1631, Clayborne, who had been secretary
of the Virginia colony, had chosen Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay as a
station for trading with the Indians. This post was in the very midst of
Maryland, and Calvert notified Clayborne that he should consider it a
part of that province. Clayborne at once showed himself a bitter enemy.
The Indians became suspicious and unfriendly, Clayborne, so it was
believed, being the instigator of this temper. An armed vessel was sent
out, with orders from Clayborne to seize ships of the St. Mary's
settlement. A fight took place, Clayborne fleeing to Virginia. Calvert
demanded that he should be given up. This was refused, and in 1637 he
went to England. A committee of the Privy Council decided that Kent
Island belonged to Maryland.
[1638]
In 1635 the first Maryland assembly met, consisting of the freemen of
the colony and the governor, Leonard Calvert, the proprietary's brother,
who was presiding officer. Lord Baltimore repudiated its acts, on the
ground that they were not proposed by him, as the charter directed. The
assembly which gathered in 1638 retaliated, rejecting the laws brought
forward by the proprietary.
[1639]
For a time the colony was without laws except the common law of England.
But Baltimore was too wise and conciliatory to allow such a state of
affairs to continue. He gave authority to the governor to assent to the
acts of the assembly, which he himself might or might not confirm.
[Illustration: Fight between Clayborne and the St. Mary's Ship.]
Accordingly in 1639 the assembly met and passed various acts, mostly
relating to civil affairs. One, however, was specially noteworthy, as
giving to the "Holy Church" "her rights and liberties," meaning by this
the Church of Rome, for, as Gardiner says, the title was never applied
to the Church of England. It was at the same time expressly enacted that
all the Christian inhabitants should be in the enjoyment of every right
and privilege as free as the natural-born subjects of England. If Roger
Williams was the first to proclaim absolute religious liberty, Lord
Baltimore was hardly behind him in putting this into practice. As has
been neatly said, "The Ark and the Dove were names of happy omen: the
one saved from the general wreck the germs of political liberty, and the
other bore the olive-branch of religious peace."
[1646]
During the civil war in England the affairs of Maryland were in a very
disturbed condition. Clayborne, Maryland's evil genius, seized the
opportunity to foment an insurrection, possessed himself once more of
Kent Island, and compelled the governor to flee to Virginia. Returning
in 1646, Calvert was fortunate enough to recover the reins of
government, but the following year witnessed the close of his
administration and his short though useful and eventful life. Few men
intrusted with almost absolute authority have exercised it with so much
firmness and at the same time with so much ability, discretion, and
uprightness.
[1650]
His successor, Greene, a Catholic, was not likely to find favor with the
Puritan Parliament of England, and Baltimore, in 1648, to conciliate the
ruling powers and to refute the charge that Maryland was only a retreat
for Romanists, removed the governor and appointed instead one who was a
Protestant and a firm supporter of Parliament. The council was also
changed so as to place the Catholics in the minority. The oath of the
new governor restrained him from molesting any person, especially if of
the Roman Catholic persuasion, on account of religious profession. The
way was thus opened for the Act of Toleration passed in 1649. This law,
after specifying certain speeches against the Trinity, the Virgin, or
the saints as punishable offences, declared that equal privileges should
be enjoyed by Christians of all creeds. Whatever the motives of
Baltimore, his policy was certainly wise and commendable.
A new and troublesome element was now introduced into the colony. Some
Puritans who had not been tolerated among the stanch Church-of-England
inhabitants of Virginia were invited by Governor Stone to Maryland.
Their home here, which they named Providence, is now known as Annapolis.
The new-comers objected to the oath of fidelity, refused to send
burgesses to the assembly, and were ready to overthrow the government
whose protection they were enjoying. Opportunity soon offered.
Parliament had already in 1652 brought Virginia to submission. Maryland
was now accused of disloyalty, and when we notice among the
commissioners appointed by the Council of State, the name of Clayborne,
it is not difficult to understand who was the author of this charge. The
governor was removed, but being popular and not averse to compromise,
was quickly restored. Then came the accession of Cromwell to power as
Protector of England. Parliament was dissolved. The authority of its
commissioners of course ceased. Baltimore seized this opportunity to
regain his position as proprietary. He bade Stone to require the oath of
fidelity to the proprietary from those who occupied lands, and to issue
all writs in his name. He maintained that the province now stood in the
same relations to the Protectorate which it had borne to the royalist
government of Charles I.
[Illustration: Oliver Cromwell.]
So thought Cromwell, but not so Clayborne or the Maryland Puritans. They
deposed Stone, and put in power Fuller, who was in sympathy with their
designs. There resulted a reversal of the acts of former assemblies, and
legislation hostile to the Catholics. The new assembly, from which
Catholics were carefully excluded by disfranchisement, at once repealed
the Act of Toleration. Protection was withdrawn from those who professed
the popish religion, and they were forbidden the exercise of that faith
in the province. Severe penalties were threatened against "prelacy" and
"licentiousness" thus restricting the benefits of their "Act concerning
Religion" to the Puritan element now in power. The authority of the
proprietary himself was disputed, and colonists were invited to take
lands without his knowledge or consent.
[1656]
Baltimore adopted vigorous measures. By his orders Stone made a forcible
attempt to regain control of the province, but was defeated at
Providence and taken prisoner. His life was spared, but four of his men
were condemned and executed. Baltimore again invoked the powerful
intervention of Cromwell, and again were the enemies of Maryland sternly
rebuked for their interference in the affairs of that province, and told
in plain language to leave matters as they had found them. In 1656,
after an inquiry by the Commissioners of Trade, the claims of Baltimore
were admitted to be just, and he promptly sent his brother Philip to be
a member of the council and secretary of the province. The legislation
of the usurping Puritans was set aside, religious toleration once more
had full sway, and a general pardon was proclaimed to those who had
taken part in the late disturbances.
In the meantime, Fendall, who had been appointed governor by Baltimore,
plotted to make himself independent of his master, and, with the
connivance of the assembly, proceeded to usurp the authority which was
lawfully vested in the proprietary. But the attempt was a miserable
failure. Philip Calvert was immediately made governor by the now
all-powerful proprietary, who had the favor and support of Charles II.,
just coming to the throne. Peace and prosperity came back to the colony
so sorely and frequently vexed by civil dissensions. The laws were just
and liberal, encouraging the advent of settlers of whatever creed, while
the rule of the Calverts was wise and benign, such as to merit the
respect and admiration of posterity. In 1643 Virginia and Maryland
together had less than twenty thousand inhabitants. In 1660 Maryland
alone, according to Fuller, had eight thousand. Chalmers thinks there
were no fewer than twelve thousand at this date.
CHAPTER VII.
NEW NETHERLAND
[1609]
While the French explorer, Champlain, was sailing along the shores of
the lake which bears his name, another equally adventurous spirit, Henry
Hudson, was on his way to the western world. Hoping to open a passage to
India by a voyage to the north, Hudson, an English navigator, offered in
1609 to sail under the authority of the Dutch East India Company. Driven
back by ice and fog from a northeast course, he turned northwest.
Searching up and down near the parallel of 40 degrees, he entered the
mouth of the great river which perpetuates his name. He found the
country inviting to the eye, and occupied by natives friendly in
disposition. The subsequent career of this bold mariner has a mournful
interest. He never returned to Holland, but, touching at Dartmouth, was
restrained by the English authorities, and forbidden longer to employ
his skill and experience for the benefit of the Dutch. Again entering
the English service and sent once more to discover the northwest
passage, he sailed into the waters of the bay which still bears his
name, where cold and hunger transformed the silent discontent of his
crew into open mutiny, and they left the fearless navigator to perish
amid the icebergs of the frozen north.
[Illustration: Seal of New Amsterdam.]
[Illustration: Peter Stuyvesant.]
[1614-1618]
Hudson had sent to Holland a report of the Great River and the country
bordering it, rich in fur-bearing animals, and it had excited eager
interest. Private individuals sent expeditions thither and carried on a
profitable trade with the natives. A few Dutch were here when, in 1613,
Captain Argall sailed from Virginia against the French at Port Royal,
Acadia, now Annapolis in Nova Scotia, who were encroaching upon the
English possessions on the coast of Maine. He compelled them to
surrender. On his return, he visited the Dutch traders of Manhattan
Island, and forced them also, as it had been discovered by Cabot in
1497, to acknowledge the sovereignty of England over this entire region.
[Illustration: Seal of New Netherland.]
It was in 1614 that the Dutch States-General, in the charter given to a
company of merchants, named the Hudson Valley New Netherland. To
facilitate trade this company made a treaty with the Five Nations and
subordinate tribes, memorable as the first compact formed between the
whites and the savages. In it the Indians were regarded as possessing
equal rights and privileges with their white brethren. The treaty was
renewed in 1645, and continued in force till the English occupation,
1664. In 1618, the charter of the New Netherland Company having expired,
the Dutch West India Company was offered a limited incorporation, but it
was not until 1621 that it received its charter, and it was two years
later that it was completely organized and approved by the
States-General. By this company were sent out Mey, as Director, to the
Delaware or South River, and Tienpont to the Hudson or North River. Four
miles below Philadelphia Fort Nassau was erected, and where Albany now
stands was begun the trading-post called Fort Orange.
[1626]
In 1626 Tienpont's successor, Peter Minuit, a German, born at Wesel, was
appointed Director-General of New Netherland. He bought of the Indians,
for the sum of twenty-four dollars, the entire island of Manhattan, and
a fort called New Amsterdam was built. The State of New York dates its
beginning from this transaction.
[Illustration: Earliest Picture of New Amsterdam.]
By their usually honest dealing with the natives the Dutch settlers
gained the friendship of the Five Nations, whose good-will was partly on
this account transferred to the English colonists later. The Dutch were
not only friendly to the red men, but tried to open social and
commercial relations with the Plymouth colonists as well. Governor
Bradford replied, mildly urging the Dutch to "clear their title" to a
territory which the English claimed by right of discovery.
[1630-1633]
[Illustration: De Vries.]
The present State of Delaware soon became the scene of attempts at
settlement. De Vries began, in 1632, a colony on the banks of the
Delaware, but it was quickly laid waste by the savages, who had been
needlessly provoked by the insolence of the commander left in charge of
the colony. In 1633 Minuit was succeeded by Van Twiller, and a fort was
erected at Hartford, though the English claimed this country as theirs.
Emigrants from the Plymouth colony began the settlement of Windsor, in
spite of the protests of the Dutch. Long Island was invaded by
enterprising New Englanders, regardless of the claim of New Netherland
thereto.
[Illustration: Costumes of Swedes.]
This "irrepressible conflict" between two races was by no means abated
by the introduction of a third. As early as 1626, Gustavus Adolphus,
King of Sweden and the hero of the Thirty Years' War, had entertained
the idea of establishing colonies in America, and in pursuance of that
object had encouraged the formation of a company, not only for trading
purposes but also to secure a refuge for the "oppressed of all
Christendom." To Usselinx, an Antwerp merchant, the originator of the
Dutch West India Company, belongs the honor of first suggesting to the
king this enterprise. The glorious death of Gustavus on the victorious
field of Lutzen in 1632 deferred the execution of a purpose which had
not been forgotten even in the midst of that long and arduous campaign.
But a few days before he fell, the Protestant hero had spoken of the
colonial prospect as "the jewel of his kingdom."
[1638]
In 1638 Minuit, who had already figured as governor of New Netherland,
having offered his services to Sweden, was intrusted with the leadership
of the first Swedish colony to America. After a few days' stay at
Jamestown the new-comers finally reached their wished-for destination on
the west shore of the Delaware Bay and River. Proceeding up the latter,
one of their first acts was to build a fort on a little stream about two
miles from its junction with the Delaware, which they named Fort
Christina, in honor of the young queen of Sweden. Near this spot stands
the present city of Wilmington. The country from Cape Henlopen to the
falls at Trenton received the title of New Sweden.
[1650]
It was in this very year that Kieft came to supersede Van Twiller, who
had given just cause for complaint by his eagerness to enrich himself at
the expense of the West India Company. During the administration of
Kieft occurred the long and doubtful conflict with the natives detailed
in the succeeding chapter. Arbitrary and exacting, he drove the Indians
to extremities, and involved the Dutch settlements in a war which for a
time threatened their destruction. Not till 1645 was peace
re-established, and in 1647 the unpopular governor was recalled. In 1647
not more than three hundred fighting men remained in the whole province.
Its total population was between fifteen hundred and two thousand. In
1652 New Amsterdam had a population of seven or eight hundred. In 1664
Stuyvesant put the number in the province at ten thousand, about fifteen
hundred of whom were in New Amsterdam.
[Illustration: The old Stadt Huys at New Amsterdam.]
[Illustration: European Provinces 1655. Map of the eastern North
America. Latitude 25 to 50 North, Longitude 75 to 95 West.]
[1655-1663]
The next governor, Stuyvesant, was the last and much the ablest ruler
among those who directed the destinies of New Netherland. His
administration embraced a period of seventeen years, during which he
renewed the former friendly relations with the savages, made a treaty
with New England, giving up pretensions to Connecticut as well as
relinquishing the east end of Long Island, and compelled the Swedes, in
1655, to acknowledge the Dutch supremacy. It was while he was absent on
his expedition against the Swedes, leaving New Amsterdam unprotected,
that the river Indians, watchful of their opportunity, invaded and laid
waste the surrounding country. In 1663 the savages attacked the village
on the Esopus, now Kingston, and almost destroyed it. It was not until
the energetic governor made a vigorous campaign against the Esopus
tribe, whom he completely subdued, that peace was established on a firm
footing.
[Illustration: New Amsterdam in the middle of the Seventeenth Century.]
[Illustration: The Duke of York, afterwards James II.]
[1664]
But the Dutch sway in their little part of the New World was about to
end. The English had never given over their claim to the country by
virtue of their first discovery of the North American continent. The New
Netherlanders, tired of arbitrary rule, sighed for the larger freedom of
their New England neighbors. Therefore, when in 1664 Charles II. granted
to his brother, the Duke of York, the territory which the Dutch were
occupying, and sent a fleet to demand its submission, the English
invader was welcomed.
[Illustration: The Tomb of Stuyvesant. "In this Vault lies buried PETRUS
STUYVESANT late Captain Genral & Governor in Chief of Amsterdam, In New
Netherland now called New York and the Dutch West India Islands. Died
A.D. 1672 Aged 80 years."]
Almost the only resistance came from the stout-hearted governor, who
could hardly be dissuaded from fighting the English single-handed, and
who signed the agreement to surrender only when his magistrates had, in
spite of him, agreed to the proposed terms. But the founders of the
Empire State have left an indelible impress upon the Union, which their
descendants have helped to strengthen and perpetuate. They were honest,
thrifty, devout, tolerant of the opinions of others. As Holland
sheltered the English Puritans from ecclesiastical intolerance, so New
Netherland welcomed within her borders the victims of New England
bigotry and narrowness.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FIRST INDIAN WARS
[1637]
Troubles between the Indians and the whites arose so early as 1636. John
Oldham was murdered on Block Island by a party of Pequot Indians. Vane
of Massachusetts sent Endicott to inflict punishment. The Pequots in
turn attacked the fort at Saybrook, and in 1637 threatened Wethersfield.
They were planning a union with the Narragansets for the destruction of
the English, when Roger Williams informed the Massachusetts colony of
their designs and, at the urgent request of the governor and council,
hastened to the chief of the Narragansets and dissuaded him from
entering into the alliance.
The moment was critical. Captain Mason with about ninety English and
seventy Mohegans, under their sachem, Uncas (a sub chief, who with his
district, Mohegan, had rebelled against the Pequot sachem, Sassacus),
was sent from Hartford down the Connecticut River. Entering the Sound,
he sailed past the mouth of the Thames and anchored in Narragansett Bay,
at the foot of Tower Hill, near Point Judith. He knew that keen-eyed
scouts from the Pequot stronghold on the west bank of the Mystic River,
near Groton, had, as his three little ships skirted the shore, been
watching him, to give warning of his approach. He therefore resolved to
come upon the enemy from an unlooked-for quarter. This plan was directly
contrary to his instructions, which required him to land at the mouth of
the Thames and attack the fort from the west side. He hoped, marching
westward across the country, to take the enemy by surprise on their
unprotected rear, while the Indians, trusting in the strength of their
fort, as it fronted the west, should believe themselves secure.
[Illustration: Attack on the Fort of the Pequots on the Mystic River
"The figure of the Indians fort or Palizado in NEW ENGLAND And the maner
of the destroying It by Captayne Underhill and Captayne Manson"]
Thirteen men had been sent back to the Thames with the vessels. Two
hundred Narragansets had joined the expedition, though their sachem,
Miantonomoh, thought the English too weak to fight the dreaded Pequots.
Mason's enterprise was admirably planned, and he was as fortunate as he
was bold and skilful. He divided his men into two parties. One, led by
Underhill, climbed the steep ascent on the south side of the Indian
village; the other, directed by Mason himself, mounted the northern
slope. The garrison was buried in slumber, made more profound by
carousals the preceding night. One Indian was heard to cry out
"Englishmen" before the volley of musketry from the attacking force told
that the white enemy had come. Mason entered a wigwam and fought, as did
the others, hand-to-hand with the now awakened and desperate foe. Coming
out with a firebrand and exclaiming "We must burn them," he set fire to
the wigwam. The flames were quickly carried through the fort by the
northeast wind. Underhill from his side applied powder. So rapidly did
the flames spread that the English had difficulty in making good their
escape, while the Pequots who escaped the sword were doomed to perish by
fire. In an hour's time from four hundred to six hundred had fallen,
more than half of them women and children. Of the Englishmen two were
killed and about twenty wounded. In this dreadful slaughter the
Narragansets had little share, for they had shown such fear that Mason
had said to Uncas, "Tell them not to fly, but stand at what distance
they please and see whether Englishmen will now fight or not."
[Illustration: Attack on the Pequot Fort.]
With the approach of day three hundred Pequots advanced from a second
fort intending to fight, but they were struck with horror at the sight
of their dead fellow-warriors. Keeping the enemy at bay, the English
marched to the vessels, which had arrived at Pequot Harbor, and, placing
the wounded on board, continued their march to Saybrook. The remnant of
the Pequots sought to escape from the country, moving westward along the
Sound. Captain Stoughton, sent with one hundred and twenty Massachusetts
men, was guided by the Narragansets to a swamp in which a little band of
those hostile savages had hidden. The men were slain, offering little
resistance. The women and children were divided among the Indian allies
or sold into slavery by the colonists of Massachusetts Bay.
Mason and Stoughton together sailed from Saybrook along the shore, while
Uncas with his men tracked the fugitives by land. At Guilford a Pequot
sachem was entrapped, shot, and his head thrust into the crotch of an
oak-tree near the harbor, giving the place the name of Sachem's Head.
Near the town of Fairfield a last stand was made by the hunted redskins,
in a swamp, to which the English were guided by a renegade Pequot. The
tribe with whom the Pequots had taken shelter, also the women and
children, were allowed to give themselves up. The men were shot down or
broke through and escaped. The wife of Mononotto fell into the hands of
the English. This Indian squaw had once shown kindness to two captive
girls, and by Winthrop's orders she was kindly treated in return. The
Pequots, once so powerful, were well-nigh exterminated. Those taken
prisoners were spared only to be held in bondage, Mononotto's wife with
the rest. Some were absorbed by the Narragansets, others by the
Mohegans, while the settlers of Connecticut, upon whom the war had
fallen so heavily, came into possession of the Pequot land.
[l638]
For nearly forty years the New England colonies were not again molested,
the merciless vigor with which they had fought making a lasting
impression upon their blood-thirsty foes. The cruel slavery to which the
surviving natives were subjected, the English justified by the example
of the Jews in their treatment of the Canaanites.
[Illustration: Signature of Miantonomoh.]
[1642]
The Narraganset chief, Miantonomoh, had become the friend and ally of
the English by a treaty ratified in 1636, mainly through the good
offices of Roger Williams, In 1638, after the destruction of the
Pequots, there was a new treaty, embracing Uncas with his bold Mohegans,
and stipulating that any quarrel between Miantonomoh and Uncas should be
referred to the English. In 1642 Miantonomoh was accused of plotting
against the English, and summoned before the General Court at Boston.
Though acquitted he vowed revenge upon Uncas as the instigator of the
charge. His friendship for Roger Williams, as also for Samuel Gorton,
the purchaser of Shawomet, or Warwick, R. I., which was claimed by
Massachusetts, had perhaps created a prejudice against him. At any rate,
when a quarrel arose between Uncas and Sequasson, Miantonomoh's friend
and ally, while the latter naturally sided with Sequasson, the
sympathies of the English were with Uncas, who had aided them against
the Pequots. With the consent of Connecticut and Massachusetts
Miantonomoh took the field against Uncas, who had attacked Sequasson. He
was defeated and taken prisoner. Carried to Hartford he was held to
await the decision of the Commissioners of the United Colonies at
Boston. They would not release him, yet had no valid ground for putting
him to death. The case was referred to five clergymen, and they voted
for his execution. For this purpose the commissioners gave orders to
turn the brave warrior over to Uncas, English witnesses to be present
and see that no cruelty was perpetrated. The sentence was carried into
effect near Norwich. Cutting a piece of flesh from the shoulder of his
murdered enemy, Uncas ate it with savage relish, declaring it to be the
sweetest meat he had ever tasted.
[Illustration: The Grave of Miantonomoh.]
[1640-1643]
The Dutch, too, as we have to some extent seen already, felt the horrors
of Indian warfare. Kieft, the Dutch director-general, a man cruel,
avaricious, and obstinate, angered the red men by demanding tribute from
them as their protector, while he refused them guns or ammunition. The
savages replied that they had to their own cost shown kindness to the
Dutch when in need of food, but would not pay tribute. Kieft attacked.
Some of the Indians were killed and their crops destroyed. This roused
their revengeful passions to the utmost. The Raritan savages visited the
colony of De Vries, on Staten Island, with death and devastation. Reward
was offered for the head of anyone of the murderers. An Indian never
forgot an injury. The nephew of one of the natives who twenty years
before had been wantonly killed went to sell furs at Fort Amsterdam, and
while there revenged his uncle's murder by the slaughter of an
unoffending colonist. Spite of warlike preparations by Kieft and his
assembly in 1641-42, the tribe would not give up the culprit. The
following year another settler was knifed by a drunken Indian. Wampum
was indeed offered in atonement, while an indignant plea was urged by
the savages against the liquor traffic, which demoralized their young
men and rendered them dangerous alike to friend and foe. But
remonstrance and blood-money could not satisfy Kieft. At Pavonia and at
Corlaer's Hook [footnote: now in the New York City limits, just below
Broadway Ferry, East River] the Dutch fell venomously upon the sleeping
and unsuspecting enemy. Men, women, and children were slaughtered, none
spared. In turn the tribes along the lower Hudson, to the number of
eleven, united and desperately attacked the Dutch wherever found. Only
near the walls of Fort Amsterdam was there safety. The governor
appointed a day of fasting, which it seems was kept with effect. The
sale of liquor to the red men was at last prohibited, and peace for a
time secured.
Soon, however, the redskins along the Hudson were again up in arms. The
noted Underhill, who with Mason had been the scourge of the Pequots,
came to the fight with fifty Englishmen as allies of the Dutch. Not
waiting to be attacked, the Indians laid waste the settlements, even
threatening Fort Amsterdam itself. At a place now known as Pelham Neck,
near New Rochelle, lived the famous but unfortunate Mrs. Hutchinson, a
fugitive from the persecuting zeal of Massachusetts. Here the implacable
savages butchered her and her family in cold blood. Her little
granddaughter alone was spared, and led captive to a far-off wigwam
prison. Only at Gravesend, on Long Island, was a successful stand made,
and that by a woman, Lady Deborah Moody, another exile from religious
persecution, who with forty stout-hearted men defended her plantation
and compelled the savages to beat a retreat.
[1645]
The colony was in extremity. New Haven refused to aid, because, as a
member of the New England confederacy, it could not act alone, and
because it was not satisfied that the Dutch war was just. An appeal was
made by Kieft's eight advisers to both the States-General and the West
India Company in Holland. The sad condition of the colonists was fully
set forth, and the responsibility directly ascribed to the mismanagement
of Kieft. At the same time, undismayed by the gloomy outlook, the
courage of the sturdy Dutchmen rose with the emergency. Small parties
were sent out against the Connecticut savages in the vicinity of
Stamford. Indian villages on Long Island were surprised and the natives
put to the sword. In two instances at least the victors disgraced
humanity by torturing the captured.
In these engagements Underhill was conspicuous and most energetic.
Having made himself familiar with the position of the Indians near
Stamford, he sailed from Manhattan with one hundred and fifty men,
landed at Greenwich, and, marching all day, at midnight drew near the
enemy. His approach was not wholly unannounced, for the moon was full.
The fight was desperate and bloody. The tragedy that had made memorable
the banks of the Mystic in the destruction of the Pequot fort was now
almost equalled. After the example of his old comrade Mason, Underhill
fired the village. By flame, shot, or sword more than five hundred human
beings perished.
While New Netherland was awaiting some message of cheer from Holland, a
company of Dutch soldiers came from Curacoa, but they did little to
follow up the successes already gained. Again the Eight sent a memorial
to the company, boldly condemning the conduct of the director and
demanding his recall. Their remonstrances were at last heeded, and the
removal of the unpopular governor resolved upon. In 1647 Kieft set sail
for Holland, but the ship was wrecked, and he with nearly all on board
was drowned.
It was high time for a change. In the two years, 1643-45, while sixteen
hundred Indians had been slain, Manhattan had become nearly depopulated.
In 1645 peace was concluded, not only with the smaller tribes in the
vicinity, but also with the powerful Mohawks about Fort Orange, and
finally with all the Indians belonging to the Five Nations or
acknowledging their authority. A pleasing incident of this treaty was
the promise of the Indians to restore the eight-year-old granddaughter
of Mrs. Hutchinson, a promise which they faithfully performed in 1646.
The great compact was made under the shadow of the Fort Amsterdam walls,
and the universal joy was expressed by a day of thanksgiving.
[Illustration: Totem or Tribe Mark of the Five Nations.]
[1650-1660]
An interval of peace for ten years was now enjoyed, when the killing of
a squaw for stealing some peaches led to an attack by several hundred of
the infuriated savages upon New Amsterdam. They were repulsed here, but
crossing to the shore of New Jersey they laid waste the settlements
there. Staten Island, too, was swept with fire and sword. One hundred
people were slain, 150 more taken captive, 300 made homeless. Peace was
again effected and maintained for three years, when fresh quarrels
began. It was not until 1660 that a more general and lasting treaty was
brought about, on which occasion a Mohawk and a Minqua chief gave
pledges in behalf of the Indians, and acted as mediators between the
contending parties.
PERIOD II.
ENGLISH AMERICA TILL THE END OF THE FRENCH AND INDIAN WAR
1660--1763
CHAPTER I.
NEW ENGLAND UNDER THE LAST STUARTS
[1660]
The Commonwealth in England went to pieces at the death of Oliver
Cromwell, its founder. The Stuart dynasty came back, but, alas!
unimproved. Charles II. was a much meaner man than his father, and James
II. was more detestable still. The rule of such kings was destined to
work sad changes in the hitherto free condition of Massachusetts. This
colony had sympathized with the Commonwealth more heartily than any of
the others. Hither had fled for refuge Goffe and Whalley, two of the
accomplices in the death of Charles I. Congregational church polity was
here established by law, to the exclusion of all others, even of
episcopacy, for whose sake Charles was harrying poor Covenanters to
death on every hillside in Scotland. Nor would his lawyers let the king
forget Charles I.'s attack on the Massachusetts charter, begun so early
as 1635, or the grounds therefor, such as the unwarranted transfer of it
to Boston, or the likelihood that but for the outbreak of the Civil War
it would have been annulled by the Long Parliament itself. Obviously
Massachusetts could not hope to be let alone by the home government
which had just come in.
At first the king, graciously responding to the colony's humble
petition, confirmed the charter granted by his father; but no sooner had
he done so than the hot royalists about him began plotting to overthrow
the same, and their purpose never slumbered till it was accomplished.
Massachusetts was too prosperous and too visibly destined for great
power in America to be suffered longer to go its independent way as
hitherto.
[Illustration: King Charles II.]
[1661]
The province--as yet, of course, excluding Plymouth with its twelve
towns and five thousand inhabitants--contained at this time, 1660, about
twenty-five thousand souls, living in fifty-two towns. These were nearly
all on the coast; Dedham, Concord, Brookfield, Lancaster, Marlborough,
and the Connecticut Valley hamlets of Springfield, Hadley, and
Northampton being the most noteworthy exceptions. Though agriculture was
the principal business, fishing was a staple industry, its product going
to France, Spain, and the Straits. Pipe-staves, fir-boards, much
material for ships, as masts, pitch and tar, also pork and beef, horses
and corn, were shipped from this colony to Virginia, in return for
tobacco and sugar either for home consumption or for export to England.
Some iron was manufactured. The province enjoyed great prosperity.
Boston stood forth as a lively and growing centre, and an English
traveller about this time declared some of its merchants to be "damnable
rich."
As their most precious possession the colonists prized their liberties,
which they claimed in virtue of their original patent. In a paper which
it put forth on June 10, 1661, the General Court asserted for the colony
the right to elect and empower its own officers, both high and low, to
make its laws, to execute the same without appeal so long as they were
not repugnant to those of England, and to defend itself by force and
arms when necessary, against every infringement of its rights, even from
acts of Parliament or of the king, if prejudicial to the country or
contrary to just colonial legislation. In a word Massachusetts, even so
early, regarded itself to all intents and purposes an independent State,
and would have proclaimed accordingly had it felt sufficiently strong.
[1664]
Manifestly the king would not grant so much. On the occasion of his
confirming the charter he demanded that the oath of allegiance be taken
by the people of the colony; that justice be administered there in his
name; and that the franchise be extended to all freemen of sufficient
substance, with the liberty to use in worship, public and private, the
forms of the English Church. The people obeyed but in part, for they
would not even appear to admit the king's will to be their law. The
franchise was slightly extended, in a grudging way, but no new religious
privileges were at this time conceded. Unfortunately political and
religious liberty were now in conflict. It was worse for the Baptists
and Quakers that the king favored them, and the treatment which they
received in the colony inclined them to the royalist side in the
controversy.
In July, 1664, commissioners arrived in Boston with full authority to
investigate the administration of the New England charters. Such a
procedure not being provided for in the Massachusetts document, the
General Court, backed by the citizens almost to a man, successfully
prevented complainants from appearing before the commission. The
commissioners having summoned the colony as defendant in a certain case,
a herald trumpeted proclamation through the streets, on the morning set
for the trial, inhibiting all from aiding their designs. The trial
collapsed, and the gentlemen who had ordered it, baffled and disgusted,
moved on to New Hampshire, there also to be balked by a decree of the
Massachusetts Governor and Council forbidding the towns so much as to
meet at their behest.
[1668]
Vengeance for such defiance was delayed by Charles II.'s very vices.
Clarendon's fall had left him surrounded by profligate aides, too timid
and too indolent to face the resolute men of Massachusetts. They often
discussed the contumacy of the colony, but went no further than words.
Massachusetts was even encouraged, in 1668, forcibly to reassert its
authority in Maine, against rule either by the king or by Sir Ferdinanda
Gorges's heir as proprietary.
Its charter had assigned to the colony land to a point three miles north
of the Merrimac. Bold in the favor of the Commonwealth, the authorities
measured from the head-waters of that river. But Plymouth had originally
claimed all the territory west of the Kennebec, and had sold it to
Gorges. Charles II. favored the Gorges heirs against Massachusetts, and
for some years previous to 1668 Massachusetts' power over Maine had been
in abeyance. Ten years later, in 1678, to make assurance doubly sure,
Massachusetts bought off the Gorges claimants, at the round price of
twelve hundred and fifty pounds sterling.
[1673]
From 1641 Massachusetts had borne sway in New Hampshire as well,
ignoring John Mason's claim under Charles I.'s charters of 1629 and
1635, still urged by one of Mason's grandsons, backed by Charles II.
Here Massachusetts was beaten. In July, 1679, New Hampshire was
permanently separated from her, and erected into a royal province, of a
nature to be explained in a subsequent chapter, being the earliest
government of this kind in New England.
[1662]
These territorial assumptions on the part of Massachusetts much
increased the king's hostility. This probably would not have proved
fatal had it not been re-enforced by the determination of the merchants
and manufacturers of the mother-country to crush what they feared was
becoming a rival power beyond seas. They insisted upon full enforcement
of the Navigation Laws, which made America's foreign trade in a cruel
degree subservient to English interest. So incorrigible was the colony,
it was found that this end could be compassed only by the abrogation of
the charter, so that English law might become immediately valid in
Massachusetts, colonial laws to the contrary notwithstanding.
Accordingly, in 1684, the charter was vacated and the colonists ceased
to be free, their old government with its popular representation giving
way to an arbitrary commission.
The other New England colonies--Plymouth, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and
New Haven--had made haste to proclaim Charles II. so soon as restored to
the throne, and to begin carrying on their governments in his name. That
beautiful and able man, the younger Winthrop, sped to London on
Connecticut's behalf, and, aided by his colony's friends at court, the
Earls of Clarendon and Manchester and Viscount Say and Seal, in 1662
secured to Connecticut, now made to include New Haven, a charter so
liberal that it continued till October 5, 1818, the ground law of the
State, then to be supplanted only by a close vote. Under this paper,
which declared all lands between the Narragansett River and the Pacific
Ocean Connecticut territory, Connecticut received every whit of that
right to govern itself which Charles was so sternly challenging in the
case of Massachusetts.
[Illustration: John Winthrop the Younger.]
From this time on, as indeed earlier, Connecticut was for many years
perhaps the most delightful example of popular government in all
history. Connecticut and New Haven together had about ten thousand
inhabitants. Their rulers were just, wise, and of a mind truly to serve
the people. Here none were persecuted for their faith. Education was
universal. Few were poor, none very rich. Nearly all supplies were of
domestic production, nothing as yet being exported but a few cattle.
Under the second Charles Rhode Island fared quite as well as
Connecticut. This was remarkable, inasmuch as the little colony of three
thousand souls, in their four towns of Providence, Newport, Portsmouth,
and Warwick, insisted on "holding forth the lively experiment"--and it
proved lively indeed--"of full liberty in religious concernments."
Charles did not oppose this, and Clarendon favored it, a motive of both
here, as with Connecticut, being to rear in New England a power friendly
to the Crown, that should rival and check Massachusetts. Both these
commonwealths were granted absolute independence in all but name. No
oath of allegiance to the king was demanded. Appeals to England were not
provided for.
[1680]
Though having no quarrel with the king, the two southern colonies were
not without their trials. Connecticut, besides continual fear of the
Dutch and the Indians, was much agitated by the controversy over the
question whether children of moral parents not church members should be
baptized, a question at length settled affirmatively by the so-called
Half-Way Covenant. It also had its boundary disputes with Massachusetts,
with Rhode Island--for Connecticut took the Narragansett River of its
charter to be the bay of that name--and with New York, which, by the
Duke of York's new patent, issued on the recovery of that province from
the Dutch in 1674, reached the Connecticut River. During England's war
with Holland, 1672-74, all the colonies stood in some fear of Dutch
attacks.
[1685]
Rhode Island had worse troubles than Connecticut. It, too, had boundary
disputes, serious and perpetual; but graver by much were its internal
feuds, caused partly by the mutual jealousy of its four towns, partly by
the numerous and jarring religious persuasions here represented.
Government was painfully feeble. Only with utmost difficulty could the
necessary taxes be raised. Warwick in particular was for some time in
arrears to John Clark, of Newport, for his invaluable services in
securing the charter of 1663. Quakers and the divers sorts of Baptists
valiantly warred each against other, using, with dreadful address, those
most deadly of carnal weapons, tongue and pen. On George Fox's visit to
the colony, Roger Williams, zealous for a debate, pursued the eminent
Quaker from Providence to Newport, rowing thither in his canoe and
arriving at midnight, only to find that his intended opponent had
departed, The latter's champion was ready, however, and a discussion of
four days ensued.
[Illustration: Sir Edmond Andros]
Before its sentence of death reached Massachusetts Charles II. was no
more, and James II., his brother, had ascended the throne. It was for a
time uncertain what sort of authority the stricken colony would be
called to accept. Already, as Duke of York, James II. had been
Proprietary of Maine east of the Kennebec (Sagadahoc), as well as of
Delaware, New Jersey, and New York. Now that he had the problem of
ruling Massachusetts to solve, it naturally occurred to the king to make
Sir Edmond Andros, already governor of New York, master also over the
whole of English America from the Saint Croix to the Delaware.
In southern New England the reign of Andros wrought no downright
persecution. He suspended the charters, and, with an irresponsible
council in each colony, assumed all legislative as well as
administrative power. Rhode Island submitted tamely. Her sister colony
did the same, save that, at Hartford, according to good tradition, in
the midst of the altercation about delivering the charter, prolonged
into candle-light, suddenly it was dark, and the precious document
disappeared to a secure place in the hollow trunk of an oak. This tree,
henceforth called the Charter Oak, stood till prostrated by a gale on
August 20, 1856.
[Illustration: The Charter Oak at Hartford.]
But in Massachusetts the colonists' worst fears were realized. Andros,
with a council of his own creation, made laws, levied taxes, and
controlled the militia. He had authority to suppress all
printing-presses and to encourage Episcopacy. In the latter interest he
opened King's Chapel to the Prayer Book. His permission was required for
any one to leave the colony. Extortionate fees and taxes were imposed.
Puritans had to swear on the Bible, which they regarded wicked, or be
disfranchised. Personal and proprietary rights were summarily set at
naught, and all deeds to land were declared void till renewed--for
money, of course. The citizens were reduced to a condition hardly short
of slavery.
[1688]
There is no describing the joy which pervaded New England as the news of
the Revolution of 1688 flew from colony to colony. Andros slunk away
from Boston, glad to escape alive. Drums beat and gala-day was kept. Old
magistrates were reinstated. Town meetings were resumed. All believed
that God had interposed, in answer to prayer, to bring deliverance to
his people from popery and thraldom.
This revolution, ushering in the liberal monarchy of William and Mary,
restored to Rhode Island and Connecticut their old charter governments
in full. New Hampshire, after a momentary union with Massachusetts
again, became once more a royal province. As to Massachusetts itself, a
large party of the citizens now either did not wish the old state of
things renewed, or were too timid to agree in demanding back their
charter as of right. Had they been bold and united, they might have
succeeded in this without any opposition from the Crown. Instead, a new
charter was conferred, creating Massachusetts also a royal province, yet
with government more liberal than the other provinces of this order
enjoyed. The governor was appointed by the Crown, and could convene,
adjourn, or dissolve the Legislature. With the consent of his council he
also created the judges, from whose highest sentence appeal could be
taken to the Privy Council. The governor could veto legislation, and the
king annul any law under three years old.
[1690-1697]
If in these things the new polity was inferior to the old, in two
respects it was superior; Suffrage was now practically universal, and
every species of religious profession, save Catholicism, made legal.
Also, Massachusetts territory was enlarged southward to take in all
Plymouth, eastward to embrace Maine (Sagadahoc) and Nova Scotia. Maine,
henceforth including Sagadahoc, that is, all land eastward to the Saint
Croix, remained part of Massachusetts till March 15, 1820, when it
became a member of the Union by itself. Nova Scotia, over which Phips's
conquest of Port Royal in 1690 had established a nominal rather than a
real English authority, was assigned to France again by the Treaty of
Ryswick, 1697.
[Illustration: Box in which the Connecticut Charter was kept.]