were to run westward to the South Sea (as the English still called the
Pacific); to the deep chagrin of the New Haven people, it included their
own towns; certainly it ran athwart the later gift to the Duke of York.
For the time being that was not a matter of much practical importance.
The Duke did not attempt to exercise his authority in the Connecticut
settlements, and an agreement was presently reached that Connecticut
should have jurisdiction to within twenty miles of the Hudson. Though
that agreement never received the royal sanction, it sufficed for the
moment. What seemed to the New Haven people of much more consequence
was that Governor Winthrop had managed to sweep their towns within his
charter grant. They liked neither the politics nor the church government
of the Connecticut towns above and about them, and for two years stood
out against being absorbed. It seemed better, however, to belong to
Connecticut than to belong to the Duke of York’s province, as they might
be obliged to if they did not accept Mr. Winthrop’s charter; Mr. Winthrop
was himself very wise, moderate, and patient in pressing the union upon
them; and in 1665 they yielded, making Mr. Winthrop governor of the
united towns upon the river and the Sound.
The King’s commissioners did not fare very well when they turned from
the taking of New Netherland to the examination and settlement of
affairs in Massachusetts. In the other colonies which they had been
directed to set in order they had little difficulty. Connecticut and
Rhode Island were just now in favor at court, and gave the commissioners
little to do except settle the boundaries between them. Rhode Island
had obtained a new charter from the King in July, 1663, scarcely a year
after Mr. Winthrop had got his for Connecticut; and, though she had
had some difficulty in saving an important strip of territory which
Connecticut’s charter had been made to include, that matter was in the
way to be adjusted before the commissioners came. In Plymouth they
found the magistrates ready to make most of the concessions his Majesty
had instructed them to demand. But in Massachusetts they were utterly
defeated of their purpose.
[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF THE KING’S PROCLAMATION FOR THE ARREST OF
WHALLEY AND GOFFE]
Colonel Nicolls could be very little with them, because he was engrossed
in the pressing and necessary business of settling the government of
the Duke’s province of New York; and yet they were not permitted by
their commission to take any official action without him. Sir Robert
Carr and Colonel Cartwright were men wholly unfitted to transact
business of delicacy and importance. They had neither tact nor weight of
character, nor any knowledge or experience in such affairs as they now
tried to handle; and they were dealing with astute men who knew every
point of the controversy and every mooted question of law like parts
of a familiar personal experience. The Massachusetts General Court had
adopted a declaration of their rights by charter the very year they
tardily proclaimed Charles II. king (1661), as if anticipating an attack
upon their government. In it they had argued their right to a complete
self-government, and had declared that they owed no further direct duty
to the King than allegiance to his person, the safe-keeping of that
part of his territories over which they exercised jurisdiction, the
punishment of crime, and the protection of the Protestant religion; and
they maintained nothing less now in the presence of the commissioners.
It proved impossible to bring them to terms. The commissioners more than
once put themselves in the wrong by a loss of temper or an unwarranted
assumption of authority; and the whole matter had at last to be referred
back, unsettled, to the King. A letter thereupon came out of England
commanding Massachusetts to send agents over to deal with the authorities
there; but they found a way to avoid obedience to the summons, and once
again, as when their charter had been attacked thirty years before,
the attention of statesmen at home was called off from their business
to matters of more pressing consequence. Clarendon, who was the master
spirit of the new policy of the government towards the colonies, too
stout for prerogative to suit the Parliament, too stiff for right to suit
the King, lost his place and was banished the kingdom in 1667, the year
after the commissioners returned to England with their report of failure.
The Dutch accepted the gage of war thrown down by England’s seizure of
New Netherland, and the struggle widened until it threatened to become
a general European conflict. Without Clarendon, politics dwindled in
England to petty intrigue. There was time to take breath again at the
Bay. Massachusetts was, it turned out, to keep her jealously guarded
charter for nearly twenty years yet.
Here the chief _authorities_ and _sources_ are those already
referred to under Sections I. to V. of this chapter.
VIII. NEW JERSEY AND CAROLINA
The Restoration and the reassertion of royal authority had done much
to check the growth of Massachusetts and her neighbor colonies of the
Puritan group, but it had noticeably stimulated settlement to the
southward, near where Virginia lay with her Cavalier leaders; and even
in New England a natural growth went slowly on. Clarendon had been
statesman enough to see that the colonies in America were no longer petty
settlements, lying outside the general scheme of national policy. He saw
that they were now permanent parts of a growing empire, and he had sought
until his fall to bring them under a general plan of administration,
which the commissioners of 1664 were to take the first step towards
setting up. America was no longer merely a place of refuge for Puritans
and royalists, each in their turn, no longer merely a region of adventure
for those whose fortunes desperately needed mending. It was henceforth
to be a place of established enterprise and of steadfast endeavor pushed
forward from generation to generation; and the steady advance of English
settlement, showing itself now almost like the movement of a race,
already sufficiently revealed what the future was to bring forth.
The capture of New Netherland, though it brought war upon England,
seemed to secure peace for America. There was no longer, when Colonel
Nicolls was done, an alien power between New England and Virginia. The
whole coast was at last indisputably English land, all the way from
the little settlements struggling for existence far to the north in
the bleak forests which lay beyond the Massachusetts grant to Spain’s
lonely forts in the far south by the warm bays of Florida. That was a
royal principality which the Duke of York had received from the lavish
Charles,—all the great triangle of rich lands which spread northward
and westward between the Connecticut and the lower waters and great Bay
of the Delaware, Long Island, Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, and all
their neighbor islands, great and small, included,—and Colonel Nicolls
had established his authority, at any rate at the centre of it, where
the Dutch had been, in a way that gave promise of making it abundantly
secure. But the Duke was a Stuart, and no statesman; loved authority,
but was not provident in the use of it; and parted with much of the
gift before it was fairly in his hands. Colonel Nicolls and his fellow
commissioners did not take possession of New Amsterdam until August,
1664, and it was then nearly two months since the Duke had given a large
part of New Netherland away to his friends Lord John Berkeley, Baron of
Stratton, and Sir George Carteret, of Saltrum.
[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF GEORGE CARTERET]
Late in June he had granted to these gentlemen, his close associates
in friendship and in affairs, his colleagues in the Board of Admiralty,
over which he presided, all his own rights and powers within that part
of his prospective territory which lay to the south of 41° 40′ north
latitude and between the Delaware River and the sea, touching the Hudson
and the harbor of New York at the north, and ending at Cape May in the
south. This new province he called New Jersey, in compliment to Sir
George Carteret, who had been governor of the island of Jersey when
the Parliament was arrayed against the King, and who had held it long
and gallantly for his royal master. Colonel Nicolls, the Duke’s able
governor in New York, knew nothing of the grant of New Jersey until the
ship _Philip_ actually put into the harbor in July, 1665, bringing a
few settlers for the new province and Philip Carteret, a kinsman of Sir
George’s, to be its governor. Colonel Nicolls had but just completed his
careful organization of the Duke’s possessions; had put his best gifts of
foresight and wise moderation into the settlement of their affairs, to
the satisfaction of the numerous Dutch as well as of the less numerous
English established there; and was not a little chagrined to see a
good year’s work so marred by his improvident master’s gift. There was
nothing for it, however, but to accept the situation and receive the
representative of the new proprietors with as good a grace as possible,
like a soldier and a gentleman. Knowing nothing of the grant to Berkeley
and Carteret, he had already authorized a settlement at Elizabethtown,
on the shore that lay nearest to Staten Island to the westward, and had
granted rights and titles to other purchasers who had settled on the
southern shore of the great outer Bay, near Sandy Hook; and the new
colonists there now discontentedly doubted what their rights would be.
Much the larger part of the population of the original province of New
Netherland, however, still remained under the authority of Colonel
Nicolls and “the Duke’s Laws,” notwithstanding the setting apart of New
Jersey to be another government,—in one direction, indeed, more than the
Dutch themselves had pretended to govern; for the Duke’s possessions
included all of Long Island, the portion which lay beyond Oyster Bay and
which had been conceded by the Dutch to the English in 1655, as well as
the parts which lay close about the bay at New York. There were probably
about seven thousand souls, all told, in New Netherland when the English
took it, and of these fifteen hundred lived in the little village which
was drawn close about the fort at New Amsterdam. The rest were near
at hand on Long Island and on Staten Island, or were scattered up and
down the lands which lay upon the Hudson on either hand as far as Fort
Orange, which Colonel Nicolls renamed “Albany,” because James was Duke
of York and Albany. The Swedes, also, who had settled on the South River
(the Delaware), and whom Stuyvesant had conquered, had built for the
most part on the western bank of the river, and were outside the bounds
of New Jersey. On the eastern bank, where Lord Berkeley and Sir George
Carteret were to be proprietors, there were but a handful of Dutch and
Swedes at most. These, with the little Dutch hamlets which stood near New
York on the western bank of the Hudson, at Weehawken, Hoboken, Pavonia,
Ahasimus, Constable’s Hook, and Bergen, and the new homes of the English
families whom Colonel Nicolls had authorized to settle within the grant
at Elizabethtown and by the Hook, contained all the subjects the new
proprietors could boast.
[Illustration: SIGNATURE OF PHILIP CARTERET]
The government which the proprietors instructed Philip Carteret to
establish was as liberal and as sensible as that which Colonel Nicolls
had set up in New York. On the day on which they appointed their governor
they had signed a document which they called “The Concessions and
Agreements of the Lords Proprietors of New Jersey, to and with all and
every of the adventurers and all such as shall settle and plant there,”
and which offered not only gifts of land upon most excellent good terms
to settlers, but religious toleration also and a free form of government.
“The Duke’s Laws,” which Colonel Nicolls had set up for the government of
New York, were equally liberal in matters of religion, but not in matters
of self-government. The New Jersey lords proprietors directed their
governor to associate with himself in the administration of the province
a council of his own choosing not only, but also an assembly of twelve
representatives, to be chosen annually by the freemen of the province.
This assembly was to make the laws of the colony, and no tax was to be
laid without its consent. The governor and his council were to appoint
only freeholders of the colony to office,—unless the assembly assented to
the appointment of others. It did not seem necessary to call an assembly
at once; the scattered hamlets could separately attend to their own
simple affairs well enough until more settlers should come. The first
years of the new governor’s rule were quietly devoted to growth.
The governor established himself and the thirty odd settlers and servants
who came with him at the new hamlet just begun at Elizabethtown; and the
next year, 1666, the _Philip_ brought other settlers to join them. The
governor took pains to make known the liberal terms of settlement he was
authorized to offer, in New England and elsewhere in the colonies already
established, as well as at home in England. A steady drift of colonists,
accordingly, began to set his way. In 1666 the Elizabethtown tract was
divided to make room for other settlements at Woodbridge and Piscataway.
The same year numerous families from Milford, Guilford, Branford, and
New Haven came and began to make homes for themselves at Newark, on the
Passaic,—dissatisfied with the condition of affairs on the Sound since
they had been tied to the Hartford government, and determined to have
a free home of their own where only church members of their own way of
thinking and of worship should have the right to vote or to hold office.
It was a very notable migration, made in organized companies, as the
first settlements upon the Sound had been, and sapped the New Haven towns
of their old stock. “The men, the methods, the laws, the officers, that
made New Haven town what it was in 1640, disappeared from the Connecticut
colony, but came to full life again immediately in New Jersey.” Even Mr.
Davenport left the familiar seat he had himself chosen and returned in
his old age to Boston. By April, 1668, New Jersey seemed to the governor
ready for its first assembly, and he called upon the freemen to make
their choice of representatives.
The Puritans of the new settlements controlled the assembly when it
came together at Elizabethtown the next month (26 May, 1668) and passed
a bill of pains and penalties against various sorts of offenders which
was drawn in some of its parts directly from the Book of Leviticus, as
an earnest of their intentions in matters of government; but they had
been in session scarcely four days when they grew impatient to be at
home again, and adjourned. When they met a second time, in November,
the little hamlets on the Delaware, which had not sent delegates to the
first session, were represented; but the people of the “Monmouth grant,”
by Sandy Hook, were not. They were angry because Governor Carteret had
refused to acknowledge their right to make rules of local government
for themselves, under the terms of their grant from Colonel Nicolls,
given before the New Jersey grant was known of in New York; and they
declared that the persons who had assumed to act for them at the first
session of the assembly, in May, had had no real authority to do so.
The representatives who did attend the November sitting soon went home
again, dissatisfied that the governor’s council did not associate itself
with them closely enough in the conduct of the assembly’s business,
and impeded, as they thought, the execution of the provisions of the
“Concessions,” the great document which was their constitution from the
proprietors. It was to be many years yet, as it turned out, before the
conduct of the government of the colony was to be satisfactorily provided
for. The several scattered settlements had little sympathy with each
other, and New Jersey was not yet a complete or organized colony.
[Illustration: LOADING SHIPS IN ALBEMARLE SOUND]
It was a day of new proprietary grants to gentlemen in favor at
court; but the making of grants was very different from the making of
governments. At the very time when Governor Carteret was trying to
form a government that would hold the scattered towns of New Jersey
together in some sort of discipline and order, the representatives of
another proprietary government of the same kind were trying the same
experiment with much the same fortune in the south on the “Carolina”
grant, which the King had made the year before he gave New Netherland
to his brother. In 1663 he had granted the lands which lay south of
Virginia between the thirty-first and the thirty-sixth degrees of north
latitude to eight proprietors: the great Earl of Clarendon, General
George Monk, now Duke of Albemarle, William Lord Craven, Anthony Lord
Ashley (soon to be Earl of Shaftesbury), Sir John Colleton, John Lord
Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, to whom the Duke of York was the next
year to give New Jersey, and Sir William Berkeley, brother of Lord John
and governor of Virginia. Here, as in New Jersey, settlers had long ago
entered and begun a life of their own. The Virginians had spoken of the
region hitherto as “South Virginia,” and it was some of their own people
who had begun its settlement. In 1653 Roger Greene had taken a hundred
settlers to the coast of the broad Sound which was afterwards to be
called Albemarle,—after the great General Monk’s new ducal title,—and had
established them on a grant at “Chowan,” given to him by the Virginia
House of Burgesses as a reward for the “hazard and trouble of first
discovery,” and as an “encouragement of others for seating those southern
parts of Virginia.” Nine years later (1662) George Durant followed with
other settlers, Quakers driven out of Maryland and Virginia, whom the
Virginian authorities were glad to be rid of and have settled out of
sight in the wilderness. They began to build to the eastward of Mr.
Greene’s people at “Chowan,” upon the next peninsula of the same indented
coast, in what was called the “Perquimans” region. And then, the next
year, 1663, the King handed their lands over to be governed by the eight
lords proprietors of “Carolina.”
[Illustration: SIGNATURES OF CAROLINA PROPRIETORS]
There were by that time quite three hundred families settled there; and
there were none besides in all the vast tract that the King’s charter
called “Carolina.” These first comers had chosen for their settlements
a region neither fertile nor wholesome. Great pine barrens stood there
upon the coast, interspersed with broad swamps dense with a tangle of
cypress and juniper. Inside the coast districts, where the land rose to
drier levels and the virgin soils lay rich and wholesome, were some of
the finest regions of all the continent, fertile and sweet-aired and
full of inviting seats; but there was no highway to these. Only the sea
and the rivers were open. The land was everywhere covered with untouched
forests, pathless and unexplored. For the present settlers were obliged
to content themselves with the flat, unwholesome coast, in spite of its
killing fevers, because it alone was accessible. This Albemarle country
was Virginia’s frontier, the refuge of the restless, the unfortunate,
and the discontented, and of all who found her laws and her power to
enforce them irksome and unbearable. Some very steady and substantial
people there were also, no doubt, who chose to live there,—like the good
Quakers whom Mr. Durant had brought thither because they could find a
welcome nowhere else. There was a good profit to be made out of timber
cut from those splendid forests, and out of the breeding of cattle, which
was easy enough; and many industrious families liked the steady trade
of the region, with its accompaniment of a free life in the ungoverned
wilderness. But it was as yet the shiftless, the irresponsible, and the
adventurous who were most attracted.
[Illustration: SEAL OF THE LORDS PROPRIETORS OF CAROLINA]
What with adventurers who were ungovernable and men of industry and
ability who wished to be let alone, it was not an easy or a promising
place in which to set up the authority of proprietors who were in England
and had done nothing to help the men whom they meant to govern. Sir
William Berkeley, nevertheless, being himself one of the proprietors,
took the first step towards making good the rights of the new masters in
1664, when, by the authority of his associates, he commissioned William
Drummond to act as governor among the people at Chowan and Perquimans.
The appointment of a governor made little difference at first. Not
until three years later did the proprietors attempt the establishment
of a regular government, and even then the arrangements which they made
were very liberal. They that year, 1667, sent over Samuel Stephens from
England to be governor in Drummond’s place, and they sent with him
a document of “Concessions,” very like that which Lord Berkeley and
Sir George Carteret, two of their number, had lately granted to the
settlers in New Jersey. There was to be perfect freedom in religion;
the elected representatives of the people were to make the laws of the
settlements; no taxes were to be imposed without their consent; and they
could assemble upon their own motion, without waiting for a summons
from the governor. The governor was to have twelve councillors and the
people were to have twelve representatives, as in New Jersey; but half
of the governor’s council were to be chosen by the assembly itself, and
governor, councillors, and representatives were to sit together as a
single body,—so that the people’s delegates were sure of a majority in
all its deliberations.
The assembly used its power to exempt all new-comers from taxes for a
year after their coming, and to provide that for five years to come no
suits should be heard for debts or any other obligations contracted
outside Carolina. Of course such laws brought insolvent Virginian debtors
and all sorts of Virginian outlaws in larger numbers than ever to the
settlements, and the Virginians called the place “Rogues’ Harbor”; but
others of a better sort came also, and it was population first of all
that the Albemarle law-makers wanted. A more settled life and a less
irregular and questionable way of encouraging immigrants came afterwards
in due time,—as well as unexpected troubles with the proprietors. The
first grant, of 1663, had not in fact included the Albemarle settlements,
though those who framed it supposed that it did; but in 1665 a new
charter was obtained which advanced the boundary line far enough
northward to make sure of including them. And then the proprietors,
having a taste for a more elaborate way of governing, adopted a highly
complicated and detailed plan, drawn up by Mr. John Locke, who was
then, at thirty-seven, secretary to Anthony Lord Ashley, one of the
proprietors. The document contained eighty-one articles, was called the
“Fundamental Constitutions” of Carolina, and was elaborate enough for a
populous kingdom. It bore date 21 July, 1669.
[Illustration: MAP OF CAROLINA, 1687]