THE OLD DOMINION
Explora-tion in the seventeenth century.
The Establishment of the English
Queen Elizabeth's long and glorious reign came to an end in 1603, when she was succeeded on the throne of England by James Stuart of Scotland,¹ son of her ill-fated cousin and rival, Mary Queen of Scots. With the Age of Elizabeth there passed also the age of romance and chivalry. The gorgeous dreams of treasure and empire which filled the minds of the explorers of the sixteenth century faded into the sober realization of the hardships involved in settling the wild and distant regions of the New World. True, the search for gold and for the northwest passage to the Indies, the plans for the wholesale conversion of the Indians, and the erection of splendid kingdoms in the heart of America still lingered on into the seventeenth cen-tury and died slowly. But these ideas lingered only; they were not, as earlier, the spring and motive of the expeditions to America. To them succeeded the study of the soil and prod-ucts of the New World, the charting of its coasts and rivers, the defense of the infant settlements against the Indians, the transportation from Europe of tools and animals, the patient waiting for the slow returns of agricultural investment, - in a word, all that goes to make a permanent, self-sufficing com-munity, a home.
King James I charters the London and Plymouth companies, 1606
King James I in the year 1606 gave permis-sion to "certain loving subjects to deduce and conduct two sev-eral colonies or plantations of settlers to Amer-ica." The Stuart king had begun his reign with a pompous an-nouncement of peace with all his European neigh-bors; conse-quently, though England claimed all North Amer-ica by virtue of Cabot's discov-ery of 1497, James limited the territory of his grant so as not to encroach either on the Spanish settle-ments of Florida or the French interests about the St. Lawrence. One group of "loving subjects," called the London Company, was to have exclusive right to settle between 34° and 38° of north latitude (see map); the other group, the Plymouth Company, was granted the equally broad region between 41° and 45°. The neutral belt from 38° to 41° was left open to both companies, with the proviso that neither should make any settlement within one hundred miles of the other. The grants extended one hundred miles inland. The powers of government bestowed on the new companies were as complicated as the grants of territory. The companies were to have a council of thirteen in England, ap-pointed by the king and subject to his control. This English council was to appoint another council of thirteen to reside in each colony, and, under the direction of a president, to manage its local affairs, subject always to the English council, which in turn was subject to the king.
33. The settlement at James-town, 1607
In May, 1607, about a hundred colonists, sent out by the London Company, reached the shores of Virginia, and sailing some miles up a broad river, started a settlement on a low pen-insula. River and settlement they named James and Jamestown in honor of the king. The colony did not thrive. By royal order the crops for five years were to be gathered into a common storehouse, and thence dispensed to the settlers, thus encour-aging the idle and shiftless to live at the expense of the in-dustrious. Authority was hard to enforce with the clumsy form of government, and the proprietors in England were too far away to consult the needs of the colonists. Exploring the land for gold and the rivers for a passage to Cathay proved more attractive to the settlers than planting corn. The unwholesome site of the town caused fever and malaria.
34. John Smith and the "starving time"
Had it not been for the almost superhuman efforts of one man, John Smith, the little colony could not have survived. Smith had come to Virginia after a romantic and world-wide time" career as a soldier of fortune. His masterful spirit at once as-sumed the direction of the colony in spite of president and council. His courage and tact with the Indians got corn for the starving settlers, and his indomitable energy inspired the good and cowed the lazy and the unjust. In his vivid narratives of early Virginia, the "Trewe Relaycion" (1608) and the "Generall Historie" (1624), he has done himself and his services to the colony full credit, for he was not a modest or retiring man. But his self-praise does not lessen the value of his services. In the summer of 1609 he was wounded by an explosion of gun-powder, and returned to England. The winter following his departure was the awful "starving time." Of five hundred men in the colony in October, but sixty were left in June. This feeble remnant, taking advantage of the arrival of ships from the Ber-mudas, determined to abandon the settlement. With but a fortnight's provisions, which they hoped would carry them to Newfoundland, bidding final farewell to the scene of their suf-fering, they dropped slowly down the broad James. But on reaching the mouth of the river they espied ships flying Eng-land's colors. It was the fleet of Lord de la Warre (Delaware), the new governor, bringing men and supplies. Thus narrowly did the Jamestown colony escape the fate of Raleigh's settlements.
35. The new charter of 1609.
De la Warre brought more than food and recruits. The Lon-don Company had been reorganized in 1609, and a new charter granted by the king, which altered both the territory and the gov-ernment of Virginia (see map, p. 28). Henceforth, as a large and rich corporation in England, the company was to conduct its affairs without the intervention of the king. Virginia was to have a governor sent out by the company. Under the new régime the colony picked up. Order was enforced under the harsh but salutary rule of Governor Dale (1611-1616). The colonists, losing the gold fever, turned to agriculture and manufacture. Tobacco became the staple product of the colony, and experiments were made in producing soap, glass, silk, and wine. A better class of emigrants came over, and in 1619 a shipload of "respectable maidens" arrived, who were auctioned off to the bachelor planters for so many pounds of tobacco apiece. A little later the sharing of harvests in common was abandoned, and the settlers were given their lands in full ownership. In the words of one of the Virginia clergy of the period, "This plan-tation which the Divell hath so often troden downe is revived and daily groweth to more and hopeful successe."
The notable year 1619. Negro slavery and representative government
The year 1619, which brought the Virginians wives and lands, is memorable also for two events of great significance for the later history of the colonies and the nation. In that year the first cargo of negro slaves was brought to the colony, and the first representative assembly convened on American soil. On July 30 two burgesses (citizens) from each plantation " met with the governor and his six councilors in the little church at James-town. This tiny legislature of twenty-seven members, after enacting various laws for the colony, adjourned on August 4, by reason of extreme heat both past and likely to ensue." Spanish, French, and Dutch settlements existed in America at the time of this first Virginia assembly of burgesses, but none of them either then had or copied later the system of representative government. Democracy was England's gift to the New World.
37. King James takes away the charter of the London Company, 1624.
The man to whom Virginia owed this great boon of self-government, and whose name should be known and honored by every American, was Sir Edwin Sandys, treasurer of the London Company. Sandys belonged to the country party in Parliament, who were making James I's life miserable by their resistance to his arbitrary government based on "divine right," or responsibility to God alone for his royal acts. Gondomar, the Spanish minister in London, whispered in James's ear that the meetings of the Company were "hotbeds of sedition." But James had let the London Company get out of his hands by the new charter, and when he tried to interfere in their elec-tion of a treasurer, they rebuked him by choosing one of the most prominent of the country party (the Earl of Southampton, a friend of Shakespeare's). Not being able to dictate to the company, James resolved to destroy it. In a moment of great depression for the colony, just after a horrible Indian massacre (1622) and a famine, James commenced suit against the com-pany, which a subservient court declared had overstepped its legal rights and forfeited its charter. James then took the colony into his own hands and sent over men to govern it who were responsible only to his Privy Council. Virginia thus became a "royal province" (1624), and remained so for one hundred fifty years, until the American Revolution.,
38. Virginia a royal province, 1624-1775
James intended to suppress the Virginia assembly (the House of Burgesses) too, and rule the colony by a committee of his courtiers. But he died before he had a chance to extin-guish the liberties of Virginia, and his son, Charles I, hoping to get the monopoly of the tobacco trade in return for the favor, allowed the House of Burgesses to continue. So Virginia fur-nished the pattern which sooner or later nearly all the Ameri-can colonies reproduced, namely, that of a governor (with a small council) appointed by the English king, and a legislature, or assembly, elected by the people of the colony.
39. Virginia named "The Old Dominion "
The people of Virginia were very loyal to the Stuarts. When the quarrel between king and Parliament in England reached the stage of civil war (1642), and Charles I was driven from his throne and beheaded (1649), many of his supporters in Eng-land, who were called Cavaliers, emigrated to Virginia, giving the colony a decidedly aristocratic character. And when Charles II was restored to his father's throne in 1660, the Virginian bur-gesses recognized his authority so promptly and enthusiastically that he called them "the best of his distant children." He even elevated Virginia to the proud position of a "dominion," by quar-tering its arms (the old seal of the Virginia Company) on his royal shield with the arms of England, Scotland, and Ireland. The burgesses were very proud of this distinction, and remem-bering that they were the oldest as well as the most faithful of the Stuart settlements in America, adopted the name of "The Old Dominion."
40. Bacon's Rebellion, 1976
Though there were actually many occasions of dispute between the governors sent over by the king and the legislature elected by the people, only one incident of prime importance occurred to disturb the peaceful history of the Old Dominion under its royal masters. In 1675 the Susquehannock Indians were harass-ing the upper settlements of the colony, and Governor Berke-ley, who was profiting largely by his private interest in the fur trade, refused to send a force of militia to punish them. He was supported by an "old and rotten" House of Burgesses, which he had kept in office, doing his bidding, for fourteen years. A young and popular planter named Nathaniel Bacon, who had seen one of his overseers murdered by the Indians, put himself at the head of three hundred volunteers and demanded an officer's commission of Governor Berkeley. Berkeley re-fused, and Bacon marched against the Indians with-out any commission, utterly routing them and saving the colony from tomahawk and firebrand. The gov-ernor proclaimed Bacon a rebel and set a price upon his head. In the distress-governor was driven from ing civil war which followed, the his capital and Jamestown was burned by the "rebels." But Bacon died of fever (or poison?) at the moment of his victory, and his party, being made up only of his personal following, fell to pieces. Berkeley returned and took grim vengeance on Ba-con's supporters until the burgesses petitioned him to "spill no more blood."
41. The sig-nificance of Bacon's Rebellion
Bacon's Rebellion, despite its deplorable features, did a good work. It showed that the colonists dared to act for themselves. It forced the dissolution of the "old and rotten" assembly and the choice of a new one representing the will of the people. It led to the recall of Berkeley by Charles II, who explained indig-nantly when he heard of the governor's cruel reprisals: "That old fool has taken away more lives in that naked country than I did here for the murder of my father." And, finally, it showed that the people of the Old Dominion, though loyal to their king, had no intention of submitting to an arbitrary governor in col-lusion with a corrupt assembly.
THE NEW ENGLAND SETTLEMENTS
42. Activities of Sir Ferdinando Gorges
While these things were going on in Virginia a very different history was being enacted in the northern regions granted to the Plymouth Company. This company sent out a colony in the very year that the London Company settled Jamestown (1607), but one winter in the little fort at the mouth of the Kennebec River, on the icebound coast of Maine, was enough to send the frozen settlers back to England. Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of Plymouth, was the moving spirit of the company, and despite his losses in the expedition of 1607-1608, he showed a deter-mination worthy of a Sir Walter Raleigh. In 1614 he sent John Smith, long since cured of the wound caused by the ex-plosion of gunpowder, to explore the coast of "northern Vir-ginia," as the Plymouth grant was called. Smith made a map of the coast from Cape Cod to Nova Scotia, called the land "New England," and first set down on the map of America such famil-iar names as Cambridge, the Charles River, Plymouth, and Cape Ann. In 1620 Gorges persuaded the king to make a new grant of this territory to a number of nobles and gentlemen about the court, who were designated as the Council for New England.
43. The Pilgrims (Separatists) land at Plym-outh, Decem-ber 21, 1620
A few weeks after the formation of this new company there landed at Plymouth, from the little vessel Mayflower at anchor off Cape Cod, a group of one hundred men and women, known to later history as the "Pilgrims." They were not sent by the Council for New England nor by the London Company. Their object was neither to explore the country for gold nor to find a northwest passage to the Indies. They came of their own free will to found homes in the wilderness, where, unmolested, they might worship God according to their conscience. They were Independents or Separatists, people who had separated from the Church of England because it retained in its worship many fea-tures, such as vestments, altars, and ceremonies, which seemed to them as "idolatrous" as the Roman Catholic rites, which England had rejected. Three centuries ago religion was an affair of the state, not alone of private choice. Rulers enforced uniformity in creed and worship, in the belief that it was necessary to the preservation of their au-thority. If a subject could differ from the king in religious opinion, it was feared that it would not be long before he would presume to differ in po-litical opinion, and then what would become of obedience and loyalty! For men who were too brave to conceal their convictions, and too honest to modify them at the command of the sovereign, only three courses were open, to submit to persecution and martyrdom, to rise in armed resistance, or to re-tire to a place beyond the reach of the king's arm. The history of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries is full of the story of cruel persecutions, civil wars, and exiles for con-science' sake. James I began his reign by declaring that he would make his subjects conform in religion or "harry them out of the land." He "harried" the Separatist congregations of some little villages in the east of England, until in 1608 they took refuge in Holland the only country in Europe where complete religious toleration existed. Not content to be absorbed into the Dutch nation and have their children forget the cus-toms and speech of England, the Separatists determined to migrate to the new land of America. They got permission from the London Company to settle in Virginia; but their pilot brought them to the shores of Cape Cod, where they landed December 21, 1620, although they had neither a right to the soil (a patent) nor power to establish a government (a charter).
44. The "Mayflower Compact" and the Pil-grim colony at Plymouth 1620-1691
Before landing, the Pilgrims gath-ered in the cabin of the Mayflower and pledged themselves to form a govern-ment and obey it. That was the first instance of complete self-government in our history, for the assembly which met at Jamestown the year before the Pilgrims landed, was called together by orders from the Vir-ginia Company in England. The win-ter of 1620-1621 on the "stern and rock-bound coast" of New England went hard with the Pilgrims. "It pleased God," wrote Bradford, their governor for many years and their historian, "to vissite us with death dayly, and with so generall a disease that the living were scarce able to burie the dead." Yet when the Mayflower returned to England in the spring not one of the colonists went with her. Their home was in America. They had come to conquer the wilderness or die, and their de-termination was expressed in the brave words of one of their leaders: "It is not with us as with men whom small things can discourage." The little colony grew slowly. It was never granted a charter by the king, and consequently its government, which was carried on by the democratic institution of the town meeting, was never legal in the eyes of the English court. Yet, because of its small size and quiet demeanor, the colony of Plymouth was allowed to continue undisturbed by the Stuarts. It took its part bravely in the defense of the New England settlements against the Indians, and saw half its towns de-stroyed in the terrible war set on foot by the Narragansett chief "King Philip," in 1675.1 Finally, in 1691, it was annexed to the powerful neighboring colony of Massachusetts Bay. Politi-cally the little colony of Plymouth, the "old colony," was of slight importance, but its moral and religious influence on New England was great. The Pilgrims demonstrated that in-dustry and courage could conquer even the inhospitable soil and climate of the Massachusetts shore, and that unflinching devotion to an ideal could make of the wilderness a home.
45. Charles I charters the Massachu-setts Bay Company, March, 1629
While the settlement at Plymouth was slowly growing, sev-eral attempts were made by Gorges and other members of the Council for New England to plant colonies in the New World. About half a hundred scattered settlers were established around the shores and on the islands of Boston harbor, when in 1628 a company of Puritan gentlemen secured a grant of land from the council and began the largest and most important of the English settlements in America, -- the colony of Massachusetts Bay. The next year they obtained from Charles I a royal charter constituting them a political body ruled by a governor, a deputy governor, and eighteen "assistants," all elected by the members of the company; and in 1630 they sent over to Mas-sachusetts seventeen ships with nearly a thousand colonists. John Endicott had established the first settlers of the company at Salem in 1628, but when the main body of emigrants came over with John Winthrop two years later, the colony was trans-ferred to a narrow neck of land a few miles to the south, known to the Indians as Shawmut. The spot was rechristened Boston, after the Puritan fishing village in the east of England, where John Cotton was pastor. Winthrop and Cotton were the lead-ing spirits of the colony in its first twenty years: the former, a cultivated gentleman from the south of England, serving almost continually as governor; the latter, a scholar and preacher of great power, acting as director of the Massachusetts conscience.
46. The per-secution of the Puritans in England
The Puritans, like the Separatists, protested against what they called "the idolatrous remnants of papacy" in the English Church; but, unlike the Separatists, they believed in reforming the Church from within rather than leaving its communion. They were for "purifying" its worship, not rejecting it; or, in the theological language of the day, they believed that "the seamless garment of Christ (the Church) should be cleansed but not rent." However, King Charles I, coming more and more under the influence of men who thought the only ecclesiastical reform needed was the extermination of independent opinions of all sorts, and the lamblike submission of Church, courts, and parliaments to the royal will, made little distinction in his despotic mind between Separatists and Puritans. He was as glad to have the latter out of England as his father had been to get rid of the former, and he granted the Massachusetts charter less as a favor than as a sentence of exile. He little dreamed that he was laying the foundations of a practically independent state in his distant domain of America.
47. The Mas-sachusetts Company takes its charter to America, 1629
For when in 1629 he angrily dismissed his Parliament and entered on his eleven years' course of despotism, several lead-ing members of the Massachusetts Company decided to emigrate to America themselves and take their charter with them. The king, absorbed in his quarrel with Parliament, probably knew nothing about the removal of the charter from England until, in 1634, the persecuting zeal of Archbishop Laud of Canterbury against the Puritans moved him to demand its surrender. The English representatives of the company politely informed the king that the charter was in America, and the colony in America (well out of reach of the king's officers) politely declined to send the charter back to England. Before the king could use force to recover the charter he was overtaken by a war with his Scottish subjects, and thus the Massachusetts Company escaped the fate which had overtaken the London Company's colony of Virginia ten years earlier.
48. Massa-chusetts to Pu-ritan colony
The object of the Massachusetts settlers was to establish a Puritan colony, and not to open a refuge for freedom of wor-ship. To keep their community holy and undefiled, they refused to admit as "freemen" (i.e. participants in the government) any but members of their own Church. Others might live in the colony so long as they did not resist the authorities, molest the ministers, or bring discredit on the Puritan system of wor-ship and government; but they had to contribute to the support of the Church, and submit to its controlling oversight of both public and private life. During the decade 1630-1640 the grow-ing tyranny of King Charles and the persecutions of the zealous Archbishop Laud drove about twenty-five thousand refugees to the new colony. A large proportion of these emigrants were highly educated men of sterling moral quality. "God sifted a nation," wrote Governor Stoughton a half century later, "in order that he might send choice grain to this wilderness"; but Archbishop Laud, when he drove out of England the great Puritan clergymen who molded the thought of the new com-munity in America, had called them "swine which rooted out God's vineyard."
49. Conse-quences of the rapid growth of the Puritan col-ony of Massa-chusetts
The large emigration to Massachusetts brought about several important political results. It relieved the colony of immediate fear of attacks by the Indians. Then, again, it enabled the authorities easily to drive out various companies of settlers established by the agents of Gorges and other claimants to the Massachusetts lands under the grants of the Council for New England, especially the rollicking followers of one Morton, who, as the historian Bradford tells us, "did set up a schoole of athisme" at Merrymount (the site of Quincy, Massachusetts), where "his men did quaff strong waters and comport themselves as if they had anew revived ... the beastly practises of ye madd Bacchanalians"; where they set up a maypole eighty feet high about which they frolicked with the Indians, and, worst of all, sold firearms to the redskins who "became madd after them and would not stick to give any prise for them .. accounting their bowes and arrowes but bables [baubles] in comparison of them." Finally, the great size of the Massachusetts colony led to a representative form of government. The freemen increased so rapidly that they could not come together in a body to make their laws; and after trying for a short time the experiment of leaving this power to the eighteen "assistants," the towns demanded the privilege of sending their own elected representa-tives to help the assistants make the laws (1633). Still only "freemen" (or members of the Puritan churches) could vote, and as the colony increased, an ever larger percentage of the inhabitants was disfranchised. The more liberal spirits of the colony protested against this narrowing of the suffrage, but the Puritan leaders were firm in their determination to keep out of the government all who were suspected of heresy in belief or laxity in morals. "A democracy" (i.e. the rule of all the people) " is no fit government either for Church or for commonwealth," declared Cotton; and even the tolerant John Winthrop defended the exclusive Puritan system in a letter to a protesting friend by the remark: "The best part is always the least, and of that best part the wiser part is always the lesser."
50. Reaction against the Puritan aris-tocracy in Massa-chusetts
It was natural that this "Puritan aristocracy," which seemed so harsh to many colonists, should lead to both voluntary and enforced exile from the territory governed under the Massa-chusetts charter. Radiating southward and westward, the emi-grants from Massachusetts established the colonies of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven.
51. Roger Williams founds Rhode Island, 1635
Roger Williams, a gentle but uncompromising young man, came to the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1631, after taking his degree at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was forth-with elected pastor of the church in Salem, and began to teach doctrines very unacceptable to the Puritan governors of the colony. He said that the land on which they had settled be-longed to the Indians, in spite of the king's charter, that the state had no control over a man's conscience, and that to make a man take the oath of citizenship was to encourage lying and hypocrisy. Williams was a knight-errant who refused to abandon his crusade against the civil authorities, and they drove him from the colony in 1636. Making his difficult way southward in midwinter, through the forests, from one Indian tribe to another, he arrived at the head of Narragansett Bay, and purchasing a tract of land from the Indians, began a settlement which he called, in recognition of God's guidance, Providence.
Other dissenters from Massachusetts followed, and soon four towns were established on the mainland about Narragansett Bay and on Rhode Island proper. In 1643 Williams secured recognition for his colony from the English Parliament, which the year before had driven King Charles from London. The little colony of "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations" so established was remarkable for two things, - democracy and religious freedom. Election "by papers" (ballots) was intro-duced, and the government was "held by free and voluntary consent of all the free inhabitants." All men might "walk as their conscience persuaded them, every one in the name of his God." The scornful orthodox brethren in Massachusetts called Rhode Island's population "the Lord's débris," while the facetious said that " if a man had lost his religion, he would be sure to find it in some Rhode Island village." Massachusetts further showed her spite against the dissenting settlers by re-fusing to admit Rhode Island into the confederation of New England colonies, formed in 1643 for protection against the In-dians; and it was not till the colony had received a royal charter from Charles II (1663) that it was securely established. For his heroic devotion to principles of freedom, far in advance of his age, Roger Williams deserves to be honored as one of the noblest figures in our colonial history.
52. Connecti-cut founded by emigrants from Massa-chusetts, 1636
The same year that Massachusetts drove Williams out of her jurisdiction the magistrates gave permission to "divers loving ffriends, neighbors, and ffreemen of Newetown (Cambridge), Dorchester, Watertown and other places, to transport themselves and their estates unto the Ryver of Conecticott, there to reside and inhabit.” These emigrants were partly attracted by the glowing reports of the fertility of the Connecticut valley, and partly repelled by the extreme rigor of the Massachusetts “ aristocracy of righteousness,” which made impossible honest expression of opinion. Led by their pastor, Thomas Hooker, they tramped across the wilderness between the Charles and the Connecticut, driving their cattle before them and carrying their household goods in wagons, —the first heralds of that mighty westward movement which was to continue through two centuries to the Pacific Ocean. The Connecticut emigrants founded the towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield on the “long river.” In 1639 they adopted their ‘* Fundamental Constitutions—, t”h e first constitution drawn up in America, and the first in modern history composed by the free founders of a state. They did not require a man to be a church member in order to vote, and their clergymen exercised far less influence over political life than those of the mother colony. Although they had trouble with Massachusetts, which still claimed that they were under her jurisdiction, and with the Dutch, who (as we shall see in the next section) had spread from the Hudson to the Connecticut, still the colonists of the river towns were strong enough to defend both their land and their government.
53. Connecti-cut after the Pequot War of 1637
After the extermination of the dangerous Pequot Indians in 1637 the colony flourished in secure and uneventful prosperity, and remained, until the American Revolution, the least vexed of all the English settlements. Until 1662 its existence was not recognized by the English government, but in that year Charles II, partly, no doubt, to raise up a powerful rival to Massachusetts, which all the Stuarts hated for its assumption of independent airs, granted a most liberal charter to Connect-icut, extending its territory westward to the South Sea (the Pacific). We shall have occasion, a few pages later, to refer again to the Connecticut and Rhode Island charters of 1662-1663.
54. The Puri tan colony of New Haven, 1638-1665
A third colony, composed of men who came through rather than out of Massachusetts, was New Haven. John Davenport, a stern Puritan divine, brought his congregation to Massachu-setts in the summer of 1637, when the colony was in the midst of the pitiless trial of Mistress Anne Hutchinson and her asso-ciates, who were accused of teaching the heresy of antinomian-ism, a thing hard for even a trained theologian to understand, and impossible to explain here. Finding the strife-charged air of Boston uncongenial, Davenport and his congregation pushed on to the shores of Long Island Sound and founded the settle-ment of New Haven (1638). The colony, which soon expanded into several towns, was as strictly Puritan and "theocratic" (God-ruled) as Massachusetts. The founders hoped to add worldly prosperity to their piety by making New Haven a great commercial port; but the proximity of the unrivaled harbor of New York (then called New Amsterdam) rendered any such hope vain from the beginning. Instead of becoming an inde-pendent commercial colony, New Haven and her sister towns found themselves, to their disgust, included in the limits of Connecticut by the royal charter of 1662. They protested valiantly against the consolidation, but were forced in the end to yield. Thus the New Haven colony ceased to exist in 1665.
55. Relations of Massachu-setts with the settle-ments of Gorges and Mason
With the process of radiation from Massachusetts of colonies to the south and west went a contrary process of absorption by Massachusetts of settlements to the north and east. Ferdinando Gorges was the father of these settlements. In spite of the failure of the Kennebec Colony in 1607, which "froze his hopes and made him sit down with his losses," as he quaintly wrote, Gorges's hopes soon thawed out again, and he labored till his death, forty years later, to establish colonies on the Maine coast. The Council for New England surrendered its charter to the king in 1635, but Gorges persisted single-handed. He got a charter in 1639, which made him proprietor of Maine. He pro-ceeded forthwith to establish an elaborate government for his puny province, in which almost every adult male was an office-holder; and devised for his capital "Gorgeana" the first city government in America. Gorges was a deadly enemy of Mas-sachusetts. As a courtier he opposed the reforming party in Parliament, and as a stanch Church of England man he hated the whole Puritan movement. He was one of the foremost agitators for the suppression of the Massachusetts charter in 1634, and labored strenuously to have strong anti-Puritan set-tlers emigrate to his province of Maine and to New Hampshire, the neighboring province of his fellow courtier and fellow church-man John Mason. By the terms of the charter of 1629 the territory of the Massachusetts Bay Company extended from three miles north of the Merrimac to three miles south of the Charles, and east and west from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. Now charters were granted by the Stuarts in reckless ignorance of the geography of America. Because the Merrimac flows east as it enters the sea, it was presumed that it flowed east throughout its course; whereas it actually rises far to the north, in the lakes of New Hampshire. A line drawn to the coast, therefore, from a point three miles north of the source of the Merrimac would include all of the Maine and New Hamp-shire settlements (see map, p. 45). Massachusetts, having ascer-tained the true course of the river, laid claim to these settlements as lying in her territory. She annexed the New Hampshire towns in 1641-1643, and after a long quarrel over the Maine The English Colonies towns, finally bought the claims of Gorges's heirs for £1250 in 1677. Charles II was furious at the transaction. In 1679 he separated New Hampshire from Massachusetts and gave it a royal governor; but Maine remained part of the Bay Colony and then of the Bay State until 1820.
56. The growth absolutism in the Massa-chusetts colony
The domination of Massachusetts over the other New Eng-land colonies, at least up to the time when Connecticut and Rhode Island received their charters, was complete. She far surpassed them all in men and wealth. The New England Con-federation, formed in 1643 by Massachusetts, Plymouth, Con-necticut, and New Haven, chiefly for defense against the Indians, was theoretically a league of four equal states, each having two members with equal voice in the governing council. But the opposition of Massachusetts kept Rhode Island out of the con-federation, and in the question of declaring war on the Dutch colony of New Netherland in 1653 the two Massachusetts coun-cilors vetoed the unanimous vote of the other six. The habit of authority grows rapidly, especially when exercised by strong men who believe that they are God's instruments in keeping the faith and morals of the community unsullied. The second half of the seventeenth century exhibited the character of the colony in its most uncompromising and unlovely aspects. The large-minded, courteous Winthrop died in 1649, and was succeeded in the governorship by a harsh and bigoted Puritan "saint," John Endicott. Faithfulness to Puritan ideals reached a point of fanatic cruelty. Quakers were hanged in 1660 on Boston Common for the crime of testifying to the "inner light," or special divine revelation (which of course made Church and clergy superfluous). Again, in 1692, nineteen persons, mostly women, were hanged in Salem village for witchcraft, or secret alliance with Satan, on the most unfair evidence of excited children and hysterical women.
57. Signs of political inde-pendence in Massachusetts
On its political side the increasing power of the magistrates of Massachusetts aroused the angry suspicions of the king. The colony banished Episcopalians, coined money, omitted the king's name in its legal forms, and broke his laws for the regulation of their trade. When he sent commissioners in 1664 to investigate these conditions, they were insulted by a con-stable in a Boston tavern. Their chairman wrote back, "Our time is lost upon men puffed up with the spirit of independ-ence." Edward Ran-dolph, sent over a few years later as a collector of revenues, complained that "the king's letters are of no more account in Massachusetts than an old number of the London Gazette."1 Fi-nally, Charles II, pro-voked beyond patience, had the Massachusetts charter annulled in his court (1684), and the colony became a royal province.
58. Edmund Andros in Boston
But before the great Puritan colony entered on its checkered career of the eighteenth century under royal governors, it bore a conspicuous part in the overthrow of that tyranny which the last Stuart king, James II, made unendurable for freeborn Englishmen. In 1686 James united New York, New Jersey, and all New England into one great province, which should be a solid bulwark against the danger of French and Indian invasion from the north, and where his governor should rule absolutely, unhampered by colo-nial charters or assemblies. He sent over Sir Edmund Andros as governor of this huge province extending from Delaware Bay to Nova Scotia. Andros was a faithful servant, an upright man, without guile or trickery, but a harsh, narrow, unbending governor, determined that the instructions of his royal master should be carried out to the letter. In pursuance of these instructions he attempted to seize the charters of Con-necticut and Rhode Island, but was baffled by the local patriots in both colonies. Ex-asperated by resistance, An-dros made his hand doubly heavy upon the Massachu-setts colony, which the Stuarts rightly looked upon as the stronghold of democratic sen-timent in America. He dis-missed the Massachusetts Assembly, abolished the colo-nial courts, dispensed justice himself, charging exorbitant fees, established a strict cen-sorship of the press, intro-duced the Episcopal worship in Boston, denied the colonists fair and speedy trials, and levied a land tax on them without the consent of their deputies.
The glorious revolution of 1689 in massachusetts
The patience of the colony was about exhausted when the welcome news arrived, in April, 1689, that James II had been driven from the English throne. The inhabitants of Boston immediately responded by a popular rising against James's odious servant. Andros tried, like his master, to flee from the vengeance of the people he had so grievously provoked, but he was seized and imprisoned, and later sent back to England.
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60. The new Massachu-setts charter of 1691
The town meeting of Boston assumed the government, ap-pointed a committee of safety, and sent envoys to London to learn the will of the new king, William of Orange. Thus the "Glorious Revolution" of 1689 in Massachusetts was truly a part of the English Revolution of 1688, and a foreshadowing of the greater Revolution begun eighty-six years later by the descendants of the men who expelled Andros in defense of the principles of the men who expelled James II.
King William granted a new charter to Massachusetts in 1691, while Connecticut and Rhode Island quietly resumed government under their old charters, retaining them as state constitutions well into the nineteenth century. The new Mas-sachusetts charter provided for the union of Plymouth with the Bay colony under a royal governor, and broke down the old Puritan régime by guaranteeing freedom of worship to all Protestant sects, and making the possession of property in-stead of membership in the church the basis of political rights. American Revolution.
Under this charter the Massachusetts colony lived until the
THE PROPRIETARY COLONIES
61. The cor-porate colo-nies (founded by companies)
Virginia and Massachusetts were corporate colonies, founded by companies of men (corporations) to whom the king gave charters, or the right to establish governments in certain speci-fied territory of America. We have seen how the Virginia Company lost its charter quite early in its history (1624), and became the first royal province, ruled by a governor and coun-cil appointed by the king. We have seen also how the Massa-chusetts Company, by the emigration of its leading members with the charter to America, became a self-governing colony, much to the king's chagrin. Finally, we have seen how Mas-sachusetts sent out as offshoots the self-governing colonies of Rhode Island and Connecticut, which were recognized by Charles II's charters of 1662-1663. All the rest of the thirteen
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colonies, which were later to unite to form the American nation, were founded as proprietorships.¹
62. The nature of the proprietary province
The proprietorship was a sort of middle thing between the royal province and the self-governing colony. The king let the reins of government out of his own hands, but did not give them into the hands of the colonists. Between the king and the settlers stood the proprietor, a man or a small group of men, generally courtiers, to whom the king had granted the province. In the royal provinces the king himself, through his Privy Council, appointed governors, established courts, collected taxes, and attended to the various details of executive govern-ment. In the self-governing colonies the people elected their governors and other executive officers, civil and military, and controlled them through their democratic legislatures. In the proprietary provinces the lords proprietors appointed the gov-ernors, established courts, collected a land tax (quitrent) from the inhabitants, offered bonuses to settlers, and in general man-aged their provinces like farms or any other business venture, subject always to the limitations imposed by the terms of their charter from the king, and the opposition of their legislatures in the colonies.2
The only enduring proprietorship established under the early Stuarts was Maryland. In 1632 George Calvert (Lord Balti-more), a Roman Catholic nobleman high in the favor of the court, obtained from Charles I the territory between the Poto-mac River and the fortieth parallel of latitude, with a very lib-eral charter. The people of Maryland were to enjoy "all the privileges, franchises, and liberties" of English subjects; no tax
63. Mary-land founded by Calvert (Lord Balti-more), 1634
1 The proprietorship was not only the commonest form of colonial grant, but it was also the earliest. Queen Elizabeth's patents to Gilbert and Raleigh were of this nature, and in the first half of the seventeenth century there were many attempts of proprietors, less heroically persistent than Sir Ferdinando Gorges, to found colonies on our shores.
2 All the proprietors except the Duke of York, King Charles II's brother, forthwith granted their provinces assemblies elected by the people. They could not, in fact, get settlers on any other terms. In the royal provinces, too, the popularly elected assemblies were retained.
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was to be levied by the Crown on persons or goods within the colony; laws were to be made "by the proprietor, with the advice of the freemen of the colony." George Calvert died before the king's great seal was affixed to the charter, but his son, Cecilius Calvert, sent a colony in 1634 to St. Marys, on the shores of Chesapeake Bay.
64. Trials of the proprie-tors of Mary-land
The second Lord Baltimore was a man of consummate tact, broad and generous in his views, unflagging in devotion to his colony. He needed all his tact, nobility, and courage to meet the difficulties with which he had to struggle. In the first place, the smiling tract of land granted to him by King Charles lay within the boundaries of the grant of King James to the Vir-ginia Company (see map, p. 28). A Virginian fur trader named Claiborne was already established on Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay, and refused either to retire or to give allegiance to the Catholic Lord Baltimore. It came to war with the Virginian Protestants before Claiborne was dislodged. Again, Lord Balti-more interpreted the words of the charter, that laws were to be made "by the proprietor, with the advice... of the freemen," to mean that the proprietor was to frame the laws and the free-men accept them; but the very first assembly of Maryland took the opposite view, insisting that the proprietor had only the right of approving or vetoing laws which they had passed. Baltimore tactfully yielded.
65. The Tol-eration Act of 1649
Religious strife also played an important part in the troubled history of the Maryland settlement. Lord Baltimore had founded his colony partly as an asylum for the persecuted Roman Catholics of England, who were regarded as idolaters by both the New England Puritans and the Virginia Episcopalians. To have Mass celebrated at St. Marys was, in the eyes of the intolerant Protestants, to pollute the soil of America. As Baltimore tolerated all Christian sects in his province, the Protestants simply flooded out the Catholics of Maryland by immigration from Virginia, New England, and old England. Eight years after the establishment of the colony the Catholics formed less than 25 per cent of the inhabitants, and in 1649 the proprietor was obliged to protect his fellow religionists in Maryland by getting the assembly to pass the famous Toleration Act, providing that “‘no person in this province professing to believe in Jesus Christ shall be in any ways troubled, molested, or discountenanced for his or her religion . so that they be not unfaithful to the lord proprietary or molest or conspire against the civil government established.”
Although this is the first act of religious toleration on the statute books of the American colonies, we should remember that Roger Williams, thirteen years earlier, had founded Rhode Island on principles of religious toleration more complete than those of the Maryland Act; for by the italicized words of the latter, Jews or freethinkers would be excluded from Lord Baltimore’s domain. By 1658 the fierce strife between Catholic and Protestant had been allayed, and Maryland settled down to a peaceful and prosperous development. The tremendous wave of anti-Catholic sentiment that followed the overthrow of the Stuarts (1689) swept the Baltimores out of their proprietorship ; but on the conversion of the family to Protestantism in 1715,
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the province of Maryland was restored to them and remained under their rule until the American Revolution.
During the first five years of his reign (1660-1665) Charles II was much occupied with the American colonies. We have already seen how the charters of Rhode Island and Connecticut were granted in 1662-1663, and we shall see in the next section how busily the king regulated colonial trade in 1660-1663. The years 1663-1665 saw the establishment of three new English colonies in America, - Carolina, New York, and New Jersey.
66. Interest of the restored Stuarts in the colonies
67. The set-tlement and history of the Carolinas, 1663-1729
In 1663 Charles II granted to a group of eight noblemen about his court the huge tract of land between Virginia and the Spanish settlement of Florida, extending westward to the "South Sea" (Pacific Ocean). The charter gave the proprie-tors power to make laws, "with the assent, advice, and appro-bation of the freemen of the colony," to grant lands, collect duties and quitrents, establish courts, appoint magistrates, erect forts, found cities, make war, and allow the settlers "such in-dulgences and dispensations in religious affairs as they should think proper and reasonable," powers as ample as Lord Balti-more's in Maryland. But the board of proprietors were not equal to Lord Baltimore in tact, energy, and devotion to the interests of the colony. Too many cooks spoiled the broth. The initial mistake was the attempt to enforce a ridiculously elab-orate constitution, the "Grand Model," composed for the occa-sion by the celebrated English philosopher John Locke, and utterly unfit for a sparse and struggling settlement. A community grew up on the Chowan River (1670), founded by some mal-contents from Virginia, and another on the shore of the Ashley River, three hundred miles to the south. The latter settlement was transferred ten years later (1680) to the site of the modern city of Charleston, South Carolina. These two widely separated settlements developed gradually into North and South Carolina respectively. The names are used as early as 1691, but the colony was not officially divided and provided with separate gov-ernors until 1711. There is little in the history of the Carolinas to detain us. It is a story of inefficient government, of wrang-ling and discord between people and governors, governors and proprietors, proprietors and king. North Carolina has been de-scribed as "a sanctuary of runaways," where "every one did what was right in his own eyes, paying tribute neither to God nor to Cæsar."¹ The Spaniards incited the Indians to attack the colony from the south, and pirates swarmed in the harbors and creeks of the coast. Finally, the assembly of South Carolina, burdened by an enormous debt from the Spanish-Indian wars, offered the lands of the province for sale to settlers on its own terms. The proprietors vetoed this action, which invaded their chartered rights. Then the assembly renounced obedience to the proprietor's magistrates, and petitioned King George I to be taken under his protection as a royal province (1719). It was the only case in our colo-nial history of a proprietary government overthrown by its own assembly. Ten years later (1729) the proprietors sold their rights and interests in both Carolinas to the crown for the paltry sum of £50,000. So two more colonies were added to the growing list of royal provinces.
68. The Dutch settle-ment of New Netherland, 1614
While the Carolina proprietors were inviting settlers to their new domain, an English fleet sent out by Charles II's brother, the Duke of York, sailed into New York harbor and demanded the surrender of the feebly garrisoned Dutch fort on Manhat-tan Island (September, 1664). The fort was commanded by Peter Stuyvesant, director general of the Dutch colony of New Netherland. About a hundred years earlier the Dutch, driven from their peaceful pursuits of farming and cheese-making by a long and cruel war with Spain, had taken to the sea and laid the foundations of that colonial empire which is to-day the chief wealth and pride of their little kingdom. Seeking to cripple Spain at all points, they had sent their ships east and west, to seize the enemy's treasure fleets, to establish forts and trading posts, and to find the northern passage to the Indies. Thus in the early autumn of 1609 Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the service of Holland, sailed into the spacious harbor of New York and up the majestic river which now bears his name. About five years later the Dutch established fortified trading posts on Manhattan Island and a few miles below the present city of Albany, and in 1621 the territory on the Hudson was granted by the States-General (Parliament) of Holland to the Dutch West India Company.
69. The ill success of the Dutch colony on the Hudson
The company did not make a success of the colony, although it offered tracts of land miles deep along both sides of the river to rich proprietors (" patroons "), with feudal privileges of trade and government, and in 1638 abolished all monopolies, opening trade and settlement to all nations, and making liberal offers of land, stock, and implements to tempt farmers. Even the city of New Amsterdam (New York), with its magnificent situation for commerce, reached a population of only sixteen hundred dur-ing the half century that it was under Dutch rule. The West India Company, intent on the profits of the fur trade with the Indians of central New York, would not spend the money neces-sary for the development and defense of the colony. They sent over director generals who had little concern for the welfare of the people, and refused to allow any popular assembly. If the settlers protested that they wanted a government like New Eng-land's, "where neither patroons, lords, nor princes were known, but only the people," they were met with the insulting threat of being "hanged on the tallest tree in the land." Furthermore, the Dutch magistrates were continually involved in territorial quarrels. They had settled on the land granted by James I in 1606 to the London and Plymouth companies, and had been immediately warned by them to leave it. They replied humbly at first that they "had found no English there," and "hoped they were not trespassing," but later they assumed a defiant tone. They disputed the right to the Connecticut valley with the emigrants from Massachusetts, and claimed the land along the lower banks of the South River (the Delaware), from which they had driven out some Swedish settlers by force,¹ although the land lay plainly within the boundaries of Lord Baltimore's charter. In 1653, when England was at war with Holland, New Netherland was saved from the attack of the New England colo-nies only by the selfish veto of Massachusetts on the unanimous vote of the other members of the Confederation of New England.
70. The Eng-lish seize the Dutch colony, 1664, and New Amsterdam becomes New York
Every year the English realized more clearly the necessity of getting rid of this alien colony, which lay like a wedge between New England and the Southern plantations, controlling the valuable route of the Hudson and making the enforcement of the trade laws in America impossible. In 1664, therefore, Charles II, on the verge of a commercial war with Holland, granted to his brother, the Duke of York, the territory between the Connecticut and Delaware rivers as a proprietary province. The first the astonished burghers of New Amsterdam knew of this transaction was the appearance of the duke's fleet in the harbor, with the curt summons to surrender the fort. Director General Stuyvesant, the "valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome, obstinate, leather-sided, lion-hearted old governor," as Diedrich.
Knickerbocker calls him, fumed and stormed, declaring that he would never surrender. But resistance was hopeless. The burgh-ers persuaded the irate governor to yield, although his gunners had their fuses lighted. New Netherland fell without a blow, and the English flag waved over an unbroken coast from Canada to Carolina.
71. What the Dutch be-queathed to New York
There are still many traces in New York of its fifty years' occupancy by the Dutch. The names of the old Knickerbocker families remind us of the patroons' estates; and from the car windows one gets glimpses of the high Dutch stoops and quaint market places in the villages along the Hudson, or sees a group of men at sundown still rolling the favorite old Dutch game of bowls, which Rip van Winkle found the dwarfs playing in the Catskills. But a far more significant bequest of New Nether-land to New York was the spirit of absolute government. Under the Dutch rule the people were without charter or popular as-sembly, and the new English proprietor was content to keep things as they were, publishing his own code of laws for the province (the "Duke's Laws"). It was not till 1683 that he yielded to pressure from his own colony and the neighbors in New England and Pennsylvania, and granted an assembly. Two years later, on coming to the throne as James II, he revoked this grant and made New York the pattern of absolute govern-ment to which he tried to make all the English colonies north of Maryland conform. What success his viceroy Andros had in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut we have already seen (p. 51). In New York the deputy-governor, Nicholson, deserted his post and sailed back to England. When the new governor sent by King William III arrived in 169, he brought orders to restore the popular assembly which James II had suppressed, and from that time on the colony enjoyed the privilege of self-government.
New York grew slowly. At the time of the foundation of our national government it was only one of the “ small states - as compared with Massachusetts, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
The immense Empire State of to-day, with its nine million inhabitants, is the growth of the last three generations. It began when the Erie Canal, and later the New York Central Railroad, made the Hudson and Mohawk valleys the main highway to the Great Lakes and the growing West.
The settlement and history of the Jerseys
Even before the Duke of York had ousted the Dutch magistrates from his new province, he granted the lower part of it, from the Hudson to the Delaware, to two of his friends, who were also members of the Carolina board of proprietors, Lord Berkeley, brother of the irritable governor of Virginia, and Sir George Carteret, formerly governor of the island of Jersey in the English Channel. In honor of Carteret the region was named New Jersey (June, 1664). The proprietors of New Jersey im-mediately published "concessions" for their colony, - a liberal constitution granting full religious liberty and a popular assem-bly with control of taxation. In 1674 the proprietors divided their province into East and West Jersey, and from that date to the end of the century the Jerseys had a turbulent history, de-spite the fact that both parts of the colony, after various trans-fers of proprietorship, came under the control of the peace-loving sect of Friends, or Quakers.¹ There were constant quarrels be-tween proprietors and governors, between governors and legis-latures, until New Jersey revolted, with the rest of the American colonies, from the rule of Great Britain.
73. William Penn founds Pennsyl-vania, 1681
One of the Quaker proprietors of West Jersey in the early days was William Penn, a young man high in the favor of the Duke of York and his royal brother Charles, on account of the services of his father, Admiral Penn, to the Stuart cause. When the old admiral died he left a claim for some sixteen thousand pounds against King Charles II, and William Penn, attracted by the idea of a Quaker settlement in the New World, accepted from the king a tract of land in payment of the debt. He was granted an immense region west of the Delaware River, which he named "Sylvania" (woodland), but which the king, in honor, he said, of the admiral, insisted on calling Pennsylvania (1681).
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The Establishment of the English
74. The pros-perity of Penn's colony
Charles II was in the midst of his quarrel with the stiff-necked colony of Massachusetts, and was no longer willing to grant pro-prietors the almost unlimited powers which he had granted to Lord Baltimore and the Duke of York. The Penn charter con-tained provisions that the colony must always keep an agent in London, that the Church of England must be tolerated, that the king might veto any act of the assembly within five years after its passage, and that the English Parliament should have the right to tax the colóny.
Penn offered attractive terms to settlers. Land was sold at ten dollars the hundred acres, complete religious freedom was allowed, a democratic assembly was summoned, and the Indians (Delawares), already humbled by their northern foes, the Iro-quois, were rendered still less dangerous by Penn's fair dealing with them. Emigrants came in great numbers, especially the Protestants from the north of Ireland, who were annoyed by cruel landlords and oppressive trade laws; and the German Protestants of the Rhine country,¹ against whom Louis XIV of France was waging a crusade. In the first half of the eighteenth century the population of Pennsylvania grew from twenty thousand to two hundred thousand. Philadelphia, the "city of brotherly love," which Penn had planned in 1683 "to resemble a green and open country town," soon outstripped New York in population, wealth, and culture, and remained throughout the eighteenth century the leading city in the American colonies. Its neat brick houses, its paved and lighted streets, its printing presses, schools, hospital and asylum, its library (1731), philo-sophical society (1743), and university (1749) all testified to the enlightenment and humanity of Penn's colony, and especially
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to the genius and industry of its leading citizen, the celebrated Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790).
75. Character of William Penn
William Penn was the greatest of the founders of the Ameri-can colonies. He had all the liberality of Roger Williams with-out his impetuousness, all the fervor of John Winthrop without a trace of intolerance, all the tact of Lord Baltimore with still greater industry and zeal. He was far in advance of his age in humanity. At a time when scores of offenses were punishable by death in England, he made murder the only capital crime in his colony. Prisons gen-erally were filthy dun-geons, but Penn made his prisons workhouses for the education and cor-rection of malefactors. His province was the first to raise its voice against slavery (in the German-town protest of 1688), and his humane treat-ment of the Indians has passed into the legend of the spreading elm and the wampum belts familiar to every American school child. When Penn's firm hand was removed from the province (1712), disputes and wranglings increased between governor and as-sembly over taxes, land transfers, trade, and defense; but the colony remained in the possession of the Penn family through-out the American colonial period.
76. Penn se-cures the "Three Lower Counties," 1682
Disappointed that his charter of 1681 gave him no coast line, Penn persuaded the Duke of York in 1682 to release to him the land which Stuyvesant had wrested from the Swedes on the Delaware in 1655, and which, in spite of Baltimore's pro-tests, had been held as a part of New York ever since the English " conquest" of 1664. This territory, called the "Three
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The Establishment of the English
Lower Counties," Penn governed by a deputy. The Lower Counties were separated from Pennsylvania in 1702, and, under the name of the colony of Delaware, were given their own legislature; but they remained a part of the proprietary domain of the Penn family till the American Revolution.
77. The col-ony of Georgia founded, 1733
For the sake of completeness we must mention among these proprietorships the colony of Georgia, although it was founded long after the Stuart dynasty had given place to the House of Hanover on the English throne. In the year that George Washington was born (1732), James Oglethorpe obtained from the king a charter granting to a body of trustees for twenty-one years the government of the unsettled part of the old Caro-lina territory south of the Savannah River. It was a combined charitable, business, and political venture. Oglethorpe, who, as chairman of a parliamentary committee of investigation, had been horrified by the condition of English prisons, wished to provide an opportunity for poor debtors and criminals to work out their salvation in the New World. The Church was anx-ious for the conversion of the Indians on the Carolina bor-ders. Capitalists saw in the projected silk and wine cultivation a promise of large profits. And the government, drifting already toward the war with Spain which was declared in 1739, was glad to have the English frontier extended southward toward the Spanish settlement of Florida. So Parliament, the society for the propagation of the gospel in foreign parts, the Bank of England, and many private citizens contributed toward the new colony, which was established on the banks of the Savannah in 1733, and named Georgia after the reigning king, George II. Slavery was forbidden in the new colony, also the traffic in rum, which was a disgrace to the New England colonies of Massa-chusetts and Rhode Island. But the colony did not prosper. The convicts were poor workers. The industries started were unsuited to the land. Not wine and silk, but rice and cotton, were destined to be the foundation of Georgia's prosperity. Oglethorpe battled manfully for his failing colony, and defeated
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the Spaniards on land and sea; but the trustees had to sur render the government to the king in 1752. The founder of the last American colony lived to see the United States acknowl-edged by Great Britain and the other powers of Europe as an independent nation.
THE COLONIES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
We have now traced the history of the establishment of the English colonies in America. It remains to devote a few pages to the economic and social condition of the colonies in their maturity in the eighteenth century.
78. Tendency of the colonies to become royal prov-inces
A glance at the accompanying table and map (pp. 68 and 69) will show how steady the tendency was for the colonies, especially those founded by proprietors, to become royal prov-inces. Only Connecticut and Rhode Island escaped at least a short period of the king's control; and repeated proposals were made in Parliament in the early years of the eighteenth century to suppress the few remaining colonial charters and unite all the colonies into one large province of the English crown, to be governed by the king's officers and provided with a provincial assembly. The causes for this tightening of royal control lay partly in the incompetency and selfishness of the proprietors, partly in the European politics,¹ partly in the need for protection against the French in Canada and their Indian allies. But the chief cause of the king's interference in colonial affairs was his desire to control their trade and manufactures for his own profit.
79. The mer-cantile theory of commerce
The political economists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries quite commonly believed that a nation's wealth was measured not by the amount of desirable goods which it could produce and exchange, but by the quantity of gold and silver which it could amass, — the miser’s ideal. In accordance with this ‘mercantile” theory of commerce, as it was called, every nation tried to buy as little from others and sell as much to others as possible, so that the “favorable balance” of cash might come into its coffers. Naturally the European countries would look on their colonies, then, as places in which to sell goods. The colonies should furnish the raw materi—a lirson , wool, furs, hides — to the mother country, and then should buy back the finished products — steel, clothing, hats, shoes — from the mother country, paying the difference in coin. Where
the money was to come from, when the colonies were forbidden either to manufacture goods themselves or to sell raw material to the other nations, does not seem greatly to have concerned the Eu-ropean statesmen. They believed that colonies existed for the ad-vantage of the mother country, and that if they could not increase the flow of gold and silver into her treasury, they were useless.
80. The Navigation Acts of 1660-1663
So Charles II's ministers were neither more nor less at fault than those of the European countries generally, when in 1660-1663 they fastened on the American colonies the Navigation Acts, or laws of trade. No goods could be carried into or out of the colonies except in ships built in the English domains and manned by crews of which three fourths at least were English subjects. No foreign goods could be brought into the colonies without first stopping in England to pay duties or be inspected. Certain "enumerated commodi-ties," including tobacco, cotton wool, and sugar (to which other articles, such as furs, rice, copper, naval stores, were added later), could not be exported from the of 1651 colonies to any port outside the British domain. To be sure, England softened the effect of the Navigation Acts by giving the enumerated colonial goods the preference, or even a mo-nopoly, in her markets, and, by a system of "drawbacks" or re-bates, reduced the duties which the colonies had to pay on goods shipped through English ports. But nevertheless it was a great hindrance to the commercial prosperity of the colonies to forbid them to buy and sell directly in the markets of Europe,