Read Ebook: A School History of the United States by McMaster John Bach

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1154 lines and 140602 words, and 24 pages

Bad as matters were, they became worse when a little fleet arrived with many new settlers, making the whole number about 500. The newcomers were a worthless set picked up in the streets of London or taken from the jails, and utterly unfit to become the founders of a state in the wilderness of the New World. Out of such material Smith in time might have made something, but he was forced by a wound to return to England, and the colony went rapidly to ruin. Sickness and famine did their work so quickly that after six months there were but sixty of the 500 men alive. Then two small ships, under Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George Somers, arrived at Jamestown with more settlers; but all decided to flee, and had actually sailed a few miles down the James, when, June 8, 1610, they met Lord Delaware with three ships full of men and supplies coming up the river. Delaware came out as governor under a new charter granted in 1609.

%22. The First Representative Assembly in America.%--Under the new charter and new governors Virginia began to thrive. More work and less grumbling were done, and a few wise reforms were introduced. One governor, however, Argall, ruled the colony so badly that the people turned against him and sent such reports to England that immigration almost ceased. The company, in consequence, removed Argall, and gave Virginia a better form of government. In future, the governor's power was to be limited, and the people were to have a share in the making of laws and the management of affairs. As the colonists, now numbering 4000 men, were living in eleven settlements, or "boroughs," it was ordered that each borough should elect two men to sit in a legislature to be called the House of Burgesses. This house, the first representative assembly ever held by white men in America, met on July 30, 1619, in the church at Jamestown, and there began "government of the people, by the people, for the people."

%23. The Establishment of Slavery in America.%--It is interesting to note that at the very time the men of Virginia thus planted free representative government in America, another institution was planted beside it, which, in the course of two hundred and fifty years, almost destroyed free government. The Burgesses met in July, and a few weeks later, on an August day, a Dutch ship entered the James and before it sailed away sold twenty negroes into slavery. The slaves increased in numbers , and slavery spread to the other colonies as they were started, till, in time, it existed in every one of them.

%24. Virginia loses her Charter, 1624.%--The establishment of popular government in Virginia was looked on by King James as a direct affront, and was one of many weighty reasons why he decided to destroy the company. To do this, he accused it of mismanagement, brought a suit against it, and in 1624 his judges declared the charter annulled, and Virginia became a royal colony.

Undeterred by such treatment, Baltimore was more determined than ever to plant a colony, and in 1632 obtained his grant of a piece of Virginia. The tract lay between the Potomac River and the fortieth degree of north latitude, and extended from the Atlantic Ocean to a north and south line through the source of the Potomac. It was called Maryland in honor of the Queen, Henrietta Maria.

The area of the colony was not large; but the authority of Lord Baltimore over it was almost boundless. He was to bring to the King each year, in token of homage, two Indian arrowheads, and pay as rent one fifth of all the gold and silver mined. This done, the "lord proprietary," as he was called, was to all intents and purposes a king. He might coin money, make war and peace, grant titles of nobility, establish courts, appoint judges, and pardon criminals; but he was not permitted to tax his people without their consent. He must summon the freemen to assist him in making the laws; but when made, they need not be sent to the King for approval, but went into force as soon as the lord proprietary signed them. Of course they must not be contrary to the laws of England.

The first settlement was made in 1634 at St. Marys. Annapolis was founded about 1683; and Baltimore in 1729.

%28. Dutch West India Company.%--On the expiration of the charter it was not renewed, but a new corporation, the Dutch West India Company , was created with almost absolute political and commercial power over all the Dutch domains in North America, which were called New Netherland. In 1623 the company began to send out settlers. Some went to Albany, or, as they called it, Fort Orange. Others were sent to the South or Delaware River, where a trading post, Fort Nassau, was built on the site of Gloucester in New Jersey. A few went to the Connecticut River; some settled on Long Island; and others on Manhattan Island, where they founded New Amsterdam, now called New York city.

All these little settlements were merely fur-trading posts. Nobody was engaged as yet in farming. To encourage this, the company took another step, and offered a great tract of land, on any navigable river or bay, to anybody who would establish a colony of fifty persons above the age of fifteen. If on a river, the domain was to be sixteen miles along one bank or eight miles along each bank, and run back into the country as far "as the situation of the occupiers will admit." The proprietor of the land was to be called a "patroon," and was absolute ruler of whatever colonies he might plant, for he was at once owner, ruler, and judge. It may well be supposed that such a tempting offer did not go a-begging, and a number of patroons were soon settled along the Hudson and on the banks of the Delaware , where they founded a town near Lewes. The settlements on the Delaware River were short-lived. The settlers quarreled with the Indians, who in revenge massacred them and drove off the garrison at Fort Nassau; whereupon the patroons sold their rights to the Dutch West India Company.

%29. The Struggle for the Delaware; the Swedes on the Delaware.%--And now began a bitter contest for the ownership of the country bordering the Delaware. A few leading officials of the Dutch Company, disgusted at the way its affairs were managed, formed a new company under the lead of William Usselinx. As they could not get a charter from Holland, for she would not create a rival to the Dutch Company, they sought and obtained one from Sweden as the South Company, and sent out a colony to settle on the Delaware River. The spot chosen was on the site of Wilmington. The country was named New Sweden, though it belonged to Maryland. The Dutch West India Company protested and rebuilt Fort Nassau. The Swedes, in retaliation, went farther up the river and fortified an island near the mouth of the Schuylkill. Had they stopped here, all would have gone well. But, made bold by the inaction of the Dutch, they began to annoy the New Netherlanders, till Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of New Netherland, unable to stand it any longer, came over from New Amsterdam with a few hundred men, overawed the Swedes, and annexed their territory west of the Delaware. New Sweden then became part of New Netherland.

SUMMARY

THE PLANTING OF NEW ENGLAND

%30. The Beginnings of New England.%--When the Dutch put up their trading posts where New York and Albany now stand, all the country east of New York, all of what is now New England, was a wilderness. As early as 1607 an attempt was made to settle it and a colony was planted on the coast of Maine by two members of the Plymouth Company, Sir John Popham, Lord Chief Justice of England, and Sir Ferdinando Gorges, governor of Plymouth. But the colonists were half starved and frozen, and in the spring of 1608 gladly went home to England.

Six years later John Smith, the hero of Virginia, explored and mapped the coast from the Penobscot to Cape Cod. He called the country New England; one of the rivers, the Charles; and two of the promontories, Cape Elizabeth and Cape Ann. Three times he attempted to lead out a colony; but that work was reserved for other men.

%31. The Separatists.%--The reign of Queen Elizabeth had witnessed in England the rise of a religious sect which insisted that certain changes should be made in the government and ceremonials of the Established or State Church of England. This they called purifying the Church, and in consequence they were themselves called Puritans. At first they did not intend to form a new sect; but in 1580 one of their ministers, named Robert Brown, urged them to separate from the Church of England, and soon gathered about him a great number of followers, who were called Separatists or Brownists. They boldly asserted their right to worship as they pleased, and put their doctrines into practice. So hot a persecution followed, that in 1608 a party, led by William Brewster and John Robinson, fled from Scrooby, a little village in northern England, to Amsterdam, in Holland; but soon went on to Leyden, where they dwelt eleven years.

%32. Why the Separatists went to New England%.--They had come to Holland as an organized community, practicing English manners and customs. For a temporary residence this would do. But if they and their children's children after them were to remain and prosper, they must break up their organization, forget their native land, their native speech, their national traditions, and to all intents and purposes become Dutch. This they could not bring themselves to do, and by 1617 they had fully determined to remove to some land where they might still continue to be Englishmen, and where they might lay the foundations of a Christian state. But one such land could then be found, and that was America. To America, therefore, they turned their attention, and after innumerable delays formed a company and obtained leave from the London Company to settle on the coast of what is now New Jersey.

%35. A Puritan Colony proposed.%--Among those who obtained such rights was a company of Dorchester merchants who planted a town on Cape Ann. The enterprise failed, and the colonists went off and settled at a place they called Naumkeag. But there was one man in Dorchester who was not discouraged by failure. He was John White, a Puritan rector. What had been done by the Separatists in a small way might be done, it seemed to White, on a great scale by an association of wealthy and influential Puritans. The matter was discussed by them in London, and in 1628 an association was formed, and a tract of land was bought from the Council for New England.

%36. The "Sea to Sea" Grant%.--Concerning the interior of our continent absolutely nothing was known. Nobody supposed it was more than half as wide as it really is. The grant to the association, therefore, stretched from three miles north of the Merrimac River to three miles south of the Charles River, along these rivers to their sources, and then westward across the continent from sea to sea.

As soon as the grant was obtained, John Endicott came out with a company of sixty persons, and took up his abode at Naumkeag, which, being an Indian and therefore a pagan name, he changed to Salem, the Hebrew word for "peace."

%37. The Massachusetts Charter, 1629%.--The next step was to obtain the right of self-government, which was secured by a royal charter creating a corporation known as the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England. Over the affairs of the company were to preside a governor, deputy governor, and a council of eighteen to be elected annually by the members of the company.

Six ships were now fitted out, and in them 406 men, women, and children, with 140 head of cattle, set sail for Massachusetts. They reached Salem in safety and made it the largest colony in New England.

Little wonder then that in 1629 twelve leading Puritans met in consultation and agreed to head a great migration to the New World, provided the charter and the government of the Massachusetts Bay Company were both removed to New England. This was agreed to, and in April, 1630, John Winthrop sailed with nearly one thousand Puritans for Salem. From Salem he moved to Charlestown, and later in the year to a little three-hilled peninsula, which the English called Tri-mountain or Tremont. There a town was founded and called Boston.

The departure of Winthrop was the signal, and before the year 1630 ended, seventeen ships, bringing fifteen hundred Puritans, reached Massachusetts. The newcomers settled Charlestown, Boston, Roxbury, Dorchester, Watertown, and Newtown . New England was planted.

%39. New Hampshire and Maine.%--When it became apparent that the Plymouth colony was permanently settled, Sir Ferdinando Gorges, whose interest in New England had never lagged, together with John Mason obtained from the Council for New England a grant of Laconia, as they called the territory between the Merrimac and the Kennebec rivers, and from the Atlantic "to the great river of Canada." Seven years later they divided their property. Mason, taking the territory between the Merrimac and Piscataqua rivers, called it New Hampshire because he was Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire in England. Gorges took the region between the Piscataqua and the Kennebec, and called it Maine. After the death of Mason his colony was neglected and from 1641 to 1679 was annexed to Massachusetts. The King separated them in 1679, joined them again in 1688, and finally parted them in 1691, making New Hampshire a royal colony.

Gorges took better care of his part and was given a charter with the title of Lord Proprietor of the Province or County of Maine, which extended, as before, from the Piscataqua to the Kennebec, and backward 120 miles from the ocean. But after his death the province fell into neglect, and the towns were gradually absorbed by Massachusetts, which, in 1677, bought the claims of the heir of Gorges for ?1250 and governed Maine as lord proprietor under the Gorges charter.

%40. Church and State in Massachusetts.%--Down to the moment of their arrival in America the Puritans had not been Separatists. They were still members of the Church of England who desired to see her form of worship purified. But the party under Endicott had no sooner reached Salem than they seceded, and the first Congregational Church in New England was founded.

Some in Salem were not prepared for so radical a step, and attempted to establish a church on the episcopal model; but Endicott promptly sent two of the leaders back to England. Thus were established two facts: 1. The separation or secession of the Colonial Church from that of England. 2. That the episcopal form of worship would not be tolerated in the colony.

In 1631 another step was taken which united church and state, for it was then ordered that "no man shall be admitted to the freedom of this body politic, but such as are members of some of the churches within the limits of the same."

This was intolerance of the grossest kind, and soon became the cause of troubles which led to the founding of Rhode Island and Connecticut.

%41. The Planting of Rhode Island.%--There came to Salem , in 1633, a young minister named Roger Williams. He dissented heartily from the intolerance of the people of Massachusetts, and, though a minister of the Salem church, insisted

To us, in this century, the justice of each of these principles is self-evident. But in the seventeenth century there was no country in the world where it was safe to declare them. For doing so in some parts of Europe, a man would most certainly have been burned at the stake. For doing so in England, he would have been put in the pillory, or had his ears cut off, or been sent to jail. That Williams's teachings should seem rank heresy in New England was quite natural. But, to make matters worse, he wrote a pamphlet in which he boldly stated

In the opinion of the people of New England such doctrine could not fail to bring down on Massachusetts the wrath of the King. When, therefore, a little later, Endicott cut the red cross of St. George out of the colors of the Salem militia, the people considered his act a defiance of royal authority, attributed it to the teachings of Williams, and proceeded to punish both. Endicott was rebuked by the General Court and forbidden to hold office for a year. Williams was ordered to go back to England. But he fled to the woods, and made his way through the snow to the wigwam of the Indian chief, Massasoit, on Narragansett Bay, and there in the summer of 1636 he founded Providence. About the same time another teacher of what was then thought heresy, Anne Hutchinson, was driven from Massachusetts, and with some of her followers went southward and founded Portsmouth and Newport, on the island of Rhode Island. For a while each of these settlements was independent, but in 1643 Williams went to London and secured a patent from Parliament which united them under the name of "The Incorporation of Providence Plantations on the Narragansett Bay in New England."

%42. Connecticut begun.%--In the same year that Roger Williams began his settlement at Providence, several hundred people from the towns near Boston went off and settled in the Connecticut valley. For a long time past there had been growing up in Massachusetts a strong feeling that the law that none but church members should vote or hold office was oppressive. This feeling became so strong that in 1635 some hardy pioneers from Dorchester pushed through the wilderness and settled at Windsor. A party from Watertown went further and settled Wethersfield. These were small movements. But in 1636 the Newtown congregation, led by its pastor, Thomas Hooker, walked to the Connecticut valley and founded Hartford. The congregations of the Dorchester and Watertown churches soon followed, while a party from Roxbury settled at Springfield. During three years these four towns were part of Massachusetts. But in 1639, Windsor, Hartford, and Wethersfield adopted a constitution and formed a little republic which in time was called Connecticut. Their "Fundamental Orders of Connecticut" was the first written constitution made in America. Their republic was the first in the history of the world to be founded by a written constitution, and marks the beginning of democratic government in our country.

%43. The New Haven Colony.%--Just at the time these things were happening in the Connecticut valley, the beginnings of another little republic were made on the shores of Long Island Sound. One day in the summer of 1637 there came to Boston a company of rich London merchants under the lead of an eloquent preacher named John Davenport. The people of Boston would gladly have kept the newcomers at that town. But the strangers desired to found a state of their own, and so, after spending some months in seeking for a spot with a good harbor, they left Boston in 1638 and founded New Haven. In 1639 Milford and Guilford were laid out, and Stamford was started in 1640. Three years later these four towns joined in a sort of federal union and took the name of the New Haven colony.

%44. "The United Colonies of New England."%--There were now five colonies in New England; namely, Plymouth, or the "Old Colony," Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven. Geographically, they were near each other. But each was weak in numbers, and if left without the aid of its neighbors, might easily have fallen a prey to some enemy. Of this the settlers were well aware, and in 1643 four of the colonies, Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven united for defense against the Indians and the Dutch, who claimed the Connecticut valley and so threatened the English colonies on the west.

The name of this league was "The United Colonies of New England," and it was the first attempt in America at federal government. All its affairs were managed by a board of eight commissioners,--two from each colony,--who must be church members. They had no power to lay taxes or to meddle with the internal concerns of the colonies, but they had entire control over all dealings with Indians or with foreign powers.

%45. The Year 1643.%--The year 1643 is thus an important one in colonial history. It was in that year that the New Haven colony was founded; that the league of The United Colonies of New England was formed; and that Roger Williams obtained the first charter of Rhode Island.

SUMMARY

THE MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN COLONIES

There was at first no intention of dividing the territory, although, after Charleston was founded , North Carolina and South Carolina sometimes had separate governors. But in 1729 the proprietors sold Carolina to the King, and it was then divided into two distinct and separate royal provinces.

The King had already granted New Netherland to his brother the Duke of York, in honor of whom the town of New Amsterdam was now renamed New York.

%49. New Jersey.%--The Duke of York no sooner received his province than he gave so much of it as lay between the Delaware and the ocean to his friends Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, and called it New Jersey, in honor of Sir George Carteret, who had been governor of the island of Jersey in the English Channel. The two proprietors divided it between them by the line shown on the map . In 1674 Berkeley sold West Jersey to a company of Quakers, who settled near Burlington. A little later, 1676, William Penn and some other Quakers bought East Jersey. There were then two colonies till 1702, when the proprietors surrendered their rights, and New Jersey became one royal province.

%50. The Beginnings of Pennsylvania.%--The part which Penn took in the settlement of New Jersey suggested to him the idea of beginning a colony which should be a refuge for the persecuted of all lands and of all religions.

%51. The Three Lower Counties: Delaware.%--If you look at the map of the British Colonies in 1764, you will see that Pennsylvania was the only English colony which did not have a seacoast. This was a cause of some anxiety to Penn, who was afraid that the settlers in Delaware and New Jersey might try to prevent his colonists from going in and out of Delaware Bay. To avoid this, he bought what is now Delaware from the Duke of York.

The three lower counties on the Delaware, as the tract was called, had no boundary. Lawfully it belonged to Lord Baltimore. But neither the Dutch patroons who settled on the Delaware in 1631, nor the Swedes who came later, nor the Dutch who annexed New Sweden to New Netherland, nor the English who conquered the Dutch, paid any regard to Baltimore's rights. At last, after the purchase of Delaware, the heirs of Baltimore and of Penn agreed on what is the present boundary line. After 1703 the people of the three lower counties were allowed to have an assembly or legislature of their own; but they had the same governor as Pennsylvania and were a part of that colony till the Revolution.

%52. Georgia.%--The return of the Carolinas to the King in 1729 was very soon followed by the establishment of the last colony ever planted by England in the United States. The founder was James Oglethorpe, an English soldier and member of Parliament. Filled with pity for the poor debtors with whom the English jails were then crowded, he formed a plan to pay the debts of the most deserving, send them to America, and give them what hundreds of thousands of men have since found in our country,--a chance to begin life anew.

Money for the colony was easily raised, and in November, 1732, Oglethorpe, with 130 persons, set out for Charleston, and after a short stay there passed southward and founded the city of Savannah . It must not be supposed that all the colonists were poor debtors. In time, Italians from Piedmont, Moravians and Lutherans from Germany, and Scotchmen from the Highlands, all made settlements in Georgia.

%53. The Thirteen English Colonies.%--Thus it came about that between 1606 and 1733 thirteen English colonies were planted on the Atlantic seaboard of what is now the United States. Naming them from north to south, they were: 1. New Hampshire, with no definite western boundary; 2. Massachusetts, which owned Maine and a strip of territory across the continent; 3. Rhode Island, with her present bounds; 4. Connecticut, with a great tract of land extending to the Pacific; 5. New York, with undefined bounds; 6. New Jersey; 7. Pennsylvania and 8. Delaware, the property of the Penn family; 9. Maryland, the property of the heirs of Lord Baltimore; 10. Virginia, with claims to a great part of North America; 11. North Carolina, 12. South Carolina, and 13. Georgia, all with claims to the Pacific.

SUMMARY

BEGINNINGS OF THE THIRTEEN COLONIES

Failures:

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet