V
THE PURITANS IN NEW ENGLAND
Takingup the settlement of the colonies more in detail, we may commence with New England. The first inhabitants of Massachusetts were pre-dominantly from the eastern half of England. This contains the counties in which Nordic influence had probably been the strongest, and the early settlement of Massachusetts was by an overwhelmingly Nordic stock, judging alike by place of origin and by family and personal names. A study of the origin of the pioneers of Plymouth, Watertown, and Dedham shows that two-thirds of them came from a region along the English coast between London and the Wash and mostly from the southern part of that stretch of territory.
Although given an important position by historians because of its priority and the romantic incidents connected with its founding, Plymouth Colony, because of its small size, played only a minor part in the early development of the American nation. Its settlers, as shown by the detailed accounts available concerning many of them, were people of the lower and middle classes, mostly of good character but attracting to their numbers also adventurers and men of more doubtful quality.
Within five or six years after the landing at Plymouth Rock, the Plymouth settlers were already outnumbered by other settlers in New England, while Plymouth itself was the parent of a number of other settlements that outstripped it. During the decade 1630-40 it became a province of eight small towns, seven of them stretching for fifty miles along the shore of Cape Cod Bay, from Scituate to Yarmouth, with Taunton lying twenty-five miles inland. The entire colony would probably have moved to the Connecticut River valley, had not the competition of settlers from Massachusetts Bay been too strong. Two generations after the original settlement there the number of inhabitants of Plymouth was no greater than it was at the start.
In the decade of 1620-30 there was a rapid but sporadic settlement of small towns on or near the Massachusetts coast, but the first great migration was that represented by the arrival of Governor Winthrop's fleet in Massachusetts Bay in 1630. The new arrivals settled Boston, Charlestown, Medford, Watertown, Roxbury, Lynn, and Dorchester. During the next decade the Puritan emigration from England continued, again largely from the northern and eastern counties, overwhelmingly of as nearly pure Nordic stock as Great Britain could show.
Showing Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland.
The difference in antecedents of the Massachusetts Bay Colony from that of Plymouth is reflected in the differences in geographical and social origin. The Pilgrim Fathers, as every one knows, took their start from Scrooby in Yorkshire at the point wherethis county joins Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, under the leadership of Bradford, the local postmaster and Robinson the clergyman. The capital for the enterprise was almost all subscribed in London, and only one-third of the first settlers were members of Robinson's congregation. The part of Scrooby and Holland in that colony has therefore often been exaggerated. The English founders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were on the other hand not merely religious dissenters, but powerful members of the Puritan nobility. The group attracted to their enterprise was therefore one of a somewhat wider social outlook. It was distinguished for the same reason from most of the later emigration.
The people who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the decade of 1630-40 doubtless had every desire to better their condition, and their zeal in seizing land from the Indians showed that they were able to put this desire into effect successfully. Their motive in emigrating, however, was more political than was that of many later colonists, most of whom came frankly to find fortune in a new country.
There were among them a sprinkling of members of the important county families and even a few representatives of the Puritan gentry. Alumni of Cambridge were liberally represented among the clergy, together with a few from Oxford, although few other professional men seem to have been in the group. Many of the settlers were from families of merchants, among whom Puritanism had made great progress in England. The bulk, however, consisted of more or less well-to-do yeomen and artisans.
Since a large part of this Puritan migration, which probably amounted to 20,000 between 1620 and 1640, came in groups often following their local clergymen, it is fairly easy to determine from what parts of Great Britain the early population of Massachusetts came. The evidence all indicates that little of it was from the far north of England where Puritanism had made comparatively slight progress. The greater proportion of the settlers came from the Puritan stronghold of East Anglia comprising the counties of Suffolk, Essex, Norfolk, and eastern Hereford. Next to this was the emigration from Wessex including Dorset, Somerset, and eastern Devon. Following came contributions from Kent, from the midland counties of Buckingham, Northampton, and Leicester, a considerable group from the borders of Wiltshire, Hampshire, and western Berkshire with some from as far west as Gloucestershire near the Welsh border. A large Boston group came from Lincolnshire (which was the home of the ancestors of the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin) and of course there was a strong contingent from London, which was largely Puritan and Presbyterian. Towns in Massachusetts tended to be settled by people who were all from the same region in England; and as the expansion of Massachusetts was very largely in the form of congregations from given towns, these populations often kept together for a long time. Frequently the town's name indicates the old home. Thus Gloucester was settled by men from that county and Dorchester was named for the town in Dorset from which its early settlers came with the Rev. John Maverick, although it contained an element of Lancashire people from the neighborhood of Preston, Liverpool, and Manchester.
Ulster Scot and New England origins—1, heaviest; 2, heavy; 3, light; 4, very light; 5, uncertain; 6, English definitely present.
Along with the desire of these settlers to better themselves, to acquire the ownership of land, and to seek fortune in new countries, the disturbed political conditions in Great Britain particularly urged Puritans to migrate. British documents of the period throw many sidelights on the nature and scope of this movement. Thus Lord Maynard, in a memorandum to Archbishop Laud in 1638, laments "the intention of divers clothiers of great trading to go suddenly into New England." He hears daily of incredible numbers of persons of very good abilities who have sold their lands to depart and says there is danger of divers parishes being impoverished.
Since some of them liked the Massachusetts government no better than the one at home, the tide of emigration turned strongly toward the West Indies, the British islands of which were rapidly filled with Nordic stock. The history of Nordic settlement in the West Indies is little known and is exceedingly instructive in connection with a study of the peopling of the New World. Bermuda was colonized in 1612, Saint Kitts in 1623, Barbadoes and Saint Croix in 1625, and Nevis three years later. By 1640 Massachusetts had about 14,000 settlers; but SaintKitts had almost as many and Barbadoes decidedly more. The number of Englishmen who migrated to the West Indies was perhaps three times as large as the number who went to all New England.
Down to the end of the eighteenth century the West Indies were flourishing, populous, and wealthy, but these islands then ceased to have any world-wide importance—not merely because of economic and agricultural changes, such as affected the sugar industry, but because the white man in the tropics could not compete on even terms with the Negro. It will be pointed out later that these islands are now virtually Negro territory, and they have become centers of emigration into the United States of a black population of low economic and social status—the Nordics having died out, or lost their original characteristics, or gone elsewhere.
From 1640 the emigration from Great Britain to New England almost stopped and the tide turned the other way; many settlers in Massachusetts either returning to England or going to the West Indies. The natural increase of the population from then on accounts for most of the growth of the New England colonies. Even here, however, the Bay State fell behind Virginia in rate of increase of white population.
PURITAN EMIGRATION FROM ENGLAND1620 TO 1640SHOWING A TOTAL OF ABOUT 67,300
New England 17,800Maryland and Virginia 9500West Indies including Bermuda about 40,000
New England 17,800Maryland and Virginia 9500West Indies including Bermuda about 40,000
Almost as soon as they had established themselves around Massachusetts Bay, groups of settlers began to push out in all directions, partly to get better or cheaper land, and partly to get greater independence of action. In this way the settlement of Connecticutwas begun as early as 1634. In the next year emigrants arrived in Connecticut from Dorchester and Watertown in Massachusetts and in 1636 from Newton. They established settlements in the Connecticut River valley bearing the names of the Massachusetts towns from which they came until the names of Windsor, Wethersfield, and Hartford were substituted. In 1638 came the settlements at New Haven, Guilford, Milford, and elsewhere. Stratford, Fairfield, Norwalk, and Stamford were established not many months later as a challenge to the Dutch from New York who regarded that part of Connecticut as their own domain. By 1640, at least a couple of thousand settlers were in Connecticut; Hartford, New Haven, and New London becoming in their turn the main gateways of immigration into the whole back country. The settlement of New England was, in general, however, from south to north, proceeding along the river valleys.
The fisheries and the excellent supply of timber for naval construction led to scattered settlements on the coast of Maine even earlier. The lack of navigable rivers delayed penetration into the interior—but during the seventeenth century the Massachusetts people had settled along most of the river valleys. Even to this day the interior of Maine is very largely backwoods. This territory was claimed by Massachusetts as a part of its own dominion, from which it did not separate until in 1820 when it was admitted as an independent State to offset Missouri in Henry Clay's famous compromise.
As Indians were gradually dispossessed, the population of Massachusetts continued to push westward. In 1676 the end of King Philip's War removed the fear of Indians for a time and led to particularly active movements of population inland. Meanwhile settlements had been made in New Hampshire and Rhode Island. The first settlement in New Hampshire had been made by David Thomson, a Scotsman who established himself on the coast; but its population came from Plymouth Colony and later from other parts of Massachusetts. The spread of the English in the New Hampshire mountains and forests, where the Indians continued hostile for a long time, was slow, and even at the time of the Revolution, New Hampshire contained few settlements of any size. The greatest development came toward the end of the period here considered. In 1700 it held but 5000 or 6000 souls. Up to 1760 only the coast towns had any considerable population, but the peace of 1763, which finally removed the French and Indian menace, resulted in a rapid penetration of settlers largely from Connecticut. In the next fifteen years 30,000 people are said to have entered New Hampshire from Connecticut alone, and a hundred new towns had been planted.
Rhode Island already had a few settlers before Roger Williams founded Providence (1636), though that is generally regarded as the beginning of the colony. Portsmouth was founded in 1638, Newport and Warwick in 1639, and in 1644 these settlements were united under one government. Because of itssmall size, Rhode Island plays in a sense only a minor part in the history of the formation of the early population of North America. But it served as a place of entry for colonists from all sources, and it likewise attracted settlers from the other colonies, due to its conspicuous policy of political and religious toleration. In another way the small size of Rhode Island led to its being a source of colonization. Its available land resources were so small that large families soon exhausted them and there was no recourse except to get out of the colony. It was therefore an incubator for colonists and furnished more emigrants in proportion to its population than did other colonies which had greater resources wherewith to care for their own people. It may be said that while Massachusetts is the parent of all New England, the whole of New England is in some sense a parent of Rhode Island. In either case, the racial homogeneity of the population is conspicuous, the little groups of settlers who represented other than Nordic stock being insignificant in numbers however much they may appeal through sentiment to the pride of their descendants.
Vermont was settled late, its main occupation not coming until after the Revolution. At first a part of New Hampshire, it attracted occasional settlers from that State and its neighbors, but there could hardly be said to have been a permanent settlement until Brattleboro was founded in 1740.
The settlement of Massachusetts west of the Connecticut River began in 1725, when the Berkshireswere invaded and Sheffield established. Settlers steadily pressed north and west, and gradually took possession of the territory between the Connecticut River and Lake Champlain. The Connecticut River was the first American frontier, as Alaska was the last.
At the time of the Revolution Vermont was very much of a frontier, in which a lawless and defiant lot known as the Green Mountain Boys held possession and yielded allegiance to no one. Within six weeks after the collapse of Shays's Rebellion, more than 700 families are said to have migrated from western Massachusetts into Vermont. Many New England soldiers who had fought over this ground in the Revolution had marked it as offering desirable home sites, and came into it to take up land and clear it, to bring their families, and establish isolated settlements which gradually coalesced into something like a settled country. The increasing influx of New Englanders led to the surrender of New York's claims on the territory, so that it took its place as an independent State in 1791, the first to be added to the original thirteen.
The picture of New England then is that of a community which received the bulk of its foundation stock in a very short period of time, 1620 to 1640, and almost wholly from a single source; that is, England, and specifically from the most Nordic districts of England. It was no mere figure of speech when Captain John Smith bestowed upon the region the prophetic name of New England. During the eighteenth century, scattered groups of other origins came to add themselves to the descendants of these early settlers; but in most cases they represented only drops in the bucket. Doubtless one of the reasons why the study of genealogy and the pride of ancestry have flourished most conspicuously in New England is that so large a proportion of the old population traces its ancestry back to the same period and to the same group of people. Even as early as the Revolution, the great bulk of the settlers of New England represented families that had been four or five generations on American soil.
If there was a conspicuous absence of immigrants of very distinguished families into New England at that time, it may be said, on the other hand, that the general level was sound and intelligent. The immigrant population of New England was composed of a small group of families dominant in business and the professions, and an overwhelming proportion of representatives of the English yeomanry, owners of small freeholds, whose sons often sailed ships or went to the fisheries. This same type made up the bulk of the population of the middle colonies and peopled the back country of the southern colonies. As most of the settlers in New England in the early migration were men who brought their families, the foundation stock thus established was on a better level than that in some other colonies where men arrived without bringing wives and therefore were forced to marry women of any kind whom the colony could furnish. The definitely Nordic characterof New England stock, its early establishment, and the survival of the able and vigorous in a region where nature took a heavy toll of weaklings, have produced in New England a population that has left its stamp on subsequent American history as has no other group.
As to the Ulster Scots we must bear in mind that the Irish question was as serious a thorn in the side of English statesmen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as it was before or since, and numerous attempts were made to alleviate the situation, if not to end it, by the colonization of Protestant people in Ireland. In 1611, James I began to encourage the emigration of people from the lowlands of Scotland, particularly from the western part, and from the north of England, into Ulster. He looked forward to establishing in Ireland a staunch Protestant population that might ultimately outnumber the Catholics and become the controlling element politically. For this reason the settlers were picked with some care. The plan succeeded so well that in a generation or a little more, about 300,000 people had been colonized in the northern part of the island, and by the end of a century their number had risen to nearly a million.
These are the "Scotch Irish" of American history. The name is a grotesque misnomer suggesting to the popular mind a sort of hybrid origin and hybrid character which has no basis in reality. They were not Irish in any sense of the word, and while most of them were Scotch a great many were English. They are designated in this book as "Ulster Scots."
Following the planting of Ulster in the north of Ireland, there was a heavy British emigration into the east of Ireland. This was due partly to economic factors and partly to the desire of Cromwell, in his turn, to solve the Irish problem by colonization, after the precedent which James I had established. These English Protestants in eastern Ireland have too often been ignored. They, too, had nothing in common with the older Roman Catholic population of the eastern part of the Island. Many of the Protestant "Irish" were Quakers.
These adopted children of Ireland also migrated freely to the American colonies and have been assumed far too easily to have been Roman Catholics. While it is extremely difficult to arrive at exact figures on this point, there is some reason to believe that the number of Protestant English in the east of Ireland during the seventeenth century was as large as the number of Protestant Scotch in the north, and this former group contributed its quota of English population to the colonies. It was this group which imposed the English language on the Irish. Until the later 1840's the Leinster Protestants and the Ulster Presbyterians were practically the only immigrants from Ireland to this country.
The great movement of Ulster Scots to America, although of an entirely different degree of magnitude, has been perhaps second only to that from the English counties in its influence on the subsequenthistory of the Continent. It began in the latter part of the seventeenth century but did not reach its height until the first quarter of the eighteenth. Five shiploads arrived in the summer of 1718, giving Cotton Mather the chance to note in his diary with anticipatory pleasure the merit that would accrue to him from showing "kindness to ye indigent." Thereafter, one finds in most histories such items as "In 1719 there came one hundred and twenty Presbyterian families from the north of Ireland who settled in Massachusetts" or "In the years 1719 and 1720 more than one hundred Presbyterian families came from the north of Ireland and settled at Londonderry in New Hampshire," and so on.
The Congregationalists of the seaboard were not too hospitable to these Presbyterians, and forced them to move inland in almost every case, away from the long-settled territory over which the Boston theocracy attempted to maintain its rule, and mostly to New Hampshire and Connecticut. Londonderry recalls its origin by its name and the Scotch who settled it not only introduced their manufactures into New Hampshire but brought along with them a still more valuable importation, the so-called Irish potato, which, having been taken from South America to Ireland long before, had, in this round-about way, been brought back to its own hemisphere. Other groups went to Worcester, to Pelham, to Palmer, to Andover, and to other communities in small numbers; while many others went to Maine. The total numbers, however, were very small.
Massachusetts had a definite policy at this time of encouraging, if not requiring, immigrants of this sort to settle on the frontiers. They furnished less competition in this way and played a useful part in keeping off the Indians.
The emigration of the Scotch and North English who had been in Ulster for a generation or two or at the most for three generations, was due to discontent with their situation there. They had built up an important manufacture of woollens and linens which has ever since been famous throughout the world; but in 1698 the jealousy of rival industrialists in England led to Parliamentary legislation which crippled the industries in Ulster and threw many men out of employment. In 1704 and the following years a religious persecution of these Presbyterians was also carried on. These economic and religious handicaps were so great that after a few years of patient waiting the population gave up hope, and within half a century about half of the entire number had moved to the New World. The most important stream went into the middle and southern colonies and will be traced later.
This exodus was a cause of alarm in the old country as well as in the new. "The rumour [of going to America] has spread like a contagious distemper," laments an Irish letter writer in 1728; "and the worst is that it affects only Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the North"; while another laments that "there are now seven ships at Belfast, that are carrying off about 1000 passengers thither; and if weknew how to stop them, as most of them can get neither victuals nor work at home, it would be cruel to do it."
Reference will recur frequently to this immigration of Ulster Scots. At this point it is necessary to emphasize in the first place that it was little different in racial background from the preceding English settlement, both groups being definitely Nordic in their make-up. In the second place it was a valuable addition to the colonies in the quality and energy of its members. In the third place it was always small in proportion to the English element.
New England in 1790, regardless of numerous non-English groups, many of them of good individual quality though insignificant in total numbers, is to be considered definitely as a transplanted English population, most of which had been settled in North America so long that its habits of thought and action had become differentiated—one might say definitely American rather than English.
A third source of New England settlers during this period, small in numbers but valuable in quality, is represented by the French Huguenots who arrived for the most part in the decade or two following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
The Huguenot migration to America falls in two general epochs. From 1555, when Admiral Coligny had a vision of a Protestant France in the New World, to the Revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, the French charter of Protestant liberty, is the first epoch, during which the immigration wasscattering. From 1685 up to about 1750 is the second epoch, when the Huguenots, fleeing from oppression and death, sought refuge in many countries. During this period their immigration to North America reached considerable proportions. Providence and Boston were points of entry for many, though more went to the Southern colonies, and to them many an American family of the present day is proud to trace its ancestry.
These French Huguenots seem to have come pre-dominantly from the middle class or artisan stratum of the population with a mixture of the lesser gentry. But their energy, ability, and character earned for them an important rôle in their adopted country, out of proportion to their small numbers. Unlike some of the other non-English groups they did not tend to establish colonies or settlements of their own, but scattered widely and merged freely into the general population. This was the less difficult in that they came from the most Nordic parts of France and in racial composition are scarcely to be distinguished from the English.
In the same way those northern and eastern counties of England, which supplied a large part of the migration to America, had, during the preceding century, received a continuous infusion of continental Huguenots to a total sometimes estimated as high as 250,000, who there also became by admixture and hereditary similitude indistinguishable from their neighbors.
The Indian population of New England thoughnever great was largely exterminated by war, disease, whiskey, and the breaking up of their cultural and economic background. In the century before the settlement of Plymouth, smallpox, introduced from the Spanish Main, had flickered up and down the New England coast and had so decimated the natives that only a weakened remnant remained to oppose the Whites.
In contrast, in the eleventh century the Norsemen who attempted to found settlements on the New England coast had met with savage resistance from the natives, whom they called Skrellings.
Intermarriage between Whites and Indians was almost unknown save in the occasional case in which a colonist was carried into captivity. The antipathy of the English settlers to the Indians was far too great to lead to the sort of miscegenation which was encouraged by the French in their part of the continent, and to which reference will be made later. In the British colonies the half-breed was looked upon as an Indian, whereas in the French colonies, as generally in all Colonial countries that had the Roman imperial tradition and the Roman Catholic religion, the half-breed was assimilated to the European group. Some of the remaining Indians along the Atlantic coast mixed with the runaway Negro slaves, but few of them contributed to the white population, and the term "half-breed" was in general a term of contempt. It was not until within the life-time of those now living that an infusion of Indian blood became a subject of pride, particularly in Oklahoma, unless one makes exception for such isolated tales as the somewhat grotesque Pocahontas tradition in Virginia.
The predominant influence of Massachusetts at the time of the Revolution is easy to understand. It possessed, to an unusual degree, unity in the various fields in which unity is most valuable to a nation—unity of race, unity of language, unity of culture, unity of religion, unity of institutions—and, more than anywhere else in the United States, its unity was attained through a long-continued, independent growth on American soil.
The French and Indian menace held back the rapidly multiplying population of New England for at least a generation. The agricultural areas were carrying more population than they could support, and they were waiting for a favorable opportunity to spread out. This opportunity came in the overthrow of Montcalm at Quebec in 1759. The Peace of Paris in 1763 left the road open, and the New England population began to push north, west, and south with a vigor that was reflected in the activity of the communities at home. The succeeding half-century is correctly regarded as the golden age of New England. Its country districts were more densely populated when the first census of the United States was taken in 1790 than they have been since. The decline, which will be traced in the next section, then began and decade after decade thereafter the New England towns and villages are found in a surprisingly large percentage of cases either standingstill or actually declining in number of inhabitants.
The history of American colonization is usually written only in terms of the additions to population. The subtractions from it may be no less important. Subtractions by migration westward were less significant because in many cases the frontier merely proliferated itself by sending its surplus out without diminishing its own standards or numbers.
The first national loss of population occurred after 1640 when the changing political conditions in England, and the tyranny of the Massachusetts Bay authorities, drove many people out of Massachusetts. This loss, serious as it was, is insignificant compared with the tremendous loss of superior stock at the time of the Revolution. The Loyalists made up an undetermined part of the population, perhaps as much as one-third. Those who had been most conspicuous or most active were obliged in many cases to flee, and persecution with the confiscation of their property was carried on even after the war. Most of the Loyalists who left the colonies went either to Canada or to the West Indies. Altogether the loss from this source may have been as great as 100,000 people representing on the whole a superior selection of the population. It is comparable in the racial damage done the American population with the loss which France suffered from the expulsion of the Huguenots.
By the Revolution, the colonizing impulse of New England had not merely begun to fill up western New York, as will be described shortly, but had ledto the formation of speculative land companies for settlement in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, and even on the lower Mississippi. The hard times following the Revolution led to a great increase in migration, which, in general, has been rapid in hard times, slower in periods of prosperity. Vermont, as already said, felt the impulse markedly. Maine also seems to have grown most rapidly in the decade or two following the Declaration of Independence, though Portland and Falmouth were the only towns worthy of the name. New Hampshire, likewise, slower in its development than other parts of New England, had begun to catch up by attracting those ready to better themselves by a change of location. Connecticut had made a steady growth and had fewer non-English elements than almost any other of the New England colonies, small as these elements were everywhere. The growth of Massachusetts had been largely in the interior, Boston having made less progress than many other cities. People were moving from Massachusetts to other colonies. Many were moving through Boston but not staying there. Politically and culturally important, the Hub of the Universe stagnated industrially until the beginning of the manufacturing era.
VI
THE GATEWAYS TO THE WEST FROM NEW ENGLAND AND VIRGINIA
In1609, the English navigator, Henry Hudson, had explored the river which now bears his name, acting on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. During the next decade, small Dutch settlements, trading posts, were established along the river; but the first real settlement is generally dated 1623 when thirty families of Walloons arrived. These were people from northern France and the southern Netherlands who had been driven into Holland by religious persecution and wanted to escape from the unsympathetic treatment which they were receiving in the southern part of Holland. Their language was not Dutch but French.
Speaking at large the Dutch settlement of New Netherland was, at the beginning, a trading venture and was based on a stronghold at the mouth of the river and another one at the head of navigation. For many years the latter settlement, originally called Fort Orange and later Albany, was much more important than the little town of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.
Restrictions on land tenure held back colonization, and at no time during the Dutch occupation did its reach extend much beyond the fertile farm lands of the Hudson valley northerly to Fort Orange, thoughan outpost to the west was established at Schenectady and scattering settlements had also been made in New Jersey and on Long Island.
In all these outlying regions, the pressure of New England migrants was too strong for the scanty Dutch population to withstand, and even in Manhattan the New Englanders had become early an important part of the population.
The immigration of respectable Dutch families did not begin in general until after 1638 when the monopoly of the West India Company was abolished. Many of the families who became great land owners in the northern part of the Hudson River valley were from Gelderland, east of the Zuyder Zee, the town of Myjerka being one of the principal centers of emigration. While many of these Dutch families were of excellent mercantile stock, it is a mistake to suppose that they represented the social élite of the home country.
Although the Dutch have left a permanent mark on the Hudson River valley, the contribution which they made to the future population of the State was small. When England captured the colony in 1664 and the Dutch immigration ceased, there were probably not many more than 10,000 inhabitants in the whole region, and of these from a quarter to a third were English.
Holland at the time was not at all a colonizing nation. Its overseas ventures were for the purpose of trade, and it had not sufficient surplus population to settle colonies permanently.
The amount of Dutch and Huguenot blood that was perpetuated in the later history of the colonies was, therefore, small by comparison with the English, but was for the most part of the same racial stock. Six or seven thousand Dutch in the present State of New York in 1664 are to be compared with 35,000 English in Virginia and 50,000 in New England at the same date.
There was no further general and organized emigration from Holland to America until the close of the Revolution. At that time some of the Amsterdam bankers, who had loaned millions of dollars to the Revolutionary government, decided to try to capitalize their investments and bought nearly 4,000,000 acres of land in New York and Pennsylvania. Most of the settlers on this tract were not Dutch; and while Dutch names may still play an important part in the Social Registers of New York and Albany, Dutch blood is insignificant in the present make-up of the population of the United States.
The southerly tide of New Englanders, which washed over the Dutch colony and others to the South, was in the first instance made up largely of those who did not find the religious convictions of their associates in Massachusetts and Connecticut to their liking.
The little "Forts" of the Dutch in the Connecticut valley were swamped shortly after 1630, and by 1639 the Connecticut people of English ancestry had established themselves at Greenwich within thirty miles of New Amsterdam and in other towns evennearer. Long Island was settled from the same source, and Thomas Belcher took up a tract upon the present site of the City of Brooklyn in the same year in which the English began to build at Greenwich. Brooklyn, until the twentieth century, has been a typically New England community, entirely distinct from the other boroughs of Greater New York. The eastern end of Long Island was long separated from the western end and was settled directly from Connecticut. The Hamptons are virtually still a part of New England.
The development of the southern part of New York State, and particularly of the Hudson River valley, was delayed indefinitely by the great land holdings of the so-called "patroons" or great landlords. New York City continued to be a cosmopolitan and nondescript town, built up on commerce and trade and without any particular racial complexion. Even at the time of the Revolution, it was inferior alike in size and in influence to Philadelphia and Boston, and New York State was but seventh in population among the thirteen colonies.
The real foundation of the greatness of the Empire State was the New England colonization of northern and western New York, which created a territory that was, and has ever since remained, quite distinct in political complexion and economic and social interests from the Hudson River valley and the metropolis at its mouth.
The commercial greatness of the City of New York dates from the opening of the Erie Canal in1825, which made New York the outlet of the lake States. Meanwhile, however, several other foreign invasions had taken place.
The French Huguenots, racially Nordic and almost identical with the British, began to arrive in Colonial New York after 1685, founding the town of New Rochelle to commemorate the French city from which so many of them had come. Here, as elsewhere, their influence was far in excess of their proportionately small number.
In 1711, Governor Hunter of New York became imbued with grandiose ideas about developing the resources of his Province and began to look for a source of cheap labor for its exploitation. He found this in the German districts on the Rhine, broadly known as the Palatinate, where various national elements, not merely German and Alsatian, but French, Swiss, Moravian, and miscellaneous, were gathered, and where the religious persecution to which they were subjected as Protestants, and the excessive hardships which they were compelled to endure from invasions of the armies of Louis XIV, had reduced them to great misery.
The population was ripe for emigration and furnished the only substantial element of non-Nordic origin in the Colonial history of America. It is not necessary to trace in detail the innumerable petty sects and national elements, often two or three times removed from their original home, of which this "Palatine" emigration was composed. For the present purpose it was pre-dominantly German-speaking,and largely of the round-headed Alpine stock in racial make-up.
About 1709, these Palatines began frantic efforts to escape from their misfortunes, and within a few years some 30,000 had gone over into Holland and even into England, where they were not welcome. The British Government was only too glad to subsidize their further emigration, and several thousand of them were transported to the Hudson River valley. They soon became discontented there and were finally colonized on the Schoharie River in New York. Here, in turn, they were ousted by what they considered political jobbery and many of them moved on to the Mohawk River, a tributary of the Hudson, while others continued down the Susquehanna River to Pennsylvania. On the whole, therefore, the Palatines are to be considered merely temporary inhabitants of New York State. Although a good many of them remained, the reports they sent out as to their treatment were so unsatisfactory that thenceforth the Palatine immigration mostly avoided New York and landed in Pennsylvania, where it will be encountered later.
The next influx, particularly after 1719, was of Ulster Scots, similar to that already mentioned as invading New England. Much of Orange County on the west of the Hudson River was settled by these Ulstermen, beginning as early as 1729, and for the next half-century the infiltration of this Nordic element was continuous, although more of it came through New England than directly into New Yorkharbor. By the time of the Revolution the Ulster Scots had spread over much of the eastern part of northern New York, having enough representatives in Albany in 1760 to establish a Presbyterian church there.
At about the same time Sir William Johnson, who had received a grant of 100,000 acres of land north of the Mohawk River for his valor in defending the colonies against the French at Crown Point and Lake George in 1755, began to look about for suitable tenants and hit upon the idea of importing Scotch Highlanders of Roman Catholic faith. Some hundreds of these arrived just before the Revolution, and like Sir John Johnson, son of Sir William, espoused the cause of the Loyalists. After the Revolution, they moved northward to Ontario where the town of Glengarry recalls their earlier home in Inverness. There, such families as the MacDonnells, McDougalls, Camerons, McIntyres, and Fergusons became an important element of strength to Canada.
As noted, New York State at the time of the Revolution was still distinctly an unimportant colony, and its greatness dates from the invasion of New Englanders immediately after the war. Connecticut, by virtue of its proximity, was the principal source of these settlers, although almost every part of New England contributed. The crossing over of the Ulster Scots has already been mentioned, but it must not be inferred that that was the principal element in the settlement of the State. The main immigration was of the old Puritan Englishstock which still dominates all of upper New York, except where subsequent colonies of recent immigrants in some of the larger industrial cities have altered the local scene.
The western shores of Lake Champlain and some of the older towns of the Hudson River valley could scarcely be recognized, after a few years, by those who had known them previously. A mere Dutch farm in 1784 had been changed in four years to the thriving city of Hudson, a typical New England commercial town with warehouses, wharves, Yankee shipping, and stores filled with Yankee notions.
A visitor to Whitesborough on the Mohawk River, in 1788, reported that "settlers are continually pouring in from the Connecticut hive." Binghamton was settled jointly by Connecticut and Massachusetts. The same spirit caused a mixing up of the population within the limits of New England so that, to take a single illustration, the men of Middlefield, a small hill town in western Massachusetts, were found on inquiry to come from nearly sixty different towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut.
After the Revolution the more enterprising young men of Massachusetts and Connecticut began to leave their home towns. Of those who departed, a half went to other places in New England, a quarter to western New York, and a quarter to Ohio and other points in the then "Far West."
The extreme western part of New York State had not begun to develop as early as the period of which we are speaking. Canandaigua was the largest town in 1790, and it had but a hundred inhabitants. Pioneers came from New Jersey and Pennsylvania by way of the Susquehanna and Tioga Rivers, went to Seneca Lake, and thence to Cayuga; others from Connecticut had entered the valley of the Mohawk by way of Albany and Fort Schuyler. Small settlements sprang up at Bath, Naples, Geneva, Aurora, Seneca Falls, Palmyra, Richmond, Fort Stanwix, and Marcellus. The Erie Canal was as yet undreamt of.
The population picture of New York State in 1790 is then a double one. The great bulk of the State, so far as area is concerned, was a colony of Anglo-Saxon origin almost identical with the New England States. The Hudson valley formed a less important appendage to this, with New York City at its mouth—a miscellaneous settlement of people of all sorts whose interests were largely commercial.
New York was one of the States that lost most heavily by the Loyalist migration at the end of the Revolution. This superior Nordic element left in two great streams; one by sea to Nova Scotia, and the other overland to Canada. Long Island was a particularly heavy loser, 3000 people going in one fleet in 1783. The influx of Loyalists into Nova Scotia, amounting to some 35,000, was a severe burden on that little colony. Those who went into Canada overland from New York were more easily assimilated, and many of the important settlements along the northern shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario,such as Kingston, date from that time. To these Ontario settlers was given, by Order in Council in 1789, the honorary name of "United Empire Loyalists," and they formed the backbone of Upper Canada, as the Province of Ontario was then called, and were a main element in defeating the plans of American strategists in 1812 to capture Canada and annex it to the Union.
Although New York is generally credited with having more Loyalists during the Revolution than any other colony, she also furnished more troops for the patriot army than did any other State except Massachusetts.
New Jersey, in contrast to its neighbors on either side, was one of the most thoroughly English of all the colonies. The settlements of the Dutch in the north, and the squabbles of a few hundred Dutch, Swedes, and Finlanders in the south, left little trace on the population when colonization once started in earnest. The real history of the colony begins in 1664 when the English proprietors, to whom it had been granted, began to colonize it seriously.
Northern New Jersey was a chaos of rugged hills and forests which offered little to the settler and is still largely waste land. The southern part of the State is also largely waste land, consisting chiefly of pine barrens so that early settlement was virtually limited to two areas. On the North River, as the Hudson was called, the lands along the meadows opposite Manhattan Island were inviting, and on the South River, as the Delaware was originally designated, there was a broad strip of fertile farm land which attracted the early settlers. Among other centers New Haven had established a colony there about 1640, but had been driven off by the Dutch. There was also some extremely fertile land around Freehold and other towns on the line between New York and Philadelphia.
Since these two areas were so inaccessible to each other by direct communication, the State grew up in two distinct settlements; that along the western side of New York harbor, then known as East Jersey, and that on the Delaware, known as West Jersey. While these two were consolidated administratively in 1702, they have never been wholly consolidated in actual character, and the two ends of the State are, even today, diverse enough to show their somewhat divergent origin.
The land along the Delaware was colonized, for the most part, directly from England by the Quakers who had secured an interest in it, and who established the only two towns of importance in West Jersey during the Colonial period—Burlington in 1667 and Salem in 1675. Those who established Burlington were mostly from Yorkshire with a large group also from London, and they took opposite sides of the town, the Yorkshire people spreading north and the London people spreading south. Geographical difficulties checked the southward spread so that Cape May was settled separately by people from Connecticut and from Long Island. Later, some of the French Huguenots went down into West Jersey,but it always remained essentially an English colony, largely of Quaker complexion and influenced by the close proximity of co-religionists in Pennsylvania.
East Jersey, like western New York, represents more directly a New England outpost. Elizabethtown had been established in 1665 by emigrants sent direct from Great Britain, but Newark had at almost the same time been colonized by people from Connecticut, who at first gave to it the name of their old home, Milford. The Elizabethtown Association somewhat later sold part of its territory to people from New Hampshire and Massachusetts who established the two hamlets of Woodbridge and Piscataqua, now New Brunswick.
In 1666, Connecticut Puritans also established on the Passaic River first Guilford, and later Branford, both of which with Milford merged in the town of Newark. The New England overflow continued until the shores of Newark Bay had become another New England colony. Such communities as the Oranges were chiefly transplanted Puritan towns.
The proprietorship of East Jersey shortly passed into the hands of Scotsmen and a steady immigration of these began about 1684. The capital of East Jersey, Perth Amboy, was named for one of the proprietors, James Drummond, the Earl of Perth. The colony soon became, and has ever since remained, one of the strongholds of Scotch Presbyterianism in America, which found its intellectual center in the establishment of Princeton University.
For a long time the two sections of New Jerseywere of about equal size and importance. As the country between them gradually filled up, the State grew slowly until at the time of the Revolution its population was estimated at about 120,000. Another fifteen years saw a healthy growth, the first census, in 1790, showing 184,139 inhabitants. The somewhat complicated details of its development should not obscure the fact that New Jersey was one of the most purely white, Protestant, Nordic settlements in the colonies.
Although prior to the arrival of William Penn there were several thousand settlers on the Delaware River, in the territory now covered by Pennsylvania and Delaware, the real settlement of that region is generally dated from the beginning of his operations in 1681, when Upland, now Chester, was settled as his headquarters. A year later Philadelphia was founded, and in spite of this late start grew so rapidly that William Penn, the Quaker, at his death, had the satisfaction of knowing that the City of Brotherly Love was the largest in North America.
While the foundation stock was made up of English Quakers, Penn had ambitious ideas of establishing a headquarters for other like-minded persons, and with this idealism was apparently mixed a solid commercial ambition which led him and his agents to advertise the merits of the colony widely. The land system, unlike that of Virginia or New Netherlands, favored the settler with small means. English and Welsh farmers rapidly appropriated to themselves the country along the west side ofthe Delaware River from Trenton to Wilmington.
Penn maintained friendly relations with the Protestant leaders in southern Germany, and he and his agents seem to have had an extraordinary flair for finding obscure and peculiar sects and getting them to emigrate to the new colony. A mere list of the odd religious denominations that soon flourished in Pennsylvania is bewildering, and an attempt to define the characteristics, which to them seemed more than matters of life and death, is quite beyond the capacity of the present-day student not steeped in the knowledge of seventeenth-century theology.
Germantown was established in October, 1673, the first outpost of the Alpine race in the present territory of the United States. Its founders were Mennonites; but they were later joined by Dunkards or Tunkers, that is, Dippers, who held to the efficacy of baptism by immersion.
Generally speaking, the Germans who came to Pennsylvania during the first quarter-century of its settlement belong to these distinctive sects, while after that time the immigration was made up of a somewhat more uniform mass of adherents of either the Lutheran or the Reformed Church. This difference soon became a recognized one for an easy division of "the Pennsylvania Dutch," as this mixed group of Alpines came to be called, not very correctly, from an assimilation ofPennsylvanische Deutsche. One would ask, on hearing such a person mentioned, "Does he belong to the sects or to the church people?"
A few of these such as the Labadists from Friesland who settled in New Castle County, Delaware, were either from Holland or parts of Germany bordering Holland, but the great bulk of the "Pennsylvania Dutch" came from the Rhine Provinces, particularly from Alsace and the Palatinate, with a liberal sprinkling of northern French Protestants who had been forced over the border, while others came from Austria and Prussia and even from northern Italy. As a matter of fact, down to the time of the World War, Americans called, colloquially, all Germans "Dutchmen."
While the Palatinate furnished only a part of the immigration its name was soon given to all similar newcomers, so that the term Palatine became a general description for a German-speaking immigrant; and one even finds in the old records such anomalies as an allusion to "a Palatine from Hamburg." An important centre of their dispersion was the town of Crefeld near the border of Holland.
The colonies in general, being overwhelmingly and typically British, looked with suspicion on any alien groups, and New England, in particular, probably would not have encouraged these Alpines to enter at all. Virginia with its Church of England establishment and its self-conscious English attitude was likewise not disposed to be hospitable to such a large group of foreigners.
Governor Oglethorpe attracted some of them to Georgia, but not very successfully, as will be mentioned later. One important group of his settlers,in particular, the Moravians, left Georgia about 1739 because they were required to take up arms against the neighboring Spanish in Florida. They moved to Pennsylvania where they founded, in 1741, the town of Bethlehem, which has been their headquarters ever since.
While New York originally welcomed the Palatines, it soon treated them so badly that thereafter almost all the vessels bearing German immigrants came directly from Dutch ports to the Delaware, and if by chance an occasional ship was forced to make a landing in New York, its passengers quickly made their way across the Jerseys into more hospitable territory.
Even in Pennsylvania the invasion of the Germans eventually began to cause alarm among the English-speaking and dominant part of the population. In Virginia this attitude of exclusion of supposedly alien races had been maintained ever since the first permanent settlement. Inspired by visions of building up a great industry, the proprietors of that colony had sent out with their "second supply" a little group of eight artisans from Germany and Poland who were skilled glassmakers. The English colonists charged them with treasonable dealings with the Indians and the Chronicler of the settlement refers to them disgustedly as those "damned Dutchmen."
Benjamin Franklin, who, in 1753, expressed his opinion of some of his fellow citizens in a letter to Peter Collinson, was merely reflecting an attitudewhich the English stock had more or less generally taken when he declared:
"Those who come hither are generally the most stupid of their own nation, and, as ignorance is often attended with credulity when knavery would mislead it, and with suspicion when honesty would set it right; and as few of the English understand the German language, and so cannot address them either from the press or the pulpit, it is almost impossible to remove any prejudices they may entertain. Their clergy have very little influence on the people, who seem to take a pleasure in abusing and discharging the minister on every trivial occasion. Not being used to liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it. And as Holben says of the young Hottentots, that they are not esteemed men until they have shown their manhood by beating their mothers, so these seem not to think themselves free, till they can feel their liberty in abusing and insulting their teachers. Thus they are under no restraint from ecclesiastical government; they behave, however, submissively enough at present to the civil government, which I wish they may continue to do, for I remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our elections, but now they come in droves and carry all before them, except in one or two counties.[7]"Few of their children in the country know English. They import many books from Germany; and of the six printing-houses in the province, two are entirely German, two half German, half English, and but two entirely English. They have one German newspaper, and one half-German. Advertisements, intended to be general, are now printed in Dutch and English. The signs in our streets haveinscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of late to make all their bonds and other legal instruments in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed in our courts, where the German business so increases that there is continued need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one-half our legislators what the other half say."In short, unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so outnumber us that we will, in my opinion, be not able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious. The French, who watch all advantages, are now themselves making a German settlement, back of us, in the Illinois country, and by means of these Germans they may in time come to an understanding with ours; and, indeed, in the last war,[8]our Germans showed a general disposition, that seemed to bode us no good. For, when the English, who were not Quakers, alarmed by the danger arising from the defenseless state of our country, entered unanimously into an association, and within this government, and the Lower Counties raised, armed, and disciplined near ten thousand men, the Germans, except a very few in proportion to their number, refused to engage in it, giving out, one amongst another, and even in print, that, if they were quiet, the French, should they take the country, would not molest them; at the time abusing the Philadelphians for fitting out privateers against the enemy, and representing the trouble, hazard, and expense of defending the province, as a greater inconvenience than any that might be expected from a change of government. Yet I am not for refusing to admit them entirely into our colonies. All that seems to me necessary is, to distribute them more equally, mix them with the English schools, where they are not too thickly settled, and take some care to prevent the practice, lately fallen into by some of the shipowners, of sweeping the German gaols to make up the number of their passengers. I say I am not against the admission of Germans in general, for they have their virtues. Their industry and frugality are exemplary. They are excellent husbandmen, and contribute greatly to the improvement of a country."
"Those who come hither are generally the most stupid of their own nation, and, as ignorance is often attended with credulity when knavery would mislead it, and with suspicion when honesty would set it right; and as few of the English understand the German language, and so cannot address them either from the press or the pulpit, it is almost impossible to remove any prejudices they may entertain. Their clergy have very little influence on the people, who seem to take a pleasure in abusing and discharging the minister on every trivial occasion. Not being used to liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it. And as Holben says of the young Hottentots, that they are not esteemed men until they have shown their manhood by beating their mothers, so these seem not to think themselves free, till they can feel their liberty in abusing and insulting their teachers. Thus they are under no restraint from ecclesiastical government; they behave, however, submissively enough at present to the civil government, which I wish they may continue to do, for I remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our elections, but now they come in droves and carry all before them, except in one or two counties.[7]
"Few of their children in the country know English. They import many books from Germany; and of the six printing-houses in the province, two are entirely German, two half German, half English, and but two entirely English. They have one German newspaper, and one half-German. Advertisements, intended to be general, are now printed in Dutch and English. The signs in our streets haveinscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of late to make all their bonds and other legal instruments in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed in our courts, where the German business so increases that there is continued need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one-half our legislators what the other half say.
"In short, unless the stream of their importation could be turned from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they will soon so outnumber us that we will, in my opinion, be not able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious. The French, who watch all advantages, are now themselves making a German settlement, back of us, in the Illinois country, and by means of these Germans they may in time come to an understanding with ours; and, indeed, in the last war,[8]our Germans showed a general disposition, that seemed to bode us no good. For, when the English, who were not Quakers, alarmed by the danger arising from the defenseless state of our country, entered unanimously into an association, and within this government, and the Lower Counties raised, armed, and disciplined near ten thousand men, the Germans, except a very few in proportion to their number, refused to engage in it, giving out, one amongst another, and even in print, that, if they were quiet, the French, should they take the country, would not molest them; at the time abusing the Philadelphians for fitting out privateers against the enemy, and representing the trouble, hazard, and expense of defending the province, as a greater inconvenience than any that might be expected from a change of government. Yet I am not for refusing to admit them entirely into our colonies. All that seems to me necessary is, to distribute them more equally, mix them with the English schools, where they are not too thickly settled, and take some care to prevent the practice, lately fallen into by some of the shipowners, of sweeping the German gaols to make up the number of their passengers. I say I am not against the admission of Germans in general, for they have their virtues. Their industry and frugality are exemplary. They are excellent husbandmen, and contribute greatly to the improvement of a country."
By 1727, the English in Pennsylvania had become sufficiently alarmed over the proportions of the Palatine invasion to demand a careful record of the numbers arriving each year so that from then on there is full official record of all foreigners entered at the port of Philadelphia. By that time there were probably fifteen or twenty thousand Germans already in the province, and the record mentioned indicates that between 1727 and 1745 approximately 22,000 arrived by ships. To this number should, of course, be added the high natural increase of those already settled.
Since the English had pre-empted much of the desirable land along the Delaware and around Philadelphia, the Germans, with whom the acquisition of farming land was a dominant passion, mostly went westward of the English settlement and formed a belt where their language was and, in scattered groups to this day, is spoken. They filled the Lehighand Schuylkill valleys and occupied a band of fertile soil beginning in eastern Pennsylvania on the Delaware, passing westward toward the Susquehanna through the towns of Allentown, Reading, Lebanon, Lancaster, and thence down to the Cumberland valley on the Maryland border where they had a natural outlet to western Virginia and to the south. The tier of counties north of this belt and along the borders of New York was comparatively neglected by them, and was filled largely by settlers from Connecticut. The influx of English and German sectaries was so rapid that within three years from its founding, Penn's province had made a growth as great as that of New Netherlands in its first half-century.
The early Quakers who belonged to the privileged group grew prosperous, and many of them finding the strict ordinances of their sect somewhat oppressive became Anglicans. Thus the Church of England gained an important position in Philadelphia which it retained up to the Revolution. In general, it represented the Loyalist element and therefore partly disintegrated when they left at the end of the war. The Revolution was largely Calvinistic, and the Established Church was in most of the northern colonies regarded with disfavor as "loyalist."
The invasion of Ulster Scots into Pennsylvania began shortly after the German immigration was well under way. Within a few years the great majority of the Ulster immigrants to America were making directly for the Delaware shores. Presbyterian congregations existed in the important towns of the colony about 1700, and within the next decade the Scotch had made numerous settlements in New Castle County, Delaware, and on both sides of the Pennsylvania-Maryland boundary at its intersection with the Delaware line.
When the great tide of emigration from Ulster set in about 1720, the Scotch found the best and most accessible soil in Pennsylvania occupied by the English and the next belt held firmly by the Germans. In general, therefore, they were obliged to pass over these two territories and settle still farther west, particularly in the Cumberland valley of which Gettysburg, York, and Carlisle are now important centers. In this district geographical isolation led later to the establishment farther south of a distinct church, the Cumberland Presbyterian, somewhat different in its tenets from the Presbyterianism of the Philadelphia region and Delaware.
The number of Scotch who thus left Ulster for Pennsylvania is uncertain, but may have exceeded 40,000 or 50,000. Taken in connection with the Palatine immigration at the same period the influx to Pennsylvania in the 1730's formed the largest migration from Europe to the New World that ever took place until the steamship era arrived.
TERRITORIAL GROWTH of the UNITED STATES
Seeking newer and freer land, the Scotch together with some Germans began to follow the mountain valleys trending southwestward from Pennsylvania. They not only filled the Shenandoah Valley in a few years, but filtered down to the back country of thesouthern colonies and to the eastern portion of what is now Tennessee.
A good illustration of this migration is Daniel Boone, himself of English stock, who was born on the Delaware only a few miles above Philadelphia. The Boone family soon moved to Reading. Thence drifting southwestward with his compatriots, Daniel Boone settled in the North Carolina uplands, along the valley of the Yadkin, then passed beyond into Kentucky, and, after that location began to be civilized, went on as a pioneer to Missouri. His son appears a little later as one of the early settlers of Kansas, his grandson as a pioneer in Colorado.
When the land west of the Alleghanies was opened for settlement about 1768, the Ulster Scots began to throng the mountain passes. In addition to their aptitude for frontier life, and the insatiable desire to find new and cheap land, they wanted to get away from their neighbors, the Pennsylvania Dutch, with whom they usually did not live on very good terms. Pittsburgh rapidly became a Nordic territory settled mainly by the Ulster Scots.
These streams of immigration were sufficient by 1740 to enable Pennsylvania to overtake and pass the population of every other colony except Maryland, Massachusetts, and Virginia, although most of them had been started a generation earlier than Penn's settlement. A decade later Maryland was passed and just after the Revolution Massachusetts was outstripped, while Philadelphia remained the metropolis of the United States until finally excelledby New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Benjamin Franklin's offhand estimate that at the end of the Colonial period one-third of the population of his adopted State was English, one-third Scotch, and one-third German, was not far from the truth. Though the population was then by a safe majority British in origin and English-speaking, the Germans remained an element impossible to assimilate, so long as they continued to be segregated in their own communities of which Lancaster was the largest inland town in the thirteen colonies.
Such of the Germans as went to the frontier States were assimilated by the Nordic groups without much difficulty; but the experience of the Pennsylvania Dutch farming communities is like that of some of the city slum districts of the last century, in presenting groups almost impossible to Americanize. Even at the present time this Alpine island of population still retains many of its alien characteristics. For this, among other reasons, the German element in Pennsylvania at the time of the Revolution played a relatively unimportant part in the affairs of the State, as suggested by the quotation from Franklin above. The dominant element was formed by the group around Philadelphia composed mainly of the original English Quakers; but the Pennsylvania-Dutch, on their farms, and the Scots on the frontier, furnished a large contingent with which the politicians had to deal, though they were seldom represented in the government and leadership of the colony. The German element was inclined to follow the leadership of the Quakers under whose invitation it had come to Pennsylvania. The Scots, on the other hand, were apt to be in a state of rebellion when occasion arose, as conspicuously in the Whiskey Rebellion, which formed one of the first tests of the power of the Federal Government under Washington's presidency.
The claim that half of the Ulstermen were adherents of the Established Church, rather than Presbyterians, is doubtless extreme, but emphasizes the typically non-Irish and Protestant character of this whole element of the population, as also the fact that many of the Ulstermen were not Scots, nor even Lowland Scots, whose ancestors had moved northward across the border from England; but were direct emigrants from England to Ireland, some indeed as late as and even after the time of Cromwell.
Delaware has been dealt with incidentally in what has been said concerning Pennsylvania, because it was part of Pennsylvania during the first period of colonization. Unimportant attempts had been made by the Dutch and Swedes, of whom the Swedes are the best known, to settle there but the population of the region when Penn arrived was mainly composed of English who had moved in under the regime of the Duke of York.
In 1633, an English nobleman, Lord Baltimore, who had for years been seeking favor with the Stuart monarchy, announced that he had become a convert to the papacy, and, with the zeal of a newconvert, desired to establish a colony in the New World where Catholics, then laboring under heavy disabilities in Great Britain, could enjoy religious freedom. He applied for, and Charles I granted, a charter for the foundation of a semi-feudal proprietorship, with the stipulation that freedom of worship should prevail.
If one stops to consider what a howl of outraged virtue would have been raised by the people of Great Britain, and what a hurricane would have descended upon the head of the monarch, had he granted the Catholics a charter without stipulating for freedom of worship, it will be realized that the much-vaunted "toleration" of Lord Baltimore's colony was not entirely an evidence of his own broad-mindedness. However, this toleration had its limits. Disbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity was a capital offense.
In 1634, the little town of St. Mary was established as the center for the new colony. Few Catholics of the home country seem to have been anxious to take advantage of the opportunities offered, and Lord Baltimore began to seek tenants elsewhere. As early as 1634, he was writing to Boston and urging Massachusetts people to emigrate, but the first great invasion of Puritans came in 1649.
Inspired by enthusiasm for the cause of the King, after he had lost his head, the Virginians under the leadership of Governor Berkeley passed ordinances expelling non-conformists from their colony, and a thousand of these who had previously gone fromNew England to Virginia were driven out and took refuge in Maryland, establishing the settlement which later became Annapolis.
During the next generation most of the arrivals in Maryland were either Puritans or Quakers. The policy of tolerance was not held to apply to Quakers, who, by a law of 1659, were to be whipped out of any town which they entered, but this measure does not seem to have been enforced very long, and English Quakers from other colonies soon formed an important part of the population.
In 1689, word reached the New World of the expulsion of James II, and the occupation of the British throne by the uncompromisingly Protestant House of Orange. While James II was on the throne a general alarm had arisen throughout the colonies over the prospects of Catholic aggression.
Many of the colonies contained a sprinkling of the Huguenot refugees who had been driven out of France only a few years before because of their Protestantism, and there were thus in every colony men who knew the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the terrible persecution which followed. The tragedy of the Thirty Years War was also still fresh in the minds of many.