There was no disposition in America, therefore, to look upon the Catholics as a group who, if in power, would distinguish themselves by a policy of broad toleration, and the one colony in which there was any appreciable number of Catholics, namely, Maryland, naturally felt the situation most keenly.The number of Catholics in the colony at that time, however, even including Negroes, was only a few thousand, and their capital of St. Mary was a hamlet of scarcely sixty houses. Probably eleven-twelfths of the population of Maryland were Protestants, and of them a majority were Puritans. These lost no time in taking steps to protect their freedom which they knew the Catholic church would never tolerate if able to do otherwise, and by a homemade revolution turned out the proprietary government and set up a staunch Protestant regime. Under this new rule, however, the few Catholic residents were subjected to no harm, but were placed under approximately the same disabilities as they had long lived under in Great Britain. Thereupon the little Roman Catholic principality in the United States was at an end, and the then Lord Baltimore, fourth of that title, shortly conformed by returning to his ancestral Protestant faith.
The Revolution of 1689 cost St. Mary its existence, for the Puritans transferred the capital to their own town of Providence (rebaptized Annapolis), and the headquarters of the Roman Catholics soon relapsed into the wilderness.
Maryland continued to be almost wholly an English colony, with more than its share of Negroes and transported convicts, and with a very slight sprinkling of aliens, much as all the colonies had. When the Acadians were transported from Nova Scotia in 1755, a considerable number of them were landed in Maryland.
Baltimore, founded in 1729, languished for a quarter of a century, but in the decade before the Revolution it began to grow with such rapidity that in a few years it was one of the half dozen most considerable towns of the continent.
The back country of Maryland was settled independently from Pennsylvania, to a considerable extent by Ulster Scots and Palatines, though there was also a steady encroachment on this cheap land by men from the tidewater who could not get possession of farms in the more expensive and fashionable as well as prosperous region.
By the Revolution, Maryland had reached a population of 250,000. Perhaps one-seventh of this was in Frederick County, where Palatines had begun to settle as early as 1710, and into which they began to enter in large numbers after about 1730. Despite this back-country element, Maryland must be recognized as being, at the time of the first census, an Anglo-Saxon colony in culture, in traditions, in language, and in population.
FOOTNOTES:[7]He is writing of Pennsylvania.[8]The French and Indian War.
FOOTNOTES:
[7]He is writing of Pennsylvania.
[7]He is writing of Pennsylvania.
[8]The French and Indian War.
[8]The French and Indian War.
VII
VIRGINIA AND HER NEIGHBORS
Thesettlement of Virginia, beginning with Jamestown in 1607, was of a different character from that of the northern and middle colonies. It was not a colonization project undertaken by families, but an exploitation by adventurers. In a sense it may be compared with the Klondike Gold Rush at the end of the nineteenth century. Men went forth seeking fortune and expecting to return in a few years with newly acquired wealth. The motley array of colonists sent to Jamestown by the Company during the first decade of activity seems to have been drawn from every part of the British Isles and every stratum of society.
After ten or a dozen years, the proprietors recognized that the wealth of their plantations would not consist in gold and pearls but that they were facing an actual colonization project, which could only be built upon the foundations of family life. An early recognition of this fact has been one of the principal sources of strength in all British colonization, and the proprietors of the Virginia colony, while continuing to encourage men of all sorts to go to their settlement on the James River, undertook one of the famous eugenic enterprises of history by sending over several shiploads of young women to makehomes for their settlers. The undertaking seems to have been carried out in good faith and with good judgment and the result was notably successful. A little later, however, the continuing demand for wives led to a sort of traffic that probably produced a less carefully selected feminine population for the plantations. On the whole, it would probably be fair to say that the "First Families of Virginia" represented a higher social standard in the male than in the female lines.
The year 1619 was racially eventful. It saw the arrival at Jamestown both of the first shipload of "uncorrupt maydes for wives," and the landing of the first cargo of Negroes. The next half-century brought the development of the plantation system and the spread of Negro slavery and the problem of miscegenation between Negro women and the lowest and most unintelligent type of white servant came into prominence. In this way originated the mulatto group which has ever since been a characteristic feature of the Negroes in the United States. Those admirers of the Mulatto who boast that he carries in his veins the blue blood of the aristocratic families of the South, would do well to read the actual records of Virginia and other colonies during the seventeenth century and see what sort of white stock actually formed the foundation of that half of this hybrid group.
The colony continued to grow for the first quarter of a century by attracting voluntary adventurers from whom the rule of the survival of the fittest exacted so heavy a toll that probably the survivors were a fairly fit lot. The abandonment of the original proprietary company in 1624 led to a marked change in the manner of populating the colony, and for the next generation the bulk of the immigrants were assisted in one way or another to get to Virginia and allowed to work out the money advanced them by their labor after their arrival.
At its best, there was little difference in the colonization plans that British colonies have always used to get desirable settlers from "home." In the case of Virginia it brought a vigorous population of all sorts, and the name of "indentured servant" covers not merely the domestic in the kitchen and the laborer in the tobacco field but artisans' apprentices and medical students. Under the extremely trying conditions many of these immigrants were unable to survive. Governor Berkeley asserted that four out of five died during the first year of residence, while Evelyn, the diarist, declared that five out of six succumbed. Such statements at least point to an excessively high mortality which must have spared most frequently those who were physically and mentally superior and well adapted to be among the founders of a new colony. Hence it seems clear that the importance of these indentured servants in the later development of Virginia, as of other colonies, is not to be reckoned in proportion to the number who arrived, but to be estimated upon the much smaller number who survived and founded families.
Another type of assisted immigrant of which agreat deal has been heard was the deported convict. Some of these were evidently men who had cheated the gallows, for the Virginians continually protested against their arrival. Apparently much the larger number, however, were men of superior quality in many respects. When nearly three hundred offenses were punishable by the death penalty in England, many of those convicted were not persons marked by great moral turpitude, and the so-called "transported convict" might have been equally well a pirate, or a preacher who persisted in expounding the gospel without proper license from the ecclesiastical authorities so to do.
Large numbers were political prisoners who found themselves temporarily on the losing side; still more were mere prisoners of war. During the Protectorate, victories like Dunbar and Worcester and the suppression of the Irish Rebellion by Cromwell in 1652 were followed by deportations of prisoners of war to the colonies, and the government felt fully justified in recovering part of the expense of transportation by selling the services of these able-bodied and intelligent men for seven years to the highest bidder. Unquestionably most of the foundation stock of this kind that survived to perpetuate itself would be entirely fit for colonization. During the same period many cavaliers took refuge in Virginia.
When the royalists were again in power after 1660, a similar stream of Commonwealth soldiers and non-conformists began to come into the colonies. The Scotch Rebellion of 1670 brought another accession to Virginia, and in 1685 many of the captives at the Battle of Sedgmoor were exiled here. Such labor was welcomed by the Virginians in marked distinction to the real criminals, of whom there were apparently only a few thousand in all. After about 1700 the spread of Negro slavery reduced the demand for white indentured labor and less of it arrived.
In the great diversity of men and women brought over in these and other ways, there are some who figure in the ancestry of the best families of Virginia at the present time, and others who, from the beginning, were misfits in the colony. Such of the latter as survived the trying ordeal of the tobacco fields either ran away, or, when their term of service expired, drifted out to the borders of the settlement.
The Virginia holdings were large and far beyond the reach of an ordinary man without capital, in marked contrast to conditions in New England, where the great majority of the settlers were small landowners. The freed bondsmen therefore had to go to the frontier or drift down into North Carolina or some other region where they were not handicapped by their lack of funds. The most shiftless and least intelligent of them tended to collect in the less valuable lands at the fringe of civilization, or to drift along to other similar settlements farther west and south. In this way originated one of the peculiar elements of the Southern population, the "poor white trash." Their numbers were recruited generationafter generation by others of the same sort while the able, enterprising, and imaginative members were continually drained off to the cities or sought better land elsewhere. These "poor whites" in the Alleghanies and through the swamp lands of North and South Carolina have been an interesting feature of the population for three centuries. Largely of pure Nordic stock, they are a striking example to the eugenist of the results of isolation and undesirable selection.
During the Stuart period Virginia was the refuge of many Puritans. They were, however, looked upon with disfavor by the prevailing royalist sentiment and the activities of Sir William Berkeley as Governor were such that not less than a thousand left the colony. Their place was taken by Royalists, invited by the Governor to find a refuge in Virginia as soon as news arrived of the execution of Charles I. Within the next twelve months probably a thousand Royalists appeared bringing many of the family names which have been conspicuous in the Old Dominion ever since. Richard Lee came a little earlier, in 1642, but it is after the death of Charles I that one begins to meet in Virginia such names as Randolph, Cary, Parke, Robinson, Marshall, Washington, and Ludwell.
The place of origin in Great Britain of most of the Royalists is not so easily traced as is that of the Massachusetts Puritans who came to America in groups, sometimes as entire congregations, but random samples of families which afterwards furnisheddistinguished leadership show that they came from practically all over England and Scotland: Washingtons from Northamptonshire, Marshalls and Jeffersons from Wales, Lees from the part of Shropshire adjoining Wales, and Randolphs from Warwickshire. James Monroe's ancestors were Scotch and Patrick Henry's father was born in Aberdeen. They had at least one thing in common, that they were of English and Nordic stock. Examination of lists in the land office at Richmond indicates that fully 95 per cent of the names of landowners during the seventeenth century were unmistakably Anglo-Saxon.
The tidewater population was fecund and spread steadily up to the fall-line of the rivers, by its own multiplication. Men and women married early. Colonel Byrd described his daughter, Evelyn, as an "antique virgin" when she was twenty. "Either our young fellows are not smart enough for her or she seems too smart for them," he moaned. With a high death rate second marriages were common. It has been the custom of late for sentimental feminists to refer to the large families of the Colonial period as having been produced by husbands who thus killed off one wife after another. Such nonsense is easily refuted by an examination of genealogies and of tombstones. Many a husband had to marry several wives because of the high death rate, but equally many wives had to marry several husbands apiece for the same reason.
The toll taken by hard work, unhygienic conditions, and childbirth without proper care among pioneer women, was no greater than the toll taken by hard work, unhygienic conditions, and Indian warfare among the men. If Colonel John Carter married five wives successively, in an age when divorce was unknown, Elizabeth Mann married six husbands.
While a purely Nordic population was thus occupying tidewater Virginia east of the Blue Ridge, another Nordic invasion from a wholly different source was entering upland Virginia on the other side of the mountains. The Shenandoah Valley is virtually an extension of the interior valleys of Pennsylvania; and while an occasional pioneer pushed his way to it through the mountains from the eastern front, the real settlement came through the side door beginning about 1725 and reaching the proportions of an invasion about 1732.
Ulster Scots coming down through Pennsylvania began that penetration of the Piedmont from north to south which is such a striking feature of the history of the South Atlantic coast during the next century. With them were some Alpines, mostly Germans from the Palatine, representative of the so-called Pennsylvania Dutch stock.
When General Braddock, whose army was nearly wiped out by the French and Indians in 1755, sighed, "Who would have thought it?" and expired, he nevertheless had cleared a road for the rapid spread of this immigration along the mountain valleys, not merely into Virginia but on through the Carolinasand to Georgia. His road was followed a few years later by General Forbes' road through the same country, and the way was open.
The upland and mountain sections of Virginia therefore came to be represented by a group with a very different outlook from those of the tidewater, dominated as it was by large landholders. This diversity of original settlement, which was of sufficient importance to effect in the Civil War a cleavage of the State and establish West Virginia as free soil, is still apparent and makes itself felt in the twentieth century.
North Carolina represents an overflowing from Virginia to the South. It was a frontier for the Old Dominion where landless men could find new homes more easily than to the westward, where they encountered the Blue Ridge. In 1653 a settlement was begun at Albemarle by Virginians who were not in accord either with the established religion or else with the political control of their colony. Most of these were Quakers.
By adopting a remarkably liberal code of laws, which welcomed insolvent debtors by cancelling their indebtedness, this colony attracted an element which the more conservative Virginians regarded with suspicion. A continual infiltration of landseekers led to steady colonization, and gradually the tidewater section of North Carolina developed as a separate region, not very thickly settled, not very prosperous, not very distinguished in any way. A few FrenchHuguenots drifted in after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. In 1710 a group of Palatines, who had left their German homes because of religious persecution, and had sought refuge in England, was passed on to North Carolina through the enterprise of a couple of Swiss promoters who were looking for colonists. As a courtesy to the promoters the settlement was given the name of New Bern, which has led to a general supposition that the population were Swiss. In fact, they were nearly all German Alpines.
Another immigration, this time of Nordics, began a few years later when Scotch Highlanders, disappointed at the results of the 1715 uprising on behalf of the Old Pretender, fled the country and came to North Carolina, starting a settlement on the Cape Fear River. Later, following the collapse of the Young Pretender in 1745, the Highlanders again found themselves in a bad situation at home. Shipload after shipload landed at Wilmington in 1746 and 1747. This emigration of Scotch Highlanders continued until the Revolution, during which time they showed themselves, strangely enough, loyal to the Hanoverian dynasty and mostly fought as Loyalists against the Continentals.
The general breakup of the clan system with the accompanying distress in the Highlands caused most of this emigration, although some of the Scots were deported as prisoners of war. Campbelltown was the centre of their settlement, and it is unfortunate that its present name of Fayetteville conceals its interesting history. Some of the Highlanders are said to have brought cattle with them, and they pushed on into the interior of the State because of the great areas of succulent grass and peavine stretching toward the mountains which provided excellent fodder for their herds.
The sympathetic patronage of Gabriel Johnston, the Governor of the Province from 1734 to 1752, was largely responsible for the welcome extended to these Highlanders. Himself a Scotchman, he was under strong suspicion of not being too loyal to the Crown. At any rate, his hospitality to the Highlanders brought to North Carolina the largest group of Highland Scotch that came to the colonies. These men of the purest Nordic blood form a selected group anthropologically. It is no mere coincidence that the tallest average height of a population in the United States at the present time is in these North Carolina counties that were settled by the Scotch Highlanders after "Bonnie Prince Charlie" ceased to be a political possibility.
While the back country of North Carolina was thus being penetrated from the seacoast by the Highland Scots, the Lowland Scots were drifting into it along the foot of the mountains from Pennsylvania and Maryland through Virginia. This was the principal source of increase of the population during the eighteenth century, and still gives to the State its characteristic complexion. Along with the Ulster Scots came, as said above, some of the German settlers, thus bringing a small Alpine element to theState. The southern tidewater region also developed at the same time as a northern extension of settlement from South Carolina.
South Carolina was settled only a little later than North Carolina by the establishment of Old Charles Town in 1665. This settlement, shortly moved across and up the river to a better location, prospered and expanded until it became South Carolina.
Originally a sort of offshoot from the West Indies, this region caught the attention of the Huguenot refugees a few years later, perhaps because Coligny had marked it out a century before as a desirable home for them. It attracted a larger proportion of the French refugees than any other colony; and although they were unwelcome at first to the English who were in possession, they soon assimilated themselves to the Anglo-Saxon population with which they were racially identical and became an important element in the upbuilding of the State. In Colonial and Revolutionary times, Gendron, Huger, LeSerrurier, deSaussure, Laurens, Lanier, Sevier, and Ravenel were all Huguenots who distinguished themselves in the service of the State.
The establishment of large-scale agriculture with plantations devoted to rice or indigo sharply limited the possibilities of settlement in the tidewater region of South Carolina, and it became a country of large holdings worked by Negro slaves in charge of overseers. Meanwhile the owners largely made their homes in or near Charleston, and brought it to theposition of the fourth city of the colonies in importance.
The growth of the colony would have been slow had it not been for the influx of the Ulster Scots coming along the foot of the mountains from the north after the middle of the eighteenth century. The upcountry thus became quite different from the tidewater, so different, that in South Carolina as in North Carolina and Virginia it was a question whether the State might not split on slavery a few years before the Civil War, and the Upland population was only whipped into line for secession by sharp practice on the part of the political leaders in the slave-holding regions.
Other small elements were incorporated easily in the Nordic population of the State, but the loss to the colony was heavy when the Loyalists left after the Revolution. On the 13th and 14th of December, 1782, 300 ships set sail from Charleston carrying not merely the soldiery but more than 9000 civilians and slaves. Half of these went to the West Indies, and most of the others to Florida where such of them as had not subsequently removed were presumably reincorporated into the United States a generation later. On the other hand, hundreds of Hessian deserters stayed in the community, as also occurred in others of the colonies, thus introducing the first noticeable immigration of Nordic Germans into the State. As previously noted, most of the so-called Palatine immigration of Germans in the eighteenth century was Alpine, in sharp contrast to theNorth German Nordics, who came to this country in large numbers in the middle of the nineteenth century after the futile revolutions of 1848.
Georgia was the last of the thirteen colonies to be settled. Even at the Revolution it was so weak that it was regarded by many of the Colonial leaders as more of a liability than an asset to the confederation. Its establishment in 1732 by Oglethorpe was on a basis appealing more to sentiment than to practical views. As in the case of some other similar schemes in contemporary times, Parliament was persuaded to appropriate nearly a hundred thousand pounds to aid the oppressed of all countries. Most of the few thousand persons who were settled by the original trustees were English, and were selected with as much care as possible from among those who were apparently "down on their luck," and who might prosper if relieved of their debts and put back on land. Many of these insolvent debtors were doubtless victims of political and economic changes, but it soon transpired that in too many cases the man who did not have sufficient capacity to make a living in England, likewise lacked sufficient capacity to make a living in the newer and more difficult conditions of Georgia.
In addition to these English debtors, Oglethorpe enlisted on the Continent small bodies of oppressed Protestants and established several other little settlements. Waldenses from Piedmont in Italy were settled in one place, a colony of Scots in another,German Moravians at still a third point, and a few French families elsewhere, as well as a colony from Salzburg, made up of a pre-dominantly Alpine stock that had suffered for its religious principles enough to deserve all the sympathy it received. The hardy Nordics (Scotch Presbyterian Highlanders) who had been settled on the southern frontier, to afford protection for Georgia from the Spaniards and Indians, were almost exterminated by the Spaniards and of all these various undertakings Savannah was the only one that prospered.
It was necessary to abandon the attempt to create a prosperous colony by means of establishing a refuge for the oppressed. Unfortunately the change was accompanied by the introduction of Negro slavery. Nevertheless, when Georgia became open to outside settlers, there was a valuable accession from colonies to the north, one of the most interesting of the groups being the Dorchester Society, which came in 1752. This Protestant congregation had left England in 1630 and founded Dorchester in Massachusetts. In 1695 a part of them had moved to South Carolina and, two generations later, some of these went still farther south to midland Georgia.
Their example was followed, or perhaps indeed preceded, by many other Carolina planters, so that the influx from this source became a real element of strength to the more southerly colony. Shortly thereafter the flood of Ulster Scots, rolling along the Piedmont, began to reach the uplands of Georgia and assured its future.
THE THIRTEEN COLONIES
The Georgians of the present day are descendants of the Oglethorpe colonists in only insignificant proportions. The Nordic settlers who came in through North Carolina, English from the tidewater region, and Ulster Scots from the Uplands, are the real founders of the State.
After the Revolution, Georgia benefited by the prevalent unrest and the tide of migration that flowed in all directions. It received settlers from all of the Southern States and some of the Northern ones, as well as new arrivals direct from Europe.
Kentucky for a generation prior to the Revolution had become known through hunters of game bringing back glowing accounts of the beauty and fertility of the level lands of central Kentucky. Access in the one case was down the Ohio River by boat, and in the other by a long and hazardous trip through the mountains, entering by the Cumberland Gap, the most practicable of several difficult passes. The danger from Indians was so great on the Ohio River that most of the invaders preferred those dangers of a different type to be encountered by the Cumberland Gap entry. It was the route which Daniel Boone, acting for a land company, had blazed: the narrow trail, six hundred miles long, that has become famous as the Wilderness Road.
By the time of the Revolution several hundred people were in Kentucky, and more were coming each year from the inland portion of Virginia, and, to a less extent, from Pennsylvania. During theRevolution the population rose and fell in accordance with local conditions on the frontier and the ravages of the Indians. With the end of the Revolution a great tide of immigration set in, composed in part of soldiers who were given land grants by the Virginia Government. With them was an element of Loyalists, as well as many families from Maryland, both seeking to get away from unpleasant associations in the East.
From 1780 onward the route down the Ohio began to be more used. The Indians were driven back or the boatmen learned how to cope with their ruses, and the annual migration began to be counted in thousands. In the year 1786 as many as 3000 went down the river, in 1788, 10,000, and in 1789, 20,000. Meanwhile, the immigration through the Cumberland Gap continued steadily. The growth of Kentucky was on a scale unparalleled in North America up to that time. Within a few decades from the day when the first cabins were erected in the region, a population of 70,000 people had entered the State, and it had half as many inhabitants as Massachusetts.
Compared with the Scotch tone of Tennessee, Kentucky was overwhelmingly English in aspect. Virginia was definitely its progenitor, a large part of its early population having come through the Shenandoah Valley. Next as feeders were Pennsylvania and North Carolina, while other regions contributed but small minorities, those from Maryland being probably the most numerous. The governmentof Virginia was seriously concerned by its losses of population from this cause. After the Revolution, officers who had served with the Virginia forces were compensated by allotments of land in the Kentucky region. The State attracted other settlers of a superior social and economic status. These gave a tone to its society and laid the foundation of a local aristocracy. Kentucky long remained distinctive because of its conspicuously English atmosphere and the social refinements which it showed in contrast to some of its neighbors. Kentucky remained part of Virginia until 1792 when it was admitted as a State.
Tennessee was, in fact, only the western part of North Carolina which originally stretched beyond the Appalachians as far as the Mississippi. The French had established a trading post on the site of Nashville as early as 1714. But the State was actually settled from the East rather than from the West, and, indeed, its western third was not settled until well into the nineteenth century. The first area of settlement was in the river valleys near the North Carolina border, and this remained the principal area during the period here considered. A second and less important point of growth was in the center of the State. In northeastern Tennessee the earlier settlements were from Virginia, and the settlers supposed that they were still within the limits of the Old Dominion.
The settlers from North Carolina soon began to push through the mountain passes and establishedthe groupings that go in history by the name of the Holston and Watauga settlements. Many of the early settlers, of whom some hundreds were present before the Revolution, were, as noted, from the upland portion of Virginia, and were Presbyterians from Scotland, often by way of Ulster, while the principal early influx from North Carolina was connected with the uprising in the Piedmont section of that colony about 1770. An insurgent element known as the Regulators put itself in opposition to the royal governor, and, being beaten, fled over the mountains for safety. A large proportion of these were from Wake County. They brought in an element of Baptists contrasting with the Presbyterianism which, on the whole, characterized the State from the beginning and still does so owing to the predominance of the Scotch in its settlement.
While the eastern community was growing, settlement began in the central portion of the State in what is known as the Cumberland district. This was for years almost isolated from the neighboring settlement to the east, the center of which was Nashville, while the eastern settlement headed in Knoxville, which became the capital.
During the Revolution the settlement of this territory continued steadily until the State had 10,000 or 12,000 inhabitants. North Carolina made liberal allotments of Tennessee lands to its soldiers who had fought in the Revolution, and this continued the stream of immigration. By the time that President Washington was inaugurated the eastern section ofthe State had some 30,000 inhabitants, the Cumberland district about 7000, and both were growing steadily. Western Tennessee was still Indian territory.
The population of Tennessee in 1790 was typical of the upland population of the South in its racial make-up. It is definitely a mere extension of the western part of North Carolina, though its inhabitants were often born in Virginia, and to a less extent in other States, as was true of the inhabitants of North Carolina itself.
In the Mississippi Valley at this period there were a few settlements established under the French and Spanish regimes, which had attracted a miscellaneous crowd of adventurers and traders. Since this territory did not become part of the United States until the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, it will be dealt with more fully in the next section. In this period we are dealing with comparatively small numbers for this entire region.
Of nearly 4,000,000 people, both white and black, in the United States in 1790, at the time of the first census, 95 per cent were living east of the Appalachians.
In territories of the present United States other than the settlements already covered, there were three little islands of population. One lay along the Mississippi in southwest Illinois, a remnant of the old French settlements with some English and American additions. A second was around Vincennes, Indiana, with a population like that of the Illinoissettlements but more strongly American. A third was in Ohio, where settlement was just beginning, the first serious colonization being that made in 1788 at Marietta by New Englanders.
Although the Revolution grew out of economic and political causes, it represents primarily one of those costly and unfortunate internecine wars in which the Nordics have been prone to indulge at intervals for two or three thousand years, and which have done so much to weaken them as a race.
Had there been no complications the effects of the Revolutionary War might have been less permanent. Winner and loser would have lived on terms of peace with each other, as they did in England after the Civil War and in the United States after the Rebellion. But the hard feeling that goes with any conflict was intensified by several factors. The Ulster Scots, in particular, had reason to feel themselves badly treated by England, and they carried into, and through, the Revolution, an unusual animosity. This feeling of resentment was shared and kept alive by many other Americans through the injudicious behavior in Canada of a number of the English governments after the Revolution.
The tradition of one hundred and fifty years of common action of the colonies and the mother country in opposing France was forgotten overnight and a sentimental attitude for which there was astonishingly little actual basis led to a glorification of France and everything French for a generation or more—an attitude that has not entirely disappearedto this day. The antagonism toward Great Britain was maintained for political reasons during the next century mostly by Irish agitators. This ill feeling prevented the close co-operation between the two greatest sections of the English-speaking races, which would have meant so much for world peace and harmony, and which would have laid the basis for a closer co-operation of all the nations of predominant Nordic stock, in the interest of the progressive evolution of mankind. A first object of statesmanship should now be to regain that solidarity of the Nordics, in the interests not merely of world progress, but of the very survival of civilization.
Denominational questions in the United States were scarcely an issue after the Revolution, for the bitter sectarian feeling that had existed earlier was rapidly disappearing, and the Roman Catholics had not yet been able to raise the issue of bigotry, for the country was overwhelmingly Protestant. Of approximately 4,000,000 persons in the United States in 1790, Catholic writers make varying claims running as high as 35,000 or 45,000 persons of their faith. Without stopping to inquire how many of those claimed for Rome were merely nominal adherents, and how many were Negroes, one may remark that at the most, about one American in each one hundred might have had some affiliation with the Roman Church. When the Catholic hierarchy was established for the first time in the United States by the appointment of the Jesuit John Carroll as bishop of Baltimore in 1789, he reported to hissuperiors that there were about 16,000 Catholics in Maryland, including children and Negroes; something over 7000 in Pennsylvania, some 3000 French around Detroit, and about 4000 scattered through the rest of the country. To this total of 30,000 might be added the unknown but small number of nominal Catholics on the frontier, in the Mississippi Valley, and in other regions where there were no priests to minister to them, and where their children, at least, were fairly sure to grow up outside the church. It is probably accurate to say that there never has been a nation which was so completely and definitely Protestant as well as Nordic as was the United States just after the American Revolution.
The total white population found in the United States by the first census (1790) was 3,172,444. To this should be added, for the present purpose, the population of parts of the continent that are now, but were not then, in the United States, that is Louisiana and Florida. The latter had but a few thousand inhabitants. The Louisiana Purchase territory may be credited with 36,000, of whom nearly one-half were Negroes. The French are estimated at about 12,000. Professor Hansen gives the figure of Whites only for the Louisiana Purchase area in 1790 as 20,000. The addition of Negroes would probably increase these population figures considerably. Texas may be allotted 5000 (Spanish) Whites, New Mexico and Arizona 15,000, and California 1000 at this period. But it will be shown later that the use of theword "White" in these Spanish-American lands is frequently largely a "courtesy title." Finally, the census enumerators did not reach the Old Northwest Territory, where there were already some 11,000 residents, about equally divided between American and French. The total white population of the territory now comprised in the continental United States may therefore be put at approximately 3,250,000 in 1790.
Disregarding the French and Spanish in the outlying regions, the only race, aside from the Nordic, that was important enough to be counted at this period was the Alpine, represented by the Germans. In Maine one in a hundred of the population might have been German, but in the other New England states the Alpines were negligible.[9]In the middle colonies they were an important element, perhaps one in every ten or twelve in such States as New York, New Jersey, and Maryland, and one-third of the whole population in Pennsylvania. Through the Southern States they formed perhaps one in twenty of the population, confined mainly to the upland regions and, having spread over from these uplands and from Pennsylvania into the west, they amounted to about one in seven in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Nine-tenths of the whole white population of 1790was therefore Nordic in race, and ninety-nine hundredths of it Protestant in religion. It was all English-speaking, save for the little island of Pennsylvania Dutch, and for the French and Spanish on the frontiers. It was all living under a political and cultural tradition that was characteristically British.
At the time of the Revolution there were about 6,000,000 people in England and about half that number in the colonies.
The preceding pages have been devoted to describing the conditions in the English colonies at the end of the Colonial Period. Let us now consider the situation of the continent as a whole.
Never before in the history of the Nordic race had there been an event comparable in importance to this occupation of North America, north of the Rio Grande, by the English and Scotch. The Canadian French were too few to be a serious obstacle to the development of the country and, as will be seen in the following pages, the rest of Canada was in race, language, religion, and cultural traditions identical with the original British colonies.
Thus we have the most vigorous race in existence, with a few outside elements which were entirely in sympathy with the dominant type, in possession of the richest and most salubrious continent in the world. That this country was healthy and well fitted to breed a highly selected race is shown by the comparison of the fate of the colonists who went to the West Indies with those who went to New England.
These Puritan migrations were in their general nature identical, but the enervating climate of the Caribbean Sea proved fatal to the Nordics who went there, while the vigor of the New Englanders as a body was increased by the elimination of weaklings through a harsh but beneficent climate.
To appreciate how highly selected a race the Americans were at that time, one has only to consider the extraordinary group of men of talent and ability, some fifty-five in number, who represented the colonies at the Convention of 1787 at Philadelphia. Those men framed the Constitution of the United States, which after a hundred and fifty years of stress and strain still remains the model for such documents throughout the world.
Let the reader consider whether our 110,000,000 whites of today could produce the same number of men with corresponding ability and equally high motive, in spite of the fact that our population is more than thirty times as large as in 1787.
So we find in 1790 a practically empty continent, its eastern half buried under a mantle of forest, with a coast line broken by ports and short navigable rivers. Across low mountain ranges we first find a vast central valley traversed for hundreds of miles by wide rivers; then a belt of treeless plains covered with succulent buffalo grass; next a region long called the "Great American Desert"; then a range of mountains dimly known to the Colonials as the "Stony Mountains"; beyond them a great alkaline desert, next the Sierra range, and lastly the genialPacific Coast. The western half of the continent abounded in mineral wealth, while in the central valley the virgin soil awaited the plow. These conditions had their counterpart in Canada. Wild game abounded, inviting the fur traders to explore the remoter places and enabling the settler to find ready food, while he built his log cabin and planted his crop.
Such was the continent and such the opportunity. In the following pages we shall see what has been done with these opportunities by the British race.
Before leaving the Colonial Period, it is well to call attention, once more, to the history of the frontier. For a hundred years and more the frontier was beset by savages often instigated by the French in Canada. The Indians killed and tortured the lonely settlers and burned their log cabins. This desultory warfare cost the English many hundreds, if not thousands of lives along the frontiers of New England as well as of Pennsylvania and Virginia.
The Indians found by English settlers on their arrival in America were probably, as to many of their tribes, the most formidable fighting men of any native race encountered by the Whites. Not only were they redoubtable warriors in their own surroundings, but they were beyond question the cruelest of mankind. The Assyrians, of all ancient peoples, were reputed to be the most fiendishly cruel, but bad as they were, they did not compare with the American Indian. The details of the torture of prisoners taken in open warfare are too revolting to describe. These tortures were carried out by the squaws while the bucks sat around and laughed at the agony of their victims. There is nothing like it in history in any part of the world and the result was that the aboriginal Indians were regarded as ravening wolves or worse and deprived of all sympathy, while the Whites stole their lands and killed their game. No one who knew the true nature of the Indian felt any regret that they were driven off their hunting grounds. This attitude was found wherever the Whites came in conflict with them and explains why they were scarcely regarded as human beings.
The effect of the existence of the Indians on the frontier was to slow down the advance westward of the settlements and to compel the backwoodsman to keep in touch with his countrymen in the rear. If there had been no hostile Indians, the settlers would have scattered widely and would have established independent communities, such as were attempted in Kentucky and Tennessee after the Revolution. In this respect the Indians were a benefit to the Whites.
At the close of the period ending in 1790, despite the loss of many valuable elements at the time of the Revolution, the American race was homogeneous and Scotch and English to the core. It was bursting the bonds of the old frontier and ready to pour a human deluge over the mountains and inundate the West.