A School History of the United States Part 5

[Ill.u.s.tration: NEW ENGLAND AND NEW NETHERLAND]

%44. "The United Colonies of New England."%--There were now five colonies in New England; namely, Plymouth, or the "Old Colony,"

Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Haven.

Geographically, they were near each other. But each was weak in numbers, and if left without the aid of its neighbors, might easily have fallen a prey to some enemy. Of this the settlers were well aware, and in 1643 four of the colonies, Plymouth, Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven[1] united for defense against the Indians and the Dutch, who claimed the Connecticut valley and so threatened the English colonies on the west.

[Footnote 1: Rhode Island was not allowed to come in, for the feeling against the followers of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson was still very strong.]

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

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

%46. New Charters.%--During the next twenty years no changes took place in the boundaries of the colonies. This was the period of the Civil War in England, of the Commonwealth, of the rule of Cromwell and the Puritans; and affairs in New England were left to take care of themselves. But in 1660 Charles II. was restored to the throne of England, and a new era opens in colonial history. In 1661 the little colony of Connecticut promptly acknowledged the restoration of Charles II. and applied for a charter. The application was more than granted; for to Connecticut (1662) was given not only a charter and an immense tract of land, but also the colony of New Haven.[1] The land grant was comprised in a strip that stretched across the continent from Rhode Island to the Pacific and was as wide as the present state.[2] In 1663 Rhode Island was given a new charter.

[Footnote 1: In 1660, after the restoration of Charles II., Edward Whalley and William Goffe (the regicides, "king-killers," as they were called), two of the judges who had condemned Charles I. to be beheaded, fled to New Haven and were protected by the people. This act had much to do with the annexation of New Haven to Connecticut.]

[Footnote 2: Read Fiske's _Beginnings of New England_, pp. 192-196. Many of the New Haven colonists were disgusted by the union of their colony with Connecticut, and in June, 1667, migrated to New Jersey, where they founded "New-Ark" or Newark.]

In 1684 the King's judges declared the Ma.s.sachusetts charter void, and James II. was about to make New England one royal colony, when the English people drove him from the throne. William and Mary in 1691 granted a new charter and united the Plymouth colony, Ma.s.sachusetts, Maine, and Nova Scotia, in one colony called Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. This charter was in force when the Revolution opened.

SUMMARY

1. The first colony established by the Plymouth Company (1607, on the coast of Maine) was a failure.

2. Captain John Smith explored the New England coast and mapped it (1613), but did not succeed in planting any colonies.

3. The permanent settlement of New England began with the arrival of a body of Separatists in the _Mayflower_ (1620), who founded the colony of Plymouth.

4. The Separatist migration from England was followed in a few years by a great exodus of Puritans, who planted towns along the coast to the north of Plymouth, and obtained a charter of government and a great strip of land, and founded the colony of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay.

5. Religious disputes drove Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson out of Ma.s.sachusetts, and led to the founding of Rhode Island (1636).

6. Other church wrangles led to an emigration from Ma.s.sachusetts to the Connecticut valley, where a little confederacy of towns was created and called Connecticut.

7. Some settlers from England went to Long Island Sound and there founded four towns which, in their turn, joined in a federal union called the New Haven Colony.

8. In time, New Haven was joined to Connecticut, and Plymouth and Maine to Ma.s.sachusetts; New Hampshire was made a royal colony; and the four New England colonies--Ma.s.sachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut--were definitely established.

9. The territory of Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut stretched across the continent to the "South Sea," or Pacific Ocean.

CHAPTER V

THE MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN COLONIES

%47. North and South Carolina.%--You remember that away back in the sixteenth century the French under Jean Ribault and the English under Ralegh undertook to plant colonies on what is now the Carolina coast.

They failed, and the country remained a wilderness till 1653, when a band of emigrants from Virginia made the first permanent settlement on the banks of the Chowan and the Roanoke. In 1663 some Englishmen from Barbados began to settle on the Cape Fear River, just at the time when Charles II. of England gave the region to eight English n.o.blemen, who, out of compliment to the King, allowed the name of Carolina given it by Ribault to remain. In 1665 the bounds were enlarged, and Carolina then extended from lat.i.tude 29 00' to 36 30', the present south boundary of Virginia, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CAROLINA AS GRANTED BY King Charles II]

There was at first no intention of dividing the territory, although, after Charleston was founded (1670), North Carolina and South Carolina sometimes had separate governors. But in 1729 the proprietors sold Carolina to the King, and it was then divided into two distinct and separate royal provinces.

%48. New York.%--An event of far greater importance than the chartering of Carolina was the seizure of New Netherland. After the conquest of New Sweden, in 1655, the possessions and claims of the Dutch in our country extended from the Connecticut River to the Delaware River, and from the Mohawk to Delaware Bay. Geographically, they cut the English colonies in two, and hampered communication between New England and the South. To own this region was therefore of the utmost importance to the English; and to get it, King Charles II., in 1664, revived the old claim that the English had discovered the country before the Dutch, and he sent a little fleet and army, which appeared off New Amsterdam and demanded its surrender. The demand was complied with; and in 1664 Dutch rule in our country ended, and England owned the seaboard from the Kennebec to the Savannah.

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

%49. New Jersey.%--The Duke of York no sooner received his province than he gave so much of it as lay between the Delaware and the ocean to his friends Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, and called it New Jersey, in honor of Sir George Carteret, who had been governor of the island of Jersey in the English Channel. The two proprietors divided it between them by the line shown on the map (p. 56). In 1674 Berkeley sold West Jersey to a company of Quakers, who settled near Burlington. A little later, 1676, William Penn and some other Quakers bought East Jersey. There were then two colonies till 1702, when the proprietors surrendered their rights, and New Jersey became one royal province.

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

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Now it so happened that Penn was the son of a distinguished admiral to whom King Charles II. owed 16,000, and seeing no chance of its ever being paid, he proposed to the King, in 1680, that the debt be paid with a tract of land in America. The King gladly agreed, and in 1681 Penn received a grant west of the Delaware. Against Penn's wish, the King called it Pennsylvania, or Penn's Woodland. It was given almost precisely the bounds of the present state.[1] In 1683 Penn made a famous treaty with the Indians, and laid out the city of Philadelphia.

[Footnote 1: There was a long dispute, however, with Lord Baltimore, over the south boundary line, which was not settled till 1763-67, when two surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, came over from England and located it as at present. In later years, when all the Atlantic seaboard states north of Maryland and Delaware had abolished slavery, this "Mason and Dixon's Line" became famous as the dividing line between the slave and the free Atlantic states.]

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

The three lower counties on the Delaware, as the tract was called, had no boundary. Lawfully it belonged to Lord Baltimore. But neither the Dutch patroons who settled on the Delaware in 1631, nor the Swedes who came later, nor the Dutch who annexed New Sweden to New Netherland, nor the English who conquered the Dutch, paid any regard to Baltimore's rights. At last, after the purchase of Delaware, the heirs of Baltimore and of Penn (1732) agreed on what is the present boundary line. After 1703 the people of the three lower counties were allowed to have an a.s.sembly or legislature of their own; but they had the same governor as Pennsylvania and were a part of that colony till the Revolution.[1]

[Footnote 1: For Pennsylvania read Janney's _Life of William Penn_ or Dixon's _History of William Penn_; Proud's or Gordon's _Pennsylvania_; Lodge's _Colonies_, pp. 213-226.]

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

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Great numbers of people became interested in his plan, and finally twenty-two persons under Oglethorpe's lead formed an a.s.sociation and secured a charter from King George II. for a colony, which they called Georgia. The territory granted lay between the Savannah and the Altamaha rivers, and extended from their mouths to their sources and then across the country to the Pacific Ocean. Oglethorpe had selected this tract in order that his colonists might serve the patriotic purpose of protecting Charleston from the Spanish attacks to which it was then exposed.

Money for the colony was easily raised,[1] and in November, 1732, Oglethorpe, with 130 persons, set out for Charleston, and after a short stay there pa.s.sed southward and founded the city of Savannah (1733). It must not be supposed that all the colonists were poor debtors. In time, Italians from Piedmont, Moravians and Lutherans from Germany, and Scotchmen from the Highlands, all made settlements in Georgia.

[Footnote 1: The House of Commons gave 10,000.]

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

SUMMARY

1. The English seized New Netherland (1664), giving it to the Duke of York; and the Duke, after establishing the province of New York, gave New Jersey to two of his friends, and sold the three counties on the Delaware to William Penn.

2. Meanwhile the King granted Penn what is now Pennsylvania (1681).

3. The Carolinas were first chartered as one proprietary colony, but were sold back to the King and finally separated in 1729.

4. Georgia, the last of the thirteen English colonies, was granted to Oglethorpe and others as a refuge for poor debtors (1732).