American Men of Action Part 2

The resources at his disposal were small, he could not hope to a.s.semble a great expedition; so he determined to make the venture with only a few men and little baggage, relying upon the friendship of the Indians, instead of seeking to conquer them, as the Spaniards had always done.

Champlain had from the first treated the Indians well, and it was this necessity of gaining their friendship that determined the policy which France pursued--the policy of making friends of the Indians, entering into an alliance with them, and helping them fight their battles.

Champlain opened operations by joining an Algonquin war-party against the Iroquois, and a.s.sisting at their defeat--starting, at the same time, a blood feud with that powerful tribe which endured as long as the French held Canada. In the course of this expedition, he discovered the beautiful lake which bears his name.

He went back to France for a time, after that, and on his next return to Canada, in 1611, began building a town at the foot of a rock which had been named Mont Royal, since corrupted to Montreal. Succeeding years were spent in further explorations, which carried him across Lake Ontario, and in plans for the conversion of the Indians, to which the aid of the Jesuits was summoned. Missions were established, and the intrepid priests pushed their way farther and farther into the wilderness. To this work, Champlain gave more and more of his thought in the last years of his life, which ended on Christmas day, 1635.

Among the young men whom Champlain set to work among the Indians was Jean Nicolet. The year before his death, Champlain sent him on an exploring expedition to the west, in the course of which he visited Lake Michigan and perhaps Lake Superior. Following in his footsteps, the Jesuits gradually established missions as far west as the Wisconsin River, and, finally, in 1670, at Sault Ste. Marie, the French formally took possession of the whole Northwest.

It was at about this time there appeared upon the scene another of those picturesque and formidable figures, in which this period of American history so abounds--Robert Cavalier La Salle. La Salle was at that time only twenty years of age. He had reached Canada four years earlier and had devoted himself for three years to the study of the Indian languages, in order to fit himself for the career of western exploration which he contemplated. One day he was visited by a party of Senecas, who told him of a river, which they called the Ohio, so great that many months were required to traverse it. From their description, La Salle concluded that it must fall into the Gulf of California, and so form the long-sought pa.s.sage to China. He determined to explore it, and after surmounting innumerable obstacles, actually did reach it, and descend it as far as the spot where the city of Louisville now stands, afterwards exploring the Illinois and the country south of the Great lakes, as well as the lakes themselves.

Fired by La Salle's report of his discoveries, two other Frenchmen, Louis Joliet, a native of Quebec, who had already led an expedition in search of the copper mines of Lake Superior, and Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit priest and accomplished linguist, started on a still greater journey. With five companions and two birchbark canoes, they headed down the Wisconsin river, and on June 17, 1673, glided out upon the blue waters of the Mississippi. A fortnight later, they reached a little village called Peoria, where the Indians received them well, and continuing down the river, pa.s.sed the Missouri, the Ohio, and finally, having gone far enough to convince themselves that the river emptied into the Gulf of Mexico and not into the Gulf of California, they turned about and reached Green Bay again in September, having paddled more than 2,500 miles. Marquette, shattered in health, remained at Green Bay, while Joliet pushed on to Montreal to tell of his discoveries. Marquette rallied sufficiently at the end of a year to attempt a mission among the Illinois Indians, where death found him in the spring of 1675. Joliet spent his last years in a vain endeavor to persuade the government of France to undertake on a grand scale the development of the rich lands along the Mississippi.

But the story which Joliet took back with him to Quebec fired anew the ambition of La Salle. He conceived New France as a great empire in the wilderness, and he determined to descend the mighty river to its mouth and establish a city there which would hold the river for France against all comers. Such occupation would, according to French doctrine, give France an indisputable right to the whole territory which the river and its tributaries drained, and La Salle's plan was to establish a chain of forts stretching from Lake Erie to the Gulf, to build up around these great cities, and so to lay the foundations for the mightiest empire in history. We may well stand amazed before a plan so ambitious, and before the determination with which this great Frenchman set about its accomplishment.

To most men, such a scheme seemed but the dream of an enthusiast; but La Salle was in deadly earnest, and for eight years he labored to perfect the details of the plan. At last, on April 9, 1682, he planted the flag of France at the mouth of the Mississippi, naming the country Louisiana in honor of his royal master, whose property it was solemnly declared to be. That done, the intrepid explorer hastened back to France; a fleet was fitted out and attempted to sail directly to the mouth of the great river, but missed it; the ships were wrecked on the coast of Texas, and La Salle was shot from ambush by two of his own followers while searching on foot for the river.

So ended La Salle's part in the accomplishment of a plan which, grandiose as it was, reached a sort of realization--for a great French city near the mouth of the river _was_ built and a thin chain of forts connecting it with Canada, where the French power remained unbroken for three quarters of a century longer; while not until the beginning of the nineteenth century, when the royal line of Louis had been succeeded by a soldier of fortune from Corsica, did the great territory which La Salle had named Louisiana pa.s.s from French possession.

On the nineteenth day of November, 1620, fourteen years after the settlement of Jamestown and twelve after the settlement of Quebec, a storm-beaten vessel of 120 tons burthen crept into the lee of Cape Cod and dropped anchor in that welcome refuge. The vessel was the Mayflower, and she had just completed the most famous voyage in American history, after that of Columbus. The colonists she carried, about a hundred in number, Separatists from the Church of England, have come down through history as the "Pilgrim Fathers." Among them was one destined to rule the fortunes of the colony for more than a quarter of a century. His name was William Bradford, and he was at that time thirty years of age.

Bradford was born in 1590 at Austerfield, in Yorkshire, England, and at the age of sixteen, joined a company of Puritans or Separatists, which met for a time at the little town of Scrooby, but, being threatened with persecution, resolved to remove to Holland. Most of the congregation got away without interference, but Bradford and a few others were arrested and spent several months in prison. As soon as he was released, he joined the colony in Amsterdam, and afterwards, in 1609, removed with it to Leyden. But the newcomers found themselves out of sympathy with Dutch customs and habits of thought, and after long debate, determined to remove to America and found a colony of their own. A patent was obtained, the Mayflower chartered, the congregation put aboard, and the voyage begun on the fifth day of September, 1620.

The colonists expected to settle somewhere near the mouth of the Hudson, but, whether by accident or design, their captain brought up off Cape Cod, and it was decided to land there. After some days' search, a suitable site for a settlement was found, work was begun on houses and fortifications, and the place was named New Plymouth.

Jonathan Carver had been chosen the first governor and guided the colony through the horrors of that first winter; the story of Jamestown was repeated, and by the coming of spring, more than half the colonists were dead. Among them was Carver himself, and William Bradford was at once chosen to succeed him. There can be no doubt that it was to Bradford's wise head and strong hand the colony owed its quick rally, and its escape from the prolonged misery which makes horrible the early history of Virginia. He seems to have possessed a temper resolute, but magnanimous and patient to an unusual degree, together with a religion sincere and devoted, yet neither intolerant nor austere. What results can be accomplished by a combination of qualities at once so rare and so admirable is shown by the work which William Bradford did at Plymouth, over which he ruled almost continuously until his death, thirty-seven years later.

Bradford's success lay first in his courage in doing away with the pernicious system by which all the property was held in common. In doing this, he violated the rules of his company, but he saw that utter failure lay the other way. He divided the colony's land among the several families, in proportion to their number, and compelled each family to shift for itself. The communal system had nearly wrecked Jamestown and would have wrecked Plymouth had not Bradford had the courage to disregard all precedent and make each family its own provider. Years afterwards, in commenting on the results of this revolutionary change, he wrote, "Any general want or suffering hath not been among them since to this day."

And, indeed, this was true. Under Bradford's guidance, the little colony increased steadily in wealth and numbers, and became the sure forerunner of the great Puritan migration of 1630, which founded the colony of Ma.s.sachusetts, into which the older colony of Plymouth was finally absorbed. Of Bradford himself, little more remains to be told. The establishment of Plymouth Plantation was his life work. He was a far bigger man than most of his contemporaries, with a broader outlook upon life and deeper resources within himself. One of these was a literary culture which fairly sets him apart as the first American man of letters. He wrote an entertaining history of his colony, as well as a number of philosophical and theological works, all marked with a style and finish noteworthy for their day.

The government of the colony of Ma.s.sachusetts presented, for over half a century, the most perfect union of church and state ever witnessed in America. The secular arm was ever ready to support the religious, and to compel every resident of the colony to walk in the strait and narrow way of Puritanism. This was a task easy enough at first, but growing more and more difficult as the character of the settlers became more diverse, until, finally, it had to be abandoned altogether.

One of the first and most formidable of all those who dared array themselves against this bulwark of Puritanism was Roger Williams. He was the son of a merchant tailor of London, had developed into a precocious boy, had shown a leaning toward Puritan doctrines, and had ended by out-Puritaning the Puritans. This was princ.i.p.ally apparent in an intolerance of compromise which led him to remarkable extremes. He refused to conform to the use of the common prayer, and so cut himself off from all chance of preferment; he renounced a property of some thousands of pounds rather than take the oath required by law; and at last was forced to flee the country, reaching Ma.s.sachusetts in 1631.

He was, of course, soon at war with the const.i.tuted authorities over questions of doctrine, and at last it was decided to get rid of him by sending him back to England. He was at Salem at the time, and hearing that a warrant had been despatched from Boston for him, he promptly took to the woods, and, making his way with a few followers to Narragansett Bay, broke ground for a settlement which he named Providence. It was the beginning of the first state in the world which took no cognizance whatever of religious belief, so long as it did not interfere with civil peace. He was soon joined by more adherents, and a few years later, he obtained from the king a charter for the colony of Rhode Island.

Almost from the moment of his landing in America, Williams had interested himself greatly in the welfare of the Indians. The princ.i.p.al cause of his expulsion from Ma.s.sachusetts was his contention that the land belonged to the Indians and not to the King of England, who therefore had no right to give it away, so that the colony's charter was invalid. His town of Providence was built on land which the Indians had given him, and he soon acquired considerable influence among them. He learned to speak their language with great facility, translated the Bible into their tongue, and on more than one occasion saved New England from the horrors of an Indian war. But, despite his lofty character, it is impossible at this day, to regard Williams with any degree of sympathy or liking, or to think of him except as a trouble-maker over trifles. Intolerance, happily, is fading from the world, and with it that useless scrupulosity of behavior, which accomplishes no good, but whose princ.i.p.al result is to make uncomfortable all who come in contact with it.

Meanwhile, just to the south of Rhode Island, a prosperous little settlement had been established, which was soon to grow into the most commercially important on the continent. We have seen how Henry Hudson, in 1609, in a vessel chartered by the Dutch West India Company, entered the Hudson river and explored it for some hundred and fifty miles. The Dutch claimed the region as the result of that voyage, and during the next few years, Dutch traders visited it regularly and did a lively business in furs; but no attempt was made at colonization until 1624, although small trading-posts had existed at various points along the river for ten years previously.

All of this country was included in the patent granted the Virginia Company, and it was for the mouth of the Hudson that the Pilgrims had sailed in the Mayflower. The charge has since been made that their captain had been bribed by the thrifty Dutch to land them somewhere else, and at any cost, to keep them away from the neighborhood of the Dutch trading-posts. From whatever cause, this was certainly done, and many years were to elapse before there came another English invasion.

In 1626, Peter Minuit, director for the Dutch West India Company, purchased Manhattan Island from the Indians, giving for it trinkets and merchandise to the value of $24, and founding New Amsterdam as the central trading depot. From the first, the settlement was a cosmopolitan one, just as it is to-day, and in 1643, it was said that eighteen languages were spoken there.

The most notable figure in this prosperous and growing colony was that of Peter Stuyvesant, an altogether picturesque and gallant personality.

Born in Holland in 1602, he had entered the army at an early age, and, as governor of Curacao, lost a leg in battle. In 1646, he was appointed director-general of New Netherlands, and reached New Amsterdam in the spring of the following year. So much powder was burned in firing salutes to welcome him that there was scarcely any left. His speech of greeting was brief and to the point.

"I shall govern you," he said, "as a father his children, for the advantage of the chartered West India Company, and these burghers, and this land."

And he proceeded to do it, having in mind the old adage that to spare the rod is to spoil the child. There was never any doubt in Stuyvesant's mind that the first business of a ruler is to rule, and popular government seemed to him the merest idiocy. "A valiant, weather-beaten, mettlesome, obstinate, leathern-sided, lion-hearted, generous-spirited old governor"--the adjectives describe him well; a sufficiently imposing figure, with his slashed hose and velvet jacket and tall cane and silver-banded wooden leg, he ruled the colony for twenty years with a rod of iron, fortifying it, enlarging it, settling its boundaries, keeping the Indians over-awed, the veriest dictator this continent ever saw, until, one August day in 1664, an English fleet sailed up the bay and summoned the city to surrender.

Stuyvesant set his men to work repairing the fortifications, and was for holding out, but the town was really defenseless against the frigates, which had only to sail up the river and bombard it from either side; his people were disaffected and to some extent not sorry to be delivered from his rule; the terms offered by the English were favorable, and though Stuyvesant swore he never would surrender, a white flag was finally run up over the ramparts of Fort Amsterdam. The city was at once renamed New York, in honor of the Duke of York, to whom it had been granted; and the hard-headed old governor spent the remaining years of his life very comfortably on his great farm, the Bouwerie, just outside the city limits.

This conquest, bloodless and easy as it was, was fraught with momentous consequences. It brought New England into closer relations with Maryland and Virginia by creating a link between them, binding them together; it gave England command of the spot designed by nature to be the commercial and military centre of the Atlantic sea-board, and confirmed a possession of it that was never thereafter seriously disturbed, until the colonies themselves disputed it. Had New Amsterdam remained Dutch, dividing, as it did, New England from the South, there would never have been any question of revolution or independence. The flash of that little white flag on that September day, decided the fate of the continent.

The Duke of York, being of a generous disposition and having many claims upon him, used a portion of the great territory granted him in America to reward his friends, and thereby laid the foundation for another great commonwealth with a unique history. New Jersey was given jointly to Sir George Carteret and Lord Berkeley, and in 1673, Lord Berkeley sold his share, illy-defined as the "southwestern part," to a Quaker named Edward Byllinge. Byllinge soon became insolvent, and his property was taken over by William Penn and two others, as trustees, and the seeds sown for one of the most interesting experiments in history.

There are few figures on the page of history more admirable, self-poised, and clear-sighted than this quiet man. He was born in London in 1644, the son of a distinguished father, and apparently destined for the usual career at the court of England. But while at Oxford, young Penn astonished everybody and scandalized his relatives by joining the Society of Friends, or Quakers, founded by George Fox only a short time before. His family at once removed him from Oxford and sent him to Paris, in the hope that amid the gayeties of the French capital he would forget his Quaker notions, but he was far from doing so. He returned home after a time, and his father threatened to shut him up in the Tower of London, but he retorted that for him the Tower was the worst argument in the world. We get some amusing glimpses of the contention in his household.

"You may 'thee' and 'thou' other folk as much as you like," his angry father told him, "but don't you dare to 'thee' and 'thou' the King, or the Duke of York, or me."

The Quakers insisted upon the use of "thee" and "thou," alleging that the use of the plural "you" was not only absurd, but a form of flattery, and this manner of address has been persisted in by them to this day.

Penn, of course, continued to use them, much to his father's indignation, and even went so far as to wear his hat in the king's presence, an act of audacity which only amused that merry monarch. The story goes that the king, seeing young Penn covered, removed his own hat, remarking jestingly, "Wherever I am, it is customary for only one to be covered"; a neat reproof, as well as a lesson in manners which would have made any other young man's ears tingle, but Penn calmly enough replied, "Keep thy hat on, Friend Charles."

After his father's death, in 1670, Penn found himself heir to a great estate, and began to devote himself entirely to the defense and explanation of Quakerism. Again and again, he was thrown into prison and kept there for months on end, but gradually he began to win for the Friends a certain degree of respect and consideration, perhaps as much because of his high social station, gallant bearing and magnetic personality, as because of any of his arguments. In 1677, he made a sort of missionary tour of Europe, returning to England to set actively afloat the project for Quaker colonization in America which he had long been turning over in his mind.

Three years, however, pa.s.sed before he could secure from the Duke of York a release of all his powers of sovereignty over West Jersey, but this was finally accomplished, and soon afterwards he secured from the crown a charter for a great strip of country in that region. Penn named this region "Sylvania," or "Woodland," but when the King came to approve the charter, he wrote the name "Penn" before "Sylvania," and when Penn protested, a.s.sured him laughingly that the name was given the country not in his honor but in that of his father, and so it stood.

Penn had been allowed a free hand in shaping the policy of his colony, and forthwith proclaimed such a government as existed nowhere else on earth. Absolute freedom of conscience was guaranteed to everyone; it was declared that governments exist for the sake of the governed, that to reform a criminal is more important than to punish him, that the death penalty should be inflicted only for murder or high treason, and that every man had a right to vote and to hold office. All of which are such matters of course to-day that we can scarcely realize how revolutionary they were two centuries ago.

To all who should come to his colony, Penn offered land at the rate of forty shillings for a hundred acres, and the experiment, denounced at first as visionary and certain of failure, was so successful that within a year, more than three thousand persons had sailed to settle along the Delaware. In the summer of 1682, Penn himself sailed for the New World, and late in the following autumn, at a spot just above the junction of the Schuylkill and Delaware, laid out a city as square and level as a checker-board, and named it Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.

Before taking possession of the land, he concluded a treaty with the Delaware Indians, to whom it belonged, "the only treaty," as Voltaire says, "between savages and Christians that was never sworn to and never broken." Penn's stately and distinguished bearing, his affability and kindness of heart, made a deep impression upon the Indians; they always remembered him with trust and affection; and seventy years elapsed before Pennsylvania tasted the horrors of Indian warfare.

The growth of the new city was phenomenal. Settlers came so fast that cabins could not be built for them, and many of them lived for a time in caves along the river. The remainder of Penn's life was spent for the most part in England, where his interests demanded his presence, but he built a handsome residence in the city which he had founded and lived there at intervals until his death.

No consideration, however brief, of his life and work can be complete without some reference to the remarkable effect the establishment of his colony had on emigration to America. Pennsylvania gave a refuge and home to the most intelligent and progressive peoples of Europe, chafing under the religious restrictions which, at home, they could not escape. The Mennonites, the Dunkers, and the Palatines were among these, but by far the most important were the so-called Scotch-Irish--Scotchmen who, a century before, had been sent to Ireland by the English government, in the hope of establishing there a Protestant population which would, in time, come to outnumber and control the native Irish. The Scotch were Presbyterians, of course, and finding the Irish environment distasteful, began, about 1720, to come to America in such numbers that, fifty years later, they formed a sixth part of our entire population. Nearly all of them settled in Western Pennsylvania, from which a steady stream flowed ever southward and westward, furnishing the hardy pioneers of Kentucky and Tennessee, and forming the main strength of American democracy. We shall see, in the chapters which follow, how many of the men eminent in the country's history, traced their descent from this stock.

One more interesting experiment in colonization, conceived and carried out by a man of unusual personality, remains to be recorded. James Oglethorpe, born in 1689, for forty years led the usual life of the wealthy English gentleman--first the army, then a period of quiet country life, and finally parliament. There, however, he took a place apart, almost at once, by his interest in prison reform. The condition of the English prisons of the day was indescribably foul and loathsome, and as horror after horror was unearthed by his investigations, a great project began to take shape in his mind. This was nothing less than the founding in America of a colony where prisoners for debt should be encouraged to settle, and where they should be given means to make a new start in life. For in those days, a man who could not pay his debts was cast into prison and kept there, frequently in the greatest misery, as though that helped matters any.

In 1732, Oglethorpe succeeded in securing a charter for such a colony, which he named Georgia, in honor of the King. Trustees were appointed, the support of influential men secured, and on November 16, 1732, the first shipload of emigrants left England. Oglethorpe himself accompanied them. He had undertaken to establish the colony on the condition that he receive no recompense, and was authorized to act as colonial governor.

Charleston, South Carolina, was reached about the middle of January, and, after some exploration, Oglethorpe selected as the site of the first settlement a bluff on the rich delta lands of the Savannah.

Thither the emigrants proceeded, and at once began to build the town, which was named Savannah after the river flowing at its feet. Oglethorpe himself was indefatigable. He concluded a treaty with the Indians, provided for the defense of the colony against the Spaniards, who held Florida, and, most important of all, welcomed a colony of Jews, who had come from London at their own expense, and who soon became as valuable as any of Savannah's citizens. Probably never before in history had a Christian community welcomed a party of this unfortunate race, which had been despised and persecuted from one end of Europe to the other, which could call no country home, nor invoke the protection of any government.

A year later, another strange band of pilgrims was welcomed--Protestants driven out of the Tyrolese valleys of Austria. A ship had been sent for them, and Oglethorpe gave them permission to select a home in any part of the province, and sent his carpenters to a.s.sist them in building their houses. Georgia owes much of her greatness to these st.u.r.dy people, whose love of independence was to find another vent in the Revolution.

As soon as these new arrivals were comfortably settled and provided for, Oglethorpe proceeded to London, where he secured the pa.s.sage of laws prohibiting slavery and the importation of liquor into the colony, and not until his connection with it ended were slaves brought in. When he returned to Georgia, it was with two vessels, and over three hundred colonists--Scotchmen, Salzburgers and Moravians, the st.u.r.diest people of the Old World. Oglethorpe welcomed them all, and it was this mixture of races which served to give Georgia her curious cosmopolitan population.

Another important arrival was Charles Wesley, who came out as a missionary, and who acted for a time as the Governor's secretary. He was succeeded by the famous George Whitfield, who labored there until his death in 1770.