Beginnings of the American People Part 5

Such unworthy persons doubtless swelled the ma.s.s of uncovenanted. Yet the historian is apt to think that for many, honest and good men enough, the cold inner temple of the ideal commonwealth must have proved more forbidding than its wind-swept outer courts. To enter its portals was an ordeal which the average man will not readily undergo, involving, as an initial procedure, a confession of faults and a profession of faith, a public revelation of inner spiritual condition, an exposure of soul to the searching and curious inspection of the sanctified. And the covenant itself was found to be no warmed and cloistered retreat, secure from the rude impact and impertinent gaze of the world. Quite the contrary! To enter the covenant was to renounce all private spiritual possessions, to give one's intimate convictions into the keeping of others, to subscribe to a very communism of the emotional life. This un-Roman Church was after all but a public confessional, in which every brother was a confessor, and life itself a penance for constructive sin. The soul that is constantly exposed grows callous or diseased; and the New England covenant provided a regimen well suited to repel the normal mind or induce in its patients a fatal spiritual anaemia.

And with every decade the house of the covenant became at once more difficult to enter and less comfortable to abide in. The Puritan was not necessarily a sad or solemn person. Yet the light heart and the merry mind were not the salient characteristics even of the cheerful Winthrop or the genial Cotton; while the conditions of life in the wilderness--the unrelieved round of exacting labor, the ever present danger from the lurking Indians, the long cold winters with their certain harvest of death from diseases which could be ascribed only to the will of G.o.d and met with resignation instead of skill, the succession of funerals as depressing as they were public and pervading--were well calculated to deepen the somber cast of the Puritan temper and accentuate the critical and introspective tendency of his mind. Inspection of one's own and one's neighbor's conduct was, indeed, always a Puritan duty; shut within the restricted horizon of a New England village, it became a necessity and almost a pleasure. When few stirring events diverted thought from the petty and the personal, when pent-up emotion found little outlet in the graces or amus.e.m.e.nts of social intercourse, observation and introspection fastened upon the minutiae of life and every eccentricity of speech and conduct was weighed and a.s.sessed. Close espionage on conduct was matched by the careful scrutiny accorded every novel opinion. When the weekly sermon was the universal topic of conversation, the refinements of belief were more discussed than essentials; often discussed, they were often questioned--by strict Separatists like Roger Williams; by cavilers at infant baptism like that "anciently religious woman," the Lady Deborah Moodie; by fervid emotionalists, such as Anne Hutchinson or the Quaker missionaries: and every discussion of the creed left it more precisely defined, more narrow, and more official. Under the stress of conflicting opinion and the attrition of acrid debate, the covenant of grace steadily hardened into a covenant of barren works, in which an air of sanctimony became an easy subst.i.tute for the sense of sanctification, and the t.i.the of mint and c.u.mmin was allowed to overbalance the weightier matters of the law.

While the covenant became more inelastic, and its rule of life more strictly defined, the call of the world became more insidious and alluring. As the colony became established beyond the fear of failure, and life fell from an artificial and self-conscious venture to be but a natural experience, as wealth increased and opportunities for relaxation and idle amus.e.m.e.nt multiplied, the elemental instincts of human nature, stronger than decrees of state, would not be denied. During the third decade after the founding, the Christmas festival found its way into the colony, and "dancing in ordinarys upon the marriage of some person" gave occasion for scandal. Extravagance in "apparill both of men and women"

became the subject of repeated legislation: "we cannot but to our grief take notice," so runs the law of 1651, "that intolerable excesse and bravery have crept in uppon us, and especially amongst people of mean condition, to the dishonor of G.o.d, the scandall of our profession, the coruption of estates, and altogether unsuitable to our povertie."

Non-attendance at church did not become a problem for the magistrates until 1646, but the fine then imposed proved ineffective; and year by year the desecration of the Sabbath became more marked and more difficult of correction. Many and sundry abuses were committed "by several persons on the Lord's day, not only by children playing in the streets and other places, but by youthes, maydes, and other persons, both strangers and others, uncivilly walkinge in the streets and fields, travelling from towne to towne, going on shipboard, frequentinge common howses and other places to drinke, sport, and otherwise to misspend that precious time."

"Maydes and youthes!" The words are significant, for by 1653 the first generation of native-born New Englanders had indeed come upon the scene to vex the Puritan fathers. How different from that of the first settlers must have been the outlook of those who had never been in England. They had never been oppressed by bishop or king; had never felt the insidious temptation of a cathedral church, or witnessed the mockery of the ma.s.s, or been repelled by a surpliced priesthood desecrating G.o.d's house with incense and music; had never seen a maypole with its accompaniment of licentious revelry, or witnessed the debauching effects of a holiday festival. They had solemnly sat in unwarmed churches; they had been present at elections; had seen men standing in the pillory or women whipped through the streets; they had diverted themselves at weddings or the husking-bee, or by walking in the woods, or by drinking in a tavern. But no frivolous and superst.i.tious world of Anti-Christ compa.s.sed them about to point the moral of the harsh Puritan tale. Their Puritanism was induced by precept and example rather than by the compelling impact of a corrupt society.

Yet no conventionalized Puritanism, no mere living on the dead level of habitual virtues could satisfy the leaders of the great migration. The founding of Ma.s.sachusetts was preeminently a self-conscious movement, the work of able and resolute men who brought an unquenchable moral enthusiasm to the support of a clearly defined purpose. They had counted the cost and made their choice; and every instinct of proud and self-contained men disposed them to minimize the difficulties which they encountered in the New World and to exaggerate those which they had overcome in the Old. Having staked their judgment on the wisdom of the venture, they were bound to be justified in the event. To admit that life on the physical and moral frontier was less than they had imagined would be a humiliating confession of failure; and worse than a confession of failure; for G.o.d had appointed this refuge for them, and not to abide in it in all contentment would be to cavil at his purpose, to question his decree. With the instinct of true pioneers they therefore idealized the barren wilderness, p.r.o.nouncing its air most healing, its soil most fertile; and with unfailing optimism proving, by the very sufferings they endured, how practicable, how s.p.a.cious and attractive was the habitation which they had set themselves to fashion.

Thus it was that the very influences which relaxed the hold of the Puritan ideal upon the ma.s.s of the people served only to strengthen its hold upon their leaders. With resolution stiffened by every obstacle, magistrates and clergy pressed on to the appointed task, never doubting that they were called upon to justify the ways of G.o.d to man. Drawing their inspiration from Geneva and the ancient Hebrew code, they a.s.sumed, with a courage as sublime as it proved futile, to foster moral and spiritual excellence by decrees of state. Indifference or opposition only called them to a stricter rule; for every physical disaster, every denial of the creed or departure from the straight line of life, was thought to be G.o.d's judgment upon them for some want of faith or failure in the law. And in later years the chastis.e.m.e.nts of the Lord were many:--the desolating King Philip's War; persistent interference with their chartered Liberties; dissensions in the Boston Church and quarrels of magistrates and clergy; the rise of "an anti-ministerial spirit" and the growth of worldliness and lax living among the people. "What are the reasons that have provoked the Lord to bring his judgments upon New England?" Such was the primary question which the Synod of 1679 was called upon to answer. "Declension from the primitive foundation work, innovation in doctrine and worship"--this, according to a committee of the deputies, was the true cause. "A spirit of division, persecuting and oppressing of G.o.d's ministers and precious saints," said Mr. Flint of Dorchester, "is the sin that is unseen." And not a few maintained that all their troubles were but well-merited punishments for having dealt too leniently with the Quakers.

And yet, in the year 1679, such explanations as these were falling to the level of the conventional for many of the magistrates and even for some of the clergy. After forty years few of the original leaders were still alive. Winthrop died in 1649, Cotton in 1652, Thomas Dudley in 1653, John Wilson in 1667, Richard Mather in 1669. The days of persecution and exile influenced the thinking of the second generation, indeed, not so much as an experience, but rather as a tradition or a tale that is told. Liberal influences, which were to oust the Mathers from control of Harvard College, were already gaining ground in Cambridge, while Boston had become the center of powerful material interests which were to prove incompatible with the rigid ideals of the founders. "The merchants seem to be rich men," writes Mr. Harris in 1675, "and their houses as handsomely furnished as most in London." In 1680 more than one hundred ships traded at the Bay, carrying fish, provisions, and lumber to southern Europe, to the Madeiras, and to the English sugar colonies in the West Indies. Many men who rose to prominence in the third quarter of the century were more concerned for the temporal than for the spiritual commonwealth; and when material interests thus came into compet.i.tion with the interests of religion, not a few were prepared to compromise with the world, and so a secular and moderate spirit crept in to corrupt the counsels of government.

The rise of the moderate party and the divergence between clergy and magistrate is therefore a notable feature of the last years of Ma.s.sachusetts history under the charter. In 1679, after the death of Leverett, Bradstreet was elected governor. He was the leader of the party of conciliation, one of many who, renouncing the rigid and uncompromising policy of the clergy, were ready to cooperate with Randolph in the hope of securing the essential interests of the colony by a timely submission to the English Government. And it is significant of the growing influence of the property interests that the moderates were stronger in the upper than in the lower chamber. In 1682 the governor and a majority of the a.s.sistants, "upon a serious consideration of his Majesty's intimation that his purpose is only to regulate our charter, in such a manner as shall be for his service and the good of this his colony," announced themselves willing to surrender the bulwark of the Puritan liberties. But the House of Deputies voted to "adhere to their former bills," preferring with the clergy rather to "die by the hand of others, than by their own."

The event reveals the opposition of the material and the ideal interests which was a prime cause in the defeat of the great Puritan experiment.

The a.s.sistants were "men of the best estates," says Randolph, while the deputies were "mostly an inferior sort of planters." Randolph was a prejudiced observer; but it is undoubtedly true that the upper chamber spoke for the shipbuilders and traders of Boston. Forty years earlier, when Laud was preparing to annul the charter, both magistrates and clergy made ready for forcible resistance. It was no longer possible.

Ma.s.sachusetts had ceased to be a wilderness community cut off from contact with the outside world. Her rapidly growing trade depended upon English markets. The base of the fisheries was shifting northward, and a French company at Nova Scotia was already seizing New England ships.

Without English protection trade would be ruined and the colony itself fall a prey to France. Forcible resistance was therefore not to be thought of. The material interests of Ma.s.sachusetts bound her to the home Government, and practical men were apt to think that even the spiritual City of G.o.d would suffer less under Anglican than under Catholic control.

The recall of the charter but opened free pa.s.sage to the latent forces that were already beginning to transform the life and thought of New England. The theocratic ideal had so far lost its hold that the event to which the clergy and a remnant of the magistrates looked forward as to a cosmic catastrophe was accepted with resignation or indifference by the ma.s.s of the people. Neither disaster nor serious disturbance accompanied the inauguration of the new regime. The extension of the suffrage to the freeholders removed more discontent than it created. A government controlled by property interests approved itself as well as one directed by religious ideas. The colony was no more distracted by the introduction of the Anglican service than by the erection of the second Boston Church; and even the pa.s.sing of Harvard College, that citadel and fortress of the old theocracy, into the hands of Boston and Cambridge liberals, was far less a tragedy to Ma.s.sachusetts than it was to the Mathers.

The life of Cotton Mather was, indeed, a kind of tragedy, for he was the most distinguished of those who grew to manhood under the old order only to witness its fall and live in degenerate days. Not less able than his father, but how much less influential! In early years his voice was a commanding one, but he was destined to see his popularity wane and to live most of his long life in comparative isolation and neglect in the very community where Increase Mather had been a high priest indeed. In such men as Cotton Mather the old spirit lived on, sharply accentuated by defeat; and transformed, in such men as Jonathan Edwards, by dint of morbid introspection and brooding on the sins of a perverse generation, into a kind of disease, or spiritual neurasthenia. Such men could but look back with poignant regret to the golden age that was past. Of that golden age, Cotton Mather himself, "smitten with a just fear of encroaching and ill-bodied degeneracies," sat down to write the history, recording in the _Magnalia_ "the great things done for us by our G.o.d,"

in the hope that he might thereby do something "to prevent the loss of the primitive principles and the primitive practices."

But he had imagined a vain thing. For even as the century drew to its close, the old Bay colony was already drifting from its back-water moorings, out into the main current of the world's thought. None could know to what uncharted seas of political and religious radicalism they were bearing on. None could foresee the time when Calvin's Inst.i.tutes would give way to the Suffolk Resolutions, when Adams would speak in place of Endicott, or the later day when Emerson would preach a new antinomianism more desolating than any known to Winthrop or Bradford.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

This period is fully treated in Channing's _History of the United States_, I, chaps, VIII-XIV; and in Tyler's _England in America_, chaps.

V-VII, IX-XIX. See also Fiske's _Old Virginia and Her Neighbours_, I, chaps. VII-XI, XIV; and Eggleston's _Beginners of a Nation_ and _The Transit of Civilization from England to America_. The const.i.tutional aspects of the colonial settlements are exhaustively treated in Osgood's _The American Colonies in the 17th Century_. For the economic and social history of the colonies, see Bruce's _Social Life in Virginia_ and _The Economic History of Virginia in the 17th Century_, and Weeden's _Economic History of New England_. Contemporary pamphlets relating to the colonies are to be found in Force's _Tracts and Other Papers_, 4 vols. Washington, 1838. To understand the motives and ideals of the Separatists and Puritans one must read their own accounts. Of these, the most charming is Bradford's _History of Plymouth Plantation_. This, as well as Governor Winthrop's _Journal_, is printed in Jameson's _Original Narratives of Early American History_. Johnson's _Wonder Working Providence_, in the same collection, is a history from the point of view of a loyal Puritan of average education and intelligence. Morton's _New English Canaan_ (1632) and _The Simple Cobler of Aggawam_ (1647) are printed in Force's _Tracts and Other Papers_, vols. II, III. A hostile account of the Puritan experiment is in Samuel Gorton's _Letter to Nathaniel Morton_, in Force's _Tracts_, etc., vol. IV. About three quarters of a century after the founding of Ma.s.sachusetts, Cotton Mather wrote his _Magnalia Christi Americana, or the Ecclesiastical History of New England_, 2 vols. Hartford, 1855. In Bk. I he gives an account of the founding from the point of view of one who felt that New England was then departing from the "primitive principles."

CHAPTER IV

ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

_Your trade is the mother and nurse of your seamen; your seamen are the life of your fleet; your fleet is the security of your trade, and both together are the wealth, strength, and glory of Britain._

LORD HAVERSHAM.

I

The decay of the old Puritanism in Ma.s.sachusetts, so distressing to Cotton Mather, was but a faint reflection of the change which had come over England since the return of Charles II to Whitehall. With the fall of the Puritan regime moral earnestness and high emotional tension, regarded as contrary to nature and reason, gave way to a rationalizing habit of mind, to seriousness tempered with well-bred common sense or spiced with a pinch of cynical indifference. Religion fell to be a conventional conformity. Theologians, wanting vital faith in G.o.d, were content to balance the probabilities of his existence. Amus.e.m.e.nt became the avocation of a leisure cla.s.s, and the average man was intent like Samuel Pepys to put money in his purse, in order to indulge himself "a little the more in pleasure, knowing that this is the proper age to do it." From Milton and the Earl of Clarendon to William Pitt, England was no country of lost causes and impossible enthusiasms. It was a pragmatic age, in which the scientific discoveries of Newton are the highest intellectual achievement, and the conclusion of Pope that "everything that is is best" gives the quality of poetic insight.

In this ago the direction of English affairs fell to men well suited to the national temper. The first Charles suffered martyrdom for his faith; the second, determined never again to go on his travels, set the standard of public morality by selling himself to France, and with a smile professing the belief that honor in man and virtue in woman were but devices to raise the price of capitulation. And so he often found it; for he was himself served by men who, having renounced their Puritan principles for place and power, were prepared to forswear the Stuarts in order to follow the rising star of William of Orange. William was an able statesman, indeed, but his interest was in the grand alliance; he "borrowed England on his way to Versailles," and governed it in the interest of the Dutch Coalition. Queen Anne and the first Georges reigned but did not govern; and in the early eighteenth century power fell to men of supple intelligence and complacent conviction--to Marlborough and little Sidney G.o.dolphin, to Harley and St. John and Sunderland, and at last to Robert Walpole, the very personification of the shrewd curiosity, the easy-going morals, the material ambitions of his generation.

Little wonder if in such an age colonies were regarded as providentially designed to promote the trade's increase. The recall of the Ma.s.sachusetts charter was but one of many circ.u.mstances which reveal the rise in England of renewed interest in the plantations. Faith in colonial ventures had never, indeed, quite disappeared, nor had the early Stuarts ever been wholly indifferent to their American possessions. But the fate of the Virginia Company had cooled the ardor of moneyed men, and the Civil War, focusing attention for a generation upon fundamental questions of morals and politics, absorbed the energies of government and nation. With the establishment of the Protectorate imperial interests again claimed attention. Cromwell, calling the merchants to counsel, inaugurated a vigorous policy of maritime and colonial expansion. The Dutch war and the conquest of Jamaica recalled to men's minds the triumphs of Elizabeth; and those who gathered round Charles II--bankrupt n.o.bles, pushing merchants, and able statesmen--turned to the business of trade and colonies with an enthusiasm unknown since the days of Gilbert and Raleigh.

Yet it was an enthusiasm well tempered to practical ends, purged of resplendent visions and vague idealisms. The plantations, regarded as incidents in the life of commerce, were thought to be important when they were found to be prosperous. In 1661 the king was a.s.sured that his American possessions were "beginning to grow into Commodities of great value and Esteeme, and though some of them continue in tobacco yet upon the Returne hither it smells well, and paies more Custome to his Majestie than the East Indies four times ouer." It was a statement of which the new king was not likely to miss the significance. Determined to preserve the prerogative without offending the nation, Charles was never indifferent to the material welfare of England; the expansion of trade would increase his own revenue, while the vigilance which preserves liberty he thought likely to be relaxed among a prosperous and well-fed people. To commercial and colonial expansion the merry monarch therefore gave his best attention. If he yawned over dull reports in council, he listened to them with ready intelligence, and was prepared to encourage every reasonable project for the extension of the empire.

For new colonial ventures opportunity was not lacking. Widely separated settlements along the American coast were cut in twain by New Netherland and flanked on either side by the possessions of France and Spain. To forestall rivals in occupying all the territory claimed by England, and to exploit intelligently its commercial resources, seemed at once a public duty and a private opportunity. And no region was thought more important, either in a commercial or a military way, than the Cape Fear and Charles River valleys. So at least reasoned the Earl of Clarendon, Ashley Cooper, and Sir John Colleton; to them, a.s.sociated with five others, was accordingly issued in 1663, and again in 1665, a proprietary grant to the Carolinas. The patentees, upon whom the charter conferred the usual right to establish and govern colonies, expected that the surplus population of Barbados and the Bahamas, where capital and slavery were driving out white laborers and small farmers, would readily migrate to the Charles River, and there engage in the cultivation of commodities--such as silk, currants, raisins, wax, almonds, olives, and oil--which, being raised neither in England nor in any English plantation, would serve to redress the balance of trade and doubtless net a handsome profit to those with faith to venture the first costs of settlement. With the English market a.s.sured, a thriving trade and a prosperous colony seemed the certain result.

In these expectations the patentees were disappointed. Dissenters already settled in the region of Albemarle Sound were little disposed to submit to restrictions which they had left Virginia to avoid. In 1665 and 1666 some discontented Barbadians, making an essay to settle on the coast farther south, found the country less inviting than they had been led to expect, and returned to Barbados as the lesser evil. The terms on which the proprietors granted land, liberal enough but frequently changed; restrictions laid on trade almost before there was anything to exchange; the doctrinaire Fundamental Const.i.tutions which John Locke, fresh from the perusal of Harrington, wrote out in the quiet of his study for governing little frontier communities the like of which he had never seen,--all had little effect but to irritate those who were already on the ground and discourage others from going there. In 1667, there were no inhabitants in Carolina south of Albemarle Sound; in 1672 scarcely more than four hundred. Not silk and almonds but provisions were raised; for it was necessary "to provide in the first place for the belly" before endeavoring to redress the balance of England's commerce.

As late as 1675 the proprietors complained that an expenditure of 10,000 had returned them nothing but the "charge of 5 or 600 people who expect to live on us." An exaggeration, doubtless; but in truth the Carolinas never profited the proprietors anything, never drew off much of the surplus population of Barbados, nor supplied England with olives or capers. North Carolina raised tobacco, which was carried by New England traders to Virginia or the Northern colonies. The inhabitants of the Southern province, reinforced by French Huguenots and English dissenters, exported provisions to the West Indies. Yet South Carolina, disappointing to the proprietors, was destined in the next century, when rice became its staple product, to serve in an almost ideal way the purpose for which it had been founded.

The Carolina charter had scarcely been issued before the Dutch were ousted from the valley of the Hudson. It was an old grievance that the Hollanders, under many obligations to England, should have presumed to occupy territory already granted by James I to the Plymouth Company. And now, wedged in between the New England and the Southern colonies, holding the first harbor on the continent and well situated to share with France in exploiting the fur trade, the grievance had become intolerable. But the offense of all was the complacence with which the merchants of New Amsterdam ignored the English Trade Acts. Reconciled at last to the strange perversity of Virginia in raising tobacco, the English Government had made the best of a bad bargain by laying a prohibition upon its cultivation in England; yet with this result: an English industry had been suppressed by law only that the Dutch, who still contested England's right to share in the spice and slave trade, might carry Virginia tobacco to European ports, smuggle European commodities into the English settlements, and so diminish the profits of British merchants and annually deprive the royal exchequer of 10,000 of customs revenue. When the Dutch war was imminent in 1664, an English fleet, therefore, took possession of Now Amsterdam in order to secure to England the commercial value of the tobacco colonies. Before the conquest was effected the king conferred upon his brother, the Duke of York, a proprietary feudal grant of all the territory lying between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers.

At the time of the conquest the colony of New Netherland was occupied by Dutch farmers and traders on western Long Island and on both sides of the Hudson as far north as the Mohawk River; central Long Island was inhabited in part by New Englanders; the eastern end entirely so. To establish English authority in the province, harmonizing at once the interests of the Catholic Duke of York, the Dutch Protestants, and the New England Puritans, was a difficult task, but it was accomplished with much skill by Colonel Nicolls, who was the first English governor.

Religious toleration was granted; land t.i.tles were confirmed; and a body of laws, known as the Duke's Laws, based upon Dutch custom and New England statutes, was prepared by the governor and with some murmuring accepted by the inhabitants. In 1683 Governor Dongan, yielding to popular demand, established a legislative body consisting of the governor's council and a house of eighteen deputies elected by the freeholders, and the freemen of the corporations of Albany and New York.

With the accession of James as King of England, the province temporarily lost its popular a.s.sembly; in 1688 it was annexed to New England under the jurisdiction of Andros; and after the Revolution it was distracted for many years by political quarrels growing out of the Leisler Rebellion. Yet none of these events interfered with the economic development of the colony. In 1674 the population was about 7000.

Natural increase, together with immigrants from England and New England, Huguenot exiles from France, and refugees which the armies of Louis XIV drove out of the Palatinate, swelled the number to about 25,000 in 1700.

Dutch merchants at Albany did a thriving business in furs; and in 1695 New York City, with a population of 5000, was already the center of an active trade, mainly West Indian, by no means wholly legal, in provisions and sugar.

The conquest of New Amsterdam was scarcely completed before the Duke of York, by "lease and re-lease," and for the sum of ten shillings, conveyed to his friends, Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, the territory between the Hudson and the Delaware Rivers, afterwards known as New Jersey. Dutch settlers already occupied the west sh.o.r.e of New York Harbor; and there were Swedes as well as Dutch on the lower Delaware. Favorable concessions offered by the proprietors soon attracted New Englanders from Long Island and Connecticut, who located in the region of Monmouth and Middletown. The proprietors nevertheless found more vexation than profit in their venture; and in 1673 Lord Berkeley sold his rights to two Friends, John Fenwick and Edward Byllinge, who were intent upon founding a refuge for the Quakers in America. Many Quakers soon settled in West Jersey along the Delaware, and upon the death of Carteret the proprietary rights to East Jersey were purchased by William Penn and other Friends who had succeeded to the rights of Fenwick and Byllinge. A mixed population and conflicting claims made the history of the first Quaker colony a turbulent one. In 1688 both Jerseys were annexed to New York; and in 1702, the proprietors having surrendered all their rights, the two colonies became the single royal province of New Jersey.

Of those who were interested in securing a refuge for the Quakers, the most active was William Penn, who had suffered ridicule and persecution for his faith, and who now desired a clearer field than the Jerseys offered for his political and religious experiments. In 1681 he therefore procured from the king a proprietary grant of the territory lying west of the Delaware from "twelve miles north of New Castle Town unto the three and fortieth degree of Northern Lat.i.tude." The land within these vague limits was thought to be "wholly Indian," and the purposes of Penn did not run counter to the colonial policy of the Government. Optimism or ignorance disposed the Lords of Trade to believe that Pennsylvania could as readily as the Carolinas be devoted to the cultivation of "oyle, dates, figgs, almons, raisins, and currans." To the political hobbies of Penn the Government was indifferent, while the intractable Quakers were cla.s.sed with jailbirds and political offenders as people who were more useful to England in the plantations than at home. The proprietor's "Account of the Province of Pennsylvania,"

translated into Dutch, German, and French, promising religious and political liberty, and offering land on easy terms to rich and poor alike, attracted good colonists in large numbers. Within ten years there were 10,000 people, mostly Quakers, in Pennsylvania and the Delaware counties. Political wrangling, somewhat difficult to understand and scarcely worth unraveling, distracted the colony of brotherly love for many years; but from the beginning the province prospered. The settlers were as thrifty as New England Puritans, and they had better soil and a more hospitable climate. Provisions were soon raised for export; and in 1700, according to Robert Quarry, the Quakers of Pennsylvania had "improved tillage to that degree that they have made bread, flower, and Beer a drugg in all the markets of the West Indies."

II

As early as 1656 London merchants were inquiring "whether it would not be a prudentiall thing to draw all the Islands, Colonies, and Dominions of America under one and the same management here." Enterprising capitalists who had ventured their money in Jamaica or Barbados were content to leave the honor and profit of founding new colonies to idealists like Penn and Shaftesbury; but they eagerly welcomed the restored monarch after the unsettled conditions of 1659, and were prepared, even before he landed, to tell him "how the forraigne plantations may be made most useful to the Trade and Navigation of these Kingdomes." Of all the busy promoters whose private interests were, by some strange whim of Providence, in such happy accord with the nation's welfare and the theories of economists, none was more conspicuous than Martin Noel. He was a man of varied activities: a stockholder in the East India Company; a farmer of the inland post office and of the excise; a banker who made loans, and issued bills of exchange and letters of credit. His many ships traded in the West Indies, in New England and Virginia, and in the Mediterranean. During the wars of the Protectorate he was himself a commissioner of prize goods, issued letters of marque, and judged the prizes taken by his own vessels. A center of great interest was his place at the Old Jewry; the resort of ship captains, merchants, investors, contractors, officials of the Government. The capital for financing one of the Jamaica expeditions was raised there by Noel, who was rewarded by a grant of twenty thousand acres of sugar land after the conquest of the island. He had been intimate with Cromwell, and after the return of Charles won the reputation of being, in all affairs of trade and plantations, "the mainstay of the Government." It was through Martin Noel, and men of his kind, that the old colonial system began to be shaped to serve the ends of the moneyed and mercantile interests of England.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Areas settled by 1660, and between 1660 and 1700.]

Enterprising men like Noel were prosperous enough, but their extended vision enabled them to complain intelligently of the decay of trade. In the year 1660 exports made not more than a fourth part of the eight and a half millions of England's foreign commerce. Money was scarce, interest high, rents and prices low. No one doubted that the effective remedy for these ills lay in establishing a "favorable balance of trade." But in the path of this achievement stood the old rivals of England--Holland, Spain, and France. Imports from France overbalanced exports thither in the proportion of 2.6 to 1.6. Spain still worked the rich silver veins of the Andes, and the conquest of Jamaica had opened English eyes to the high value of her West Indian possessions. Above all, the thrifty Dutch, intrenched in the East Indies and on the west coast of Africa, supplied Europe with the major part of Oriental products and denied England's right to share with them the honor and profit of importing slaves into Spanish America. To restore the balance of the French trade, and to contest with Holland and Spain for the lucrative commerce of the East and the West Indies was the underlying economic motive of the wars and diplomacy, as well as of the colonial policy of the Restoration period; it was for this that the Royal African and Hudson Bay Companies were organized; for this the Dutch and French wars were waged; for this regulations were enacted for trade and plantations. And to contemporaries the wisdom of such measures was evident in the result: at the close of the century, although imports remained approximately the same as in 1660, exports had reached the unprecedented figure of seven millions sterling.

In achieving this result, the plantations were expected to play an important part; and no one doubted that they had done so. During the decade after the Restoration, the commerce between England and her American possessions was about one tenth of her total foreign trade; in 1700 it was about one seventh. Imports from the colonies rose from 500,000 to more than 1,000,000, and exports to the colonies from 105,910 to 750,000. But the mere increase of trade was no perfect index of the importance of the plantations; for the colonial trade built up the merchant marine far more, in proportion to its volume, than any other. The American voyages were long; plantation commodities bulked large in proportion to their value; and whereas much of the commerce between England and Europe was carried in foreign ships, colonial trade was confined to British vessels. If, therefore, the merchant marine more than doubled during the Restoration, that happy result was thought to be largely due to the colonies. "The Plantacion trade is one of the greatest nurseries of the Shipping and Seamen of this Kingdome, and one of the greatest branches of its trade," said the customs commissioners in 1678; "the Plantacions, New Castle trade, and the fisheries, make 3/4 of all the seamen in ye Nation."

The colonies which enlisted the enthusiasm of the commissioners were the plantations proper. There were men, such as Charles Davenant, who thought New England might have its uses; but the high value of Maryland and Virginia, of Barbados and Jamaica, was obvious to all. Maryland and Virginia, it is true, were not quite ideal colonies, since it was found necessary, in their interest, to prohibit the raising of tobacco in England. But the sugar islands were without reproach. England was not now, as in the time of James I, thought to be overpopulated; and Barbados and Jamaica found favor, not only because their products were neither raised nor made in England, but because they could be exploited by slave labor. It was pointed out that happily "by taking off one useless person, for such generally go abroad [to the islands], we add Twenty Blacks to the Labour and Manufactures of the Nation." Negroes procured in Africa at slight cost might, indeed, be counted as commodities of export, while the island colonies cultivated precisely those commodities which England would otherwise have imported from foreign countries. And the statistics of the custom-house confirmed the theory of the pamphleteer; in 1697, seven eighths of all colonial commerce was with the tobacco and sugar plantations, and Jamaica alone offered a greater market than all the Northern and Middle colonies combined.

It was thus the West Indies which statesmen had chiefly in mind when they set about regulating trade and navigation to the end that "we may in every part be more sellers than buyers, and thereby the Coyne and present stocke of money be preserved and increased." Three acts of Parliament, embodying the ideas of London merchants interested in the tobacco and sugar plantations, formulated the principles of England's commercial code. The famous Navigation Act of 1660 confined colonial carrying trade wholly, and the foreign carrying trade mainly, to English and colonial shipping, and provided that certain colonial products--sugar, tobacco, cotton-wool, indigo, ginger, dyeing-woods; the so-called "enumerated" commodities--could be shipped only to England or to an English colony. In 1663 the Staple Act prohibited the importation into the colonies of any commodities raised or made in Europe,--with the exception of salt, of horses and provisions from Scotland and Ireland, of wine from the Madeiras and the Azores, and of commodities not allowed to be imported into England,--unless they were first landed in England.

In order not to discriminate against English in favor of colonial consumers of colonial products, a third act was pa.s.sed in 1673 providing that enumerated commodities, which paid a duty when shipped directly to England, should pay a duty when shipped from one colony to another. In 1705 rice, mola.s.ses, and naval stores were added to the list of enumerated commodities, and in 1733 prohibitive duties, never enforced, were laid upon rum, mola.s.ses, and sugar imported from foreign islands into the continental colonies. The purpose of these laws, and of the supplementary acts, of which more than half a hundred were pa.s.sed between 1689 and 1765, was to foster the industries of the empire at the expense of foreign countries, and to develop colonial industry along lines that did not bring it into compet.i.tion with English agriculture or manufactures.

Information gathered by the Privy Council committees, which the Stuarts appointed to coordinate the work of managing trade and the plantations, soon demonstrated that it was easier to make laws than it was to enforce them. Until the end of the century, illicit trade, inseparably connected with piracy, became increasingly flagrant in nearly every colony. West Indian buccaneers, lineal descendants of the Elizabethan "sea dogues,"

nesting at Jamaica under English sanction until after the peace with Spain in 1670, resorted to Charleston, New York, Providence, or Boston, and under licenses granted by royal governors joined hands with the colonial free-trader or East Indian "interlopers" to make the acts of trade a byword and a reproach. New England and Dutch merchants, "regarding neither the acts of trade nor the law of nature," carried provisions to Canada during the French wars. Tobacco was taken to Holland and Scotland, or smuggled from Maryland through Pennsylvania into the Northern colonies. Bolted flour and provisions were exchanged by New York traders in the Spanish islands for mola.s.ses and rum.

European commodities and the spices and fabrics of the Orient, secured at trifling cost from pirates or "interlopers" in exchange for rum or Spanish pieces of eight, were carried in small boats up the innumerable estuaries that indent the coast from New England to Virginia. Indolent governors were often ignorant of the law; dishonest ones, willing for money down to wink at its violation; and even those, like Bellomont, who were honest and energetic, found themselves without the necessary machinery for its effective enforcement.

If the violation of the Trade Acts called loudly for a more direct supervision of the colonies, the growing menace of Canada enforced the same lesson. Under the imbecile Charles II, Spain was no longer, as in Elizabethan times, the first danger. Colbert's attention to colonial affairs, as well as Louis XIV's European ambitions, soon obscured the commercial rivalry of England and Holland, while the accession of William of Orange to the throne of the Stuarts, by pledging England to twenty years of war against the House of Bourbon, revealed the startling fact that it was New France rather than New Spain which threatened the security of British America. English settlements had not yet pa.s.sed the Alleghany foothills before French missionaries and explorers had penetrated by the chain of lakes to the heart of the continent. Jean Nicolet as early as 1640, Radisson and Grosseilliers in 1660, were canoeing down the Wisconsin River toward the Mississippi; and in 1671, the year before Count Frontenac landed at Quebec to begin the regeneration of Canada, Saint-Lusson, with impressive ceremony in the presence of fourteen native tribes at Sault Ste. Marie, took possession of the great Northwest in the name of the Grand Monarch.

It was no mere spirit of adventure, or dream of limitless empire, that dispersed the French settlements over so wide an area. As Virginia was founded on tobacco, so was Canada on furs; and unless the Indians on the northern lakes could be induced to bring their furs down the St.