The American Nation: A History Part 8

5. As a form of subsidy the king agreed to give the company two war- vessels of two hundred to three hundred tons, armed and equipped for a voyage; but they were to be victualled, supported, and, in case of loss, replaced by the company. He also presented them with certain cannon formerly the property of the East India Company. The nature of these gifts seems to intimate the possibility of warlike expeditions of the company against the king's enemies and its own, and prizes are referred to repeatedly as a possible source of income.

6. All goods of all kinds brought from New France were to be exempted for fifteen years from all duties and imposts; and all victuals, munitions of war, and all other necessaries exported from France to the colony should be likewise exempt. Other privileges were permission to n.o.bles, clergymen, and officers to join the company without derogation from their rank, and an agreement to enn.o.ble twelve prominent members of the company; full naturalization as French citizens of all colonists and converted natives; and the advancement of all artisans who should pursue their trades in the colony for six years, to full mastership in their respective occupations.

7. The duties the company was bound to fulfil in return for these concessions were primarily those of colonization. The company engaged to take over to New France two or three hundred colonists of both s.e.xes within the year 1628, and altogether four thousand within fifteen years; to lodge, feed, and provide them with the necessaries of life for three years after their emigration; and then to a.s.sign to them enough cleared land for their support and enough grain to sow it and to feed them till the first harvest. These provisions showed a clear insight into the difficulties of settlement of a new country, but they also imposed upon the company a crushing burden of expense which required true Gallic optimism to contemplate with any a.s.surance of success.

8. Next to peopling of the colony came the conversion of the heathen.

Indeed, this object, with proper piety, was placed in the forefront of the edict creating the company. In each settlement the company was bound to provide at least three priests and give them support for fifteen years, or else provide them with cleared land sufficient for their support. After the expiration of the fifteen years, and for further missionary efforts, the religious needs of the colony were commended to the charity and devotion of the company and the colonists.

9. It was required that all colonists should be natural-born Frenchmen and Catholics. The absolute orthodoxy of this colony from its inception was in striking contrast with the freedom from religious restriction of the colonies planned by Coligny before the civil wars had forced the government to introduce rigorous conformity.

10. The company's rights over the colony were great: they could appoint officers of sovereign justice, who should be commissioned by the crown; and nominate military officials by sea and land over ships, troops, and fortresses, the king agreeing to appoint their nominees. They were empowered to build forts, forge cannon, make gunpowder, and do all things necessary for the security of the colony and its commerce.

11. The charter contained no provisions for the internal government of the company, simply recognizing the existing voluntary organization of one hundred a.s.sociates, whom it describes as a "strong company for the establishment of a colony of native Frenchmen." As far as membership extends, they were allowed to join to themselves any additional number up to another hundred.

Thus was organized the company which, through the genius of Champlain and with much tribulation, laid the foundations of the colony of Canada.

Considering as types these four companies dating from 1600, 1609, 1621, and 1628, and representing England, Holland, and France, a comparison of their main characteristics leads to the following generalizations:

1. It is evident that there was in early modern times a movement for the organization and chartering of companies for distant commerce, closely dependent on their respective governments. These companies had their period of rise in the sixteenth century; a rapid and wide-spread development in the seventeenth; and a subsequent decline and discredit in the eighteenth. The movement was European; every country whose situation or ambitions would at all admit of distant trading, and whose system of commerce was not, like that of Spain and Portugal, already stereotyped under government control, adopted approximately the same policy.

2. To each of these companies was secured by its charter the monopoly of trade in a particular region. Its members alone had power or right to carry on commerce with a specified people, over a specified extent of coasts or lands, and during a definite period of years. This monopoly might be only as against the fellow-countrymen of the members of the company; but an effort, generally successful, was made to exclude all other Europeans from each reserved field of commerce.

3. The companies were based on unions of the capital of many merchants or other adventurers. An official Dutch letter on the trade with America speaks of "knowing by experience that without the common a.s.sistance of a general company navigation and commerce could not be practised, maintained, and defended in the regions and quarters designated above, because of the great risks from corsairs, pirates, and other extortions which are met with upon such voyages." [Footnote: Letters to the Dutch West India Company, June 9, 1621.] The preliminary equipment of ships, the purchase of supplies and merchandise, the acquisition of land, the building of forts and the supply of weapons and military material; the payment of a military force to protect their commerce against natives or interloping Europeans; the expenses, in many cases, of transporting and supporting colonists; and, finally, the long waiting before returns could be reasonably hoped for--some or all of these expenses were inseparable from the whole plan of establishing distant trade. It was no wonder that individual traders gave place to great unions of the merchants of London, Amsterdam, or Dieppe, who risked part of their means and united their resources to form companies to trade with the East and West Indies, Africa, and other outlying parts of the world.

4. Neither the possession of a monopoly nor the creation of a large, joint capital was considered enough to launch an enterprise of this kind. The grant of public or political powers by government was necessary to make its economic objects attainable, and these were given with a free hand. The companies very generally received, explicitly or by implication, rights of peace and war, of supreme justice, of administrative independence, and of legislation for their own territory, members, and servants. A chartered company was in many cases the holder from the crown of a wide fief in which it possessed more than feudal powers. As a matter of fact, the companies generally remained quite dependent on the home authorities, but this resulted from the desire to save expense, from the supremacy of commercial ideals, or from patriotism, rather than from deficiencies in their charters.

5. In the grant of these extensive political powers the home governments had ulterior motives. The seventeenth century was a period of intense international rivalry, and the chartered commercial companies were pieces in the game. It was not mere profit in pounds, shillings, and pence which Elizabeth hoped to obtain from the voyages of the ships of the East India Company, but a weakening of the power and wealth and colonial dominion of Spain. Even in the more peaceful times of James, the Spaniards saw, and were justified in seeing, in the popular interest in Virginia another phase of the national hatred of Spain. [Footnote: Letters from Zuniga to Philip III, in Brown, Genesis of the United States, docs, xxviii.-x.x.xiii., etc.] It was at the close of the twelve years' truce between the Netherlands and Spain, just when the war was being resumed, that the Dutch West India Company was formed, and its greatest activity was in a warlike rivalry with its great opponent in South America. "The reputation of this crown" was combined with "the glory of G.o.d" in the charter of the Canada Company; and most of the commercial and colonizing projects of France in the seventeenth as in the nineteenth century, had a large element of political pride behind them. Sometimes it was warlike conquest, sometimes the expulsion of a rival, sometimes the acquisition of a new base of operations, sometimes the obtaining of a more favorable balance of trade, sometimes mere international rivalry; but whatever the other elements, there were always some political objects in addition to the hope of obtaining dividends from trade.

6. For the history of America, the most important characteristic common to the chartered companies of the seventeenth century is the territorial foothold they obtained in the regions where they possessed their monopolies. It might be only a few acres of ground used for a fort, storehouses, and dwellings, which was all the English East India Company possessed for the first century and a half of its existence; or it might be the almost limitless domains of the Canada or Virginia Company. There was no distinction between two kinds of companies, one for commerce, the other for colonization, but simply one of relative attention given to the two interests, according to the character of the regions for which the companies had obtained their concessions. All the companies expected to carry on commerce; all expected to plant some of their fellow-countrymen on the soil of the country with which they meant to trade. If the region of their activity was the ancient, wealthy, thickly settled, and firmly governed coast of India, the settlers were only a few servants of the company. If, on the other hand, the region for which the monopoly of the company was granted was a broad and temperate tract, occupied by a spa.r.s.e population of savages, and offering only such objects of trade or profit as could be collected slowly or wrested by European labor from, the soil or the forest, the quickest way to a commercial profit was the establishment on the distant soil of a large body of colonists from the home land.

This necessity for colonization in order to carry out their other objects makes the chartered commercial companies of the seventeenth century fundamental factors in American history. The proprietary companies of Virginia, Ma.s.sachusetts, New Netherland, Canada, and other colonies were primarily commercial bodies seeking dividends, and only secondarily colonization societies sending over settlers. This distinction, and the gradual pre-dominance of the latter over the former, is the clew to much of the early history of settlement in America. The commercial object could only be carried out by employing the plan of colonization, but new motives were soon added. The patriotic and religious conditions of the times created an interest in the American settlements as places where men could begin life, anew with new possibilities. Hence the company, the home government, dissatisfied religious bodies, and many individuals, looked to the settlements in America with other than a commercial interest. The policy of the companies was modified and eventually transformed by the influence of these non-commercial interests.

As financial enterprises, the chartered commercial companies were subject to such great practical difficulties that few of them survived for any great length of time or repaid their original investment to the shareholders. Some were reorganized time and again, each time on a more extensive scale, and each time to suffer heavier losses. [Footnote: W.

R. Scott, "The Royal African Company" (Am. Hist. Review, VIII., 2).]

They experienced much mismanagement and softie peculation and fraud on the part of their directors; in some cases false dividends were declared for the purpose of temporarily raising the value of the stock.

Their credit was bad, and they sometimes had to borrow money at fifty and even seventy-five per cent, interest. [Footnote: Bonna.s.sieux, Les Grandes Compagnies de Commerce, 494, etc.]

They encountered other difficulties quite apart from the incompetency or dishonesty of their directors. Parliaments and States-General were opposed to monopolistic and privileged companies, and threw what obstacles they could in their way; and political exigencies often forced even the sovereigns who had given them their charters to disavow and discourage them. [Footnote: Letter of October 8, 1607, from Zufiiga to the king of Spain, in Brown, Genesis of the United States, I., 121.]

Their greatest difficulties, how-ever, arose from the very nature of the problem which they were trying to solve. Distant commerce with barbarous races, amid jealous rivals, carried on with insufficient capital; the persuasion of reluctant emigrants to establish themselves in the wilderness at a time when the mother-country was not yet overcrowded; the long waiting for returns and the failure of one dream after another--it was these difficulties in the very work itself that led to the failure of most of the companies and the scanty success of the others.

Nevertheless, the companies played a very important part in the advancement of civilization during the period of their existence. They enriched Europe with many products of the New World and the more distant Old World, which could hardly have reached it, or reached it in such abundance, except for the organized voyages of the chartered companies. The formation of chartered companies relieved certain nations of their dependence upon other nations for some of the necessities and many of the luxuries of life. National independence was furthered, at the same time that foreign products were made much cheaper. Spices, sugar, coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, cotton, silk, drugs, and other articles were made accessible to all. New shipping was built by the companies and additional commercial intercourse created.

[Footnote: Bonna.s.sieux, Les Grandes Compagnies de Commerce, 514.] New territories were made valuable and new centres of activity created in old and stagnant as well as in new and undeveloped countries. Above all, the chartered companies were the actual instruments by which many colonies were founded, and a strong impress given to the inst.i.tutions of these colonies through all their later history.

CHAPTER IX

THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION ON THE CONTINENT

(1500-1625)

In a.n.a.lyzing the forces which affected the colonization of America, the depth of the impression made upon Europe by the Protestant Reformation can hardly be overestimated. Although the direct and immediate influence of this great movement upon the fortunes of America was great, its indirect and remote effects have been still more important.

One of these effects was the creation of a religious motive for emigration which, in conjunction with other incentives, was one of the earliest and most constant causes for the peopling of America.

It is true that the desire for religious freedom was only one among many such impelling forces. The desire to better their fortunes was perhaps the most fundamental and enduring consideration that influenced emigrants. Many settlers came because at home they had failed or were burdened with debt, or had become involved in ill repute or crime, and hoped to make a new start in a new land. Many sought the New World as many still press to the frontier, from sheer restlessness and recklessness, from the love of adventure, the hope that luck will do better for them than labor. Many came as a result of urgent inducements offered by projectors of colonies or agents of shipmasters, as in the case of the early "company servants" or the later "redemptioners" or "indentured servants."

No inconsiderable number came because they were forced to come: the earlier planters of colonies and patentees of lands received permission to seize for their uses men and women of the lower cla.s.ses, much as men were pressed into naval service; paupers were handed over to the colonizing companies to be shipped to their settlements; repeatedly the prisons were emptied to provide colonists, and commissions were appointed, as in England in 1633, "to reprieve able-bodied persons convicted of certain felonies, and to bestow them to be used in discoveries and other foreign employments." [Footnote: Cal. of State Pap, Domestic, 1631-1633, p. 547.]

Somewhat later, transportation to the colonies to labor for a fixed number of years became a familiar form of commutation of the death penalty, and after 1662 it was made the statutory penalty for certain offences.

Yet among this multiplicity of motives for emigration to the colonies religion held a peculiar place. Many men for whom the dominant inducement was a more material one were partly led by religious motives; many of the changes in Europe that unsettled men and made them more ready to leave their old homes were results of the Reformation.

Religious motives were the earliest to send any really large body of settlers to the English colonies, and they remained for more than a century probably the most effective motives.

During the first twenty years of the settlement of Virginia, where the religious incentive was least strong, less than six thousand settlers came over; during the first twenty years of the settlement of New England, where it was strongest, there were more than twenty thousand.

The later churchmen of Virginia and the Carolinas, the Catholics of Maryland, the Quakers of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and a great body of Presbyterians, Huguenots, Mennonites, Moravians, and adherents of other sects which were products of the Reformation, sought tinder the more liberal laws of the colonies the religious liberty which they could not find at home.

The working of this influence in England will appear in a later chapter on the religious history of that country during this period; its peculiar development in Germany seems to demand a further word of explanation here. Three forms of reformed doctrine and organization-- Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Zwinglianism--grew up on German soil in the years between 1517 and 1555, and obtained more or less extensive recognition and power from imperial, princely, or city authorities.

Lutheranism, the most moderate and widely accepted form of Protestantism, was officially established in most of the central and northern and in some of the southern states and cities; Calvinism, less widely extended but more strictly organized, held a similar position in the southwest; while the doctrines of Zwingli, which had been adopted and were enforced in the greater part of Switzerland, spread to a number of those southern regions of Germany from which Switzerland was as yet indistinctly separated. [Footnote: Armstrong, The Emperor Charles V., I., 228-231.]

A vast number of earnest souls were not satisfied with any of these forms of official religion, and even in the earliest days of the Reformation, preachers arose who went beyond the moderate reforms of Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin, and whose teachings gained a ready acceptance. In Saxony, in Hesse, in South Germany, and in Moravia; in the cities of Constance, Strasburg, Augsburg, and Nuremberg; in the Netherlands and in Switzerland, there was much preaching and formation of independent religious communities quite apart from, and indeed in opposition to, the official Reformation. [Footnote: Moeller, Hist, of the Christian Church (English trans.), III., 36, 64, 88, 94.] These radical preachers and their followers represented very different beliefs and practices. That which was common to them all was an acceptance of the Bible literally interpreted as a guide both to doctrine and to church organization. The effort to return to the apostolic organization of the church led them to reject any but an unpaid ministry, and to insist that none should be members of their congregations except such as were personally converted and who conformed their lives to the teachings of the Bible.

Their idea was, therefore, the formation of little companies separated from the surrounding people of the world rather than the Lutheran or Zwinglian plan of a reorganization of the national church on Protestant lines en ma.s.se. An austere piety, the wearing of plain clothes, the avoidance of forms of social respect, the refusal to take an oath or to hold civil office, an a.s.sertion of the sinfulness of paying or receiving t.i.thes or interest, an approach to communistic practice in matters of property--some or all of these were widely disseminated among the lower cla.s.ses of the people to whom such teachings princ.i.p.ally appealed.

The doctrine which came nearest to being a point of uniformity and a possible bond of union among these reformers was their objection to infant baptism. To them baptism was the mark of a personally attained relation to Christ, and was, therefore, meaningless when administered to an unconscious infant. Certain "prophets" who came to Wittenberg from Zwickau confronted Luther and Melancthon with this principle as early as 1521; and radical reformers proclaimed it in opposition to Zwingli at Zurich in 1523. Everywhere advocacy of an exact adherence to the verbal teaching of Holy Writ and a rejection of the claims of an established church, were accompanied by opposition to infant baptism.

In 1525 for the first time the logical deduction from their premises was made; those baptized only in their infancy were a.s.serted not to have been effectively baptized at all, and were rebaptized as a sign of their conversion. [Footnote: Moeller, Hist, of the Christian Church (English trans.), III., 65.] From this time onward re-baptism, or, from the point of view of its advocates, the first valid baptism, became the test and mark of adoption into many communities of true believers.

Those who practised this rite were, therefore, called "Anabaptists"-- that is to say, those who baptized a second time--or, more frequently, merely "Baptists."

The rebaptism of a person who had been already once baptized was not only in the eyes of the established church an impiety, it was in the eyes of the established law a capital crime, and the history of Anabaptism in Germany is the history of a long martyrdom. In Catholic and Protestant countries alike these radicals were persecuted. From Strasburg and Nuremberg they were expelled, in Zurich their leaders were drowned, in Augsburg they were beheaded, in Austria, Wittenberg, Bavaria, and the Palatinate they were burned at the stake.

In 1534 their sect was brought into sudden and fatal prominence by the revolt in Munster and its vicinity. Here a body of adherents of radical religious doctrines added to their creed a tenet not common to the general body of Anabaptists--that is to say, the duty of taking up temporal arms to overthrow the existing powers and to introduce the New Jerusalem. The old episcopal city was seized by the Anabaptist leaders, b.l.o.o.d.y battles were fought, and after a six months' orgy of fanaticism, libertinism, and violence the rebels were defeated by the united troops of Catholic and Lutheran powers and a terrible vengeance taken.

Anabaptists everywhere, no matter how peaceable and moderate their principles, suffered under the imputation of holding such doctrines as had led to the terrible excesses at Munster, as they had long before been held to sympathize with the Peasants' Revolt; and their persecutions became correspondingly harsher. Nevertheless, they continued to form communities and to spread through Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The attractiveness of the teachings of wandering Anabaptist preachers long continued unabated, and their regularly organized congregations or communities, because of their thrift, honesty, and plainness of life, survived and flourished, wherever they could obtain even the barest and most temporary toleration.

They were necessarily a people without a national home. Seldom for a whole generation did any considerable body of Anabaptists or Pietists remain undisturbed in any one locality. Expelled by imperial edict from Bohemia, they made their way to Hungary and Transylvania; fined, imprisoned, and in danger of death in Protestant Switzerland, they migrated to the Tyrol, to the Palatinate, and to the south German cities, only soon to be visited there with still worse persecution.

During the two great religious wars they suffered especial hardships, and in the midst of the Thirty Years' War they were rigorously expelled by the emperor from all his hereditary dominions, even from Moravia, where they had been allowed to exist for almost a century. [Footnote: Moeller, Hist. of the Christian Church (English trans.), III., 437- 442.] Either from original differences of doctrine and personal influence, or from later divisions and reorganization, grew up those bodies which, although often, as has been seen, grouped under the general head of Anabaptists, have become known in Europe and America as Mennonites, Amish, and Dunkers; and each of these bodies has experienced various divisions. The Schwenkfelders, Boehmists, and other mystics or pietists, are habitually grouped with these sects, rather because of their similar historical origin and att.i.tude to the established churches than of any ident.i.ty of religious belief.

By the close of the seventeenth century the condition of these dissenters from the established churches had become more tolerable; but they were at best a remnant, narrowed in spirit by persecution, repeatedly separated from their earlier homes, still under the ban of ecclesiastical disapproval, and even where tolerated living under burdensome restrictions. The rising colonies of the New World, especially those which promised religious liberty, and above all that one of them whose Quaker founder held doctrines so like their own, must have exerted, notwithstanding their alien race and tongue, an almost irresistible attraction upon them. In view of the political and religious history of Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is therefore no wonder that a vast number of Germans emigrated to America, and that in Pennsylvania were soon to be found numerous representatives of every religious sect that existed in the fatherland.

The religious divisions which sprang from the Protestant Reformation were not restricted to the Old World. In America, also, religion was a centrifugal influence, splitting up old colonies, and establishing new centres of population, which in turn attracted other groups of emigrants from Europe, and brought into existence still other types of government and society. [Footnote: Eggleston, Beginners of a Nation, 266-346.] The results were shown in the characteristics of Rhode Island and Connecticut, of Germantown and Bethlehem, in some of the princ.i.p.al contrasts between New France and New England, and in many of the lesser diversities that have distinguished different sections of America in their subsequent history. Many influences combined to give form and character to each American settlement: its race elements, the commercial requirements of the controlling chartered company, the demands of the home government, the theoretical ideas of the founder, the habitudes of the colonists in the lands from which they came. Among these influences, as among the motives for emigration, the religious experiences and desires of the settlers were a prime factor.

The Reformation indirectly affected America by wars which soon led to the rise of some nations, the fall of others; they pitted Catholic states against Protestant states, they weakened Germany, France, and the southern Netherlands by a sanguinary civil struggle, and were avoided in England only by harsh persecution.

In the Iberian peninsula the progress of Protestantism was so slight and so quickly crushed out that it played no part in the colonization of Portuguese or Spanish America. It is true that the somewhat outworn machinery of the Inquisition was rejuvenated in the sixteenth century, so as to reach a Protestant movement in Seville, the sailing-point for the American fleets; and this was made an excuse for the introduction of a stricter and more vigorous policy of orthodox uniformity in Spain.

The Inquisition also found occupation in looking after heretic foreign merchants and sailors in Spanish seaports, and Jews and Protestant Germans in the American colonies; but no Spaniards ever emigrated to America to escape religious persecution.

As for France, the terrible religious wars of the sixteenth century weakened her projects of colonization, as they did all her other activities, and divided her people into two hostile parties, one of which must ultimately crush out the other. The short-lived colonies established in the middle years of the sixteenth century in Brazil and in Florida were due largely to the hope that they might be places of refuge for oppressed Huguenots. The first French colonies which had any successful outcome, however, were the creation of the other religious party; for Richelieu, when he took up the establishment of colonies in 1624, insisted on Catholic orthodoxy in the religion of the colonists.