A History of the United States - Charles Kendall Adams

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Commonwealths”); E. H. Roberts, New York (“American Commonwealths”); W. H. Browne, Maryland (“American Commonwealths”); C. F. Adams, Massachusetts, its Historians and its History; F. L. Hawks, History of North Carolina (2 vols.); J. T. Scharf, History of Delaware (2 vols.); J. T. Scharf, History of Maryland (3 vols.); S. G. Arnold, History of Rhode Island (2 vols.); S. G. Fisher, The True William Penn; W. H. Browne, George Calvert and Cecilius Calvert (“Makers of America”); O. S. Straus, Roger Williams. For both Chapters II. and III., see especially Thwaites, The Colonies, chaps, iv., vi., vii., and ix.

      Several interesting novels have their scenes laid in the early colonial period; of these, Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is the most famous. Cooper’s Water Witch and Simms’s Cassique of Kiowah describe early New York and Charleston. Irving’s History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker is practically a work of fiction and is full of humor. For more recent and other older novels, see Channing and Hart’s Guide, § 36 a.

[30] Born, 1582; died, 1632. Graduated at Oxford, 1597; became a Roman Catholic in 1624; obtained a patent (1632) from Charles I. for what is now Delaware and Maryland.
[31] Under royal control religious persecution was allowed, and the colony ceased to flourish until in 1715 the Calverts were again made proprietors. Conditions then improved, and in 1729 Baltimore was founded as a port.
[32] Compare fifteen thousand in 1650 with forty thousand in 1670.
[33] Born, 1612; died, 1662. Noted Puritan statesman who came to Boston in 1635, and became governor the next year; took sides with Mrs. Hutchinson in the famous Antinomian controversy; soon returned to England; entered Parliament, became treasurer of the navy, and was prominent in the impeachment of Strafford; became a prominent leader and frequently opposed Cromwell; presided over the state council in 1659; is believed to have invented “the previous question” in parliamentary practice; on the accession of Charles II., was executed on the general charge of treason.
[34] Harvard died in 1638, having been in the colony only a year.
[35] Plymouth built a fur-trading house at Windsor in 1633; Dutchmen had already settled at Hartford.
[36] It was a royal province from 1679 to 1685, after which it was reunited with Massachusetts.
[37] Born in London, 1637; died, 1714. Governor of New York, 1674 to 1681; seized New Jersey in 1680; appointed governor of New England and New York in 1686, with headquarters at Boston; was deposed in 1689 and sent to England; governor of Virginia, 1692 to 1698.
[38] Last Dutch governor of New Netherlands; born, 1612; died, 1682. Appointed governor in 1647; ruled in arbitrary fashion and encountered much popular opposition; attacked and annexed the Swedish colony of Delaware in 1655; signed a treaty surrendering New Netherlands to the English, September 9, 1664; died on his farm of “Great Bowerie,” which embraced a large part of the present lower New York City.
[39] A term used in Yorkshire, England, for a division of a county.
[40] Born, 1644; died, 1718. Was expelled from Oxford for joining the Quakers; was imprisoned in the Tower for preaching their tenets; received from Charles II. an extensive grant in 1681; took possession of his province and negotiated his famous treaty with Indians in 1682; returned to England in 1684; was deprived of his province in 1686; regained it in 1688; visited America again at the close of the century; during his career in England he did much writing and preaching, was now influential in politics, now under suspicion, had trouble with his settlers in America, and also with members of his own family.
[41] A writ compelling a person or body of persons to show by what authority they hold certain rights or offices.
[42] Until 1738 New Jersey was administered by the governor of New York, through a deputy.

       the country at the end of the seventeenth century.

       Table of Contents

       Table of Contents

      77. Population.—We have now learned that of the thirteen original colonies that formed the United States, all except the youngest, Georgia, had attained individual, or semi-individual, existence by the end of the seventeenth century. The population of New England in 1700 was about one hundred and five thousand, Massachusetts, including Maine, leading with about seventy thousand, and Connecticut coming second with about twenty-five thousand. Rhode Island and New Hampshire were much smaller, containing only six thousand and five thousand respectively. Homogeneity, thrift, piety, and love of liberty characterized the population of the New England colonies, and were the presage of the great development the eighteenth century was to see. The population of the Middle colonies in 1700 was about fifty-nine thousand, New York having twenty-five thousand, the Jerseys fourteen thousand, and Pennsylvania and Delaware about twenty thousand. Homogeneity was characteristic of New Jersey alone, both New York and Pennsylvania having very mixed populations. Thrift characterized all the Middle region; but English enterprise was somewhat tempered by Dutch phlegm and Quaker sobriety. In the Southern colonies (if we may estimate from figures of 1688) there were more than twenty-five thousand persons in Maryland, sixty thousand in Virginia, and about five thousand in the Carolinas. The English race was dominant, but the presence of large numbers of black slaves, who were chiefly fit for work in the fields, checked the enterprise of the whites by confining it practically to agriculture.

      78. Social Conditions.—With regard to social conditions, the tendency in the South was to form an aristocracy, based on race and the distinction between manual and other forms of labor. In New England, too, there was an aristocracy, based mainly on education and religion, but also on birth and wealth. In the Middle colonies there were traces of an aristocracy in the “Patroons” of New York and in the masters of the fairly numerous negro slaves. But on the whole, manual labor was held in esteem, and the population was democratic in its tendencies.

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      79. Political Characteristics of New England.—The aristocracy of New England was unlike any other the world has ever seen. Its members were energetic, unusually well-educated, serious, and full of a sense of responsibility. They filled with distinction the public offices and the professions, especially the ministry. Precedence was allowed them by the merchants, farmers, and mechanics through force of custom, not through the presence of a caste system like that of slavery (although a few slaves were owned), or through the force of laws derived from the feudal system. As the masses of the people increased in wealth and culture, and learned to use the opportunities allowed them by the New World, the power of the aristocracy naturally decreased, although it continued to exert considerable influence well into the nineteenth

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