Page images
PDF
EPUB

by the love of adventure and trade. New England and Virginia, Great Britain and France, contributed settlers. Puritans, prelatists, and Huguenots combined to form those peculiar communities, for which Locke and Shaftesbury legislated with such wise absurdity. Some one alleges respecting the Puritans of New England, that, on their first arrival at Cape Cod, they caught a chill from the climate, which they have not thrown off to this day. So regarding Carolina, the fever and ague, so troublesome at Oyster Point in the infancy of the country, would seem to afflict the constitution of the Charlestonians down to the present time. The fever is on them now: the ague, doubtless, will come in due time.

The parent of New York was the United Republic of the Nertherlands. Under the energies of her Protestant faith, that leading commercial nation sent her sons and her ideas to every clime. Under her flag, Hudson discovered the magnificent river bearing his name. Trading-houses sprung up on the island anchored at its mouth; and behold New Amsterdam! future metropolis of the Western world. Commercial enterprise presided at her birth, and has ruled her destinies since.

But the most remarkable of the colonies is the cluster that occupied the soil of New England, which may be regarded as substantially one.

Two centuries and a half ago, the people of England, under the sway of a monarchical church and state, found themselves in religious and political bondage. Feeling deeply the loss of their religious rights, some fled to the New World. Others, on British soil, raised the standard in defence of British rights. Mark the different results. Britons at home overthrew their tyrants and obtained their liberty; but soon they lost it again. The banished Stuarts were recalled, and the Episcopal hierarchy was reestablished. Yet the tyranny of the Star Chamber and Bishops' courts was too heavy to be borne. The battles must be fought over, and a foreign hero called in to vindicate English rights, and sway the sceptre of English power.

The fugitives, meanwhile, settled the coast of New England, and cherished the spirit of indomitable independence. They upheld, as their first object, their scorned Puritan faith, and made their home the abode of intelligence and piety. Unlike

their brethren in England, they maintained their rights against domestic traitors and foreign foes; and (however Mr. Carlyle may regard it) wrought out problems in political and ecclesiastical science for the advancement of mankind. By native instincts and principles espoused, freest of the free, they were trained to become defenders and propagandists of freedom in the New World. Such was the gift which Europe originally bestowed on North America, for planting its colonies and rearing up Christian commonwealths. To this we care only to add, that Spain colonized Florida, and settled St. Augustine, the oldest town in the country; Sweden made to New Jersey and Delaware contributions of her free-spirited industry; and France bestowed upon the colonies at large her Huguenot principle and artistic skill.

[ocr errors]

What it is next important to know was the situation of the colonists, in the new localities in which they were placed? and what the influences operating upon them from without ?

It may be difficult, at this advanced day, fully to appreciate these, but their action was unquestionably great. To the immigrants from Europe, America was a new and wonderful world. They found it constructed on a scale of magnificence to which they had not been accustomed; they had made a formidable voyage to reach its shores, and they had undertaken the lofty enterprise of establishing homes, churches and commonwealths, in it. They were alone with Nature, and her voices addressed them with power.

Every reader, at some time in his travels, may have been overtaken by the grandeur of physical forms and objects, and subdued by their all-embracing power-tost, for example, on the mighty ocean; the ship, whose deck he trod, a speck on the waste of waters, the blue above, the blue below, and the elements in mysterious intercourse everywhere around. Or, borne into the seclusion of the vast forest, remote from human dwellings, the shafts rising to the skies on every side, reaching forth their giant arms above, and covering all with the canopy of their magnificent foliage. In such scenes, man feels himself, "how small!" "how insignificant!" Soon, however, mind asserts its perogatives; and, when animated with high purposes,

and in sympathy with the Creator, it becomes conscious of a grandeur and nobility of endowments far surpassing material objects. Nature first humbles, and then exalts, the spirit of

man.

The colonists had traversed the ocean in grandeur and storm; they were landed, as exiles, on the edge of an immense and savage wilderness. Cut off by vast solitudes from home and civilized life, they toiled, suffered, and executed their heroic enterprises, alone. The spirit of freedom fell upon them from the skies, and the scenes of nature around invigorated in their souls the lofty sense of independence.

This, we are aware, may seem fanciful. But how, on any other view, can we account for facts that meet us in their history? The Republican spirit broke forth early, and almost simultaneously, all along the Atlantic coast. Attempts were often made to establish arbitrary institutions, and we anticipate that resistance should have arisen to them in New England; but that such resolute efforts for liberty should have been put forth under the commercial corporations of Virginia and New Netherlands, and under the proprietary governments of other colonies, is what surprises us. We account for it, in some measure, at least, by referring to the influences exerted on the people by their new location. The solitudes and powers of the Western world stimulated sentiments native to the human breast they reinvigorated the consciousness of the equal rights of man under the government of his Maker, and in the presence of his fellow-men.

But there was internal action among the colonies and the diverse forces included in them. As religious principles espoused constitute the most powerful forces known in history, it is essential to state that the Christian faith according to the Protestant forms, demanding free inquiry and an open Bible, was the prevailing religion of the colonists. This at once assumed sway in the largest and most influential colonies, and soon after in parts colonized under Roman Catholic auspices. Florida, as a power in the land, never amounted to anything considerable, religiously or otherwise. The principles of the see of Rome, and of the court of Philip II., which destroyed the rising liberties, and wellnigh the life of Spain, could not

exist in the air of this country. Maryland was relieved from the sway of arbitrary principles by the personal magnanimity of its proprietor, and freedom found security there.

The spirit also of the different Protestant denominations was gradually modified. Episcopalianism was established in Virginia as the religion of the colony, and Puritans and others were persecuted. Puritanism was established in Massachusetts, and Episcopalians and others were persecuted. Tolerance, then unknown in all other parts of the world, was but imperfectly understood by the American colonists. By virtue, however, of their principles and position, persecution soon ceased; intolerance disappeared; free inquiry and charity prevailed.

Assimilation also took place in national traits and manners. The Huguenot French mingled with the inhabitants of all the colonies, infusing into the nation's veins some of the best blood that circles in it. The Sweeds came under the jurisdiction of the Dutch. Erelong the Dutch yielded to the power of the English. New Englanders soon overran the province of New York, and made their appearance in Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, everywhere stimulating the spirit of religious and popular liberty. At the North, the inhabitants, cemented by a common religious faith and great commercial enterprise, became in good degree a homogeneous people. Virginia, received numerous accessions from England and became a mother colony, sending forth her sons and exerting a strong influence around the Chesapeake and towards the South. In the progress of events, therefore, it came to pass that two colonies, or colony-groups, stood prominent on the Atlantic coast, - New England at the North, and Virginia (connecting Maryland with it,) at the South. These two, nearly equal in population, early became the first-rate power of the land; and on these two, as principal centres, we shall find the democratic and aristocratic elements severally crystallized and found development.

But here let us apply the great historical touchstone, by which the animating spirit of nations is mainly tested and determined. The institutions established and maintained by a people more than anything else disclose its actual life, and the energy with which it acts upon the world. What are the insti

tutions, then, which the fathers of the country erected and transmitted to their successors? The answer will shed light on the condition of the colonies at large, and will mark a distinction between the North and the South, in political character, social condition, and actual power.

The New England colonists, in coming from the Old World, left behind them the social gradations and political inequalities that so greatly hamper the energies of Great Britain to this day; and brought to their new home all the acknowledged, and some of the unacknowledged rights of Englishmen. They established no monarchy or oligarchy. They erected no institutions based on landed proprietorship and upheld by laws of entail. But keeping in mind the old Saxon Witenagemote and the ancient rights of Englishmen, they established broadly the representative parliament or legislature. Holding this to be the great instrument of popular liberty, they mortised it with utmost firmness into the fundamental constitution of the State, and were careful to endow it with that highest function of power-the control of the public purse. Establishing also the right of general suffrage, the mastery of the people over their political affairs was rendered complete.

In jurisprudence, they established a code of laws more consonant with justice, and, at the same time, more humane, than existed on the statute-books of any other nation.

They organized a church-polity, drawn avowedly from the Bible, the freest that has existed since apostolic times, and invigorated it with a faith that has been conspicuous in upholding mental and political freedom on all contested fields: a faith and polity in closest sympathy with Republican institutions.

They, first in the history of the world, avowed the doctrine that the State should permit none of the children in it to grow up in ignorance. They established free primary and grammar schools for the education of the whole community, to develop, train, and adorn the minds of the people, and fit them to act as Christian citizens in the state and the world. These political, religious, and educational institutions are monuments reared in human society, revealing the character of the New England colonists, calling up men of high aims and of an organizing

« PreviousContinue »