The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 by Julian Hawthorne

J >> Julian Hawthorne >> The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1

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In arguments about the best ways of managing nations or communities, it
has been generally conceded that this scheme of an executive head on one
side, and a people freely communicating their wants to him on the other,
is sound, provided, first, that he is as solicitous about their welfare as
they themselves are; and secondly, that means exist for continuous and
unchecked intercommunication between them and him:--it being premised, of
course, that the ability of the head is commensurate with his willingness.
And leaving basic principles for the moment aside, it is notorious that
one-man power is far prompter, weightier, and cleaner-cut than the
confused and incomplete compromises of a body of representatives are apt
to be.

All this may be conceded. And yet experience shows that the one-man
system, even when the man is a Lord Baltimore, is unsatisfactory. Lord
Baltimore, indeed, finally achieved a technical success; his people loved
and honored him, his wishes were measurably realized, and, so far as he
was concerned, Maryland was the victim of fewer mistakes than were the
other colonies. But the fact that Lord Baltimore's career closed in peace
and credit was due less to what he did and desired, than to the necessity
his career was under of sooner or later coming to a close. Had he
possessed a hundred times the ability and benevolence that were his, and
had been immortal into the bargain, the people would have cast him out;
they were willing to tolerate him for a few years, more or less, but as a
fixture--No! "Tolerate" is too harsh a word; but another might be too
weak. The truth is, men do not care half so much what they get, as how
they get it. The wolf in Aesop's fable keenly wanted a share of the bones
which made his friend the mastiff so sleek; but the hint that the bones
and the collar went together drove him hungry but free back to his desert.
It is of no avail to give a man all he asks for; he resents having to ask
you for it, and wants to know by what right you have it to give. A man can
be grateful for friendship, for a sympathetic look, for a brave word
spoken in his behalf against odds--he can be your debtor for such things,
and keep his manhood uncompromised. But if you give him food, and ease, or
preferment, and condescension therewith, look for no thanks from him;
esteem yourself fortunate if he do not hold you his enemy. The gifts of
the soul are free; but material benefits are captivity. So the Maryland
colonists, recognizing that their proprietor meant well, forgave him his
generosity, and his activities in their behalf--but only because they knew
that his day would presently be past. Man is infinite as well as finite:
infinite in his claims, finite in his power of giving. And for Baltimore
to presume to give the people all they claimed, was as much as to say that
his fullness could equal their want, or that his rights and capacities
were more than theirs. He gave them all that a democracy can possess
--except the one thing that constitutes democracy; that is, absolute
self-direction. It may well be that their little ship of state, steered by
themselves, would have encountered many mishaps from which his sagacious
guidance preserved it. But rather rocks with their pilotage than port with
his: and beyond forgiving him their magnanimity could not go.

There is little more than this to be derived from study of the Maryland
experiment. Let a man manage himself, in big as well as in little things,
and he will be happy on raw clams and plain water, with a snow-drift for a
pillow--as we saw him happy in Plymouth Bay: but give him roast ortolans
and silken raiment, and manage him never so little, and you cannot relieve
his discontent. And is it not well that it should be so? Verily it is--if
America be not a dream, and immortality a delusion.

Lord Baltimore would perhaps have liked to see all his colonists
Catholics; but his experience of religious intolerance had not inflamed
him against other creeds than his own, as would have been the case with a
Spaniard; it seemed to awaken a desire to set tolerance an example. Any
one might join his community except felons and atheists; and as a matter
of fact, his assortment of colonists soon became as motley as that of
Williams in Providence. The landing of the first expedition on an island
in the Potomac was attended by the making and erecting by the Jesuit
priests of a rude cross, and the celebration of mass; but there were even
then more Protestants than Catholics in the party; and though the
leadership was Catholic for many years, it was not on account of the
numerical majority of persons of that faith. Episcopalians ejected from
New England, Puritans fleeing from the old country, Quakers and
Anabaptists who were unwelcome everywhere else, met with hospitality in
Maryland. Let them but believe in Jesus Christ, and all else was forgiven
them. Nevertheless, Catholicism was the religion of the country. Its
inhabitants might be likened to promiscuous guests at an inn whose
landlord made no criticisms on their beliefs, further than to inscribe the
Papal insignia on the signboard over his door. Thus liberty was
discriminated from license, and in the midst of tolerance there was order.

The first settlement was made on a small creek entering the north side of
the Potomac. Here an Indian village already existed; but its occupants
were on the point of deserting it, and were glad to accept payment from
the colonists for the site which they had no further use for. On the other
hand, the colonists could avail themselves of the wigwams just as they
stood, and had their maize fields ready cleared. Baltimore, meanwhile,
through his agent (and brother) Leonard Calvert, furnished them with all
the equipment they needed; and so well was the way smoothed before them,
that the colony made progress ten times as rapidly as Virginia had done.
They called their new home St. Mary's; and the date of its occupation was
1634. Their first popular assembly met for legislation in the second month
of the ensuing year. In that and subsequent meetings they asserted their
right of jurisdiction, their right to enact laws, the freedom of "holy
church": his lordship gently giving them their head. In 1642, perhaps to
disburden themselves of some of their obligation to him, they voted him a
subsidy. Almost the only definite privilege which he seems to have
retained was that of pre-emption of lands. At this period (1643) all
England was by the ears, and Baltimore's hold upon his colony was relaxed.
In Virginia and the other colonies, which had governors of their own, the
neglect of the mother country gave them opportunity for progress; but the
people of Maryland, no longer feeling the sway of their non-resident
proprietor, and having no one else to look after them, became disorderly;
which would not have happened, had they been empowered to elect a ruler
from among themselves. Baltimore's enemies took advantage of these
disturbances to petition for his removal from the proprietorship; but he
was equal to the occasion; and by confirming his colonists in all just
liberties, with freedom of conscience in the foreground, he composed their
dissensions, and took away his enemies' ground of complaint. In 1649, the
legislature sat for the first time in two branches, so that one might be a
check upon the other. Upon this principle all American legislatures are
still formed.

But the reign of Cromwell in England gave occasion for sophistries in
Maryland. All other Englishmen, in the colonies or at home, were members
of a commonwealth; but Baltimore still claimed the Marylanders'
allegiance. On what grounds?--for since the king from whom he derived his
power was done away with, so must be the derivative power. Baltimore stood
between them and republicanism. To give edge to the predicament, the
colony was menaced by covetous Virginia on one hand, and by fugitive
Charles II., with a governor of his own manufacture, on the other.
Calamity seemed at hand.

In 1650, the year after Charles I.'s execution, the Parliament appointed
commissioners to bring royalist colonies into line; Maryland was to be
reannexed to Virginia; Bennett, then governor of Virginia, and Clairborne,
unseated Stone, Baltimore's lieutenant, appointed an executive council,
and ordered that burgesses were to be elected by supporters of Cromwell
only. The question of reannexation was referred to Parliament. Baltimore
protested that Maryland had been less royalist than Virginia; and before
the Parliament could decide what to do, it was dissolved, carrying with it
the authority of Bennett and Clairborne. Stone now reappeared defiant; but
the Virginians attacked him, and he surrendered on compulsion. The
Virginian government decreed that no Roman Catholics could hereafter vote
or be elected.

Baltimore, taking his stand on his charter, declared these doings
mutinous; and Cromwell supported him. Stone once more asserted himself;
but in the skirmish with the Virginians that followed, he was defeated,
yielded (he seems to have had no granite in his composition), and, with
his supporters, was ordered to be shot. His life was spared, however; but
Cromwell, again appealed to, refused to act. The ownership of Maryland was
therefore still undetermined. It was not until 1667 that Baltimore and
Bennett agreed to compromise their dispute. The boundary between the two
domains was maintained, but settlers from Virginia were not to be
disturbed in their holdings. The second year after Cromwell's death, the
representatives of Maryland met and voted themselves an independent
assembly, making Fendall, Baltimore's appointee, subject to their will.
Finally, being weary of turmoil, they made it felony to alter what they
had done. The colony was then abreast of Virginia in political privileges,
and had a population of about ten thousand, in spite of its vicissitudes.

But the quiet, invincible Lord Baltimore was still to be reckoned with.
At the Restoration, he sent his deputy to the colony, which submitted to
his authority, and Fendall was convicted of treason for having allowed the
assembly to overrule him. A general amnesty was proclaimed, however, and
the kindliness of the government during the remainder of the proprietor's
undisputed sway attracted thousands of settlers from all the nations of
Europe. Between Baltimore and the people, a give-and-take policy was
established, one privilege being set against another, so that their
liberties were maintained, and his rights recognized. Though he stood in
his own person for all that was opposed to democracy, he presided over a
community which was essentially democratic; and he had the breadth of mind
to acknowledge that because he owned allegiance to kings and popes, was no
reason why others should do so. Suum cuique. Could he but have gone a step
further, and denied himself the gratification of retaining his hard-earned
proprietorship, he would have been one of the really great men of history.

The ripple of events which we have recorded may seem too insignificant;
of still less import is the story of the efforts of Clairborne, from 1634:
to 1647, to gain, or retain possession of Kent Island, in the Chesapeake,
on which he had "squatted" before Baltimore got his charter. Yet, from
another point of view, even slight matters may weigh when they are related
to the stirring of the elements which are to crystallize into a nation.
Maryland, like a bird half tamed, was ready to fly away when the cage door
was left open, and yet was not averse to its easy confinement when the
door was shut again. But, unlike the bird, time made it fonder of liberty,
instead of leading it to forget it; and when the cage fell apart, it was
at home in the free air.

The settlement of the Carolinas, during the twenty years or so from 1660
to 1680, presented features of singular grotesqueness. There was, on one
side, a vast wilderness covering the region now occupied by North and
South Carolina, and westward to the Pacific. It had been nibbled at, for a
hundred years, by Spaniards, French and English, but no permanent hold had
been got upon it. Here were thousands upon thousands of square miles in
which nature rioted unrestrained, with semi-tropic fervor; the topography
of which was unknown, and whose character in any respect was a matter of
pure conjecture. This wilderness was on one side; on the other were a
worthless king, a handful of courtiers, and a couple of highly gifted
doctrinaires, Lord Shaftesbury and John Locke, the philosopher. We can
picture Charles II. lolling in his chair, with a map of the Americas
spread out on his knees, while the other gentlemen in big wigs and silk
attire, and long rapiers dangling at their sides, are grouped about him.
"I'll give you all south of Virginia," says he, indicating the territory
with a sweep of his long fingers. "Ashley, you and your friend Locke can
draw up a constitution, and stuff it full of your fine ideas; they sound
well: we'll see how they work. You shall be kings every man of you; and
may you like it no worse than I do! You'll have no France or Holland to
thwart you--only bogs and briers and a few naked blacks. Your charter
shall pass the seals to-morrow: and much good may it do you!"

So the theorists and the courtiers set out to subdue the untutored
savageness of nature with a paper preamble and diagrams and rules and
inhibitions, and orders of nobility and a college of heralds, and
institutions of slavery and serfdom, and definitions of freeholders and
landgraves, caciques and palatines; and specifications of fifths for
proprietors, fifths for the nobility, and the rest for the common herd,
who were never to be permitted to be anything but the common herd, with no
suffrage, no privileges, and no souls. All contingencies were provided
against, except the one contingency, not wholly unimportant, that none of
the proposals of the Model Constitution could be carried into effect.
Strange, that Ashley Cooper--as Lord Shaftesbury was then--one of the most
brilliant men in Europe, and John Locke, should get together and draw
squares over a sheet of paper, each representing four hundred and eighty
thousand acres, with a cacique and landgraves and their appurtenances in
each--and that they should fail to perceive that corresponding areas would
never be marked out in the pathless forests, and that noblemen could not
be found nor created to take up their stand, like chessmen, each in his
lonely and inaccessible morass or mountain or thicket, and exercise the
prerogatives of the paper preamble over trees and panthers and birds of
the air! How could men of such radiant intelligence as Locke and
Shaftesbury unquestionably were, show themselves so radically ignorant of
the nature of their fellowmen, and of the elementary principles of
colonization? The whole thing reads, to-day, like some stupendous jest;
yet it was planned in grave earnest, and persons were found to go across
the Atlantic and try to make it work.

Lord Shaftesbury was one of the Hampshire Coopers, and the first earl. He
was a sort of English Voltaire: small and thin, nervous and fractious,
with a great cold brain, no affections and no illusions; he had faith in
organizations, but none in man; was destitute of compunctions, careless of
conventions and appearances, cynical, penetrating, and frivolous. He was a
skeptic in religion, but a devotee of astrology; easily worried in safety,
but cool and audacious in danger. He despised if he did not hate the
people, and regarded kings as an unavoidable nuisance; the state, he
thought, was the aristocracy, whose business it was to keep the people
down and hold the king in check. His career--now supporting the royalists,
now the roundheads, now neither--seems incoherent and unprincipled; but in
truth he was one of the least variable men of his time; he held to his
course, and king and parliament did the tacking. He was an incorruptible
judge, though he took bribes; and an unerring one, though he disregarded
forms of law. He was tried for treason, and acquitted; joined the Monmouth
conspiracy, and escaped to Holland, where he died at the age of sixty-two.
What he lacked was human sympathies, which are the beginning of wisdom;
and this deficiency it was, no doubt, that led him into the otherwise
incomprehensible folly of the Carolina scheme.

Locke could plead the excuse of being totally unfamiliar with practical
life; he was a philosopher of abstractions, who made an ideal world to fit
his theories about it. He could write an essay on the Understanding, but
was unversed in Common-sense. His nature was more calm and normal than
Shaftesbury's, but in their intellectual conclusions they were not
dissimilar. The views about the common people which Sir William Berkeley
expressed with stupid brutality, they stated with punctual elegance. They
were well mated for the purpose in hand, and they performed it with due
deliberation and sobriety. It was not until five years after the grant was
made that the constitution was written and sealed. It achieved an
instantaneous success in England, much as a brilliant novel might, in our
time; and the authors were enthusiastically belauded. The proprietors
--Albemarle, Craven, Clarendon, Berkeley, Sir William Berkeley, Sir John
Colleton and Sir George Carteret, and Shaftesbury himself--began to look
about for their serfs and caciques, and to think of their revenues.
Meanwhile the primeval forest across three thousand miles of ocean laughed
with its innumerable leaves, and waved its boughs in the breath of the
spirit of liberty. The laws of the study went forth to battle with the
laws of nature.

Ignorant of these courtly and scholarly proceedings, a small knot of
bonafide settlers had built their huts on Albemarle Sound, and had for
some years been living there in the homeliest and most uneducated peace
and simplicity. Some had come from Virginia, some from New England, and
others from the island of Bermuda. They had their little assembly and
their governor Stevens, their humble plantations, their modest trade,
their beloved solitudes, and the plainest and least obtrusive laws
imaginable. They paddled up and down their placid bayous and rivers in
birch-bark canoes; they shot deer and 'possums for food and panthers for
safety, they loved their wives and begat their children, they wore shirts
and leggins of deerskin like the Indians, and they breathed the pure
wholesomeness of the warm southern air. When to these backwoods innocents
was borne from afar the marvelous rumors of the silk-stockinged and
lace-ruffled glories, originated during an idle morning in the king's
dressing-room, which were to transfigure their forest into trim gardens
and smug plantations, surrounding royal palaces and sumptuous hunting
pavilions, perambulated by uniformed officials, cultivated by meek armies
of serfs, looking up from their labors only to doff their caps to lordly
palatines and lily-fingered ladies with high heels and low corsages: when
they tried to picture to themselves their solemn glades and shadow-haunted
streams and inviolate hills, their eyries of eagles and lairs of stag and
puma, the savage beauty of their perilous swamps, all the wild
magnificence of this pure home of theirs--metamorphosed by royal edict
into a magnified Versailles, in which lutes and mandolins should take the
place of the wolf's howl and the panther's scream, the keen scent of the
pine balsam be replaced by the reek of musk and patchouli, the honest
sanctity of their couches of fern give way to the embroidered corruption
of a fine lady's bedchamber, the simple vigor of their pioneer parliament
bewitch itself into a glittering senate chamber, where languid chancellors
fingered their golden chains and exchanged witty epigrams with big-wigged,
snuff-taking cavaliers:--when they attempted to house these strange ideas
in their unsophisticated brains, they must have stared at one another with
a naive perplexity which slowly broadened their tanned and bearded visages
into contagious grins. They looked at their hearty, clear-eyed wives, and
watched the gambols of their sturdy children, and shook their heads, and
turned to their work once more.

The first movements of the new dispensation took the form of trying to
draw the colonists together into towns, of reviving the Navigation Acts,
of levying taxes on their infant commerce, and in general of tying fetters
of official red tape on the brawny limbs of a primitive and natural
civilization. The colony was accused of being the refuge of outlaws and
traitors, rogues and heretics; and Sir William Berkeley, governor of
Virginia, one of the proprietors under the Model Constitution, was deputed
to make as much mischief in the virgin settlement as he could.

The colonists numbered about four thousand, spread over a large
territory; they did not want to desert their palmetto thatched cabins and
strenuously-cleared acres; they disliked crowding into towns; they saw no
justice in paying to intangible and alien proprietors a penny tax on their
tobacco exports to New England--though they paid it nevertheless. They
particularly objected to the interference of Governor Berkeley, for they
knew him well. And when the free election of their assembly was attacked,
they sent emissaries to England to remonstrate, and meanwhile, John
Culpepper leading, and without waiting for the return of their emissaries,
they arose and wiped out the things and persons that were objectionable,
and then returned serenely to their business. They did not fly into a
passion, and froth at the mouth, and massacre and torture; but quietly and
inflexibly, with hardly a keener flash from their fearless eyes, they put
things to rights, and thought no more about it.

Such treasonable proceedings, however, fluttered the council chambers in
London sorely, and stout John Culpepper, who believed in popular liberty
and was not afraid to say so, went to England to justify what had been
done. He was arrested and put on trial, though he demanded to be tried, if
at all, in the place where the offense was committed. The intent of his
adversaries was not to give him justice, but simply to hang him; and why
go to the trouble and expense of carrying him to Carolina to do that? He
went near to becoming a martyr, did stout John; but, unexpectedly,
Shaftesbury, who might believe in despotism, but who fretted to behold
injustice, undertook his defense and brought him out clear. The rest of
the "rebels" were amnestied the following year, 1681. But one Seth Sothel,
who had bought out Lord Clarendon's proprietary rights, was sent out as
governor; and after escaping from the Algerine pirates, who captured and
kept him for a couple of years, he arrived at Albemarle, commissioned, as
Bancroft admirably puts it, to "Transform a log cabin into a baronial
castle, a negro slave into a herd of leet-men." Sothel was not long in
perceiving that this was beyond his powers, but he could steal: and so he
did for a few years, when the colonists, thinking he had enough, unseated
him, tried him, and sentenced him to a year's exile and to nevermore be
officer of theirs.

These planters of North Carolina were good Americans from the beginning,
endowed with a courage and love of liberty which foretold the spirit of
Washington's army,--and a religious tolerance which did not prevent them
from listening with sympathy and approval to the spiritual harangues of
Fox, the Quaker, who sojourned among them with gratifying results. Their
prejudice against towns continued, and one must walk far to visit them,
with only marks on the forest trees to guide. They were inveterately
contented, and having emancipated themselves from the blight of the Model
Constitution, rapidly became prosperous. The only effect of Messrs. Locke
and Shaftesbury's scheme of an aristocratic Utopia was to make the
settlers conscious of their strength and devoted to their freedom. Indeed,
the North Carolinians were in great part men who had not only fled from
the oppressions of England, but had found even the mild restraints of the
other colonies irksome.

The fate of the Model in South Carolina was similar, though the
preliminary experiences were different. When Joseph West, agent for the
proprietors, and William Sayle, experienced in colonizing, took three
shiploads of emigrants to the junction of the Ashley and Cooper rivers,
about twenty miles south of latitude 33 , they had a copy of the Model
with them. But the first thing they did after getting ashore was to vote
that its provisions were impracticable, and to revise it to such a degree
that, when it was sent over to England for approval, its authors did not
recognize their work, and disowned it. But the settlers constituted their
assembly on the general lines which might now be called American, and put
up their huts, in 1672, on the ground where now stands Charleston. The
climate was too hot for white labor, and the timely arrival of negro
slaves was welcome; in a few years they doubled the number of the whites.
The staple crops of the southern plantations needed much more work than
those of New England and the north, and this, as well as the preference of
the negroes themselves for the warmer climates, determined the
distribution of black slavery on the Atlantic coast.

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