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

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32

Another cause of embarrassment to the king was the reluctance of
Parliament to pass laws inhibiting the reasonable liberties of the
colonies. The influence of the Lords somewhat preponderated, because they
controlled many of the elections to the Commons; but neither branch was
disposed to increase the power of the king, and they were, besides, split
by internal factions. It was not until the mercantile interest got into
the saddle that Parliament saw the expediency of restricting the
productive and commercial freedom of the colonies, and the necessity, in
order to secure these ends, of diminishing their legislative license.
Meanwhile, William tried more than one device of his own. First, by dint
of the prerogative, he ordered that each colony north of Carolina should
appoint a fixed quota of men and money for the defense of New York against
the common enemy; this order it was found impossible to carry out. Next,
he caused a board of trade to be appointed in 1696 to inquire into the
condition of the colonies, and as to what should be done about them; and
after a year, this board reported that in their opinion what was wanted
was a captain-general to exercise a sort of military dictatorship over all
the North American provinces. But the ministry held this plan to be
imprudent, and it fell through. At the same time, William Penn worked out
a scheme truly statesmanlike, proposing an annual congress of two
delegates from each province to devise ways and means, which they could
more intelligently do than could any council or board in England. The plan
was advocated by Charles Davenant, a writer on political economy, who
observed that the stronger the colonies became, the more profitable to
England would they be; only despotism could drive them to rebellion; and
innovations in their charters would be prejudicial to the king's power.
But this also was rejected; and finally the conduct of necessary measures
was given to "royal instructions," that is, to the king; but to the king
subject to the usual parliamentary restraint. And none of the better class
of Englishmen wished to tyrannize over their fellow Englishmen across the
sea.

Under this arrangement, the appointment of judges was taken from the
people; Habeas Corpus was refused, or permitted as a favor; censorship of
the press was revived; license to preach except as granted by a bishop was
denied; charters were withheld from dissenters; slavery was encouraged;
and the colonies not as yet under royal control were told that the common
weal demanded that they should be placed in the same condition of
dependency as those who were. But William died in 1702, before this
arrangement could be carried out. Queen Anne, however, listened to
alarmist reports of the unruly and disaffected condition of the colonies,
and allowed a bill for their "better regulation" to be introduced. It was
now that the mercantile interest began to show its power.

The old argument, that every nation may claim the services of its own
subjects, wherever they are, was revived; and that England ought to be the
sole buyer and seller of American trade. All the oppressive and irritating
commercial regulations were put in force, and all colonial laws opposing
them were abrogated. Complaints under these regulations were taken out of
the hands of colonial judges and juries, on the plea that they were often
the offenders. Woolen manufactures, as interfering with English industry,
were so rigorously forbidden, that a sailor in an American port could not
buy himself a flannel shirt, and the Virginians were put to it to clothe
themselves at all. Naturally, the people resisted so far as they could,
and that was not a little; England could not spare a sufficient force to
insure obedience to laws of such a kind. "We have a right to the same
liberties as Englishmen," was the burden of all remonstrances, and it was
supported by councilors on the bench and ministers in the pulpit. The
revenues were so small as hardly to repay the cost of management. It is
hard to coerce a nation and get a profit over expenses; and the colonies
were a nation--they numbered nearly three hundred thousand in Anne's reign
--without the advantage of being coherent; they were a baker's dozen of
disputatious and recalcitrant incoherencies. The only arbitrary measure of
taxation that was amiably accepted was the post-office tax, which was seen
to be productive of a useful service at a reasonable cost; and an act to
secure suitable trees for masts for the navy was tolerated because there
were so many trees. The coinage system was no system at all, and led to
much confusion and loss; and the severe laws against piracy, which had
grown to be common, and in the profits of which persons high in the
community were often suspected and sometimes proved to have been
participants, were less effective than they certainly ought to have been;
but they, and the bloody and desperate objects of them, added a
picturesque page to the annals of the time.

Concerning the condition of the several colonies during the years
following the Revolution of 1688, it may be said, in general, that it was
much better in fact than it was in theory. There were narrow and unjust
and short-sighted laws and regulations, and there were men of a
corresponding stamp to execute them; but the success such persons met with
was sporadic, uncertain, and partial. The people were grown too big, and
too well aware of their bigness, to be ground down and kept in subjection,
even had the will so to afflict them been steady and virulent--which it
cannot be said to have been. The people knew that, be the law what it
might, it could, on the whole, be evaded or disregarded, unless or until
the mother country undertook to enforce it by landing an army and
regularly making war; and England had too many troubles of her own, and
also contained too many liberal-minded men, to attempt such a thing for
the present. The proof that the colonies were not seriously or
consistently oppressed is evident from the fact that they all increased
rapidly in population and wealth, notwithstanding their "troubles"; and it
was not until England had settled down under her Georges, and that
Providence had inspired the third of that name with the pig-headedness
that cost his adopted subjects so dear, that the Revolution became a
possibility. Yet even now there was no lack of talk of such an
eventuality; the remark was common that in process of time the colonies
would declare their independence. But perhaps it was made rather with
intent to spur England to adopt preventative measures in season, than from
a real conviction that the event would actually take place.

New York, at the time of William's accession, had been under the control
of Andros, who at that epoch commanded a domain two or three times as
large as Britain. Nicholson was his lieutenant; and on the news of the
Revolution Jacob Leisler, a German, who had come over in 1660 as a soldier
of the Dutch West India Company, and had made a fortune, unseated
Nicholson and proclaimed William and Mary. Supported by the mass of the
Dutch inhabitants, but without other warrant, he assumed the functions of
royal lieutenant-governor, pending the arrival of the new king's
appointee. In the interests of order, it was the best thing to do. But he
made active enemies among the other elements of the cosmopolitan
population of New York, and they awaited an opportunity to be avenged on
him. This came with the arrival of Henry Sloughter in 1691, with the
king's commission. Sloughter can only be described as a drunken
profligate. At the earliest moment, Leisler sent to know his commands, and
offered to surrender the fort. Sloughter answered by arresting him and
Milborne, his son-in-law, on the charge of high treason--an absurdity; but
they were arraigned before a partisan court and condemned to be hanged
--they refusing to plead and appealing to the king. It is said that
Sloughter did not intend to carry the sentence into effect; but the local
enemies of Leisler made the governor drunk that night, and secured his
signature to the decree. This was on May 14, 1691; on the 15th, the house
disapproved the sentence, but on the 16th it was carried out, the victims
meeting their fate with dignity and courage. In 1695, the attainder was
reversed by act of parliament; but it remains the most disgraceful episode
of William's government of the colonies.

Meanwhile, Sloughter was recalled, and Fletcher sent out. He was not a
sodden imbecile, but he was ill-chosen for his office. He described the
New Yorkers of that day as "divided, contentious and impoverished" and
immediately began a conflict with them. His attitude may be judged from a
passage in his remarks to the assembly soon afterward: "There never was an
amendment desired by the council board but what was rejected. It is a sign
of a stubborn ill-temper.... While I stay in this government I will take
care that neither heresy, schism, nor rebellion be preached among you, nor
vice and profanity be encouraged. You seem to take the power into your own
hands and set up for everything." This last observation was probably not
devoid of truth; nor was a subsequent one, "There are none of you but what
are big with the privileges of Englishmen and Magna Charta." That well
describes the colonist of the period, whether in New York or elsewhere. It
had been said of New Yorkers, however, that they were a conquered people,
who had no rights that a king was bound to respect; and the grain of truth
in the saying may have made the New Yorkers more than commonly anxious to
keep out the small end of the wedge. Bellomont's incumbency was mild, and
chiefly memorable by reason of his having commissioned a certain William
Kidd to suppress piracy; but Kidd--if tradition is to be believed:
--certainly his most unfair and prejudiced trial in London afforded no
evidence of it--found more pleasure in the observance than in the breach,
and became the most famous pirate of them all. There is gold enough of his
getting buried along the coasts to buy a modern ironclad fleet, according
to the belief of the credulous. A little later, Steed Bonnet, Richard
Worley, and Edward Teach, nicknamed Blackbeard, had similar fame and fate.
Their business, like others of great profit, incurred great risks.

Of Lord Cornbury, the next governor, Bancroft remarks, with unwonted
energy, that "He joined the worst form of arrogance to intellectual
imbecility," and that "happily for New York, he had every vice of
character necessary to discipline a colony into self-reliance and
resistance." He began by stealing $1,500 appropriated to fortify the
Narrows; it was the last money he got from the various assemblies that he
called and dissolved, and the assemblies became steadily more independent
and embarrassing. In 1707, the Quaker speaker read out in meeting a paper
accusing him of bribe taking. Cornbury disappears from American history
the next year; and completed his career, in England, as the third Earl of
Clarendon.

Under Lovelace, the assembly refused supplies and assumed executive
powers; when Hunter came, he found a fertile and wealthy country, but
nothing in it for him: "Sancho Panza was but a type of me." He was a man
of humor and sagacity, and perceived that "the colonists are infants at
their mother's breasts, but will wean themselves when they come of age."
Before he got through with the New Yorkers, he had reason to suspect that
the weaning time had all but arrived.

New Jersey passed through many trivial vicissitudes, changes of
ownership, vexed land-titles, and royal encroachments. For several years
the people had no visible government at all. They did not hold themselves
so well in hand as did New York, and were less audacious and aggressive in
resistance; but in one way or another, they fairly held their own,
prospered and multiplied. Pennsylvania enjoyed from the first more
undisturbed independence and self-direction than the others; at one time
it seemed to be their ambition to discover something which Penn would not
grant them, and then to ask for it. But the great Quaker was equal to the
occasion; no selfishness, crankiness, or whimsicality on their part could
wear out his patience and benevolence. In the intervals of his
imprisonments in England he labored for their welfare. The queen
contemplated making Pennsylvania a royal province, but Penn, though poor,
would not let it go except on condition it might retain its democratic
liberties. The people, in short, kept everything in their own hands, and
their difficulties arose chiefly from their disputes as to what to do with
so much freedom. It was a colony where everybody was equal, without an
established church, where any one was welcome to enter and dwell, which
was destitute of arms or defense or even police, which yet grew in all
good things more rapidly than any of its sister colonies. The people waxed
fat and kicked, but they did no evil in the sight of the Lord, whatever
England may have thought of them; and after the contentious little
appendage of Delaware had finally been cut off from its big foster sister
(though they shared the same governors until the Revolution) there is
little more to be said of either of them.

The Roman Catholic owners of Maryland fared ill after William came into
power; he made the colony a royal province in 1691, and for thirty years
or more there were no more Baltimores in the government. Under Copley, the
first royal governor, the Church of England was declared to be
established; but dissenters were afterward protected; only the Catholics
were treated with intolerance in the garden themselves had made. The
people soon settled down and became contented, and slowly their numbers
augmented. But the Baltimores were persistent, and the fourth lord, in
1715, took advantage of his infancy to compass a blameless reconciliation
with the Church of England, thereby securing his installation in the
proprietary rights of his forefathers, from which the family was not
evicted until the Revolution of the colonies in 1775 opened a new chapter
in the history of the world.

Virginia recovered rapidly from Berkeley, and suffered little from
Andros, who was governor in 1692, but with his fangs drawn, and an
experience to remember. The people still eschewed towns, and lived each
family in its own solitude, hospitable to all, but content with their own
company. The love of independence grew alike in the descendants of the
cavaliers and in the common people, and the wide application of the
suffrage equalized power, and even enabled the lower sort to keep the
gentry, when the fancy took them, out of the places of authority and
trust. Democracy was in the woods and streams and the blue sky, and all
breathed it in and absorbed it into their blood and bone. They early
petitioned William for home rule in all its purity; he permitted land
grants to be confirmed, but would not let their assembly supplant the
English parliament as a governing power. He sought, unsuccessfully, to
increase the authority of the church; for though the bishop might license
and the governor recommend, the parish would not present. It was a
leisurely, good-natured, careless, but spirited people, indifferent to
commerce, content to harvest their fields and rule their slaves, and let
the world go by. A more enviable existence than theirs it would be hard to
imagine. All their financial transactions were done in tobacco, even to
the clergyman's stipend and the judge's fee. No enemy menaced them;
politics were rather an amusement than a serious duty; yet in these
fertile regions were made the brains and characters which afterward, for
so many years, ruled the councils of the United States, or led her armies
in war. They lay fallow for seventy-five years, and then gave the best of
accounts of themselves. England did not quite know what to make of the
Virginians; to judge by the reports of the governors, they were changeable
as a pretty woman. But they were simply capricious humorists, full of life
and intelligence, who did what they pleased and did not take themselves
too seriously. They indulged themselves with the novel toy, the
post-office; and founded William and Mary College in 1693. This venerable
institution passed its second centennial with one hundred and sixty
students on its roll; but, soon after, it "ceased upon the midnight,
without pain." Anybody may have a college in these days.

The Carolinas, no longer pestered by Grand Models, became another rustic
paradise. Their suns were warm, their forests vast, their people
delighting in a sort of wild civilization. When James II. went down, the
Carolinians needed no care-taker, and declined to avail themselves of the
martial law suggested by the anxious proprietors. But in 1690 they allowed
Seth Sothel to occupy the gubernatorial seat, and sent up a legislature.
The southern section was subjected to some superficial annoyance by the
proprietors, who wished to make an income from the country, but were
unwilling to put their hands in their pockets in the first place; they
insisted upon their authority, and the colonists did not say them nay, but
maintained freedom of action in all their concerns nevertheless. A series
of proprietary governors were sent out to them--Ludwell first, then Smith;
both failed, and retired. Then came Archdale, the Quaker, who struck a
popular note in his remark that dissenters could cut wood and hoe crops as
well as the highest churchmen; his policy was to concede, to conciliate
and to harmonize, and he was welcome and useful. The Indians, and even the
Spaniards, were brought into friendly relations. Liberty of conscience was
accorded to all but "papists," who were certainly hardly used in these
times. An attempt to base political power on possession of land was
defeated in 1702. The Church of England was accepted in 1704, and though
dissenters were tolerated, it remained the official dispenser of religion
until the Revolution. All these things were on the surface; the colony,
inside, was free, happy and prosperous; it had adopted rice culture, with
a great supply of negro slaves, and it brought furs from far in the
interior. The Huguenots had been enfranchised as soon as it was known that
England had turned her back on Catholicism and James. None of the colonies
had before them a future more peaceful and profitable than South Carolina.
The slaves were her only burden; but at that period they seemed not a
burden, but the assurance of her prosperity.

North Carolina was as happy and as peaceful as her southern sister, but
the conditions of life there were different. The proprietors attempted to
control the people, but were worsted in almost every encounter. Laws were
passed only to be disregarded. Here, as elsewhere, the Quakers became
conspicuous in inculcating liberal notions, and were paid the compliment
of being hated and feared by the emissaries of England. What was to be
done with a population made up of fugitives of all kinds, not from Europe
only, but from the other colonies, who held all creeds, or none at all;
who lived by hunting and tree-cutting; who were as averse from towns as
Virginia, and many of whom could not be said to have any fixed abode at
all? If restraints were proposed, they ignored them; if they were pressed,
they resisted them, sometimes boisterously, but never with bloodshed.
Robert Daniel, deputy governor in 1704, tried to establish the Church of
England; a building was erected, but in all the province there was but one
clergyman, with an absentee congregation scattered over hundreds of miles
of mountain and forest. In the following year there were two governors
elected by opposite factions, each with his own legislature; and in 1711
Edward Hyde, going out to restore order, confounded the confusion. He
called in Spotswood from Virginia to help him; but there were too many
Quakers; and the old soldier, after landing a party of marines to indicate
his disapproval of anarchy, retired. Meantime, fresh emigrants kept
arriving, including many Palatinates from Germany. It was not a profitable
country to its reputed owners, who, in 1714, received a hundred dollars
apiece from it. But it supported its inhabitants all the better; and it
was eight years more before they supplied themselves with a court house,
and forty, before they felt the need of a printing press.

In New England, Connecticut and Rhode Island, which had suffered
comparatively little from the despotism of James, readily recovered such
minor rights as they had been deprived of. There was a dispute between
Fitz-John Winthrop and Fletcher as to the command of the local militia,
the former, with his fellow colonists, demanding that the control be kept
by the colony; Winthrop went to England and got confirmation of his plea;
and from the people, on his return, the governorship. There were a score
and a half of flourishing towns in Connecticut, each with its meeting
house and school. Little Rhode Island recovered its charter, whether the
original or a duplicate. An act was pending in England to abrogate all
colonial charters, and was backed by the strong mercantile influence; but
the French war caused it to go over. Lord Cornbury, and Joseph Dudley, the
Massachusetts-born traitor, did their best to get a royal governor for
these colonies, but they failed; though Dudley, at the instance of Cotton
Mather, was afterward made governor of Massachusetts.

But no son of Massachusetts has so well deserved the condemnation of
history as Cotton Mather himself. Such political sins as his advocacy of
Dudley, and his opposition to the revival of the old charter, are
trifling; they might have been the result of ordinary blindness or
selfishness merely; but his part in the witchcraft delusion cannot be so
accounted for. In his persecution of the accused persons he was actuated
by a spirit of inflamed vanity and malignity truly diabolic; and if there
can be a crime which Heaven cannot forgive, assuredly Cotton Mather
steeped himself in it. He was a singular being; yet he represented the
evil tendencies of Puritanism; they drained into him, so to say, until he
became their sensible incarnation. In his person, at last, the Puritans of
Massachusetts beheld united every devilish trait to which the tenets of
their belief could incline them; and the hideousness of the spectacle so
impressed them that, from that time forward, any further Cotton Mathers
became impossible. There is no feature in Mather's case that can be held
to palliate his conduct. He had the best education of the time, coming, as
he did, from a line of scholars, and out-Heroding them in the variety and
curiousness of his accomplishments, and in the number of his published
"works"--three hundred and eighty-three. Nothing that he produced has any
original value; but his erudition was enormous. Of "Magnalia," his chief
and representative work, it has been said that "it is a heterogeneous and
polyglot compilation of information useful and useless, of unbridled
pedantry, of religious adjuration, biographical anecdotes, political
maxims, and theories of education.... Indeed, it contains everything
except order, accuracy, sobriety, proportion, development, and upshot."
This man, born in 1663, was not yet thirty years of age when his campaign
against the witches began; indeed, he had given a hint of his direction
some years earlier. In his multifarious reading he had become acquainted
with all existing traditions and speculations concerning witchcraft, and
his profession as minister in the Calvinist communion predisposed him to
investigate all accessible details concerning the devil. He was
passionately hungry for notoriety and conspicuousness: Tydides melior
patre was the ambition he proposed to himself.

A huge memory, stored with the promiscuous rubbish of libraries, and with
facts which were transformed into rubbish by his treatment of them, was
combined in him with a diseased imagination, and a personal vanity almost
surpassing belief. His mental shallowness and consequent restlessness
rendered anything like original thought impossible to him; and the faculty
of intellectual digestion was not less beyond him. It is probable that
curiosity was the motive which originally drew him to the study of
witchcraft; a vague credence of such things was common at the time; and in
France and England many executions for the supposed crime had taken place.
Mather had no convictions on the subject; he was incapable of convictions
of any kind; and the revelation of his private diary shows that at the
very time he was wallowing in murders, and shrieking out for ever more
victims, he was in secret doubting the truth of all religion, and
coquetting with atheism. But men of no religious faith are prone to
superstitions; the man who denies God is the first to seek for guidance
from the stars. Suppose there should be a devil?--was Mather's thought. It
is not to be wondered at that such a man should be fascinated by the
notion; and we may perhaps concede to Mather that, if at any time in his
career he approached belief in anything, the devil was the subject of his
belief. Had his character been genuine and vigorous, such a belief would
have led him to plunge into witchcraft, not as a persecutor, but as a
performer; he would have aimed to be chief at the witches' Sabbath, and to
have rioted in the terrible powers with which Satan's children were
credited. But he was far from owning this bold and trenchant fiber: though
he could not believe in God, he dared not defy Him; and still he could not
refrain from dabbling in the forbidden mysteries. Moreover, there was an
obscure and questionable faculty inherent in certain persons,
unaccountable on any recognized natural grounds, which gave support to the
witchcraft theory. We call this faculty hypnotism now; and physiology
seeks to connect it with the nervous affections of hysteria and epilepsy.
At all times, and in all quarters of the earth, manifestations of it have
not been wanting; and in Africa it has for centuries existed as a
so-called religious cult, to which in this country the name of Hoodooism
or Voodooism has been applied. It is a savage form of devil worship,
including snake-charming, and the lore of fetiches and charms; and its
professors are able to produce abnormal effects, within certain limits,
upon the nerves and imaginations of their clients or victims. Among the
negro slaves in Massachusetts in 1692, and the negro-Indian mongrels,
there were persons able to exercise this power. They attracted the
attention of Cotton Mather.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32