Part 2

But the bloody deed was not to go unrevenged. A bold Gascon, Dominic de Gourgues, in 1567, equipped three ships and set sail for Florida. He swooped down suddenly, like a falcon on the forts at the mouth of the St. John's, and putting the occupants to the sword, hanged them in the forest, inscribing over their dangling corpses, this mocking reply to the taunt at the Lutherans: "I do this not as unto Spaniards and sailors, but as unto murderers, robbers and traitors!"

The revenge was merciless; and thus terminated the first chapter in the history of religious liberty in America. BLOOD stained the earliest meeting between Catholic and Protestant on the present soil of our Union!

* * * * *

The power of Spain, the unattractiveness of our coast, the indifferent climate, and the failure to find wealthy native nations to plunder, kept the northern part of our continent in the back ground for the greater part of a century after the voyages of Columbus and Cabot. There were discouragements at that time for mercantile or maritime enterprise, which make us marvel the more at the energy of the men who with such slender vessels and knowledge of navigation, tempted the dangers of unknown seas.

Emigration from land to land, from neighboring country to neighboring country, was, at that epoch, a formidable enterprise; what then must we think of the hardihood, or compulsion, which could either tempt or drive men, not only over conterminous boundaries, but across distant seas? Feudal loyalty and the strong tie of family, bound them not only to their local homes, but to their native land. The lusty sons of labor were required to till the soil, while their stalwart brethren, clad in steel, were wandering on murderous errands, over half of Europe, fighting for Protestantism or Catholicity. Adventure, then, in the shape of colonization, must hardly be thought of, from the inland states of the old world; and, even from the maritime nations, with the exception of Spain and Portugal, we find nothing worthy of record, save the fisheries on the Banks, the small settlements of the French in Acadia and along the St. Lawrence, and the holy efforts of Catholic Missionaries among the Northern Indians. If we did not know their zeal to have been Christian, it might almost be considered romantic.

Soon after the return of De Gourgues from his revengeful exploit, the report of the daring deed and its provocation, was spread over Europe, and excited the people's attention to America more eagerly than ever. Among those who were attracted to the subject, was a British gentleman, whose character and misfortunes have always engaged my sincere admiration.

Sir Walter Raleigh was the natural offspring of the remarkable age in which he lived. We owe him our profoundest respect, for it was Sir Walter who gave the first decided impulse to our race's beneficial enjoyment of this continent. It was his fortune to live at a time of great and various action. The world was convulsed with the throes of a new civilization, and the energy it exhibited was consequent upon its long repose. It was an age of transition. It was an age of coat and corselet--of steel and satin--of rudeness and refinement,--in which the antique soldier was melting into the modern citizen. It was the twilight of feudalism. Baronial strongholds were yielding to municipal independence. Learning began to teach its marvels to the masses; warfare still called chivalrous men to the field; a spirited queen, surrounded by gallant cavaliers, sat on a dazzling throne; adventurous commerce armed splendid navies and nursed a brood of hardy sailors; while the mysterious New World invited enterprise to invade its romantic and golden depths. It was peculiarly an age of thought and action; and is characterized by a vitality which is apparent to all who recollect its heroes, statesmen, philosophers and poets.

Sir Walter Raleigh was destined, by his deeds and his doom, to bring this northern continent, which we are now enjoying, into prominent notice. He was the embodiment of the boyhood of our new world. In early life he had been a soldier, but the drift of his genius led him into statesmanship. He was a well known favorite of the Virgin Queen. A spirit of adventure bore him across the Atlantic, where, if the occasion had offered, he would have rivalled Cortez in his courageous hardihood, and outstripped him in his lukewarm humanity. He became a courtier; and, mingling in the intrigues of the palace, according to the morals of the age, was soon too great a favorite with his sovereign to escape the dislike of men who beheld his sudden rise with envy. From the palace he passed to prison; and, scorning the idleness which would have rusted so active an intellect, he prepared that remarkable History of the World, wherein he concentrated a mass of rare learning, curious investigation, and subtle thought, which demonstrate the comprehensive and yet minute character of his wonderful mind. A volume of poems shows how sweetly he could sing. The story of his battles, discloses how bravely he could fight. The narrative of his voyages proves the boldness of his seamanship. The calmness of his prison life teaches us the manly lesson of endurance. The devotion of his wife, denotes how deeply he could love; while his letters to that cherished woman--those domestic records in which the heart divulges its dearest secrets--teem with proofs of his affection and Christianity. Indeed, the gallantry of his courtiership; the foresight of his statecraft; the splendid dandyism of his apparel; the wild freedom and companionship of his forest life, show how completely the fop and the forager, the queenly pet and loyal subject, the author and the actor, the noble and the democrat, the soldier and the scholar, were, in the age of Elizabeth and James, blent in one man, and that man--Sir Walter Raleigh.

Do we not detect in this first adventurous and practical patron of North America, many of the seemingly discordant qualities which mingle so commonly in the versatile life of our own people? If the calendar of courts had its saints, like the calendar of the church, well might Sir Walter have been canonized as protector of the broad realm for which the brutal James made him a martyr to the jealousy and fear of Spain.[2]

Queen Elizabeth was the first British Sovereign who built up that maritime power of England which has converted her magnificent Island--dot as it is, in the waste of the sea--into the wharf of the world. She was no friend of the Spaniards, and she had men in her service who admired Spanish galeons. Wealth, realized in coin, and gold or silver, in bulk, were tempting merchandize in frail vessels, which sailors, half pirate, half privateer, might easily deliver of their burden. It was easier to rob than to mine; and, while Spain performed the labor in the bowels of the earth, England took the profit as a prize on the sea! Such were some of the elements of maritime success, which weakened Spain by draining her colonial wealth, while it enriched her rival and injured the Catholic sovereign.

Yet, in the ranks of these adventurers, there were men of honest purpose; and, among the first whose designs of colonization on this continent were unquestionably conceived in a spirit of discovery and speculation, was the half brother of Sir Walter Raleigh--Sir Humphrey Gilbert. But Sir Humphrey, while pursuing his northern adventures, was unluckily lost at sea, and Sir Walter took up the thread where his relative dropped it. I regret that I have not time to pursue this subject, and can only say that his enterprises were, doubtless, the germ of that colonization, which, by degrees, has filled up and formed our Union.

You will remember the striking difference between colonization from England, and the colonization from other nations of ancient and modern times. The short, imperfect navigation of the Greeks, along the shores and among the islands of their inland sea, made colonization rather a diffusive overflow, than an adventurous transplanting of their people. They were urged to this oozing emigration either by personal want, by the command of law, or by the oracles of their gods, who doubtless spoke under the authority of law. Where the national religion was a unit in faith, there was no persecution to drive men off, nor had the spirit of adventure seized those primitive classics with the zeal of "annexation" that animated after ages.

The Roman colonies were massive, military progresses of population, seeking to spread national power by conquest and permanent encampment.

Portugal and Spain, mingled avarice and dominion in their conquests or occupation of new lands.

The French Protestants were, to a great extent, prevented by the bigotry of their home government, as well as by foreign jealousy, from obtaining a sanctuary in America. France drove the refugees chiefly into other European countries, where they established their manufacturing industry; and thus, fanaticism kept out of America laborious multitudes who would have pressed hard on the British settlements. In the islands, a small trade and the investment of money, rather than the desire to acquire fortune by personal industry, were the motives of the early and regular emigration of Frenchmen.

The Dutch, devoted to trade, generally located themselves where they "have just room enough to manifest the miracles of frugality and diligence."[3]

Thus, wherever we trace mankind abandoning its home, in ancient or modern days, we find a selfish motive, a superstitious command, a love of wealth, a lust of power, or a spirit of robbery, controlling the movement. The first adventurous effort towards the realization of actual settlement on this continent, was, as we have seen, made by the persecuted Huguenots, and was, probably, an attempt rather to fly from oppression, than to establish religious freedom. The first English settlement, also, was founded more upon speculation than on any novel or exalted principle. There was a quest of gold, a desire for land, and an honest hope of improving personal fortunes.

VIRGINIA had been a charter government, but, in 1624, it was merged in the Royal Government. The crown reassumed the dominion it had granted to others. Virginia, in the first two decades of the seventeenth century, although exhibiting some prosperous phases, was nothing more than a delicate off-shoot from the British stock, somewhat vigorous for its change to virgin soil, but likely to bear the same fruit as its parent tree. Virginia was a limb timidly transplanted,--not a branch torn off, and flung to wither or to fertilize new realms by its decay. This continent, with all that a century and a half of maritime coasting had done for it, was but thinly sprinkled with settlements, which bore the same proportion to the vast continental wilderness that single ships or small squadrons bear to the illimitable sea. But the spirit of adventure, the desire for refuge, the dream of liberty, were soon to plant the seeds of a new civilization in the Western World.

* * * * *

Henry VIII, Founder of the English Church, as he had, whilom, been, Defender of the Roman Faith, was no friend of toleration; but the rigor of his system was somewhat relaxed during the reign of the sixth Edward. Mary, daughter of Henry, and sister of Edward, re-constructed the great ancestral church, and the world is hardly divided in opinion as to the character of her reign. Elizabeth re-established the church that had been founded by her father; and her successor James I of England and VI of Scotland,--the Protestant son of a Catholic mother,--while he openly adhered to the church of his realm, could not avoid some exhibitions of coquettish tenderness for the faith of his slaughtered parent.

But, amid all these changes, there was one class upon which the wrath of the Church of England and of the Church of Rome, met in accordant severity;--this was the Puritan and ultra Puritan sect,--to which I have alluded at the commencement of this discourse,--whose lot was even more disastrous under the Protestant Elizabeth, than under the Catholic Mary. The remorseless courts of her commissioners, who inquisitorially tried these religionists by interrogation on oath, imprisoned them, if they remained lawfully silent and condemned them if they honestly confessed!

A congregation of these sectaries had existed for some time on the boundaries of Lincoln, Nottingham and York, under the guidance of Richard Clifton and John Robinson, the latter of whom was a modest, polished, and learned man. This christian fold was organized about 1602; but worried by ceaseless persecution, it fled to Holland, where its members, fearing they would be absorbed in the country that had entertained them so hospitably, resolved in 1620 to remove to that portion of the great American wilderness, known as North Virginia. Such, in the chronology of our Continent, was the first decisive emigration of our parent people to the New World, _for the sake of opinion_.

It is neither my purpose, nor is it necessary, to sketch the subsequent history of this New England emigration, or of the followers, who swelled it into colonial significance.

Its great characteristic, seems to me, to have been, an unalterable will to worship God according to _its_ own sectarian ideas, and to afford an equal right and protection to all who thought as _it_ did, or were willing to conform to its despotic and anchoritic austerity. It is not very clear, what were its notions of abstract political liberty; yet there can be very little doubt what its practical opinions of equality must have been, when we remember the common dangers, duties, and interests of such a band of emigrants on the dreary, ice-bound, savage haunted, coasts of Massachusetts.

"_When Adam delved, and Eve span, Pray who was then the gentleman?_"

may well be asked of a community which for so long a time, had been the guest of foreigners, and now saw the first great human and divine law of liberty and equality, taught by the compulsion of labor and mutual protection, on a strip of land between the sea and the forest. The colonists were literally reduced to first principles; they were stripped of the comforts, pomps, ambitions, distinctions, of the Old World, and they embraced the common destiny of a hopeful future in the New.[4] They had been persecuted for their opinions, but that did not make them tolerant of the opinions of their persecutors. It was better, then, that oppressor and oppressed should live apart in both hemispheres; and thus, in sincerity, if not in justice, their future history exhibits many bad examples of the malign spirit from which they fled in Europe. If they were, essentially, Republicans, their democracy was limited to a political and religious equality of Puritan sectarianism;--it had not ripened into the democracy of an all embracing Christianity.[5]

These occurrences took place during the reign of the prince who united the Scottish and English thrones. At the Court of James, and in his intimate service, during nearly the whole period of his sovereignty, was a distinguished personage, who, though his name does not figure grandly on the page of history, was deeply interested in the destiny of our continent.

SIR GEORGE CALVERT, was descended from a noble Flemish family, which emigrated and settled in the North of England, where, in 1582, the Founder of Maryland was born. After taking his Bachelor's degree at Oxford and travelling on the Continent, he became, at the age of twenty-five, private Secretary to Sir Robert Cecil, the Lord Treasurer--afterwards the celebrated Earl of Salisbury. In 1609, he appears as one of the patentees named in the new Charter then granted to the Virginia Company. After the death of his ministerial patron, he was honored with knighthood and made clerk of the crown to the Privy Council. This brought him closely to the side of his sovereign. In 1619, he was appointed one of the Secretaries of State, and was then, also, elected to Parliament; first for his native Yorkshire, and subsequently for Oxford. He continued in office, under James, as Secretary of State, until near that monarch's death, and resigned in 1624.

Born in the Church of England, Sir George, had, in the course of his public career, become a Roman Catholic. With the period or the means of his conversion from the court-faith to an unpopular creed, we have now no concern. Fuller, in his "Worthies of England," asserts that Calvert resigned in consequence of his change of religion;--other writers, relying, perhaps, more on the _obiter dicta_ of memoirs and history, believe that his convictions as to faith had changed some years before. Be that, however, as it may, the resignation, and its alleged cause which was well known to his loving master, James, produced no ill feeling in that sovereign. He retired in unpersecuted peace. He was even honored by the retention of his seat at the Privy Council;--the King bestowed a pension for his faithful services;--regranted him, in fee simple, lands which he previously held by another tenure; and, finally, created him Lord Baron of Baltimore, in Ireland.[6]

Whilst Sir George was in office, his attention, it seems, had been early directed towards America; and in 1620, he is still mentioned in a list of the members of the Virginia Company. Soon after, he became concerned in the plantation of Newfoundland, and finally, obtained a patent for it, to him and his heirs, as Absolute Lord and Proprietary, with all the royalties of a Count Palatine. We must regret that the original, or a copy of this grant for the province of Avalon, in Newfoundland, has not been recently seen, or, if discovered, transmitted to this country.

Here, Sir George built a house; spent £25,000 in improvements; removed his family to grace the new Principality; manned ships, at his own charge, to relieve and guard the British fisheries from the attacks of the French; but, at length, after a residence of some years, and an ungrateful return from the soil and climate, he abandoned his luckless enterprise.

Yet, it was soil and climate alone that disheartened the Northern adventurer:--he had not turned his back on America. In 1629 he repaired to Virginia, in which he had been so long concerned, and was most ungraciously greeted by the Protestant royalists, with an offer of the Test-Oaths of Allegiance and supremacy. Sir George, very properly refused the challenge, and departed with his followers from the inhospitable James River, where the bigotry of prelacy denied him a foothold within the fair region he had partly owned.

But, before he returned to England, he remembered that Virginia was now a Royal Province and no longer the property of corporate speculation;--he recollected that there were large portions of it still unoccupied by white men, and that there were bays and rivers, pouring, sea-like, to the ocean, of which grand reports had come to him when he was one of the committee of the Council for the affairs of the Plantations. Accordingly, when he left the James River, he steered his keel around the protecting peninsula of Old Point Comfort, and ascending the majestic Chesapeake, entered its tributary streams, and laid, in imagination, at least, the foundations of Maryland.

His examination of the region being ended, Calvert went home to England, and in 1632, obtained the grant of Maryland from Charles I, the son of his royal patron and friend. The charter, which is said to have been the composition of Sir George, did not, however, pass the seals until after the death of its author; but was issued to his eldest son and heir, Cecilius, on the 20th of June, 1632. The life of Sir George had been one of uninterrupted personal and political success; his family was large, united and happy; if he did not inherit wealth, he, at least, contrived to secure it; and, although his conscience taught him to abandon the faith of his fathers, his avowal of the change had been the signal for princely favors instead of political persecution.

Here the historic connexion of the _first_ LORD BALTIMORE with Maryland ends. The real work of Plantation was the task of CECILIUS, the first actual Lord Proprietary, and of LEONARD CALVERT, his brother, to whom, in the following year, the heir of the family intrusted the original task of colonial settlement. If anything was done by SIR GEORGE, in furtherance of the rights, liberties, or interests of humanity, so far as the foundation of Maryland is concerned, it was unquestionably effected anterior to this period, for we have no authority to say, that after his death, his children were mere executors of previous designs, or, that what was then done, was not the result of their own provident liberality. I think there can be no question that the charter was the work of Sir George. That, at least, is his property; and he must be responsible for its defects, as well as entitled to its glory.[7]

I presume it is hardly necessary for me to say what manner of person the King was, whom Calvert had served so intimately during nearly a whole reign. James is precisely the historical prodigy, to which a reflective mind would suppose the horrors of his parentage naturally gave birth. In royal chronology he stands between two axes,--the one that cleft the ivory neck of his beautiful mother--the other that severed the irresolute but refined head of his son and heir. His father, doubtless, had been deeply concerned in the shocking murder of his mother's second husband. Cradled on the throne of Scotland; educated for Kingship by strangers; the ward of a regency; the shuttle-cock of ambitious politicians; the hope and tool of two kingdoms,--James lived during an age in which the struggle of opinion and interest, of prerogative and privilege, of human right and royal power, of glimmering science and superstitious quackery, might well have bewildered an intellect, brighter and calmer than his. The English people, who were yet in the dawn of free opinions, but who, with the patience that has always characterized them, were willing to obey any symbol of order,--may be said, rather to have tolerated than honored his pedantry in learning, his kingcraft in state, his petulance in authority, and his manifold absurdities, which, while they made him tyrannical, deprived him of the dignity that sometimes renders even a tyrant respectable.

You will readily believe that a man like George Calvert found it sometimes difficult to serve such a sovereign, in intimate state relations. In private life he might not have selected him for a friend or a companion. But James was his King; the impersonation of British Royalty and nationality. In serving him, he was but true to England; and, even in that task, it, no doubt, often required the whole strength of his heart's loyalty, to withstand the follies of the royal buffoon. Calvert, I think, was not an enthusiast, but, emphatically, a man of his time. His time was not one of Reform, and he had no brave ambition to be a Reformer. Accustomed to the routine of an observing and technical official life, he was, essentially a practical man, and dealt, in politics, exclusively with the present. Endowed, probably, with but slender imagination, he found little charm or flavor in excursive abstractions. His maxim may perhaps have been--"_quieta ne movete_,"--the motto of moderate or cautions men who live in disturbed times, preceding or succeeding revolutions, and think it better--

"---- to bear those ills we have "Than fly to others that we know not of!"

Yet, with all these characteristics, no one will hesitate to believe that Calvert was a bold and resolute person, when it is recollected that he visited the wilderness of the New World in the seventeenth century, and projected therein the formation of a British Province.