Part 1020

"It is hard to trace the early history of Unitarianism in New England. The name was seldom used, yet not omitted with any view to concealment; for we have abundant proof that the ministers to whom it belonged preached what they believed clearly and fully. … But a marvellous change had taken place in the last century, at the beginning of which the denial of the Trinity would have seemed no better than blasphemy; while at its close nearly all the clergy of Boston and its vicinity and many others in Massachusetts were known to dissent from the ancestral creed, to have ceased to use Trinitarian doxologies, and to preach what was then known as Arianism, regarding Jesus Christ as the greatest and oldest of created beings, but in no proper sense as God. At the same time, so little stress was laid on the Trinity by its professed believers that, with two or three exceptions, these Arians remained in full church fellowship with those of the orthodox faith. In the territory now within the limits of Boston there were, a century ago, but two professedly Trinitarian ministers, one of them being Dr. Thacher, of the liberal Brattle Square Church, while Dr. Eckley, of the Old South Church, was known to entertain doubts as to the deity of Christ."

_A. P. Peabody, Early New England Unitarians (Unitarianism: its Origin and History)._

UNITED BRETHREN (Unitas Fratrum).

See BOHEMIA: A. D. 1434-1457, and 1621-1648; also MORAVIAN OR BOHEMIAN BRETHREN.

UNITED EMPIRE LOYALISTS.

See TORIES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

UNITED IRISHMEN, The Society of.

See IRELAND: A. D. 1793-1798.

UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN, Formation of the.

See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1707.

UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND, Creation of the.

See IRELAND: A. D. 1798-1800.

UNITED NETHERLANDS, or United Provinces, or United States of the Netherlands.

See NETHERLANDS: A. D. 1577-1581, 1581-1584, 1584-1585, and after.

UNITED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, The.

See SCOTLAND: A. D. 1843.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: Start--------

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1492-1620. Discovery and exploration of the Atlantic coast.

See AMERICA.

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: A. D. 1607-1752. First settlement and organization of the thirteen original English colonies.

The earliest attempts at European settlement (as distinct from exploration) within the present limits of the United States were made by French Huguenots, under the patronage of Admiral Coligny; first at Port Royal, on Beaufort River, Florida, where Jean Ribaut, in 1562, placed a few colonists who soon abandoned the spot, and, two years later, at Fort Caroline, on St. John's River, in the same peninsula. The second colony, commanded by René de Laudonnière, was considerable in numbers but unpromising in character, and not likely to gain a footing in the country, even if it had been left in peace. It was tragically extinguished, however, by the Spaniards in September, 1565. The Spaniards had then established themselves in a fortified settlement at St. Augustine. It was surprised and destroyed in 1567 by an avenging Huguenot, but was promptly restored, and has survived to the present day,—the oldest city in the United States. (See FLORIDA.)—The first undertakings at colonization from England were inspired and led by Sir Walter Raleigh. After unsuccessful attempts, in conjunction with his elder half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, to establish settlements in Newfoundland, Raleigh obtained a grant from Queen Elizabeth, in 1584, under which he planted a colony of 108 settlers, commanded by Ralph Lane, on Roanoke Island, within the boundaries of the present State of North Carolina. In honor of the virgin queen of England, the name Virginia was given to the region at large. Lane's colonists had expected to find gold, silver and pearls, and lost interest in the country when none could be discovered. In June, 1586, they persuaded Sir Francis Drake, who had touched at Roanoke with his fleet, to carry them home. Soon afterwards, several ships, sent out by Raleigh with reinforcements and supplies, arrived at the island, to find it deserted. They left fifteen men to hold the ground; but a year passed before another expedition reached the place. The fort was then found in ruins; the fifteen men had disappeared, and nothing of their fate could be learned. The new colony perished in the same way—its fate an impenetrable secret of the savage land. This was Raleigh's last venture in colonization. His means were exhausted; England was absorbed in watching and preparing for the Spanish Armada; the time had not come to "plant an English nation in America." Sir Walter assigned his rights and interests in Virginia to a company of merchant adventurers, which accomplished nothing permanently. Twenty years passed before another vigorous effort of English colonization was made. In 1606 King James issued a royal charter to a company singularly formed in two branches or divisions, one having its headquarters at London, and known as the London Company, the other established at Plymouth and known as the Plymouth Company. Between them they were given authority to occupy territory in America from the 34th to the 45th degree of latitude; but the two grants overlapped in the middle, with the intention of giving the greater domain to the company which secured it by the earliest actual occupation. The London Company, holding the southward grant, despatched to Virginia a company of 105 emigrants, who established at Jamestown, on the northerly bank of James River (May 13, 1607), the first permanent English settlement in America, and founded there the colony and the subsequent State of Virginia. The colony survived many hardships and trials, owing its existence largely to the energy and courage of the famous Captain John Smith, who was one of its chief men from the beginning. Its prosperity was secured after a few years by the systematic cultivation of tobacco, for which the demand in England grew fast. In 1619, negro slavery was introduced; and by that time the white inhabitants of Virginia had increased to nearly 4,000 in number, divided between eleven settlements.

See VIRGINIA.

{3166}

Meantime, the Plymouth Company had done nothing effectively in the northward region assigned to it. Bartholomew Gosnold, in 1602, had examined the coast from Maine to Cape Cod, and built a lonely house on the island of Cuttyhunk; Martin Pring, in 1603, had loaded two ships with sassafras in Massachusetts Bay; a colony named in honor of the chief justice of England, Sir John Popham, had shivered through the winter of 1607-8 near the mouth of Kennebec River and then gone home; Captain John Smith, in 1614, had made a voyage to the country, in the interest of London merchants, and had named it New England; but no lasting English settlement had been made anywhere within the bounds of King James' grant to the Plymouth Company, at the waning of the year 1620, when Virginia was well grown. It was then by chance, rather than by design, that the small ship Mayflower landed a little company of religious exiles on the Massachusetts coast, at Plymouth (December 21, 1620), instead of bearing them farther south. Driven from England into Holland by persecutions, twelve years before, this congregation of Independents, or Separatists, now sought liberty of conscience in the New World. They came with a patent from the London, or South Virginia Company, and expected to plant their settlement within that company's territorial bounds. But circumstances which seemed adverse at the time bent their course to the New England shore, and they accepted it for a home, not doubting that the proprietors of the land, who desired colonists, would permit them to stay. The next year they received a patent from the Council for New England, which had succeeded to the rights of the Plymouth Company. Of the hardships which these Pilgrim Fathers endured in the first years of their Plymouth Plantation, who does not know the story! Of the courage, the constancy and the prudence with which they overcame their difficulties, who has not admired the spectacle! For eight years they remained the only successful colony in New England. Then came the memorable movement of Puritans out of Old England into New England, beginning with the little settlement at Salem, under John Endicott; expanding next year into the "Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay"; founding Dorchester, Roxbury, Charlestown, Watertown, and Boston, in 1630, and rapidly possessing and putting the stamp of the stern, strong Puritan character on the whole section of America which it planted with towns. In the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay a cleavage soon occurred, on lines between democratic and aristocratic or theocratic opinion, and democratic seceders pushed southwestwards into the Connecticut Valley, where Dutch and English were disputing possession of the country. There they settled the question decisively, in 1635 and 1636, by founding the towns of Hartford, Windsor, Wethersfield and Springfield. Three years later the three towns first named confederated themselves in a little republic, with a frame of government which is the first known written constitution, and so gave birth to the future State of Connecticut. In 1638 New Haven was founded by a company of wealthy nonconformists from England, under the lead of their minister, John Davenport, and was a distinct colony until 1662, when it was annexed to Connecticut by a royal charter. Another State, the smallest of the New England commonwealths, was taking form at this same time, in a little wedge of territory on Narragansett Bay, between Connecticut and Massachusetts. Roger Williams, the great apostle of a tolerant Christianity, driven from Salem by the intolerant Puritanism of the Bay, went forth with a few followers into the wilderness, bought land from the Narragansett Indians, and laid the foundations (1636) of the town of Providence. In that same year another small company of people, banished from Boston for receiving the teachings of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, bought the island of Aquidneck or Aquetnet from the Indians and settled at its northern end. This community was soon divided, and part of it removed to the southern end of the island, beginning a settlement which grew to be the town of Newport. The island as a whole received the name of the Isle of Rhodes, or Rhode Island; and in 1644 its two settlements were united with Providence, under a charter procured in England by Roger Williams, forming the colony of Providence Plantations. In 1643 the colonies of Massachusetts, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Haven, entered into a confederation, from which Rhode Island was excluded, calling themselves "The United Colonies of New England." The object of the confederation was common action in defence against the Indians and the Dutch on the Hudson. It was the beginning of the cementing of New England. Before this time, small settlements had been planted here and there in northern New England, within territory covered by grants made to Sir Ferdinando Gorges and Captain John Mason. The province claimed by Gorges was subsequently called Maine, and that of Mason, New Hampshire; but Maine never rose to an independent colonial existence. After years of dispute and litigation, between 1651, and 1677, the jurisdiction of Massachusetts was extended over the province, and it remained the "District of Maine" until 1820, when Massachusetts yielded the separation which made it a sovereign state in the American Union. The New Hampshire settlements were also annexed to Massachusetts, in 1641, after Captain Mason's death; were separated in 1679, to be organized as a royal province; were temporarily reclaimed without royal authority in 1685; but finally parted from Massachusetts in 1692, from which time until the Revolution they remained a distinct colony.

See NEW ENGLAND; also MASSACHUSETTS, CONNECTICUT, RHODE ISLAND, NEW HAMPSHIRE, and MAINE.

While the English were thus colonizing New England at the north and Virginia at the south, the Dutch, not recognizing their claims to the country between, had taken possession of the important valley of the Hudson River and the region around its mouth, and had named the country "New Netherland." The river had been discovered in 1609 by Henry Hudson, an English sailor, but exploring in the service of the Dutch. Trading with the Indians for furs was begun the next year; the coast and the rivers of the region were actively explored; a New Netherland Company was chartered; a trading-house, called Fort Nassau, was built on the Hudson as far to the north, or nearly so, as Albany; but no real colonization was undertaken until 1623. The New Netherland Company had then been superseded by the Dutch West India Company, with rights and powers extending to Africa as well as the West Indies and the North American coasts. It bought Manhattan Island and large tracts of land from the Indians, but had little success for several years in settling them. In 1629 it introduced a strange experiment, creating a kind of feudal system in the New World, by conveying great estates to individuals, called Patroons, or Patrons, who would undertake to colonize them, and who received with their territorial grant much of the powers and many of the characteristics of a feudal lord. {3167} Several Patroon colonies were established on a baronial scale; but, generally, the system did not produce satisfactory results, and in 1640 the Company tried the better experiment of making the trade of New Netherland free to all comers, offering small independent grants of land to settlers, and limiting the Patroons in their appropriation of territory. The Company government, however, as administered by the directors or governors whom it sent out, was too arbitrary to permit a colonial growth at all comparable with that of New England. Collisions with the English in Connecticut arose, over questions of boundary, but the latter held their ground. Southward, on the Delaware, the Swedes made a settlement where the city of Wilmington now stands, and refused to be warned off by the Dutch, who claimed the region. This Swedish colony prospered and enlarged itself during sixteen years, but was overcome by Director Stuyvesant of New Netherland in 1654. A little later than the appearance of the Swedes on the Delaware, certain colonists from New Haven bought lands from the Indians on both banks of the Delaware and made attempts at settlement, in what is now New Jersey and on the site of the future city of Philadelphia. The Dutch and Swedes combined against them and they failed. In 1664 the whole situation in this middle region was changed by the English conquest of New Netherland. The territory so acquired—or regained, if the original English claim had been good—passed then, by royal grant, to the Duke of York (afterwards King James II.), and became the proprietary province of New York.

See NEW YORK.

The Duke of York, in turn, the same year, transferred to Lord John Berkeley and Sir George Carteret the part of his domain which lay between the Hudson and the Delaware, and it received the name of New Cæsarea, or New Jersey. Under encouragement from Berkeley and Carteret the New Haven colonization was resumed. Ten years later Berkeley sold his rights to a party of Quakers who were seeking a refuge for their persecuted sect in the New World. A division of the province was made and the Quaker proprietors received West Jersey, while East Jersey remained to Carteret.

See NEW JERSEY.

Before this time, William Penn had become the principal owner of the West Jersey interest. Not long afterwards (1681), by surrendering a claim which his father held against the British government, Penn procured from King Charles II. a much greater proprietary domain, on the western side of the Delaware, being no less than the vast tract, 40,000 square miles in extent, which received the name of Pennsylvania. To his title from the king he added a deed of purchase from the Indians. Penn's scheme of colonization was very liberally framed, and it was conducted with marked success. Philadelphia, first laid out in 1683, had 2,000 inhabitants in 1685, and Pennsylvania at large had 8,000. Penn himself did not find peace or happiness in his position as a princely proprietor; but he founded a great and prosperous commonwealth on noble lines.

See PENNSYLVANIA.

In order to possess one bank of the Delaware River and Bay to the sea, William Penn, after securing his grant from the king, bought additionally from the Duke of York the claims of the latter to that strip of territory which the Swedes had settled on and struggled for with the Dutch, and which took an independent political form in later days as the State of Delaware. The Delaware "territories," as they were called, never accepted their dependent relationship to Pennsylvania, and as early as 1702 it was found necessary to concede them a separate legislature, though they continued under Penn's proprietary government.

See DELAWARE.

Adjoining Penn's province on the south was the domain of another great proprietor, Lord Baltimore, whose title deed, from the same royal source as that of Penn, but prior in time by half a century, gave rise to conflicts which troubled the whole life of the peaceful Friend. The first Lord Baltimore (George Calvert) received from James I. in 1632 a patent which gave him territory on the northerly side of the Potomac River, stretching to the Delaware Bay and River and to the 40th parallel of north latitude. By its terms it did undoubtedly take in Delaware and part of Pennsylvania; but the intervening occupation by the Swedes and Dutch, the English conquest, and the royal grant to the Duke of York, confused the title. The controversy was not settled until 1761-7, when "Mason and Dixon's line" was run as the accepted boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania. The lords proprietary of Maryland had been in conflict long before Penn's time with their neighbors at the south, in Virginia, and had many difficulties to encounter and many troubles in their undertaking to found a state. The powers they had received with their grant from the king were the largest that royalty could concede to a subject, and gave to their province the character of a palatine principality. But they exercised their substantial sovereignty with an admirable moderation. They were Catholics, and the early settlers in Maryland were largely though not wholly of that faith. But they introduced a policy of tolerance which was strange at the time to every other part of the New World except Rhode Island, and made their province free to all religions. Numerous Puritans entered it, especially from Virginia, where they were unwelcome; and these, it can hardly be denied, made ill returns for the tolerant hospitality they received. During the time of the Civil War, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate in England, the Maryland Puritans were hostile, not only to the proprietary government, but to its tolerant principles, and used the ascendancy which they frequently gained in a spirit that does not compare favorably with that of their adversaries. Subsequently the ascendancy of the Puritans gave way to that of the Anglican Church, without restoring the toleration which Catholicism in power had established—a rare instance in history—and which Protestantism in power had suppressed.

See MARYLAND.

Beyond the Virginia plantations, in the South, the coasts to which Raleigh had sent his first colonists, and to which the virgin queen had intended to give her name, waited long for settlement. The first durable colony within that territory which took its name in time from a less worthy sovereign was planted in 1653, at Albemarle, on the Chowan River, by a small company of dissenters from Virginia. {3168} In 1665 a considerable party of emigrants from the Barbadoes, headed by a wealthy planter of that island, Sir John Yeamans, established themselves on Cape Fear River, near its mouth, in the district which was afterwards called Clarendon. Two years before this time, in 1663, King Charles II. had discharged some part of his heavy obligations to his loyal supporters by granting that whole section of the American continent which lies between the 31st and 36th parallels of latitude to a company of courtiers, including Clarendon, Monk, Shaftesbury, and others, and the province was named Carolina. It was divided into two great counties, Albemarle and Clarendon, and these corresponded somewhat nearly to the North Carolina and South Carolina of the present day. In 1670 the lords proprietors sent out a colony under William Sayle, which settled first at Port Royal; but Sayle died soon after landing, and the colonists were induced to migrate northwards to the Ashley River, where Sir John Yeamans met them with a considerable part of his Clarendon colony, and became the head of the united settlements. There they founded "Old Charleston," and, after a few years, shifting the site to the confluence of the Ashley and the Cooper, they began the building of the present city of Charleston. This became the nucleus of the subsequently distinct colony of South Carolina, as Albemarle did of that of North Carolina. The division was made in 1729, when the rights of the Proprietors were bought by the Crown, and the Carolinas became crown colonies. Until that time, the southern colony had made far greater progress than its northern twin. It had received a considerable immigration of Huguenots from France and of Scotch-Irish from the north of Ireland, as well as of English, and Charleston was becoming an important port, especially frequented by buccaneers. But after the displacement of the proprietary government, North Carolina began quickly to receive more than its share of the Scotch-Irish immigration and no small number of Highland Scotch. The colony was developed almost wholly in the agricultural direction, with few and small towns. Slavery was introduced at an early day, and rooted itself in the industrial system, as it did in that of all the southern settlements.

See NORTH CAROLINA and SOUTH CAROLINA.