Part 7

The picture of New England then is that of a community which received the bulk of its foundation stock in a very short period of time, 1620 to 1640, and almost wholly from a single source; that is, England, and specifically from the most Nordic districts of England. It was no mere figure of speech when Captain John Smith bestowed upon the region the prophetic name of New England. During the eighteenth century, scattered groups of other origins came to add themselves to the descendants of these early settlers; but in most cases they represented only drops in the bucket. Doubtless one of the reasons why the study of genealogy and the pride of ancestry have flourished most conspicuously in New England is that so large a proportion of the old population traces its ancestry back to the same period and to the same group of people. Even as early as the Revolution, the great bulk of the settlers of New England represented families that had been four or five generations on American soil.

If there was a conspicuous absence of immigrants of very distinguished families into New England at that time, it may be said, on the other hand, that the general level was sound and intelligent. The immigrant population of New England was composed of a small group of families dominant in business and the professions, and an overwhelming proportion of representatives of the English yeomanry, owners of small freeholds, whose sons often sailed ships or went to the fisheries. This same type made up the bulk of the population of the middle colonies and peopled the back country of the southern colonies. As most of the settlers in New England in the early migration were men who brought their families, the foundation stock thus established was on a better level than that in some other colonies where men arrived without bringing wives and therefore were forced to marry women of any kind whom the colony could furnish. The definitely Nordic character of New England stock, its early establishment, and the survival of the able and vigorous in a region where nature took a heavy toll of weaklings, have produced in New England a population that has left its stamp on subsequent American history as has no other group.

As to the Ulster Scots we must bear in mind that the Irish question was as serious a thorn in the side of English statesmen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as it was before or since, and numerous attempts were made to alleviate the situation, if not to end it, by the colonization of Protestant people in Ireland. In 1611, James I began to encourage the emigration of people from the lowlands of Scotland, particularly from the western part, and from the north of England, into Ulster. He looked forward to establishing in Ireland a staunch Protestant population that might ultimately outnumber the Catholics and become the controlling element politically. For this reason the settlers were picked with some care. The plan succeeded so well that in a generation or a little more, about 300,000 people had been colonized in the northern part of the island, and by the end of a century their number had risen to nearly a million.

These are the "Scotch Irish" of American history. The name is a grotesque misnomer suggesting to the popular mind a sort of hybrid origin and hybrid character which has no basis in reality. They were not Irish in any sense of the word, and while most of them were Scotch a great many were English. They are designated in this book as "Ulster Scots."

Following the planting of Ulster in the north of Ireland, there was a heavy British emigration into the east of Ireland. This was due partly to economic factors and partly to the desire of Cromwell, in his turn, to solve the Irish problem by colonization, after the precedent which James I had established. These English Protestants in eastern Ireland have too often been ignored. They, too, had nothing in common with the older Roman Catholic population of the eastern part of the Island. Many of the Protestant "Irish" were Quakers.

These adopted children of Ireland also migrated freely to the American colonies and have been assumed far too easily to have been Roman Catholics. While it is extremely difficult to arrive at exact figures on this point, there is some reason to believe that the number of Protestant English in the east of Ireland during the seventeenth century was as large as the number of Protestant Scotch in the north, and this former group contributed its quota of English population to the colonies. It was this group which imposed the English language on the Irish. Until the later 1840's the Leinster Protestants and the Ulster Presbyterians were practically the only immigrants from Ireland to this country.

The great movement of Ulster Scots to America, although of an entirely different degree of magnitude, has been perhaps second only to that from the English counties in its influence on the subsequent history of the Continent. It began in the latter part of the seventeenth century but did not reach its height until the first quarter of the eighteenth. Five shiploads arrived in the summer of 1718, giving Cotton Mather the chance to note in his diary with anticipatory pleasure the merit that would accrue to him from showing "kindness to ye indigent." Thereafter, one finds in most histories such items as "In 1719 there came one hundred and twenty Presbyterian families from the north of Ireland who settled in Massachusetts" or "In the years 1719 and 1720 more than one hundred Presbyterian families came from the north of Ireland and settled at Londonderry in New Hampshire," and so on.

The Congregationalists of the seaboard were not too hospitable to these Presbyterians, and forced them to move inland in almost every case, away from the long-settled territory over which the Boston theocracy attempted to maintain its rule, and mostly to New Hampshire and Connecticut. Londonderry recalls its origin by its name and the Scotch who settled it not only introduced their manufactures into New Hampshire but brought along with them a still more valuable importation, the so-called Irish potato, which, having been taken from South America to Ireland long before, had, in this round-about way, been brought back to its own hemisphere. Other groups went to Worcester, to Pelham, to Palmer, to Andover, and to other communities in small numbers; while many others went to Maine. The total numbers, however, were very small.

Massachusetts had a definite policy at this time of encouraging, if not requiring, immigrants of this sort to settle on the frontiers. They furnished less competition in this way and played a useful part in keeping off the Indians.

The emigration of the Scotch and North English who had been in Ulster for a generation or two or at the most for three generations, was due to discontent with their situation there. They had built up an important manufacture of woollens and linens which has ever since been famous throughout the world; but in 1698 the jealousy of rival industrialists in England led to Parliamentary legislation which crippled the industries in Ulster and threw many men out of employment. In 1704 and the following years a religious persecution of these Presbyterians was also carried on. These economic and religious handicaps were so great that after a few years of patient waiting the population gave up hope, and within half a century about half of the entire number had moved to the New World. The most important stream went into the middle and southern colonies and will be traced later.

This exodus was a cause of alarm in the old country as well as in the new. "The rumour [of going to America] has spread like a contagious distemper," laments an Irish letter writer in 1728; "and the worst is that it affects only Protestants, and reigns chiefly in the North"; while another laments that "there are now seven ships at Belfast, that are carrying off about 1000 passengers thither; and if we knew how to stop them, as most of them can get neither victuals nor work at home, it would be cruel to do it."

Reference will recur frequently to this immigration of Ulster Scots. At this point it is necessary to emphasize in the first place that it was little different in racial background from the preceding English settlement, both groups being definitely Nordic in their make-up. In the second place it was a valuable addition to the colonies in the quality and energy of its members. In the third place it was always small in proportion to the English element.

New England in 1790, regardless of numerous non-English groups, many of them of good individual quality though insignificant in total numbers, is to be considered definitely as a transplanted English population, most of which had been settled in North America so long that its habits of thought and action had become differentiated--one might say definitely American rather than English.

A third source of New England settlers during this period, small in numbers but valuable in quality, is represented by the French Huguenots who arrived for the most part in the decade or two following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

The Huguenot migration to America falls in two general epochs. From 1555, when Admiral Coligny had a vision of a Protestant France in the New World, to the Revocation in 1685 of the Edict of Nantes, the French charter of Protestant liberty, is the first epoch, during which the immigration was scattering. From 1685 up to about 1750 is the second epoch, when the Huguenots, fleeing from oppression and death, sought refuge in many countries. During this period their immigration to North America reached considerable proportions. Providence and Boston were points of entry for many, though more went to the Southern colonies, and to them many an American family of the present day is proud to trace its ancestry.

These French Huguenots seem to have come pre-dominantly from the middle class or artisan stratum of the population with a mixture of the lesser gentry. But their energy, ability, and character earned for them an important rôle in their adopted country, out of proportion to their small numbers. Unlike some of the other non-English groups they did not tend to establish colonies or settlements of their own, but scattered widely and merged freely into the general population. This was the less difficult in that they came from the most Nordic parts of France and in racial composition are scarcely to be distinguished from the English.

In the same way those northern and eastern counties of England, which supplied a large part of the migration to America, had, during the preceding century, received a continuous infusion of continental Huguenots to a total sometimes estimated as high as 250,000, who there also became by admixture and hereditary similitude indistinguishable from their neighbors.

The Indian population of New England though never great was largely exterminated by war, disease, whiskey, and the breaking up of their cultural and economic background. In the century before the settlement of Plymouth, smallpox, introduced from the Spanish Main, had flickered up and down the New England coast and had so decimated the natives that only a weakened remnant remained to oppose the Whites.

In contrast, in the eleventh century the Norsemen who attempted to found settlements on the New England coast had met with savage resistance from the natives, whom they called Skrellings.

Intermarriage between Whites and Indians was almost unknown save in the occasional case in which a colonist was carried into captivity. The antipathy of the English settlers to the Indians was far too great to lead to the sort of miscegenation which was encouraged by the French in their part of the continent, and to which reference will be made later. In the British colonies the half-breed was looked upon as an Indian, whereas in the French colonies, as generally in all Colonial countries that had the Roman imperial tradition and the Roman Catholic religion, the half-breed was assimilated to the European group. Some of the remaining Indians along the Atlantic coast mixed with the runaway Negro slaves, but few of them contributed to the white population, and the term "half-breed" was in general a term of contempt. It was not until within the life-time of those now living that an infusion of Indian blood became a subject of pride, particularly in Oklahoma, unless one makes exception for such isolated tales as the somewhat grotesque Pocahontas tradition in Virginia.

The predominant influence of Massachusetts at the time of the Revolution is easy to understand. It possessed, to an unusual degree, unity in the various fields in which unity is most valuable to a nation--unity of race, unity of language, unity of culture, unity of religion, unity of institutions--and, more than anywhere else in the United States, its unity was attained through a long-continued, independent growth on American soil.

The French and Indian menace held back the rapidly multiplying population of New England for at least a generation. The agricultural areas were carrying more population than they could support, and they were waiting for a favorable opportunity to spread out. This opportunity came in the overthrow of Montcalm at Quebec in 1759. The Peace of Paris in 1763 left the road open, and the New England population began to push north, west, and south with a vigor that was reflected in the activity of the communities at home. The succeeding half-century is correctly regarded as the golden age of New England. Its country districts were more densely populated when the first census of the United States was taken in 1790 than they have been since. The decline, which will be traced in the next section, then began and decade after decade thereafter the New England towns and villages are found in a surprisingly large percentage of cases either standing still or actually declining in number of inhabitants.

The history of American colonization is usually written only in terms of the additions to population. The subtractions from it may be no less important. Subtractions by migration westward were less significant because in many cases the frontier merely proliferated itself by sending its surplus out without diminishing its own standards or numbers.

The first national loss of population occurred after 1640 when the changing political conditions in England, and the tyranny of the Massachusetts Bay authorities, drove many people out of Massachusetts. This loss, serious as it was, is insignificant compared with the tremendous loss of superior stock at the time of the Revolution. The Loyalists made up an undetermined part of the population, perhaps as much as one-third. Those who had been most conspicuous or most active were obliged in many cases to flee, and persecution with the confiscation of their property was carried on even after the war. Most of the Loyalists who left the colonies went either to Canada or to the West Indies. Altogether the loss from this source may have been as great as 100,000 people representing on the whole a superior selection of the population. It is comparable in the racial damage done the American population with the loss which France suffered from the expulsion of the Huguenots.

By the Revolution, the colonizing impulse of New England had not merely begun to fill up western New York, as will be described shortly, but had led to the formation of speculative land companies for settlement in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania, and even on the lower Mississippi. The hard times following the Revolution led to a great increase in migration, which, in general, has been rapid in hard times, slower in periods of prosperity. Vermont, as already said, felt the impulse markedly. Maine also seems to have grown most rapidly in the decade or two following the Declaration of Independence, though Portland and Falmouth were the only towns worthy of the name. New Hampshire, likewise, slower in its development than other parts of New England, had begun to catch up by attracting those ready to better themselves by a change of location. Connecticut had made a steady growth and had fewer non-English elements than almost any other of the New England colonies, small as these elements were everywhere. The growth of Massachusetts had been largely in the interior, Boston having made less progress than many other cities. People were moving from Massachusetts to other colonies. Many were moving through Boston but not staying there. Politically and culturally important, the Hub of the Universe stagnated industrially until the beginning of the manufacturing era.

VI

THE GATEWAYS TO THE WEST FROM NEW ENGLAND AND VIRGINIA

In 1609, the English navigator, Henry Hudson, had explored the river which now bears his name, acting on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. During the next decade, small Dutch settlements, trading posts, were established along the river; but the first real settlement is generally dated 1623 when thirty families of Walloons arrived. These were people from northern France and the southern Netherlands who had been driven into Holland by religious persecution and wanted to escape from the unsympathetic treatment which they were receiving in the southern part of Holland. Their language was not Dutch but French.

Speaking at large the Dutch settlement of New Netherland was, at the beginning, a trading venture and was based on a stronghold at the mouth of the river and another one at the head of navigation. For many years the latter settlement, originally called Fort Orange and later Albany, was much more important than the little town of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.

Restrictions on land tenure held back colonization, and at no time during the Dutch occupation did its reach extend much beyond the fertile farm lands of the Hudson valley northerly to Fort Orange, though an outpost to the west was established at Schenectady and scattering settlements had also been made in New Jersey and on Long Island.

In all these outlying regions, the pressure of New England migrants was too strong for the scanty Dutch population to withstand, and even in Manhattan the New Englanders had become early an important part of the population.

The immigration of respectable Dutch families did not begin in general until after 1638 when the monopoly of the West India Company was abolished. Many of the families who became great land owners in the northern part of the Hudson River valley were from Gelderland, east of the Zuyder Zee, the town of Myjerka being one of the principal centers of emigration. While many of these Dutch families were of excellent mercantile stock, it is a mistake to suppose that they represented the social élite of the home country.

Although the Dutch have left a permanent mark on the Hudson River valley, the contribution which they made to the future population of the State was small. When England captured the colony in 1664 and the Dutch immigration ceased, there were probably not many more than 10,000 inhabitants in the whole region, and of these from a quarter to a third were English.

Holland at the time was not at all a colonizing nation. Its overseas ventures were for the purpose of trade, and it had not sufficient surplus population to settle colonies permanently.

The amount of Dutch and Huguenot blood that was perpetuated in the later history of the colonies was, therefore, small by comparison with the English, but was for the most part of the same racial stock. Six or seven thousand Dutch in the present State of New York in 1664 are to be compared with 35,000 English in Virginia and 50,000 in New England at the same date.

There was no further general and organized emigration from Holland to America until the close of the Revolution. At that time some of the Amsterdam bankers, who had loaned millions of dollars to the Revolutionary government, decided to try to capitalize their investments and bought nearly 4,000,000 acres of land in New York and Pennsylvania. Most of the settlers on this tract were not Dutch; and while Dutch names may still play an important part in the Social Registers of New York and Albany, Dutch blood is insignificant in the present make-up of the population of the United States.

The southerly tide of New Englanders, which washed over the Dutch colony and others to the South, was in the first instance made up largely of those who did not find the religious convictions of their associates in Massachusetts and Connecticut to their liking.

The little "Forts" of the Dutch in the Connecticut valley were swamped shortly after 1630, and by 1639 the Connecticut people of English ancestry had established themselves at Greenwich within thirty miles of New Amsterdam and in other towns even nearer. Long Island was settled from the same source, and Thomas Belcher took up a tract upon the present site of the City of Brooklyn in the same year in which the English began to build at Greenwich. Brooklyn, until the twentieth century, has been a typically New England community, entirely distinct from the other boroughs of Greater New York. The eastern end of Long Island was long separated from the western end and was settled directly from Connecticut. The Hamptons are virtually still a part of New England.

The development of the southern part of New York State, and particularly of the Hudson River valley, was delayed indefinitely by the great land holdings of the so-called "patroons" or great landlords. New York City continued to be a cosmopolitan and nondescript town, built up on commerce and trade and without any particular racial complexion. Even at the time of the Revolution, it was inferior alike in size and in influence to Philadelphia and Boston, and New York State was but seventh in population among the thirteen colonies.

The real foundation of the greatness of the Empire State was the New England colonization of northern and western New York, which created a territory that was, and has ever since remained, quite distinct in political complexion and economic and social interests from the Hudson River valley and the metropolis at its mouth.

The commercial greatness of the City of New York dates from the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which made New York the outlet of the lake States. Meanwhile, however, several other foreign invasions had taken place.

The French Huguenots, racially Nordic and almost identical with the British, began to arrive in Colonial New York after 1685, founding the town of New Rochelle to commemorate the French city from which so many of them had come. Here, as elsewhere, their influence was far in excess of their proportionately small number.

In 1711, Governor Hunter of New York became imbued with grandiose ideas about developing the resources of his Province and began to look for a source of cheap labor for its exploitation. He found this in the German districts on the Rhine, broadly known as the Palatinate, where various national elements, not merely German and Alsatian, but French, Swiss, Moravian, and miscellaneous, were gathered, and where the religious persecution to which they were subjected as Protestants, and the excessive hardships which they were compelled to endure from invasions of the armies of Louis XIV, had reduced them to great misery.

The population was ripe for emigration and furnished the only substantial element of non-Nordic origin in the Colonial history of America. It is not necessary to trace in detail the innumerable petty sects and national elements, often two or three times removed from their original home, of which this "Palatine" emigration was composed. For the present purpose it was pre-dominantly German-speaking, and largely of the round-headed Alpine stock in racial make-up.