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Random House Walks from BEC 2009
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A School History of the United States by John Bach McMaster

J >> John Bach McMaster >> A School History of the United States




[Footnote 1: In 1660, after the restoration of Charles II., Edward
Whalley and William Goffe (the regicides, "king-killers," as they were
called), two of the judges who had condemned Charles I. to be beheaded,
fled to New Haven and were protected by the people. This act had much to
do with the annexation of New Haven to Connecticut.]

[Footnote 2: Read Fiske's _Beginnings of New England_, pp. 192-196. Many
of the New Haven colonists were disgusted by the union of their colony
with Connecticut, and in June, 1667, migrated to New Jersey, where they
founded "New-Ark" or Newark.]

In 1684 the King's judges declared the Massachusetts charter void, and
James II. was about to make New England one royal colony, when the
English people drove him from the throne. William and Mary in 1691
granted a new charter and united the Plymouth colony, Massachusetts,
Maine, and Nova Scotia, in one colony called Massachusetts Bay. This
charter was in force when the Revolution opened.


SUMMARY

1. The first colony established by the Plymouth Company (1607, on the
coast of Maine) was a failure.

2. Captain John Smith explored the New England coast and mapped it
(1613), but did not succeed in planting any colonies.

3. The permanent settlement of New England began with the arrival of a
body of Separatists in the _Mayflower_ (1620), who founded the colony
of Plymouth.

4. The Separatist migration from England was followed in a few years by
a great exodus of Puritans, who planted towns along the coast to the
north of Plymouth, and obtained a charter of government and a great
strip of land, and founded the colony of Massachusetts Bay.

5. Religious disputes drove Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson out of
Massachusetts, and led to the founding of Rhode Island (1636).

6. Other church wrangles led to an emigration from Massachusetts to the
Connecticut valley, where a little confederacy of towns was created and
called Connecticut.

7. Some settlers from England went to Long Island Sound and there
founded four towns which, in their turn, joined in a federal union
called the New Haven Colony.

8. In time, New Haven was joined to Connecticut, and Plymouth and Maine
to Massachusetts; New Hampshire was made a royal colony; and the four
New England colonies--Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and
Connecticut--were definitely established.

9. The territory of Massachusetts and Connecticut stretched across the
continent to the "South Sea," or Pacific Ocean.




CHAPTER V


THE MIDDLE AND SOUTHERN COLONIES

%47. North and South Carolina.%--You remember that away back in the
sixteenth century the French under Jean Ribault and the English under
Ralegh undertook to plant colonies on what is now the Carolina coast.
They failed, and the country remained a wilderness till 1653, when a
band of emigrants from Virginia made the first permanent settlement on
the banks of the Chowan and the Roanoke. In 1663 some Englishmen from
Barbados began to settle on the Cape Fear River, just at the time when
Charles II. of England gave the region to eight English noblemen, who,
out of compliment to the King, allowed the name of Carolina given it by
Ribault to remain. In 1665 the bounds were enlarged, and Carolina then
extended from latitude 29 deg. 00' to 36 deg. 30', the present south boundary of
Virginia, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

[Illustration: CAROLINA AS GRANTED BY King Charles II]

There was at first no intention of dividing the territory, although,
after Charleston was founded (1670), North Carolina and South Carolina
sometimes had separate governors. But in 1729 the proprietors sold
Carolina to the King, and it was then divided into two distinct and
separate royal provinces.

%48. New York.%--An event of far greater importance than the
chartering of Carolina was the seizure of New Netherland. After the
conquest of New Sweden, in 1655, the possessions and claims of the Dutch
in our country extended from the Connecticut River to the Delaware
River, and from the Mohawk to Delaware Bay. Geographically, they cut the
English colonies in two, and hampered communication between New England
and the South. To own this region was therefore of the utmost importance
to the English; and to get it, King Charles II., in 1664, revived the
old claim that the English had discovered the country before the Dutch,
and he sent a little fleet and army, which appeared off New Amsterdam
and demanded its surrender. The demand was complied with; and in 1664
Dutch rule in our country ended, and England owned the seaboard from the
Kennebec to the Savannah.

The King had already granted New Netherland to his brother the Duke of
York, in honor of whom the town of New Amsterdam was now renamed
New York.

%49. New Jersey.%--The Duke of York no sooner received his province
than he gave so much of it as lay between the Delaware and the ocean to
his friends Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, and called it New
Jersey, in honor of Sir George Carteret, who had been governor of the
island of Jersey in the English Channel. The two proprietors divided it
between them by the line shown on the map (p. 56). In 1674 Berkeley sold
West Jersey to a company of Quakers, who settled near Burlington. A
little later, 1676, William Penn and some other Quakers bought East
Jersey. There were then two colonies till 1702, when the proprietors
surrendered their rights, and New Jersey became one royal province.

%50. The Beginnings of Pennsylvania.%--The part which Penn took in
the settlement of New Jersey suggested to him the idea of beginning a
colony which should be a refuge for the persecuted of all lands and of
all religions.

[Illustration]

Now it so happened that Penn was the son of a distinguished admiral to
whom King Charles II. owed L16,000, and seeing no chance of its ever
being paid, he proposed to the King, in 1680, that the debt be paid with
a tract of land in America. The King gladly agreed, and in 1681 Penn
received a grant west of the Delaware. Against Penn's wish, the King
called it Pennsylvania, or Penn's Woodland. It was given almost
precisely the bounds of the present state.[1] In 1683 Penn made a famous
treaty with the Indians, and laid out the city of Philadelphia.

[Footnote 1: There was a long dispute, however, with Lord Baltimore,
over the south boundary line, which was not settled till 1763-67, when
two surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, came over from England
and located it as at present. In later years, when all the Atlantic
seaboard states north of Maryland and Delaware had abolished slavery,
this "Mason and Dixon's Line" became famous as the dividing line between
the slave and the free Atlantic states.]

%51. The Three Lower Counties: Delaware.%--If you look at the map of
the British Colonies in 1764, you will see that Pennsylvania was the
only English colony which did not have a seacoast. This was a cause of
some anxiety to Penn, who was afraid that the settlers in Delaware and
New Jersey might try to prevent his colonists from going in and out of
Delaware Bay. To avoid this, he bought what is now Delaware from the
Duke of York.

The three lower counties on the Delaware, as the tract was called, had
no boundary. Lawfully it belonged to Lord Baltimore. But neither the
Dutch patroons who settled on the Delaware in 1631, nor the Swedes who
came later, nor the Dutch who annexed New Sweden to New Netherland, nor
the English who conquered the Dutch, paid any regard to Baltimore's
rights. At last, after the purchase of Delaware, the heirs of Baltimore
and of Penn (1732) agreed on what is the present boundary line. After
1703 the people of the three lower counties were allowed to have an
assembly or legislature of their own; but they had the same governor as
Pennsylvania and were a part of that colony till the Revolution.[1]

[Footnote 1: For Pennsylvania read Janney's _Life of William Penn_ or
Dixon's _History of William Penn_; Proud's or Gordon's _Pennsylvania_;
Lodge's _Colonies_, pp. 213-226.]

%52. Georgia.%--The return of the Carolinas to the King in 1729 was
very soon followed by the establishment of the last colony ever planted
by England in the United States. The founder was James Oglethorpe, an
English soldier and member of Parliament. Filled with pity for the poor
debtors with whom the English jails were then crowded, he formed a plan
to pay the debts of the most deserving, send them to America, and give
them what hundreds of thousands of men have since found in our
country,--a chance to begin life anew.

[Illustration]

Great numbers of people became interested in his plan, and finally
twenty-two persons under Oglethorpe's lead formed an association and
secured a charter from King George II. for a colony, which they called
Georgia. The territory granted lay between the Savannah and the
Altamaha rivers, and extended from their mouths to their sources and
then across the country to the Pacific Ocean. Oglethorpe had selected
this tract in order that his colonists might serve the patriotic purpose
of protecting Charleston from the Spanish attacks to which it was
then exposed.

Money for the colony was easily raised,[1] and in November, 1732,
Oglethorpe, with 130 persons, set out for Charleston, and after a short
stay there passed southward and founded the city of Savannah (1733). It
must not be supposed that all the colonists were poor debtors. In time,
Italians from Piedmont, Moravians and Lutherans from Germany, and
Scotchmen from the Highlands, all made settlements in Georgia.

[Footnote 1: The House of Commons gave L10,000.]

%53. The Thirteen English Colonies.%--Thus it came about that between
1606 and 1733 thirteen English colonies were planted on the Atlantic
seaboard of what is now the United States. Naming them from north to
south, they were: 1. New Hampshire, with no definite western boundary;
2. Massachusetts, which owned Maine and a strip of territory across the
continent; 3. Rhode Island, with her present bounds; 4. Connecticut,
with a great tract of land extending to the Pacific; 5. New York, with
undefined bounds; 6. New Jersey; 7. Pennsylvania and 8. Delaware, the
property of the Penn family; 9. Maryland, the property of the heirs of
Lord Baltimore; 10. Virginia, with claims to a great part of North
America; 11. North Carolina, 12. South Carolina, and 13. Georgia, all
with claims to the Pacific.


SUMMARY

1. The English seized New Netherland (1664), giving it to the Duke of
York; and the Duke, after establishing the province of New York, gave
New Jersey to two of his friends, and sold the three counties on the
Delaware to William Penn.

2. Meanwhile the King granted Penn what is now Pennsylvania (1681).

3. The Carolinas were first chartered as one proprietary colony, but
were sold back to the King and finally separated in 1729.

4. Georgia, the last of the thirteen English colonies, was granted to
Oglethorpe and others as a refuge for poor debtors (1732).

BEGINNINGS OF THE THIRTEEN COLONIES

_English_.

Failures:

1579. Gilbert.
1584. }Ralegh, Roanoke Island.
1587. }

Successes:

1606. London Company, Plymouth Company.
1607. Virginia settled.
1609. Boundary of London Company changed. Origin of
Virginia claim.
1620. Landing of the Pilgrims. Plymouth colony.
1622. Grant to Mason and Gorges.
1628. Land bought for Massachusetts Bay colony.
1629. Mason and Gorges divide their grant into Maine
and New Hampshire.
1632. Maryland patent granted.
1639. Connecticut constitution
(Windsor. Hartford. Wethersfield)
1643. New Haven colony organized
(New Haven. Milford. Guilford. Stamford.)
1643. Rhode Island chartered.
1662. Connecticut chartered.
(Connecticut. New Haven.)
1663. Rhode Island rechartered.
1663. Carolina patent granted.
After 1729 North and South Carolina.
1664. New Netherland conquered and New York founded.
1664. New Jersey granted to Berkeley and Carteret.
1681. Pennsylvania granted to Penn.
1682. Three counties on the Delaware bought by Penn.
1691. Plymouth and Maine (and Nova Scotia)
united with Massachusetts.
1732. Georgia chartered.

_Dutch_.
1613. Begin to colonize New Netherland

_Swedes_.
1638. South Company makes settlement on the Delaware.
1655. Conquered by the Dutch.




CHAPTER VI


THE FRENCH IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY

%54. The Early French Possessions% on our continent may be arranged
in three great areas: 1. Acadia, 2. New France, 3. Louisiana, or the
basin of the Mississippi River.

ACADIA comprised what is now New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and a part of
Maine. It was settled in the early years of the seventeenth century at
Port Royal (now Annapolis, Nova Scotia), at Mount Desert Island, and on
the St. Croix River.

NEW FRANCE was the drainage basin of the St. Lawrence and the Great
Lakes. As far back as 1535 Jacques Cartier explored the St. Lawrence
River to the site of Montreal. But it was not till 1608 that a party
under Champlain made the first permanent settlement on the river,
at Quebec.

The French settlers at once entered into an alliance with the Huron and
Algonquin Indians, who lived along the St. Lawrence River. But these
tribes were the bitter enemies of the Iroquois, who dwelt in what is now
central New York, and when, in consequence of this alliance, the French
were summoned to take the warpath, Champlain, with a few followers,
went, and on the shore of the lake which now bears his name, not far
from the site of Ticonderoga, he met and defeated the Iroquois tribe of
Mohawks in July, 1609.

The battle was a small affair; but its consequences were serious and
lasting, for the Iroquois were thenceforth the enemies of the French,
and prevented them from ever coming southward and taking possession of
the Hudson and the Mohawk valleys. When, therefore, the French
merchants began to engage in the fur trade with the Indians, and the
French priests began their efforts to convert the Indians to
Christianity, they were forced to go westward further and further into
the interior.

[Illustration: EUROPEAN CLAIMS AND EXPLORATIONS 1650]

Their route, instead of being up the St. Lawrence, was up the Ottawa
River to its head waters, over the portage to Lake Nipissing, and down
its outlet to Georgian Bay, where the waters of the Great Lakes lay
before them (see map on p. 63). They explored these lakes, dotted their
shores here and there with mission and fur-trading stations, and took
possession of the country.

%55. The French on the Mississippi.%--In the course of these
explorations the French heard accounts from the Indians of a great
river to the westward, and in 1672 Father Marquette (mar-ket') and Louis
Joliet (zho-le-a') were sent by the governor of New France to search for
it. They set out, in May, 1673, from Michilimackinac, a French trading
post and mission at the foot of Lake Michigan. With five companions, in
two birch-bark canoes, they paddled up the lake to Green Bay, entered
Fox River, and, dragging the boats through its boiling rapids, came to a
village where lived the Miamis and the Kickapoos. These Indians tried to
dissuade them from going on; but Marquette was resolute, and on the 10th
of June, 1673, he led his followers over the swamps and marshes that
separated Fox River from a river which the Indian guides assured him
flowed into the Mississippi. This westward-flowing river he called the
Wisconsin, and there the guides left him, as he says, "alone, amid that
unknown country, in the hands of God."

The little band shoved their canoes boldly out upon the river, and for
seven days floated slowly downward into the unknown. At last, on the
17th of June, they paddled out on the bosom of the Mississippi, and,
turning their canoes to the south, followed the bends and twists of the
river, past the mouth of the Missouri, past the Ohio, to a point not far
from the mouth of the Arkansas. There the voyage ended, and the party
went slowly back to the Lakes.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great
West_.]

%56. La Salle finishes the Work of Marquette and Joliet.%--The
discovery of Marquette and Joliet was the greatest of the age. Yet five
years went by before Robert de la Salle (lah sahl') set forth with
authority from the French King "to labor at the discovery of the western
part of New France," and began the attempt to follow the river to the
sea. In 1678 La Salle and his companions left Canada, and made their way
to the shore of Lake Erie, where during the winter they built and
launched the _Griffin_, the first ship that ever floated on those
waters. In this they sailed to the mouth of Green Bay, and from there
pushed on to the Illinois River, to an Indian camp not far from the
site of Peoria, Ill. Just below this camp La Salle built Fort Crevecoeur
(cra'v-ker, a word meaning heart-break, vexation).

[Illustration: %FRENCH CLAIMS% MISSIONS AND TRADING POSTS IN
MISSISSIPPI VALLEY %in 1700%]

Leaving the party there in charge of Henri de Tonty to construct another
ship, he with five companions went back to Canada. On his return he
found that Fort Crevecoeur was in ruins, and that Tonty and the few men
who had been faithful were gone, he knew not where. In the hope of
meeting them he pushed on down the Illinois to the Mississippi. To go on
would have been easy, but he turned back to find Tonty, and passed the
winter on the St. Joseph River.

From there in November, 1681, he once more set forth, crossed the lake
to the place where Chicago now is, went up the Chicago River and over
the portage to the Illinois, and early in February floated out on the
Mississippi. It was, on that day, a surging torrent full of trees and
floating ice; but the explorers kept on their way and came at last to
the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. There La Salle took formal possession
of all the regions drained by the Mississippi, the Ohio, and their
tributaries, claiming them in the name of France, and naming the country
thus claimed "Louisiana." The iron will, the splendid courage, of La
Salle had triumphed over every obstacle and made him one of the grandest
characters in history.

But his work was far from ended. The valley he had explored, the
territory he had added to France, must be occupied, and to occupy it two
things were necessary: 1. A colony must be planted at the mouth of the
Mississippi, to control its navigation and shut out the Spaniards. 2. A
strong fort must be built on the Illinois, to overawe the Indians.

In order to overawe the Indians, La Salle now hurried back to the
Illinois River, where, in December, 1682, near the present town of
Ottawa, on the summit of a cliff now known as "Starved Rock," he built a
stockade which he called Fort St. Louis. In 1684, while on a voyage from
France to plant a colony on the Mississippi, he missed the mouth and
brought up on the coast of Texas; and, landing on the sands of
Matagorda Bay, the colonists built another Fort St. Louis. But death
rapidly reduced their numbers, and, in their distress, they parted. Some
remained at the fort and were killed by the Indians. Others, led by La
Salle, started for the Illinois River and reached it; but without their
leader, whom they had murdered on the way.


SUMMARY

1. After the settlement of Quebec (1608) the French began to explore the
regions lying to the west, discovered the Great Lakes, and heard of a
great river--the Mississippi.

2. This river Marquette and Joliet explored from the mouth of the
Wisconsin to the mouth of the Arkansas (1673).

3. Then La Salle floated down the Mississippi from the Illinois to the
Gulf of Mexico, took formal possession of the valley in the name of his
King, and called it Louisiana (1682).

[Illustration: Starved Rock]




CHAPTER VII


THE INDIANS

[Illustration: A typical Indian]

%57%. When Europeans first set foot on our shores, they found the
country already inhabited, and, adopting the name given to the men of
the New World by Columbus, they called these people "Indians."

They were not "Indians," or natives of Asia, but a race by themselves,
which ages before the time of Columbus was spread over all North and
South America.

Like their descendants in the West to-day, they had red or
copper-colored skins, their eyes and long straight hair were jet black,
their faces beardless, and their cheek bones high.

%58. The Villages.%---East of the Rocky Mountains the Indians lived
in villages, often covering several acres in area, and surrounded by
stockades of two and even three rows of posts. The stockade was pierced
with loopholes, and provided with platforms on which were piles of
stones for the defenders to hurl on the heads of their enemies.
Sometimes the structures which formed the village were wigwams--rude
structures made by driving poles into the ground in a circle, drawing
their tops near together, and then covering them with bark or skins.
Sometimes the dwellings had rudely framed sides and roofs covered with
layers of elm bark. Usually these structures were fifteen or twenty feet
wide by 100 feet long. At each end was a door. Along each side were ten
or twelve stalls, in each of which lived a family, so that one house
held twenty or more families. Down the middle at regular intervals were
fire pits where the food was cooked, the smoke escaping through holes in
the roof.[1]

[Footnote 1: Read Parkman's _Conspiracy of Pontiac_, Vol. I., pp. 17,
18.]

[Illustration: Buffalo-skin lodge]

%59. Clans and Tribes.%--All the families living in such a house
traced descent from a common female ancestor, and formed a clan. Each
clan had its own name,--usually that of some animal, as the Wolf, the
Bear, or the Turtle,--its own sachem or civil magistrate, and its own
war chiefs, and owned all the food and all the property, except weapons
and ornaments, in common. A number of such clans made a tribe, which had
one language and was governed by a council of the clan sachems.

[Illustration: Seneca long house]

%60. The Three Indian Races.%--With slight exceptions, the tribes
living east of the Mississippi are divided, by those who have studied
their languages, into three great groups:

1. The Muskhogees, who lived south of the Tennessee River and comprised
the Creek, the Seminole, the Choctaw, and the Chickasaw tribes.

2. The Iroquoian group, which occupied the country from the Delaware and
the Hudson to and beyond the St. Lawrence and Lakes Ontario and Erie,
besides isolated tracts in North Carolina and Tennessee. The chief
tribes were the Iroquois proper,--forming a confederacy in central New
York known as the Five Nations (Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas,
and Mohawks),--the Hurons, the Eries, the Cherokees, and the Tuscaroras.

[Illustration: Moccasin]

3. The Algonquian group, which occupied the rest of what is now the
United States east of the Mississippi, besides the larger part of
Canada. In this group were the Mohegans, Pequots, and Narragansetts of
New England; the Delawares; the Powhatans of Virginia; the Shawnees of
the Ohio valley, and many others living around the Great Lakes.

[Illustration: Flint Hatchet]

%61. Weapons and Implements and Clothing.%--All of these tribes had
made some progress towards civilization. They used pottery and
ornamental pipes of clay. They raised beans and squashes, pumpkins,
tobacco, and maize, or Indian corn, which they ground to meal by rubbing
between two stones. For hunting they had bows, arrows with stone heads,
hatchets of flint, and spears. In summer they went almost naked. In
winter they wore clothing made from the skins of fur-bearing animals and
the hides of buffalo and deer. For navigating streams and rivers, lakes
and bays, they constructed canoes of birch bark sewed together with
thongs of deerskin and smeared at the joints with spruce-tree gum.

%62. Traits of Character.%--Living an outdoor life, and depending for
daily food not so much on the maize they raised as on the fish they
caught and the animals they killed, the Indians were most expert
woodsmen. They were swift of foot, quick-witted, keen-sighted, and most
patient of hunger, fatigue, and cold. White men were amazed at the
rapidity with which the Indian followed the most obscure trail over the
most difficult ground, at the perfection with which he imitated the bark
of the wolf, the hoot of the owl, the call of the moose, and at the
catlike tread with which he walked over beds of autumn leaves the side
of the grazing deer.

[Illustration: Ornamental pipe]

[Illustration: Quiver, with bows and arrows]

Courage and fortitude he possessed in the highest degree. Yet with his
bravery were associated all the vices, all the dark and crooked ways,
which are the resort of the cowardly and the weak. He was treacherous,
revengeful, and cruel beyond description. Much as he loved war (and war
was his chief occupation), the fair and open fight had no charm for him.
To his mind it was madness to take the scalp of an enemy at the risk of
his own, when he might waylay him in an ambush or shoot him with an
arrow from behind a tree. He was never so happy as when, at the dead of
night, he roused his sleeping victims with an unearthly yell and
massacred them by the light of their burning home.