CHAPTER XVIII. THE RESULT THUS FAR. CHAP. THUS have we traced, almost exclusively from contemporary documents and records, the colonization of the twelve oldest states of our Union. At the period of the great European revolution of 1688, they contained not very many beyond two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom MASSACHUSETTS, with Plymouth and Maine, may have had forty-four thousand; New HAMPSHIRE and RHODE ISLAND, with Providence, each six thousand; CONNECTICUT, from seventeen to twenty thousand; that is, all New England, seventy-five thousand souls; NEW YORK, not less than twenty thousand; NEW JERSEY, half as many; PENNSYLVANIA and DELAWARE, perhaps twelve thousand; MARYLAND, twentyfive thousand; VIRGINIA, fifty thousand, or more; and the two CAROLINAS, which then included the soil of Georgia, probably not less than eight thousand souls. The emigration of the fathers of these twelve commonwealths, with the planting of the principles on which they rested, though, like the introduction of Christian 1 Neal, ii. 601. Sir Win. Petty, 75, says 150,000. Brattle says, in 1708, in N. England, from 100 to 120,000. This is right, and corresponds with other data. In the account for N. E. for 1688, I have confidence. Neal blunders about Boston, which, in 1790, had not 20,000, much less in 1720. The statements in the text are made by inductions, and are, I believe, substantially correct. The positive data in those days are half the time notoriously false; as the statements of Randolph. The account in Humphrey much underrates Virginia. XVIII. ity into Rome, but little regarded by contemporary CHAP writers, was the most momentous event of the seventeenth century. The elements of our country, such as she exists to-day, were already there. Of the institutions of the Old World, monarchy had no motive to emigrate, and was present only by its shadow; in the proprietary governments, by the shadow of a shadow. The feudal aristocracy had accomplished its mission in Europe; it could not gain new life among the equal hardships of the wilderness; in at least four of the twelve colonies, it did not originally exist at all, and, in the rest, had scarcely a monument except in the forms of holding property. Priestcraft did not emigrate; by the steadfast attraction of interest, it was retained in the Old World; to the forests of America, religion came as a companion; the American mind never bowed to an idolatry of forms; and there was not a prelate in the whole English part of the continent. The municipal corporations of the European commercial world, the close intrenchments of burghers against the landed aristocracy, could not be transferred to our shores, where no baronial castles demanded the concerted opposition of guilds. Nothing came from Europe but a free people. The people, separating itself from all other elements of previous civilization; the people, self-confiding and industrious; the people, wise by all traditions that favored popular happiness,the people alone broke away from European influence, and in the New World laid the foundations of our republic; "Plebeian, though ingenuous the stock From which her graces and her honors sprung." Life of The people alone were present in power. Like Moses, Norton's they had escaped from Egyptian bondage to the wil- Cotton XVIII CHARACTER OF VIRGINIA. CHAP. derness, that God might there give them the pattern of the tabernacle. Like the favored evangelist, the exiles, in their western Patmos, listened to the angel that dictated the new gospel of freedom. Overwhelmed in Europe, popular liberty, like the fabled fountain of the sacred Arethusa, gushed forth profusely in remoter fields. Of the nations of the European world, the chief emigration was from that Germanic race most famed for the love of personal independence. The immense majority of American families were not of "the high folk of Normandie," but were of "the low men," who were Saxons. This is true of New England; it is true of the south. Shall the Virginians be described in a word? They were Anglo-Saxons in the woods again, with the inherited culture and intelligence of the seventeenth century. “The major part of the house of burgesses now consisted of Virginians that never saw a town." The Anglo-Saxon mind, in its serenest nationality, neither distorted by fanaticism, nor subdued by superstition, nor wounded by persecution, nor excited by new ideas, but fondly cherishing the active instinct. for personal freedom, secure possession, and legislative power, such as belonged to it before the reformation, and existed independent of the reformation, had made its dwelling-place in the empire of Powhatan. With consistent firmness of character, the Virginians welcomed legislative power; displaced an unpopular governor; at the overthrow of monarchy, established the freest government by happy intuition; rebelled against the politics of the Stuarts; and, uneasy at the royalist principles which prevailed in its forming aristocracy, soon manifested the tendency of the age at the polls. "The inclinations of the country," wrote Spotswood, XVIII. when the generation born during the period of Bacon's CHAP. rebellion had grown to maturity, "are rendered mysterious by a new and unaccountable humor, which hath 1710 obtained in several counties, of excluding the gentlemen from being burgesses, and choosing only persons of mean figure and character." But Spotswood, a royalist, a High Churchman, a traveller, reverenced the virtues of the people. "I will do justice to this country," he writes to the bishop of London-and his evidence is without suspicion of a bias; "I have observed here less swearing and prophaneness, less drunkenness and debauchery, less uncharitable feuds and animosities, and less knaverys and villanys, than in any part of the world lot has been." where my Of the systems of philosophy of the Old World, the colonists, including their philosophy in their religion, as the people up to that time had always done, were neither skeptics nor sensualists, but Christians. The school that bows to the senses as the sole interpreter of truth, had little share in colonizing our America. The colonists from Maine to Carolina, the adventurous companions of Smith, the Puritan felons that freighted the fleet of Winthrop, the Quaker outlaws that fled from jails with a Newgate prisoner as their sovereign,—all had faith in God and in the soul. The system which had been revealed in Judea,-the system which combines and perfects the symbolic wisdom of the Orient and the reflective genius of Greece,-the system, conforming to reason, yet kindling enthusiasm; always hastening reform, yet always conservative; proclaiming absolute equality among men, yet not suddenly abolishing the unequal institutions of society; guarantying absolute freedom, yet invoking the inexorable restrictions of duty in the highest degree theoretical, and yet in 454 XVIII. THE NECESSITY OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION. CHAP. the highest degree practical; awakening the inner man to a consciousness of his destiny, and yet adapted with exact harmony to the outward world; at once divine and humane,—this system was professed in every part of our widely-extended country, and cradled our freedom. Our fathers were not only Christians; they werc, even in Maryland by a vast majority, elsewhere almost unanimously, Protestants. Now the Protestant reformation, considered in its largest influence on politics, was the common people awakening to freedom of mind. During the decline of the Roman empire, the oppressed invoked the power of Christianity to resist the tyranny of brute force; and the merciful priest assumed the office of protector. The tribunes of Rome, appointed by the people, had been declared inviolable by the popular vote; the new tribunes of humanity, deriving their office from religion, and ordained by religion to an inviolable sanctity, defended the poor man's house against lust by the sacrament of marriage; restrained arbitrary passion by a menace of the misery due to sin unrepented and unatoned; and taught respect for naked humanity by sprinkling every new-born child with the water of life, confirming every youth, bearing the oil of consolation to every death-bed, and sharing freely with every human being the consecrated emblem of God present with man. But the protection from priests became a tyranny. Expressing all moral truth by the mysteries of symbols, and reserving to itself the administration of the seven sacraments, the priesthood claimed a monopoly of thought, and exercised an absolute spiritual dominion. Human bondage was deeply riveted; for tyranny |