CHAPTER XI AMERICAN LITERATURE-COLONIAL PERIOD Historical References ADAMS, H. History of the United States [1801-1817]. 9 v. BANCROFT, G. History of the United States [1492-1782]. 6 v. FISKE, J. Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789. FISKE, J. Beginnings of New England. Last CHANNING, E., and HART, A. B. Guide to the Study of American History. [A bibliographical guide to all periods and topics. Indispensable.] JOHNSTON, A. American Politics. LODGE, H. C. Short History of the English Colonies in America. WINSOR, J. (Ed.). Narrative and Critical History of America. 8 v. THE migration to America, beginning with the voyages to Virginia in 1608 and continuing down to our day, is the greatest western movement of the human race of which we have any record. Its effect on the progress of Historical Sketch. civilization is second only to that of the migration of the Germanic tribes into the island of Britain. Thus far the character of the United States has been determined by the first settlers, who, coming from England, built the legal, social, and religious framework of the colonies according to English models, and made the English language the national speech of a great community. They gave us our rights of inheritance in English literature. Therefore, though the Huguenot, Hollandish, and Germanic elements in the seventeenth-century emigration are by no means negligible in a general survey of the sources of our nation, they may be overlooked in so brief an examination of American literary expression as it is possible for us to make. The impulses to early immigration into America were twofold, commercial and religious. The desire to acquire land in a new country, and the love of adventure, combined with the political ambition to extend the realm of England, led to the early colonization of Virginia. The Catholic colony of Maryland was partly based on the desire to escape from Protestant persecution. The Hollandish settlement at the mouth of the Hudson River was originally a trading post. The Puritan settlements at Hartford, New Haven, Plymouth, and Boston were intended to be refuges for those who made a certain fashion of religious worship a matter of conscience, and had been tyrannically persecuted by the ecclesiastical authorities in England. The motives of the original settlers determined the characters of the original communities, and these characters are still distinct, though intermingling, and the dominance of the national idea has tended to reduce all to a common type. It will be readily understood that the settlement of the new country was no holiday work. The long voyage was made in very slow and small sailing vessels. The landing in the North was in a rocky and sterile country, and everywhere on a soil covered with forests. As a rule more than half of those who first landed, died within a year or two of exposure and privation. The Pilgrims, who settled at Plymouth, understood pretty well the risks they ran, and we are lost in admiration of their indomitable courage and resolution. Even in the milder climate of the South, the first colony nearly perished, and it was not till after in credible hardships that a foothold was obtained and a scanty living wrung from the soil. The natural apparatus of civilization-houses, roads, fields, churches were all lacking, and the community that had to provide these prime necessaries out of nothing could find little time for literary expression. As time went on, the communities in Virginia tended to the feudal ideal of large landholders each with a considerable body of dependents. Tobacco was found to be an exportable product. Land was abundant and fertile, and numerous navigable rivers made it accessible. Cultivation by slave labor was early introduced. There was little or no urban life. Manufactures and diversified industries were not fostered, and during the seventeenth century no towns or cities of any size were built. The planter sent his tobacco to Europe, often directly from his own wharf, and procured from there, in return, furniture, clothes, and even the bricks of his dwelling. He sent his children to be educated in Europe. An isolated life developed executive ability and power to handle practical affairs in individuals rather than the life of the community. The Englishman in Virginia was far less interested in questions of the invisible life of duty and destiny than was the Englishman in New England. Among the Virginians were some scholarly men from England (Sandys, who wrote here a very acceptable translation of Ovid, for instance), but their relations were to the mother country. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the growth of the Southern settlements was the extension of the system of large detached plantations with few centers of intellectual life. The College of William and Mary was not founded till 1693, and for some time was little more than a boys' boarding school. The first settlement in New England was made at Plymouth, in 1620, by a congregation of Separatists or Brownists, a sect of Independents, who had been forced from England to a refuge in Holland in 1608. They sailed as a body or church in the little ship Mayflower from Southampton. Their sufferings were so great that more than half of their number died during the first year. In 1628 began the Puritan emigration to Massachusetts Bay, in consequence of the harshness of Archbishop Laud. In the following decade some twenty thousand English people crossed the Atlantic to settle in the New World. They came with ministers, wives, and children, and usually settled together, and at once established their church organization. Among them were men of education and position at home. Their first ministers were usually clergymen of the Church of England unwilling to conform to the regulations of the ecclesiastical authority, who, on coming to this country, were forced to adopt the Congregational order. In the beginning the embryo communities allowed great power to the church and restricted citizenship to church members. Greater liberality prevailed in the Hartford colony, and by degrees was adopted in other Puritan communities. But every where provisions were ✓ made for education. Harvard College was founded in 1636, and Yale College in 1701. These, though intended as seminaries for the production of ministers, slowly became secularized as time went on. Religion was based on the Old Testament, and the weekly sermon familiarized the people with abstract reasoning. There was at least intellectual training in this, and although their thought seems to us crude, it was not materialistic, nor were their interests confined to worldly matters. The necessity of protection against the Indians, and the civil questions raised by the government of rapidly increasing communities, gave the Puritans exercise in military affairs and in broader questions of government. The illdefined boundaries of the patents, or charters, were in time settled as those of the present states. The French and Indian wars, which ended in the cession of Canada by the French in 1763, was a matter of great moment to the colonies, and their militia and seamen were largely instrumental in bringing about the successful issue. Soon the important question of the relation of the home government to the colonies, precipitated by the arbitrary interpretations of George III., absorbed the interest of all the colonies, forced them into a confederation, the prototype of our own Union, and brought about a war with the mother country which resulted in the independence of the United States. In 1787 the Constitution was drawn up and after some months of discussion ratified by nine states and the career of our country as an independent nation began. Periods of American American history naturally divides itself into the Colonial and the National periods, the first extending from the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620 to the Declaration of Independence in History. 1776, and the second from that date to the death of President Lincoln in 1865. There are, of course, subsidiary phases, and there is also the distinction between the Northern and the Southern colonies, the Puritans and the Cavaliers, with the Dutch colony of New York and the Quaker colony of Pennsylvania lying between them. These minor differences we cannot note in our limits, and students are fortunate in having in Professor Tyler's "American Literature" an admirable examination of the entire field with sufficient illustrative extracts to |