In the year 1681 all the Dutch possessions had been added to the dominion of the English in America; and it was in this year that William Penn, having received a grant of a large tract of land in what is now Pennsylvania, sent out a colony, which settled on his grant. The next year he came in person, assumed the governorship of the colony, founded Philadelphia, and made his famous treaties with the Indians. At the close of the seventeenth century the English dominion comprised the whole coast, from Canada to the Carolinas; and it may be fairly said that when the eighteenth century opened, the era of colonization had reached its culmination, English civilization was indelibly stamped on, and firmly planted in, the new continent. The crystallizing process of a new and mighty nation had begun and was in rapid progress.
IV. THE COLONIAL ERA.
England's Acquirements.
The Colonial Era, intervening between the permanent colonization of the Atlantic coast and the momentous time when the colonies united to assert their independence, may be said to have been comprised within a period of a little more than a century. In 1664 England had acquired possession of the whole colonized territory from the Kennebec to the southern boundary of South Carolina. Georgia was still unsettled, and remained to be colonized some sixty years after by that good and gallant General Oglethorpe, who forbade slavery to be introduced into the province, and prohibited the sale of rum within its limits. Florida was still held by the Spanish, the only continental power which then had a foothold on the Atlantic border of what is now the United States.
Colonial Progress.
The century of settlement and growth which we call the Colonial Era was full of hardship, romance, brave struggling with great difficulties, fortitude, and alternate misfortune and success. As we look back upon it from this distance, however, we do not fail to be struck with the steady and certain progress made towards a compact and enduring nationality. Even then the same variety of race and habits and characteristics which the United States reveal to-day were to be observed in the population which was scattered over the narrow strip of territory extending a thousand miles along the seaboard. There were English everywhere—predominant then, as English traits still possess, in a yet more marked degree, the prevailing influence. There were, however, Dutch in New York and Pennsylvania, some Swedes still in Delaware, Danes in New Jersey, French Huguenots in the Carolinas, Austrian Moravians, not long after, in Georgia, and Spaniards in Florida.
The New England Colonies.
Amid such a diversity of races, of course the habits, the laws, and the religious opinions of the colonies widely differed. But these differences were not confined to those arising from variety of origin. The English in New England presented a very marked contrast to the English in New York and in Virginia. The settlements of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay comprised communities of zealous Calvinists, rigid in their religious belief and ceremonies, codifying their religious principles into political law, and adhering resolutely, through thick and thin, to the idea expressed, by one of the early Puritans, that "our New England was originally a plantation of religion, and not a plantation of trade."