%98. Occupations in New England.%—In New England the colonists were almost entirely English, though there were some Scotch, some Scotch-Irish, a few Huguenot refugees from France, and, in Rhode Island, a few Portuguese Jews. As the climate and soil did not admit of raising any great staple, such as rice or tobacco, the people "took to the sea." They cut down trees, with which the land was covered, built ships, and sailed away to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland for cod, and to the whale fisheries for oil. They went to the English, Dutch, and Spanish West Indian Islands, with flour, salt meat, horses, oxen; with salted salmon, cod, and mackerel; with staves for barrels; with onions and salted oysters. In return, they came back with sugar, molasses, cotton, wool, logwood, and Spanish dollars with which the New England Colonies paid for the goods they took from England. They went to Spain, where their ships were often sold, the captains chartering English vessels and coming home with cargoes of goods made in England. Six hundred ships are said to have been employed in the foreign trade of Boston, and more than a thousand in the fisheries and the trade along the coast.
[Illustration: Dutch House at Albany[1]
[Footnote 1: From an old print.]
Farming, outside of Connecticut, yielded little more than a bare subsistence. Manufactures in general were forbidden by English law. Paper and hats were made in small quantities, leather was tanned, lumber was sawed, and rum was distilled from molasses; but it was on homemade manufactures that the people depended.
%99. Occupations in the Middle Colonies.%—In the Middle Colonies the population was a mixture of people from many European countries. The line of little villages which began at the west end of Long Island and stretched up the Hudson to Albany, and out the Mohawk to Schenectady—-the settled part of New York—contained Englishmen, Irishmen, Dutchmen, French Huguenots, Germans from the Rhine countries, and negroes from Africa. The chief occupations of those people were farming, making flour, and carrying on an extensive commerce with England, Spain, and the West Indian Islands.
[Illustration: Shoes worn by Palatines in Pennsylvania]
In New Jersey the population was almost entirely English, but in Pennsylvania it was as mixed as in New York. Around Philadelphia the English predominated, but with them were mingled Swedes, Dutch, Welsh, Germans, and Scotch-Irish. Taken together, the Germans and the Scotch-Irish far outnumbered the English, and made up the mass of the population between the Schuylkill and the Susquehanna rivers. Both were self-willed and stubborn, and they were utterly unable to get along together peaceably, so that their settlements ran across the state in two parallel bands, in one of which whole regions could be found in which not a word of English was spoken. Indeed, then, and long after the nineteenth century began, the laws of Pennsylvania were printed both in English and in German. The chief occupation of the people was farming; and it is safe to say that no such farms, no such cattle, no such grain, flour, provisions, could be found in any other part of the country. Lumber, too, was cut and sold in great quantities; and along the frontier there was a lively fur trade with the Indians. At Philadelphia was centered a fine trade with Europe and the West Indies. Had it not been for the action of the mother country, manufactures would have flourished greatly; even as it was, iron and paper were manufactured in considerable quantities.
%100. Occupations in the Southern Colonies.%—South of Pennsylvania, and especially south of the Potomac River, lay a region utterly unlike anything to the north of it. In Virginia, there were no cities, no large towns, no centers of population. At an early day in the history of the colony the legislature had attempted to remedy this, and had ordered towns to be built at certain places, had made them the only ports where ships from abroad could be entered, had established tobacco warehouses in them, had offered special privileges to tradesmen who would settle in them, and had provided that each should have a market and a fair. But the success was small, and Fredericksburg and Alexandria and Petersburg were straggling villages. Jamestown, the old capital, had by this time ceased to exist. Williamsburg, the new capital, was a village of 200 houses. There was no business, no incentive in Virginia to build towns. The planters owned immense plantations along the river banks, and raised tobacco, which, when gathered, cured, and packed into hogsheads, was rolled away to the nearest wharf for inspection and shipment to London. In those early days, when good roads were unknown and wagons few, shafts were attached to each hogshead by iron bolts driven into the heads, and the cask was thus turned into a huge roller. With each year's crop would go a long list of articles of every sort,—hardware, glass, crockery, clothing, furniture, household utensils, wines,—which the agent was instructed to buy with the proceeds of the tobacco and send back to the planter when the ships came a year later for another crop. The country abounded in trees, yet tables, chairs, boxes, cart wheels, bowls, birch brooms, all came from the mother country. The wood used for building houses was actually cut, sent to England as logs to be dressed, and then taken back to Virginia for use.
[Illustration: Tobacco rolling[1]
[Footnote 1: From a model in the National Museum, Washington.]