The American Colonies.
Clive was recalled by broken health to England, and the fortunes of the struggle in India were left for decision to a later day. But while France was struggling for the Empire of the East she was striving with even more apparent success for the command of the new world of the West. From the time when the Puritan emigration added the four New England States, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island to those of Maryland and Virginia the progress of the English colonies in North America had been slow, but it had never ceased. Settlers still came, though in smaller numbers, and two new colonies south of Virginia received from Charles the Second their name of the Carolinas. The war with Holland in 1664 transferred to British rule a district claimed by the Dutch from the Hudson to the inner Lakes; and this country, which was granted by Charles to his brother, received from him the name of New York. Portions were soon broken off from its vast territory to form the colonies of New Jersey and Delaware. In 1682 a train of Quakers followed William Penn across the Delaware into the heart of the primæval forest, and became a colony which recalled its founder and the woodlands among which he planted it in its name of Pennsylvania. A long interval elapsed before a new settlement, which received its title of Georgia from the reigning sovereign, George the Second, was established by General Oglethorpe on the Savannah as a refuge for English debtors and for the persecuted Protestants of Germany.
Their progress.
Slow as this progress seemed, the colonies were really growing fast in numbers and in wealth. Their whole population amounted at the time we have reached to about 1,200,000 whites and a quarter of a million of negroes; and this amounted to nearly a fourth of that of the mother country. Its increase indeed was amazing. The inhabitants of Virginia were doubling in every twenty-one years, while Massachusetts saw five-and-twenty new towns spring into existence in a quarter of a century. The wealth of the colonists was growing even faster than their numbers. As yet the southern colonies were the more productive. Virginia boasted of its tobacco plantations, Georgia and the Carolinas of their maize and rice and indigo crops, while New York and Pennsylvania, with, the colonies of New England, were restricted to their whale and cod fisheries, their corn-harvests, and their timber trade. The distinction indeed between the northern and southern colonies was more than an industrial one. While New England absorbed half a million of whites, and the middle colonies from the Hudson to the Potomac contained almost as many, there were less than 300,000 whites in those to the south of the Potomac. These on the other hand contained 130,000 negroes, and the central States 70,000, while but 11,000 were found in the States of New England. In the Southern States this prevalence of slavery produced an aristocratic spirit and favoured the creation of large estates; even the system of entails had been introduced among the wealthy planters of Virginia, where many of the older English families found representatives in houses such as those of Fairfax and Washington. Throughout New England, on the other hand, the characteristics of the Puritans, their piety, their intolerance, their simplicity of life, their pedantry, their love of equality and tendency to democratic institutions, remained unchanged. There were few large fortunes, though the comfort was general. "Some of the most considerable provinces of America," said Burke in 1769, "such for instance as Connecticut and Massachusetts Bay, have not in each of them two men who can afford at a distance from their estates to spend a thousand pounds a year." In education and political activity New England stood far ahead of its fellow-colonies, for the settlement of the Puritans had been followed at once by the establishment of a system of local schools which is still the glory of America. "Every township," it was enacted, "after the Lord hath increased them to the number of fifty householders, shall appoint one to teach all children to write and read; and when any town shall increase to the number of a hundred families, they shall set up a grammar school." The result was that in the midst of the eighteenth century New England was the one part of the world where every man and woman was able to read and write.
Their political condition.
Great however as these differences were, and great as was to be their influence on American history, they were little felt as yet. In the main features of their outer organization the whole of the colonies stood fairly at one. In religious and in civil matters alike all of them contrasted sharply with the England at home. Europe saw for the first time a state growing up amidst the forests of the West where religious freedom had become complete. Religious tolerance had in fact been brought about by a medley of religious faiths such as the world had never seen before. New England was still a Puritan stronghold. In all the Southern colonies the Episcopal Church was established by law, and the bulk of the settlers clung to it; but Roman Catholics formed a large part of the population of Maryland. Pennsylvania was a State of Quakers. Presbyterians and Baptists had fled from tests and persecutions to colonize New Jersey. Lutherans and Moravians from Germany abounded among the settlers of Carolina and Georgia. In such a chaos of creeds religious persecution became impossible. There was the same outer diversity and the same real unity in the political tendency and organization of the States. The colonists proudly looked on the Constitutions of their various States as copies of that of the mother country. England had given them her system of self-government, as she had given them her law, her language, her religion, and her blood. But the circumstances of their settlement had freed them from many of the worst abuses which clogged the action of constitutional government at home. The representative suffrage was in some cases universal and in all proportioned to population. There were no rotten boroughs, and members of the legislative assemblies were subject to annual re-election. The will of the settlers told in this way directly and immediately on the legislation in a way unknown to the English Parliament, and the settlers were men whose will was braced and invigorated by their personal independence and comfort, the tradition of their past, and the personal temper which was created by the greater loneliness and self-dependence of their lives. Whether the spirit of the colony was democratic, moderate, or oligarchical, its form of government was pretty much the same. The original rights of the proprietor, the projector and grantee of the earliest settlement, had in all cases, save in those of Pennsylvania and Maryland, either ceased to exist or fallen into desuetude. The government of each colony lay in a House of Assembly elected by the people at large, with a Council sometimes elected, sometimes nominated by the Governor, and a Governor appointed by the Crown, or, as in Connecticut and Rhode Island, chosen by the colonists.
English control.
With the appointment of these Governors all administrative interference on the part of the Government at home practically ended. The superintendence of the colonies rested with a Board for Trade and Plantations, which, though itself without executive power, advised the Secretary of State for the Southern Department, within which America was included. But for two centuries they were left by a happy neglect to themselves. It was wittily said at a later day that "Mr. Grenville lost America because he read the American despatches, which none of his predecessors ever did." There was little room indeed for any interference within the limits of the colonies. Their privileges were secured by royal charters. Their Assemblies alone exercised the right of internal taxation, and they exercised it sparingly. Walpole, like Pitt afterwards, set roughly aside the project for an American excise. "I have Old England set against me," he said, "by this measure, and do you think I will have New England too?" America, in fact, contributed to England's resources not by taxation, but by the monopoly of her trade. It was from England that she might import, to England alone that she might send her exports. She was prohibited from manufacturing her own products, or from exporting them in any but a raw state for manufacture in the mother country. But even in matters of trade the supremacy of the mother country was far from being a galling one. There were some small import duties, but they were evaded by a well-understood system of smuggling. The restriction of trade with the colonies to Great Britain was more than compensated by the commercial privileges which the Americans enjoyed as British subjects.
French aggression.
As yet therefore there was nothing to break the good will which the colonists felt towards the mother country, while the danger of French aggression drew them closely to it. Populous as they had become, English settlements still lay mainly along the seaboard of the Atlantic; for only a few exploring parties had penetrated into the Alleghanies before the Seven Years' War; and Indian tribes wandered unquestioned along the lakes. It was not till the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748 that the pretensions of France drew the eyes of the colonists and of English statesmen to the interior of the Western continent. Planted firmly in Louisiana and Canada, France openly claimed the whole country west of the Alleghanies as its own, and its governors now ordered all English settlers or merchants to be driven from the valleys of Ohio or Mississippi which were still in the hands of Indian tribes. Even the inactive Pelham revolted against pretensions such as these; and the Duke of Bedford, who was then Secretary for the Southern Department, was stirred to energetic action. The original French settlers were driven from Acadia or Nova Scotia, and an English colony planted there, whose settlement of Halifax still bears the name of its founder Lord Halifax, the head of the Board of Trade. An Ohio Company was formed, and its agents made their way to the valleys of that river and the Kentucky; while envoys from Virginia and Pennsylvania drew closer the alliance between their colonies and the Indian tribes across the mountains. Nor were the French slow to accept the challenge. Fighting began in Acadia. A vessel of war appeared in Ontario, and Niagara was turned into a fort. A force of 1200 men despatched to Erie drove the few English settlers from their little colony on the fork of the Ohio, and founded there a fort called Duquesne, on the site of the later Pittsburg. The fort at once gave this force command of the river valley. After a fruitless attack on it under George Washington, a young Virginian, who had been despatched with a handful of men to meet the danger, the colonists were forced to withdraw over the mountains, and the whole of the west was left in the hands of France.
