PENN’S DEPARTURE.
It has been endeavoured to throw obloquy on Penn’s name from his political connexion with James II.; but as the tree must be known by its fruits, Penn’s reputation may safely be left to the test of his works. He founded a state based on the most liberal principles; self-exaltation or self-aggrandisement never formed a part of his plan; and the soundness of his legislative wisdom is shown by the fundamental principles of his government remaining to be those of Pennsylvania to the present time. Penn’s happiness in his province was, like all human happiness, of a very mixed character. Discontents and heart-burnings arose; a democratic assembly warred against a feudal proprietary, each wronging the other, because they were brought into unnatural juxtaposition. Besides the anxieties arising from the dissatisfied condition of a province which he had established with so much care and hope, Penn was harassed by embarrassed circumstances. Nobly refusing a revenue from his state, he was imprisoned for debt in his advancing years; and, to add still further to his distress, when his friend James II. was deposed, and an exile in France, he was imprisoned on an unsupported charge of keeping up a treasonable correspondence with him. In 1692, the government of Pennsylvania was taken from him, and placed in the hands of Fletcher, governor of New York. Two years afterwards, the suspicions against him being removed, he was restored to his rights—“the Territories,” or three lower counties on the Delaware, which in 1691 had withdrawn from their connexion with Pennsylvania and been indulged with a deputy-governor by Penn, now becoming once more a portion of his jurisdiction, having been reunited to the larger state by Fletcher, during his governorship.
The only drawback that appears in the character of the philanthropic legislator of Pennsylvania, is at the same time so incongruous with the spirit of his life and actions, that it seems to stand forth in startling deformity. This refers to negro slaves, whom he held apparently without much sense of injustice. True, he used his influence to insure the slave “moral and religious culture, and the rights and comforts of domestic life,” yet, when he was unsuccessful in so doing, he continued to hold slaves, as, indeed, did other Friends. The poor Germans, “the little handful of Friends from the highlands above the Rhine,” in accordance with the doctrines of George Fox, were the only body in Pennsylvania who at that time saw clearly that it was not lawful for Christians to keep slaves. The unlettered Swedes, half a century before, who settled on the western bank of the Delaware, and now were numbered among William Penn’s people had, however, early borne their testimony against slavery. “The Swedes,” said they, arguing from the sound principle of human nature, “will gain more with a free people, with wives and children, than by slaves, who labour with reluctance and soon perish by hard usage.” The simple wisdom of these peasants was, in this respect, superior to the wisdom of more elevated men whether of that age or the present.
CHAPTER XXII.
NEW FRANCE.—DISCOVERIES IN THE REGION OF THE GREAT LAKES.
We have already spoken of the early French discoveries in Canada, or New France, the settlements on the Bay of Fundy and the St. Lawrence, the founding of Quebec and Montreal, of Champlain’s expeditions southward, and his discovery of the lake which still bears his name. The English colonists, from Maine to South Carolina, whom we have seen firmly plant themselves on the new soil, occupied as yet, comparatively speaking, merely the sea-coast, and engaged as they were in agriculture and maritime trade, had little time or inclination for inland exploration. For three-quarters of a century their knowledge of the interior was derived from the Indians and from French discoverers.
Besides, as regarded the New England States, the formidable belt of the Iroquois territory, or the territory of the Five Nations, which formed their western boundary, effectually prevented them whilst in their earlier stage from advancing far in that direction. This most powerful of the Indian confederacies consisted of the five nations of Senecas, Cayugas, Onondagas, Oneidas and Mohawks, who occupied a vast extent of country between the St. Lawrence, Lake Champlain, and the upper waters of the Hudson, including the great lakes of Ontario and Erie, as far north as Lake Huron and the Georgian Bay. It was this formidable barrier which, while it prevented the Dutch from exploring the Hudson to the north, had already prevented the French from descending the same river, when Champlain had discovered the heads of the stream.
The French fur-traders on the St. Lawrence and its tributaries were necessarily brought into connexion with the Indian, but not alone was this the case with the French trader; the French missionary kept pace with him, and even went far a-head, and became the great European explorer of the interior of North America.
We have seen with admiration, the zeal of Eliot and his coadjutors in Christianising the feeble remains of the Indian tribes in New England; and George Fox and his friends equally nobly preaching to those of Maryland, Carolina and Virginia, as to “men and brethren” in whose souls the Divine Voice had an utterance as well as in their own; we have seen William Penn legislating for them equally as for the whites, and forming with them a covenant of peace which has obtained a world-wide reputation. But the Christian zeal and uprightness of these men was far surpassed in intensity by the devotedness, the constancy, and the heroism of the Jesuit missionaries of New France, who in their earnestness to save the souls of the heathen, died the death of martyrs and counted their loss great gain in Christ.
Too little is known by general English readers of this affecting portion of American history, which is unsurpassed by anything we have yet related.
When, in 1632, Quebec was restored to the French, a hundred associates, Richelieu, Champlain and various opulent merchants being of the number, obtained a grant of New France from Louis XIII., the grant including “the whole basin of the St. Lawrence, and of such other rivers of New France as flowed into the sea, besides Florida, which was claimed as a French province by virtue of Coligny’s unsuccessful efforts.” Champlain, the governor of New France, a man of a religious mind, who had already declared that the salvation of a soul was worth more than the conquest of an empire, was the earnest supporter of missionary labours. As missionaries of New France, he would have selected priests of the Franciscan or mendicant order, as being “free from ambition;” but he was overruled, and the mission of converting the heathens of the New World was intrusted alone to the Jesuits. They had here the monopoly of souls. Their labours, however, were of the most apostolic character. “They had,” says Bancroft, “the faults of ascetic superstition, but the horrors of a Canadian life in the wilderness were resisted with invincible passive courage and a deep internal tranquillity. The history of their labours is connected with the origin of every celebrated town in the annals of French America; not a cape was turned, no a river entered, but a Jesuit led the way.”