A School History of the United States. John Bach McMaster
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.]
Maryland was in the same condition. Her people raised tobacco, and with it bought their clothing, household goods, brass and copper wares, and iron utensils in Great Britain.
In South Carolina rice was the great staple, just as tobacco was the staple of Virginia, and there too were large plantations and no towns. All the social, commercial, legal, and political life of the colony centered in Charleston, from which a direct trade was carried on with London.
[Illustration: %An old Maryland manor house%]
Labor on the plantations of Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia was performed exclusively by negro slaves and redemptioners.
%101. Civil Government in the English Colonies.%—If we arrange the colonies according to the kind of civil government in each, we find that they fall into three classes:
1. The charter colonies (Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island).
2. The proprietary colonies (Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland).
3. The royal, or provincial, colonies (New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia).
The charters of the first group were written contracts between the King and the colonists, defined the share each should have in the government, and were not to be changed without the consent of both parties. In colonies of the second group some individual, called the proprietary, was granted a great tract of land by the King, and, under a royal charter, was given power to sell the land to settlers, establish government, and appoint the governors of his colony. In the third group, the King appointed the governors and instructed them as to the way in which he wished his colonies to be ruled.
With these differences, all the colonies had the same form of government. In each there was a legislature elected by the people; in each the right to vote was limited to men who owned land, paid taxes, had a certain yearly income, and were members of some Christian church. The legislature consisted of two branches: the lower house, to which the people elected delegates; and the upper house, or council, appointed by the governor. These legislatures could do many things, but their powers were limited and their acts were subject to review: 1. They could do nothing contrary to the laws of England. 2. Whatever they did could be vetoed by the governors, and no bill could be passed over the veto. 3. All laws passed by a colonial legislature (except in the case of Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Maryland), and approved by a governor, must even then be sent to England to be examined by the King in Council, and could be "disallowed" or vetoed by the King at any time within three years. This power was used so constantly that the colonial legislatures, in time, would pass laws to run for two years, and when that time expired would reënact them for two years more, and so on in order to avoid the veto. In this way the colonists became used to three political institutions which were afterwards embodied in what is now the American system of state and national government: 1. The written constitution defining the powers of government. 2. The exercise of the veto power by the governor. 3. The setting aside of laws by a judicial body from whose decision there is no appeal.
%102. The Colonial Governors.%—The governor of a royal province was the personal representative of the King, and as such had vast power. The legislature could meet only when he called it. He could at any moment prorogue it (that is, command it to adjourn to a certain day) or dissolve it, and, if the King approved, he need never call it together again. He was the chief justice of the highest colonial court, he appointed all the judges, and, as commander in chief of the militia, appointed all important officers. Yet even he was subject to some control, for his salary was paid by the colony over which he ruled, and, by refusing to pay this salary, the legislature could, and over and over again did, force him to approve acts he would not otherwise have sanctioned. In Connecticut and Rhode Island the people elected the governors. This right once existed also