The Essential Writings of President Woodrow Wilson. Woodrow Wilson
old, come, like themselves, out of England, or drawn from the older settlements by the attractions of the goodly region, looking out, as it did, on either hand to a broad river and an easy trade. They felt it scarcely an expatriation to live there, so constantly did ships come and go between their wharves and the home ports at Bristol and London. It soon grew to be nothing singular to see well-to-do men go every year to England upon some errand of profit or pleasure.
It was with such a region and such stirring neighbors that the young Washingtons identified themselves while they were yet youths in their twenties; and there they prospered shrewdly with the rest. Prudent men and men of character readily accumulated estates in the untouched glades and forests of Westmoreland. The season of their coming, moreover, sadly as things seemed to go in 1656, turned out propitious. The Restoration opened a new era in the settlement of the country. Englishmen bestirred themselves to take actual possession of all the great coast-line they had so long claimed without occupying. "The Dutch had enjoyed New Netherland during the distractions of the reign of Charles I. without any other interruption" than the seizure of their post upon the Connecticut by the New-Englanders, and the aggressions alike of Swedes and English upon the Delaware; but the ministers of Charles II., though " for some time perplexed in what light to view them, whether as subjects or as aliens, determined at length that New Netherland ought in justice to be resumed," and the thing was presently accomplished in true sovereign fashion by force of arms. To the ducal province of New York, Penn presently added the thrifty Quaker colony which so promptly created a busy town and mart of trade at Philadelphia, and which pushed its rural settlements back so speedily into the fertile lands that lay towards the west. Then, while the new colonizing impulse still ran strong, New Jersey, too, was added, with her limits at one end upon the Hudson and the great bay at New York, where she depended upon one rival for a port of entry, and at the other upon the Delaware, where another rival presided over the trade of her southern highway to the sea. To the southward straggling settlements upon Albemarle Sound grew slowly into the colony of North Carolina; and still other settlements, upon the rivers that lay towards Florida, throve so bravely that Charleston presently boasted itself a substantial town, and South Carolina had risen to be a considerable colony, prosperous, well ordered, and showing a quick life and individuality of her own.
A new migration had come out of England to the colonies, and Englishmen looked with fresh confidence to see their countrymen build an empire in America. And yet perhaps not an empire of pure English blood. New York was for long scarcely the less a Dutch province, for all she had changed owners, and saw Englishmen crowd in to control her trade. There were Swedes still upon the Delaware; and Pennsylvania mustered among her colonists, besides a strange mixture out of many nations — Germans, French, Dutch, Finns, and English. Even in Virginia, which so steadily kept its English character, there were to be found groups of French Huguenots and Germans who had been given an ungrudging welcome; and South Carolina, though strongly English too, had taken some of her best blood out of France when Louis so generously gave the world fifty thousand families of the finest breed of his kingdom by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685).
The second quarter of the eighteenth century saw Scots-Irish enter Virginia and the middle colonies in hosts that for a time numbered ten thousand by the year. Pennsylvania alone, in the single year 1729, could reckon five thousand of these sturdy people who had come to multiply and strengthen her settlements.
It was to the middle colonies that most foreigners came, and their coming gave to the towns and farms of that region a variety of tongues and customs, of manners and trades and ways of life and worship, to be found nowhere else. Boston, with all its trade and seafaring, had no touch of that cosmopolitan character which New York had taken on quite inevitably in the course of her varying fortunes, and which Philadelphia had assumed by choice; and rural Virginia scarcely felt amidst her scattered plantations the presence of the few families who lived by standards that were not English. The common feature of the new time, with its novel enterprises and its general immigration, was that the colonies everywhere, whether young or old, felt a keen stimulation and a new interest in affairs beyond their borders. A partial exchange of population began, a noticeable intercolonial migration. Whole congregations came out of New England to found towns in New Jersey, and individuals out of every colony vent-tired more freely than before to exchange one region for another, in order to coax health or fortune. Population was thus not a little compacted, while the colonies were drawn by insensible degrees to feel a certain community of interest and cultivate a certain community of opinion.
An expanding life, widened fields of enterprise and adventure, quickened hopes, and the fair prospects of a growing empire everywhere heartened strong men in the colonies to steady endeavor when the new century opened—the scheming, calculating eighteenth century, so unimpassioned and conventional at first, so tempestuous at last. The men of the colonies were not so new as their continent in the ways of civilization. They were Old World men put upon fresh coasts and a forest frontier, to make the most of them, create markets, build a new trade, become masters of vast resources as yet untouched and incalculable; and they did their work for the most part with unmatched spirit and energy, notwithstanding they were checked and hampered by the statutes of the realm. The Navigation Acts forbade the use of any but English ships in trade; forbade all trade, besides, which did not run direct to and from the ports of England. The colonies must not pass England by even in their trade with one another. What they could not produce themselves they must bring straight from England; what they had to dispose of they mast send straight to England. If they would exchange among themselves they must make England by the way, so that English merchants should be their middlemen and factors; or else, if they must needs carry direct from port to port of their own coasts, they must pay such duties as they would have paid in English ports had they actually gone the intermediate voyage to England preferred by the statutes. 'Twas the "usage of other nations" besides England "to keep their plantation trade to themselves " in that day, as the Parliament itself said and no man could deny, and 'twas the purpose of such restrictions to maintain " a greater correspondence and kindness between " England and her subjects in America, "keeping them in a firmer dependence," and at the same time "rendering them yet more beneficial and advantageous" to English seamen, merchants, wool-growers, and manufacturers; but it cost the colonists pride and convenience and profit to obey.
Some, who felt the harness of such law too smartly, consoled themselves by inventing means to escape it. The coast was long; was opened by many an unused harbor, great and small; could not everywhere and always be watched by king's officers; was frequented by a tolerant people, who had no very nice conscience about withholding taxes from a sovereign whose messages and commands came quickly over sea only when the wind held fair for weeks together; and cargoes could be got both out and in at small expense of secrecy and no expense at all in duties. Iii short, smuggling was easy. 'Twas a time of frequent wars, moreover, and privateering commissions were to be had for the asking; so that French ships could be brought in with their lading, condemned, and handsomely sold, without the trouble of paying French prices or English port dues. Privateering, too, was cousin-german to something still better; 'twas but a sort of formal apprenticeship to piracy ; and the quiet, unused harbors of the coast showed many a place where the regular profession might be set up. Veritable pirates took the sea, hunted down what commerce they would —English no less than French and Dutch and Spanish —rendezvoused in lonely sounds, inlets, and rivers where king's officers never came, and kept very respectable company when they came at last to dispose of their plunder at New York or Charleston, being men very learned in subterfuges and very quick-fingered at bribing. And then there was "the Red Sea trade," whose merchants sent fleets to Madagascar in the season to exchange cargoes with rough men out of the Eastern seas, of whom they courteously asked no questions. The larger ports were full of sailors who waited to be engaged, not at regular wages but "on the grand account"; and it took many weary years of hangman's labor to bring enough pirates to the gallows to scotch the ugly business. In 1717 it was reported in the colonies that there were quite fifteen hundred pirates on the coast, full one-half of whom made their headquarters, very brazenly, at New Providence in the Bahamas; and there were merchants and mariners by the score who had pangs of keen regret to see the breezy trade go down, as the century drew on a decade or two, because of the steady vigilance and stem endeavor