The Life of George Washington. Woodrow Wilson
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 of Governors who had been straitly commanded to suppress it.
The Navigation Acts bred an irritation in the colonies which grew with their growth and strengthened with their consciousness of strength and capacity. Not because such restrictions were uncommon, but because the colonies were forward and exacting. There was, indeed, much to commend the legislation they resented. It attracted the capital of English merchants to the American trade, it went far towards securing English supremacy on the seas, and it was strictly within the powers of Parliament, as no man could deny. Parliament had an undoubted right to regulate imperial interests, of this or any other kind, even though it regulated them unreasonably. But colonies that reckoned their English population by the hundred thousand and lived by trade and adventure would not long have brooked such a policy of restraint had they had the leisure to fret over it. They did not as yet have the leisure. The French stood menacingly at their western gates, through which the great fur trade made its way; where the long rivers ran which threaded the central valleys of the continent; where the Mississippi stretched itself from north to south like a great body of dividing waters, flanking all the coast and its settlements—where alone a true mastery of the continent and its resources could be held. It would be time enough to reckon with Parliament touching the carrying trade when they had made good their title to what they were to trade withal.
The French had been a long time about their work, for they had done it like subjects, at the bidding of an ambitious king, rather than like free men striving as they pleased for themselves. But what they had done they had done systematically. and with a fixed policy that did not vary, though ministers and even dynasties might come and go. The English had crowded to the coasts of the continent as they pleased, and had mustered their tens of thousands before the French reckoned more than a few hundreds. But the French had hit upon the mighty river St. Lawrence, whose waters came out of the great lakes and the heart of the continent; their posts were garrisons; what men they had they put forward, at each step of discovery, at some point of vantage upon lake or river, whence they were not easily dislodged. Their shrewd fur-traders and dauntless priests struck everywhere into the heart of the forests, leading forward both trade and conquest, until at last, through the country of the Illinois and out of far Lake Michigan, the streams had been found which ran down into the west to the flooding Mississippi. Colonists were sent to the mouth of the vast river, posts presently dotted its banks here and there throughout its length, trade passed up and down its spreading stream, and the English, their eyes at last caught by the stealthy movement, looked in a short space to see French settlements "running all along from our lakes by the back of Virginia and Carolina to the Bay of Mexico."
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