Chapter VI: The Gateways to the West From New England and Virginia

In 1609, the English navigator, Henry Hudson, had explored the river which now bears his name, acting on behalf of the Dutch East India Company. During the next decade, small Dutch settlements, trading posts, were established along the river; but the first real settlement is generally dated 1623 when thirty families of Walloons arrived. These were people from northern France and the southern Netherlands who had been driven into Holland by religious persecution and wanted to escape from the unsympathetic treatment which they were receiving in the southern part of Holland. Their language was not Dutch but French.

Speaking at large the Dutch settlement of New Netherland was, at the beginning, a trading venture and was based on a stronghold at the mouth of the river and another one at the head of navigation. For many years the latter settlement, originally called Fort Orange and later Albany, was much more important than the little town of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island.

Restrictions on land tenure held back colonization, and at no time during the Dutch occupation did its reach extend much beyond the fertile farm lands of the Hudson valley northerly to Fort Orange, though an outpost to the west was established at Schenectady and scattering settlements had also been made in New Jersey and on Long Island.

In all these outlying regions, the pressure of New England migrants was too strong for the scanty Dutch population to withstand, and even in Manhattan the New Englanders had become early an important part of the population.

The immigration of respectable Dutch families did not begin in general until after 1638 when the monopoly of the West India Company was abolished. Many of the families who became great land owners in the northern part of the Hudson River valley were from Gelderland, east of the Zuyder Zee, the town of Myjerka being one of the principal centers of emigration. While many of these Dutch families were of excellent mercantile stock, it is a mistake to suppose that they represented the social élite of the home country.

Although the Dutch have left a permanent mark on the Hudson River valley, the contribution which they made to the future population of the State was small. When England captured the colony in 1664 and the Dutch immigration ceased, there were probably not many more than 10,000 inhabitants in the whole region, and of these from a quarter to a third were English.

Holland at the time was not at all a colonizing nation. Its overseas ventures were for the purpose of trade, and it had not sufficient surplus population to settle colonies permanently.

The amount of Dutch and Huguenot blood that was perpetuated in the later history of the colonies was, therefore, small by comparison with the English, but was for the most part of the same racial stock. Six or seven thousand Dutch in the present State of New York in 1664 are to be compared with 35,000 English in Virginia and 50,000 in New England at the same date.

There was no further general and organized emigration from Holland to America until the close of the Revolution. At that time some of the Amsterdam bankers, who had loaned millions of dollars to the Revolutionary government, decided to try to capitalize their investments and bought nearly 4,000,000 acres of land in New York and Pennsylvania. Most of the settlers on this tract were not Dutch; and while Dutch names may still play an important part in the Social Registers of New York and Albany, Dutch blood is insignificant in the present make-up of the population of the United States.

The southerly tide of New Englanders, which washed over the Dutch colony and others to the South, was in the first instance made up largely of those who did not find the religious convictions of their associates in Massachusetts and Connecticut to their liking.

The little "Forts" of the Dutch in the Connecticut valley were swamped shortly after 1630, and by 1639 the Connecticut people of English ancestry had established themselves at Greenwich within thirty miles of New Amsterdam and in other towns even nearer. Long Island was settled from the same source, and Thomas Belcher took up a tract upon the present site of the City of Brooklyn in the same year in which the English began to build at Greenwich. Brooklyn, until the twentieth century, has been a typically New England community, entirely distinct from the other boroughs of Greater New York. The eastern end of Long Island was long separated from the western end and was settled directly from Connecticut. The Hamptons are virtually still a part of New England.

The development of the southern part of New York State, and particularly of the Hudson River valley, was delayed indefinitely by the great land holdings of the so-called "patroons" or great landlords. New York City continued to be a cosmopolitan and nondescript town, built up on commerce and trade and without any particular racial complexion. Even at the time of the Revolution, it was inferior alike in size and in influence to Philadelphia and Boston, and New York State was but seventh in population among the thirteen colonies.

The real foundation of the greatness of the Empire State was the New England colonization of northern and western New York, which created a territory that was, and has ever since remained, quite distinct in political complexion and economic and social interests from the Hudson River valley and the metropolis at its mouth.

The commercial greatness of the City of New York dates from the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which made New York the outlet of the lake States. Meanwhile, however, several other foreign invasions had taken place.

The French Huguenots, racially Nordic and almost identical with the British, began to arrive in Colonial New York after 1685, founding the town of New Rochelle to commemorate the French city from which so many of them had come. Here, as elsewhere, their influence was far in excess of their proportionately small number.

In 1711, Governor Hunter of New York became imbued with grandiose ideas about developing the resources of his Province and began to look for a source of cheap labor for its exploitation. He found this in the German districts on the Rhine, broadly known as the Palatinate, where various national elements, not merely German and Alsatian, but French, Swiss, Moravian, and miscellaneous, were gathered, and where the religious persecution to which they were subjected as Protestants, and the excessive hardships which they were compelled to endure from invasions of the armies of Louis XIV, had reduced them to great misery.

The population was ripe for emigration and furnished the only substantial element of non-Nordic origin in the Colonial history of America. It is not necessary to trace in detail the innumerable petty sects and national elements, often two or three times removed from their original home, of which this "Palatine" emigration was composed. For the present purpose it was pre-dominantly German-speaking, and largely of the round-headed Alpine stock in racial make-up.

About 1709, these Palatines began frantic efforts to escape from their misfortunes, and within a few years some 30,000 had gone over into Holland and even into England, where they were not welcome. The British Government was only too glad to subsidize their further emigration, and several thousand of them were transported to the Hudson River valley. They soon became discontented there and were finally colonized on the Schoharie River in New York. Here, in turn, they were ousted by what they considered political jobbery and many of them moved on to the Mohawk River, a tributary of the Hudson, while others continued down the Susquehanna River to Pennsylvania. On the whole, therefore, the Palatines are to be considered merely temporary inhabitants of New York State. Although a good many of them remained, the reports they sent out as to their treatment were so unsatisfactory that thenceforth the Palatine immigration mostly avoided New York and landed in Pennsylvania, where it will be encountered later.

The next influx, particularly after 1719, was of Ulster Scots, similar to that already mentioned as invading New England. Much of Orange County on the west of the Hudson River was settled by these Ulstermen, beginning as early as 1729, and for the next half-century the infiltration of this Nordic element was continuous, although more of it came through New England than directly into New York harbor. By the time of the Revolution the Ulster Scots had spread over much of the eastern part of northern New York, having enough representatives in Albany in 1760 to establish a Presbyterian church there.

At about the same time Sir William Johnson, who had received a grant of 100,000 acres of land north of the Mohawk River for his valor in defending the colonies against the French at Crown Point and Lake George in 1755, began to look about for suitable tenants and hit upon the idea of importing Scotch Highlanders of Roman Catholic faith. Some hundreds of these arrived just before the Revolution, and like Sir John Johnson, son of Sir William, espoused the cause of the Loyalists. After the Revolution, they moved northward to Ontario where the town of Glengarry recalls their earlier home in Inverness. There, such families as the MacDonnells, McDougalls, Camerons, McIntyres, and Fergusons became an important element of strength to Canada.

As noted, New York State at the time of the Revolution was still distinctly an unimportant colony, and its greatness dates from the invasion of New Englanders immediately after the war. Connecticut, by virtue of its proximity, was the principal source of these settlers, although almost every part of New England contributed. The crossing over of the Ulster Scots has already been mentioned, but it must not be inferred that that was the principal element in the settlement of the State. The main immigration was of the old Puritan English stock which still dominates all of upper New York, except where subsequent colonies of recent immigrants in some of the larger industrial cities have altered the local scene.

The western shores of Lake Champlain and some of the older towns of the Hudson River valley could scarcely be recognized, after a few years, by those who had known them previously. A mere Dutch farm in 1784 had been changed in four years to the thriving city of Hudson, a typical New England commercial town with warehouses, wharves, Yankee shipping, and stores filled with Yankee notions.

A visitor to Whitesborough on the Mohawk River, in 1788, reported that "settlers are continually pouring in from the Connecticut hive." Binghamton was settled jointly by Connecticut and Massachusetts. The same spirit caused a mixing up of the population within the limits of New England so that, to take a single illustration, the men of Middlefield, a small hill town in western Massachusetts, were found on inquiry to come from nearly sixty different towns in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

After the Revolution the more enterprising young men of Massachusetts and Connecticut began to leave their home towns. Of those who departed, a half went to other places in New England, a quarter to western New York, and a quarter to Ohio and other points in the then "Far West."

The extreme western part of New York State had not begun to develop as early as the period of which we are speaking. Canandaigua was the largest town in 1790, and it had but a hundred inhabitants. Pioneers came from New Jersey and Pennsylvania by way of the Susquehanna and Tioga Rivers, went to Seneca Lake, and thence to Cayuga; others from Connecticut had entered the valley of the Mohawk by way of Albany and Fort Schuyler. Small settlements sprang up at Bath, Naples, Geneva, Aurora, Seneca Falls, Palmyra, Richmond, Fort Stanwix, and Marcellus. The Erie Canal was as yet undreamt of.

The population picture of New York State in 1790 is then a double one. The great bulk of the State, so far as area is concerned, was a colony of Anglo-Saxon origin almost identical with the New England States. The Hudson valley formed a less important appendage to this, with New York City at its mouth--a miscellaneous settlement of people of all sorts whose interests were largely commercial.

New York was one of the States that lost most heavily by the Loyalist migration at the end of the Revolution. This superior Nordic element left in two great streams; one by sea to Nova Scotia, and the other overland to Canada. Long Island was a particularly heavy loser, 3000 people going in one fleet in 1783. The influx of Loyalists into Nova Scotia, amounting to some 35,000, was a severe burden on that little colony. Those who went into Canada overland from New York were more easily assimilated, and many of the important settlements along the northern shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, such as Kingston, date from that time. To these Ontario settlers was given, by Order in Council in 1789, the honorary name of "United Empire Loyalists," and they formed the backbone of Upper Canada, as the Province of Ontario was then called, and were a main element in defeating the plans of American strategists in 1812 to capture Canada and annex it to the Union.

Although New York is generally credited with having more Loyalists during the Revolution than any other colony, she also furnished more troops for the patriot army than did any other State except Massachusetts.

New Jersey, in contrast to its neighbors on either side, was one of the most thoroughly English of all the colonies. The settlements of the Dutch in the north, and the squabbles of a few hundred Dutch, Swedes, and Finlanders in the south, left little trace on the population when colonization once started in earnest. The real history of the colony begins in 1664 when the English proprietors, to whom it had been granted, began to colonize it seriously.

Northern New Jersey was a chaos of rugged hills and forests which offered little to the settler and is still largely waste land. The southern part of the State is also largely waste land, consisting chiefly of pine barrens so that early settlement was virtually limited to two areas. On the North River, as the Hudson was called, the lands along the meadows opposite Manhattan Island were inviting, and on the South River, as the Delaware was originally designated, there was a broad strip of fertile farm land which attracted the early settlers. Among other centers New Haven had established a colony there about 1640, but had been driven off by the Dutch. There was also some extremely fertile land around Freehold and other towns on the line between New York and Philadelphia.

Since these two areas were so inaccessible to each other by direct communication, the State grew up in two distinct settlements; that along the western side of New York harbor, then known as East Jersey, and that on the Delaware, known as West Jersey. While these two were consolidated administratively in 1702, they have never been wholly consolidated in actual character, and the two ends of the State are, even today, diverse enough to show their somewhat divergent origin.

The land along the Delaware was colonized, for the most part, directly from England by the Quakers who had secured an interest in it, and who established the only two towns of importance in West Jersey during the Colonial period--Burlington in 1667 and Salem in 1675. Those who established Burlington were mostly from Yorkshire with a large group also from London, and they took opposite sides of the town, the Yorkshire people spreading north and the London people spreading south. Geographical difficulties checked the southward spread so that Cape May was settled separately by people from Connecticut and from Long Island. Later, some of the French Huguenots went down into West Jersey, but it always remained essentially an English colony, largely of Quaker complexion and influenced by the close proximity of co-religionists in Pennsylvania.

East Jersey, like western New York, represents more directly a New England outpost. Elizabethtown had been established in 1665 by emigrants sent direct from Great Britain, but Newark had at almost the same time been colonized by people from Connecticut, who at first gave to it the name of their old home, Milford. The Elizabethtown Association somewhat later sold part of its territory to people from New Hampshire and Massachusetts who established the two hamlets of Woodbridge and Piscataqua, now New Brunswick.

In 1666, Connecticut Puritans also established on the Passaic River first Guilford, and later Branford, both of which with Milford merged in the town of Newark. The New England overflow continued until the shores of Newark Bay had become another New England colony. Such communities as the Oranges were chiefly transplanted Puritan towns.

The proprietorship of East Jersey shortly passed into the hands of Scotsmen and a steady immigration of these began about 1684. The capital of East Jersey, Perth Amboy, was named for one of the proprietors, James Drummond, the Earl of Perth. The colony soon became, and has ever since remained, one of the strongholds of Scotch Presbyterianism in America, which found its intellectual center in the establishment of Princeton University.

For a long time the two sections of New Jersey were of about equal size and importance. As the country between them gradually filled up, the State grew slowly until at the time of the Revolution its population was estimated at about 120,000. Another fifteen years saw a healthy growth, the first census, in 1790, showing 184,139 inhabitants. The somewhat complicated details of its development should not obscure the fact that New Jersey was one of the most purely white, Protestant, Nordic settlements in the colonies.

Although prior to the arrival of William Penn there were several thousand settlers on the Delaware River, in the territory now covered by Pennsylvania and Delaware, the real settlement of that region is generally dated from the beginning of his operations in 1681, when Upland, now Chester, was settled as his headquarters. A year later Philadelphia was founded, and in spite of this late start grew so rapidly that William Penn, the Quaker, at his death, had the satisfaction of knowing that the City of Brotherly Love was the largest in North America.

While the foundation stock was made up of English Quakers, Penn had ambitious ideas of establishing a headquarters for other like-minded persons, and with this idealism was apparently mixed a solid commercial ambition which led him and his agents to advertise the merits of the colony widely. The land system, unlike that of Virginia or New Netherlands, favored the settler with small means. English and Welsh farmers rapidly appropriated to themselves the country along the west side of the Delaware River from Trenton to Wilmington.

Penn maintained friendly relations with the Protestant leaders in southern Germany, and he and his agents seem to have had an extraordinary flair for finding obscure and peculiar sects and getting them to emigrate to the new colony. A mere list of the odd religious denominations that soon flourished in Pennsylvania is bewildering, and an attempt to define the characteristics, which to them seemed more than matters of life and death, is quite beyond the capacity of the present-day student not steeped in the knowledge of seventeenth-century theology.

Germantown was established in October, 1673, the first outpost of the Alpine race in the present territory of the United States. Its founders were Mennonites; but they were later joined by Dunkards or Tunkers, that is, Dippers, who held to the efficacy of baptism by immersion.

Generally speaking, the Germans who came to Pennsylvania during the first quarter-century of its settlement belong to these distinctive sects, while after that time the immigration was made up of a somewhat more uniform mass of adherents of either the Lutheran or the Reformed Church. This difference soon became a recognized one for an easy division of "the Pennsylvania Dutch," as this mixed group of Alpines came to be called, not very correctly, from an assimilation of _Pennsylvanische Deutsche_. One would ask, on hearing such a person mentioned, "Does he belong to the sects or to the church people?"

A few of these such as the Labadists from Friesland who settled in New Castle County, Delaware, were either from Holland or parts of Germany bordering Holland, but the great bulk of the "Pennsylvania Dutch" came from the Rhine Provinces, particularly from Alsace and the Palatinate, with a liberal sprinkling of northern French Protestants who had been forced over the border, while others came from Austria and Prussia and even from northern Italy. As a matter of fact, down to the time of the World War, Americans called, colloquially, all Germans "Dutchmen."

While the Palatinate furnished only a part of the immigration its name was soon given to all similar newcomers, so that the term Palatine became a general description for a German-speaking immigrant; and one even finds in the old records such anomalies as an allusion to "a Palatine from Hamburg." An important centre of their dispersion was the town of Crefeld near the border of Holland.

The colonies in general, being overwhelmingly and typically British, looked with suspicion on any alien groups, and New England, in particular, probably would not have encouraged these Alpines to enter at all. Virginia with its Church of England establishment and its self-conscious English attitude was likewise not disposed to be hospitable to such a large group of foreigners.

Governor Oglethorpe attracted some of them to Georgia, but not very successfully, as will be mentioned later. One important group of his settlers, in particular, the Moravians, left Georgia about 1739 because they were required to take up arms against the neighboring Spanish in Florida. They moved to Pennsylvania where they founded, in 1741, the town of Bethlehem, which has been their headquarters ever since.

While New York originally welcomed the Palatines, it soon treated them so badly that thereafter almost all the vessels bearing German immigrants came directly from Dutch ports to the Delaware, and if by chance an occasional ship was forced to make a landing in New York, its passengers quickly made their way across the Jerseys into more hospitable territory.

Even in Pennsylvania the invasion of the Germans eventually began to cause alarm among the English-speaking and dominant part of the population. In Virginia this attitude of exclusion of supposedly alien races had been maintained ever since the first permanent settlement. Inspired by visions of building up a great industry, the proprietors of that colony had sent out with their "second supply" a little group of eight artisans from Germany and Poland who were skilled glassmakers. The English colonists charged them with treasonable dealings with the Indians and the Chronicler of the settlement refers to them disgustedly as those "damned Dutchmen."

Benjamin Franklin, who, in 1753, expressed his opinion of some of his fellow citizens in a letter to Peter Collinson, was merely reflecting an attitude which the English stock had more or less generally taken when he declared:

"Those who come hither are generally the most stupid of their own
nation, and, as ignorance is often attended with credulity when
knavery would mislead it, and with suspicion when honesty would set
it right; and as few of the English understand the German language,
and so cannot address them either from the press or the pulpit, it
is almost impossible to remove any prejudices they may entertain.
Their clergy have very little influence on the people, who seem to
take a pleasure in abusing and discharging the minister on every
trivial occasion. Not being used to liberty, they know not how to
make a modest use of it. And as Holben says of the young Hottentots,
that they are not esteemed men until they have shown their manhood
by beating their mothers, so these seem not to think themselves
free, till they can feel their liberty in abusing and insulting
their teachers. Thus they are under no restraint from ecclesiastical
government; they behave, however, submissively enough at present to
the civil government, which I wish they may continue to do, for I
remember when they modestly declined intermeddling in our elections,
but now they come in droves and carry all before them, except in one
or two counties.[7]

"Few of their children in the country know English. They import
many books from Germany; and of the six printing-houses in the
province, two are entirely German, two half German, half English, and
but two entirely English. They have one German newspaper, and one
half-German. Advertisements, intended to be general, are now printed
in Dutch and English. The signs in our streets have inscriptions
in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of
late to make all their bonds and other legal instruments in their
own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed
in our courts, where the German business so increases that there
is continued need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years
they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one-half our
legislators what the other half say.

"In short, unless the stream of their importation could be turned
from this to other colonies, as you very judiciously propose, they
will soon so outnumber us that we will, in my opinion, be not able
to preserve our language, and even our government will become
precarious. The French, who watch all advantages, are now themselves
making a German settlement, back of us, in the Illinois country, and
by means of these Germans they may in time come to an understanding
with ours; and, indeed, in the last war,[8] our Germans showed a
general disposition, that seemed to bode us no good. For, when the
English, who were not Quakers, alarmed by the danger arising from
the defenseless state of our country, entered unanimously into an
association, and within this government, and the Lower Counties
raised, armed, and disciplined near ten thousand men, the Germans,
except a very few in proportion to their number, refused to engage
in it, giving out, one amongst another, and even in print, that, if
they were quiet, the French, should they take the country, would not
molest them; at the time abusing the Philadelphians for fitting out
privateers against the enemy, and representing the trouble, hazard,
and expense of defending the province, as a greater inconvenience
than any that might be expected from a change of government. Yet I
am not for refusing to admit them entirely into our colonies. All
that seems to me necessary is, to distribute them more equally,
mix them with the English schools, where they are not too thickly
settled, and take some care to prevent the practice, lately fallen
into by some of the shipowners, of sweeping the German gaols to
make up the number of their passengers. I say I am not against the
admission of Germans in general, for they have their virtues. Their
industry and frugality are exemplary. They are excellent husbandmen,
and contribute greatly to the improvement of a country."

By 1727, the English in Pennsylvania had become sufficiently alarmed over the proportions of the Palatine invasion to demand a careful record of the numbers arriving each year so that from then on there is full official record of all foreigners entered at the port of Philadelphia. By that time there were probably fifteen or twenty thousand Germans already in the province, and the record mentioned indicates that between 1727 and 1745 approximately 22,000 arrived by ships. To this number should, of course, be added the high natural increase of those already settled.

Since the English had pre-empted much of the desirable land along the Delaware and around Philadelphia, the Germans, with whom the acquisition of farming land was a dominant passion, mostly went westward of the English settlement and formed a belt where their language was and, in scattered groups to this day, is spoken. They filled the Lehigh and Schuylkill valleys and occupied a band of fertile soil beginning in eastern Pennsylvania on the Delaware, passing westward toward the Susquehanna through the towns of Allentown, Reading, Lebanon, Lancaster, and thence down to the Cumberland valley on the Maryland border where they had a natural outlet to western Virginia and to the south. The tier of counties north of this belt and along the borders of New York was comparatively neglected by them, and was filled largely by settlers from Connecticut. The influx of English and German sectaries was so rapid that within three years from its founding, Penn's province had made a growth as great as that of New Netherlands in its first half-century.

The early Quakers who belonged to the privileged group grew prosperous, and many of them finding the strict ordinances of their sect somewhat oppressive became Anglicans. Thus the Church of England gained an important position in Philadelphia which it retained up to the Revolution. In general, it represented the Loyalist element and therefore partly disintegrated when they left at the end of the war. The Revolution was largely Calvinistic, and the Established Church was in most of the northern colonies regarded with disfavor as "loyalist."

The invasion of Ulster Scots into Pennsylvania began shortly after the German immigration was well under way. Within a few years the great majority of the Ulster immigrants to America were making directly for the Delaware shores. Presbyterian congregations existed in the important towns of the colony about 1700, and within the next decade the Scotch had made numerous settlements in New Castle County, Delaware, and on both sides of the Pennsylvania-Maryland boundary at its intersection with the Delaware line.

When the great tide of emigration from Ulster set in about 1720, the Scotch found the best and most accessible soil in Pennsylvania occupied by the English and the next belt held firmly by the Germans. In general, therefore, they were obliged to pass over these two territories and settle still farther west, particularly in the Cumberland valley of which Gettysburg, York, and Carlisle are now important centers. In this district geographical isolation led later to the establishment farther south of a distinct church, the Cumberland Presbyterian, somewhat different in its tenets from the Presbyterianism of the Philadelphia region and Delaware.

The number of Scotch who thus left Ulster for Pennsylvania is uncertain, but may have exceeded 40,000 or 50,000. Taken in connection with the Palatine immigration at the same period the influx to Pennsylvania in the 1730's formed the largest migration from Europe to the New World that ever took place until the steamship era arrived.

Seeking newer and freer land, the Scotch together with some Germans began to follow the mountain valleys trending southwestward from Pennsylvania. They not only filled the Shenandoah Valley in a few years, but filtered down to the back country of the southern colonies and to the eastern portion of what is now Tennessee.

A good illustration of this migration is Daniel Boone, himself of English stock, who was born on the Delaware only a few miles above Philadelphia. The Boone family soon moved to Reading. Thence drifting southwestward with his compatriots, Daniel Boone settled in the North Carolina uplands, along the valley of the Yadkin, then passed beyond into Kentucky, and, after that location began to be civilized, went on as a pioneer to Missouri. His son appears a little later as one of the early settlers of Kansas, his grandson as a pioneer in Colorado.

When the land west of the Alleghanies was opened for settlement about 1768, the Ulster Scots began to throng the mountain passes. In addition to their aptitude for frontier life, and the insatiable desire to find new and cheap land, they wanted to get away from their neighbors, the Pennsylvania Dutch, with whom they usually did not live on very good terms. Pittsburgh rapidly became a Nordic territory settled mainly by the Ulster Scots.

These streams of immigration were sufficient by 1740 to enable Pennsylvania to overtake and pass the population of every other colony except Maryland, Massachusetts, and Virginia, although most of them had been started a generation earlier than Penn's settlement. A decade later Maryland was passed and just after the Revolution Massachusetts was outstripped, while Philadelphia remained the metropolis of the United States until finally excelled by New York City in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Benjamin Franklin's offhand estimate that at the end of the Colonial period one-third of the population of his adopted State was English, one-third Scotch, and one-third German, was not far from the truth. Though the population was then by a safe majority British in origin and English-speaking, the Germans remained an element impossible to assimilate, so long as they continued to be segregated in their own communities of which Lancaster was the largest inland town in the thirteen colonies.

Such of the Germans as went to the frontier States were assimilated by the Nordic groups without much difficulty; but the experience of the Pennsylvania Dutch farming communities is like that of some of the city slum districts of the last century, in presenting groups almost impossible to Americanize. Even at the present time this Alpine island of population still retains many of its alien characteristics. For this, among other reasons, the German element in Pennsylvania at the time of the Revolution played a relatively unimportant part in the affairs of the State, as suggested by the quotation from Franklin above. The dominant element was formed by the group around Philadelphia composed mainly of the original English Quakers; but the Pennsylvania-Dutch, on their farms, and the Scots on the frontier, furnished a large contingent with which the politicians had to deal, though they were seldom represented in the government and leadership of the colony. The German element was inclined to follow the leadership of the Quakers under whose invitation it had come to Pennsylvania. The Scots, on the other hand, were apt to be in a state of rebellion when occasion arose, as conspicuously in the Whiskey Rebellion, which formed one of the first tests of the power of the Federal Government under Washington's presidency.

The claim that half of the Ulstermen were adherents of the Established Church, rather than Presbyterians, is doubtless extreme, but emphasizes the typically non-Irish and Protestant character of this whole element of the population, as also the fact that many of the Ulstermen were not Scots, nor even Lowland Scots, whose ancestors had moved northward across the border from England; but were direct emigrants from England to Ireland, some indeed as late as and even after the time of Cromwell.

Delaware has been dealt with incidentally in what has been said concerning Pennsylvania, because it was part of Pennsylvania during the first period of colonization. Unimportant attempts had been made by the Dutch and Swedes, of whom the Swedes are the best known, to settle there but the population of the region when Penn arrived was mainly composed of English who had moved in under the regime of the Duke of York.

In 1633, an English nobleman, Lord Baltimore, who had for years been seeking favor with the Stuart monarchy, announced that he had become a convert to the papacy, and, with the zeal of a new convert, desired to establish a colony in the New World where Catholics, then laboring under heavy disabilities in Great Britain, could enjoy religious freedom. He applied for, and Charles I granted, a charter for the foundation of a semi-feudal proprietorship, with the stipulation that freedom of worship should prevail.

If one stops to consider what a howl of outraged virtue would have been raised by the people of Great Britain, and what a hurricane would have descended upon the head of the monarch, had he granted the Catholics a charter without stipulating for freedom of worship, it will be realized that the much-vaunted "toleration" of Lord Baltimore's colony was not entirely an evidence of his own broad-mindedness. However, this toleration had its limits. Disbelief in the doctrine of the Trinity was a capital offense.

In 1634, the little town of St. Mary was established as the center for the new colony. Few Catholics of the home country seem to have been anxious to take advantage of the opportunities offered, and Lord Baltimore began to seek tenants elsewhere. As early as 1634, he was writing to Boston and urging Massachusetts people to emigrate, but the first great invasion of Puritans came in 1649.

Inspired by enthusiasm for the cause of the King, after he had lost his head, the Virginians under the leadership of Governor Berkeley passed ordinances expelling non-conformists from their colony, and a thousand of these who had previously gone from New England to Virginia were driven out and took refuge in Maryland, establishing the settlement which later became Annapolis.

During the next generation most of the arrivals in Maryland were either Puritans or Quakers. The policy of tolerance was not held to apply to Quakers, who, by a law of 1659, were to be whipped out of any town which they entered, but this measure does not seem to have been enforced very long, and English Quakers from other colonies soon formed an important part of the population.

In 1689, word reached the New World of the expulsion of James II, and the occupation of the British throne by the uncompromisingly Protestant House of Orange. While James II was on the throne a general alarm had arisen throughout the colonies over the prospects of Catholic aggression.

Many of the colonies contained a sprinkling of the Huguenot refugees who had been driven out of France only a few years before because of their Protestantism, and there were thus in every colony men who knew the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the terrible persecution which followed. The tragedy of the Thirty Years War was also still fresh in the minds of many.

There was no disposition in America, therefore, to look upon the Catholics as a group who, if in power, would distinguish themselves by a policy of broad toleration, and the one colony in which there was any appreciable number of Catholics, namely, Maryland, naturally felt the situation most keenly. The number of Catholics in the colony at that time, however, even including Negroes, was only a few thousand, and their capital of St. Mary was a hamlet of scarcely sixty houses. Probably eleven-twelfths of the population of Maryland were Protestants, and of them a majority were Puritans. These lost no time in taking steps to protect their freedom which they knew the Catholic church would never tolerate if able to do otherwise, and by a homemade revolution turned out the proprietary government and set up a staunch Protestant regime. Under this new rule, however, the few Catholic residents were subjected to no harm, but were placed under approximately the same disabilities as they had long lived under in Great Britain. Thereupon the little Roman Catholic principality in the United States was at an end, and the then Lord Baltimore, fourth of that title, shortly conformed by returning to his ancestral Protestant faith.

The Revolution of 1689 cost St. Mary its existence, for the Puritans transferred the capital to their own town of Providence (rebaptized Annapolis), and the headquarters of the Roman Catholics soon relapsed into the wilderness.

Maryland continued to be almost wholly an English colony, with more than its share of Negroes and transported convicts, and with a very slight sprinkling of aliens, much as all the colonies had. When the Acadians were transported from Nova Scotia in 1755, a considerable number of them were landed in Maryland.

Baltimore, founded in 1729, languished for a quarter of a century, but in the decade before the Revolution it began to grow with such rapidity that in a few years it was one of the half dozen most considerable towns of the continent.

The back country of Maryland was settled independently from Pennsylvania, to a considerable extent by Ulster Scots and Palatines, though there was also a steady encroachment on this cheap land by men from the tidewater who could not get possession of farms in the more expensive and fashionable as well as prosperous region.

By the Revolution, Maryland had reached a population of 250,000. Perhaps one-seventh of this was in Frederick County, where Palatines had begun to settle as early as 1710, and into which they began to enter in large numbers after about 1730. Despite this back-country element, Maryland must be recognized as being, at the time of the first census, an Anglo-Saxon colony in culture, in traditions, in language, and in population.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 7: He is writing of Pennsylvania.]

[Footnote 8: The French and Indian War.]