American colonial period

“ The beginnings of the continental American colonies, indeed, are too apt to be considered as isolated events. Their unique importance from the standpoint of American history has tended to obscure their real nature. From that standpoint, they are naturally viewed as the founding of a great nation; but if they are considered solely in that relation, not only the planting of the colonies themselves, but the subsequent history of their relations with the mother-country, and the whole course of England’s old colonial policy, are bound to be misunderstood. ”

“ Nor, though I have spoken freely of American affairs, do I mean to deny that your native tribes may have had a just cause of quarrel with the American colonists. And I regard it as a mark of their gratitude that they adhered to the royal cause, because the governors, acting in the king's name, had been their most constant friends; and the colonial subjects, possibly at times their treacherous invaders. ”

“ How liberal a construction has been given to the distinction between imperial and colonial questions is shown by the fact that the whole of the unappropriated lands in the regions behind our American and Australian colonies have been given up to the uncontrolled disposal of the colonial communities, though they might, without injustice, have been kept in the hands of the imperial government, to be administered for the greatest advantage of future emigrants from all parts of the empire. ”

“ It cannot too often be pointed out that the colonial period was a colonial period, and that the relations subsisting between England and the colonies were necessarily those subsisting between a sovereign state and its dependencies. There was no more reason for the colonist of Massachusetts or Barbadoes to consider himself entirely independent of English control, than there is for the settler in Alaska to consider himself wholly independent of the United States to-day. ”

“ Widely different was the case of the English colonies in North America. All these settlements started under some form of grant or charter, derived ultimately from the Crown: the Crown from time to time interfered and made a show of its supremacy; but there was no system of any sort or kind, and communities grew up, which in practice had never been governed from home but governed themselves. Most of all, the New England colonies embodied to the full the spirit of colonial independence. ”

“ The colonial system by which this whole hemisphere was bound has fallen into ruins, totally abolished by revolutions converting colonies into independent nations throughout the two American continents, excepting a portion of territory chiefly at the northern extremity of our own, and confined to the remnants of dominion retained by Great Britain over the insular archipelago, geographically the appendages of our part of the globe. With all the rest we have free trade, even with the insular colonies of all the European nations, except Great Britain. ”

“ The timber, live-stock, and provisions which came from the neighboring continent were essential to the existence of the West Indian planters and negroes. When war cut off these supplies, famine and pestilence followed. After the peace of 1783 even the most conservative English statesmen were obliged to admit that the strictness of their old colonial system could not be maintained, and that the United States, though independent, must be admitted to some of the privileges of a British colony. ”

“ England could not manage its American colonial interests because the government had no ideal of the colonies beyond that of a commercial business, and the colonies could not handle the interests of England in America because each colony was a separate organization having political interests together in common only in the British Parliament. ”

“ In regard to the Colony,—which, after all, is at once the best evidence of the progress of the Parent Institution, and the surest test of its principles,—the authentic and indisputable accounts which reach us from every quarter, must be admitted as sufficient to satisfy all reasonable and candid minds, not only of the actual prosperity of the present settlements, but of the practicableness of the colonial scheme on the larger and nobler scale always anticipated, more or less, by the advocates of the cause. ”

“ The thirteen American colonies, which in 1775 dared defy the might of Great Britain, and which in a stubborn struggle were able to win their independence, were settled at various times, and by colonists actuated by widely different motives. ”

“ How to make Colonial Government work harmoniously.The preceding pages have sufficiently pointed out the nature of those evils, to the extensive operation of which, I attribute the various practical grievances, and the present unsatisfactory condition of the North American Colonies. It is not by weakening, but strengthening the influence of the people on its Government ”

“ To-day as the Colonies send their sons in their thousands to uphold the Motherland in her fight for Justice and Freedom, we know that our colonial attitude has been more than justified, and England is indeed proud of her Dominions. ”

“ Every colonist had a right to inhabit, if he pleased, in any other colony, and as a British subject he was capable of inheriting lands by descent in every other colony. The commercial intercourse of the colonies too was regulated by the general laws of the British empire, and could not be restrained or obstructed by colonial legislation. ”

“ The social and economic condition of the people is described, and attention is paid to the political characteristics of the several colonies both in the conduct of their local affairs and in their relations with each other and the mother-country. It is shown that the causes of the Revolution were deep-seated in colonial history. Attention is also called to the fact, generally overlooked, that the thirteen mainland colonies which revolted in 1776 were not all of the English colonial establishments in America. ”

“ At the very moment when new forces were being let loose by the social ferment following the Renaissance and the Reformation, the new lands offered vents through which those forces might in part escape, without causing such explosions as wholly to wreck the social system. Their presence, or, to phrase it differently, the existence of a practically unlimited frontier, during the whole of our colonial period, was 30one of the great formative elements in our institutions, and in the relations between the colonies and England. ”

“ It is unfortunate that the colonial back country appealed so long to historians solely in connection with the colonial wars, for the development of its society, its institutions and mental attitude all need study. ”

“ From small beginnings the English colonies came into being along the Eastern seaboard of America. Puritans and cavaliers, profligates and mechanics, all helped to create what might have been except for sad misunderstandings part of the British empire of to-day. Behind the Alleghany slopes another great power was attempting to form a colonial empire. North of the St Lawrence, New France had already [Pg 167] been established; by the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana had already been named. ”

“ Thus the Government of the United States, no less than the people and authorities of Minnesota, were represented in the north-west movement.”
No matter how prosperous a colony of Great Britain may he, a colony it must be so long as it is not independent. The first result of the prosperity of an American colony is its independence as a State, and its incorporation as a member of the common sovereignty. ”

“ The colonial union was the crowning service of the founders of New England to humanity. Now they began, one by one, to descend into the grave, worn to early death by a toilsome grapple with the rough and grinding forces of nature. ”

“ The policy pursued by the British government towards the North American provinces alienated the affections of the people from the mother-country, and the idea of these extensive colonies becoming a great and independent empire, having gained possession of many minds, the Americans became impatient of their condition. ”

“ There is matter of intensely exciting interest and of momentous bearing upon the fortunes of the red man running through the whole colonial period of our history before we had become a nation, with a central power and a common responsibility for our acts. During this colonial period, — beginning with the first scattered and independent settlements, from Acadia and Canada, down along the seaboard to the Gulf, and ending with the war of the Revolution, — each isolated group of colonists was of necessity left to its own methods and policy in intercourse and treatment of the savages. ”

“ There is not a single page, from the period of its colonial [463] existence to its present standard of greatness and renown, from which we are absent. From the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock to the advent of the Cavaliers at Jamestown; from the stirring periods of the Revolution, which resulted in the emancipation of the colonists from British imperialism, to the Rebellion in 1860—resulting in the salvation of the Federal Union—we have ever and always been a potent factor in the history of this country. ”

“ One thing is, however, indispensable to the success of this or any other system of Colonial Government. You must renounce the habit of telling the Colonies that the Colonial is a provisional existence. You must allow them to believe that, without severing the bonds which unite them to Great Britain, they may attain the degree of perfection, and of social and political development, to which organised communities of free men have a right to aspire. ”

“ High dignitaries in both church and state in Old England, and puritans in New England, had participated in the profits of a trade, by which the ignorant and barbarous natives of Africa were brought from that country, and sold into slavery in the American Colonies. The generation in the Southern States which defended their country in the late war, found amongst them, in a civilized and christianized condition, 4,000,000 of the descendants of those degraded Africans. ”

“ In wealth, in population, the American Colonies far surpassed all that remained of her Empire; and the American Colonies were irrecoverably gone. It is no wonder that in the first shock of such a loss England looked on herself as on the verge of ruin, or that the Bourbon Courts believed her position as a world-power to be practically at an end. ”

“ The citizen of the United Kingdom has often been compelled to regard the colonies as great dependencies which increased his responsibilities and multiplied his difficulties without returning to the mother-country, under their present organization, strength in men or resources, or even in exclusive commercial advantage. Every new colony or colonial interest was to him something new to defend, and augmented the burden of Empire. ”

“ With its power and influence with the Indians, its wealth and organization, and its knowledge of the country and means for bringing colonists from either Canada or the home country, it could have quickly and easily throttled all attempts to establish American settlements by establishing those devoted to the support of the British claim to the country. ”

“ Of the many schemes that have been proposed, we most approve of that of African colonization. If we were able, and at liberty to go whithersoever we would, the greater number, willing to leave this community, would prefer LIBERIA, on the coast of Africa. Others, no doubt, would turn them towards some other regions; the world is wide. Already established there, in the settlement of the American colonization society, are many of our brethren, the pioneers of African restoration, who encourage us to join them. ”

“ The colony’s increasing illegal trade was threatening the destruction of the legitimate business of colonial and home merchants alike, as well as the Empire’s international relations. Although New England’s domestic trade was of slight value to the mother-country, she occupied a strategic position of first importance in relation to the valuable staple colonies of the south and the West Indies, and, in case of war with France, it was essential that England should have some means of official communication with, and control over, her strongest colony on the enemy’s frontier in America. ”

“ For though it may be true that the practice of defending the Colonies with the troops and at the cost of the mother-country was an innovation upon the earlier Colonial system, introduced at the time of the great war, it is not the less certain that to the generation of colonists that had grown up since that time the abandonment of it had all the effect of novelty. ”

“ The observer of the providential destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race in America notices that the emancipation of the thirteen American colonies, which constituted so many states and an independent nation, instead of being the result of the alleged political grievances, was rather the impulsive force of expansion, which encountered insuperable obstacles while the states were colonies subordinate to a European nation. ”

“ LEADING HISTORICAL FACTS Virginia and Massachusetts produced the most of our colonial literature. There were, however, thirteen colonies stretched along the seaboard from Georgia (1733) , the last to be founded, to Canada. Although these colonies were established under different grants or charters, and although some had more liberty and suffered less from the interference of England than others, it is nevertheless true that every colony was a school for a self-governing democracy. No colonies elsewhere in the world had the same amount of liberty. ”

“ Before our Revolutionary War the dealings of that Government, as such, with the Indians are hardly distinguishable from those of our own colonial authorities. Since the establishment of our Government the matter is more complicated. While we were still colonies Britain sought, as we did, alliances with Indians against Indians; our wars with the savages were in her interest as well as our own, and the declaration of war against them came more than once from the other side of the water. ”