American colonists

“ One more point may be noted as having an important bearing upon the general question of the relations between a mother country and its colonies, one which in particular contributed to ill-feeling between England and the North American states. Colonization rarely takes place in an empty land. The colonists on arrival find native inhabitants, strong or weak, few or many, as the case may be. In North America there were strong fighting races of Indians, and the native question played an all-important part in the early history of European settlement in this part of the world. ”

“ The English migration and the founding of the English colonies was in fact due mainly to the initiative of the colonists themselves; and the institutions which they established in America were different from those which statesmen and traders had imagined. The character of colonial life and institutions was determined by the motives which induced the settlers to leave the land of their birth, by the inherited traditions which they carried with them into the wilderness, and by the wilderness itself—the circumstances which, in the new country, closed them round. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At more than one period, English colonists have been accused of believing that “it is the undoubted right of every Englishman to settle where he likes, to behave as he sees fit, and to call upon the Mother-Country to foot the bill.” [759] This, however, is not merely a colonial characteristic: it is the spirit developed upon every frontier, as the later history of American westward expansion may be called upon to illustrate; and, as we have pointed out, the whole chain of colonies formed the long encircling frontier of England. ”

“ The first and most natural way of lighting the houses of the American colonists, both in the North and South, was by the pine-knots of the fat pitch-pine, which, of course, were found everywhere in the greatest plenty in the forests. ”

“ While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial instincts and traditions of the first colonists were overwhelmingly English, and that their political and ethical views were the product of a turbulent and distraught time, it is even more important to note how the physical situation of the colonists affected their intellectual and moral, as well as their political problems. ”

“ These rulers properly regarded their functions as more industrial than political. They for the first time distributed the colonists into a series of settlements up and down the river for farming and live-stock tending; they spurred the willing workers by assigning them three-acre private gardens ”

“ Colonization of the American continent, its earliest conditions and opportunities, 216, 218,219; safety of the colonists lay in the inter-tribal warfare of the natives, and in making alliance with one tribe against another, 217, 221; methods of the different colonists, 218-220; plea of the colonists in justification of their course towards the natives, 220, 221; theory of discovery under which Europeans took possession of the continent, 226, 227; claim of the colonists that the natives were their rightful subjects, 228-230; the white man's reasons for dispossessing the Indians, 239, 240 ”

“ In speaking of the American Revolution, the Report declared: “Throughout ... there should be but one aim: to impress upon the pupils the sublime spectacle of thirteen weak colonies spread along fifteen hundred miles of sea coast, poorly equipped and poorly disciplined, giving battle to the strongest military and naval power in the world. In addition the Colonists were surrounded by hostile Indians and in their midst was a large body of Tories working at times openly, at times secretly, but, at all times against them.... ”

“ America opened wide her hospitable doors and gave assurance of liberty and comfort to all who came. The thirteen colonies now contained a population of about three millions.
Up to the year 1764, the Americans cherished a deep reverence and affection for the mother country. They were proud to be considered British subjects, and of the lofty place England held among the nations of the earth. They gloried in the splendor of her military achievements. They copied her manners and her fashions. Her language, laws and literature were as fondly cherished by the colonists as by the English themselves. ”

“ Although there was, unluckily, little that the white man could teach him that was of any service, he, on the contrary, taught the colonists many a useful lesson. He showed them how and where to plant, trapped their game and gathered in their stock of furs, guided them through the almost trackless forests, and, in a multitude of ways, gave them knowledge of the land which they had entered and of the products it might yield. ”

“ The English colonies were very different from those of the French. Founded in the early days of religious persecution by men too strong-minded to accept tyranny or to make composition with their consciences, the new colonies of Englishmen in America had thriven in accordance with the antique spirit of independence which had called them into existence. The colonists were a hardy, a stubborn, and a high-minded people, well fitted to battle with the elements and the Indians, and to preserve, under new conditions, the austere standard of morality which led them to look for liberty across the sea. ”

“ The United States have about 2,000,000 slaves, and about 500,000 free colored people.
The American Colonization Society has existed for thirteen years, and has exported yearly, upon an average, about 150 persons. ”

“ Every reader of history is aware of the melancholy and disastrous commencement of most of our American colonies. The great cause was that they were founded in injustice. Adventurers, with charters from the English monarch in their pockets, as the Spaniards and Portuguese had the Pope's bull in theirs, landed on the coast of America and claimed it for their own, reckoning the native inhabitants of no more account than the bears and fallow-deer of the woods. ”

“ The lords and gentry of England were astonished at the intelligence displayed in the opposition, by the rural population of America. They fancied the colonists to be an ignorant, ragged people, living in log cabins, scattered through the wilderness, and, in social position, two or three degrees below European and Irish peasantry. Great was their surprise to hear from all the colonies, and from the remotest districts in each colony, the voice of intelligent and dignified rebuke. ”

“ Only, as colonization spread in the long course of years, the dwellers in one province came into contact with the dwellers in another, and both the one and the other came face to face with the French advance. Then the pressure of common danger made for union, and the race instinct gathered strength. The mother country sent out soldiers; colonists were enlisted in royal regiments to supplement the provincial militias; and in clumsy, most imperfect fashion, the English in North America began to shape themselves into a nation. ”

“ Its benevolent purposes are not confined to the limits of one continent—not to the prosperity of a solitary race. They embrace the largest two portions of the earth, with the peace and happiness of both descriptions of their present inhabitants, and the countless millions of their posterity. The colonists, reared in the bosom of this republic, with a knowledge of the blessings which liberty imparts, although now unable to share them, will carry a recollection of them to benighted Africa, and light up, in time, her immense territory. ”

“ It is impossible to forget in the early history of the North American colonies, what facility the French displayed, in contrast with the English, in attaining communication with the children of the forest, in acquiring and retaining their confidence, in taking on their rude and uncultivated modes of life, and in shaping even their superstitions to their own selfish purposes. ”

“ The island colony proved valuable as a supply and repair station for traders and explorers, and thus served as a nucleus of both French and English settlement in America.
It is difficult for us of to-day to realize that, at any time in the world's history, enlightened folk should have thought good colonists could be made out of the sweepings of the jails and gutters of the Old World. ”

“ In this way the balance is adjusted in favour of the colonies. It is a great deal more than redressed if the superior, social, and economic conditions, under which the colonists live, are also placed in the scale. ”

“ The people who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the decade of 1630-40 doubtless had every desire to better their condition, and their zeal in seizing land from the Indians showed that they were able to put this desire into effect successfully. Their motive in emigrating, however, was more political than was that of many later colonists, most of whom came frankly to find fortune in a new country. ”

“ The colonists were exceedingly perplexed to know what to do in these emergencies. The whole wilderness of North America was filled with savages. If they commenced a general war, it was impossible to predict how far its ravages might extend. The colonists were eminently men of peace. They wished to build houses, and cultivate fields, and surround their homes with the comforts and the opulence of a high civilization. They had bought their lands of the Indians fairly, and had paid for them all that the lands then were worth. ”

“ The reason was that the French relations to the Indians were more human than those of the English. No doubt, among the English colonists were Quakers and Moravians, whose tenets bade them deal gently with the people of the soil; and on the New York frontier, from Dutch times, there had been friendship, sometimes warmer sometimes cooler, between the Dutch and the English colonists on the one hand, and the Iroquois on the other. But the ordinary English colonist's view of the red man was the Old Testament view—hard, exclusive, and often cruel. ”

“ One might venture positively to assert that the occupancy of this continent by Europeans would have been indefinitely deferred and delayed had all its native tribes, in amity with each other, or willing for the occasion to arrest their feuds, made a bold and united front to resist the first intrusion upon their common domains. Certainly the full truth of this assertion might be illustrated as applicable to many incidents and crises in the first feeble and struggling fortunes of our original colonists in various exposed and inhospitable places. ”

“ A colony so feeble could hardly be expected to preserve its borders from the invasion of neighbours as vigorous and of as expansive a character as those of New England, more especially as the puritan colonists never scrupled to question the right of their weaker neighbours to any territory at all. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Most of the early colonists of all classes were too busy in fighting Indians and raising the means of living to concern themselves with the relatives left in England. This indifference was not uncommon among us, and was in those early days to be expected. ”

“ They alone, amidst the hordes of gold-greedy colonists who scoured the country in search of mines and slaves, established humane relations with the Indians, learned their language, studied their records, and while bringing them into schools to teach them Christianity, learned from them all that could be discovered concerning their own religion, history, and traditions. ”

“ That is why English colonies succeed. And it is the lack of this passion for the land which makes bad colonists of men of other nationalities.
The Americans are simply brutal about their possessions. Out here in the North-west one is horrified at the general callousness. I have watched people making what we should call a home, breaking new land, building a charming house, working hard to make everything within and without as perfect as they know how. ”

“ The proposition of forming inland colonies in America is, we humbly conceive, entirely new: it adopts principles in respect to American settlements, different from what have hitherto been the policy of this kingdom, and leads to a system which, if pursued through all its consequences, is, in the present state of that country, of the greatest importance. ”

“ The document shows the determination of the colonists to occupy a highly commendable position among the nations of the earth. We have no sympathy with the motives which induced the purchase of the colony; and we have little with the despondency that drove our brethren from our shores. ”

“ In this book American colonization is considered in the light of general colonization as a phase of history. Englishmen in planting colonies in America brought with them the institutions with which they had been familiar at home: it is shown what these institutions were, and how, in adapting themselves to new conditions of growth, they differed from English models. As prominent among the changed conditions, the physical geography of America and its aboriginal inhabitants receive somewhat extended treatment ”