American settlers

“ We have now acquired insular regions, situated in the tropics, and in another hemisphere, and hence unsuitable for American settlers, even if they were not, as they are, already populated, and their lands already largely taken up. ”

“ 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 settlers are very largely immigrants who are trying to acquire a home and livelihood on the land. The writer of [Pg xvi] this Introduction has been studying this same subject for many years, and has done so in many different parts of the United States. The conclusion which we might reach deductively is confirmed by observation—namely, that the man who settles on the land in the right way is, with the rarest exceptions, likely to become a good American, as are also his children. ”

“ The first emigrations to North America were not composed of a strolling banditti of rude nations, like the first people of most other colonies in the history of the world. The early settlers in the newly discovered continent were as far advanced in civilization, policy, and manner; in their ideas of government, the nature of compacts, and the bands of civil union, as any of their neighbors at that period among the most polished nations of Europe. ”

“ The most important aspect of the history of the movement into the frontier of New York at this period, therefore, was the evidence which it afforded that in the competition for settlement between colonies possessing a vast area of vacant land, those which imposed feudal tenures and undemocratic restraints, and which exploited settlers, were certain to lose. ”

“ The Pilgrim Fathers and the early settlers in Australia and South Africa and amidst the snows of Canada were colonists of whom any mother-nation might be proud; but the emigrants who shrink at the crudeness of our present American civilization, who shirk the responsibilities of our government, who must have a leisure class with which to play, and who are shocked by the familiarity of our press, are colonists who leave their country for their country's good. ”

“ The first settlers upon this continent were imbued with the spirit of freedom, and to gain this object left their mother country. The American shores became the asylum of the oppressed of all nationalities. ”

“ When the first settlers landed on American shores, the difficulties in finding or making shelter must have seemed ironical as well as almost unbearable. ”

“ Towards the north on the banks of the Mississippi, the settlers are generally Frenchmen, who now assume by degrees the American manners and language. Many of them are wealthy store-keepers, merchants, and farmers; but for the most part, however, a lightfooted kind of people, who, from their fathers, have inherited frivolity, and from their mothers, Indian women, uncleanliness. ”

“ To this good rule we attribute, to a great extent, not alone our success in bringing settlers to our colonies, but likewise their general contentment in their new homes and brave cheerfulness in meeting the trials, hardships, and set-backs, which are incident to new settlements. ”

“ In the main the settlers were persons of slender means, and lived hard, frontier lives. They tilled small farms with their own hands, and indentured servitude and slave-holding were consequently unimportant. ”

“ Long before the colony arrived, people were gathering in and occupying the best of the land, and thus scattering the little band of colonists. Indeed the fame of the colony will people this country by many times the number of actual settlers it itself will bring. ”

“ While in the Land Service of the United States there were many examples of heroic conduct by colored settlers worthy of the highest praise. Many of them, emigrants from other Southern States, seeking better conditions, and arriving with barely sufficient to pay entrance fee, and nothing to sustain them in their fight with nature to clear their heavily-wooded land and fit it for cultivation. ”

“ In thirty-three of our largest cities the foreign population is larger than the native; in Milwaukee and Fall River the foreign percentage rises as high as eighty-five [Pg 200] per cent. In all these cities the foreign colonies are as distinct and practically as isolated socially as though they were in Russia or Poland, Italy or Hungary. Foreign in language, customs, habits, and institutions, these colonies are separated from each other, as well as from the American population, by race, customs, and religion. ”

“ The colonies remained united for about seventy years, when it became apparent that the territory was too large to be well governed by one assembly and a single governor. In 1729, the present division was made, and the rights of government and seven-eighths of the land were returned to the crown.
The soil and climate were so favorable that thousands of immigrants were attracted thither. Among them were numerous Huguenots or French Protestants, whose intelligence, thrift, and morality placed them among the very best settlers found anywhere in our country. ”

“ I doubt not that, if the emigrant had remained at home, it would have taken a thousand years to attain the same general development now reached by the free States of North America* The settlers carried with them the best ideas and the best institutions of their native land— the arts and sciences of England, the forms of a representative government, the trial by jury, the common law, the ideas of Christianity, and the traditions of the human race. In the woods, far from help, they were forced to become self-reliant and thrifty men. ”

“ In the early wars of the New England colonists — and the same might be said of those of Virginia — with the natives, the whole brunt of the strife, in loss of life and goods, and in charges for military stores and operations, came upon the actual settlers. ”

“ This same type made up the bulk of the population of the middle colonies and peopled the back country of the southern colonies. As most of the settlers in New England in the early migration were men who brought their families, the foundation stock thus established was on a better level than that in some other colonies where men arrived without bringing wives and therefore were forced to marry women of any kind whom the colony could furnish. ”

“ The settlers of colonies in America did not carry with them the laws of the land, as being bound by them wherever they should settle. They left the realm to avoid the inconveniences and hardships they were under, where some of those laws were in force, particularly ecclesiastical laws, those for payment of tythes and others. ”

“ This, together with the number of convicts, who after the expiration of their sentences remain with their respective families growing up under them, has so increased the population of free settlers, that the prosperity of the settlement, as a colony, has proportionally advanced ”

“ But since you began, the interpenetration of town and country by railroads, and the rush of emigrants to our colonies, have widened infinitely the sphere of your influence; and you are now teaching them also to live as useful men in the farthest corners of these isles, and in far lands beyond the seas, to become educated emigrants, loyal colonists; to raise, by their example, rude settlers, and ruder savages ”

“ The colonists were accustomed in England to specific ranks and orders of society. In America, while there were from the first sharp social distinctions, the fact that the great body of the settlers began life in the wilderness side by side, on an equal basis, was favorable to a democratic sentiment. Nobility was connected, in English minds, with great landed estates, of which there were few in America outside of Virginia, Maryland, South Carolina, and New York. ”

“ As soon as the colonies rallied from the first years of poverty and, above all, of comparative isolation, and a sequent tide of prosperity and wealth came rolling in, the settlers began to pick up in dress, to bedeck themselves, to send eagerly to the mother [Pg 316] country for new petticoats and doublets that, when proudly donned, did not seem simple and grave enough for the critical eyes of the omnipotent New England magistrates and ministers. ”

“ The observation of the writer and his interviews on this question with the people engaged in colonization have led him to the conclusion that such groups ought to be of from five to fifteen families each, settled in the same neighborhood among either groups of other nationalities or native settlers.
Such distribution of the immigrant settlers in smaller groups is favored by the immigrants themselves. ”

“ Emigrants from the Southern states shared their benefits equally with those from the North. Settlers were pouring in from all sections of the country; but chiefly from the North and West, because the hardy inhabitants of those states are always ready for enterprise and toil. ”

“ Along the western frontier of the colonies that were so soon to be the United States, on the slopes of the wooded mountains, and in the long, trough-like valleys that lay between the ranges, dwelt a peculiar and characteristically American people. ”

“ Tribes which a few years ago were so far removed from all White settlements as to render any annoyance or conflict between the two races improbable and almost impossible, have now, by the tide of emigration, been brought in close proximity to, and almost daily contact with, settlers. ”

“ It is not wonderful, therefore, that every trace of the convict origin of a certain proportion of the population of the United States of America should have disappeared entirely long ago. The free emigrant inhabitants of the American colonies were too numerous, from the very first, to permit persons of this class and origin to form a separate body in the community, far less to give the tone to society. ”

“ Wherever the earliest colonists settled in America, they had to adopt the modes of travel and the ways of getting from place to place of their predecessors and new neighbors, the Indians. These were first—and generally—to walk on their own stout legs; second, to go wherever they could by water, in boats. In Maryland and Virginia, where for a long time nearly all settlers tried to build their homes on the banks of the rivers and bays, the travel was almost entirely by boats; as it was between settlements on all the great rivers, the Hudson, Connecticut, and Merrimac. ”

“ I left these good folks in the height of enjoyment, and should not perhaps have said so much about them, but that having all very lately come from the United States across the plains, they had brought with them, and as yet retained, the simple manners and wants of a rural population. These people form the most valuable portion of the{53} emigration, for they come as permanent settlers, and they continue permanent improvers. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Fortunately, for the colony, many of the emigrants were men of more than ordinary ability; men who went out with a double purpose; first, to seek homes for themselves and families out of the reach of the American prejudice; second, to carry the gospel of civilization to their brethren. ”

“ In the southern colonies we find much the same attitude of welcome to respectable settlers, and fear of criminals and paupers, with this difference, that as immigration was slower into these colonies, more active measures were occasionally taken by the colonies themselves to encourage it. ”

“ Such people are not able to make a success of farming and should be avoided. These classes of applicants are found among immigrants as well as among natives, soldiers, and civilians.
How important the selection of settlers is for the success of colonization and settlement on land is shown by the close scrutiny of prospective settlers made by the agents of modern private colonization companies and also by certain state immigration officials. ”

“ While there I met many settlers on intimate terms, and I felt for them a peculiar sympathy, because they so strikingly reminded me of the men of our own western frontier of America, of the pioneer farmers and ranch-men who built up the States of the great plains and the Rocky Mountains. ”

“ From this point the settlements on the fertile tracts of intervale land which lie near the river become more numerous, and it is no unfrequent occurrence with travellers in the woods to fall in with a farmer and his family hard at work forming A FIRST SETTLEMENT. These settlers are mostly Americans, [5] or English and Scotch farmers, who have emigrated from the mother country to endeavour by honest labour to obtain a comfortable independence for themselves and their children. ”

“ The character originally impressed upon New England by such men was maintained by the powerful influence of the colleges and schools, so that there was always more attention devoted to scholarship and to writing than in any of the other colonies. Communities of Europeans, thrust into a wilderness and severed from Europe by the ocean, were naturally in danger of losing their higher culture and lapsing into the crudeness of frontier life. All the American colonies were deeply affected by this situation. ”