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cargoes of black chattels, and even before that slaves had been smuggled into the colony from South Carolina.

Although the charter of the trustees was to run for twenty-one years, they surrendered it shortly before it expired by limitation. The great scheme had proved a failure. Once more it had been demonstrated that men are not made by coddling, and that states as well as character are only wrought out by the exercise of individual expression and the struggle that brings out the best of which men are possessed. The silk and the wine and the olives that were to make Georgia prosperous and England rich had not been grown, nor were any attempts made to raise them. The Georgians looked over to South Carolina and saw slaves toiling in the swamp lands and raising indigo and rice, which made their neighbors rich, while they were struggling with poverty; and they wanted slaves so that they might also grow rice and indigo and be surrounded by the same comfort. The alluring vision of a peaceful, happy, contented community was a dream that had never been realized. Of all the English colonies Georgia was the most discontented and the most backward, exceeding even North Carolina in this respect. In Georgia, as in all the Southern colonies afflicted with the curse of slavery, there was the element of "mean whites" (the Georgia "crackers" of to-day can trace their descent through an unbroken line to ancestors who were among

Oglethorpe's first settlers), and slavery there as everywhere else degraded free labor and encouraged thriftlessness and slack habits. There was much crime and lawlessness, there were neither schools nor literature, the people were rude and uncouth, communication was difficult because the roads were mere trails.

When the Crown took over the charter a royal governor was appointed and a form of government established similar to those in the other provinces. Rice and indigo worked by slaves were the principal products of the colony, but lumber and turpentine were also important articles of commerce. Down to the Revolution, when the other colonies were highly developed and had given birth to men of the widest mental attainments, Georgia was still a struggling, backward, illiterate community.

CHAPTER XIX

THE FIRST WRITTEN CONSTITUTION

WHILE a civilization was being developed in the South, the northern colonies, laid on the Pilgrim and Puritan foundation, were growing apace and making progress along their own lines. We have already seen how New England came into being, and it is not necessary for the purpose the writer has in view to trace minutely the growth of Massachusetts during the years immediately following, but some attention must be paid to the origin of the other New England colonies, to complete the historical perspective.

The rigid theocracy established by the Puritan founders of Massachusetts invited to resistance men less inclined to subordinate earthly rule to divine interpretation or who were more liberal in their concept of life; and the foundation of what is now the state of Connecticut has a twofold interest to the student of early American development. Connecticut, or as it first appeared in American history, the settlement of Hartford, was the protest of dissidents against the iron-clad rule of the theocracy, who found that it was easier to abandon Massachusetts and carve out for themselves a new home in the wilderness than to remain and perpetually be at war. Connecticut is further

interesting to us because it was the beginning of that great and world-influencing movement, by which the parent colony casts forth a shoot which takes root and flourishes in new soil. Before this time colonies had been formed by conquest or migration from the mother country, but now we are to see the colony sending forth her own pioneers to extend the frontier and increase her strength.

Theocratic tyranny soon bred its discontent. As early as 1633 Thomas Hooker, a clergyman in charge of a congregation at Newton, a man of learning and eloquence, much more tolerant than the majority of the Puritan ministers, with far less pugnacity and hair-splitting narrowness, and a belief in democracy rather than the autocratic rule of the church, to whom the divine right of selfordained governors was no less repugnant than that of kings, began to agitate resistance to the ecclesiastical oligarchy then in control in Massachusetts; and he found zealous supporters not only in his own congregation, but also in the neighboring towns of Watertown and Dorchester.

The idea of democracy at that time, as a philosophic principle, was very foreign to the ideas of the men whose descendants were to establish it as an enduring form of government; Winthrop had such a poor opinion of power entrusted to the people that to him democracy was "amongst most civil nations accounted the meanest and worst of all forms of government," and he found historical

warrant for believing “that it hath always been of least continuance and fullest of trouble"; John Cotton, that "thundering preacher,” voiced what was generally believed when he said, "Democracy I do not conceive that God did ordain as a fit government either for church or commonwealth."

The theocracy had a quick and ready means for overcoming resistance to authority and banished those who challenged its rule. It is probable that would have been the fate of Hooker and his associates had they not forestalled action by voluntarily emigrating. Accordingly, the people of the three towns, the able-bodied, the old, and the little children, with their cattle and their household goods, left Massachusetts and turned their faces to the south, where on the banks of the Connecticut River they founded the three towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, Hartford being the most important and occupying in a sense the relation of the seat of the central government to the allied towns. At first these towns, which Massachusetts regarded as one of her outposts, were governed by Massachusetts through a board of commissioners, but that extraordinary craving for self-government, which is written on every page of American history from the landing at Jamestown to the present day, made these Massachusetts emigrants determined to be their own rulers, and the towns elected representatives to a General Court at Hartford, which became the mother town of the new colony and was the

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