CHAPTER VIII

ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES DRAW APART

For almost a century after the first coming of the English to America we find no evidence of the existence of the seed of union from which later was to spring a nation. The new English nation that Raleigh dreamed of on the shores of Virginia was to be not a nation in the modern sense but royal provinces always governed from home, which were to redound to the glory and strength of England, whose people, while acknowledging the authority of proprietors or governors, would recognize a still higher allegiance to the Crown, and in America continue to be Englishmen as much as they were in England. As charters and patents were granted for each new colony, there was no comprehensive plan of coördination, and no attempt to lay the foundation of a political or social system that admitted of easy and harmonious expansion. The circumstances under which the colonies were founded made this to a large extent impossible. Differences of religion, climate, and social conditions repelled rather than attracted the settlements stretched along the Atlantic seaboard from Massachusetts to the Carolinas. Common purposes and aspirations and a moral and political concept of life frequently, but not always,

brought about unity of action between the men of New England, but they were suspicious of and disliked the settlers of New York, who fully reciprocated the feeling; Penn's religion destroyed sympathy between his colony and New England; religious and political differences kept New England apart from Maryland and Virginia; no strong ties bound the Carolinas and later Georgia with their southern neighbors or the more remote colonies of the North.1

1

"Down to the eve of war which began in 1775," Palfrey tells us, "New England had little knowledge of the communities which took part with her in that conflict. Till the time of the Boston Port Bill, Massachusetts and Virginia, the two principal English colonies, had with each other scarcely more relations of acquaintance, business, mutual influence, or common action, than either of them had with Jamaica or Quebec." Between the several

1 "A voluntary association or coalition, at least a permanent one, is almost as difficult to be supposed: for fire and water are not more heterogeneous than the different colonies in North America. Nothing can exceed the jealousy and emulation, which they possess in regard to each other. The inhabitants of Pennsylvania and New York have an inexhaustible source of animosity, in their jealousy for the trade of the Jerseys. Massachusetts Bay and Rhode Island, are not less interested in that of Connecticut. The West Indies are a common subject or emulation to them all. Even the limits and boundaries of each colony, are a constant source of litigation. — In short, such is the difference of character, of manners, of religion, of interest, of the different colonies, that I think, if I am not wholly ignorant of the human mind, were they left to themselves, there would soon be a civil war, from one end of the continent to the other; while the Indians and Negroes would, with better reason, impatiently watch the opportunity of exterminating them all together." Burnaby: Travels into North America, p. 92.

2 Palfrey: History of New England, vol. 1, preface, p. ix; cf. Parkman: Montcalm and Wolfe, vol. 1, chap. 1, passim.

members of each group there were, perhaps, special intimacies, domestic, commercial, military, religious; but between the several groups there were almost no intimacies at all.1

Every colony had its own domestic and military problems which fully taxed its resources. The North made war against the Indian and had the fear of the French; in the South there was another form of Indian warfare and the menace of Spain. Trade, which knows no barriers and no nationality, which gives birth to no sentiment and teaches no patriotism, brought these widely scattered settlers together; but it fostered no spirit of a new nationality and offered no inducement to cast off the old; for while trade brings nations in contact in the common meeting-place of the market-house and ought to soften national animosities and break down prejudices, it is one of the anomalies of commerce that it engenders envy and creates a longing for conquest. The men of New England traded with those of the South, but there the intercourse ended. A colonial league was beyond their political philosophy. Yet unperceived there was a force at work that was to unify these people when the time was ripe. Unlike as they were in many things, in one thing they met on common ground.

The constitutions of all the colonies were modeled on that of England; in all the colonies there were the same political methods; the same politi

1 Tyler: A History of American Literature, vol. 11, p. 9.

cal principles animated men North and South; and men thus trained in the same school found it not difficult to work together when political union could no longer be delayed. This power of cohesive attraction was stimulated by the policy of the English Government. It was an influence "strongly tending to counteract the principles that separated the American communities from each other, and to unite them by a growing sense of common interest and common injury in a confederacy fatal to the prerogative of the parent state. Every added year tended no less to weaken the divisive influence of the distinctions imported by the original colonists into their settlements, than to enhance the sense of united interest, and to augment the power by which this interest might be sustained and defended."1

Pressure from without as well as their own needs. brought about the first loosely formed confederacy, which was to foreshadow the union of the next century. The New England colonists had early been taught respect for the fighting ability of the red man and made to realize that he was a foe constantly to be guarded against. To the north were the French, a peril equally as great as the Indians; to the west were the Dutch, whose military power was less to be feared, but whose pin-pricking policy and claims to English territory were a constant source of friction. And the skies were black at home.

1 Grahame: The History of the United States, vol. II, p. 411.

In this year, 1638, when the proposal for the New England Confederacy is first made by Connecticut, civil war is raging in England and the defeat of the Parliamentary Party will, the colonists fear, see the old order restored, and Laud, delivered from his prison, more determined than ever to enslave conscience and "harry and besett" the Puritans of New England as he had those of the Old.

Negotiations begun in 1638 culminated in 1643 in a union of the colonies of Connecticut, New Haven, Massachusetts, and Plymouth, which an American historian has well described as "merely a business arrangement; it did not conduce to arouse any particular attachments or patriotism." Each colony retained its own government, and no provision was made for a Federal Congress or Bundesrath or for federal taxation; the affairs of the Union were to be administered by eight commissioners, two from each colony; the vote of six was required to carry any measure, and from their vote there was no appeal to the people. The expenses of war were divided among the colonies on a per capita basis, as were the spoils of war. The Union, which was declared to be perpetual, was dissolved in 1684. It was never satisfactory, for it made Massachusetts, whose population and resources were larger than those of the other three colonies combined, subordinate to them, and when Massachusetts was outvoted her only remedy was to violate the compact, 1 Elson: History of the United States of America, p. 120.