INTRODUCTION.

A VIEW OF THE BRITISH COLONIES OF NORTH AMERICA FROM THEIR ORIGIN TO THEIR INDEPENDENCE.

CHAPTER I.

Of the first settlements, character, and condition of the inhabitants.

To the influence of commercial enterprize, we owe the commencement of the British empire in America; to religious and political persecutions, the growth and subversion of it. The original incentive to the colonization of Virginia, was the hope of possessing the rich mines that were supposed to exist in the unexplored regions of that province. But the rapid torrent of population, which afterwards flowed into it, and covered, by its successive inundations, the other portions of this vast territory, was agitated by a contrary spirit. The emigrants to New England, to Pennsylvania, Maryland, and for the most part, to the Carolinas, were distinguished for their piety or superstition; and, for the exclusive exercise of

their devotions, or predominance of their religion, they cheerfully resigned all temporal interests and affections. A portion of these, having encountered, in its fiercest violence, the fury of theological animosity, being alternately the instruments and victims of it, renounced the unavailing struggle by voluntary migration. A part were banished by the interdictions of an illiberal government; others were proscribed by the conscientious bigotry of a tyrant, and sought a refuge from the rage of their persecutors, amongst the barbarians of the desert.

The settlement of these states was prosecuted at a time when the principles of freedom, after an extinction of many centuries, were revived in the mother country; and, from the animosities, factions and furious civil wars which distracted that kingdom, there was produced, for the population of America, a resolute and enterprising race of inhabitants. Of these, some were unsuccessful in rebellion and fled from the vengeance of the laws; others, for a known attachment to liberty, migrated with the connivance of their sovereigns. Next, in order, we may comprehend those who pined in hopeless poverty from the exorbitant exactions of corrupt and rapacious governments, or the persecutions of adverse fortune. Nor were these inferior to the partners of their exile in dignity of numbers, strength or resolution

of character. Some, also, of an honest ambition and restless spirit, disdainful of inferiority, wearied of the opprobrious obscurity to which their merit was depressed by the ascendant of wealth, by the influence of privileged orders, and by the struggles and stratagems of dishonorable competition, sought, in the wild regions of an uncivilized world, the rewards of their enterprize, or security from unmerited contempt.

In this elemental population, the English character, in conjunction with the Irish and Scotch, was predominant; tinctured, however, in no small degree, by the admixture of other nations; of French, Swedes, Hollanders, and Germans. It was formed from the coalition of the national antipathies and prepossessions of all Europe, animated by the most imperious passions of the human mind, and diversified in its progress, by strange contrasts and incompatible associations. Into this "common asylum of mankind" were thrown, by the alternate waves of revolution and faction, the stern, bigoted republican, and the adherent of his murdered sovereign. The persecutor found refuge amongst the victims of his persecution; the catholic was associated with the hugonot, the puritan with the quaker, the pious divine with the inexorable fanatic.

The mother country, rarely prodigal towards her colonial offspring in acts of benevolence, to neglect or

injury, sometimes added indignity and insult. At an age in which their tenderness most required the cares of maternity, when they had already merited, by their services and by their fidelity, a share in the distribution of public honors and rewards, she turned loose among them the convicts of her prisons. This barbarous policy was, however, innoxious in its consequence. The malefactors thus transported, were, for the most part, victims of ecclesiastical bigotry, royalists hostile to the tyranny of Cromwell, refractory and seditious persons who had meditated or attempted rebellion against the domineering spirit of their kings, or criminal only by the ascendency of opposite factions. Some were vagabonds and thieves. But, of these, the number was too inconsiderable and too extensively diffused, to produce contamination. Cut off from the nutriment of his vices, even the villain, by honest pursuits and the predominance of good example, was reclaimed; and by an honorable conclusion of his life, atoned for the former transgressions of it. From such ancestry, we may add, were the descendants of Romulus, the models of every moral excellence which adorns human nature, and of every political virtue that commands the admiration of the world.

The subsequent population which reared the superstructure of the colonial edifice was derived prin

cipally from a continuation of the causes that originally produced it. The meritorious character of this successive accumulation of inhabitants, and the integrity of their origin, with the few casual exceptions I have enumerated, may be safely inferred from their progress in the career of prosperity, their improvement in the arts, the humanity of their institutions; and, no less unequivocally, from a simple retrospect of the condition of that country to which they removed, and a consideration of the motives by which men, in the different stages of society, are impelled to migration.

The vagrant and inconstant habits of the barbarian weaken the ties which connect him with a fixed habitation; by the impulse of animal feelings, or the instigation of a warlike spirit, he seeks those regions only which may gratify his indolence or invite his rapacity. Among the inhabitants of civilized nations, those who are nursed in idleness and luxury, less devoted to virtue than to pleasure, are seduced from their homes by the vices of a more profligate people, or the blandishments of a milder heaven. The ruffian is regardless of country or kindred; and, in the midst of corrupt and populous communities, seeks the associates of his crimes, the food of his debaucheries and rapine. The spirit of enterprize, the sense of dignity are extinguished in the bosom of the slave;