Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II

Great Epochs in American
History, Vol. II

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Title: Great Epochs in American History, Vol. II The Planting Of The
First Colonies: 1562--1733
Author: Various
Editor: Francis W. Halsey
Release Date: June 11, 2005 [EBook #16038]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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EPOCHS, AMERICAN ***

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GREAT EPOCHS IN AMERICAN HISTORY
DESCRIBED BY FAMOUS WRITERS FROM COLUMBUS TO
WILSON
Edited, with Introductions and Explanatory Notes
By FRANCIS W. HALSEY

_Associate Editor of "The World's Famous Orations"; Associate Editor
of "The Best of the World's Classics"; author of "The Old New York
Frontier"; Editor of "Seeing Europe With Famous Authors"_
IN TEN VOLUMES
ILLUSTRATED
VOL. II
THE PLANTING OF THE FIRST COLONIES: 1562--1733
Current Literature Publishing Company New York
COPYRIGHT, 1912 AND 1916, by
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
[_Printed in the United States of America_]

[Transcriber's Note: This text retains original spellings. Also,
superscripted abbreviations or contractions are indicated by the use of a
caret (^), such as w^th (with).]

INTRODUCTION
(_The Planting of the First Colonies_)
After the discoverers and explorers of the sixteenth century came
(chiefly in the seventeenth) the founders of settlements that grew into
States--French Huguenots in Florida and Carolina; Spaniards in St.
Augustine; English Protestants in Virginia and Massachusetts; Dutch
and English in New York; Swedes in New Jersey and Delaware;
Catholic English in Maryland; Quaker English and Germans in
Pennsylvania; Germans and Scotch-Irish in Carolina; French Catholics
in Louisiana; Oglethorpe's debtors in Georgia.
To some of these came disastrous failures--to the Huguenots and
Spaniards in Florida, to the English in Roanoke, Cuttyhunk and
Kennebee. Others who survived had stern and precarious first
years--the English in Jamestown and Plymouth, the Dutch in New York,
the French in New Orleans. Chief among leaders stand John Smith,
Bradford, Penn, Bienville and Oglethorpe, and chief among settlements,
Jamestown, Plymouth, New York, Massachusetts Bay, Wilmington,
Philadelphia, New Orleans and Savannah. The several movements, in
their failures as in their successes, were distributed over a century and
three-quarters, but since the coming of Columbus a much longer period
had elapsed. From the discovery to the arrival of Oglethorpe lie 240

years, or a hundred years more than the period that separates our day
from the years when America gained her independence from England.
Each center of settlement had been inspired by an impulse separate
from that of others. Alike as some of them were, in having as a moving
cause a desire to escape from persecution, religious or political, or
otherwise to better conditions, they were divided by years, if not by
generations, in time; the settlers came from lands isolated and remote
from one another; they were different as to race, form of government,
and religious and political ideals, and, once communities had been
founded, each expanded on lines of its own and knew little of its
neighbors.
The Spaniards who founded St. Augustine continued long to live there,
but of social and political growth in Spanish Florida there was none.
Spain, in those eventful European years, was fully absorbed elsewhere
in Continental wars which taxed all her strength, especially that furious
war, waged for forty years against Holland, and from which Spain
retired ultimately in failure. In those years also was overthrown Philip's
Armada, an event in which the scepter of maritime-empire passed from
Spain to England.
Of the French settlements the chief was New Orleans, French from the
beginning, and so to remain in racial preponderance, religious beliefs,
and political ideals, for a century and a half after Bienville founded
it--so, in fact, it still remains in our day. But elsewhere the French gave
to the United States no permanent settlements. Numbers of them came
to Florida, only to perish by the sword; others in large numbers settled
in South Carolina, only to become merged with other races, among
whom the English, with their speech and their laws, became supreme.
On Manhattan Island and in the valleys of the Hudson and lower
Mohawk settled the Dutch a few years after the English at Jamestown.
They erected forts on Manhattan Island and at Albany, Hartford and
near Philadelphia; they partitioned vast tracts of fertile lands among
favorite patroons; they built up a successful trade in furs with the
Indians--and sent the profits home. Real settlements they did not
found--at least, not settlements that were infused with the spirit of local
enterprise, or