Our Foreigners | Page 5

Revere, Peter Faneuil, and James
Bowdoin of Massachusetts; John Jay, Nicholas Bayard, Stephen
DeLancey of New York; Elias Boudinot of New Jersey; Henry Laurens
and Francis Marion of South Carolina. Like the Scotch-Irish, these
French Protestants and their descendants have distinguished themselves
for their capacity for leadership.
The Jews came early to New York, and as far back as 1691 they had a
synagogue in Manhattan. The civil disabilities then so common in
Europe were not enforced against them in America, except that they
could not vote for members of the legislature. As that body itself
declared in 1737, the Jews did not possess the parliamentary franchise
in England, and no special act had endowed them with this right in the
colonies. The earliest representatives of this race in America came to
New Amsterdam with the Dutch and were nearly all Spanish and
Portuguese Jews, who had found refuge in Holland after their
wholesale expulsion from the Iberian peninsula in 1492. Rhode Island,
too, and Pennsylvania had a substantial Jewish population. The Jews
settled characteristically in the towns and soon became a factor in
commercial enterprise. It is to be noted that they contributed liberally to
the patriot cause in the Revolution.

While the ships bearing these many different stocks were sailing
westward, England did not gain possession of the whole Atlantic
seaboard without contest. The Dutch came to Manhattan in 1623 and
for fifty years held sway over the imperial valley of the Hudson. It was
a brief interval, as history goes, but it was long enough to stamp upon
the town of Manhattan the cosmopolitan character it has ever since
maintained. Into its liberal and congenial atmosphere were drawn Jews,
Moravians, and Anabaptists; Scotch Presbyterians and English
Nonconformists; Waldenses from Piedmont and Huguenots from
France. The same spirit that made Holland the lenient host to political
and religious refugees from every land in that restive age characterized
her colony and laid the foundations of the great city of today. England
had to wrest from the Dutch their ascendancy in New Netherland,
where they split in twain the great English colonies of New England
and of the South and controlled the magnificent harbor at the mouth of
the Hudson, which has since become the water gate of the nation.
While the English were thus engaged in establishing themselves on the
coast, the French girt them in by a strategic circle of forts and trading
posts reaching from Acadia, up the St. Lawrence, around the Great
Lakes, and down the valley of the Mississippi, with outposts on the
Ohio and other important confluents. When, after the final struggle
between France and Britain for world empire, France retired from the
North American continent, she left to England all her possessions east
of the Mississippi, with the exception of a few insignificant islands in
the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the West Indies; and to Spain she ceded
New Orleans and her vast claims beyond the great river.
Thus from the first, the lure of the New World beckoned to many races,
and to every condition of men. By the time that England's dominion
spread over half the northern continent, her colonies were no longer
merely English. They were the most cosmopolitan areas in the world. A
few European cities had at times been cities of refuge, but New York
and Philadelphia were more than mere temporary shelters to every
creed. Nowhere else could so many tongues be heard as in a stroll
down Broadway to the Battery. No European commonwealths
embraced in their citizenry one-half the ethnic diversity of the

Carolinas or of Pennsylvania. And within the wide range of his
American domains, the English King could point to one spot or another
and say: "Here the Spaniards have built a chaste and beautiful mission;
here the French have founded a noble city; here my stubborn
Roundheads have planted a whole nest of commonwealths; here my
Dutch neighbors thought they stole a march on me, but I forestalled
them; this valley is filled with Germans, and that plateau is covered
with Scotch-Irish, while the Swedes have taken possession of all this
region." And with a proud gesture he could add, "But everywhere they
read their laws in the King's English and acknowledge my
sovereignty."
Against the shifting background of history these many races of diverse
origin played their individual parts, each contributing its essential
characteristics to the growing complex of a new order of society in
America. So on this stage, broad as the western world, we see these
men of different strains subduing a wilderness and welding its diverse
parts into a great nation, stretching out the eager hand of exploration for
yet more land, bringing with arduous toil the ample gifts of sea and
forest to the townsfolk, hewing out homesteads