COLONIAL MIGRATION 249 of their time, and had they been merely seeking a good investment they would not have put their money into a new colony. A weightier motive was undoubtedly that of the public service and of the credit they would gain from its furtherance. They intended Carolina not as a competitor with existing Plantations but as a contribution to the imperial self-sufficiency that was the ideal of the time. It was not to grow sugar or tobacco, but the silks, wines, fruits and oils which England was then purchasing in foreign markets. Economic thought was by this time unfavourable to the emigration of useful English citizens, which it held to be a draining of the mother country's strength. The proprietors therefore sent out few native Englishmen, but looked rather to the older colonies, to Scotland, and to the Huguenots of France for the peopling of their new dominion. The plans for Carolina are thus worth a more detailed study than is here possible.1 They outran their performance, but they are a complete illustration of the imperial ideas of the time. The actual expansion of the reign of Charles II was almost entirely based upon the circumstance that all the older colonies had, for various reasons, a surplus population ready to migrate elsewhere. New England, particularly Massachusetts, was prolific of men. Its soil and climate were harsh, and many found its social atmosphere harsher still. Before the close of the century wandering New Englanders, toughened by discipline but eager to escape from it, had made their mark all over the world, in English politics, in the adventurous West Indies, and in oceanic trade extending even round the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean. To all the new American colonies they brought their energy and their independent political ideas; their religious straitness is the only quality they seem to have left behind them. Bermuda was a tiny colony with a high birth rate. Its population early reached the limits its soil could bear, and Bermudians also pervaded the western Atlantic as seamen and settlers even before the first Stuart wave of emigration had spent its force. In Barbados and the Leeward Islands fecundity was not so evident and death rates were high, but there the development of sugar planting displaced much of the white population for reasons already explained. Finally, Virginia was beginning to buy negro labour and had no more surplus land at the water's edge to bestow upon time-expired white servants. Her landless whites formed a class too numerous to find employment between the planter aristocracy and the servile mass. Some became frontiersmen in the higher grounds of the interior, but many were ready to migrate along the coastline outside the colony's limits. At the date of the grant of the Carolina patent some Virginians were already prospecting in search of fertile land about Albemarle Sound within the northern limit of the province. Sir William Berkeley, 1 See Raper, C. L., North Carolina; M'Crady, E., Hist. of South Carolina; Beer, vol. II, chap. ix. as the proprietor nearest to the scene of action, supervised the consolidation of this settlement and sent a Virginian, William Drummond, to be its first governor. These people settled down and became the nucleus of North Carolina. At about the same time, although the exact date is obscure, a party of New Englanders and another of Barbadians established themselves at Cape Fear, further to the southward. They were isolated from the first settlement by a long stretch of unoccupied coast, and in 1667 they abandoned their undertaking, whereupon some of them joined the Albemarle Sound colony. Meanwhile the proprietors sought to plant other regions by their own initiative. Sir John Colleton despatched exploring parties from Barbados in 1665–6, but no settlement was achieved until after the Dutch War. Then, in 1669, an expedition sailed from England with about a hundred emigrants, picked up more at Barbados and Bermuda, and in 1670 disembarked them all at the harbour subsequently called Charleston. Next year some recruits from New York joined them, and in this way the colonisation of South Carolina was begun. In the hope of introducing wine and silk cultivation the proprietors next brought over a body of Huguenots from France. Lastly, after long negotiations, a band of Scottish pioneers sailed from Glasgow and reached Carolina in 1684. They formed a separate settlement at Port Royal, well to the south of Charleston, the motive of the proprietors being that they should serve as an outpost of that colony against Spanish raiders from Florida. The position was perilous and its tenure brief. In 1686 the Spaniards sailed up the coast and destroyed the little settlement, whose survivors fled to Charleston.1 By the close of the century the colonisation of Carolina had thus concentrated round two centres, Albemarle Sound and Charleston, and these were already organised as the two distinct governments of North and South Carolina. In other respects besides area the results were disappointing. The projected new forms of cultivation never took root; even the French recruits proved as incapable of producing wine and silk in America as did the English pioneers. Subsistence-farming and the export of foodstuffs to the West Indies became the chief legitimate occupations, whilst the intricacy of the coastline made it an entrepôt for the many forms of illicit trade. The proprietors tried hard to make their colony respectable, but found themselves politically powerless. Their subjects were not law-abiding Englishmen from the homeland but colonial-bred adventurers, contemptuous of authority, and many of them debtors and bad characters who had made their places of origin too hot for them. John Locke, Shaftesbury's secretary, devised a form of government called the "Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina". Although embodying the most approved political theories of the day, it never came into operation, and the Carolinas evolved 1 Insh, G. P., Scottish Colonial Schemes, 1620-86, pp. 186-211. NEW ENGLAND AND NEW NETHERLAND 251 institutions of the ordinary colonial type, with governor, council and elected Assembly. The Assemblies reflected the character of their constituents, passed easy-going laws for the protection of local debtors and insurgents, and declined to enforce the proprietors' claims for quit-rents. Nevertheless, in spite of all drawbacks, the Carolina colonies were a permanent achievement and the seed of greater things. But they were hardly an expansion of England; in origin and character they were more truly the firstfruit of the expansion of colonial America. The difference may be realised on comparing the impotence of their proprietors with the stern discipline maintained by the Earl of Carlisle in Barbados at an earlier date. The conquest of the Dutch New Netherland, renamed by its captors New York and New Jersey, was the second undertaking of constructive imperialism in the America of the Restoration. Viewed in isolation it may appear an act of unprovoked piracy; examined in its setting it may still be described as unscrupulous, but certainly not as unwarranted. The watchword of the Restoration was the coordination of imperial activities on the basis of the laws of trade. The two chief obstacles were the particular interests of colonists and the desire of foreigners to intrude into the Empire's commerce. These obstacles appeared most serious in New England and New Netherland respectively. Massachusetts, the strongest State of New England, had already developed through its port of Boston an all-round trade by which it supplied the Plantations with foodstuffs, took their sugar and other produce in return, exchanged them with continental Europe for manufactured goods, to be distributed throughout the colonies. Boston was in fact aspiring to the position of a metropolis of the Atlantic Empire, with a firm grasp of the business designed by home statesmen to be the monopoly of London and the English capitalist. Clarendon understood the ambition and realised that the political weight of Massachusetts made it formidable.1 He sought for a counterpoise and found it in Connecticut, a colony which lacked a good seaport, was more largely agricultural in its interests, and disliked the air of superiority affected by Massachusetts. Connecticut men were expanding westwards along the stretch of coast between their river and the Hudson, and were also establishing themselves in the eastern half of Long Island; and both these regions were claimed by the Dutch. The latter had their headquarters at New Amsterdam at the mouth of the Hudson, their posts extended up that river to Rensselaerswyk on the border of the Six Nations, and along the coast they claimed ownership southwards to the estuary of the Delaware, which they had conquered from Sweden in 1655. The Dutch were traders rather than colonists, and at New Amsterdam they welcomed illicit cargoes from the English colonies and forwarded 1 See Kaye, P. L., Colonial Administration under Lord Clarendon, and Beer, Old Colonial System. them to Europe. Thus Boston used the Dutch port as an annexe for its own more risky operations, which could be conducted in greater safety under a foreign jurisdiction. The situation therefore amounted to this, that a conquest of New Netherland would gratify and strengthen Connecticut, check the independence of Massachusetts, and render it possible to set about the enforcement of the laws of trade and navigation; it was in fact indispensable to the imperial policy of the ministry. In formal justification there existed the excuse that England had more than once denounced the Dutch occupation as a trespass upon English rights founded on prior discovery and the Virginia charters of James I. The excuse was inconsistent, for England, from the reign of Elizabeth onwards, had strongly asserted the counterdoctrine that effective occupation was the only test of colonial titles; and if the Dutch occupation was not very effective, there had been no attempt at English occupation of any sort save in the eastern part of the territory. There was yet another significance in the conquest of the Hudson waterway-its strategic value in a conflict with New France. But that was a frontiersman's interest, and there is no evidence that it occurred in 1664 to English statesmen, whose eyes were upon the coast and the ocean to the exclusion of the interior. In this respect they were building better than they knew. The Duke of York, brother of Charles II, undertook the prosecution of the plan.1 In March 1664 he received letters patent creating him proprietor of certain territory to the north of New England, of the islands from Cape Cod to the Hudson, and of the mainland of the Dutch possessions. He sent out Colonel Richard Nicolls with a force not five hundred strong and orders to enlist more men in New England. At Boston the commander met with a profession of willingness but an actual delay which made the Massachusetts men too late to share in the campaign. Connecticut, on the other hand, provided an effective contingent, and at the end of August Nicolls took New Amsterdam without firing a shot. In October a subordinate occupied the Delaware settlements and the conquest was complete. The Dutch Government made no effort at recovery, and the Treaty of Breda by recognising actual conquests left the colony in English hands. It was in effect exchanged for Surinam. The exclusive object having been to perfect the system of imperial relationships, the duke did not care very greatly what local institutions were established in the territory so long as that object was attained. This is the clue to his colonial policy, and it explains his political tolerance overseas as compared with his absolutism at home. It explains also his gift of half the conquest to Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret, two of the Carolina proprietors; in his view he was delegating a responsibility rather than parting with a source of profit. 1 See Van Rensselaer, M. G., Hist. of New York in the Seventeenth Century; Channing, E., Hist. of United States, vol. II, chap. ii. NEW YORK AND NEW JERSEY 253 Whilst the result of the undertaking was yet unknown, he made over to Berkeley and Carteret the land from the Hudson to the Delaware under the name of New Jersey. Nicolls established his master's authority with very little friction at New York, where the Dutch ex-governor set the example of swearing allegiance. The colony was as yet hardly fit for representative government, much less for autonomy of the New England type, but the arrangements actually made were wise and liberal. "The Duke's Laws", applied in 1665 to the English of Long Island and subsequently to the whole province, allowed liberty of conscience and worship and trial by jury, and personal freedom was certainly not less extensive than in any other colony. In the next Dutch War, that of 1672-4, New York was retaken by its former owners but was restored at the peace. Sir Edmund Andros, a man of firmness and good sense, was governor from 1674 to 1680, and Colonel Thomas Dongan from 1682 to 1688. Andros defined the boundaries with neighbouring colonies and enforced the laws of trade. Dongan was empowered by the duke to introduce representative government, and the first Assembly met in 1683. This step is in sharp contrast with the trend of home politics at the time; and in general it may be said that the character and policy of James, Duke of York, cannot be fairly judged without taking his colonial proceedings into account. Dongan also realised the military importance of the Hudson and made a lasting alliance with the Six Nations who occupied the forest country north of the province. There was no extensive English emigration to New York. At the time of the conquest it contained about 7000 Dutchmen, nearly all of whom remained as English subjects. Huguenots and some German settlers went there during the Restoration period. New Englanders entered the eastern regions, and the duke, who employed Catholics and Protestants indifferently, sent out some Irish officials. The result, as in Carolina, was scarcely an English colony, but neither was it typically American; it was rather cosmopolitan and so remained for a century to come. The New Jersey grant to Berkeley and Carteret was made in June 1664. The two proprietors agreed to interest themselves in West and East Jersey respectively, the former meaning the south-westward region bounded by the Delaware estuary. The Dutch population of New Jersey was very scanty, and in the first two years it was augmented by new arrivals from England and also from Connecticut and New Haven. The vigorous New Englanders set the pace in political matters and procured the election of the first Assembly in 1668. This body sought at once to establish autonomy of the New England type, and a contest with the proprietors resulted. The Dutch reconquest in 1673 left the immediate future uncertain, and before peace had ensured restitution Lord Berkeley sold his rights in West Jersey to two Quakers, John Fenwick and Edward Byllyng. Hence arose the first |