POST, EDUCATION AND NEWSPAPERS 399 Posts were already in operation in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as well as between Boston and New York and Williamsburg, when Parliament established a General Post Office for all His Majesty's Dominions in 1710. Letters cost 45. an ounce from London to New York. Mr Dummer's service of packet boats to the West Indies and New York had been ruined by captures in the French wars. A fortnightly service to New York was reopened in 1755.1 Inland, communication improved slowly. Main roads were built from Boston to New York, and from Philadelphia to Maryland, Virginia, and Carolina. But for the most part, especially in the south, bridle tracks prevailed, and water transport by rivers and coasting sloops. As late as 1731 one-third of the Assembly of New York came to town by river.2 Facilities for education varied greatly in the several colonies. In New England not only had Harvard College been founded in 1636, but from the earliest times in every township of fifty householders in Massachusetts and Connecticut elementary schools had to be provided, and schools for higher education in those of one hundred. In the middle colonies great diversity of religious belief militated against the establishment of any general school system. There were several schools in Pennsylvania, and there the Academy at Philadelphia provided a liberal education, thanks largely to the efforts of Franklin (1749). Otherwise, the colleges founded in the eighteenth century, such as Yale (Connecticut, 1716), and Princeton (New Jersey, 1746), were designed principally for the training of clergy. Dartmouth College (New Hampshire, 1769) was intended to train Indians as missionaries. In Maryland, every county was required to have a school. In the southern colonies, the conditions of education as of labour were similar to those in the West Indies. Virginia had a dozen free schools, but rich planters usually maintained a tutor or sent their sons to school and college in England. Here, too, LieutenantGovernor Nicholson and James Blair had founded, with help from England, the College of William and Mary for the education of youthful Virginians and the sons of Indian chiefs (1691). Virginians, too, could boast of writers like Beverley, Byrd, and Stith, who could write the history of the Dominion with elegance and ease. The first regular newspaper, the Boston Newsletter, was published in 1704. In 1721, James Franklin began to publish the New England Courant, and successfully resisted an attempt by the Assembly to impose a censorship of the press. His brother Benjamin, after making his way as a journeyman printer, founded the Pennsylvania Gazette. The first number of the New York Weekly Journal appeared in 1733. It was published by John Peter Zenger, whose trial for libel was undoubtedly one of the turning points in American history. When Governor William Cosby, a strong-willed Irish soldier, arrived in New York, he called upon Rip van Dam, who had acted as lieutenant-governor 1 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1708, no. 10; 1712, no. 10, i. 2 C.O. 5, 1055, f. 210. before his arrival, to refund half the emoluments received since his appointment, in accordance with the usual practice and instructions. Van Dam refused. As Cosby was himself chancellor, he could not have the case tried in Chancery. He therefore took it to the Court of Exchequer, before judges sitting as a Court of Equity. The right of governors to constitute courts had long been challenged in the colonies, but was consistently maintained as part of the prerogative of the Crown. When the legality of a court which had no statutory basis was now again questioned, the chief justice, Lewis Morris, a man of great political distinction, admitted its invalidity, and retired from the bench. He appealed to the people, obtained decisive victories at the elections, and defended his position in Zenger's paper. Zenger was prosecuted for publishing a false and scandalous libel. His counsel, Smith and Alexander, questioned the validity of the court, and were promptly disbarred. But Andrew Hamilton, a Scottish lawyer of consummate ability and a leading figure in public life in Philadelphia, suddenly appeared for the defence. He was now eighty years of age. His eminence in the profession compelled the judges to listen to him. They ruled that it was not necessary to prove that the publication was false; and that it was for the court to decide whether it was libellous. The jury had only to decide the fact of publication. With rare eloquence and close argument, Hamilton then appealed to the jury for a verdict in the cause of liberty-the liberty of "exposing and opposing arbitrary power", and won his case (1735). He did more. Not only had he persuaded an American jury thus to break away from the rule of English courts, but also to strike a blow for the right to discuss and oppose the Government in the press.1 Meanwhile lands were being rapidly taken up, and the spaces towards the frontiers and the coasts occupied. Townships developed and multiplied. Northwards towards Canada, southwards towards Florida, westwards towards the Alleghanies, expansion took place. In some directions, as in New York and Massachusetts and Virginia, this process was delayed by the excessive grants of lands made to individuals. The Council of Trade endeavoured with some success to rectify land speculation of this kind in New York and Virginia. But its alternative policy of small holdings of fifty to a hundred acres, as in Nova Scotia and Georgia, was found to discourage settlers.3 The population is said to have doubled itself every twenty years, mainly by natural increase of the native-born. The censuses are imperfect, but conjectural estimates give the total number of whites in 1720 as 339,000, and blacks 96,000. The combined population had 1 Channing, II, 488 seqq.; Osgood, II, 443 seqq.; Chandler, American Criminal Trials, I, 159 seqq. 3 C.O. 5/971, no. 34; 5/898, no. 62. 2 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1699-1713, passim. Doyle, J. A., English in America, vol. ш, app. I. POPULATION AND IMMIGRATION 401 risen to 1,500,000 in 1760, of which 299,000 were blacks in Maryland and the south. Only about 8 per cent. of the 878,000 inhabitants north of Maryland were negroes. For in the northern colonies, where grain was raised, climate and occupation were more suitable for white labour, and negro slaves were kept chiefly in the port towns. Wages were high and the demand for free labour and indentured white servants was constantly increasing. Some colonies, however, endeavoured to protect themselves against the importation of felons, but their acts were annulled by the Home Government. South of the Potomac the conditions of climate and labour were more suitable for negroes. In Virginia the number of slaves rose from 12,000 in 17081 to 150,000 in 1760, forming half of the total population. They were reckoned as chattels or merchandise, and laws, brutally severe, sanctioned burning and mutilation among their punishments. Insurrections or conspiracies, as in New York in 1712 and 1741, sometimes caused panic executions and legislation, which some governors did their best to restrain. On the other hand, there was a growth of feeling against slavery. In Massachusetts, Samuel Sewalls argued that all men had a right to liberty, and in Pennsylvania, whereas Penn had owned slaves without a qualm, Friends in 1758 were advised to set their negroes at liberty." In race, as in religious and political outlook, New England retained its homogeneity, in contrast to the middle colonies, where to the original Swedish and Dutch populations were added waves of immigration. Encouraged by the British Naturalisation Act, and by their generous reception in England, Protestants from Switzerland and refugees from persecution in the Rhenish Palatinate began to pass in increasing numbers through Holland and England to the American colonies. The movement began in 1708, when a few Palatines under Joshua von Kocherthal, a German minister, came to England, and were sent to New York. There they founded Newburg. In the following year 13,000 poverty-stricken refugees from the Palatinate arrived in London. Some hundreds of these went to North Carolina, together with some Swiss immigrants, and founded New Berne. They were led by Baron Christoph de Graffenried, who had received large grants of lands from the lords proprietors.5 Another 3000 were sent over with Governor Hunter and settled in New York. They were to receive forty acres apiece after they had paid for their passage and subsistence by the manufacture of naval stores. This early experiment in state-aided emigration was not a success. The Palatines proved mutinous, and before their work came to fruition, the Tory ministry stopped supplies. Hunter, nearly ruined by supporting them, was obliged to allow them to shift for Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1708, no. 216. Ibid. 1711-12, no. 454; 1712-14, nos. 293, 525, etc.; 1714-15, no. 673. 3 Sewall, S., The Selling of Joseph, 1701. Sharpless, I., Quaker Government, 1, 432. 'Graffenried's Narrative, N.C. Col. Recs. I. CHBE I 26 themselves.1 Some settled on lands purchased from the Mohawks in the frontier valley of Schoharie, others along the Mohawk River, forming, with Fort Hunter and Oswego, the new frontier of New York2 (1726). Some, at the invitation of Lieutenant-Governor Keith, settled on the north-west frontier of Pennsylvania. Their leader, Conrad Weiser, long served the Pennsylvanian government in negotiations with the Indians.3 New York had thus hardly fulfilled the hopes of wealth and liberty held out by the "Newlanders", as the emigration agents were called. Accordingly the greater part of the 75,000 Germans who crossed the Atlantic after 1717 was attracted rather to Pennsylvania. There they helped to settle the western frontier as far as the Susquehanna. Others passed onwards along the Shenandoah Valley into the Valley of Virginia and North Carolina and western Maryland, forming always a barrier force on the western frontiers.4 In South Carolina, Swiss emigrants brought by John Peter Pury of Neuchâtel under contract with the Government to cultivate vines and silk, founded Purysburg on the Savannah River in 1731. Other German settlements continued to be made in the neighbourhood, along the Edisto and Congaree Rivers, until the central and southwestern part of the province was to a considerable extent peopled by them. These German emigrants had little influence politically. They were the product of an economic as well as a religious movement. Sold as indentured labourers and servants to farmers in the interior, they passed through a term of toil and servitude to possessions and freedom they could not have attained at home. They formed agricultural settlements, where they kept to their own language and customs, and left the government to the British settlers. Their chief importance was as an occupying force, destined to form part of a new civilisation not wholly British in character, and as helping immediately in the westward movement to the mountains. All such foreign Protestants who had resided in the colonies for seven years were naturalised by an Act of Parliament in 1740. Before that, foreign-born immigrants had been naturalised in the several colonies, either by special act or general law, as in New York in 1715, and in Massachusetts in 1731.5 Purely British elements were contributed by the emigration of disbanded soldiers, Jacobites, and the transported felons. Many Scottish prisoners, military and political, after the risings of 1715 and 1745, were sent to the Plantations and sold into service. Others came of their own accord, and founded separate settlements, as in North 2 N.Y. Col. Docs. v, 460–634. 1 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1710-15, passim. 3 Walton, Joseph, Conrad Weiser and the Indian Policy of Colonial Pennsylvania. • Hercheval, History of the Valley of Virginia; Wayland, The German Element in the Shenandoah Valley; Schmidt, History of German Element in Virginia; Faust, Virginia Mag. Hist. 5 Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1715, nos. 435, 530; Mass. Provincial Laws, 11, 586. N.C. Col. Recs. IV, p. ix; Cal. St. Pap. Col. 1716, nos. 309–314. RELIGIOUS DENOMINATIONS 403 and South Carolina. Many Irish Roman Catholics settled in Maryland, and many Protestant "Scottish-Irish", mainly from the north of Ireland, on the borders of New England and Nova Scotia,1 or passed through Philadelphia and made their way south and west. 2 The German Protestants were for the most part Baptists. Their several sects-Mennonites, Dunkers, Schwenkfelders, Moravians— derived from that "Pietism" which was a revolt against the formalism of the Lutheran and reformed Churches. By their insistence on simplicity of life, liberty of conscience and a popular Church, they represented essentially the same tendencies as Quakers and Methodists. It was, indeed, from the Moravians in Georgia that John Wesley learned the Pietistic features of their faith, which led to his foundation of Methodism. Eager for missionary work among the Creeks and Cherokees, they had obtained a grant of land there. But their refusal to bear arms against the Spaniards (1737) led to their removal and settlement at Bethlehem, Pa., near the abortive settlement of Nazareth, where George Whitefield had attempted, in 1740, in conjunction with them to found a school for negroes. With ScottishIrish immigrants, the influx of Presbyterianism advanced steadily, in spite of attempts at repression as in Virginia, and Baptists also increased all over the continent, especially in North Carolina. There were relatively few Roman Catholics in the colonies. Where they were most numerous, the laws against them were severest. In Maryland where, owing to its origin, they formed about one-thirteenth of the population, they were penalised by a double tax, and disfranchised if they refused to take the oaths appointed, whilst their neighbourhood to Virginia led to restrictive legislation in the Old Dominion. In general, the proximity of French Jesuit missionaries and their intrigues with the Indians, and resentment at the political interference of the Pope, helped to keep the colonists intensely hostile to Roman Catholicism. In New England, every township had a Congregational Church, which formed the centre of its society. It was only by degrees that some toleration was extended to other denominations. In New York and New Jersey, where politics blended with ecclesiastical issues and the suspicion of Jacobitism hung over many of the Anglican clergy, it was said that the proportion of Anglicans to Dissenters was one to forty. 3 Under the influence of the Anglican reaction the Church of England began to take a more active part in colonial life. The Bishop of London was assigned ecclesiastical jurisdiction as metropolitan of the colonies. He was represented by Commissaries, of whom the most eminent were James Blair of Virginia and Dr Bray of Maryland. In Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas, the Church 1 C.O. 5, 898, nos. 55, 61. 2 Transactions of the Moravian Society; Levering, Hist. of Bethlehem. |