CH. XII. THE SOUTHERN COLONIES. 289 dition greatly resembled Virginia, but properties were smaller; a few rich Roman Catholics might still be found among the landowners,' and the colony was full of convicts, who were brought there in great numbers from England, and sold as slaves to the planters. In Maryland the same law of real property prevailed as in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, but in all the other Southern colonies the English law, with its tendency to favour great agglomerations of land, was maintained. In the vast provinces of Carolina the climate was more enervating and the proportion of negroes was much larger than in Virginia, and there were greater contrasts of wealth and poverty than in any other parts of British America. Georgia and Florida were too undeveloped to have much political or intellectual influence. Through the whole of the Southern colonies there was much less severity of religious orthodoxy, less energy and moral fibre, less industrial, political, and intellectual activity than in the North, and a much greater tendency both to idleness and to amusement. Charleston is said, of all the American towns, to have approached most nearly to the social refinement of a great European capital. In general, however, the American colonies had attained. to great prosperity and to a high level of civilisation. Burnaby noticed that in a journey of 1,200 miles through the Northern and Central colonies he had not met with a single beggar.3 Domestic wages were much higher, and farmers and farm Adams mentions in 1774 a Catholic gentleman named Carroll (one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence) who lived at Annapolis, in Maryland, as a man of the first fortune in America. His income is 10,000l. a year now, will be 14,000l. in two or three years they say; besides, his father has a vast estate which will be his.'-Adams' Works, ii. 380. 2 Story's Constitution of the United States, i. 165, 166. In 1777 Adams writes that in Maryland 'they have but few merchants. They are chiefly planters and farmers; the planters are those who raise tobacco, and the farmers such as raise wheat, &c. The lands are cultivated and all sorts of trades are exercised by negroes or by transported convicts, which has occasioned the planters and farmers to assume the title of gentlemen, and they hold their negroes and convicts-that is, all labouring people and tradesmenin such contempt, that they think themselves a distinct order of beings. Hence they never will suffer their sons to labour or learn any trade, but they bring them up in idleness or, what is worse, in horse-racing, cock-fighting, and card-playing. . . . The object of the men of property here, the planters, &c., is universally wealth. Every way in the world is sought to get and save money; land jobbers, speculators in land; little generosity to the public, little public spirit.'-Adams' Works, ii. 436. 3 Pinkerton's Voyages, xiii. 750. Ibid. xiii. 500. It must be remembered, however, that the slaves in America were not only negroes and labourers incomparably more prosperous than in England or in any other part of Europe. The Northern yeomanry,' wrote an American economist at a time when America can have done little more than recover from the losses of the War of Independence, not only require more clothing than the Southern, but they live on expensive food and drinks. Every man, even the poorest, makes use of tea, sugar, spirits, and a multitude of articles which are not consumed by the labourers of any other country. . . . Most of the labouring people in New England eat meat twice a day, and as much as their appetites demand.' Owing to the admirable parish libraries, there were New England parishes where almost every householder has read the works of Addison, Sherlock, Atterbury, Watts, Young, and other similar writings, and will converse handsomely on the subjects of which they treat;' and Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, would in almost all the elements of civilisation have ranked high among the provincial towns of Europe. When Kalm visited Canada in 1750, he found that there was not a single printing press in the whole territory possessed by the French, but before that time most of the more important British colonies possessed a newspaper, and by the close of 1765 at least forty-three newspapers are said to have been established in America.3 There were seven important colleges, and there were at least four literary magazines.5 1 In New England, education was always conducted at home, but in the Southern and some of the Middle colonies the rich planters were accustomed to send their sons for education to England. In these States education was almost a monopoly of the rich; schoolmasters were despised, and schools were extremely rare. Martin, the last royal governor in North Carolina, stated that in his time there were only two schools in the whole colony. In the first thirty years of the eighteenth century there was but one grammar school, in the next forty years there convicts-many of the poor emigrants from Europe sold themselves to the planters for a term of years, and sometimes in this way paid their passage. Webster's Essays, pp. 339, 366. This was published in 1790. 2 Pinkerton, xiii. 660. much lower estimate (Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, iii. 90-92). 4 Harvard, William and Mary, Yale, New Jersey, King's, Philadelphia, and Rhode Island. 5 Tyler, ii. 305, 306. 3 Tyler's Hist. of American Literature, ii. 304. Miller, however, gives a p. 35. Miller, iii. 191, 192, 194. See Sabine's American Loyalists, CH. XII. AMERICAN EDUCATION. 291 Noah were but three in the great province of South Carolina.' Webster mentions that he once saw a copy of instructions given to a representative of Maryland by his constituents, and he found that out of more than a hundred names that were subscribed, three-fifths were marked by a cross because the men could not write.' He ascertained in 1785 that the circulation of newspapers in the single New England State of Connecticut was equal to that in the whole American territory south of Pennsylvania, and he has recorded the extraordinary fact that in some parts of the colonies the education of the young was frequently confided to the care of purchased convicts.3 All the great seminaries of learning lay in the Northern and Middle colonies and in Virginia, and the English education of the rich planters of the South had greatly coloured their political opinions. At the same time they formed the more important part of the very small leisure class which existed in America; and it is a remarkable fact that the Southern colonies, though in general far behind the Northern ones, produced no less than five out of the first seven presidents of the United States. In the Northern colonies, on the contrary, education was both very widely diffused and very equal. The average was exceedingly high, but there were no eminences. The men were early devoted to money-making, but it was noticed that there was a general ambition to educate women above their fortunes, and that in some towns there were three times as many 'genteelly bred' women as men. leisure class, the difficulty of 'Miller's Retrospect, iii. 230. The most important business in civil society is in many parts of America committed to the most worthless characters. . . . Education is sunk to a level with the most menial services. . . . Will it be denied that before the war it was a frequent practice for gentlemen to purchase convicts who had been transported for their crimes and employ them as private tutors in their families?'-Ibid. pp. 17-19. See too pp. 55, 338. Ibid. p. 30. In that curious book, the Life of Bampfylde Moore Caren, which was published in 1749, and which shows The absence of any considerable procuring books, and especially great personal knowledge of America, it is said, "There are five printing houses [in Boston], at one of which the Boston Gazette is printed, and comes out twice a week. The presses here are generally full of work, which is in a great measure owing to the colleges and schools for useful learning in New England, whereas at New York there is but one little bookseller's shop, and none at all in Virginia, Maryland, Carolina, Barbadoes, or any of the sugar islands,' p. 199. As late as 1760 it is said that there were no Greek types in the country, or if there were that no printer knew how to set them.'-Tudor's Life of Otis, p. 16. the intensely commercial and money-making character of the colonists, were fatal to original literature; and, except for a few theological works, American literary history before the middle of the eighteenth century would be almost a blank. Berkeley wrote his Alciphron' and his Minute Philosopher' in Rhode Island; but the first native writer of real eminence was Jonathan Edwards, who was born in 1703. He was soon followed by Benjamin Franklin, who in literature, as in science, took a place among the greatest of his contemporaries. Rittenhouse, who was born near Philadelphia in 1732, attained some distinction in astronomy; and among the Americans who sought a home in England were the painters Copley and West, and the grammarian Lindley Murray. Several of those noble public libraries which are now one of the great glories of America had already arisen; the first circulating library was established at Philadelphia in 1731,' and between 1763 and 1770 a medical school was founded in the same city, and courses of lectures were for the first time given on anatomy, on the institutes of medicine, on the Linnæan system of botany, and on the discoveries of Lavoisier in chemistry.2 The moral and political aspect of the country presented a much more blended and doubtful picture, and must have greatly perplexed those who tried to cast the horoscope of America. Nations are essentially what their circumstances make them, and the circumstances of the American colonists were exceedingly peculiar. A country where so large a proportion of the inhabitants were recent immigrants, drawn from different nations and professing various creeds; where, owing to the vast extent of territory and the imperfection of the means of communication, they were thrown very slightly in contact with one another, and where the money-making spirit was peculiarly intense, was not likely to produce much patriotism or community of feeling. On the other hand, the same circumstances had developed to an almost unprecedented degree energy, variety of resource, independence of character, capacity 1 Franklin's Life, p. 99. 2 Miller's Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, iii. 236, 237, 282. This book contains an admirable account of the early intellectual history of the colonies. See too Hildreth's Hist. of the United States, ii. 513. CH. XII. AMERICAN MORALS. 293 for self-government. In a simple and laborious society many of the seed-plots of European vice were unknown. Small freeholders cultivating their own lands were placed under conditions very favourable to moral development, and the wild life of the explorer, the pioneer, and the huntsman gave an unbounded scope to those superfluous energies which become so dangerous when they are repressed or misdirected. Beliefs that had long been waning in Europe retained much vigour in the colonies, and there were little sects or societies which represented the fervour and purity of the early Christians perhaps as perfectly as anything upon earth. Travellers noticed that, except where slavery had exercised its demoralising influence, the intercourse between the sexes was singularly free and at the same time singularly pure. There was a great simplicity and freshness of character, a spirit of warm hospitality, a strong domestic feeling. Political corruption, which was the great cancer of English life, was almost unknown, though there were serious scandals connected with the law courts, and though the level of commercial integrity was probably lower than in England. A large proportion of the men who played a conspicuous part in the events to be recorded, were men of high private morals, simple, domestic, honourable, and religious. When the conflict with England became inevitable, one of the first proceedings of the different States was to appoint days of humiliation and prayer, and Washington notes in his private diary how on this occasion he went to church and fasted all day.' The most stringent rules were made in the American camp to suppress all games of chance and to punish all profane language. John Adams, recounting week after week in his diary the texts of the sermons he had heard, and his estimate of the comparative merits of the preachers, when he was leading the popular party in the very agony of the struggle for the independence of America, is a typical example of a class of politicians strangely unlike the revolutionists of Europe. The most serious evil of the colonies was the number and force of the influences which were impelling large classes to 1 Chastellux, i. 153, 154. Mémoires de Lafayette, i. p. 25. See too the very engaging picture of Pennsyl vanian morals and manners in the Mémoires du Comte de Ségu |