Nationalities of the American Colonists

SEVERAL European nations, as we have seen, contributed materials for the English-American colonies. They were people of varied and opposite tastes, habits and theological views, but, as a rule, they commingled without asperity; and when the time came for a political union, no serious antagonisms were apparent. Churchmen and Dissenters, Roman Catholics, Puritans and Friends, finally settled down quietly together, and labored with a generous faith in each other for the public good. The Puritans of New England, the Friends of Pennsylvania, the Roman Catholics of Maryland and the Churchmen of Virginia, though often narrow in their theological views, manifested a common love of liberty, and acted upon the common rule that the majority should govern.

A great majority of the emigrants who settled the English domain in America were of Teutonic origin. The English, Lowland Scotch, Dutch and Swedes, were decidedly of German blood. The Irish and French were few at first. Denmark and the Baltic regions contributed a considerable number, and natives from Africa were soon scattered among the white population of all the colonies. With the exception of Georgia, the emigrants had founded settlements and colonies without the aid of the British government, and often in defiance of its expressed wishes and absolute decrees. Subjects of the same perils and hardships, there grew up among them, insensibly, a brotherhood of feeling that prepared the people of thirteen of the colonies, after uniting in resistance to the aggressions of the French during a war of more than seven years duration, to resist, almost as one man, every form of oppression, when the government to which they acknowledged their allegiance became an oppressor.

There was a great diversity of character seen among the inhabitants of the several colonies, owing, chiefly, to their origin, early habits, and the climate. Those of Virginia were from classes in English society wherein a lack of rigid moral discipline allowed free living and its attendant vices. This circumstance, combined with the influence of a mild climate, produced a tendency to voluptuousness and ease among the Virginians and their southern neighbors. They generally exhibited less moral restraint, more hospitality, and greater frankness and social refinement, than the people of New England. The latter were from the middling classes of society. They included a great many religious enthusiasts, possessing more zeal than knowledge. Very rigid in their manners, shy and jealous of strangers, they were extremely strict in their notions, and attempted to regulate the habits and tastes of society by formal standards. Their early legislation, as we have seen, recognizing as it did the right to control the most minute regulations of social life, often presents food for merriment for their descendants. The General Court of Massachusetts, on one occasion, required the proper officers to notice the "apparel" of the people, especially their "ribbands and great boots." Drinking of healths in public or private; wearing funeral badges; celebrating the Church festivals of Christmas and Easter, and many other things that seemed quite improper to magistrates and legislators, and especially to the Puritan clergy, were forbidden. At Hartford, the General Court kept an eye constantly upon the conduct of the people. Freemen were compelled to vote under a penalty of six-pence; the use of tobacco was prohibited to persons under twenty years of age, without the certificate of a physician; and no others were allowed to use it more than once a day, and then they must be more than ten miles from any house. The people of Hartford were compelled to rise in the morning when the watchman rang his bell. And so, in a great variety of enactments, the law-makers, with pure intentions, noble purposes and virtuous aims, tried to make the whole people Christians after their own pattern. If they did not accomplish these higher designs, they erected strong bulwarks against the smaller vices which compose, in a great degree, private and public evils. They dwelt upon a parsimonious soil. Possessing neither the means nor the inclination for sumptuous living indulged in by their southern brethren, the New Englanders lived in very plain houses and their habits were frugal.

The ideas, manners, customs and pursuits of the Dutch made a deep impression upon the colonists of New York and portions of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, which is not yet effaced, but appears conspicuous in many places. They were a race of industrious, frugal, plodding money-getters, loving personal ease and freedom from disturbance. They possessed very few of the elements of progress. They were constitutionally averse to change, and had very little faith in anything not known to their fathers. They were distinguished by many of the more substantial virtues that are necessary in giving health to society and stability to a State. The Swedes and Finns on the Delaware did not differ much from the Dutch in their general characteristics; but the habits of the Friends, whose influence predominated in West Jersey and Pennsylvania, were quite different. There was a refined simplicity in the manners and habits of the latter that won the esteem and confidence of virtuous and cultivated people, and the respect of every class. They made no ostentatious display in their dress or of their piety. They were governed in their daily life by a religious sentiment without fanaticism, which was a powerful safeguard against vice and immorality.