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CON-FRONT-US PIECE.
The Company of Distinguished Comedians expressly engaged for this Performance.

THE
COMIC HISTORY
OF
THE UNITED STATES,

FROM A PERIOD PRIOR TO THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA

TO TIMES LONG SUBSEQUENT TO THE PRESENT.

By JOHN D. SHERWOOD.

“Quamquam ridentem dicere verum

Quid vetat?”

Horace, Satire I.

“A man may say a Wise thing though he say it with a Laugh.”

Old Song.

WITH ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATIONS BY HARRY SCRATCHLY.

BOSTON:

FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.

1870.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by

FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.,

in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

WELCH,
BIGELOW,
& CO.
UNIVERSITY
PRESS.

DEDICATION.

——●——

TO MY WIFE.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

——●——

SUBJECTS.

CONTENTS.

PREFATORY.

BOOK FIRST.

BOOK SECOND.

BOOK THIRD.

BOOK FOURTH.

THE COMIC HISTORY OF THE

UNITED STATES.

Columbus discovers America.

THE COMIC HISTORY OF THE

UNITED STATES.

PREFATORY.

TREATING THE READER TO AN ACCOUNT OF THE AUTHOR, AND OF THE PLAN, OBJECT, AND PRINCIPLES OF THIS HISTORY.

The Author, proposing to be intimate with the Reader, deems an Introduction desirable.—Born Early and Poor.—How the Two Facts were managed and overcome.—School Days and Nights.—College Lines, crooked and straight.—Father’s Face against his.—A New American Decalogue.—Into the Married and other States and Territories.—Settling down.—Advantages of a Sub-urban Residence.—Outside and Inside Views of the Author’s Head.—Plans and Purposes of the Work.—Laughing Facts.—Roman Precedents.—Impartiality holding the Shears and Tape.—Sources of our Information.—Acknowledgments to Smith and Brown.—Our Illustrations.

The Reader scrapes Acquaintance with the Author.

Due it is alike to the originality and dignity of this work, and to the respectability, comfort, and good understanding of the reader and ourself, that a formal introduction should take place at the very outset.

For although we feel sure that without this we shall, after keeping company together a few evenings, exchange confidences and hearts with each other for life, yet to avoid needless suspicions,—mute and silent though they be,—and to obviate the hazards and discomforts of injurious side-glances, interrogative of my origin, person, parentage, education, and moral character,—which the paterfamilias may, and naturally would, cast upon a new teacher, who offers to take a place in his household, sit in one corner of the family room when the lamps are lit, and to sleep in the spare bedroom when they are turned down,—I propose to state at once who it is that comes with this friendly audacity, what are his intentions, and how he expects to behave himself in a relation at once so familiar and responsible, viz. that of a good-natured, equable, humorous companion and friend, indicating and painting facts in a pleasant, genial, and healthy way.

First, then, as to ourself. I say not myself; for this would be to roll immediately my complex egoism out of the manifold garments which a historian wears of course; but I say Ourself, that gathered, round Impersonation which may be well supposed to be a crystallized something, like a cunning frost-work on the long window-panes of history,—an armless hand writing Mene and other hieroglyphics on the wall, or a Briareus with his hundred hands, heads, and feet, running in a hundred different ways, staring through a hundred telescopes at the calm ages, and writing with a century of hands the doings, undoings, and misdoings of the race. This manifold, dignified mystery I mean to put on and wear after this chapter; but in order to insure the confidence which I now seek, I shall slip, for a few minutes, out of my state gear, and taking your hand,—now no longer withheld nor even hesitatingly given,—look trustingly into your eyes, and mention a few of those particulars of myself, which you have a gracious right to know, in order to judge of my standing in the world, my intellectual competency and fitness, and the plumptitude of my moral proportions.

I was born very early in life; so early, in fact, that although present, and making such an effort as befitted my first appearance, I was so inexpressibly interested in the matter, that I forgot my future office, that of recorder of passing events. The fact of my birth—a fact which is apt to happen to most people—is not perhaps so singular as that, being born in the United States, I contrived to live beyond the first five years, that fatal semi-decade. I ought, perhaps, now to add, in order to quiet any apprehensions after my last alarming remark, that “I still live”; and that, having survived the perils and plums of parental kindness in infancy, I hope to outlive the equally fatal neglect and indifference which marks our treatment of old age.

My parents, at the time I was given to the world, were poor, and, therefore, not respectable. They had been simple enough to marry young, and for love; and although they had mated each other well, they had failed to put a yoke upon the neck of fortune. These early struggles, however, stiffened in them the moral elements, and marbleized, so to speak, the soft woods of their country natures, making a substance very different from that thin, moral veneering which is upholstered from the beechen groves that timber the sunny slopes of life. Both of them were Presbyterians; always attending the Sunday services, sitting in a gallery seat, close to the pulpit, and so taking the brunt of the hard blows which were rightfully felt in, and—I sometimes thought—spent themselves upon, our uncushioned pew.

An offer from my father’s brother, who had become rich in mercantile business, drew my father and the family in my fifth year to the city of Philadelphia. With this change of base came sharper tactics against the army of poverty; and at last, by fighting it on the same line, although it took all the summer of his life, he achieved the victory. I was then sent to the best schools; took lessons at home in some branches from a private teacher; took—I own it now—lessons in other branches privately, out of the house, without my father’s knowledge, although at his expense for the tuition; and at last I went to college.

Hard study, matched by an irrepressible love of pranks at night; a knowledge of Euclid’s lines and clothes line; of belles-lettres and unlettered belles; of geometrical and other squares; of chemistry applied to known uses and to experiments for which there were no precedents in the books; prizes offered by the faculty, and prizes offered by Mrs. Green and Mrs. White in the persons of their handsome daughters,—these all braided together the threads of my university life into a pattern which, if not unusual, was made up principally of figures little admired at home.

My father was not at all pleased with the well-red bill I brought with me, and quite as little with the unsigned ones which followed me, from college; and, concluding that I might run my own face for a while, set his sharply against me.

I took to teaching; sounding over again the shallow depths of old studies, but often striking the lead on the rocky bottom of a temper too long indulged not to be stern when touched by children’s thoughtlessness.

My father’s death cast upon me responsibilities for my mother and the estate, which dropped the curtain upon my dream-life, and lifted it from the long perspective of actual work and business cares. Among my father’s papers I found the following original document, which I reproduce here, as showing his shrewdness of observation, and the character of the parent who helped to form some elements of my own.

“A New American Decalogue.

“Hear, O Jonathan, the commandments which thou hast made,—teaching them to thy infants, thy Freedmen, thy Irishmen, thy office-holders,—the asses within thy gates.

I.

“Thou shalt have no other God but Gain. Trade, and labor, husband-ry and all other brokerage, shall be his profits.

II.

“Graven images and pictures other than greenbacks and fractional currency thou shalt not make.

“These shalt continue to be unlike anything elsewhere, in the heavens above or in the earth beneath; and to them, therefore, thou mayst bow down thyself unto the thirty-third or thirty-fourth generation, using up in their pursuit all thy soles, thy health, and thy neighbor as thyself.

III.

“Thou shalt not mistake any other god for the aforesaid, such as Religion, True Worship, Charity, Virtue, Obedience, Truth; for Gain, being a jealous God, requires all your time, strength, health, soul, and body, and will show no mercy upon those who keep not his day-book, ledger, and cash-books.

IV.

“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it wholly to thyself.

V.

“Honor thy children, bowing down to them and worshipping them, giving them what they least require, that their days may be the shortest, in the United States, of all lands whatsoever.

VI.

“Thou shalt not kill the goose which lays the golden eggs.

VII.

“Thou shalt commit adulterations with almost everything in the earth beneath, and especially by the waters which are throughout the world.

VIII.

“Thou shalt steal whenever an official opportunity offers.

“Making a Cæsar of thyself, thou shalt render unto him all the money that is brought unto thee.

IX.

“Thou shalt forbear all witness against thy neighbor; lest thy time be consumed needlessly in the public service, and he afterwards, also, witness against thee.

X.

“Thou shalt acquire so much by the foregoing commandments, as not to covet thy neighbor’s house and lot, nor any other real or un-real estate of his whatsoever.”

Settling up the property which my father had accumulated, although disregarding this code, and unsettling myself, I roamed abroad long and widely; practically dog-earing in Europe, Asia, and Africa the leaves of that illuminated volume of travel which I had all my life been intent to own.

Then came marriage,—religious convictions,—studying for the ministry,—children in the house,—studying them, and how to feed them,—ordination,—a call to a rus-urban congregation in the vicinity of New York,—only a short hour’s ride on a rail, and well feathered, without tar, by plentiful dust,—preaching to an assemblage, gathered from behind sharp counters on week-days, to measure my discourses critically, and to secure their money’s worth on Sundays,—and all the nameless little experiences that roll over the cog-wheels of a suburban parson’s life. Two bronchial attacks commissioned me to look up a better throat,—once in a journey to South America, and once across the prairies to California.

These experiences, added to their predecessors, have accumulated, with my readings, the materials for a history which the leisure half-hours, paragraphed between the compact duties of my thirty years of ministerial work, have permitted me to put together, and which now, dear reader, I place, as my cor cordium, in your hands.

It is the cream, skimmed from my carefully kept dairy; or rather the condensed milk of my very being, left at your door, to make your tea pleasanter, and your pudding sweeter and richer.

As you may be curious to possess, and I am most happy of an opportunity to get off my latest photogram, I add, as an item serving to assist you in making up the sum of my qualifications, this

External View of the Author’s Head,

bare-ly remarking that as its unfurnished state may disappoint you, I will endeavor to restore your pleasing illusion, by giving you gratuitously

An Inside View,

flattering myself that, although you may find nothing in it, you will at least confess, that seldom dare an author venture upon such an exposure of his stock in trade.

Having now furnished all the main elements which will enable my pupil readers to outline my intellectual portraiture, having frankly shown four sides of myself,—a lower side and an upper side, an outside and inside,—being the only sides, I trust, that I shall take in this history, I crave leave now to add, secondly, a word as to the plan, object, and principles of this history. They are, in brief, to put facts, veritable and authentic facts, whether agreeable or disagreeable in themselves, in that pleasing dress that will make them welcome visitors to the drawing-room, good chums in the bedchamber, chatty companions in the cars, on steamers and steamboats, jolly physicians to the dyspeptically lean, and pleasantly wise counsellors to the troubled.

I feel so sure that, as not one of the illuminated readers of these chronicles has ever mistaken dulness for wisdom, so not one will need be reminded that the most solid and trusted truths may wear the smiles of joy and hilarity.

The Romans on their solemn festival days were wont to carry in their processions the images of their ancestors, even those long deceased, wreathed with flowers. So carry we the images of the Past, garlanded with the rosy links of fun and jollity.

We shall not be tempted by the lure of originality, nor even by the attractive ambition of gaining credit for profound critical and historical acumen, to follow the late fashion of dressing up stale and unwholesome characters in fine clothes and qualities. We shall neither foist the virtuous regimentals and well-earned epaulettes of Washington upon Benedict Arnold, nor tease history to fling a mantle of false charity over Burr’s treason. We shall not worry the public conscience into any praise, however faint, of the crimson waistcoat of Mr. Jefferson Davis, nor waste any admiration upon the spotted neck-tie, perhaps too loosely drawn, of Jacob Thompson. Impartial justice shall hold our tape and handle our shears.

It is usual for historians to indicate the sources of their information; but as we have refused no means of enriching these annals, using for that purpose whatever materials our multiform reading could supply, from the Ramayana, the great Sanscrit epic, impressed on wax, down to the last published child’s primer, printed on patented wooden paper, we could not name all our authorities without giving a catalogue inconvenient for our publishers, and too long for the abridged lives of our readers. We cannot, however, refrain from acknowledging our obligations to John Smith, Esq., for original information, novel ideas, and new turns of thought around old notions, running through every page of this history; to Mr. Jones, for valuable public documents; and to Mr. Brown, the well-known sexton of Grace Church, New York, who in the course of his lifelong diggings, has exhumed several pieces of Americans, whom we have reconstructed and preserved in our historical cases.

As to the illustrations which flash upon and light up our pages, they will speak for themselves; if they do not, any word of ours would be, Vox et preterea nihil.

BOOK FIRST.
DISCOVERIES.
B. C. TO 1607 A. D.

“Through the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.”

Tennyson.

“Here are old trees, tall oaks and gnarled pines

That stream with gray, green mosses; here the ground

Was never touched by spade, and flowers spring up

Unsown and die ungathered. It is sweet

To linger here among the flitting birds

And leaping squirrels, wandering brooks, and winds

That shake the leaves and scatter as they pass

A fragrance from the cedars thickly set

With pale blue berries. In their peaceful shades,

Peaceful, unpruned, immeasurably old,

My thoughts go up the long, dim path of years

Back to the earliest days.”

Bryant.

“That would be wooed and not unsought be won.”

Shakespeare.

CHAPTER I.
OF AMERICA BEFORE ITS DISCOVERY IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.
B. C.-1000 A. D.

America older than Europe, Asia, or Africa.—Chronic Errors on the Subject.—Europe presented to America.—Truth vindicated.—Proofs of our Superior Antiquity.—Luxurious Civilization of the Races who stocked this Continent before the Indians.—Amount of Coal left by them unburned.—Large supplies of Fish packed away safely in our Mountains.—Fish Culture Measure of Human Culture.—Fossil Cran-iology.—Laughable Blunders of Former Historians and Ethnologists.—Ancient Nations, Babylonian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Ten Lost Tribes, etc., trickling through, appearing on this Side of the Earth.—Instances cited.—Mythologies of Greece and Rome originated here.—Proofs and Reproofs.—American Nests well feathered Ages ago.—Large Stocks for Future Use.

America before its Discovery.

Hitherto not only foreign writers, but even our own people, have ignored the existence of America prior to what is popularly called its discovery, a phenomenon which might be more appropriately denominated a return of the descendants of the old stock to the haunts of their forefathers. That event—reserved until the close of the fifteenth century of the Christian era, after the invention of gunpowder had exploded numerous obstructions in the path of progress, and just before the Lutheran Reformation came in with its fresh needs for more room—turned up an Old World for new uses.

Of course the newly ventilated space thus rediscovered excited much talk at the time, and created a sensation in that unsensational age. The first Europeans who were presented to America were as much elated, as Americans now at their presentation to European courts; as if America, like those courts, had not existed and had not had its shows, jewels, follies, history, and fêtes, centuries before they were shown up to it. Has not this sensation lasted quite long enough? Is it not time—now that nearly four hundred years have allowed the first ardor and surprise to cool off—to vindicate the claim of the Western Continent against the long-suffered error of mistaking what they were new to for what was itself new?

The arrogant pretensions of what is pleased to call itself the Old World have quite long enough kept back our bashful and blushing claims.

Indeed, in our chronic modesty, we are allowing our country to get somewhat mature in speaking of itself as new; while even children now know that ours is, in fact, the elder continent. Agassiz is not gassing us when he picks our ancient Alleghany flints and tells us, that the camp-fires in the Lackawanna, Schuylkill, and Lehigh valleys blazed away long before those at Newcastle and in the English Black Country were lit up. The Rocky Mountains got up their vertebrated backs ages before Mont Blanc put on such cool airs and carried its head so loftily over the more modest chignon of our Orizaba and Long’s Peak. The Mississippi got down to its delta long before the Rhone or Rhine reached even their alpha. Let us then henceforth assert the dignity of our superior antiquity; and commiserate[commiserate] the other half of the globe in being so long unknown to our older America.

What was the precise height, the fashionable color of hair and eyes, the modish vices, the sartorial virtues, of the races which stocked our prairies, and hunted plesiosauria, and megalosauria, and other tall game along our wide valleys, and across the granite peaks of our long mountain ranges, we have not now at hand any plates or photographs to show; but well do we know that we are very much obliged to them for leaving unburned such lots of good coal, snugly stowed away in dry, ample cellars; and that those cellars were placed in such a peaceable Quaker State as Pennsylvania, where we can go and help ourselves by the cart-load without getting into a stew. How beautifully, too, they—those young Americans—packed away their fish; so well that they—the fish—are now just as fresh as when Noah performed his maritime adventure, Moses was fished up by the banks of the Nile, or Jonah became cargo in the deeply laden whale.

What large provisions those jolly dwellers on this hemisphere, long ages ago, must have made, when we find such abundance of funny finny things, so carefully stowed away in layers, all over the continent, from the icy plains around the North Pole, down through the Isthmus belt, and along the saw-shaped ridges of South America, to the farthermost cape. Now, if we had no other proof of the high civilization, we may truthfully say, the dainty and luxurious refinement, of those pre-Columbian inhabitants of this hemisphere, the existence of these fish, so beautifully canned,—better disposed, in fact, than if they had been arranged in layers by the accomplished herring-packers of Scotland or Holland,—we might safely rest there the well-digested argument; knowing well, as all our readers do, that the love of fish was one of the peculiar features that marked the highest point of Assyrian, Egyptian, and Persian civilization; remembering that in the time of Pericles, the polished Athenian left the charming music of his flowing speech, when he heard the bell in the Agora announce that the fish auction had begun; and further recalling the fact that the fish-ponds of Lucullus, Pompey, Crassus, and the millionnaire Romans, gauged, like yard-sticks, the intellectual culture of Rome.

Fossil cranes have also been found ingeniously tucked away in appropriate crusts,—a cran-iological development not to be overlooked; although upon this head we forbear to enlarge. The Hadrosaurus—now restored to us by strangely unsubstantial Water-house Hawkins—shows that in his (i. e. the former H.’s) production what countless ages must have been exhausted and for his sustenance what numberless lives consumed, which, if unslaughtered, might have gone on, and after centuries of growth developed to be not only men, but even American voters.

Time stocking America.
(p. 59)

“Perhaps in scaly armor, up and down those ancient seas,

Roamed he with an appetite that nothing could appease;

Crushing shoals and hosts of being, every one of whom that ran

Would, in course of time and season, have developed up to man;

But fata sic profulgent, and we only may bewail

Our dear relations slaughtered when this monster curled his tail.”

From what has already been said it is clear that many of the aboriginal settlers in this half of the world died game to the last.

After mention of these higher arguments of our elder civilization, we shall not weaken the proofs by an exhibition of later American antiquities, such as the sculptured temples found in Yucatan and Central America; the time-coated, swallow-tailed fanes of the Peruvians; the exaggerated structures of the dwarfed Aztecs; or the tall earth-mounds which, scattered from Lake Erie through the Mississippi Valley, and forced through the tight-set lips of the Isthmus, are at last swallowed up by Venezuela.

Many doubtless are the swarms that have hived here through the busy centuries which preceded the Egyptian Pharaohs, the comparatively modern empires of Assyria, Persia, and China, and the still later kingdoms of Agamemnon and Priam; empires and kingdoms that stand on the dim frontis-pages of our ordinary histories. These hives, overflowing their quarters, have sent out superfluous swarms across the ice bridge over our northern strait into the plains of Asia, and thence into Africa and Europe.

Laughable indeed is the exhibition which erudite European historians, ethnologists, and others have made of themselves in deducing from Asia, as the mother-swarm, the colonies that have peopled the world; when in truth Asia was only the half-way house, the luncheon-place of our trampers, on their march into their foggy countries and chronicles.

Thus it is now ascertained by late researches that there is a great resemblance between the languages of the Mongols and Japanese, and those of Equador and New Granada. Hopes are entertained that antiquarians may discover some ancient precedents for our Yankee tongues and words derived from sources whose authoritative beginnings now puzzle us.

So, too, no doubt, migrations homeward have taken place from the faded and colorless scenes of these exploring raids.

Hitherward trickled, probably, the ten Israelitish tribes, hitherto supposed to be lost, diffusing themselves wanderingly for the past two thousand five hundred and eighty-nine years, and now collecting in pools in our towns and cities, and around our stock-exchanges.

Here, too, have reappeared, after going in on the other side, the broken pieces of the empire of Nineveh, mixed up with fragments of its gates of brass, which fused in the transmission, have veneered the faces of those who pulled through, forming in their descendants the race of brazen-faced itinerant pedlers, auctioneers, and plumbers among us.

So the ancient empire of Egypt, shivered up by Cæsar, percolating through, at last dripped into that stalagmite, the Tombs of New York, with its newly formed but not reformed Cæsars and Pompeys inside.

In a word, most of the old kingdoms, and even cities, such as Troy, Rome, Syracuse, Alexandria, Macedon, Athens, Sparta, and others, disappearing from sight on the other and newer hemisphere, and straining through into ours, have come out on our side condensed by the pressure in small spots, but with similar names,—spots smaller but just as smart and big-feeling as their larger selves. This, too, accounts for our sudden expansions, whether in crinoline or credit; the compressed and squeezed germ reasserting often its chance for pristine greatness in sudden and unexpected ways.

Now that we have started the train of thought, each of our readers can easily turn engineer and stoker, and by applying a little fuel of his own, can drive it over all the various tracks which run from his metropolitan, central brain.

“No wonder,” each one will exclaim, “that our people are so thin after so much pressing of their ancestors; no wonder at our new-minted words, the old ones having been fused at a red heat in the central fires.”

Here, too, is the secret of our burning eloquence. This is the source of our extraordinary architecture, borrowed, like an actor’s costume at a fancy ball, from huddled heaps of clothing made for others, and brought together in party-colored, but ill-sorted union. Looked at from this angle, we can account, too, for our mythological tendencies,—the invocations to Jove, when surprised; the devotion to Apollo in our magazines; the frequent use of the lyre in our trade; the love for bare shoulders, like Junos, in our divine assemblages; our leanings at night to Bacchus; and other customs and habits that creep out even from under pan-taletes. Greece at first took her Olympus from us; and we in the course of time have, like affectionate parents, borrowed it back again.

From these varied proofs it is manifest that, before Columbus brought over to America specimens of the European stock existing in his time, our hemisphere had been hard at work firing up at Popocatepetl; scooping out harbors on our coasts; creasing our valleys in fluvial grooves for our fast-running craft and boats; feathering the future nests of a later posterity with materials for use; and in general laying in a large stock for a successful business to be taken up and carried on afterwards by those who should come back from their migrations to become large dealers in universal notions, general purveyors, forwarders and advancers on all kinds of property, from continents to a spool of cotton, from polar Alaska ice to West India warming-pans and peppery troches.

How long it took them to flutter back to these old deserted nests, how many were lost before they had fairly got settled in them, and what broods now chirp, sing, and crow, through branches new and old, honest or brittle, these pages are full fledged to show.

CHAPTER II.
OF THE DISCOVERIES IN AMERICA DURING THE ELEVENTH, FIFTEENTH, SIXTEENTH, AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.
1000–1607.

America not discovered by Jason.—Lithographic Specimens attributed to the Northmen in the Eleventh Century curious, but by Skalds more Modern.—Bishop Berkeley’s Western Star not the First American Constellation.—Columbus offers a Continent at Private Sale; Isabella, a Spanish Lady, takes him up, and the Profits also.—Of Ferdinand’s Necklace.—Price of Eggs advanced in Spain.—England finally sees Something.—A Fish Story confirmed.—Discoveries which Columbus did not make.—Ponce de Leon.—Mexico unfortunately discovered.—The Straits of Magellan and other Straits.—De Soto at the Bottom of the Mississippi.—Champlain, a wise Man, founds Quebec upon a Rock.—Sir Walter Raleigh and him smoking.—The Mayflower anchored.—Hudson up Stream.

America was not discovered by Jason while looking up the golden fleece, although the existence of many American habits point to an originator, whose name is lost, but whose Asiatic practices are not. It is supposed by some that the late war crops were the product of certain stray dragon’s teeth, possibly dropped by that wily Greek on our prolific soil. But these hypotheses, although as wise as many others connected with early maritime discoveries, are too learned to be useful. History declines to pull such wool over the eyes of its readers or to encourage traditions which flatter the pride of ancient nations, whose age is the only excuse for their fond, grandfatherly dotings. Nor is it any more true that the Northmen, in the eleventh century, fell upon this out-lying continent, when engaged in general lithography along our coasts,—the pictured rocks near Taunton, although a spirited illustration of one page of our chronicles, being now proved to be sketches by later Scandinavian Skalds, less than eight hundred years old. We also feel obliged to deny the merit accorded by some to Bishop Berkeley, of having made the first discovery of America. This notion of some rests all its weight on the strength of those lines, “Westward the star of empire takes its way.” But those were not the first lines that were carried ashore and made fast to our continent, nor this the earliest star which appeared over our American boards.

Much as we should love, in the interest of modern historical research, to invent a new discoverer for America, candor compels us to award the glory still to Christopher Columbus. Had he lived three hundred and seventy-seven years later, he would have advertised for a partner in some paper of wide circulation; but not having that advantage, he circulated himself, offering a continent at private sale to all European nations that fronted the sunset. But all declined with thanks, until at last, as is well known, one Isabella, a Spanish lady, taken with the speculation, became a silent partner in the business. She not only furnished the capital, and took a high interest in the result, but finally reaped nearly all the profits,—a pleasant example of woman’s rights thoroughly enforced. She even took a necklace from her neck to procure funds for the expedition; and with this example before him, her associate Ferdinand, after trying his hand on several Moors, thought that, after unclasping from the neck of Columbus “the gem of the Antilles,” he could substitute a chain less golden. Posterity, however, indignantly breaking the metallic hasp, has clapped the iron collar back on the neck of the selfish, cunning, and thankless Ferdinando.

The Pictured Rocks at Taunton attributed to the Northmen, or Skalds, of the Eleventh Century.
(p. 66)

We must not forget to mention that before the old pilot could get his project to stand, he had raised the price of eggs throughout Spain by placing so many on their own poor broken heads. For this destruction, however, he consoled himself with the maxim, “all’s well that ends well.” He carried his eggs and hopes to England, France, Portugal, and Navarre; but both were kept so long that they became addled.

A heavy fog prevented England at first from seeing the enterprise; but after the discovery of real land was made, she lost no time in procuring the advantages of it, and endeavored to secure them to herself, by allowing several vessels to be outfitted at Bristol.

These vessels were not built by Laird; but, sailing away on the blind side of the island, succeeded at last in boarding the continent, and exchanging some unprinted religious tracks for certain other tracts, afterwards well stamped by royal authority.

On their return, the promoters of this missionary enterprise built a handsome church, where prayers were daily offered for many years, for past success, and intercessions made for the interposition of the same kind Providence for new exchanges of a similar kind. These expeditions, it may be remarked, have been and are the foundation of England’s greatness,—her church and her trade; or rather to name them in juster order and according to her own estimate, her trade and her church. The Cabots, father and son, will ever be remembered by their addition to the world’s wealth by the discovery, in 1497, of Newfoundland. At the time it was thought to be a story somewhat fishy, but it is now swallowed without any bones.

Landing of Columbus.
(p. 68)

The Portuguese were less fortunate, their ships having got somehow entangled in the line in crossing it, they were obliged to cast anchor against a high wind, which as usual was not so ill as not to benefit their English rivals. What became of these ships is not positively known; a glimpse of only one of them having since been obtained in Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. The rest may have drifted northwards, and their masts made to serve to splice the north pole, the old one having become somewhat loose from being so much worked about by meddlesome navigators.

Among the discoveries in America which Columbus did not make we may enumerate the following:—

First, a name for the continent; an omission afterwards supplied by a shabby countryman of his, whose own name we will not perpetuate by mentioning in this history.

Second, iron-clads; although he did come across some very hard characters, whose scaly armor history has ever since been mercilessly denting and battering. Columbus himself, although at one time cased in iron, and sent home on a trial trip, while he learned the value and preciousness of metal at the Spanish court, failed to discover its property to float him across seas successfully. Nor do we find any warrant for believing that he was the discoverer of,

Third, balsam of liverwort, the extract of buchu, Peruvian hair-dye, or the sozodont, notwithstanding the strenuous assertions to the contrary of the candid proprietors of those invaluable preparations. The only extract he succeeded in making was a promise of honors, never performed, although highly labelled; and it is well known that the only color he succeeded in obtaining in America, for his own hair, was gray. From the ingredients of this blanching powder he ultimately died himself at Valladolid.

Fourth, nor is there any better foundation for the common error, that he was the discoverer of the Tammany Society, and furnished designs and colored drawings for the wigwam, in which the Democratic braves find so many original and aboriginal voters. Indian polls, from which the hair had been carefully removed, he did see, and even took a few back with him to Spain; but it is needless to say that these polling-places were not the exemplars of those which Tammany so often and so lovingly pats on the head.

Fifth, equally erroneous is the general belief that he discovered “Hail Columbia,” although it is true that he got enough of it, in the sense that some illy educated small boys now use that phrase.

Discovery of Newfoundland.
(p. 71)

Ponce de Leon, following up the discoveries of Columbus, landed in Florida, in 1512, and endeavored to find there a fountain possessing the properties of giving to the imbiber perpetual youth. Although he did not succeed in this quest, it seems probable that some one else did, for it is well known that several Americans, such as Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and others, have lived quite too long, while other distinguished Americans, as Burr and others, have manifested in a very lively way a green old age, cutting up capers which none but very young people would have thought of. He also discovered the Dry Tortugas,—a temperance station of the first water, famous as the habitation of Dr. Mudd.

A few years later, A. D. 1517, Mexico was unfortunately discovered, and from that time to the present has been the scene of constant embroilments, beginning with the broiling of Montezuma, by Cortez, and ending with the unhappy stew made by Maximilian for himself. Mexico is the American abattoir,—the general slaughter-house of our continent. Ice for the preservation of the quarters of her victims, where no quarter was shown, is obtained from the elevated plains into which the country is as yet insufficiently broken up.

We ought to mention the voyage, in 1520, of a Portuguese, Magellan by name, who touched at the Canaries for yellow birds, coasted along the shores of Brazil in search of other golden products, but finally brought up in a very tight place, on the extreme southern tip of our western globe; calling the spot, under great pressure, the Straits of Magellan.

He became so exhilarated, however, at Cape Horn, that he kept on, like the man with the cork leg, and went all around the world, being its first circumventor, and giving the first proof of the gyrating effects of mixing liquors with water.

De Soto first chanced upon the Mississippi River, and, in 1542, was flung upon it with all his heavy armor on,—“a sink-or-swim” experiment, which resulted in his remaining down at the bottom.

Diving for wrecks has since become for divers and diverse reasons common in that turbulent stream; but he is honored as the great diver; the river not being strong enough to get him up. John Law afterwards tried a Mississippi venture; but, unlike De Soto, he went up, and never came down again. Both De Leon and De Soto showed true American enterprise and energy in the pursuit of gold. Like their countryman Cortez, in Mexico, they were, however, more desirous of discovering metallic placers, and extracting from them sudden riches, than of luring by patient industry from a jealous soil its hoarded secrets of cereal wealth.

On the north, Cartier, in 1534, became the unhappy discoverer of the Canadas, and other out-lying, uncovered, cold regions, afterwards parcelled out, not to ice companies like the Knickerbocker and others, but into viceroyalties. These freezing places, from the continual stirring about in them of such contrary elements for the succeeding century, might well be called the ice-creameries of England and France.

Champlain, in 1603, like a wise man, founded Quebec on a rock; for which he has been illy requited by being called the father of the French settlements in Canada.

Sir Walter Raleigh introduces Smoking to the English Court.
(p. 74)

Sir Walter Raleigh’s name must always burn brightly in American history, for his discovery of a smoking material on the James River. But his fame needs no puffing here, although his reputation became somewhat blown before his death. Another important event soon after occurred in connection with American discoveries. A Mayflower drifted, in December, across seas, and floating against Plymouth Rock, struck its tiny anchors in it, and, with Yankee enterprise, climbed all over it, covering its rugged clefts and bare surface with a mass of luxuriant flowers, with which also sprang up tangling weed-growths, all of which have since been dried and attracted great attention, much sneezing, some sneering, and great use of handkerchiefs to preserve the odor of, or prevent the smell of, what has penetrated all departments of American history. The last discovery which we shall here mention was that of Hudson, who brought to light the benighted island of Manhattan, then, as since, infested by Woods and other poisonous growths. The natives, as now, were very free in their manners; staring at the newly arrived, and taking them in by the exhibition of trinkets and gilt ornaments. In spite of the sluggish airs from the shores of Westchester and Dutchess, the ships of Hudson succeeded in reaching Rhinebeck; a few of his men even penetrating to the dense regions of Albany.

CHAPTER III.
ON THE INDIAN CHARACTER.

Survey of Indian Character and Lands.—Our Pacific Intentions towards the Indians.—The Whites better read than the Red Men, and the Effects of Learning.—The Pale Complexion of their Affairs.—Wet Blankets thrown over their other Habits.—Different Traits discovered by School-Girls and through official Spectacles.—Meaning of Indian Reservations.—Indian Style of Dress and its Conveniences.—Indian Names.—Examples of their Happy Application.

No history of the United States would be complete without a survey of the character of the Indian; as no State of the Union is acceptable to its inhabitants without a survey and appropriation of his lands.

Various as are the lights in which the former may be regarded, there is but one light, that of an enlight-ened self-interest, with which the latter have been treated. The speed with which we have hurried the brick-colored races towards the sun’s setting is conclusive proof of our Pacific intentions, and of our dislike to unsettled titles. Red as is the color of the Indian, to this complexion do all his tribes come at last,—a pale conviction that the white man is better read than they.

The chapter of our discoveries on this continent opens with the Indian in the foreground; and the historian, like the earliest explorer, is brought immediately face to face with him. Unlike the explorer, however, we will pause long enough to bury the proprietor of the estate which he seized and we occupy.

Blankets, often very wet, have been thrown over the Indian; while as often he has been painted so thickly, and feathered so profusely, as to become a bird of quite another color from that of our North American vulture. Slow in learning the geography of the race that rides him down as on a pale horse evermore, he has acquired the name of but one of our streams, that of the Firewater, a river whose dry banks seem always to divide his retreating from our pursuing frontier boundaries.

Perhaps we cannot give a more variegated notion of the different aspects under which the Indian character is viewed, than by putting it in an American kaleidoscope, and there giving it a few turns, certain that these turns will not be more curious or numerous than their owners’ fortunes.

1. The Indian character as viewed in schools and colleges.

Listen to an average specimen from the pen of Miss Jemima Letitia Youngfancy,—her most pronounced effort before the trustees and patrons of Rising Hill Seminary.

“‘Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind

Sees God in clouds, and hears him in the wind.’

Lamentations or Shakespeare.

“No subject is of greater importance to the well-being of our race than a proper estimate of the character of the red man. Injustice here is more deplorable, since it involves the historic position of a race once lords of all this continent, now fast dwindling away, not only out of physical existence, but from the realms of discriminating praise. His has been the misfortune to be despoiled, not simply of the bosky inheritance of fair fields and boundless domains, where his ancestors roamed as free as the winds that sweep over the breezy sierras of the Rocky Mountains, but of the justice which pleads before the tribunal of posterity for rights withheld and wrongs inflicted. Not content to pursue his retreating and emaciated footsteps into the tomb, where his poor body is scarcely allowed to moulder away in peace, amid the implements and trophies of the chase, the white man, as voracious as the prairie wolves, which whet their sharp fangs against the rocky bases that prop up the giant Cordilleras of our beloved land, has denied to him those monumental rights with which even savages adorn the last resting-places of their braves,—the trophied inscriptions carved in the enduring language in which Virgil sang and Tully burned, and in which Menander, prophetic of our Transatlantic greatness, babbled to the dull ears of a Roman race, which recked not of that ‘proud stoic of the woods,’ who, in life a victim of wrong, at death folds himself to his solemn sleep, in the language of the greatest of our living poets,

‘Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch

About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams,’

but who, also, in the apt words of the same rapt minstrel,

‘Like Truth crushed to earth shall rise again,—

The eternal years of God are theirs.’”

While the waves of applause which ripple around this popular and characteristic rhapsody, grow calm against the solid shores of historic truth, we turn to another American view equally characteristic.

2. The Indian character as seen through official spectacles. Extract from the Report of the Secretary of the Interior:—

“The beneficent policy of repression, steadily pursued by our government towards the Indian tribes still surviving, cannot fail to strike every one but themselves. While sentimental Christianity continues to dwell upon the rapid extinguishment of their tribes, the archives of this department bear gratifying witness to the more rapid extinguishment of their titles.

“There now remain in our borders—which were, it must be admitted, for the sake of argument, once theirs—but about three hundred thousand of these nomad wanderers. Our people must feel an especial gratification in the proud reflection, that it is their bounty which, now reaching forth the comforts of our abundance to these remnants of tribes, supplies at the reasonable rate of some $10.15 per caput, the wants of such as are spared by our efficient and active army corps of Indian destructives.

“This bounty is distributed by honest agents, who never fail, while dispensing it, to impress upon the recipients a proper regard for the moral suasion of our well-mounted rifles. The small commissions reserved from these treaty-stipulated funds, by these agents, is too American not to be recognized with patriotic pride; and the especial thanks of Congress are due to these self-denying distributers for the amount which they kindly leave to be disseminated among the intended beneficiaries.

“There is a natural jealousy among our people in those States and Territories where former laws injudiciously, but, as it fortunately proves, unsuccessfully located these Indian remnants, against the continuous occupation of tracts of lands called reservations, to which they have been from time to time removed. I cannot too strongly recommend that this jealousy and acquisitiveness be duly respected, and new reservations somewhere be speedily provided. Both Providence and our need of their territory plainly mark the Indians as the American Ishmaelites, against whom everybody’s hand is raised, and whose shifting tent can only be steadied up permanently against the sunset on the Pacific Ocean.”

Some people seem to think that the Indian was created to keep before us a décolleté style of dress, adapted to the freedom of our institutions,—a traveller’s costume, most convenient for the administration of medical assistance, in case of such railroad divertisements and steamboat pyrotechnic displays as often enliven our journeyings.

An Indian Reservation.
(p. 81)

Others look upon the preservation of these remnants as providential fields for the employment of the patience of domestic missionaries. Young ladies contemplate them as the only living representatives of mythological Loves, the sole heirs to the bow and arrow. Others still admire them as our only legendary and poetic creations; the only ghostly figures that creep weirdly through our sharp-set American quadrilles.

But while such discordant notions rasp the American ear and conscience about their predecessors, there is a mode of hushing up all these family jars; one which seems to have been adopted in all ages, from the time of Joshua the son of Nun, down to the Irish wakes of our time, namely, to drown them all in the jubilant music procured and paid for at the expense of the estate to be divided up.

A few words in regard to Indian names. An affectionate and grateful regard for the painted races, which will soon be seen only in the picture-galleries and books of colored engravings, has sought to sow a crop of Indian names over our lakes, rivers, mountains, and towns. Unfortunately we have succeeded in keeping scarcely enough for seed. But one State has borrowed the name of the Indian himself,—Indian-ah?—she spelling it, however, in an un-English way, without a h, as if she had said,

“O, breathe not his name.”

The application of some of these names has been singularly felicitous, as Sing-Sing, where the State guests attempt no musical flights, but are made to hum quite another tune, if not to hush up altogether; Miss-ouri, whose ill-fated union in our Federal family has been attended with such left-handed rights,—State rights, Fanny Wrights, and, for a long time in Kansas, conflicting rights; Minnehaha, whose ringing laugh is during so long a portion of the year frozen in her soft throat; Kan-sas, suggestive of her capacity for billingsgate and free use of abusive language; Oregon, and yet inviting emigrants to her valuable mines while she laughs a cunning laugh under the protecting cap of Mount Hood; Wy-an-dot River, as if it had come to a sort of rocky comma, or interrupting ledge, over which it was pausing a moment for breath to take a hop-and-skip-and-carry-one overy leap; Pot-to-wat-o-my River, seeming like a whole family council around a skillet steaming over a fire, while the carrotty-headed mother was slightly walloping the youngest of the party for asking some improper question; Pawn-ee Fork, reminding one of those old-clothes shops kept by U. S., where the unsuspecting and improvident Indian, always in want, might be tempted to pledge his wild lands for a little ready cash, or a silver fork, or blue trinket; Man-hat-tan, as if to perpetuate the fact of the great head quality of the white man in dealing with the dusky ones for the purchase of the little island that carries as its name, a cover for the little transaction which transferred twenty-four dollars to the one, for the fourteen miles of real estate sandwiched between the North and East Rivers; Winne-bago, which sets one sneezing a coltish sneeze even at the head-waters of the Missis-sippi, and in her matronly presence; and a thousand other spicy aboriginal condiments, sprinkled, like pepper and salt over a luscious ham, over our continent, to make it more piquant and relishable in the taking.

BOOK SECOND.
SETTLEMENTS AND COLONIES.
1607 TO 1775.

“And vaguely here,

Through the dim mists that crowd the atmosphere,

We draw the outlines of weird figures cast

In shadows on the background of the past.”

Longfellow’s “New England Tragedies.”

“’Tis pleasant through the loopholes of retreat

To peep at such a world.”

Cowper.

CHAPTER I.
OF AMERICAN SETTLEMENTS GENERALLY.

Some American Grounds, like Coffee, unsettled.—Some Settlements pulled up by the Roots; others chilled by Fever and Ague.—Moist Soils objected to except by Doctors.—Unexpected Crops of Tomahawks from Wheat sown.—Settlements in America because of the Impracticability of making any at Home with Creditors.—Wild Oats sown between thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth Parallels.—Frequent Settlements make long Friends.—Settlements of Old Tavern Scores in Chalky Districts.—Religious Squalls prostrate some Plantations.—Indian Tempests uproot others.—Growth of Virginia, although Queen Elizabeth a femme sole.—Clergymen’s Settlements.—Brides unsettled.—Drake around the World.

The First Year’s Crop in the New
Settlements.

Clergymen’s discourses, like grape clusters, usually show two sides,—a positive or sunny one and a negative or shady one.

Desirous of bringing out the native bunches of our history more roundly against the leafy background of its verdant youth, we begin by showing alternating merits and demerits. And first the negative, or shady side.

The first damp observation shows that many parts of America have never been settled at all. In certain districts, grounds are found, as in coffee, unsettled; and good grounds exist for this, and, contradictory as it may seem, these are generally discovered in poor water.

In some cases, like those of Gosnold, Raleigh, De La Roche, and others, attempts were made, and settlements actually planted, which seemed for a time to thrive; but the impatient planters, like curious boys, were so desirous of ascertaining how much their plants had grown, that they pulled them up to look at the roots,—an inspection which the plants resented by sulking and dying out. In other instances, fever and ague was mixed up with the first seed, and this had a chilling effect upon the husbandmen.

Indeed, a hard fight is still going on in many parts of the country with this strong unsettler, the record of whose assaults and charges is found in the apothecary shops and doctors’ offices. These highly colored little stockades and forts with the rosy-hued land-offices for the sale of the most desirable real estate, with water-lots running in front of them, often indeed comprise the entire settlement.

In some instances, the character of the soil interfered seriously with any permanent occupation of the place. People who had no objection to watered silks, or watered paper, entertained, it has been found, well-grounded reasons for not liking an oozy surface, paragraphed between watery curves, and punctuated with bullfrogs and other pointed characters. Some of the early settlers did venture upon these maritime risks; but policy, or no policy, they ended their speculations under weeping willows, with Keat-like epitaphs over them,—

“Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Oftentimes, even where the soil was rich, the early settler became discouraged by the unexpected crops he obtained. Planting wheat, he found that it came up a rank growth of Indian corn, tasselled out into tomahawks or sharp-pointed arrows, instead of the silken tufts which he had a right to look for in the order of nature. This result frequently took place in the valleys of the Connecticut and Mohawk, along the banks of the Mystic River, and upon the otherwise pleasant slopes overlooking Narragansett Bay.

In several instances, too, as in the case of the shipped by the council of the Plymouth Company, the seed thus sent was taken from heaps of full-grown vicious specimens, to be found only in London, or other large places, instead of being judiciously selected from healthy young stocks. Such seed, of course, not only became sour and fermented, but this fermentation spoiled whatever good grain was found accidentally mixed with it. This kind of crop was even worse than that of the tomahawks or arrows. Of course, these penal crops were short-lived. The profligate and dissolute soon died in the virtuous solitudes in which they had no previous experience at home to recall and compare; and escaped as soon as possible from settlements whose greatest crime, in their eyes, was that in them they could make no scores long enough to be worth running away from.

Some attempted settlements here, because they could not succeed in making any with their creditors at home. Of this class, many were found in the bounds of the London Company, scraped up under the charter of James I., granted in 1606,—a company which sowed their wild oats between the thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth parallels of latitude, but whose doings, undoings, and misdoings had no parallel whatever. Some of this seed, lying dormant, sprouted up in these regions as late as 1861, and covered the Carolinas and Virginia with a crop worse than teazles or Canada thistles.

The maxim that “frequent settlements make long friends,” was doubly verified along the New England coast, where the security of the settler could only be maintained by short and decisive footings-up of and with the breech-less and treaty-breaking Picts of our history, or by such often-planted gatherings as would prevent their attempts to run up a score.

It is almost needless to say that in all the regions from the Penobscot River to St. Augustine, under all the various charters, and among all classes of colonists, English, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, or Huguenot, settlements were often made on the walls and behind the doors of taverns, where the weekly score was kept,—a geological district mapped out in a chalk formation, the size of which seemed always to astonish the settler whenever his attention was particularly invited to it. Whatever his own fields bore, here the crop was unfailing; or rather its growth was generally in the inverse ratio to that of his wheat or tobacco patch.

In a few instances settlements, fairly and permanently made were suddenly uprooted by sudden squalls or tempests, which, razing the hair from the heads of the colonists, still, as we read of their ferocity and fury, raise our own. Such was the scalping-party that swept over Deerfield, the savage whirlwind down the valley of the Wyoming, and the rapid gust that licked up the little settlement of Cherry Valley.

Now and then also occurred a religious tornado, which prostrated whole patches of plantations, and which, at one time, threatened to become the prevailing winds of our American continent, taking the place even of our strong and steadily blowing trade-winds. Thus a company of French Huguenots, sent out in 1565, by Admiral Coligni, and planted in Florida, were overwhelmed by a party of Spaniards, under Melendez, who, after murdering them all, placed over their mutilated bodies this inscription: “We do this not as unto Frenchmen, but as unto heretics.” Which was the heretical part thus mercilessly dealt with, and which the French portion not intended to be harmed, cotemporary accounts do not furnish us with materials sufficient to enable us to discriminate. They do tell us, however, that this then fashionable mode of treating religious convictions was imitated by the countrymen of the French, acting upon what was then thought to be the proper interpretation of the merciful and benign principles of The Book, viz., “doing unto others, what they do unto you”; for soon after De Gourges, sailing from France with three ships, formed a surprise party to two Spanish forts, and after executing a Spanish dance with the garrison, took them out and hung them up in the trees like dried fruit; and fearing that the specimens might be mistaken, left above them the recipe, as follows: “I do this not as unto Spaniards, or mariners, but as unto traitors, robbers, and murderers.”

Whether the Spaniards thus done for properly appreciated the delicate discrimination, we are not informed.

To the statistician it may be of interest to know that of the abortive attempts at settlements within the present limits of the United States, six were made by the English, one by the Swedes, two by Spaniards, and two by the French. Lovers of that branch of political history will be able to wring out of these figures results more extraordinary than any we can torture them into.

On the whole, however, notwithstanding all drawbacks and misfortunes, the settlements gained steadily on the Indians, fever and ague, the cold and exposure, tomahawks, tavern-keepers, and surprise parties. Some marriages took place, but no settlements were made on the bride, except perhaps, in the course of time, her old father-in-law and mother-in-law, who were fortunate if they brought with them, as addition to her scanty stock, two whole empty trunks, their own. Queen Elizabeth did everything to promote the growth of population in her favorite colony of Virginia, except to furnish them with a personal example; but to make up for this omission, she sent out some Episcopal clergymen, provided with surplice and stole, and with licenses to marry. These obtained settlements for themselves, and zealously stimulated them in others.

As soon as the settlements began fairly to demonstrate that they would succeed, they were of course vigorously patronized, and in fact “encumbered with help.” Plenty of people there were then who at first, at the bare mention of American settlements, had placed their thumbs to their noses, and irreverently given their fingers a quick gyratory motion in the air, but who now came forward and claimed the merit of having always been the especial friends of the colonists, and pointed, like the very lieutenants and aid-de-camps of General Success, to their uniformly entertained convictions, triumphantly exclaiming, “Did we not always tell you so?” As candid historians, we cannot withhold our pencils from sketching the portraits of these burly friends of the early years of America; these large-hearted souls, who, sitting at home over their comfortable cannel-coal fires, piled cheerily up with the dividends from the stock of some of the companies formed for planting these shores, which they would not touch until it got up to par, and who then, fearing that their attachments might not be appreciated, cried out their undeviating devotion in voices that fairly drowned all others.

From these characters, which only shine in the full noonday of prosperity, we gladly turn to Sir Francis Drake, who, as early as 1586, did not hesitate to divide his last crust with the feeble and struggling colony of Roanoke Island, succoring them by timely aid, and not sucking from them the little feeble strength which short crops and long watchings against wary foes had left them. Although born in England, Drake had a soul which compassed the world, around whose waist he passed the second girdle which had ever belted it.

Drake with his Fleet sails round the World.
(p. 94)

CHAPTER II.
THE SETTLEMENTS OF VIRGINIA, DELAWARE, MARYLAND, THE CAROLINAS, AND GEORGIA.

Colored Views whitened.—Blue Ridges and Black Welts in Virginia.—Virginia, smothered up in Infancy by Charters, survives Royal nursing.—Her Vigilance against her Suitors.—Cotton introduced.—How the World managed previously.—Charles I. and his numerous Autographs.—Georgia and Oglethorpe.—Charleston set up.—A Point on Old Point Comfort.—Tobacco first piped about.—Unmarried Girls as Articles of Import.—Estimated in, if not by, Pounds.—The Fancy Constitution of John Locke for North Carolina.—Its own Length, but Short Life.—South Carolina Rivers do not run up.—Popular Errors corrected.—John Wesley.—Singular Effect of his Preaching on the Indians.—Maryland as a Duck of a Colony canvassed.

Colored views are too apt to be given and taken of these six States, shading down from the dead African black, through every gradation of tint, to a hue almost unimpeach-ably Caucasian.

It is true that Virginia carried on her bosom a Blue Ridge, as in later times some of her progeny have borne on their backs darker ridges; but until 1620 no welts of the latter character stood out on her fair shoulders; and these, be it said to his shame, were raised by the master of a Dutch man-of-war who, on the very day in August that the Pilgrim party embarked in the Mayflower, at Delft-Haven, in his own country, landed twenty negroes for sale on the banks of the James River, leaving a black mark which two hundred and forty-five years have barely succeeded in washing out. In her very cradle, in 1606, Virginia was loaded down and half smothered with that royal blanket, a charter. Not content with this comforter, the royal nurses from London kept piling other blankets of the same kind upon the vigorous infant, and because it was vigorous, until within the short space of fourteen years no less than four were heaped upon her. These were far from being counter-panes, but on the contrary served in that warm climate to distress the child, and eventually to bring out eruptions. Under the second of these, in 1609, Maryland was tucked up in the same bed with Virginia; but in 1621, not finding the company agreeable, she was taken out by Lord Baltimore, and put into a pleasant and comfortable trundle-bed of her own; the chivalrous young lord naming the baby after Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I., and daughter of the gallant Henry of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV. of France. The year 1621 was emphasized in the infant settlement of Virginia by the introduction of cotton and the first written constitution,—two prolific American seeds that have each borne large harvests. Considering the varied uses to which the former is now applied in clothing human bodies and habitations, and the latter in padding political addresses and lawsuits, we are puzzled to conceive how the world got on, and especially how congressmen managed to make speeches, or lawyers to live, prior to those great discoveries,—discoveries more important in some aspects than those of iron, the Reformation, Illinois divorces, gunpowder, steam, the doctrine of legal insanity, Brandreth’s pills, and others, without which of course no well-ordered or well-digesting family can long proceed.

Seven years later Charles I. contracted to take the entire tobacco crop of Virginia; hoping probably by the free use of this narcotic to drug the alarmed political conscience of England.

The ship that took the first Maryland emigrants up the Potomac to their new settlement was called the Ark and the Dove, and carried in its beak the olive-branch of religious toleration.

In 1630, the same liberality in disposing of broad strips of American territory was shown by King Charles I. in granting a deed, embracing North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to Sir Robert Heath; but in 1663 his son, the second Charles, desirous of improving his own handwriting, which had been somewhat neglected from his eighth year, in consequence of the necessarily active business life Cromwell had obliged him to lead, put his signature, early one foggy morning, to a paper which somebody laid in his way, and which, when brought out to the light, proved to be a grant to Lord Clarendon and several other pleasant, gentlemanly fellows, of this same small North American farm. This select little knot of farmers, after building a few barns on their farm, discovered that it was not large enough for their purposes. Like the Irishman who wanted an additional sixpence to drink the health of the gentleman who had generously given him a five-dollar bill, they desired a back field to dump manure on; and they finally obtained a second autograph from the obliging Charles to a bit of paper, allowing them to use forever the small patch lying westward to the Pacific. The farm was kept together until 1729, when it was divided up by George II. into two parts, called North and South Carolina; the latter half being, three years later, again split into two, and the lower part named, after the burly old landlord, Georgia. Nearly fifty years, however, before this division, upon a tongue of land called Oyster Point, and bivalved between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, Charleston was first set upon its uneasy foundations. Whether affected by the contiguity of Folly Island, by the use of too much pepper—always cheap in warm regions—upon the native oysters, or whether unduly exhilarated by too exclusive a contemplation of the cotton seed, which seems to have enlarged its dilated and dilating pupils, the place, although but seven feet above high tide, has always been given to high notions, and subject to a certain vertigo. An admirable ingredient, the Protestant Huguenot element, tossed out of France by the revoked edict of Nantes, was infused into the young settlement of South Carolina in 1685. The plant of liberty, however, early struck its anchoring roots close by the side of the cotton-plant; and although the governors, sent out by the royal proprietors from England, continually hacked into its smooth trunk, it still grew apace, and its bracing tonic odors filled not only the regions watered by the Santee and Pedee, but were wafted northwards and over the sister Colonies.

Although it is said that “old Virginny never tires,” it must have been because she had a robust constitution, for a busier body never existed. Always resisting the attempts made by the profligate royal governors upon her virginity, she had to watch them, day and night, for fear that they would steal her hard earnings and run away with them. In fact, during the sixty years that succeeded her birth at Jamestown, in 1606, she was constantly on the alert, putting up scarecrows on her cornfields, and notices of spring-guns, to warn away intruders; but these, so far from frightening away, only attracted the curious bills of the Indians. She was also forced to hold fast with might and main to the scanty wardrobe brought out by her from England, and with which those dissolute fellows, the young, titled, rakish, good-for-nothing overseers, were always taking liberties. Fortunately for her, as well as her sisters, the two Carolinas and Georgia, her shoulders were well covered by capes, so securely fastened on that they could not be snatched away, and their charms exposed to the rude stare or prying curiosity of idle visitors from France and England, and even from staid, sober Holland. And we here take the opportunity of repelling the slander so often circulated upon Virginia, that she is “the mother of States,”—an aspersion which, if true, would stain her virgin fame, and leave a bar sinister across the shields of the States thus born out of wedlock.

The first suitor for the budding affections of the youthful Georgia, or Georgiana, although bearing the suspicious name of Ogle-thorpe, proved to be a man of honorable intentions, high-minded, and in every respect faithful to his ardent vows,—a constant mate in all her joys and trials during his residence on the Savannah River, from 1732 to 1743. Virginia’s royal lovers, on the contrary, although always protesting their good intentions, were almost uniformly faithless. The last one bore the ill-omened, but appropriate name of Dun-more. He was very importunate, and in every way attempted to get her to make over her then valuable property to him, but in vain; and at last so mercenary did he become, and so disagreeable did he make himself, that she was obliged to show him the door.

The spirited damsel was always plucky, and soon after this domestic difficulty made up her mind to be wholly independent, and so in fact publicly gave out to the whole world, saying that “she didn’t care who knew it.” Massachusetts gallantly stood by the young girl in her declaration, and so did all her brothers and sisters; even little Rhody tossing up her jaunty sailor’s cap, and shouting out that, under Providence, she was ready to “sail in.”

The name of Sir Walter Raleigh is greenly twined through the earliest settlements of North Carolina. In her coasts he took a constantly augmenting interest, and furnished to the State its capital. His love for the new settlement only ceased to beat with his heart. His verse, which the author of “The Fairy Queen” describes as “sprinkled with nectar,” and “vieing with the notes of the summer nightingale,” was musical with her praises; and his “History of the World” lays at her feet the tribute of his warm, chivalric nature.

The duty which he felt and gave to the two Colonies, Virginia and North Carolina, was very different from the duties which his successors endeavored to draw from them,—duties so onerous as to drain not only the pockets but the hearts of the young communities from which they were pressed out.

But amid all the trials to which Virginia was subjected by the rapacity of her governors and the unsated appetites of councils, named by the home board corporators, there was one point which she could always contemplate with satisfaction, namely, Old Point Comfort,—a grandmotherly place, which her children then, and since, often visited, laying their hot heads lovingly in her lap, until her pleasant breezes cooled their feverish throbbings.

Tobacco was first grown in Virginia in 1616; and we crave leave to add, that although much piped about ever since, has never ceased to create a smoke; its curls hanging thickly and gracefully around the heads of its world-wide admirers from that time down to the present,—an instance of unchanged custom rarely seen.

Virginia, however, did not grow all of her luxuries; for, in 1620, we find her importing ninety respectable unmarried girls, who, on their arrival, and after payment of customary duties, were soon disposed of. This successful invoice was followed, the succeeding year, by a cargo of sixty more, the price for whom increased, after they were landed, from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco. How this advance affected the relations between them and the lower-priced wives of the preceding year, whether it laid the foundation for the difference between the F. F. V.’s and the white trash, the want of newspapers and of well-preserved family bills does not enable us to judge.

Certain it is that this commercial rape was as cordially acquiesced in by the seized damsels, as was the rape of the Sabines by those young ladies; and proved to be as beneficial to the growth of the infant settlement as that novel match-making on the banks of the Tiber.

The descendants of these unions on the James and Potomac would have been more numerous had not their numbers been thinned off by Indian knives, which were very busy in 1622, 1623, and 1644–1646. This last war was followed, three years later, by a petty imitation of the civil strife which had raged for seven years between the Parliament and Charles I. in England, and which ended, in the latter country, by taking off the king’s head, and in Virginia by taking away many of their former constitutional privileges. Cromwell fumigated them thoroughly in their own tobacco-smoke, until all the smell of loyalty was gone. Upon the accession of Charles II., in 1660, arbitrary legislation was sought here, as in England, to stamp out the rights of the people which had silently but steadily grown up into a stiff crop; but resistance followed, and in this struggle between Virginia and the crown the succeeding years were spent, until 1754.

The principal event in the history of the settlement of North Carolina was the fancy constitution furnished for it in 1669, by John Locke, whose understanding about it differed wholly from that of the people, through whose heads it never could be got. Besides having plenty of time on his hands, Locke made his constitution so long, and divided it up into so many parts, that the youngest settler died before he had read it half through, and bequeathed the further perusal of it to his descendants, with all his shares in what it most resembled,—the Dismal Swamp.

A sniff of this vague, shadowy constitution, or bundle of airy rights, by the adjacent settlement of South Carolina, affected her with such a fit of sneezing, that it kept on from that time until 1865, and from which she only found relief now and then in her cotton pocket-handkerchiefs.

We may remark that it is a vulgar error to suppose that the rivers in South Carolina run up hill,—just as it is a common mistake to believe that the Tar River, in North Carolina, originates in a turpentine district, and flows in a thick stream into Pamlico Sound. We may as well, also, correct the almost universal notion, that the inhabitants of Charleston have a particular fondness for fire as a steady, every-day diet.

The chief incident which marked the uneventful record of the Georgia settlement was the advent, in 1736, of John Wesley.

He preached in the Methodist language to the Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees; but those short-lived tribes, attending on a certain occasion one of his camp-meetings, and listening to the benevolent missionary giving out one of his brother Charles’s hymns, became so discouraged that they went back to their own camp and ways.

In addition to what we have already said of Maryland, we would state that its mild climate attracted canvas-back ducks, as its mild principles of religious toleration brought to its borders swarms of emigrants. Both have had a damp residence amid its amphibious shores, where the land seems two thirds water, and the water a little more moist than elsewhere.

Map of Maryland.
(p. 105)

CHAPTER III.
JOHN SMITH.

John Smith historically considered.—The Number in Leading Cities stated.—How classified.—Why he is not put in a separate Volume or in an Appendix.—Origin of the Smiths.—American Genealogical Trees.—Smiths up a Stump, in the Sap, and dangling from the Branches.—The Antiquity and Ubiquity of the Smiths.—Variety and Extent of their Occupations and Operations.—Will probably in time own all the World.—Comic Situations of John Smiths in Cities, at Family Dinner-Parties, at Prayer-Meetings, at Balls, in Titles to Real Estate, etc.—Whether he can be sued.—Other Legal Questions in reference to him considered.—John Smith of Pocahontas Fame a Myth.