History of the United States, etc

Front matter

HISTORY OK The United States, WRITTEN FOR THE CHAUTAUQUA READING CIRCLES. BY EDWARD E. HALE. NEW YORK: CHAUTAUQUA PRESS C. L. S. C. Department, 805 Broadway. 1887. The required books of trie C. L. S. C. are recommended by a Council of six. It must, however, be understood that recom mendation does not involve an approval by the Council, or by any member of it, of every principle or doctrine contained in the book recommended. Copyright 1887, by Phillips i: Hunt. 805 Eroadway, New York. CONTENTS. PAeB

Preface

. THE preparation of a history of the United States for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle has been a real pleasure. Of course the council understand, when they place as short a book as this in the hands of readers, that those readers will wish to refer to the more full studies which illustrate either the general subject or special details which will have interest to different persons in different local ities. The master work of Mr. Bancroft, which brings the history of America down to the adoption of the Constitution, will be — or should be — within reach, in some public library, of each of our readers in America. The Popular History of the Utiited States, edited under the masterly care of Mr. Sydney H. Gay, one of the first of American historians, brings the history down to the end of the Civil War.

It is the work of many writers, of whom Mr. Gay is easily the chief, and it may be referred to as an authority of the first class. In each neighborhood local histories of value will be found ; and it was one of not the least advantages of the series of centennial celebrations which covered the years from 1863 to 1883 that they called the attention of students in every part of the United States to the materials yet to be found for the proper understanding of the history of the country. Such local histories should be sought for by our readers wherever they are, and will make an agreeable accompaniment to the study of the general history which is now in their hands. It is quite safe to say that we understand the history of our own country better than it was ever understood before ; and

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. while there are still many things concealed which we should be glad to know, time, as it passes, uncovers more which were hidden by the prudence or timidity of the past, so that, on the whole, we are gainers in the matter of history as time goes by. It must be confessed that the habit of the American mind has not, on the whole, been favorable for the writers of his tory, who would collect those suggestions or illustrations by which we make the past appear on our canvas in the light of to-day. The first settlers in the country were, perhaps, too much engaged with the hard duties of pioneers, to be able to give much time to the description of those picturesque and romantic surroundings which their successors would be so glad to look upon. It happens, oddly enough, that it is more often from the rapid sketch of some traveler, who is not bound down by the cares of pressing daily duty, that we are apt to catch what the artists would call the broken lights which give distinctness, vividness, and even interest, to the picture of the past which we are trying to re-create.

Fortu nately for us, it happens, in some instances, that the work of such travelers can be found. In particular we owe to the French writers, of the period of the Revolution and of the generation which follows it, some hints on the method of daily life in America which it would be difficult to gain from the more studied and serious business papers which our fathers have left to us. It is not too late for us to express the wish and the hope that the students in the Chautauqua course will thus" under take the preservation of the materials of local history in the neighborhoods in which they live. There can scarcely be named a part of the United States — perhaps there cannot be named a part of the United States — where careful conversation with the aged, careful exploration of the public records, and careful investigation of files of old letters, or of old books of account, would not bring to light much which would have historic value for the writer, whoever he may be, who is to undertake the work in another generation which has been undertaken in the book which is now in the reader's hands.

PREFACE.

. 9 The writing of our history is no longer the gathering to gether of the traditions of a few colonists landing from Europe on the eastern shore of America. The nation of to-day is a nation which is to seek its origin not only in the history of Great Britain and Ireland ; but in the history of France, of Spain, of Holland, of Germany, of Russia, and of Mexico. The early efforts at colonization have been made from different motives, by men of wholly different training, and in very different ways. The original memoirs and au thorities which explain them are to be found in very different places and languages. Nothing can be more fascinating than to study such origins in the early documents which still exist, or in the traditions which will not exist long. And we cannot but recommend such study to the faithful student of the his tory of the United States.

There are some points in our history which will always, probably, be more or less doubtful, and be matters for discussion among conscientious students. But there are many points, which would have been spoken of thus doubtfully a generation ago, which may now be considered as quite definitely settled. The first of these is the arrival of the Northmen on our coast at the end of the tenth century of the Christian era. Even when Mr. Irving wrote his Life of Columbus, such a discovery of America seemed matter rather for legend, and perhaps only of fancy. But the reader of American history to-day should understand that the fact may be considered as settled beyond doubt, and that the questions which arise are simply questions of detail as to what may have been the farthest point gained by these Northern explorers.

On the other side of the continent it has been made equally clear, by the investigations of the Californian antiquaries, that vessels from Asia could have arrived on the western coast in any of the centuries from Marco Polo's time down, and, probably, for many centuries before. All the old questions about the peopling of this continent from any stock different from the stocks which peopled Europe and Asia may thus be dismissed where they belong. The opening of 1*

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. 10 the archives of different European countries to investigation throws more and more light on such fictions as have sur rounded the voyages of Verrazano and others, and, on the whole, the history of the mythical century, as we have ven tured to call it, is better understood now than it was fifty years ago. Of the colonial history proper, careful studies were early made in each of the colonies. But, with the passion for scientific historical investigation which belongs to our time, a great deal is done in every year to make those histories more human, if we may so say, and intelligible. Such work, for instance, as Mr. VVeeden's great book on the History of Commerce brings under one point of view subjects of which, in the past, the study has been only fragmentary, disjointed, and unsatisfactory in proportion.

Of the Revolution, of its causes, its methods, and its results, we certainly know much more than Judge Marshall knew, or even George Washington, or any of the men of their times. The governments in possession of European archives are no longer coy about opening to students the papers in their pos session. We know, for instance, that George the Third was his own enemy, and the enemy of Great Britain. We know something of the divided councils of England, and of the causes which led to division ; of the policies of France and Spain and the other countries of Europe. We are able to make a study much more complete than was in the power of Mr. Botta, Mr. Grahame, Judge Marshall, or any other of the earlier historians. In the study of our own political history there is unques tionably great difficulty.

One is tempted to say that the American statesman has a habit of secretiveness which did not belong to Sully, or to the Walpoles, or even the Pitts, of other generations. One is tempted to say that because certain measures cannot be fully discussed before the great audience of all the people of America, the real discussion of them is left to the privacy of confidential language, leaving no sign behind. It seems as if this happened more often than in

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. 11 Europe. But perhaps this is what historians always say of two or three generations before the time they write in. This is certain, that with the passage of years we obtain more and more side lights, sometimes from very unexpected sources, as to the methods, and even as to ihe actions, of the men who came most into the public eye in the first generations of the Federal Union. It is more and more certain that these men were not as important as they thought themselves, and as their times thought them. It is more and more certain that the People of the United States governs the United States. It directs the fortunes of the United States even where the magistrates of its election, who are after all but the servants of its will, have not rightly comprehended what is the true destiny of the republic.

It is certainly a curious and instruct ive truth that the three great victories of America, in the first thirty years after the formation of the Federal Constitution, were victories in no sort premeditated by the chief magistrates of America, and to which it may be said their administration of government did not in any way contribute. The creation of the great industry by which cotton was raised and sent over the world — the opening and maintenance of the immense maritime prosperity of thirty years — the marvelous emigration by which the valley of the Mississippi has been made the store-house from which the world is fed — these ate the three important features of the first fifty years of American history. In regard to each of them we may say that the ad ministration which had charge of the "government" of the country knew little of the causes which led to it, or of the methods by which it was developed.

So far as it could it did much to check them. But the People is wiser than any man of the people ; and the People, under the direction of the God who always smiles on well-meant endeavor, carried them through. The careful reader will see, in more than one instance, that the same subject has been referred to, and even the same statement repeated, in different chapters of this book. It is proper to say here that this is not an accident or oversight,

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. but that this repetition of statement has been decided on. as, on the whole, convenient to such readers as will have this book in hand. It would, of course, have been quite in my power to have referred the reader from chapter to chapter, or from page to page, for the details which I have preferred to repeat. But my object has been to present to him, what he is told, in the way easiest for him ; and I have been willing to sacrifice the appearance of elaborate finish, if I could give to him the information which he wished, in the form most con venient to him. EDWARD E. HALE. Roxbury, Mass., May 5, 1887. THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES.

Chapter I

First Voyages of Discovery. Northmen's Discoveries — The Icelandic Accounts — Life in Rhode Island — Expedition Around Cape Cod and Into Massachusetts Bay — Skraellings — Return to Greenland — Another Expedition Entered Buzzard's Bay — Skeleton in Armor — Columbus's Discovery — Charter to John and Sebastian Cabot — Venetian Discoveries — Mythical Period of History — Juan Ponce de Leon's Discovery of Florida — Verazzano — De Soto Landed in Florida — De Soto's Death and Burial in the Mississippi River — Failure of Spanish Attempt to Colonize Florida — Rumors and Expeditions in Search of Great Wealth in Northern Mexico — Settlement of Santa Fe and St. Augustine — Landing of Sir Francis Drake on Pacific Coast — Huguenots — Sir John Hawkins — Mcnendez — Revenge on the Spaniards — Storming of San Mateo — Defeat of the Spanish — Lane's Settlement at Roanoke— That Island Abandoned — Arrival of Sir Richard Grenville — First English Child Born in What is Now the United States — Gosnold's Expedition and Settlement of Cuttyhunk.

THE earliest discovery of the coast of the United States was made by the Northmen. These bold navigators, having made themselves quite at home in Iceland, crossed to Greenland, and early in the eleventh century one of their ex peditions pressed farther south and reached the coasts of Nova Scotia and, probably, of Massachusetts. The only narrative which is preserved is in poetical language and has in it the elements of legend. There is great controversy in regard to it and to its claims as history. At the present moment, how ever, the balance of opinion among well-informed people supposes that an expedition led by Leif, a Norse prince, in the year 1000 of the Christian era, passed as far south as what is now known as Mount Hope Bay, at the head of Narra gansett Bay, in Rhode Island. The Icelandic accounts go into a good deal of detail as to the aspect of the shores, and different enthusiasts point out one and another spot which they consider to be well described now.

The most definite sign, however, which is given as to their locality is an intimation that, on the shortest day of the year, the sun rose at half-past seven in the morning and set at half-past four. If this observation had been made with mathematical correctness, and with instruments of perfection, the latitude of the point where they spent the winter would be 41 degrees, 24 minutes and 10 seconds, which is about that of Mount Hope Bay. Their own phrase is, '' There came no frost in the winter to this country, and the grass hardly withered there." They thought the nature of the country was so good that cattle would not require house feeding. With our more luxurious agriculture this seems a remarkable statement to make of southern New England. But it is quite within the memory of living men that horses were left with out shelter in the open air through the winter in Rhode Island.

Lets, having determined to spend the winter here, divided his company into two parties, one of which should be a party of explorers, while the other watched the country. They took turns in this duty. A German named Tyrker returned from one of these expeditions in great excitement. At first the Icelanders thought he was out of his mind. But he said at last, in their own language, " I have not been far off, but still I have something new to tell. I find vines and grapes." " Is that true, my foster father ? " said Leif. " True it is," he said. " I grew up in a land where there is no want of either vines or grapes." This is the picturesque account which is given of the dis covery of grapes in the new land, which gave it the name of Vinland. This statement has been thought to show that the NORTHMEN. 15 explorers must have come well down into the New England region, and verifies the statement made with regard to latitude.

The discovery proved to them to be an important one. They gathered the grapes in great quantities and heaped them upon the stern boat of their vessel. They filled the hold of the vessel with timber which would be valuable in Green land, and with this cargo returned home in the spring. In fact, as Dr. Gray informs us, the Fox grape of the New England shore may be traced as far north as Massachusetts, and, possibly, in New Hampshire. The Vitis œstivalis, which is also eatable, may be found in New Brunswick. The Frost grape, which is scarcely eatable, runs into Lower Canada. There is some doubt whether it can be found in Nova Scotia. Certainly it would be hard to load a boat with its clusters. In the next year, the year 1002, the brother of Leif, named Thorvald, who is said to have been the ancestor of the great sculptor Thorvaldsen, repeated the voyage with a crew of thirty men.

He found the booths still standing which his brother had put up, and he, as his brother had done, went into winter quarters in this pleasant land. He found salmon and other fish in those waters; and here again is an accurate description of what he would have found were he at the head of Narragansett Bay. In the spring Thorvald coasted to the westward and is supposed to have gone as far as New York, where he found another lake through which a river flowed to the sea. This is supposed to describe the Tappan-sea of the Dutch. On one occasion they saw a shed built of wood, for the housing of corn ; but they saw no people. Having remained the next winter, Thorvald started in his ship for a more extended expedition. He is supposed to have doubled Cape Cod from the south and entered Massa chusetts Bay.

At the head of that bay he met with natives for the first time. These natives are described as"skrael lings." They were small men, and are described as the Northmen describe the Esquimaux Indians. The impression has thus been given that at this early period the coast of New England was possessed by a race which we now know only in the Arctic regions, and subsequently dispossessed by the Algonquin race of Indians whom the English found there afterward. But of this conquest by the Algonquins no trace has been found in their legends . neither are any skeletons of Esquimaux found in the Indian burial-places of New England. The Northmen stole upon nine skraellings unawares and captured eight of them, whom they killed in cold blood. The ninth escaped. He brought back with him his fellows to avenge the murder.

The Northmen fled to their ships. After the running battle it proved that Thorvald had been wounded. He died there, and was buried, as is supposed, on a cape which looks out on Boston Bay. At his head and feet they planted crosses. They sailed back around Cape Cod to Vinland, and in the next spring they returned to Green land. In the spring or summer of 1005 another expedition sailed, but did not succeed in finding Vinland, or, indeed, any land. But in the year 1007 a party of three ships and 140 men and women tried the adventure again. They recognized the points discovered before ; they noticed islands which are supposed to have been Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, and they entered Buzzard's Bay. Here they spent their first winter. But they were not sufficiently provisioned, and one party undertook to return to Iceland.

They never reached it, however, and it was rumored that they were re duced into slavery in Ireland. The other two ships sailed farther on and made other explorations. The travelers made a settlement which might have been permanent but for an attack of the natives. They are described as being black and fierce, with coarse hair, large eyes and broad cheeks. The expression "broad cheeks" is a good description of the American Indians. After one and another skirmish and severe attack their colony was given up in the year 1010. In the next year Freydis, an energetic woman who had been in the early expeditions, led out another colony and arrived at the place, which by this time was well known, where Leif had built his booths. But, if the Saga is to be EARLY VOYAGES. 17 believed, the party having quarreled, more than half of them were murdered in a horrible treachery, and with the spring the survivors returned to Greenland or Iceland.

With this piece of savage barbarism the history of ten years of coloniza tion ends somewhat suddenly. The whole history is so romantic that every effort has been made to corroborate it from the indications now or recently to be found in New England. Of these the most interesting besides those which have been mentioned was the discovery near Fall River of the " skeleton in armor," which gives the subject of one of Mr. Longfellow's early poems. But, by a misfortune, this skeleton and the armor were burned in a museum before critical attention had been called to the Sagas which gave us this description. For some time it was supposed that there was another monument of the Northmen in the wind-mill still standing on the little public square at Newport; but more careful investigation showed that this was built as a wind-mill in the second generation of English settlements.

There remains to be noticed here a curiouslv inscribed rock on the shore in Berkley, in Massachusetts, near the place where it is supposed the Northmen settled. But the marks heavily cut in this granite, although evidently the work of men, resemble so closely the marks on Indian blankets, and even on rocks in different parts of the United States, that no real argument can be drawn from them. There are many traditions existing in early European his tory of voyages made across the Atlantic, in which it is supposed that the explorers discovered a new land. But for the purposes of the history of the United States, which is what engages us, these need not be examined in detail. It is sup posed that the success of the Norse adventure was one of the encouragements which Columbus had for the great discovery in which, on the nth of October, r402, he revealed, for prac tical purposes, the western continent to the Old World.

His success was followed by the grant of Henry VII. in England of a charter to John and Sebastian Cabot to sail westward to attempt a similar discovery. It is now quite freely said that the French fishermen of the coast of Biscay had been in the habit of taking fish off the banks of Newfoundland long be fore that time. It may well be that in such fishing they were acquainted with one and another point on the north eastern coast of America where they could land and dry their fish ; and it may be that such points were not considered of any great importance, as they offered but little that was tempting for colonization. Whether the Cabots had any information from such persons is not known. What is cer tain is that as early as the ioth of August, 1497, there is a memorandum in King Henry's private accounts that ten pounds was to go to " hym that found the new isle."

On the 24th of the same month the Venetian ambassador in England wrote home that a " Venetian who is a very good mariner, and has good skill in discovering new islands, has returned safe, and has found two very large and fertile islands ; having likewise found the seven cities four hundred leagues from England on the west. In the spring his majesty means to send him with fifteen or twenty ships." These dates are given because they are certain dates. What is very perplex ing in the narrative is that an early map is found in which it is distinctly said that Cabot made this discovery in the year of the birth of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, 1494 ; three years earlier than the date given in the account book and in the Venetian letter. But this map cannot be regarded as of the very first authority, because in another of its inscriptions it says that the great discovery was made in the year 1544.

The date as given by Hakluyt, the great English historian, is 1497, and this date must be taken as the historical date when the Cabots made their landing which they marked as Prima Vista. So far as may be inferred from the small map, which is the earliest representing their voyage, they struck the continent somewhere near the eastern point of the Island of Cape Breton, not a great way from the fortress afterward so distinguished in American history, Louisburg. The island of Newfoundland, which might seem to bear the name of being the first point of discovery, was observed in one of these PONCE DE LEON. 19 early voyages, but it is not the point which is indicated on the Cabots' map as Prima Vista. From this time, at the end of the fifteenth century, to the be ginning of the seventeenth, come in a hundred years which have been well called the mythical period of our history.

It is in those hundred years, almost mysterious, that poets might place their imagined histories, and that the really adventurous novelist might run wild without much chance of correction. It is even a matter of question who first laid down the outline of the present coast of the United States. Sebastian Cabot probably made a voyage far south. He went as far as 36 de grees of northern latitude, which is about the latitude of South ern Florida. But although he landed in some places and found copper among the natives, and although he captured some of them, he left no outline of the shore which is now known. Good authorities even doubt whether he ever sailed south of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The first narrative of any adventure in which we know Europeans to have made any considerable progress in the United States of to-day, after the time of the Northmen, is that by Juan Ponce De Leon.

He had heard legends in the West India Islands of a fountain of perpetual youth which was to be found in Florida. That peninsula had not then received its name. He sailed from Porto Rico with three ships, in March, 15 12, to discover it ; and, passing one of the little "keys" on the south of Florida on Easter Sunday, which the Spaniards call " The Feast of Flowers," he named the land Florida because it was covered with flowers. His account of the new discovery represented it as a very important one, and he was made its first governor on condition that he would colonize it, which, in 1521, he attempted to do, but in a fight with the Indians he was killed. In 15 19 Garay, the Spanish Governor of Jamaica, explored the gulf coast and discovered that Florida was not an island, as Ponce De Leon had sup posed.

In these expeditions Fernandina was the northern point touched by the Spanish, and on some of the old maps there is a blank left between the northern point of Florida as it now exists and the region which we call the British Provinces. How that blank was filled on the maps of the world is still a question. There is a narrative, which finds its place in most of the histories, of an exploration made by a pirate named Verraz ano who sailed under a commission from the King of France. According to his own account, he struck the land on the 34th parallel in the spring of 1524. According to the same account he sailed to the 50th degree of northern latitude. In the older histories he is generally called the first discoverer of the Atlantic coast of the United States. But as he says he found lilies and roses in New Jersey in the month of April, as he found the Indians in Rhode Island making wine and oil before the sixth of May, as every other detail in this expedition is such as a vivid imagination supplies readily and easily, it must be doubted whether any facts are at the bottom of his narrative.

It really seems probable that the conjecture of Mr. Stevens is to be taken as the basis of real history. This writer sup poses that, while the geographers of the East were still under the impression that America was a part of Asia, some one, who knew that the land of Asia in those latitudes was unbroken by any deep strait, drew in an imaginary line of the United States, from Florida to what was called the land of the Bac alaos. Mr. Stevens supposes that subsequent navigators when they touched the real coast of the United States improved upon this imaginary line. In this way it may be said, almost without a paradox, that the Atlantic coast of the United States was never at any one moment, or by any one voyage, discovered to Europe. Had there been any rumor or hope of discovery of gold in these cases the Spaniards would have pressed their discoveries in that direction.

But, in truth, they were more tempted elsewhere. An expedition in quest both of gold and other wealth was led out from the West Indies in 1528 by Pamphilo de Narvaez. He landed in, or near, Tampa Bay two days before Easter, and from that time he and his com- DE SOTO. 21 panions, becoming more and more wretched in different extremities, explored the region north of the Gulf of Mex ico. To us of to-day the most interesting result of this expedition is that four survivors, who were made slaves by the Indians, wandered from tribe to tribe for six years, and, having passed through our present Texas and the Mexican province of Sonora, came out at last on the northern settle ments of the Spaniards, near the Gulf of California. It was the information which these people gave with regard to the somewhat civilized Indians, of whom the remnants exist in the Zunis and Moquis of to-day, which set the Spaniards upon exploration in that region.