Popular history of America ...

Preface

The editor has sought the best materials in the preparation of this History of America, and is indebted to McKenzie's admirable History of the United States, a work published abroad some ten years ago, for the larger part of the text, and especially for the fine moral analyses in the parts having reference to the Puritans, to Slavery, and to the War for the Union. The opening and closing chapters, and the parts having especial reference to Canada, are, for the most part, original ; the text from McKenzie has been enlarged, revised, and edited ; stories have been interpolated, and the illustrations have been selected from the best sources by the most competent editors. The pubhshers havo thus aimed to present a work of unusual attractiveness and value.

H. BUTTERWORTH.

Boston, May, 1881.

CONTENTS,

Chapter Page

I. The Mysterious Races i-^

ir. The Great Discovery, AD. 1492 ...... 29

III. Seeking Homes in the New Land 51

IV. King Philip's War 117

V. The Growing Empire 136

VI. Witchcraft in New England ■ • 157

VII. Persecution and Religious Liberty 165

VIII. Growth and Government of the Colonies . . 177

IX. The French Colonies 187

X. The Eve of Revolution 202

XI. Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston .... 237

XII. The Declaration of Independence 269

XIH. The War for Independence 274

XIV. The Thirteen States become a Nation. . 302

XV. From Washington to Madison 313

XVI. The Two Empires, — the United States and

Canada 332

XVII. The Story of Slavery .... 340

XVIII. Mexico and the Mexican War 363

XIX. Kansas and John Brown . 376

XX. Abraham Lincoln 392

XXI. War 407

XXII. Liberty to the Slave 431

XXIII. Gettysburg and Richmond -445

XXIV. The Martyr President 477

XXV. Peace 486

XXVI. Prosperity 494

XXVII. 1880 — 18S1. President Garfield — A.ssassination

— Death — Marquis of Lorne — The Population of the United States and Canada —

Conclusion 509

Presidents and Vice-Presidents of the United States . 524

Population and Area of the States and Territories . 525 List of Cities and Towns having Population of 10,000

and upwards 526

Chronological Table ..... 529

Index 535

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Penn's Treaty with the Indians ..... . Frontispiece

PAGE

The Cradock Mansion ...,0.12

Phoenician Vessel ..... = ... 14

Dighton Rock 15

Skeleton in Armor 16

Mounds at Marietta, Ohio 17

Mounds near Newark, Ohio . 20

Fragment of Ancient Pueblo Pottery 21

Toltec Ruins, Yucatan 23

Siberian Elephant and Mastodon Restored 25

Indians in Council 27

Coil-made Jar from Southern Utah 28

Spanish Prior ti

Columbus Watching for Land -^-7

" Dreary with Ice and Snow " . . . -77

Ponce de Leon in the St. John's River .......... 38

Bivouac in Florida , -iq

Burial of De Soto a-.

Home of the Alligator 46

Tropica] Forest 47

Henry VIII .51

Champlain 1-2

Quebec in 1608 . . . c--

Chained Bible, Time of James I c6

Planting the Cross on New Lands C7

Francis I 60

The Ruined Settlement 61

Sir Walter Raleigh . 64

The Settlers at Jamestown 65

Clearing the Forest 68

John Smith a Captive among the Indians ......<... 69

Indian Attack on Settlers in Virginia 73

Baptism of Virginia Dare . 77

Captain Smith and the Chief of Paspahegh . . 79 viii List of Illustrations.

PAGE

Marriage of John Rolfe and Pocahontas . . . . = 8i

" Meadows Stretched to the Eastward " . . . . . . . 84

Dinner Amusements at Port Royal . . . . . . . , 87

Baptism of Indians at Port Royal 91

James 1 93

The Mayflower at Sea ..... 95

William, Prince of Orange = • 97

The Pilgrims Receiving Massasoit loi

Many Visitors .... 105

Oliver Cromwell 106

Founding a New Settlement 107

Charles 1 109

Dealing out the Five Kernels of .Corn iii

French and Dutch Quarrel 115

Destruction of the Narragansetts ... 121

The Alarm 123

Death in the Field 124

Death of King Philip 125

Weetamo on a Raft ....... 128

Philip's Head Brought, to Plymouth . . 129

Monument to John Eliot 135

Henry Hudson in the North River ... 137

Charles H 140

Dutch Traders at Manhattan 141

Penn's Arrival in America 144

Ruins in Central America 145

Dr. Johnson 148

Penn's Colonists on the Delaware 150

George H 151

Oglethorpe and the Indians ., ... 153

Witchcraft at Salem Village 161

Whipping Quakers at the Cart's Tail in Boston ..... 167

Roger Williams in Peril for his Enemies 171

George Fox . = . 173

The Old and the New . ... 175

George Washington . ... 181

Franklin 184

Burke - 185

Death of General Braddock ..... .191

French and English Naval Conflict . .... -195

List of Illustyations.

PAGE

Montcalm i9<S

Death of Wolfe if)9

William Pitt, Earl of Chatham - 206

Samuel Adams , . . . - 209

Destruction of Tea .... 213

The Signal Lanterns ............... 21S

Paul Revere's Ride 219

Battle of Lexington • • ~-l

British at Colonel Barrett's 225

Roads and Historic Localities at Concord, Mass 226

Combat at the Bridge 227

Fight at Merriam's Corner 230

Christ Church, the Old North Meeting-House 232

The Hancock House 236

Faneuil Hall .... 237

Andros a Prisoner in Boston 239

Queen Mary -4'

The Battle of Bunker Hill -43

The Old Powder-House at Somerville 247

General Israel Putnam -5^

English Ships of-War 25s

Breed's and Bunker Hills 259

Bunker Hill Monument 261

The Washington Elm 262

George HI 271

Continental Currency 273

Washington Crossing the Delaware 277

Lafayette = . 281

English Attacked at Germantown 285

French Naval Victory 291

The Assault 3°^

1775 ' 303"

Mount Vernon 3^9

Fight between the Constellation and La Vengeance 311

The English Right of Search 3' 5

Sea-Fight, War of 1812 Z^l

English Captive in French and Indian War . 321

Jesuit Missionary Addressing the Indians 3^7

Marquette and Joliet Discover the Mississippi . • • • 333

La Salle Claims the Mississippi Valley for France ... . 337

Murder of La Salle in Texas 34 1

X List of Illustrations.

PAGE

Emigrants on the St. Lawrence 347

Mule-jenny Spinning- frame , 3^1

Scene in Texas y^^

Daniel Webster 361

General Taylor on the Rio Grande 364

Spanish Monastery in Mexico ............ 365

General Pierce Landing in Mexico 368

The Land of Promise 369

Gold Digging 372

Crossing the Mountains 373

Gold Washing in California y]-]

Pioneer Life in the West 381

Border Settlers , 385

Pioneer Travellers 389

Home of a Western Pioneer 393

Going to Court through Western Woods ........ 399

1861 405

Attack on Fort Sumter , . . 409

Passing through Baltimore 415

Battle-Field 430

Slaves Escaping to Union Troops , 433

Battle of Antietam 437

Plan of Battle of Gettysburg 447

The Wilderness 457

Camp Followers of Sherman's Army, Foraging 461

Sheridan Turning the Tide of Battle 465

Ruins in Richmond 471

Negro Troops in Richmond 475

President Lincoln in Richmond . . ...... 479

Assassination of Lincoln .... 481

Capitol at Washington .... 487

Horticultural Hall .... ...... 495

Bridge near Fairmount . . 499

Memorial Hall .... - . . 503

James A. Garfield ... ..... 509

Young Garfield and the Salt-Boiler 511

Young Garfield and the l^oard of Trustees . . 513

Assassination of President Garfield ... 517

THE CRADOCK MANSION.

The oldesl house in America; built about 1634 by Matthew Cradnrk. thp first Governor of the Massachuse'' ^s Colcnv

YOUNG FOLKS HISTORY OF AMERICA.

Chapter I. The Mysterious Races

It is highly probable that the American continent was known to the ancients, though in a somewhat imperfect way. Plato, four hundred years before our Saviour's turif , gives a particular account of the great island of Atlantis, " an island that was larger than Libya (Africa) and Asia." Stiabo and Pliny both mention a like mysterious island. We are told that this great territory was inhabited by a powerful people, who became so wicked that they were drowned by the judgment of heaven, and that the island itself, that was larger than Africa and Asia, sunk in the sea. For mf.ny years it was deemed dangerous for navigators to sail westward on account of the ruins of this mysterious island which, it was believed, strewed the waters and im'peded the way.

Atlantis may have been a fabulous land, but the Phoenicians or Canaanites had a knowledge of a country beyond the sea. Phoenicia, like England, once ruled the waves. Take the map of Asia and glance over the r^arrow strip of territory lying between the hills of Palestine and the sea. Here are the sites of Tyre and Sidon, the ancient London and Liverpool of the Mediterranean, into v/hose gay bazaars, glittering temples, and spacious palaces once flowed the luxuries of the world. The ships of Phoenicia gathered the treasures of the Mediterranean, the Euxine, ^nd the Adriatic, the vine-clad hills of Ionia and Italy _, and the shores of Southern Europe and Northern Africa. The Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) were for a long period believed to be the end of the world.

The Phoenician sailors began to strike out beyond the Pillars of Hercules. They visited the British Islands for tin,

PHCENICIAN VESSEL.

and the shores of the Baltic for amber. We are told that certain of these navigators were once driven on to a wonderfully fertile island in the Western Ocean, and that it was their purpcse to keep this discovery a secret.

THE WRITING ROCK AND SKELETON IN ARMOR.

Among the most marked evidences that tlie coast of New England was visited by old-time mariners long before the coming of the Spanish voyagers and the Pilgrims, are the well-preserved relics known as the Writing Rock, at Dighton,

The Writing Rock. I5

Massachusetts, the Skeleton in Armor found at Fall River, and that ancient landmark, the Old Stone Tower, at Newport.

The celebrated Writing Rock at Dighton is situated on the Taunton River, a stream associated with many Indian traditions and events of colonial history. It is otten visited by antiquaries, and its inscriptions are well preserved. It consists of a solitary mass of fine-grained granite, lying on the sands of the river, a few feet above low-water mark, but covered with water at each rising of the tide. On the water side it presents an inclined plane, the face of which, eleven feet

DIGHTON ROCK.

by five feet, seems to have been originally covered with sculptures and hieroglyphic inscriptions. The face of the rock is extremely hard, and, however old the inscriptions may be, those that rise above the low- water mark can have undergone but little change from the action of the elements.

The rock was noticed by the Pilgrims, but received little attention from historians and antiquaries until the years 1834-35, when a most extraordinary relic was found a few miles distant, in the town of Fall River. In digging down a hill near the town, a mass of earth sHd off, uncovering a human skull, which was found to belong to a skeleton buried i6

Young Folks History of America.

in a sitting posture, enveloped in a covering of bark. This envelope was removed, when the astonished workman saw that the trunk of this skeleton was encased in a breastplate of brass. The breastplate, which was similar to that which Homer describes as having been worn by Hector, was thirteen inches long, six inches broad at the upper end and about

five inches at the lower.

It was evidently cast in a furnace, and was about one-eighth of an inch in thickness.

But what is most remarkable about this armor is, that it seems to have no association with the armorial customs of Northern or Eastern Europe, nor with any recent historical date.

Below the breastplate, and entirely encircling the body, was a belt composed of brass tubes, each four and a half inches in length and three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter. The tubes were cast upon hollow reeds, and were so prepared as to protect the vulnerable parts of the body below the breastplate.

Who were these mysterious and unknown mariners? The poet Longfellow, in his " Skeleton in Armor," associates this nameless hero with the builders of the round arch tower at Newport, which the Danes claim as the work of their ancestors.^ Out of the materials thus supplied the i)oet weaves a fanciful story, which is familiar to many of my readers : --

" Speak, si^eak, thou fearful guest, Who with thy hollow breast.

Still in rude armor drest, Comest to daunt me \

THE SKELETON IN ARMOR

To which the skeleton in armor is supposed to begin his story thus : —

" Far in the Northern land, By the wild Baltic strand, I, with my childish hand, Tamed the ger-falcon."

The researches of travellers and antiquaries have, however, thrown discredit upon the romantic narrative that follows these lines. Both the skeleton and the inscription on the Writing Rock seem to be of Asiatic origin. Several careful writers on the subject beheve the Writing Rock to contain a representation of the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar), and that the mail-clad hero was one of the crew of a Phoenician vessel who passed the Pillars of Hercules and crossed the Atlantic. The armor is the same as appears in drawings taken from the sculptures found at Palenque, Mexico, which has led to the supposition that an Asiatic race transiently settled in North America, and afterwards went to Mexico and founded those rock-walled cities, in exploring the ruins of which such astonishing evidences of Asiatic civilization have been discovered. A portion of the North American Indians and certain tribes of the Aztecs in Mexico had distinct traditions of the flood.

THE MOUND-BUILDERS.

Of all the vanished races of antiquity the Mound-builders are among the most mysterious and interesting. Their mounds are to be found principally in the West, and are numerous in the Mississippi Valley. A mound until recently was to be seen on the plain of Cahokia, Illinois, nearly opposite the city of St. Louis, Missouri, that was seven hundred feet long, five hundred feet broad, ninety feet high, and that covered more than eight acres of ground. Some of these

Young Folks History of America.

mounds in Wisconsin and Iowa are in the shape of huge animals ; and there is one near Brush Creek, Adams County,

MOUNDS NEAR NEWARK, OHIO.

Ohio, that is in the form of a serpent, and that is more than one thousand feet in length. The mouth of this strange figure is open, as in the act of swallowing or ejecting an oval

The Mound-Builders.

substance, which is also curiously made of earth-works. This oval mound is thought to represent an Qg<g.

At Marietta, Ohio, are ancient works that cover an area about three-fourths of a mile long, and half a mile broad. " There are two irregular squares, one containing fifty acres, and the other twenty-seven acres, together with the crowning work standing apart, which is a mound thirty feet high, elliptical in form, and enclosed by a circular embankment."

But the most intricate, and perhaps the most extensive, of the works of the Mound-builders are those in the Licking Valley, near Newark, Ohio, extending over an area of two square miles. Why they were built we may not even conjecture, but that they were constructed with almost infinite toil by a superior race of people, under skilled direction and for some definite purpose, no one can deny who examines them.

Many of these mounds have been found to contain skeletons ; and the appearance of the bones would seem to point to an antiquity of two thousand or more years. Curious pottery, known as the " coil-made," has been found in the mounds and caves, and at the ruined

FRAGMENT OF ANCIENT PUEBLO POTTERY.

pueblos in Utah. Vessels of various forms and sizes were made, without the potter's wheel, by coiling bands of clay upon themselves. On the outside the projecting edges of these coils often formed bands or ridges, which were cut into diamond-shaped figures, marked with the thumb-nail, or otherwise ornamented, as shown in the engraving of the coil-made jar.

The ancient Mexican pyramids, teocailis, or temples of the sun, were still more remarkable. Two of the most ancient of these, near the city of Mexico, were each nearly two hundred feet high, and the larger of these two covers an area of eleven acres, which is nearly equal to that of the Pyramid of Cheops, in Egypt. The ancient city of Mexico contained nearly two thousand temples and structures, and it is believed that there were some forty thousand in the whole empire.

Who built these mounds in the Mississippi Valley, and these pyramids in Mexico ? Not the Indians who were found in America when the country was discovered. They are the productions of greater skill and culture than these tribes possessed. They are doubtless the monuments of a vanished people, whose coming and going and splendid history must ever remain to a great extent a mystery.

Antiquaries have furnished many theories to answer this question which arises in the mind of every student of history. Some have maintained that the Mound-builders and the mysterious people who preceded the Aztecs in Mexico were the descendants of crews from Japan, whose ships had been accidentally driven across the Pacific.

A more reasonable solution is that these people migrated from Asia.

Take your map : look at the Isthmus of Suez ; cross Central Asia to Siberia ; carefully examine Behring Strait ; run your eye down the western coast and the Mississippi Valley, thence to Mexico, thence across the Isthmus of Panama to Peru. You have now passed over the supposed track of an Asiatic race, possibly the Shepherd Kings.

Who were the Shepherd Kings ?

They cam** down to Egypt from Central India, driving \heir flocks before them, about the time of the building of the Tower of Babel. They conquered Egypt, built the pyramids, but were at last overcome by the ancient inhabitants, and

TOLTEC RUINS, YUCATAN.

driven away from the Nile. They wandered back into Central Asia. In Siberia, it would seem, they erected mounds like those in the Mississippi Valley. They are then supposed to have journeyed north, crossed Behring Strait, which was then very narrow, passed through Alaska to the temperate zone, and pushed south to Mexico, Central America, and Peru.

THE SIBERIAN ELEPHANT AND MASTODON RESTORED.

We do not say that this theory is proven to be true : it has many things to support it. It is so interesting and it makes the ancient Egyptians seem so neighboriy, we could wish it to be true.

That access from Asia to America was easy centuries ago, possibly by land connection, is evident from the discovery in Siberia and on the Pacific coast, in Alaska, of the remains o\ tlie Siberian elephant.

26 Yozmg Folks History of America.

THE INDIANS.

The Indians do not seem to have spnmg from the Mound-builders or the founders of the ancient Mexican Empire. They may have been the descendants of Mongolian emigrants who crossed at different times the Strait of Behring.

Nearly all the Indian tribes that inhabited the continent at the time of its discovery are gone. They have vanished, like the forests they inhabited, and the beasts of prey they hunted. New England was once the home of the Narragansetts, the Pequots, the Mohegans, but nothing but the names of these tribes remain ; the Iroquois dwelt by the great lakes of Erie and Huron, and the Algonquin nations inhabited the centre of the continent. Beyond the Algonquin territory lived the Dacotahs, on the prairies of the west, while on the south were the Tuscaroras, the Catawbas, the Creeks, and the Seminoles. With the exception of the Seminoles and the Dacotahs, hardly a remnant of these tribes remains ; the church-spires rise and the school-bells ring where their wigwams clustered, and the locomotives roll through the fair valleys where they once smoked the pipe of peace, and under the pine-plumed hills against which their war-cry was raised.

They were a race of tall, powerful men — copper-colored, with hazel eye, high cheek-bone, and coarse black hair. In manner they were grave, and not without a measure of dignity. They had courage, but it was of that kind which is greater in suffering than in doing. They were true to their, friends, but to their enemies they were cunning, treacherous, and cruel. Civilization could lay no hold upon them. They quickly learned to use the whitf man's musket. They never learned to use the tools of the white man's industry. They developed a love for intoxicating drink, passionate and irresistible beyond all example. The first settlers of New Eng-

The Indians.

land intended to treat them as Christian men should. They took no land from them. What land they required they bought and paid for. Nearly all of New England's soil was

INDIANS IN COUNCIL.

come by with scrupulous honesty. The friendship of the Indians was anxiously cultivated, — sometimes from fear, oftener from pity. But nothing could stay their progress towards extinction. Inordinate drunkenness and the gradual

Yotmg Folks History of America.

limitation of their hunting-grounds told fatally on their numbers. And occasionally the English were forced to march against some tribe which refused to be at peace, and to inflict a defeat which left few survivors.

COIL-MADE JAR FROM SOUTHERN UTAH.