English influence on the United States

Preface

' I A HESE essays are on the subjects of addresses -*■ which I delivered during October and November, 1914, in Boston and Cambridge, Mass., in Providence, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore. They were primarily intended to show the close connection between English and American life; but they also emphasise the fact that from the first there have been divergences between English institutions, as they were maintained and developed in the Old Country, and the similar social elements as transplanted and moulded by the environment of a New World and the experience it afforded. I have drawn at times on architectural evidence, the importance of which does not seem to me to have been fully appreciated, either as regards the precise character or the long continuance of English influence.

As I had many opportunities of conversation with American friends on these topics, I feel able

<*3 vi Preface

to put forward the opinions here expressed as something more than the impressions of a passing visitor ; and I venture to hope that these essays may do something to explain the Englishman to the American, and the American to the Englishman, and thus conduce to the mutual understanding which is the basis of a firm friendship.

W. C.

Trinity College, Cambridge.

ii March, 191 6.

: ;| 1

Introduction

T N the two volumes of my Essay on Western Civili- * sation I tried to mark the special contributions which have been made by different peoples in the past to the civilised life of modern Europe; I did not endeavour, however, to enter on any discussion of the movement which has been the characteristic feature of recent times, or to analyse the diffusion of European civilisation throughout the world. The essays which are here collected indicate the lines on which we must proceed in order to deal with this problem. I have endeavoured to separate one particular thread, and to show the ties which have connected England with one of the new nations of the world — the United States. Many influences have been at work — French and Spanish, Teutonic 1 and Scandinavian; but England, as the Mother Country, and the source of ideas of law and government in the United States, may be rightly regarded as the main channel by which European civilisation 1 Roosevelt, History as Literature and other Essays, 99.

viii Introduction

has reached North America. I have tried to render the discussion more precise, by confining myself to what is specially English rather than British; it is only in the chapter on academic life (Chapter IV) that I have touched on anything that is characteristically Scottish.

The influence of the English stock and of English origin can be traced in every aspect of American life, rural and urban, social and political ; but there is need for discrimination as to the degree of influence exercised in different departments. The connection was extraordinarily close at first in regard to rural life and the organisation of the township (Chapter I). While the city life of America shows traces of an English origin, it appears to be almost entirely an independent development (Chapters II ' and III). It is interesting, too, to notice how much the two countries have shared a common opinion as to the limitation of the functions of government and the free play of private interests on the one hand (Chapter V), and as to the wisdom of holding aloof from foreign complications on the other (Chapter VI) ; and to see how difference of experience, during the last century and a half, has been reflected in the attitude towards modern social and political problems which the people of each country are inclined to take.

Contents

PAGE

Preface v

Introduction vii

Chapter I The Township 1

(i) The Settlement in Britain and in America compared.

The word Colonisation implies the plantation of an organised community, and cannot be properly used to describe the migration of individual men and women who have no ties to hold them together ; this is true both of the ancient and of the modern world. The surplus population of Greek cities swarmed off, with the design of reproducing their own type of civilised life on some distant cpast. The Romans settled colonies of veterans as outposts on the frontiers of the Empire, and archaeological research brings home to us the pains which they took to carry their civilisation with them. This, too, was the aim of the English and French settlers in North America. The Pilgrim Fathers, and the

1 Harvard Historical Society.

founders of other colonies, were not casual immigrants who prepared to take their chances of making their way as new comers in a strange land; they desired to realise the ideals of life in a civilised community which they had framed in the old country. Their habits of life had been formed; and they did not wish to break with England altogether, but to infuse English institutions with a new spirit and make the community more truly Christian.

The main difference between ancient colonisation and the plantation of the New World lies in the fact that the city was the unit of Greek civilisation, and colonisation consisted in the planting of cities. The necessities of military organisation rendered it inevitable that Roman colonisation should have a similar character; but the English plantations in America aimed on the whole at being self-sufficing communities which would raise the necessaries of life from their own soil, though they did not forget the possibility of exporting their products. They established themselves in groups which were convenient for defence against possible Indian attacks, and for the prosecution of tillage and pasture farming. Inevitably they reproduced, in the New World, the methods of farming and the organisation of agricultural labour with which they had been familiar in England; though with such modifications as were i] Settlement in Britain 3

rendered necessary by the conditions of a new country. England had not yet become either a great commercial or industrial nation ; her material prosperity was mainly due to her success in the cultivation of the land; corn had been one of the principal exports of Britain, both in Roman, and later in Elizabethan times. Considerable attention was given in the early seventeenth century to the possibilities of reclaiming waste land and extending agriculture within Great Britain, and the founders of the American colonies aimed at organising agriculture and land management on English lines in the New World.

There may well be some question, however, as to the precise character of the system and methods of tillage which they carried with them. At the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century English agriculture was in a state of transition; at an earlier period the manorial system had been dominant, and this type of organisation would doubtless have been reproduced, as it was in New France. A few generations later the collective management of arable land had so far broken up in England, that there would have been little reason to look for any signs of it in the New World ; but at the close of the reign of Elizabeth and under the first two Stuarts, there was an

1 — 2 extraordinary variety of agricultural conditions in different parts of England; and it is interesting to try to see how closely the various elements, which were established in the plantations, were connected with prototypes in seventeenth century England.

In the plantation of the New World, history was repeating itself. Some noo years earlier the Anglo- Saxon tribes had migrated from the Continent and planted themselves in England. There is an interesting parallel between the tribal settlement in Britain and the plantation of the Atlantic coast; for the ingrained habits of the old stock were once more illustrated. New England became a land of true nucleated villages, not of the separate hamlets which characterise Celtic settlement 1 . The colonists established themselves in agricultural communities, according as they were attracted by natural conditions and the convenience of wood and water 2 . But while there is this broad similarity, there are also striking contrasts between the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain and the plantation of New England.

When the Anglo-Saxons planted themselves in Britain they found the relics of an ancient civilisa-

2 Tacitus, Germania, c. 16.

i] Imperial Civilisation 5

tion; they entered on the possession of a highlycultivated country, which had, till recently, been one of the granaries of the Roman Empire; much of the land they occupied was doubtless under cultivation when the Britons were driven out, and there was little to be done in the way of clearing 1 . The Angles and Saxons as they drove the Britons back and occupied one district after another, became acquainted with fruit trees and cereals which the Romans had taught the Britons to cultivate, and with breeds of horses, sheep and cattle which had been introduced from the Continent. The Anglo- Saxons could profit immensely from the material vestiges of the arts of life as practised by the Romans, but there was a complete break between the Imperial political system and the life of the English people as it was -gradually organised.

This may be noted both in town and country; the Roman roads had been the great arteries of communication in the Empire, for commercial as well as for military purposes, but the Anglo-Saxons had no use for such facilities for travel ; they regarded

1 The Southern, Midland and Eastern Counties of England which were occupied by the Romans for a long period of years have had a character impressed on them which differs from that of the parts of Britain north of the Ribble and the Tees and west of the Dee and the Wye, where there are few traces of permanent occupation by the Romans.

the roads as convenient boundaries by which to mark the limits beyond which their cattle should not stray, but their villages were not built upon the roads. The parish map of Cambridgeshire illustrates the contrast between rural life under the Romans, and after the English occupation. The Roman roads, as well as the old British lines of fortification, seem to have been useless to the new comers for their original purposes; but like the river channels, these roads and dykes were made to serve as boundaries between one village and another, and formed a territorial framework, into which their villages were fitted by the settlers.

The contrast in the habits of life is still more striking in the towns, such as London, Lincoln and York, where the site of the Roman city has been adopted for an English town. Usages in regard to the burial of the dead are among the most persistent of social habits and the Romans buried their dead in cemeteries outside the city like those of the catacombs at Rome. When the Roman troops were withdrawn and the Britons fell back towards the West, the Roman cities must, have fallen into decay, if they were not wholly deserted ; the English were not tempted to occupy them at all at first; but as commerce began to develop and centres of i] Cemeteries and Burial Grounds 7

trade sprang up afresh, it became convenient to reoccupy portions of the old site. The English carried their own habit of burial into the towns, and buried their dead in plots adjoining their houses, so that numerous burying grounds were set aside within the cities. The difference of habit between the English and the Romans in this respect has left a deep mark on English life. In the Middle Ages, when there was an intense realisation of the unseen world, the religious sense demanded that there should be places for worship in close connection with burial grounds; and all through the rural districts, every village burying ground was consecrated, and churches were erected, so that regular provision for Christian rites was rendered available through the length and breadth of the land. Ecclesiastical Institutions took a territorial character and the burying ground in every English village was associated with the village church. Modern cities are forced to conform to the Roman practice and to provide cemeteries outside the town ; but it is interesting to note that the English habit of burial, as contrasted with the Roman, had asserted itself in the New World. At Portsmouth in New Hampshire, there are several examples of small burying grounds, established in the home lots within this populous place. Puritanism was shy of superstitious observances in regard to the departed, and the close association of places for burial with facilities for Christian prayer and worship seems to have been the exception rather than the rule, at least in Massachusetts 1 . This practice was appropriate to the changed spirit of the time, for a parish church and a parish burying ground are found in every village in England, but comparatively little provision has been made for maintaining Christian ordinances throughout large rural areas in New England 2 ; meeting houses were not erected by the colonists unless there was a prospect of a considerable congregation to hear sermons, and grounds were set aside for burial wherever it seemed convenient.

There was one striking contrast between the personnel of the original English settlers in Britain and that of the colonists in New England. The primitive hero is represented as a handy man who might have some acquaintance with land management as well as with seamanship, who could forge the sword he wielded in battle, and was skilled as

1 The depositing of George Whitefield's remains at Newburyport, under the pulpit where he last preached, with the arrangement for showing his relics, is probably unique.

2 Governor Rollin of New Hampshire. Proclamation in Concord Evening Monitor, 6 April 1899. Quoted by Cunningham, Christianity and Social Questions, 58. Compare also p. 152 below.

i] Roman Husbandry g

a bard ; he did his best at everything his hand found to do but he could hardly have been said to be an expert. Eleven hundred years later when the American coast was colonised, the division of employments had long been recognised ; those who were organising a new plantation endeavoured to see that the colonists should be provided with skilled artificers of every kind 1 , and, as clergy, doctors and lawyers were joining in the new ventures, men of education were available who could be relied upon to take a leading part in the management of affairs. There were also great differences in the opportunities for learning and for improvements which were afforded by the changed conditions. It is impossible to gauge how much the English were indebted to Rome, or what English agriculture in the Middle Ages owed to Imperial survivals in Britain, and to the introduction of Roman practice through monastic influence. Gregory the Great, who sent out the first mission to the Angles, was a careful and skilful administrator of the great estates of the Roman See; and the Benedictine monasteries, which were planted in every part of England, maintained a type of agricultural organisation that was generally pursued throughout the whole country. Each

1 Advertisement, 1609. Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce , 11. 338.

io The Township [ch.

village was a unit of collective agriculture, where the various inhabitants, who had shares of land and oxen for ploughing, co-operated together in agricultural labour. All had to conform to the same system in regard to the management of land and the rotation of crops. But though there were some valuable products in the New World with which the English settlers had been previously unacquainted, they had comparatively little to learn in regard to the arts of life from their Indian neighbours.

A typical English village in the later Middle Ages, with its burying ground and church, consisted of a main street along which the houses were ranged. Each house facing the street had a yard and garden or orchard behind, which constituted the home lot ; while there might sometimes be a row or two of humbler cottages set end-wise towards the street, with little, if any, ground attached to them. The arable holdings lay intermixed in common fields which stretched beyond the home lots; and each husbandman could claim a larger or smaller number of the half-acre strips which were not separated by any fence, but merely marked out by narrow grass baulks. Each husbandman had a share of the hay of the meadow; and all pastured their cattle together on the common waste, and on such portions i] Common Cultivation n

of the open fields as were not under crop. The settlements which the colonists laid out in the New World were similar in many respects to those they had left in the Old. Arrangements were made for common pasturage on the common; it appears to have been quite usual for the settlers in New England to use the arable fields for common pasturage after the crops were cleared from the ground ; but in one respect there was a complete departure from the traditional system. The practice of laying out each man's holding as a number of separate strips, intermixed with the strips of other owners, in an arable field was abandoned 1 ; and each man had his arable, and sometimes his meadow land in severalty 2 : the system of common cultivation in common fields does not seem to have been introduced into the New World. The typical arrangement of New England arable land did not correspond at all to the typical virgate in Mr Seebohm's map of Hitchin 3 . The arable lands were held in severalty;

1 On the laying out of land in tiers and granting allotments in each tier, compare C. M. Andrews, River Towns of Connecticut, 45 (Johns Hopkins Studies in Historical and Political Science, Series vn.).

2 On difficulties in regard to rights of meadow, see Hudson, Lexington, 33.

3 English Village Community ; this map has been reproduced in Cunningham's Growth of English Industry and Commerce, 1. 44.

and the normal holding was an oblong strip, with a narrow frontage towards the river or the street 1 . It is interesting to note that the methods of farming for which provision was thus made in New England closely reflect the conditions which were becoming current in Elizabethan England 2 . Collective cultivation was falling into desuetude, and energetic farmers demanded scope for individual management of arable land; but the practice of common pasturage was still very generally retained 3 .

(ii) The Township in England.

The settlements which were formed in the New World embodied an immense amount of experience which had been acquired during the centuries that intervened between the invasion of Britain and the English colonisation of any part of North America: and this holds good, not only of the

1 The lots at Maiden in 1634 were eight times as long as they were broad (Corey, History of Maiden, 61). Compare also the map of allotments in Witherfield in C. M. Andrews, op. cit. 5. The same general method of arrangement is found in Pennsylvania (Browning, Welsh Settlement in Pennsylvania, 31) and in Canada, W. B. Munro, Seignior al System in Canada (Harvard Historical Studies), 80.

2 See p. 20 below.

3 Each individual was responsible for fencing his own boundaries so as to prevent damage to his neighbour's crops. C. W. Alvord, Introduction to Collections of Illinois Historical Library, 11. pp. xxii, 139. Reynolds, Pioneer History, 49.

methods of tillage, but of habits of self-government. ''The Puritans who colonised New England did not," as Mr Fiske 1 rightly points out, " invent the town meeting. They were familiar already with the proceedings of the vestry meeting and the manorial courts, but they were severed now from church and from aristocracy.' ' A close examination is necessary, however, in order to show precisely what they left behind and what they carried with them to the New World.

Throughout the Middle Ages there were two distinct elements in the administration of English rural life, and it is a problem of great difficulty to make out in what fashion they were combined at any particular place or time 2 . There was, on the one hand, the manorial or seigneural authority, which exercised control over the whole organisation, and served as the link through which each village discharged its duties and responsibilities towards the realm as a whole 3 . On the other hand, there was an element of communal assent and approval, which was none the less real because it is exceedingly obscure. There are innumerable records which preserve the history of English villages from the

1 American Political Ideals, 49.

2 W. J. Ashley, Introduction to translation of Fustel de Coulange's The Origin of Property in Land, p. xli.

3 See below, p. 103.

manorial point of view; but communal management was very generally a matter of custom and tradition, and we have to rely for the most part on incidental allusions. In the plantation of the New World these elements may be said to have fallen apart ; in Virginia and the South, the manorial system and the organisation of labour by dependents were introduced, and a similar system was established by the Dutch in New York, and by the French in Canada, Louisiana and the valley of the Ohio ; and in these areas the communal element fell into the background, especially where the planters were dependent on slaves or servitors for agricultural labour. In New England, on the other hand, the manorial element seems to have been quite unimportant, while communal control became the method by which local administration of internal affairs was carried on. The township had existed in England from time immemorial, but it did not attain its full development until it was transplanted from the old country to the New World.

The term township, which is typical of New England, has almost dropped out of use in the greater part of England, though it is still familiar in the Northern Counties ; we speak more commonly of parishes or manors or villages; and it is not quite clear whether a township was only another name for these groups, or whether it had any special significance. We can perhaps settle the matter most easily by considering the way in which this special term is applied. One of the earliest instances is in the Rolls of Parliament, where it is applied to the village of Chesterton, which was mostly comprised in a royal manor and was a parish (1414) 1 . On the other hand, there were many parishes, especially in the North of England, which contained a number of townships ; the parish of Kendal contained twenty-four "townships or constabularies, and fifteen chapelries 2 " ; while the borough of Much Wenlock, in Shropshire, consisted of several separate townships. Life in an English village had various aspects, and it seems that the terms parish and manor and township were ordinarily applicable to the same social group. When it is viewed in its ecclesiastical relations, and with reference to episcopal authority, it is termed a parish ; its relation to civil authority and the payment of taxation 3 is accentuated if it is called a manor, and with respect to the communal management of its internal affairs it is properly designated a township. The township

1 Rot. Pari. iv. 603.

3 Townships were assessed for the wages of Knights of the Shires in 1444. Rot. Pari. v. 11 1.

and its officials were concerned with internal police 1 ; but it had also important functions to discharge during the Middle Ages in the management of the cultivation of the Common Fields, and the exercise of rights of pasturage on the Common Waste 2 . It has besides been utilised as a unit for the administration of the Poor Law in some of the Northern Counties, since the time of Charles II 3 . The Borders between England and Scotland had been exposed to constant raids, and were very sparsely inhabited ; after the Union of the Crowns there seemed to be a possibility of reducing this turbulent area to order, and the centres of cultivation and pasture farming, which were formed within the limits of ancient ecclesiastical parishes, were rightly spoken of as Townships.

We have a few hints which enable us to guess at the methods by which the business of the township

1 H. B. Simpson, The Office of Constable, in English Historical Review, x. 627.

2 As the unit for agricultural purposes, it has recently come into fresh notice. Since 1850, the Enclosure Commissioners have found it convenient to take the township as the unit in terms of which they report on any scheme for the enclosure of Commons. Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, 270.

was conducted in the county of Durham during the fourteenth century. The tenants of Wallsend were summoned to a town meeting in 1368 1 , and at Acley in the following year 2 a committee of six was elected for ordering the affairs of the community. These would include the management of the collective agriculture of the place, and this was not by any means an easy matter. The two branches of land management were closely interconnected, though distinct areas were allotted to the open fields on which a course of tillage was carried on continuously, to the meadow land which was used for hay, and the waste which was permanent pasturage. The course of cultivation on the open fields and the quota of work which each man should do were laid down by custom, and there would be little opportunity for revising them unless the lord of the manor consented. But the rights of pasturage on the waste, and the management of the stock, must frequently have given rise to difficult decisions. In many cases it seems that the right to pasture on the waste was reserved to those who had strips in the open fields, and who could not carry on their tillage unless they had the means of pasturing the

i8 The Township [ch.

oxen which they contributed to the plough teams of the village. In other cases each cottager could claim a right to put one cow or more upon the common waste. It cannot have been an easy matter to decide what persons had a common right and to settle exactly what kind of stock and what number of beasts each commoner was entitled to put out to feed 1 . There were other difficulties, not about the rights of commoners, but about the management of the stock. It was desirable to have the means of separating any sheep or cattle that were diseased and to be able to segregate the cattle at special times. In one or two cases this communal management of the live stock on the common waste has lasted till recent times; it is still maintained at Whittlesea in Cambridgeshire; and specimens of the orders, which were made in the seventeenth century, at Cottenham, have been printed 2 . The good management of the village stock was essential

1 The Durham Halimote Rolls show that questions were raised in the fourteenth century as to whether sufficient pasturage was available for the tenantry (p. 12); and as to one who had no land being prevented from using the common (p. 17). Questions of meadow (Sec. 23), of closes and separate pastures (pp. 24, 40, 54) had to be dealt with, as well as the provision which should be made for oxen (p. 62) and for horses (pp. 22, 69). It was a complicated business.

2 Common Rights at Cottenham and Stretham in Cambridgeshire in Camden Miscellany, xn. (Camden Society, 3rd series, xviii. 1910).

to village prosperity. In many cases land was more valuable for purposes of pasture than for tillage; but there is ample reason to believe that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries insufficient attention was given to this important branch of the economy of the township.

The great agricultural improvement, which was being introduced during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was the substitution of individual for communal management of land. The man who succeeded in withdrawing his holding from communal control and working at it on his own lines, was able to make much more of it, especially if his holding was large enough to enable him to bring both tillage and the management of stock into his own hands and to make them co-operate. The old common fields were being exhausted; but when a farmer could convert his arable fields into pasture and keep his stock upon them, they recuperated after a few years 1 . Fitzherbert goes fully into the advantages which accrued when this method of convertible husbandry superseded the old cultivation of open fields, and the maintenance of stock on common

1 Simkovitch, Hay and History, in Polit. Science Quarterly (1913), xxvni. 401.

2 — 2 waste 1 . In any township where one or two of the more substantial men had succeeded in withdrawing their holdings and their stock from communal management, they would of course have no interest in seeing that good order was maintained on the common waste. As early as the fourteenth century there were complaints that the election of communal officials was falling into disuse 2 ; and as regulation ceased to be effective the privileges of the commoners were more and more abused. We hear complaints, on the one hand, of rich men who put so many cattle on the waste that the common was eaten bare and the poor commoners were seriously wronged; on the other hand, there is ample evidence that undesirables were able to establish themselves as squatters on the common waste 3 . Wherever the chief fault may have lain, there seems to be little doubt that the old system of managing the pasturage had broken down, and that the resources of the commons were being shamefully wasted in the seventeenth century. Generally speaking the communal management, not only of the open fields but of the village stock, appears to have come to an