fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007 - Ethical Culture ...

Next, the fact that wages were generally higher and workingconditions better in the colonies than in England did much toadvance the cause of liberty. The reason for this happy conditionwas a distinct shortage of labor, and a prime reason for theshortage was land for the asking. The frontier population wasmade up of thousands of men who had left the seaboard to toilfor themselves in the great forest. The results of this constantmigration were as important for the seaboard as they were forthe wilderness.From the beginning the frontier was an area of protest andthus a nursery of republican notions. Under‐represented inassemblies that made a habit of overtaxing them, scornful of theprivileges and leadership assumed by the tidewater aristocracy,resentful of attempts to saddle them with unwanted ministersand officials, the men of the back country were in fact if notin print the most determined radicals of the colonial period.If their quaint and strangely deferential protests contributedvery little to the literature of a rising democracy, they neverthelessmade more popular the arguments for liberty andself‐government.Finally, all these factors combined to give new force to theEnglish heritage of law, liberty, and self-government. Theover‐refined and often archaic institutions that the settlersbrought along as part of their intellectual baggage werethrust once again into the crucible of primitive conditions. Ifthese institutions emerged in shapes that horrified royal governors,they were nevertheless more simple, workable, andpopular than they had been for several centuries in England.The laws and institutions of early Rhode Island or NorthCarolina would not have worked in more civilized societies,but they had abandoned most of their outworn features andwere ready to develop along American lines. The hardworking,long‐suffering men and women of the frontier—”People alisle willful Inclined to doe when and how they please or notat al” were themselves a primary force in the rise of colonialself‐government.The English descent and heritage of the colonists, theconflict of imperial and colonial interests, the rollingocean, the all‐pervading frontier—these were the“forces‐behind‐the‐forces” that shaped the history of thecolonies and spurred the peaceful revolution that preceded thebloody one of ‘76. Of these forces we shall speak or think onalmost every page of this book.IIIThe colonists were not completely at the mercy of theirenvironment. Much of the environment was of their ownmaking; and if circumstances were favorable to the rise ofliberty, they did not relieve the colonists of the formidable taskof winning it for themselves. The condition of liberty in ‘76 wasin large part the work of men determined to be free, and thequestions thus arise: Who were these men who talked so muchof their rights and privileges? Whence came they to America,and how did they fare?The attempt of historians and genealogists to decipher thenational origins of the colonists has led to confusion andcontroversy, first, because of a manifest lack of statistics, andsecond, because of the temptation, apparently too strong evenfor some of our best‐intentioned scholars, to magnify the numbersand accomplishments of one nationality at the expenseof all others. Nevertheless, the development of more reliablehistorical techniques and a more equitable historical spirithas created a broad area of consensus on the composition anddistribution of the population.It is now generally agreed that almost all immigrants to thecolonies came from the middle and lower classes. “The richstay in Europe,” wrote Crevecoeur; “is only the middling andthe poor that emigrate.” The myths of aristocratic lineage diehard, especially in Cavalier country, but diaries, shipping lists,and court minutes tell us in no uncertain terms of the simpleorigins of even the most haughty families of New York andVirginia. This does not mean that early America was a landof rogues and poor servant‐girls. England and the Continentsent over thousands upon thousands of substantial, intelligent,propertied men and women. Yet fully half the people whocame to the colonies could not pay their own passage, andgentleman immigrants, even in the seventeenth century, wereamazingly few.As a matter of fact, those twentieth century Americans wholike to go searching for an ancestor among the gentry of EastAnglia may wind up with three or four among the riffraff ofOld Bailey. Probably thirty to forty thousand convicts w ereshipped from England to the colonies in the eighteenth century,a fact that inspired Dr. Johnson’s famous growl: “Sir,they are a race of convicts, and ought to be content withanything we allow them short of hanging.” Their behavior inthe colonies, especially in unhappy Virginia and Maryland,moved Franklin to offer America’s rattlesnakes to England asthe only appropriate return. Not only did transported convictscommit a large proportion of the crimes in eighteenth centuryAmerica, but their presence did much to degrade the servantclass and make a callous society even more callous. The mothercountry’s insistence on dumping “the dregs, the excrescenceof England” in the colonies was a major item in the catalogueof American grievances, especially since the Privy Councilvetoed repeatedly the acts through which the colonies soughtto protect themselves.Well before 1976 the colonies had begun to take on a pattern ofnational origins that was “characteristically American”: Theylooked to one country for their language, institutions, and118 fieldston american reader volume i – fall 2007