§200]

IN NEW ENGLAND

167 edge was not an alms, to be dependent on the chance charity of private men or the precarious pittance of a trust-fund, but a sacred debt which the commonwealth owed to every one of its children. The opening of the first grammar-school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in state and church; the first row of pot-hooks and trammels which the little Shearjashubs and Elkanahs blotted and blubbered across their copybooks was the preamble to the Declaration of Independence.”

The Puritan plan embraced a complete state system from primary school to "university." In 1636, a year after Boston established the first town school, Massachusetts established her "state university" (as Harvard truly was in the seventeenth century, though it was named for the good clergyman who afterward endowed it with his library). Then the law of 1647 joined primary school and university in one whole, providing that each village of a hundred householders must maintain a 'grammar-school, with a teacher able to instruct youth so as they may be fitted for the University."

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True, this noble attempt was too ambitious. Grinding poverty made it impossible for frontier villages of four or five hundred people to maintain a Latin school; and, despite heavy fines upon the towns that failed to do so, such schools gradually gave way, except in one or two large places, to a few private academies, which came to represent the later New England idea in secondary education. Thus, the state system was broken at the middle, and both extremities suffered. The universities ceased finally to be state institutions; and the primary schools deteriorated sadly, especially in the period of Puritan decline about 1700, with meager courses, short terms, and low aims. But with all its temporary failure in its first home, the Puritan ideal of a state system of public instruction was never wholly lost sight of in America.

200. Population in 1775 numbered 2,500,000.1 One third had been born in Europe. The English nationality was dominant in every colony. In the Carolinas the Huguenots were numerous, and in South Carolina and Georgia there was a large Ger

1 Cf. § 179.

man population. South Carolina, too, had many Highland Scots. The largest non-English elements were found in the Middle colonies: Dutch and Germans in New York; Dutch and Swedes in Delaware; Germans, Welsh, and Celtic Irish in Pennsylvania. In the Carolinas, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, the back counties were settled mainly by the Scotch-Irish (or Presbyterian English), with a strip of German settlements between them and the older tide-water counties.

Negro slaves 2 made a fifth of the whole population, and half of that south of Mason and Dixon's line (§ 171). That line divided the population of the country into two nearly equal halves; but two thirds of the Whites were found on the north side of it.

201. Labor was supplied, in the main, by free men in New England, by indentured White servants in the Middle colonies, and by Negro slaves in the South.

The White bond servants were of several classes. The man who sold himself into service for four or seven years in return for passage money for himself or his family, was known as a "redemptioner," or "free-willer." The German immigrants of the eighteenth century, like many of the English settlers (§ 24), came in this way. Many White convicts were transported from England and condemned to a term of service, seven or fourteen years. After 1717, this class increased rapidly in number, averaging 1000 a year for the fifty years preceding the Revolution. Classed with the convicts in law, but very different from them in character, were the political "convicts," — prisoners sold into service by the victorious

1 These came to America after the defeat at Culloden and the breaking up of the clan system. Curiously enough, they were Tories in the Revolution. The same conservative and loyal temper which had made them cling to the exiled House of Stuart in England made them in America adherents of King George.

2 In 1619, while Virginia was still the only English colony on the continent, she received her first importation of Negro slaves, twenty in number. As late as 1648, there were only 300 in her population of 15,000. By 1670 the number had risen to 2000 (out of a total of 40,000). A century later nearly half her population was Black; while in South Carolina, more than half was Black. In Maryland the proportion was about a fourth, and in New York a seventh.

3 Indentured servants had nearly disappeared from New England (except for the apprenticeship of minors); but they were still numerous in Virginia.

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THE PEOPLE AND THEIR WORK

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parties, each in turn, during the English civil wars of the seventeenth century.1

202. The condition of White servants was often a deplorable servitude. The colonial press, up to the Revolution, teems with advertisements offering rewards for runaway servants. More than seventy such notices are contained in the "Newspaper Extracts" published in the New Jersey Archives for

THIS Day run-away from his Mafter

Abraham Anderson of New-Marblehead, a white Man Servant, about 16 Years of Age, with fhort brownish ftrait Hair, he is pretty clear fkin'd, fomething freckled, and I think, on his left Foot the top of one of his middle Toes is cut off: He carried off with him a triped worfted and wool Jacket, two tow and linnen Shirts, one pair of tow and linnen Trowfers, and one pair of tow and linnen ftriped Breeches, two pair of lightish coloured blue Hole, and a new Caltor Hat: His Name is Florence Sylvefter alias Ned Carter : Whofoever shall apprehend and take up faid Fellow, and him deliver to his abovesaid Maller in New Marblehead, in the County of York, or to Capt. Josoup Bangs in Falmouth, thall have FOUR POUNDS, lawful Money, as a Reward, and all neceffary Charges paid.

August 25. 755.

Abraham Anderson.

ADVERTISEMENT FROM THE Boston Weekly News Letter, September 18, 1755. A photograph of the original, which is in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

that little colony, for only the two years, 1771, 1772. This must have meant one runaway servant to each 1000 of the population; and probably not half the runaways are in those advertisements. One runaway is described as "born in the

1 Often the convicts were not hardened criminals, but rather the victims of the atrocious laws in England at the time. Many were intelligent and capable. In Maryland in 1773 a majority of all tutors and teachers are said to have been convicts. Some of them (like a much larger part of the redemptioners), after their term of service, became prosperous and useful citizens. Even in aristocratic Virginia, a transported thief rose to become attorney-general. Charles Thomson, Secretary of the Continental Congress, was a "redemptioner," as was also one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. So, too, was Zenger (§ 191); and many members of colonial legislatures could be named who came to America as "bond servants."

colony," about 50 years old, and as having "served in the last war [French War] and a carpenter by trade.”

There are still more significant and gruesome. notices by jailers, proving that it was customary to arrest a vagrant workingman on suspicion of his being a runaway, and then, if no master appeared to claim him within a fixed time, to sell him into servitude for his jail fees! Some of these White "servants are described as fitted with "iron collars." American law and custom permitted these barbarities upon the helpless poor in the days of Lexington and Bunker Hill.1

203. Negroes were not numerous enough in the North (except perhaps in New York) to affect the life of the people seriously. In the South, Black slavery degraded the condition of the indentured White "servant," and more serious still-made it difficult for him to find profitable and honorable work when his term of service had expired. As early as 1735, the result appeared in the presence of the class known later as "Poor Whites." In that year William Byrd (§ 165) declared that these "Ethiopians" "blow up the Pride and ruin the Industry of our White People, who, seeing a Rank of poor Creatures below them, detest work for Fear it should make them look like Slaves."

In Virginia, as a rule, slavery was mild; while in South Carolina and Georgia it was excessively brutal. In those two colonies the rice plantations called constantly for fresh importations of savage Africans. In all colonies with a large slave population there were cruel "Black Laws," to keep slaves from running away; and every where the general attitude of the law toward the slave was one of indifference to human rights. The worst phases of the law were not often appealed to in actual practice; but in New York in 1741, during a panic due to a supposed plot for a slave insurrection, fourteen negroes were burned at the stake (with legal formalities) and a still larger number were hanged, — all on very flimsy evidence.

204. Dependence upon slave labor helped to keep industry purely agricultural in the South, since the slave was unfit for

1 The class should read the six advertisements reproduced in Source Book, No. 117, and present other points learned by such reading.

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NORTH AND SOUTH

171

manufactures or for the work of a skilled artisan. Tobacco raising was the chief employment in the tidewater districts of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, and rice cultivation in South Carolina and Georgia.

These tidewater staples were grown mainly on large plantations; and the Virginia planter in particular sought to add estate to estate, and to keep land in his family by rigid laws of entail.1 Between this class of large planters and the "Poor Whites," however, there was always a considerable number of small farmers in Virginia; and in North Carolina this element Iwas the main one. The western counties of all the colonies were occupied exclusively in small farming.

205. In the Middle colonies, foodstuffs were raised on a large scale. These colonies exported to the West Indies (both English and French) most of the bread, flour, beer, beef, and pork used there. In these colonies, too, immigrant artisans from Germany early introduced rudimentary manufactures, linen, pottery, glassware, hats, shoes, furniture.

206. In New England, occupations were still more varied. The majority of the people lived still in agricultural villages and tilled small farms; but they could not wring all their subsistence from the scanty soil. Each farmer was a "Jack-at-alltrades." In the winter days, he hewed out clapboards, staves, and shingles; and in the long evenings, at a little forge in the fireplace, he hammered out nails and tacks from a bar of iron. Even in the towns, all but the merchant and professional classes had to be able to turn their hands to a variety of work if they would prosper. Mr. Weeden tells of a certain John Marshall, a constable at Braintree, and a commissioned officer in the militia company there, who "farmed a little, made laths in the winter, was painter, carpenter, and messenger, and burned bricks, bought and sold live-stock," and who managed by these varied industries to earn about four shillings a day.

1"Entail" is a legal arrangement to prevent land from being sold or willed away out of a fixed line of inheritance. Entail is found only where primogeniture (inheritance by the oldest son) is the rule.