PLYMOUTH AND JAMESTOWN CONTRASTED. 27 learning might not be buried in the grave of our fathers, that every township should maintain a school for reading and writing, and every town of a hundred householders a grammar school, with a teacher qualified to fit youths for the University." From the settlement at Jamestown has sprung a race of directly opposite characteristics, of which Gov. Berkeley, of Va., was an early representative, who, in 1671, said, in a report to the Privy Councils, "I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have, these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience and heresy and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them and libels against the best government: God keep us from both." While there have been many individual exceptions to the prevailing rule,-some of the noblest minds and hearts that ever adorned the race having sprung from the colony at Jamestown, and who were so, not in consequence, but despite of the institutions and habits which were there established, the rule itself, nevertheless, holds good; and two widely differing orders of society were then planted upon our soil. The social usages, and the individual habits and interests of those two orders were so diverse, that when they came to act under a common government, conflicts of opinion and of interest at once arose, and which the progress of time immeasurably increased; until the most bitter and violent discussions were succeeded by violence to individuals, outrage upon territorial rights, and, finally, a deadly thrust at the national life. The true nature of these inherent differences, and the sources of our national disorders, are thus forcibly traced in a recent work: "When, in the eventful year 1620, the ocean bore on its turbulent bosom a band of Puritans to Massachusetts and a cargo of negroes to Virginia, it deposited on our soil two hos Barons of the South. 28 PLYMOUTH AND JAMESTOWN CONTRASTED. tile elements, the seeds of two rival social systems, the story of whose growth and expansion, of whose competitions and aggressions, forms the distinctive history of the Republic, down to this day. "The May-Flower brought the germ of a civilization in which thought is free,-learning diffused like the light,-law made the equal bulwark of every individual,-labor compensated and honored; a civilization in which the rights of every man are recognized, the prerogatives of every class and sect protected, and the largest development of the whole body of society encouraged. "The Dutch ship brought, with its menial cargo, the germ of a social order radically different, a social order that regards the State as existing solely for the benefit of a dominant class, which it arms accordingly with absolute and irresponsible power, and to which the other members of the community are related as cattle are related to their owners,- a social order in which justice is ignored, learning restricted, genius and enterprise discouraged, labor extorted and dishonored, the dictates of religion contemned, all improvement vetoed, and the organic forces that are intended to develop and magnify a state stricken with deadly paralysis. "It should have been morally self-evident, in the beginning, that these two social orders could never mature-within the same national domain-without coming into collision, shocking the government to its centre, and involving the destruction of at least one of the antagonistic interests. The event was inevitable as the working of instincts in the blood, its fulfilment only a question of time. "The antithesis has a yet deeper root. The Puritans who came to Massachusetts left a sturdy brotherhood in England, who overturned the throne of Charles I., reared a Commonwealth out of the chaos of civil war, and engendered among the English people a republican spirit, that allowed the king PLYMOUTH AND JAMESTOWN CONTRASTED. 29 dom no rest till bounds were set to the royal prerogative, and the rights of the subject fortified by law. The Cavaliers who settled in Virginia-assuming the charge of that peculiar 'property' brought over by the Dutch slave-trader—were of that effeminate and supercilious nobility that drew the lance in behalf of the oppressive Stuarts; that poured out treasure and life so profusely in defence of a family whose crafty malice was equaled only by its scandalous vices and impotent imbecility; and that resisted with such virulent hostility the spirit of political reform marshalled under Cromwell and William of Orange. "Thus the two parties-the representatives of liberty and oppression-whose struggles comprise the glory and shame of English history in the seventeenth century, delegated their quarrel to the new empire then rising in the West; and here, accordingly, under modified conditions, we are fighting to reach an issue far grander and more momentous than that which banished James II. and gave a new dynasty to England. "The two antagonistic systems found congenial soil in the places where they were planted. Freedom was cherished in Massachusetts, slavery was fostered in Virginia. There was a momentary effort, it is true, to establish an aristocracy in the Puritan Colony; but it was found hostile to the temper of the province. It is true, also, that slavery obtained a temporary footing in this Colony, as in all the other Colonies, and that the slave-trade formed an important part of the early commerce of New England. But it was impossible that the system should long survive, in opposition to that intense love of freedom which was the salt of the otherwise unsavory character of the Puritans, and in the face of the institutions they founded and matured. To Massachusetts belongs the honor of having been the first of the States to abolish negro slavery by a solemn judicial decision. In Virginia, the baleful plant of despotism became rooted deeper in her growing polity in the 30 PLYMOUTH AND JAMESTOWN CONTRASTED. process of time. In the first instance, negroes were enslaved on the ground that they were heathen; but as they began to be converted and Christianized, it became necessary to base their servitude on their alleged inferiority as a race. Having thus subverted the liberties of the negroes, the Virginia planters proceeded to curtail the rights of the other race, and poor white men were disfranchised by an act of the Provincial Assembly.* "The political tendencies of the two Colonies were consistent with their antecedents. On the breaking out of the English civil war, Massachusetts indicated her sympathies by dropping the oath of allegiance, and furling, for a while, the red cross of England, while Virginia, with Maryland, adhered to the king, and piously cursed the Roundheads who were prevailing against him.t "The extreme pertinacity with which the Southern Colonies adhered to the slave system is well illustrated in the early history of Georgia. General James Oglethorpe-a member of the British Parliament, and a man whose enlightened views and humane policy render him worthy of an honorable remembrance-'conceived the idea of opening for the poor of his own country, and for the persecuted Protestants of all nations, an asylum in America.' In 1733, having obtained a grant from the king, he landed at Savannah with one hundred and twenty emigrants, and commenced a settlement. In this infant society, slavery was strictly prohibited, and pronounced, 'not only immoral, but contrary to the laws of England.' "But, unfortunately for this attempt to plant a free state, most of the first emigrants were not accustomed to labor. "The Colony did not prosper,' and the colonists began to complain that they were prohibited the use of slave labor. "The *Hildreth's History of the United States, Vol. I. pp. 523, 524. SLAVERY IN GEORGIA. 31 regulations of the trustees began to be evaded, and the laws against slavery were not rigidly enforced. At first, slaves from South Carolina were hired for short periods; then for a hundred years, or during life; and a sum equal to the value of the negro paid in advance.' In this way the insidious system rooted itself in the new State; slave-traders sailed boldly for Africa from the port of Savannah; the trustees, baffled in their humane endeavor, resigned their charter; and Georgia obeyed the fatal gravitation that has carried her sister States into the slough of slavery.* "General Oglethorpe returned to England in 1743, where he distinguished himself by writing against slavery and the impressment of seamen. In a letter to his friend Granville Sharp, he alludes to his former connection with the Colony of Georgia: 'My friends and I settled the Colony of Georgia, and by charter were established trustees, to make laws, &c. We determined not to suffer slavery there. But the slavemerchants and their adherents occasioned us not only much trouble, but at last got the then government to favor them. We would not suffer slavery (which is against the Gospel as well as the fundamental law of England) to be authorized under our authority; we refused, as trustees, to make a law permitting such a horrid crime. The government, finding the trustees firmly resolved not to concur with what they believed unjust, took away the charter, by which no law could be passed without our consent.'t "We have heard it argued that the system of slavery at the South was forced upon a reluctant people in the beginning; but facts, we apprehend, will scarcely warrant the plea. The whole system of colonial slavery was illegal under the law of England; and, though it was fostered in some instances by *Wilson's Am. Hist. pp. 262, 265, 266. +Stuart's Memoir of Sharp. |