A HISTORY OF
LIFE IN THE UNITED STATES
THE BEGINNERS OF A NATION
A HISTORY OF THE SOURCE AND RISE
OF THE EARLIEST ENGLISH SETTLEMENTS
IN AMERICA WITH SPECIAL
REFERENCE TO THE LIFE AND
CHARACTER OF THE PEOPLE
BY
EDWARD EGGLESTON
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1896
Copyright, 1896,
By EDWARD EGGLESTON.
TO
THE RIGHT HONORABLE JAMES BRYCE, M. P.
My dear Mr. Bryce:
In giving an account of the origins of the UnitedStates, I have told a story of English achievement. Itis fitting that I should inscribe it to you, who of all theEnglishmen of this generation have rendered the most eminentservice to the American Commonwealth. You haveshown with admirable clearness and candor, and withmarvelous breadth of thought and sympathy, what are theresults in the present time of the English beginnings inAmerica, and to you, therefore, I offer this volume. Ineed not assure you that it gives me great pleasure towrite your name here as godfather to my book, and tosubscribe myself, my dear Mr. Bryce,
Yours very sincerely,
Edward Eggleston.
(p. vii) PREFACE.
In this work, brought to completion after manyyears of patient research, I have sought to trace fromtheir source the various and often complex movementsthat resulted in the early English settlements in America,and in the evolution of a great nation with Englishspeech and traditions. It has been my aim to makethese pages reflect the character of the age in whichthe English colonies were begun, and the traits of thecolonists, and to bring into relief the social, political,intellectual, and religious forces that promoted emigration.This does not pretend to be the usual accountof all the events attending early colonization; it israther a history in which the succession of cause andeffect is the main topic—a history of the dynamics ofcolony-planting in the first half of the seventeenth century.Who were the beginners of English life in America?What propulsions sent them for refuge to a wilderness?What visions beckoned them to undertakethe founding of new states? What manner of men weretheir leaders? And what is the story of their hopes,their experiments, and their disappointments? Theseare the questions I have tried to answer.
The founders of the little settlements that had theunexpected fortune to expand into an empire I havenot been able to treat otherwise than unreverently.Here are no forefathers or foremothers, but simply Englishmen and women of the seventeenth century, withthe faults and fanaticisms as well as the virtues oftheir age. I have disregarded that convention which(p. viii) makes it obligatory for a writer of American historyto explain that intolerance in the first settlers was notjust like other intolerance, and that their cruelty and injusticewere justifiable under the circumstances. Thiswalking backward to throw a mantle over the nakednessof ancestors may be admirable as an example of diluvianpiety, but it is none the less reprehensible in thewriting of history.
While the present work is complete in itself, it is alsopart of a larger enterprise, as the half-title indicates.In January, 1880, I began to ma