Some American Grounds, like Coffee, unsettled.—Some Settlements pulled up by the Roots; others chilled by Fever and Ague.—Moist Soils objected to except by Doctors.—Unexpected Crops of Tomahawks from Wheat sown.—Settlements in America because of the Impracticability of making any at Home with Creditors.—Wild Oats sown between thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth Parallels.—Frequent Settlements make long Friends.—Settlements of Old Tavern Scores in Chalky Districts.—Religious Squalls prostrate some Plantations.—Indian Tempests uproot others.—Growth of Virginia, although Queen Elizabeth a femme sole.—Clergymen’s Settlements.—Brides unsettled.—Drake around the World.

Clergymen’s discourses, like grape clusters, usually show two sides,—a positive or sunny one and a negative or shady one.

Desirous of bringing out the native bunches of our history more roundly against the leafy background of its verdant youth, we begin by showing alternating merits and demerits. And first the negative, or shady side.

The first damp observation shows that many parts of America have never been settled at all. In certain districts, grounds are found, as in coffee, unsettled; and good grounds exist for this, and, contradictory as it may seem, these are generally discovered in poor water.

In some cases, like those of Gosnold, Raleigh, De La Roche, and others, attempts were made, and settlements actually planted, which seemed for a time to thrive; but the impatient planters, like curious boys, were so desirous of ascertaining how much their plants had grown, that they pulled them up to look at the roots,—an inspection which the plants resented by sulking and dying out. In other instances, fever and ague was mixed up with the first seed, and this had a chilling effect upon the husbandmen.

Indeed, a hard fight is still going on in many parts of the country with this strong unsettler, the record of whose assaults and charges is found in the apothecary shops and doctors’ offices. These highly colored little stockades and forts with the rosy-hued land-offices for the sale of the most desirable real estate, with water-lots running in front of them, often indeed comprise the entire settlement.

In some instances, the character of the soil interfered seriously with any permanent occupation of the place. People who had no objection to watered silks, or watered paper, entertained, it has been found, well-grounded reasons for not liking an oozy surface, paragraphed between watery curves, and punctuated with bullfrogs and other pointed characters. Some of the early settlers did venture upon these maritime risks; but policy, or no policy, they ended their speculations under weeping willows, with Keat-like epitaphs over them,—

Oftentimes, even where the soil was rich, the early settler became discouraged by the unexpected crops he obtained. Planting wheat, he found that it came up a rank growth of Indian corn, tasselled out into tomahawks or sharp-pointed arrows, instead of the silken tufts which he had a right to look for in the order of nature. This result frequently took place in the valleys of the Connecticut and Mohawk, along the banks of the Mystic River, and upon the otherwise pleasant slopes overlooking Narragansett Bay.

In several instances, too, as in the case of the shipped by the council of the Plymouth Company, the seed thus sent was taken from heaps of full-grown vicious specimens, to be found only in London, or other large places, instead of being judiciously selected from healthy young stocks. Such seed, of course, not only became sour and fermented, but this fermentation spoiled whatever good grain was found accidentally mixed with it. This kind of crop was even worse than that of the tomahawks or arrows. Of course, these penal crops were short-lived. The profligate and dissolute soon died in the virtuous solitudes in which they had no previous experience at home to recall and compare; and escaped as soon as possible from settlements whose greatest crime, in their eyes, was that in them they could make no scores long enough to be worth running away from.

Some attempted settlements here, because they could not succeed in making any with their creditors at home. Of this class, many were found in the bounds of the London Company, scraped up under the charter of James I., granted in 1606,—a company which sowed their wild oats between the thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth parallels of latitude, but whose doings, undoings, and misdoings had no parallel whatever. Some of this seed, lying dormant, sprouted up in these regions as late as 1861, and covered the Carolinas and Virginia with a crop worse than teazles or Canada thistles.

The maxim that “frequent settlements make long friends,” was doubly verified along the New England coast, where the security of the settler could only be maintained by short and decisive footings-up of and with the breech-less and treaty-breaking Picts of our history, or by such often-planted gatherings as would prevent their attempts to run up a score.

It is almost needless to say that in all the regions from the Penobscot River to St. Augustine, under all the various charters, and among all classes of colonists, English, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, or Huguenot, settlements were often made on the walls and behind the doors of taverns, where the weekly score was kept,—a geological district mapped out in a chalk formation, the size of which seemed always to astonish the settler whenever his attention was particularly invited to it. Whatever his own fields bore, here the crop was unfailing; or rather its growth was generally in the inverse ratio to that of his wheat or tobacco patch.

In a few instances settlements, fairly and permanently made were suddenly uprooted by sudden squalls or tempests, which, razing the hair from the heads of the colonists, still, as we read of their ferocity and fury, raise our own. Such was the scalping-party that swept over Deerfield, the savage whirlwind down the valley of the Wyoming, and the rapid gust that licked up the little settlement of Cherry Valley.

Now and then also occurred a religious tornado, which prostrated whole patches of plantations, and which, at one time, threatened to become the prevailing winds of our American continent, taking the place even of our strong and steadily blowing trade-winds. Thus a company of French Huguenots, sent out in 1565, by Admiral Coligni, and planted in Florida, were overwhelmed by a party of Spaniards, under Melendez, who, after murdering them all, placed over their mutilated bodies this inscription: “We do this not as unto Frenchmen, but as unto heretics.” Which was the heretical part thus mercilessly dealt with, and which the French portion not intended to be harmed, cotemporary accounts do not furnish us with materials sufficient to enable us to discriminate. They do tell us, however, that this then fashionable mode of treating religious convictions was imitated by the countrymen of the French, acting upon what was then thought to be the proper interpretation of the merciful and benign principles of The Book, viz., “doing unto others, what they do unto you”; for soon after De Gourges, sailing from France with three ships, formed a surprise party to two Spanish forts, and after executing a Spanish dance with the garrison, took them out and hung them up in the trees like dried fruit; and fearing that the specimens might be mistaken, left above them the recipe, as follows: “I do this not as unto Spaniards, or mariners, but as unto traitors, robbers, and murderers.”

Whether the Spaniards thus done for properly appreciated the delicate discrimination, we are not informed.

To the statistician it may be of interest to know that of the abortive attempts at settlements within the present limits of the United States, six were made by the English, one by the Swedes, two by Spaniards, and two by the French. Lovers of that branch of political history will be able to wring out of these figures results more extraordinary than any we can torture them into.

On the whole, however, notwithstanding all drawbacks and misfortunes, the settlements gained steadily on the Indians, fever and ague, the cold and exposure, tomahawks, tavern-keepers, and surprise parties. Some marriages took place, but no settlements were made on the bride, except perhaps, in the course of time, her old father-in-law and mother-in-law, who were fortunate if they brought with them, as addition to her scanty stock, two whole empty trunks, their own. Queen Elizabeth did everything to promote the growth of population in her favorite colony of Virginia, except to furnish them with a personal example; but to make up for this omission, she sent out some Episcopal clergymen, provided with surplice and stole, and with licenses to marry. These obtained settlements for themselves, and zealously stimulated them in others.

As soon as the settlements began fairly to demonstrate that they would succeed, they were of course vigorously patronized, and in fact “encumbered with help.” Plenty of people there were then who at first, at the bare mention of American settlements, had placed their thumbs to their noses, and irreverently given their fingers a quick gyratory motion in the air, but who now came forward and claimed the merit of having always been the especial friends of the colonists, and pointed, like the very lieutenants and aid-de-camps of General Success, to their uniformly entertained convictions, triumphantly exclaiming, “Did we not always tell you so?” As candid historians, we cannot withhold our pencils from sketching the portraits of these burly friends of the early years of America; these large-hearted souls, who, sitting at home over their comfortable cannel-coal fires, piled cheerily up with the dividends from the stock of some of the companies formed for planting these shores, which they would not touch until it got up to par, and who then, fearing that their attachments might not be appreciated, cried out their undeviating devotion in voices that fairly drowned all others.

From these characters, which only shine in the full noonday of prosperity, we gladly turn to Sir Francis Drake, who, as early as 1586, did not hesitate to divide his last crust with the feeble and struggling colony of Roanoke Island, succoring them by timely aid, and not sucking from them the little feeble strength which short crops and long watchings against wary foes had left them. Although born in England, Drake had a soul which compassed the world, around whose waist he passed the second girdle which had ever belted it.

Colored Views whitened.—Blue Ridges and Black Welts in Virginia.—Virginia, smothered up in Infancy by Charters, survives Royal nursing.—Her Vigilance against her Suitors.—Cotton introduced.—How the World managed previously.—Charles I. and his numerous Autographs.—Georgia and Oglethorpe.—Charleston set up.—A Point on Old Point Comfort.—Tobacco first piped about.—Unmarried Girls as Articles of Import.—Estimated in, if not by, Pounds.—The Fancy Constitution of John Locke for North Carolina.—Its own Length, but Short Life.—South Carolina Rivers do not run up.—Popular Errors corrected.—John Wesley.—Singular Effect of his Preaching on the Indians.—Maryland as a Duck of a Colony canvassed.

Colored views are too apt to be given and taken of these six States, shading down from the dead African black, through every gradation of tint, to a hue almost unimpeach-ably Caucasian.

It is true that Virginia carried on her bosom a Blue Ridge, as in later times some of her progeny have borne on their backs darker ridges; but until 1620 no welts of the latter character stood out on her fair shoulders; and these, be it said to his shame, were raised by the master of a Dutch man-of-war who, on the very day in August that the Pilgrim party embarked in the Mayflower, at Delft-Haven, in his own country, landed twenty negroes for sale on the banks of the James River, leaving a black mark which two hundred and forty-five years have barely succeeded in washing out. In her very cradle, in 1606, Virginia was loaded down and half smothered with that royal blanket, a charter. Not content with this comforter, the royal nurses from London kept piling other blankets of the same kind upon the vigorous infant, and because it was vigorous, until within the short space of fourteen years no less than four were heaped upon her. These were far from being counter-panes, but on the contrary served in that warm climate to distress the child, and eventually to bring out eruptions. Under the second of these, in 1609, Maryland was tucked up in the same bed with Virginia; but in 1621, not finding the company agreeable, she was taken out by Lord Baltimore, and put into a pleasant and comfortable trundle-bed of her own; the chivalrous young lord naming the baby after Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I., and daughter of the gallant Henry of Navarre, afterwards Henry IV. of France. The year 1621 was emphasized in the infant settlement of Virginia by the introduction of cotton and the first written constitution,—two prolific American seeds that have each borne large harvests. Considering the varied uses to which the former is now applied in clothing human bodies and habitations, and the latter in padding political addresses and lawsuits, we are puzzled to conceive how the world got on, and especially how congressmen managed to make speeches, or lawyers to live, prior to those great discoveries,—discoveries more important in some aspects than those of iron, the Reformation, Illinois divorces, gunpowder, steam, the doctrine of legal insanity, Brandreth’s pills, and others, without which of course no well-ordered or well-digesting family can long proceed.

Seven years later Charles I. contracted to take the entire tobacco crop of Virginia; hoping probably by the free use of this narcotic to drug the alarmed political conscience of England.

The ship that took the first Maryland emigrants up the Potomac to their new settlement was called the Ark and the Dove, and carried in its beak the olive-branch of religious toleration.

In 1630, the same liberality in disposing of broad strips of American territory was shown by King Charles I. in granting a deed, embracing North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, to Sir Robert Heath; but in 1663 his son, the second Charles, desirous of improving his own handwriting, which had been somewhat neglected from his eighth year, in consequence of the necessarily active business life Cromwell had obliged him to lead, put his signature, early one foggy morning, to a paper which somebody laid in his way, and which, when brought out to the light, proved to be a grant to Lord Clarendon and several other pleasant, gentlemanly fellows, of this same small North American farm. This select little knot of farmers, after building a few barns on their farm, discovered that it was not large enough for their purposes. Like the Irishman who wanted an additional sixpence to drink the health of the gentleman who had generously given him a five-dollar bill, they desired a back field to dump manure on; and they finally obtained a second autograph from the obliging Charles to a bit of paper, allowing them to use forever the small patch lying westward to the Pacific. The farm was kept together until 1729, when it was divided up by George II. into two parts, called North and South Carolina; the latter half being, three years later, again split into two, and the lower part named, after the burly old landlord, Georgia. Nearly fifty years, however, before this division, upon a tongue of land called Oyster Point, and bivalved between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, Charleston was first set upon its uneasy foundations. Whether affected by the contiguity of Folly Island, by the use of too much pepper—always cheap in warm regions—upon the native oysters, or whether unduly exhilarated by too exclusive a contemplation of the cotton seed, which seems to have enlarged its dilated and dilating pupils, the place, although but seven feet above high tide, has always been given to high notions, and subject to a certain vertigo. An admirable ingredient, the Protestant Huguenot element, tossed out of France by the revoked edict of Nantes, was infused into the young settlement of South Carolina in 1685. The plant of liberty, however, early struck its anchoring roots close by the side of the cotton-plant; and although the governors, sent out by the royal proprietors from England, continually hacked into its smooth trunk, it still grew apace, and its bracing tonic odors filled not only the regions watered by the Santee and Pedee, but were wafted northwards and over the sister Colonies.

Although it is said that “old Virginny never tires,” it must have been because she had a robust constitution, for a busier body never existed. Always resisting the attempts made by the profligate royal governors upon her virginity, she had to watch them, day and night, for fear that they would steal her hard earnings and run away with them. In fact, during the sixty years that succeeded her birth at Jamestown, in 1606, she was constantly on the alert, putting up scarecrows on her cornfields, and notices of spring-guns, to warn away intruders; but these, so far from frightening away, only attracted the curious bills of the Indians. She was also forced to hold fast with might and main to the scanty wardrobe brought out by her from England, and with which those dissolute fellows, the young, titled, rakish, good-for-nothing overseers, were always taking liberties. Fortunately for her, as well as her sisters, the two Carolinas and Georgia, her shoulders were well covered by capes, so securely fastened on that they could not be snatched away, and their charms exposed to the rude stare or prying curiosity of idle visitors from France and England, and even from staid, sober Holland. And we here take the opportunity of repelling the slander so often circulated upon Virginia, that she is “the mother of States,”—an aspersion which, if true, would stain her virgin fame, and leave a bar sinister across the shields of the States thus born out of wedlock.

The first suitor for the budding affections of the youthful Georgia, or Georgiana, although bearing the suspicious name of Ogle-thorpe, proved to be a man of honorable intentions, high-minded, and in every respect faithful to his ardent vows,—a constant mate in all her joys and trials during his residence on the Savannah River, from 1732 to 1743. Virginia’s royal lovers, on the contrary, although always protesting their good intentions, were almost uniformly faithless. The last one bore the ill-omened, but appropriate name of Dun-more. He was very importunate, and in every way attempted to get her to make over her then valuable property to him, but in vain; and at last so mercenary did he become, and so disagreeable did he make himself, that she was obliged to show him the door.

The spirited damsel was always plucky, and soon after this domestic difficulty made up her mind to be wholly independent, and so in fact publicly gave out to the whole world, saying that “she didn’t care who knew it.” Massachusetts gallantly stood by the young girl in her declaration, and so did all her brothers and sisters; even little Rhody tossing up her jaunty sailor’s cap, and shouting out that, under Providence, she was ready to “sail in.”

The name of Sir Walter Raleigh is greenly twined through the earliest settlements of North Carolina. In her coasts he took a constantly augmenting interest, and furnished to the State its capital. His love for the new settlement only ceased to beat with his heart. His verse, which the author of “The Fairy Queen” describes as “sprinkled with nectar,” and “vieing with the notes of the summer nightingale,” was musical with her praises; and his “History of the World” lays at her feet the tribute of his warm, chivalric nature.

The duty which he felt and gave to the two Colonies, Virginia and North Carolina, was very different from the duties which his successors endeavored to draw from them,—duties so onerous as to drain not only the pockets but the hearts of the young communities from which they were pressed out.

But amid all the trials to which Virginia was subjected by the rapacity of her governors and the unsated appetites of councils, named by the home board corporators, there was one point which she could always contemplate with satisfaction, namely, Old Point Comfort,—a grandmotherly place, which her children then, and since, often visited, laying their hot heads lovingly in her lap, until her pleasant breezes cooled their feverish throbbings.

Tobacco was first grown in Virginia in 1616; and we crave leave to add, that although much piped about ever since, has never ceased to create a smoke; its curls hanging thickly and gracefully around the heads of its world-wide admirers from that time down to the present,—an instance of unchanged custom rarely seen.

Virginia, however, did not grow all of her luxuries; for, in 1620, we find her importing ninety respectable unmarried girls, who, on their arrival, and after payment of customary duties, were soon disposed of. This successful invoice was followed, the succeeding year, by a cargo of sixty more, the price for whom increased, after they were landed, from one hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty pounds of tobacco. How this advance affected the relations between them and the lower-priced wives of the preceding year, whether it laid the foundation for the difference between the F. F. V.’s and the white trash, the want of newspapers and of well-preserved family bills does not enable us to judge.

Certain it is that this commercial rape was as cordially acquiesced in by the seized damsels, as was the rape of the Sabines by those young ladies; and proved to be as beneficial to the growth of the infant settlement as that novel match-making on the banks of the Tiber.

The descendants of these unions on the James and Potomac would have been more numerous had not their numbers been thinned off by Indian knives, which were very busy in 1622, 1623, and 1644–1646. This last war was followed, three years later, by a petty imitation of the civil strife which had raged for seven years between the Parliament and Charles I. in England, and which ended, in the latter country, by taking off the king’s head, and in Virginia by taking away many of their former constitutional privileges. Cromwell fumigated them thoroughly in their own tobacco-smoke, until all the smell of loyalty was gone. Upon the accession of Charles II., in 1660, arbitrary legislation was sought here, as in England, to stamp out the rights of the people which had silently but steadily grown up into a stiff crop; but resistance followed, and in this struggle between Virginia and the crown the succeeding years were spent, until 1754.

The principal event in the history of the settlement of North Carolina was the fancy constitution furnished for it in 1669, by John Locke, whose understanding about it differed wholly from that of the people, through whose heads it never could be got. Besides having plenty of time on his hands, Locke made his constitution so long, and divided it up into so many parts, that the youngest settler died before he had read it half through, and bequeathed the further perusal of it to his descendants, with all his shares in what it most resembled,—the Dismal Swamp.

A sniff of this vague, shadowy constitution, or bundle of airy rights, by the adjacent settlement of South Carolina, affected her with such a fit of sneezing, that it kept on from that time until 1865, and from which she only found relief now and then in her cotton pocket-handkerchiefs.

We may remark that it is a vulgar error to suppose that the rivers in South Carolina run up hill,—just as it is a common mistake to believe that the Tar River, in North Carolina, originates in a turpentine district, and flows in a thick stream into Pamlico Sound. We may as well, also, correct the almost universal notion, that the inhabitants of Charleston have a particular fondness for fire as a steady, every-day diet.

The chief incident which marked the uneventful record of the Georgia settlement was the advent, in 1736, of John Wesley.

He preached in the Methodist language to the Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees; but those short-lived tribes, attending on a certain occasion one of his camp-meetings, and listening to the benevolent missionary giving out one of his brother Charles’s hymns, became so discouraged that they went back to their own camp and ways.

In addition to what we have already said of Maryland, we would state that its mild climate attracted canvas-back ducks, as its mild principles of religious toleration brought to its borders swarms of emigrants. Both have had a damp residence amid its amphibious shores, where the land seems two thirds water, and the water a little more moist than elsewhere.

John Smith historically considered.—The Number in Leading Cities stated.—How classified.—Why he is not put in a separate Volume or in an Appendix.—Origin of the Smiths.—American Genealogical Trees.—Smiths up a Stump, in the Sap, and dangling from the Branches.—The Antiquity and Ubiquity of the Smiths.—Variety and Extent of their Occupations and Operations.—Will probably in time own all the World.—Comic Situations of John Smiths in Cities, at Family Dinner-Parties, at Prayer-Meetings, at Balls, in Titles to Real Estate, etc.—Whether he can be sued.—Other Legal Questions in reference to him considered.—John Smith of Pocahontas Fame a Myth.

As a magnet, laid amid a heap of iron-filings, gathers them all to itself in close-fitting unity, so the figure of John Smith crystallizes about it the elements of the early settler’s life in Virginia. Nor upon the banks of the Chickahominy alone does John Smith stalk in romantic proportions; but through all times, in every kingdom, state, city, and village, at all epochs, and in every shade of barbarism or civilization, is he found. New York holds 187; Philadelphia, 231; Boston, 35; Brooklyn, 118; London, 480; and every capital in the world its own appropriate complement.

No railroad can be run that does not touch his farm; no joke that does not skim his peculiarities; no portrait that does not contain his features; no conductor’s stealings that does not comprise his contributions; no miller’s breakfast-bell that does not toll the knell of a portion of his grist.

As dyers classify mankind by the color of their skins, wine-growers belt the world by isothermal vine-lines, and lawyers divide the human race into plaintiffs and defendants, so the historian, straining his telescopic gaze over the centuries and the globe, and discarding the division of the species into “mankind and the Beecher family,”—no longer appropriate since the publication of “Norwood” reduced the latter down to the common level,—justly sweeps all mankind into two great classes, the Smiths and the rest of creation.

And so John Smith finds appropriate place, not only in every history, but a special niche and chapter to himself. We might perhaps have put this select mention of a great public benefactor, an erudite scholar, and universal toiler, into a note, smothered up in an appendix, dimmed by the milky-way of small asterisks, and hazily obscured by countless references and authorities; but this injustice to the merits of an ancient family, whose tombs mound every churchyard, and whose door-plates shine on almost every house in our cities and towns not appropriated to drugs, groceries, or confectioneries, would, we are persuaded, sorely wound the public conscience.

The origin of the Smiths, like that of so many other distinguished families, is involved in distressing doubt. Audacious investigation, with a natural wish to penetrate to the roots, and too fearless of consequences where prudence perhaps might be better satisfied with a limited view of ancestry, has pressed its inquiries up and down genealogical trees until it has unearthed Smiths at the base, Smiths in the sap, Smiths up the stump, and even Smiths dangling at the end of the branches. No nation looks down in theory from such lofty heights of indifference upon ancestral distinctions as the American; none can better afford to cut down their genealogical, as they do their natural, forests; yet none are so fond of looking up to these airy and waving altitudes, and none that more carefully spare the tree which in youth sheltered them, and which waves, like the flag, long and fruity to their eyes. An American book of leading families would be larger than the London Directory, and make the fortune of even the Congressional Printer. True, the family herald would in nearly all these cases, like the chroniclers of ancient states, and the biographer of the Smiths, be obliged to substitute foggy conjecture for well-defined tracings. They would all find that their researches would, if carried back far enough, converge to the same focal point; and if produced at equal distances in the future, diffuse themselves into a common social, monetary, and undistinguishing equality: for families and states are much like boys at the ends of a balanced board, now up, now down, at one time touching the ground, then curving upward through medium spaces to a culminating point, while some one at the other end is noiselessly passing through a reversed career.

And so John Smith balances and pendulates on the same board with a Van Rensselaer, John Brown with a Tozewell, Mr. Snooks with a Winthrop, and John Doe with a Hampton.

There is, we think, but little doubt that the Hebrew Samson, the Greek Hercules, the Spanish Cid, the Scandinavian Thor, and the English Arthur of the Round Table, were each the John Smith of his nation and time, a multiform unity swinging round the circle of varied labor, hard work, and heroic deeds, accomplishing under one name—a family one, possessed at various times by several individuals—the work of all reapers, sewing-machines, cow-milkers, cotton and woollen factories. These national heroes, like the John Smiths, their descendants now, were arrayed in warm climates in a fragmentary style of short dress; in the middle regions in a Highland garb, appropriately frilled or furred; and in the north with a canine material, heroic in quality, and modishly artistical,—a bark.

The most reliable studies trace the smith genealogy back to Vulcan’s workshop, the original Smith being one of those employed on designs for Achilles’s shield,—a claim which experts in coats-of-arms will not readily stamp as a forge-ry.

As there is no period of history without its John Smith, so there is no profession that does not enroll, no trade that does not contain, no occupation, from an office-holder’s up to that of an honest man’s, that does not embrace his name. Everywhere, on the sea and land; between every parallel of latitude, almost between every pair of sheets; at every pole and at every polling-place; on all rivers and in every strait; at every point, and even at Point-no-point; on the top, at the middle and bottom of every hill, enterprise, company, board of directors, and job; in all churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples; preaching, singing, and listening; talking all tongues, as well as curing, drying, and eating them; in prisons, police-stations, pulpits, grand-jury and other boxes; to-day hung, to-morrow putting on his black cap and sentencing the culprit to the rope’s end, and the day following condemning a pair to a less hempen noose; in the pugilistic ring, or ecclesiastical fight; the actor on the stage, and at the same time the spectator in the box, looking at himself personating his own character,—for every character is his,—everywhere, and in everything, is found this jolly, morose, lazy, active, sleepy, wakeful, fighting, pacific, coarse, refined, fat, lean, tall, short, blue-eyed, black-eyed John Smith.

In truth, when we think of him as ubiquitous, omniscient, and omnipresent, doing all things in all places, carrying on all businesses, living on all the real estate, owning at some time or other all the personal property, pocketing all the greenbacks, whistling to all the dogs, riding all the horses, looking after all the little poodle dogs, buying shoes and stockings for all the children agreeable and disagreeable, we get into such a world of John Smiths, such a nightmare of Johns, such a maelstrom of Smiths, such a gurgling, roaring, splitting, spitting, laughing, screeching, titilated, exhilarated, carnival, and Fourth of July of John Smiths, that we seem to be in a room lined with mirrors that reflect only John Smiths from all sides; indeed, we almost fancy ourselves a John Smith, our father and mother a John Smith, and all our aunts, cousins, uncles, nephews, brothers, and sisters, and even their clergymen, grocers, shoemakers, bootblacks, to be John Smiths, and that our last note and the mortgage on our house is owned by John Smith.

But the Smith family do not create all the humor and spend all the jollity upon others. Funny are the scenes which transpire among themselves. At a family party two John Smiths introduced, and each staring at his other self, is a conundrum; three a charade, in which the whole company give it up. A popular young lady, with card in her belt to carry the memory of her numerous engagements, finds herself swimming in doubt as to the identity of her partners, when John Smith claims her in the next dance, then for the following cotillon, then bows over her hand for the succeeding polka, and so confronts her at every turn of the figure and every return of the dance, until she doubts her own individuality, and requests to be baptized over again with a new name to get out of the tangle. Then at a family dinner-party of Smiths, when Mr. Smith asks Mr. John Smith the part of the turkey he prefers, and several voices in different tones and keys indicate as many different portions of the bird, there is a delightful series of warm explanations which enables the meal to become healthily cool, while each of the responders courteously leaves the piece he wants and takes one he did not desire.

Among the comic situations which Mr. Smith unconsciously creates are, that of a conveyancer, in a large city, endeavoring to trace a title through a J. S., or trying to ascertain which of the one hundred in the directory is the rightful defendant in a judgment, or the mortgagor in a mortgage, constituting a lien on the property sought to be transferred; or a country cousin, for the first time in New York or Philadelphia, consulting the directory to find her puzzled way to the forgotten residence of her cousin John Smith, or innocently asking a polite but humorous gentleman, in the street whether he knows John Smith’s house; or a clergyman in a city prayer-meeting asking John Smith to lead in prayer, and finding three or four, with closed eyes, responding to the request; or a notary making up his mind where to leave a notice of protest of a large note on the indorser John Smith, who wittily wrote his name without any address under it. Indeed, it would be one of the causes célèbres for a jury to determine whether a child might not guiltlessly mistake his parent who bore only this undistinguishing name; whether a forgery of the name could be committed; whether an express company be bound to deliver a trunk to this nominis umbræ; or whether a wife, Mrs. John Smith, could be lawfully convicted of eloping with any one.

Then when John Smith comes to die, in the churchyard, and afterwards when the dead arise—but we stagger under the vision of puzzled bones and stop.

We cannot write more lucidly the history of the John Smith of Pocahontas fame. It grows mythical the more we look at it; an abstraction dancing over the coals of the early settlement of Virginia, a face and figure flitting like a twisting flame, up, around, and through the grate; seeming as we try to fix our attention upon him like a dozen different men, one falling in love with the young squaw, another surveying the James and Rappahannock, another mastering the turbulent spirits of a dissolute and discontented settlement; another caught and brought before Powhatan, while a graceful girl of twelve summers gently puts away the descending club; another sailing to England, and peeping out ever and anon among the friendly faces that make the living frame to her young virgin face, yet again dissolving and melting into the gray dimness of the morning light. Of only one thing do we feel certain in regard to John Smith in general, the average John Smith, that the portrait here presented, taken by instantaneous photography, representing his multitudinous character, is the only genuine and original likeness ever published.

Views of the New England States and Character determined by one’s Church.—Partial Notions about Clocks, Nutmegs, Pumpkin Pies, etc.—Getting an Historical Coach to one’s self.—Why the Puritans did not hang up their Stockings on their first Christmas Eve.—Their nearest Neighbors.—Indian Points and other Points.—Governor Carver and Want of Meats.—Massasoit, and how he kept his Faith in-violate.—New Hampshire on the Rampage.—Why Boston was begun, and why it is not finished.—Roger Williams and his Providential Ways and Doings.—Connecticut founded, although its Charter not found.—The Wind against Cromwell.—Harvard College.—Vermont and her Ways and Means.

“Tell me,” says a witty Frenchman, “what time in the morning a man rises, and I will tell you his notions of the character of the Germans.” Tell us the kind of church a man attends, and we will undertake to give you his opinion of the character of the Puritan Pilgrims, and the objects and value of the New England settlements. Not more various are men’s religions than their New England convictions; as checkered and contrary as the black and white squares on a Scotch shawl. Some people, of pious trainings but of an agricultural turn of mind, hold the idea that New England came, like the wonderful coach in the story of Cinderella, from a pumpkin; and hence travel naturally to the conclusion that the principal mission of her people is to keep up Thanksgiving day.

Others run all their lives with the notion that the Yankee States were settled by a race of peripatetic traders,—a revival of the school of Aristotle,—let out in Greece, and taking a play-spell here. Their picture of New England would be a pedler, dipped like a tallow-candle in an economical, tight-fitting suit of tawny homespun, driving a wagon full of tin notions, clocks, and a variety of domestic nutmegs, artistically whittled out of bass-wood, singing Old Hundred, with a pitch-pipe close to his nose to keep it in tune. Others, on the contrary, regard it as a large, full-bearing orchard in autumn, laden with golden fruit, fall-pippins, pearmains, seek-no-furthers, russets, and spitzenbergs, supplying its owners, the neighborhood, and the distant market with their incomparable harvest. Fortunate for the historian, for debating-societies, and the magazines are these variegated opinions. They give a spiciness to New England, as if she were a tropical garden instead of a poor-man’s patch, fenced in with rocks and spiked down with long pegs to prevent the frost in the spring from heaving her up uncomfortably. They serve, like French cookery, to present the same dish simmering in various sauces under different aspects and names, and yet all from the same little market-basket.

Cooke, the comic actor, who hated to be crowded, once so successfully used upon a stage-driver his extraordinary power of changing the expression of his face,—getting in at one door of the coach, slipping out of the one opposite, and again presenting himself with a new style of visage,—that he took all the inside to himself. And so it has been with the New England character. It has so many phases that it requires almost the entire omnibus of American history to itself. One point is quite certain, that the first settlers had a hard place to land on, and a great many sharp Indian points to provide against after they had landed.

St. Augustine was fifty-five, Jamestown fourteen, and the baby Dutch settlement on Manhattan Island ten years of age, when the little English congregation which had passed thirteen years at Leyden in Holland,—stowed away in two small vessels, one of sixty and the other of one hundred and eighty tons,—stepped out of their cold cabins upon the colder rock of Plymouth. It was four days before Christmas; but for want of good fireplaces they did not hang up their stockings. It was as much as they could do to keep from hanging themselves. Their nearest white neighbors were at Port Royal, Nova Scotia, five hundred miles distant,—a trifle too far away to invite New-Year’s calls.

Most of the party were obliged to wade on shore, thus breaking the ice for those who followed; the spray of the sea freezing as it fell upon them, making them quite ice-clad, in fact almost as shaggy and pointed as their inside purposes and character.

They carried on shore one dead body, the only one who had died on the voyage of one hundred and six days; the first planting in that field, which in time, like the rest of the world, was to be claimed as God’s acre.

The soil upon which they settled bore more charters, Indian arrows, and gravestones than pumpkins or corn; and even two years after the landing, we are told that the stock on hand of the latter was so small that only five kernels were allowed for each private,—an allowance which, since the great Rebellion, seems incredibly small.

There was a Carver among the party, and, being a sharp fellow, he was appointed Governor; but as there was but little meat to be sliced,—deer being scarce and high priced,—and the Indians seldom giving any quarter, he soon pined away and died. Cape Cod was not far distant, but the emigrants being without boats, the fish, especially without potatoes, were poor picking. A few years later, however, and there were large fishing-parties made up, which not only took in fish, but each other, by hook and by crook. The grapes of Martha’s Vineyard, at the time of which we speak, hung so high as to be very sour. Besides the Puritans, it is well known, set their faces against the cup, as they did against kissing. The modern town of Dux-bury, which nudges Plymouth on the east, was then too young to afford much game, even for the long reaches of Miles Standish, who was obliged to content himself with such small shooting as the Narragansetts afforded.

Massasoit, however, was the fast friend of the settlers, and made a treaty which, in the bluest times, he always kept in-violate.

In 1629 a patent was received from that accomplished penman Charles I., incorporating “The Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay, in New England”; which eventually proved to be, what most patents are, not worth the paper it was written on. New Hampshire and a part of Maine, included in this patent, was as early as 1622 sold out to two enterprising young gentlemen, Sir Ferdinand Gorges and Captain John Mason; but after an experiment of nineteen years, these royal speculators resold their state rights to Massachusetts, which held on to them until 1680, when Charles II., in order to make a place for a friend and to encourage lawsuits about titles in the idle courts, erected New Hampshire into a separate Province, independent of Massachusetts, but dependent on himself.

Lying under cold snow-white sheets, with jealous neighbors, the French settlers of Canada and Acadia, ready to put pins in the youngster and keep her crying, and if possible to stunt her growth, Maine was longest in her cradle of any of the infant settlements. As early as 1602 some Frenchmen landed on her coast, but only remained long enough to make a few eyelet-holes in that watery frill which the busy but chill fingers of the Atlantic has wrought upon her eastern hem. It was reserved for the sturdier Saxon race to take the infant in hand, and, by hardier treatment, to bring her up to robuster strength. The first serious effort was made in 1622. That court pet, Gorges, obtained, in 1639, a charter, which not only covered the present State, but lapped over into the borders of Massachusetts. The latter resented this interference with her own by making counter-claims, and in 1652 insisted upon taking the child under its exclusive protection. The contest, carried into the English courts, outlived of course its original promoters, but was at last, in 1677, terminated, to the astonishment of the suitors and the disgust of the lawyers. The custody of the infant, now grown to be a stripling, was awarded to Massachusetts, which, always looking after the Maine chance, got a most obstreperous minor in charge.

In 1630 a band of eight hundred and forty bodies and souls, led by John Winthrop, and tempted by a spring of good water, settled on the peninsula of Shawmut, and began Boston, which, we are glad to say, is not finished yet. May it never be; but, ever growing, may it carry on wagon-making as successfully as in former days, furnishing hubs for those covered transportation carts which trundle westward, and which, if allowed to stand still over night, swarm into a new colony the next morning.

The following year a miniature church and state experiment was made in the Massachusetts settlement, by limiting the eligibility to civil office to church-members, whether civil or not.

The first log-cabin builders, who had themselves fled from the knife of the law, whetted it to a keen edge and turned it upon their fellow-sufferers, who differed from them in their religious or moral sentiments. Profane swearing, tippling, taking interest on loans of money, and wearing expensive jewelry became legal crimes, among those who had suppressed with Spartan rigor their exercise in themselves and their families. The next generation, in 1658, could not tolerate drab coats or drab principles, and sought to put down the new fashions by hanging up several of their owners in them. The wood-colored styles multiplied of course, notwithstanding the crimson mode of dealing with them,—a mode which, whenever mentioned, brings up a flush on every fair New England cheek to this day. The flush is not likely to be left unsummoned so long as the enemies of New England have any ink left, or so long as her own gifted sons preserve in choicest amber the well-embalmed and dramatic specimens.

In 1635 Roger Williams, illuminated by principles of religious toleration, unkindled as yet in the Puritan settlements of Massachusetts Bay, Salem, and Boston, carried his softly burning torch out of the reach of the chill breath of the General Court, which sought in vain to blow out the wavering flame.

He pitched his tent on the Blackstone River where it widens into Narragansett Bay, and there grafted such a lovely little bud of religious equality upon the old trunk of settled law, that, swelling under Providence into the State of Rhode Island, it has become one of the finest fruit-trees in our American orchard. Some people, of aquatic notions and learning their geography in the pitching hold of a yacht, have erroneously supposed that Rhode Island was included in the state of Newport. Such notions rest on very sandy foundations, and are no more to be trusted than the speculations of the idly learned about the round tower of that resort for capital sea-bathing.

The settlement of Rhode Island, like the other American plantations, was kept alive and stirring by Indian wars; but, aided by the Narragansetts, she succeeded at last, after attempting to bury their hatchets, in burying the Pequods themselves, leaving not one to perpetuate the seed.

Meanwhile, the valley of the Connecticut, visited by exploring parties from Plymouth Colony under the younger Winthrop, and by heavy flanked Dutchmen from the island of Manhattan, had also attracted attention to its valuable real estate; and its lots of course were mapped out and deeded in that first-class broker’s office, the Court of Charles I., situated in London.

Wethersfield, although it then had no onions to affect their eyes, made the mouths of a party of emigrants, who went there under Hooker in June, 1636, to water pleasantly, as they gaped over its broad meadow-lands, shaded with huge trees, and dipping their heavy grasses into the wide and flowing river.

But these huge trees at Wethersfield and Windsor, under which the infant plantations of Connecticut were made, were less valuable than the large old oak at Hartford, which afterwards became more famous for standing mute, and hiding its secrets, than the talking oak of Tennyson.

Ten years later, in 1638, New Haven was founded, built from the first on the square; its long sand-reaches cooled in the shade of branches that waved frequent welcomes to successive bands of settlers. But a shadier event for Charles I. occurred this year in England, in the detention of John Hampden and Oliver Cromwell, with all their traps and plunder, after it and they had been safely stowed away under hatches on board ship.

How little do we know what’s in the wind? Had it blown that day southwest instead of northeast, Charles I. might have worn his handsome but worthless head many years longer; the Stuart family to-day might perhaps be occupying the state chair of Victoria and the heavy Hanoverians; and the descendants of Messrs. Cromwell and Hampden be keeping store in some of our villages, or even got so low as to become aldermen, members of assembly, or even descended to the House of Representatives.

The same year John Harvard left a donation of three thousand dollars to a select school, founded two years previously at Newtown, which took his money and name. From this small, yet early laid foundation, Harvard College has since got up several Storeys; and although Sparks have been applied to the edifice, it still stands, like a tower set on a hill, diffusing its learned light to Holmes happy and genial, reaching upward to Longfellow, and even illuminating men Whittier than he.

We have now briefly traced the settlements of five of the New England States, bringing down their history to 1643, when, with the exception of spunky Rhode Island, they formed their first union against the witty but out-witted French of Acadia on the northeast, the trading, solid Dutch of Manhattan, and the universally hostile Indian tribes, whose enmity now became in the inverse ratio of their hunting-grounds. The sixth of these States, Vermont, came late and strugglingly among her brothers and sisters. Both New York and New Hampshire pouted and grumbled at the appearance of the new-comer, and threatened to smother her in the cradle. But the child, fed on simple food, and breathing the healthy air of the Green Mountains, grew apace after its birth in 1724, and got such a good Constitution in 1777, that she at length acquired all her rights; and what by fishing in the Connecticut, hunting among her evergreen hills, and keeping to her mutton and her last, she looked as she sat in the old continental schoolhouse as fresh, blooming, and thrifty as any. Vermont early sent away her surplus beef and swine, but she kept plenty of pluck at home.

It is sometimes said that if the Western States had been first discovered, New England would never have been settled at all; but this seeming reproach upon the hard and stern features of New England soil and climate warms into a compliment when we see what fabrics of iron, cotton, and woollen have been conjured from her narrow means, what wealth dangles from her hooks, what oil she gets without blubbering, what a clean white marble face she puts on our houses and stores, and what nutmegs and tropical wonders she picks up from her beeches and haze-le bushes, and what seasoning she distributes to spice our tables with literary condiments.