In all that he did in the New World Penn showed himself not only a great
but a most just and wise man. He imitated, with happier issue, the
liberality of Baltimore in the matter of religious freedom, and to this
day the Catholics of Philadelphia boast of possessing the only Church in
the United States in which Mass has been said continuously since the
seventeenth century. But it is in his dealings with the natives that
Penn's humanity and honour stand out most conspicuously. None of the
other founders of English colonies had ever treated the Indians except
as vermin to be exterminated as quickly as possible. Penn treated them
as free contracting parties with full human rights. He bought of them
fairly the land he needed, and strictly observed every article of the
pact that he made with them. Anyone visiting to-day the city which he
founded will find in its centre a little strip of green, still unbuilt
upon, where, in theory, any passing Indians are at liberty to pitch
their camp--a monument and one of the clauses of Penn's celebrated
treaty.
In the same reign the settlement of the lands lying to the south of
Virginia had begun, under the charter granted by Charles II. to the Hyde
family, and the new plantations were called after the sovereign
"Carolina." But their importance dates from the next century, when they
received the main stream of a new tide of immigration due to political
and economic causes. England, having planted a Protestant Anglo-Scottish
colony in North-East Ireland, proceeded to ruin its own creation by a
long series of commercial laws directed to the protection of English
manufacturers against the competition of the colonists. Under the
pressure of this tyranny a great number of these colonists, largely
Scotch by original nationality and Presbyterian by religion, left Ulster
for America. They poured into the Carolinas, North and South, as well as
into Pennsylvania and Virginia, and overflowed into a new colony which
was established further west and named Georgia. It is important to note
this element in the colonization of the Southern States, because it is
too often loosely suggested that the later division of North and South
corresponded to the division of Cavalier and Puritan. It is not so.
Virginia and Maryland may be called Cavalier in their origin, but in the
Carolinas and Georgia there appears a Puritan tradition, not indeed as
fanatical as that of New England, but almost as persistent. Moreover
this Scotch-Irish stock, whose fathers, it may be supposed, left Ireland
in no very good temper with the rulers of Great Britain, afterwards
supplied the most military and the most determined element in
Washington's armies, and gave to the Republic some of its most striking
historical personalities: Patrick Henry and John Caldwell Calhoun,
Jackson, the great President, and his namesake the brilliant soldier of
the Confederacy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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