A SOURCE BOOK IN AMERICAN HISTORY TO 1787 COLLECTED AND EDITED BY WILLIS MASON WEST SOMETIME PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA [Illustration] ALLYN AND BACON #Boston New York Chicago# COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY WILLIS MASON WEST. #Norwood Press# J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. FOREWORD Early American history is especially suited for "source work" in secondary schools and undergraduate college classes. After the year 1800, there are too many documents and many of them are too long. The student can get no systematic survey nor any sense of continuity; and source work is therefore merely illustrative of particular incidents. But, for the early period, it is possible, by careful selection and exclusion, to lay a basis for a fairly connected study. To do this, it is necessary to combine in one volume selections which are usually grouped separately, as "Documents" and as "Readings,"--such, for instance, as the Massachusetts charter, on the one hand, and Winthrop's letters to his wife, on the other. Rigid scholarship may object to the inclusion of such different sorts of sources between the same covers. But students cannot be expected to own or use more than one volume of sources in American history; and the practical educational advantages of the combination seem to me to outweigh all possible objections--besides which, something might be said for the arrangement in itself, for young students, on the side of interest and convenience. A number of admirable collections of sources for schools are already in use. And yet, in preparing my _American History and Government_,[1] I found no single volume which contained the different kinds of source material desirable for illustration, while much of the most valuable material was still inaccessible in any collection. Some two-thirds of the selections in the present volume, I believe, have not previously appeared in Source Books; and, for many of the customary documents, I have found it desirable to print parts not usually given. Thus, for Gorges' Patent for Maine, instead of reproducing the territorial grant (which is all that is given in the only Source Book which touches on that document), I have chosen rather to give the portion authorizing a degree of popular self-government (the reference to the "parliament in New England").