III AMERICAN HISTORY FROM 1700 TO 1800 REFERENCES GENERAL AUTHORITIES: Excellent short accounts are Channing, Student's History, 128-314; Thwaites, Colonies, Chapters xi-xiv; Hart, Formation of the Union, 1-175. SPECIAL WORKS: The authorities mentioned in the brief bibliographies at the beginnings of chapters in the books mentioned above, and, for minute study, the works referred to in the larger bibliographies mentioned below. BIBLIOGRAPHIES: Channing and Hart, Guide, §§ 131-166; Winsor's America, V-VIII. IN broad outline the history of America during the eighteenth century seems as different from that of England as was the case a century earlier. Two facts which we remarked in seventeenth-century America remained unchanged. In the first place no one really cared much who occupied the throne. The question of who was sent out as governor of a colony was more important than that of who sent him. In the second place, the absorptive power of the native American race remained undiminished, as indeed it seems still to remain. Though there was comparatively less immigration to America in the eighteenth century than in the seventeenth or the nineteenth, there was enough to show our surprising power of assimilation. In another aspect, the history of America during the Increased eighteenth century is unlike that of the century before. Impor Until 1700, at least in New England, the dominant Eng tance of the State. New Eng land and New lish ideal had been rather the moral than the political,the tradition of the English Bible rather than that of the Common Law. The fathers of New England had almost succeeded in establishing "a theocracy as near as might be to that which was the glory of Israel." The story of the Mathers shows how this theocratic ambition came to grief. Church and State in America tended to separate. Once separate, the State was bound to control in public affairs; and so the Church began to decline into formalism. The eighteenth century in America, therefore, was one of growing material prosperity, under the chief guidance no longer of the clergy, but rather of that social class to \whose commercial energy this prosperity was chiefly due. Meanwhile throughout the first half of our eighteenth century, external affairs constantly took a pretty definite form. Increased commercial prosperity and superficial social changes could not alter the fact that until the conquest of Canada the English colonies in America were constantly menaced by those disturbances which tradition still calls the French and Indian wars. These began before the seventeenth century closed. In 1690 Sir William Phips captured Port Royal, now Annapolis, in Nova Scotia; later in the year he came to grief in an expedition. against Quebec itself; in 1704 came the still remembered sack of Deerfield in the Connecticut valley; in 1745 came ̧ Sir William Pepperell's conquest of Louisbourg; in 1755 came Braddock's defeat; in 1759 came Wolfe's final conquest at Quebec. When the eighteenth century began,— as the encircling names of Quebec, Montreal, Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans may still remind us,—it was doubtful whether the continent which is now the United States would ultimately be controlled by the traditions of England or by those of continental Europe. Throughout the first half of the century this question was still in doubt, -never more so, perhaps, than when Braddock fell in what is now Western Pennsylvania. The victory on the Plains of Abraham settled the fate of a hemisphere. Once for all, the continent of America passed into the control of the race which still maintains there the traditions of English Law. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century came a movement which throws a good deal of light on American temperament. The dissenting sect commonly called Methodist originated in a fervent evangelical protest against the corrupt, unspiritualized condition of the English Church during the reign of George II. Though Methodism made permanent impression on the middle class of England, it can hardly be regarded in England as a social force of the first historical importance. Nor were any of its manifestations there sufficient to attract the instant attention of people who now consider general English history. In America the case was different. During the earlier years of the eighteenth century the Puritan churches had begun to stiffen into formalism. Though this never went so far as to divorce religion from life, there was such decline of religious fervor as to give the more earnest clergy serious ground for alarm. Awaken In 1738 George Whitefield, perhaps the most powerful of English revivalists, first visited the colonies. In that year he devoted himself to the spiritual awakening of The Great Georgia. In 1740 he came to New England. The Great Awakening of religion during the next few years was largely due to his preaching. At first the clergy were disposed ardently to welcome this revival of religious en ing. thusiasm. Soon, however, the revival took a turn at which The people who had been so profoundly stirred by this lution. consideration. Before speaking of that, we had best con- 1 cord, and Bunker Hill came in 1775, the year in which Burke delivered his masterly speech on Conciliation with America. On the Fourth of July, 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed. American independence was finally acknowledged by the peace of 1783. The Constitution of the United States was adopted in 1789. In 1800 the presidency of John Adams was drawing to a close, and Washington was dead. Now, very broadly speaking, the forces which expressed themselves in these familiar facts were forces which tended in America to destroy the fortunes of established and wealthy people, and to substitute as the ruling class throughout the country one more like that which had been stirred by the Great Awakening. In other words, the Revolution once more brought to the surface of American life the sort of natives whom the Great Awakening shows so fully to have preserved the spontaneity and the enthusiasm of earlier days. ment of American During the eighteenth century, in brief, America seems Developslowly to have been developing into an independent nationality as conservative of its traditions as England Nationality. was of hers, but less obviously so because American traditions were far less threatened. The geographical isolation of America combined with the absorptive power of our native race to preserve the general type of character which America had displayed from its settlement. In the history of native Americans, the seventeenth century has already defined itself as a period of inexperience. The fact that American conditions changed so little until the Revolution implies that this national inexperience persisted. In many superficial aspects, no doubt, the native Americans of 1776, particularly of the prosperous class, |