change. Here, especially in South Carolina, the great staple was rice. The rice planters were men of education and culture, and they comprised the ruling class. Most of them lived in Charleston and spent but a few months of the year in the malarial regions in which the rice was produced.

The old colonial aristocracy of the South was not without its shortcomings, but on the whole it was chivalric and picturesque; and it is a remarkable fact that it was this old aristocracy of a single southern colony that furnished the newborn Republic with its greatest soldier, half of its first cabinet, and four of its first five presidents.

The small farmers of the South were also a respectable class, and of course more numerous than the great planters. They were slave owners on a small scale, and many of them rose by dint of genius, by thrift and industry, to the upper class,' while, as stated before, there was an almost impassable barrier between them and the lower classes, composed of servants and slaves.

RELIGION; EDUCATION; MEDICINE

In tracing the growth of the several colonies we have had frequent occasion to notice the religious life of the people, but a few additional words are necessary here. In the Carolinas, Virginia, and Maryland the Church of England was recognized by law as the State Church; and in Maryland, which had passed through Catholic and Puritan hands, this church was supported by general taxation. Many of the clergy were men of doubtful morals, men who were foremost at the horse races, and who were seldom outdone in drinking, betting, and gambling. The Established Church had little footing in the North, outside of New York, where it was rapidly gaining. In Pennsylvania and Rhode Island alone were all religions free.

In New England, except Rhode Island, the Puritan or Congregational Church was practically the State Church. In no other part of America had religion taken such a powerful hold on the people as here. The minister was held in the highest esteem and reverence by the people, who considered it a privilege to sit on the hard seats and listen to his three-hour sermon as he dilated on the special providences of God, on some metaphysical abstraction, or on the

1 Patrick Henry and John Marshall were striking examples of this.
2 This had been done at times in Virginia and the Carolinas.

tortures of the lost soul.

minister.

The New England ministers were men of profound learning. Many of them could read the Old Testament in the original Hebrew, the New in the New England original Greek, and expound them in classic Latin. We may grow weary of the pedantry, the metaphysics, and the narrowness of the Puritan ministers, but it cannot be denied that they were sincere, honest men. The greatest of the New England ministers was Jonathan Edwards, whose work on the "Freedom of the Will" is one of the very few colonial productions that still live in American literature.

Next to religion the Puritans valued education, and they had scarcely become established in their new home when they turned their attention to the education of their children. In 1636 it was voted to found a college at Newtown, now Cambridge, three miles west of Boston. Two years later, John Harvard, a young clergyman, gave the institution a portion of his estate, amounting to about $4000, a large sum in those days, — and it was called after his name. In 1647 the General Court of Massachusetts ordered that a common school be established in every township of fifty families, and a grammar school in each of the larger towns. From this crude beginning has developed the public school systems of the United States. The school term in New England was seldom more than four months in the year; the teacher was often a youthful divinity student, and sometimes the minister of the parish, or even the innkeeper. The pupils pondered for long, weary hours over the "New England Primer," the catechism, and various cumbrous text-books of the time.

Schools.

In New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania commendable effort was made to educate the young, but the schools fell below those of New England, and seldom at this period was a school to be found outside the towns and villages. In the South the education of the masses was almost wholly neglected, except for some feeble efforts in Maryland and Virginia. The rich employed private tutors, the minister, or sometimes an indented servant, while a few of the most opulent sent their sons to England or the North to be educated. There was no public school system in Virginia before the Revolution, yet this colony could boast the second

1 The seven colleges founded before the Revolution were: Harvard, 1636; William and Mary, 1693; Yale, 1701; Princeton, 1746; University of Pennsylvania, 1749; King's (Columbia), 1754; and Brown University, 1764.

college in America in point of the time of its founding. The efforts to educate the young in many of the colonies was most praiseworthy, but outside of New England and New York there was no public school system till after the Revolution, all efforts to educate the young in other colonies being private.

The practice of medicine in the colonies was in a cruder state even than were the educational facilities. The village doctor was

indeed an important personage, quite equal to the schoolMedicine. master or the innkeeper, and not much inferior to the minister. He was at home in every family, and was highly respected by all classes. He was present at every birth and every funeral; he sat with the minister at the bed of death, and put his name with that of the lawyer to every will.1 His medical education was usually meager, and often consisted only of a short apprenticeship with some noted physician. No medical college existed in the colonies before the Revolution. The practice of bloodletting for almost any disease was universal; and if the physician was not at hand, this was done by the barber, the clergyman, or any medical amateur. The drugs used were few, and their rightful use was little known. St. John'swort was taken as a cure for many ills, for madness, and to drive away devils. A popular medicine was composed of toads burned to a crisp and powdered, then taken in small doses for diseases of the blood. There was a great deal of mystery in connection with the practice of medicine. In addition to the regular physicians there were many quacks who hawked their Indian medicines and special cures about the country; but these were not peculiar to colonial times we have them still.

MEANS OF TRAVEL; MAILS; NEWSPAPERS

In nothing has there been a greater change in the last hundred years than in the means of travel. For two thousand years, as Henry Adams says, to the opening of the nineteenth century, the world had made no improvement in the methods of traveling. That century brought the river steamer, the ocean greyhound, the lightning express train, the bicycle, the electric car, and the automobile. In colonial times travel by land was in the old-fashioned stagecoach, on horseback, or afoot. The roads were usually execrable. Many of

1 McMaster, Vol. I, p. 29.

2 Eggleston's "Transit of Civilization,” p. 53.

8 Ibid., p.

58.

COLONIAL LIFE

Roads.

The stage

coach.

209

the towns were wholly without roads, being connected with their neighbors by Indian trails. The best roads to be found were in Pennsylvania, all centering into Philadelphia, and on these at all seasons the great Conestoga wagons lumbered into the busy city, laden with grain and produce from the river valleys and the mountain slopes. Long journeys were often made on foot by all classes. A governor of Massachusetts relates that he made extensive journeys afoot, and speaks of being borne across the swamps on the back of an Indian guide. A favorite mode of travel was on horseback. A farmer went to church astride a horse, with his wife sitting behind him on a cushion called a pillion; while the young people walked, stopping to change their shoes before reaching the meetinghouse. Great quantities of grain and other farm products were brought from the remote settlements on pack horses, winding their weary way through the lonely forest by the Indian trails. Coaches and chaises were few until late in the seventeenth century. Not until 1766 was there a regular line of stagecoaches between New York and Philadelphia. The journey was then made in three days; but ten years later a new stage, called the "flying machine," was started, and it made the trip in two days. A stage journey from one part of the country to another was as comfortless as could well be imagined. The coach was without springs, and the seats were hard and often backless. The horses were jaded and worn, and the roads were rough with boulders and stumps of trees, or furrowed with ruts and quagmires. The journey was usually begun at three o'clock in the morning, and after eighteen hours of jogging over the rough roads the weary traveler was put down at a country inn whose bed and board were such as few horny-handed laborers of to-day would endure. Long before daybreak the next morning a blast from the driver's horn summoned him to the renewal of his journey. If the coach stuck fast in a mire, as it often did, the passengers must alight and help lift it out. When they came to a river, they found no bridge. The crossing was made, at the peril of all, on a rude raft of timbers, or a number of canoes lashed together. After five or six days of such torture the traveler from Boston found himself in the city of New York. The great highways of those early days were those that nature had furnished the rivers and bays. Without these the people of the different colonies would have been isolated indeed, and would scarcely have known of the existence of one another. Even

P

as it was, only the few ever traveled far from home; the majority of the native common people lived and died in the neighborhood in which they were born.

The mail was carried by postriders, who followed the main roads as far as there were any; on reaching the roadless settlements they found their way through the forest as best they could

The mails.

by the trails and bridle paths. The postman left a city, not at regular intervals, but only when he received enough mail to pay the expenses of the trip. The remote settlements were fortunate if they received mail once a month. Benjamin Franklin was appointed post-master general in 1753, and he served about twenty years. He soon made the service a paying one to the Crown. Yet even then the amount of mail delivered in the whole country in a year was less than that now delivered in the city of New York in one day.2

Newspapers were not carried in the mails, but by private arrangement. The newspapers were small and ill-printed, and contained little that we would call news. The chief contents were bits of poetry, advertisements for runaway slaves and indented servants, arrivals of cargoes, bits of European news, and essays on politics, morals, and religion. The Boston News Letter, established in 1704, was the first permanent newspaper in America. At the opening of the Revolution there were thirty-seven newspapers printed in the colonies, with a combined weekly circulation of about five thousand copies. The first daily was not printed until 1784.

COLONIAL GOVERNMENT

In addition to the brief account of the government of each colony in our narrative of the settlements, an account must here be given of colonial government as a whole.

The thirteen colonies are usually grouped, according to the form of government, into three classes the Charter, the Royal, and the Proprietary; but recent historical research has evolved a better classification into the proprietary, the corporate, and the provincial, or royal. The corporate colonies were practically self-governing and

1 As early as 1710 Parliament passed the first colonial post office act.

2 McMaster, Vol. I, p. 41.

8 In a series of able articles in the Political Science Quarterly, Vol. II, H. L. Osgood shows that the "charter" does not indicate a form of government; it is simply a grant of power of certain rights which may or may not pertain to colony planting. In granting a colonial charter the king created a corporation and gave