EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION

THIS volume of THE HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICA is the first of three, by different hands, having for their subject Colonization. Its scope is coterminous with that of the most fascinating field of American history. There is in the story of the colonization of the South a glamour of romance that does not attach to any other period in the up-bringing of what is now the United States.

The records of the colonization of New England, and of its constituent parts, are filled with pages that are of the most vital importance in the study of the social, economic, and constitutional growth of these United States; but few of them, however, thrill the modern reader. This because the men and women of Plymouth and Massachusetts, of Hartford, New Haven, and the Providence and Rhode Island Plantations are too nearly akin, despite their manners that jar upon our modernity, to the men and women of the present day. It is hard to throw around them the aureole of romance. True is it that, thanks to New England's second-greatest poet, the drapery of imagination has enfolded, and mayhap obscured, the characters of Standish and Alden and other worthies whose names will ever dwell in our memories; yet, nevertheless, Romance refuses to clothe the stark realism of New England with the mantle of fancy. It gives her, ungrudgingly, the maximum of credit for her share in nation building, but it has ever denied to

her the attractiveness that comes from mystery, the glamour that is the offspring of myth.

The history of the colonization period of the Middle States, if we except the conflicts between the Long House and the whites, and the struggle between the pertinacious Claiborne and the representatives of Lord Baltimore, has little upon which romance can fasten. In truth, the importance of the record of the colonies and provinces in that portion of America bounded on the north by the St. Lawrence and on the south by the Potomac is one of politics, save for the Indian troubles and the struggles between rather pusillanimous colonists to get possession of this or that bit of promising wilderness.

Men and women with commercial or agricultural training came to the Middle colonies on business bent. They were strictly commercialists; they had well-defined plans of settlement. They knew something of the conditions that awaited them; they knew more of the methods by which success might be wrested from adversity. Their contribution, as colonists, to American progress is the substantial one; nevertheless, there is little or nothing about it, when it is considered broadly, that is roseated by

romance.

The South and the Southwest, however, amply supply the lack which we note in the history of the colonization of New England and the Middle States. The territory that lengthened northward from the Mexican Gulf and the Rio Grande to where the Potomac and Ohio leashed its onward stretch or the trackless plains of the Middle West halted its earliest pioneers was the home of romance. It had from the first years of westward voyaging been a land of mystery, a land where it was asserted, and believed, that gold and precious stones might be had for the gathering, and where spices and perfumes abounded. Within its confines were thought to be wonderful cities with walls of gold, fountains that gave perpetual youth to those who laved themselves therein, and gardens in which might be partaken the delights

of Eden. Exploration, as we have seen in the first volume of this history of North America, had done much to dispel these golden dreams; yet, despite the knowledge gained in the period through which moved the figures of Cortés, De Soto, and Coronado, the minds of men still invested the South with an unreality that centuries of knowledge hardly took from it. The romance of the elder fables was replaced by that arising from the projects whose phantasies again and again influenced the impressionable and imaginative Latin of the colonization era.

There are substantial reasons for this continuing romance. The New England colonies were of exceedingly limited area; the Middle colonies could not pretend to vast stretches of territory; but the South was, seemingly, limitless. Hundreds of miles to the north it stretched, and westward its bounds were unknown thousands of miles from the landing place of the first colonizers. Deep were its mysteries. Dark forests harbored widespread and numerous tribes of strange savages. In its swamps lurked animals to Europeans unknown, and its waters held fish of astonishing qualities. Over its vast prairies roamed beasts that excited terror or stirred admiration. Climate, too, was not without its influence, and upon the newcomers fell the spell that has universally enthralled those who dwell beneath Southern skies, and the Spirit of the Land took the European invaders captive. Then, too, these first colonizers were not as the men of the North. They did not come to plant gardens, to till fields, to follow the kine to pasture. Theirs was not the intent to build homes. In the opinion of the nations that first contended for its possession, the South was a land to be exploited. Their colonists came upon it as soldiers; they established garrisons, they proposed to get by trading, if they must, but by force if they could not otherwise obtain it, sufficient of the products of the country to reward their enforced sojourn in a wild land. Passages to Cathay were objects more attractive to endeavor than was the cultivation of crops. Diamond reefs and gold mines claimed more

attention than mechanical pursuits, and the fur trade was ever the mainspring of frontier activity.

Many of the first colonists reaped what the earlier explorers had sown, a harvest of hate, a terror that caused them to spend more time in subjugation and conciliation than they had first deemed necessary; and others brought upon themselves, by deceit and misapplied force, the antagonism of the native tribes. But with years came experience, and with experience, wisdom; and soon we find the tribes coming into subjections called alliances. In such a period, with such colonists, romance was inevitable. The history of Southern colonization is full of it. and Frenchmen, Georgians, Carolinians, and Virginians, all give their share. Conflicts between struggling nations; vast commercial enterprises rivalling the most gigantic of modern capitalistic aggregations in importance; colonization projects that have never been equalled; expeditionary plans that have few compeers; loves that altered the course of colonial history-all these things are bound up with the record of Southern colonization.

Spaniards

In the present volume the great men of the past live again. We range the forests with soldiers and hunters of France and Spain, and seek, as it were, to further the ambitious schemes of conflicting commanders. We sail with colonists that Raleigh sent, and we labor under the rule of the Virginia Company. We are with Oglethorpe and his associates in his Georgian enterprise. But the days of the soldier gave way to the days of the planter; the agriculturist displaced the trapper; the stock raiser, the hunter. The ambitious schemes by which control of waterways was of the greatest importance, because of the carriage of furs, gave place to plans for making the most of the lands available for the raising of tobacco.

The struggle for possession of the southern territory was stilled in the greater struggle to form self-supporting and self-governing colonies. With the supremacy of the English came the dominance of the material and orderly. Even

in the South in the later period of colonization we find the realities of life crowding out romance. Whether in Virginia or the Carolinas, in Georgia or the Floridas, or in the far country beyond the Appalachians, the spirit of endeavor is aroused and the way prepared, as is foreshadowed in the later pages of the work before us, for the struggle that is to be described in the volume devoted to the Revolution.

The author has made much of his opportunities. He sets before us the history of the years of colonization in a manner deserving of large praise. With skill and judgment he has given us of the romance, and yet he presents naught but the romance of fact, as he sets before us the activities of the three contending nations and the triple methods by which they pursued their colonial policies. In all this he has, because of his use of source material, and of his wide knowledge of the subject, been able to draw a picture that is fresh and of unusual interest. He has given us a chapter in history that has never been adequately presented. The author is peculiarly fitted by inclination and study for the task of preparing this present volume. residence in the heart of the South, his intimate acquaintance with its records and those of Spain, France, and England, and his devotion to the period of which this volume treats, have given him a zeitgeist that enables him to make an illuminating exposition of the history of Southern Colonization, and because of this I take pleasure in giving the present volume its place in THE HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICA. GUY CARLEton Lee.

Johns Hopkins University.

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