any other people of the earth," was their inheritance from the magnanimous ancestors we have been describing; nurtured by perils, labour, and self-denial, until all their opinions, customs, inclinations, and habits of thought and feeling were impressed with the same hardy traits of independence. It harmonized with the rugged soil they cultivated and the vast solitudes and boundless forests by which they were surrounded, and strengthened, perpetually, by contrast, their repug nance to the narrow dogmas, the insolent assumptions, and artificial institutions of the over-crowded and oppressed population of Europe. The persecutions from which they had fled, voluntarily relinquishing their native land, to find political freedom and liberty of faith in the wilderness; the privations they endured, by hunger and cold, pestilence, famine, and war, to establish their new dwellings; the perpetual watchfulness with which, by day and night, while toiling for food and shelter, they had to defend their lives from the tomahawk of a subtle and merciless enemy, and at the same time, to maintain their rights against the unnatural oppres sions of the mother country-all combined to invigorate the principles they brought with them, and to perfect, by severe bodily and mental discipline, a national character for austere virtue, irrepressible energy, and indomitable courage ;jealous and sagacious in its distrust of power; full of the pride of personal independence; quick to detect, and prompt to repel, all encroachments upon their rights.

A leading element in the early colonial character, and perhaps the strongest in giving it its peculiar cast of austerity and elevation, was religious enthusiasm. The settlers of New England were dissenters, who had been oppressed at home by church and state: by the Catholic, and by the established Protestant church, as either, in the alternate vibrations of this mighty engine of despotism, preponderated. They were, as Botta well expresses it, "Protestants against Protestantism itself," and added to the other pressing inducements to emigration the higher sanctions of religious duty. Many be. vea themselves under the immediate direction of heaven. The stern traits of the English Puritans, so remarkable in the civil wars of the first Charles, and under the Commonwealth, were strong in the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock, gradually losing, in their descendants, under the benign influence of a better knowledge and wider freedom, the fanaticism which predominated at home; but preserving their pious trust in

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Providence, their frugal habits, exact morals, and vigilant sense of independence. The parliamentary act of uniformity, passed in 1662, by which two thousand of the most con scientious Presbyterian preachers were arbitrarily deprived of their livings, for refusing to subscribe to certain articles of belief, sent great numbers of the most learned and pious ministers of that faith into exile in the Colonies, where they contributed essentially to sustain this tone of elevated reli gious feeling. Many of them were thoroughly educated in the best English universities; and to them, the general diffu sion of education, in the infancy of the Colonies, is mainly to be attributed. Those who have seen how extensive even now is the influence of the clergy of New England, over the minds and feelings of the people, can well imagine what must, in that day, have been the reception of so many zeal. ous ministers, who had sacrificed every thing to conscience. As it was in Massachusetts, then the mother colony of New England, so it was in the other Colonies, which took their rise from her, and followed her examples of severe virtue, when they dissented from and resisted her religious discipline. Connecticut and New Haven, at first separate colonies, were principally peopled by emigrants from Massachusetts, in the spirit of voluntary adventure, without compulsion, and at first acted under her authority. But it must be recorded, as one of the anomalies of human nature, that New Hamp shire and Rhode Island rose out of the religious dissensions and persecutions of those who had themselves been exiled by persecution. Exeter, the first settlement in New Hampshire, was founded in 1638, by a party of Colonists, who had been compelled to leave Massachusetts, for adopting the peculiar religious sentiments which Mrs. Hutchinson taught, and for which she had been excommunicated; and two years previous, Roger Williams, under similar persecutions, had established the colony of Rhode Island. This latter case, in particular, affords, striking proof of the inconsistency of men, in the new possession of power, and inexperienced in the practical application of universal principles to affairs touching their individual consciences; and, at the same time, it demonstrates how happily the character of the Colonists was adapted to defeat the effects and consequences of those antiquated errors, and to prove religious despotism as incompatible with the condition of America as political despotism. Williams, banished from Massachusetts, for entertaining

views of the right of private opinion, in religious matters, and the injustice of government interference in points of faith, too liberal to suit the Synod, established, in 1636, ther colony of Providence, so called in gratitude for his deliverance, upon the basis of entire freedom of conscience. There he was subsequently joined by many others, maintaining the same liberality of sentiment. The sternness of religious enthusiasm was softened in them by the benevolent influences of their tolerant institutions, and the effect was gradually returned to the mother colony in which they had been proscribed, enlarging the kindlier traits of the New England character, without affecting its exact sobriety of manners; its vigorous contempt of luxury, or its pious elevation of sentiment.

Nor were these ecclesiastical dissensions, springing, as they did, out of a European taint of error, and defeated by the operations of circumstances peculiar to America, unfavoura ble to the general cause of liberty. In a country so boundless, and with political freedom so entirely unrestrained, religious intolerance had only the effect of dispersing communities and multiplying new settlements. Where state

power could not restrain emigration, and the genius of the people was averse to all arbitrary institutions, religious ty-. ranny could be but a temporary insanity, and its fruits were a farther enlightenment of public opinion, hostile to its repetition. They who feared not to cross the ocean, then deemed a perilous undertaking, in search of greater liberty of conscience, could not fear to remove a few miles further, to become entirely masters of their own actions. They, who, under these delusions, drove forth their fellow colonists from among them, found that persecution could not conquer its victims, and that at every attempt to oppress, more enlightened principles grew up in every direction, beyond their reach. The futility of the effort, as well as the natural reaction stimulated by an increasing freedom of political inquiry, soon checked this intolerant spirit. Out of the ardent discussions and controversies, and the social improvements to which they led, grew greater liberty of thought; more subtle inquiry into original principles; a stronger assertion of individual rights, an aptitude to inquire rigidly into all pretensions to authority over them, and promptness to repel encroachment.

It ought to be added, in justice to the New England clergy

of the period, that these mistaken notions of religious supre macy were, by no means, accompanied by any predilection. for arbitrary power in politics. As a body, they were, from the beginning, among the sturdiest defenders of the rights of the Colonies. In the very midst of their highest intolerance, at a very early period of the attempts of the royal authority against the colonial charters, they gave a unanimous evidence of their love for political liberty. In the year preceding that in which Providence was peopled by their persecutions, movements were made in England, hostile to the charter, and the design avowed of forming all New England into a consolidated government. The Colonists, in alarm, summoned the ministers, as "the fathers of the Commonwealth," to aid the magistrates with their counsel. All but one met at Boston, in 1635, and unanimously advised, that if the scheme of a general government should be persisted in, and a royal governor sent out, the Colonists "ought not to accept him, but defend their lawfu, possessions, if able; otherwise, to avoid and protract." Nearly fifty years afterwards they manifested! a like intrepid spirit, and the historian Hutchinson says, that they "turned the scale in favour of resistance to the arbitrary measures of Charles II. The struggle between the Colony and the king's officers had been long and violent; and the agents of the province in London, had written home in despondency, representing their case as desperate, and desiring the general court to determine whether, since many cities in England and some of the plantations had submitted, it were better" to resign" to his majesty's pleasure, or suffer a quo warranto to issue. Under the advisement of the ministers, after debate, it was concluded, in a magnanimous phrase that deserves commemoration, that they would not submit for "it was better to die by the hands of others, than by their own."

Though these religious persecutions chiefly prevailed in New England, yet their influences extended through the whole country, to which New England contributed so much of population, and such prominent traits of character. Other colonies too, practised, at different times, a similar policy, and the same remarks are applicable to them.

Returning from this digressive view of the effects of a par ticular modification of the early religious temperament of the mother colonies, which was necessary to a true estimate of their character, we find the same temperament, sometimes

under similar modifications, and always with similar effects, in the southern provinces. Originally, English dissenters, of the Presbyterian faith, peopled the northern settlements: In Pennsylvania the Quakers founded their city of refuge, and Episcopalians were the great majority in Virginia. Maryland had been made, at a very early period, the peaceful asylum of Catholics, who, tired of the violence of contending parties at home, each by turn persecutor or victim, as the state formed by turns an alliance with the strongest sect, established on the Chesapeake, the first community in the world, in which entire freedom of conscience was a fundamental maxim of law. It preceded the settlement of Providence, by two years. St. Mary's, in Maryland, was founded by Lord Baltimore, with a company of "Roman Catholics, of family and fortune," about two hundred in number, in 1634. The expulsion of Roger Williams from Massachusetts, and his pilgrimage in search of a land of rest, did not take place till 1636. The new colony received numerous additions even from New England. The established church in Virginia made the same perilous error of judgment as the Synod of Massachusetts; and it forms a curious fact in the history of the human mind, that exiles from intolerant Episcopacy in Virginia; persecuted dissenters from puritan New England; the Swedes driven by violence from Delaware, and French Huguenots from Europe, found generous protection and complete freedom of faith in a colony of Catholics.

Still farther south the same religious feelings entered into the propelling motives of the emigrants, and impressed their traits upon subsequent generations. The first settlers south of Virginia were refugees from that state, fleeing from church persecutions, who established themselves on Albemarle Sound, in North Carolina, between 1640 and 1650. South Carolina received her first population from New England, and subsequently a large accession of numbers in French Protestants, expelled from their native country by the perfidious and suicidal act of Louis XIV., in the revocation of the Edict of Nantz. Many of these families were to be found in every colony, and they were firm advocates of tolerant principles. The German Palatines, too, escaping from persecution at home, came over in considerable numbers, and settled in different parts of the two Carolinas. Bound together by similarity of condition, common sufferings and identity of principles, these Colonists, though of various nations originally, soon acquired,