DURING the seventeenth century the pressure of material needs and the scattered character of the settlements prevented much development in the finer elements of civilization; and though New England showed a strongly idealistic spirit, her culture was narrowed by theological partisanship.

     At the close of the century these unfavorable conditions were gradually changing and there began a period of substantial progress in civilization. The older communities were emerging from the hardships of the pioneer period; they were coming to have leisure and taste for intellectual pursuits, and becoming ambitious of larger opportunities for their children. The improved communications between different colonies were giving to their higher life some real community of interest, by weakening local and sectarian prejudices. The development of mercantile interests also helped to bring the backward or one-sided life of the colonies into vital contact with the main currents of European progress. In Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and

Charleston there were many men who had regular business connections with the Old World and from time to time found it necessary to cross the ocean.

     Much credit must also be given to the royal governors. Francis Nicholson, for instance, while governor in Virginia, Maryland, and South Carolina, gave special attention to education, urging it upon the attention of his colonial assembly, and himself making contributions to the cause. When Yale College was founded, this zealous Anglican showed a surprising breadth of interest by contributing to its stock of books. So, too, his successor in Virginia, Governor Spotswood, was one of the chief patrons of William and Mary College.¹

     In New York and Massachusetts, Governor Burnet left an enviable reputation as a man of scholarly and literary tastes. In New York he had among his political advisers a rather unusual group of intellectual men, and during his residence in Massachusetts he was understood to be a contributor of essays to the New England Weekly Journal. Governor Dudley, whatever his faults may have been, was a “gentleman and a scholar” who kept himself in sympathy with the literary and scientific activities of his time.²

     The Anglican church also exerted an important civilizing influence. The first two commissaries of

the bishop of London, Blair in Virginia and Bray in Maryland, are almost as well known for their educational as for their religious activities. The Venerable Society emphasized the educational side of its missionary work, and in many southern parishes the Anglican lay reader was the first teacher. In New England also the Anglican clergy were an important intellectual force, helping their Puritan neighbors by the stimulus of competition and preparing the way for a more tolerant practice.¹

     Perhaps the finest gift of the English church to the life of New England was the mission of George Berkeley, who lived from 1729 to 1731 in the vicinity of Newport. Dean Berkeley was the highest ecclesiastical dignitary who had hitherto visited the colonies, and was known already as a brilliant scholar. As the founders of Massachusetts had hoped to build up a “bulwark against Anti-Christ,” so Berkeley saw in the fresh and youthful life of the New World a refuge for Christian and Protestant civilization. He desired to establish an American college under Anglican auspices, but the project was not supported by the English government, and he returned to England much disappointed.

     Yet the time which Berkeley spent in Newport was not wasted. In a kindly way he used his influence against the sectarian spirit of New England

Puritanism, and his sympathies were not confined within his own communion. After his return to England he gave generously to Yale College, both in books and in land, and he also contributed some books to the library of Harvard College. Through the stimulus of his intercourse and example he strengthened the intellectual life of the little colony where he lived, and his influence can be traced also in the founding of King’s College in New York, 1754, under the leadership of his friend and disciple, Samuel Johnson.¹

     During this period there was substantial progress in the founding and development of educational institutions, and in the south the most important event was the founding of William and Mary College. Some subscriptions for such a college had been taken in Berkeley’s administration; but little was accomplished until 1691, when the assembly sent commissary Blair to England with instructions to secure a charter. Blair appealed successfully to the queen and the king, and in 1693 came back with a royal charter, together with a substantial endow ment from the royal revenues. From time to time this endowment was increased by grants from the assembly and by private gifts.²

     William and Mary College was thus founded under distinctly Anglican auspices and its close conrection with the church continued throughout the colonial era. Commissary Blair himself was its first president, holding the office for fifty years; its professors were generally clergymen in charge of neighboring parishes, and emphasis was constantly laid upon training for the service of the Anglican church. About the college there was subsequently built the capital town of Williamsburg, which, with its double attraction of the college and the seat of government, became a social centre of some importance. The college itself passed through many vicissitudes; it was burned down in 1705, and, though soon restored, it was described about 1724 by one of its professors, the Reverend Hugh Jones, as “a college without a chapel, without a scholarship, and without a statute” having “a library without books comparatively speaking; and a president without a fixed salary till of late.” In 1729 the faculty consisted of President Blair and six professors, including two in theology and two in the school of philosophy. Though its influence in the colonial era was hardly comparable with that of Harvard, in Massachusetts, it trained a large proportion of the men who were to play conspicuous parts in the struggle for independence.¹

     William and Mary was the only college in the south during the colonial era, and the demand for higher education had to be met by sending young men out of the colony either to England, or, occasionally, to one of the northern colleges. In the richer families an education over-seas was, therefore, more common than in New England.

     In secondary and elementary education the south made some progress during the first half of the eighteenth century. A “grammar” school at Williamsburg gave preliminary training in Greek and Latin. In 1695 the Maryland assembly passed an act for one or more free schools in which Latin and Greek might be taught, but only one was established under its provisions, the King William’s School at Annapolis. In 1763, Governor Sharpe declared that there was not in Maryland even one good grammarschool.¹

     South Carolina during the earlier years of the eighteenth century passed a number of laws for the encouragement of education. In 1711 the colony, with the co-operation of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, established a school in Charleston; and a few were established elsewhere through bequests by individuals or through the efforts of societies.²

     North Carolina was probably the most backward

of all the colonies, but even here a few schools were established during the first two decades of the eighteenth century, chiefly through the efforts of the Anglican church. The net results, however, were small, and in 1736 Governor Johnston reproached the assembly with having “never yet taken the least care to erect one school, which deserves the name in this extended country.”¹

     None of the southern colonies had a genuine public-school system, but the deficiency in organized education was partly made up by private instruction, which, in South Carolina especially, employed a considerable number of persons during the latter part of the provincial era. In that colony also something was done for the poor by the rich through the institution of schools with free scholarships.²

     Eight years after the incorporation of William and Mary College another institution for higher education was incorporated in Connecticut. Yale College, like its predecessors in Massachusetts and Virginia, was founded under strongly clerical influences, and was intended to be largely, though not exclusively, a training school for ministers. Most of its promoters were Harvard graduates; but in Connecticut there was a demand for a college nearer home, while in Massachusetts many men felt that Harvard was drifting away from the orthodox standards. The

act of 1701 incorporating the new college provided for a board of trustees composed exclusively of ministers.¹

     For the next seventeen years the college led an extremely precarious existence. A part of the instruction was given at Saybrook, but some of the students were provided for at various other places. Local jealousies made it difficult to fix a permanent seat for the college; but in 1716 the trustees agreed upon New Haven, and their decision was sanctioned by the general court. There was still some resistance, and in 1718 rival commencements were held at Weathersfield and New Haven; but by concessions to the disappointed towns the breach was soon healed. Meanwhile, donations were coming in from various quarters. Jeremiah Dummer collected a number of books for the college from friends in England; but the most important benefactor was Elihu Yale, a native of Boston, who, after receiving his education in England, became a prosperous East Indian merchant, and governor for the East India Company at Madras. In 1718, at the first New Haven commencement, the school was christened by its new name of Yale College, and in 1719 Timothy Cutler was made resident rector or president of the college.²

     The college seemed at last to be definitely established; but it soon sustained a severe shock through the conversion of President Cutler to the principle

of episcopal ordination. The trustees, however, proved equal to the occasion; Cutler was promptly deposed and a drastic rule was adopted excluding from the government of the college any one who might be tainted with “Arminian and Prelatical Corruptions.” Yale College was thus more carefully forearmed against heresy than Harvard had ever been. Cutler’s successors, Williams and Clap, both proved efficient administrators and safe theologians, and the college became prosperous and influential. Yale was the academic headquarters of thoroughgoing Calvinism both for New England and the middle colonies; and it trained the two great Calvinistic teachers of the period, Jonathan Dickinson and Jonathan Edwards, who became later the first two presidents of the college of New Jersey. Some of the secular leaders of the middle colonies were also educated at Yale, including such New-Yorkers as William Smith the historian and William Livingston the politician and later revolutionary leader.¹

     The enthusiasm of Cotton Mather and his friends for Yale was largely due to their consciousness of waning influence at Harvard, where there had long been a vigorous contest between liberals and conservatives for the control of the college. The Mathers desired a new charter in place of the old one of 1650, which should secure the doctrinal

orthodoxy of the college. No act, however, which the colonists could agree upon, was acceptable to the crown or its agent the governor; until in 1707 the difficulty was solved by a short resolution declaring the old charter to be still in force.

     The more liberal element in the church was gradually increasing its representation in the corporation, and in 1707, with the help of Governor Dudley, they elected John Leverett as president. In 1717 the Mather influence suffered another severe check when two more ministers of the liberal school were elected to the corporation. In 1722 the conservatives were strong enough to get through the general court a vote which, by adding the resident tutors to the corporation, would have eliminated the objectionable new members, but this project was blocked by Governor Shute.¹

     These controversies between ecclesiastical factions, though petty enough in themselves, are historically significant because they involve the important issue of academic freedom against ecclesiastical control; and because the victory of the liberals made the college for the future one of the strong humanizing forces in New England life. In other ways, also, this was a period of educational progress for Harvard. In 1721 and 1727 the London merchant, Thomas Hollis, established the first two professorships at the college, one in divinity and one in natural

philosophy. The latter chair was assigned, in 1738, to John Winthrop, a young graduate who during forty years of service was to be one of the best representatives in America of the scholar’s life.¹

     Educational progress came more slowly in the middle colonies. The Quakers of Pennsylvania believed thoroughly in elementary education, but they cared little for the higher learning, partly because they had no clergy requiring special teaching. The first college in Pennsylvania was not founded until 1755, and then the chief mover in the enterprise was Benjamin Franklin, a transplanted New-Englander. Perhaps the most important Pennsylvania school founded before that time was the one established at Philadelphia in 1697 and subsequently known as the William Penn Charter School.²

     In New York the presence of two distinct nationalities interfered seriously with educational progress, and, though there were schools in the province, they had a poor reputation. William Smith the historian, himself a native and prominent citizen of the province, wrote in 1756 that the schools were “in the lowest order.”³

     In New Jersey a law authorizing towns to levy taxes for the support of public schools was passed as early as 1693, and during the next half-century

a considerable number of schools were actually established. The educational leadership in New Jersey came largely from the Presbyterian church, which had gathered to itself not merely the original Presbyterians of Scotch-Irish stock, but their fellow-Calvinists from New England, Holland, and Germany. Largely through the efforts of Presbyterian ministers, the first charter of the College of New Jersey was granted in 1746, three of the four principal ministerial promoters being graduates of Yale, and one of Harvard. A year later, another Harvard graduate, Jonathan Belcher, became governor of New Jersey, and through his efforts a new charter was granted, which placed the college upon a secure foundation. Thus the higher education of the middle colonies was in large measure the product of New England training.¹ No other college was founded in the middle region before 1750, but the subject was already attracting attention, and the next decade saw the founding of Columbia College under Anglican auspices at New York, and of the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia, the freest from ecclesiastical control of all the colonial colleges.

     An important evidence of a developing civilization is the accumulation of private and public libraries. In the endowment of the early American colleges, notably of Harvard and Yale, donations

of books had played an important part. Gradually there developed in New England such considerable private collections as those of the Mathers and Thomas Prince. In the south the best-known private collection was that of Westover, in Virginia, which, when sold in 1778, numbered nearly four thousand volumes, collected largely by William Byrd, the contemporary of Governor Spotswood, and showing broad literary and scientific interests.¹

     Towards the close of the seventeenth century, Reverend Thomas Bray collected and sent to various places in America small libraries, made up largely, but not wholly, of theological literature. Most of these were in Maryland, but one of the most important was in Charleston, South Carolina, and there were three in New England. About 1729 the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel sent to New York a library of one thousand volumes for the use of the neighboring clergy. Generally speaking, little was done by the colonists to develop these collections, but in 1698 the South Carolina assembly appropriated money for the support of the library in Charleston, for which the distinction has been claimed of being the first public library in America.²

     Of more importance as an indication of colonial

initiative in this field was the public subscription library in Philadelphia founded by Franklin in 1731 and incorporated in 1742. Franklin tells us that “The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns, and in other provinces . . . reading became fashionable; and our people, having no publick amusements to divert their attention from study, became better acquainted with books, and in a few years were observ’d by strangers to be better instructed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in other countries.” A somewhat similar movement resulted in the formation of the Charleston Library Society in 1743.¹

     The development of journalism is one of the most important social facts of this provincial era. At the close of the seventeenth century there was not a single newspaper published in North America, and even after the founding of the Boston News Letter, in 1704, fifteen years passed before it had any rival on the continent. During the next two decades, however, newspapers were established in Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina. These were generally weekly publications, very imperfect in their reports of American news, giving considerable space to English court life and parliamentary procedure and to scientific or literary essays. Though often cautious

about the expression of editorial views they became important agencies of political controversy, and furnish to-day valuable sources of information upon numerous aspects of provincial politics.¹

     During the first half of the eighteenth century Boston was the chief journalistic centre in the colonies, and in 1735 there were five newspapers simultaneously published in the town. There Franklin began his career as printer and journalist by assisting his brother in the publication of the New England Courant. Papers of a much higher order were the New England Weekly Journal and the Weekly Rehearsal, afterwards continued in the Boston Weekly Post, which had distinctly literary aims and received contributions from leading ministers and laymen.²

     During the seventeenth century the clergy were almost the only educated professional men in America. Lawyers were few and were regarded with suspicion, and there were few thoroughly trained physicians. During the next half-century there was a decided advance in all of these professions. The development of the Anglican church brought into the middle and southern colonies a few clergymen like Blair in Virginia and Garden in South Carolina, who had shared in the best educational opportunities of their time and yet were ready to spend their lives in the New World.

     In New England the clergy lost ground relatively, but their best men began to show a broader spirit. At the beginning of this era the representative men were the two Mathers, especially Cotton Mather, who, though a man of great learning, felt it to be one of his chief functions to check the rising tide of innovation. With all his voluminous publications, he lacked the scholar’s critical instinct. The men who succeeded him differed from him not so much in their formal statements of doctrine as in their more tolerant temper. Such a man was Benjamin Colman, one of the liberals whose influence in Harvard College was so much dreaded by Cotton Mather. “There are some practices and principles,” he said, “that look Catholic, which though I cannot reason myself into, yet I bear a secret reverence to in others, and dare not for the world speak a word against. Their souls look enlarged to me; and mine does so the more to myself, for not daring to judge them.” Yet Colman had misgivings about Yale College accepting Berkeley’s generous gift of books.¹

     The most scholarly Puritan minister of the next generation was Thomas Prince, a graduate of Harvard in 1707, and for forty years pastor of the South Church in Boston. Prince found time to build up a large library and to write his scholarly though fragmentary Chronological History of New England.

In his dedication he enunciated principles of scholarship strikingly different from those of the Magnalia Christi. “I would not,” he said, “take the least iota upon trust, if possible,” and “I cite my vouchers to every passage.”¹

     The progress of the medical profession was comparatively slow. One of the best-known and in some respects most intelligent of American physicians during this period was William Douglass, the author of an entertaining but not quite trustworthy historical and descriptive account of the colonies. Strangely enough, the sceptical Douglass opposed inoculation as a protection against small-pox, while Cotton Mather defended it. William Smith gave a gloomy view of physicians in New York about the middle of the eighteenth century, declaring that there were few really skilful ones, while “quacks abound like locusts in Egypt.” South Carolina had a few physicians who showed not only practical skill but some capacity for scientific research.²

     At the beginning of the eighteenth century lawyers were so few that even the most important judicial positions were often filled by men without specific legal training. This was true in the southern and middle colonies as well as in New England. In South Carolina, for instance, the first professional lawyer of whom there seems to be any

definite record was Nicholas Trott, who came to the province in 1698.

     During the next fifty years there was a steadily increasing number of trained lawyers, many of whom, especially in the southern and middle colonies, had learned their profession in England. The political leadership of the lawyers may be illustrated by such names as those of Charles Pinckney in South Carolina, Daniel Dulany the elder, in Maryland, and Andrew Hamilton in Pennsylvania, all professional lawyers and all leaders in their respective assemblies. Even Massachusetts, where the common-law traditions were weakest, was producing some strong lawyers; among them John Read, the leader among his contemporaries in the profession; Paul Dudley, a student at the Temple in London and afterwards attorney-general and chief-justice of his native province; and Jeremiah Gridley, who seems to have been a sort of mentor for the younger lawyers of the revolutionary era.¹

     There are many evidences of increased refinement and of genuine intellectual interests. It has been said that the New-Englanders of the early eighteenth century show little appreciation of the contemporary literary movement in England; and it is true, for instance, that the Harvard College library contained few of the memorable books of the age of Anne. Nevertheless, Franklin while a boy in Boston undertook to form his style on the Spectator, and the

newspaper essays of the period show clearly the influence of Addison and Steele.¹

     A wide-spread interest in natural science corresponded to the contemporary tendency of English thought; even Cotton Mather was interested in these studies, as were his contemporaries Joseph and Paul Dudley. Many Americans of that time were members of the Royal Society of London or contributors to its transactions, including the Winthrops and Paul Dudley in Massachusetts, William Byrd in Virginia, and the physician Lining of South Carolina. In Philadelphia the Quaker John Bartram won a European reputation as a naturalist; and there Franklin, in 1743, issued his appeal for the formation of an American philosophical society to stimulate and organize research.²

     In some of the provincial towns there were considerable groups of cultivated people. With increasing wealth came a development of the æsthetic side of life, especially in domestic architecture and the furnishing of the house. The artist Smibert, who came to New England with Berkeley, left some portraits of representative provincial personages, which, like the later ones by Copley, indicate refined and comfortable standards of life.

     Hugh Jones thought that while his Virginian friends were not much disposed “to dive into books,”

the southwest. During the eighteenth century there was often sharp rivalry between individual colonies for the control of this trade. The Virginians, gradually losing ground before the Carolinians, complained of unfair regulations imposed by South Carolina, which afterwards had similar complaints to make of Georgia. In the south as well as in the north the international rivalry between French and English was also active. The Board of Trade complained that the trade which ought to be a source of strength to the English interest was tainted with so many abuses that it often provoked the hostility of the Indians. They therefore urged new regulations for Indian affairs. No general measures were adopted, however, for many years.¹

     Except for the Indian trade, American commerce, whether intercolonial or international, was mainly carried on by sea, and in sea-going commerce New England easily took the lead. The abundance of good harbors on her coasts, the rich resources offered by the northern coast and deep-sea fisheries, and the ready supply of lumber for ship-building had all combined to make the New-Englanders a seagoing people.

     The prosperity of New England commerce was closely related to the development of the fisheries.

During the early French wars this interest suffered severely, and it was not until the second quarter of the eighteenth century that the New-Englanders fairly established themselves in the northern fisheries. Then the industry developed rapidly all along the north shore, and in 1741 the single port of Gloucester had seventy vessels engaged. The cod-fisheries were the most important; but there was also an interesting development in whaling, from the early catch of drift-whales and the small-boat fisheries near the coast, to the deep-sea whaling which reached its prime by the middle of the eighteenth century and carried New England seamen on perilous voyages to the most remote regions of the Atlantic.¹

     The fisheries of New England may fairly be described as the foundation of her international trade; for fish was, on the whole, her steadiest article of export. The better grades were shipped to the Catholic countries of southern Europe and the produce of the trade was expended sometimes in the illegal importation of European products; but in the main, probably in English manufactures or in wine from the Azores or the Canaries, a permissible article of direct import under the navigation acts. Other important exports for this transatlantic trade were lumber and naval stores, though New England herself gradually came to depend for naval stores upon

their “quick apprehension” gave them a “Sufficiency of Knowledge and Fluency of Tongue.” During the second quarter of the eighteenth century the genteel public of Charleston was listening to lectures on natural science, paying good prices at the theatre to see such plays as Addison’s tragedy of “Cato,” and observing St. Cecilia’s day by a concert of vocal and instrumental music. William Smith, writing of New York, gives the impression, confirmed by later writers, of a community which had some of the social graces, but was not very intellectual.¹

     Boston was thought by the Anglican clergyman, Burnaby, in 1760, to be “undeniably forwarder in the arts” than either Pennsylvania or New York. He considered their public buildings “more elegant” and observed “a more general turn for music, painting, and the belles lettres.” The strict observance of Sunday was still a subject of comment by visitors, and the theatre was under the ban, but otherwise the Puritan discipline was much relaxed. Smith thought his own people of New York “not so gay as our neighbors at Boston,” and in 1740 the Boston ladies were reported as indulging “every little piece of gentility to the height of the mode.”² In Boston and New York, as well as in Annapolis,

Williamsburg, and Charleston, English models were closely followed in dress and social practices, though it was observed in New York that the London fashions were adopted in America just as they were going out of use in England.¹

     Provincial society was growing richer, freer, more cosmopolitan in the eighteenth century, but it was felt by many to be losing in ethical and religious vigor. Significant as a protest against the prevailing tendencies of the time was the religious revival which had for its chief preachers Jonathan Edwards and George Whitefield. The “Great Awakening” may be said to have begun in 1734 with the revival in Edwards’s Church at Northampton, in western Massachusetts. A short period of comparative inaction followed, but in 1739 the smouldering fire was fanned into flame by the passionate eloquence of Whitefield. The new revival spread through the southern and middle colonies and produced a powerful impression upon nearly all classes. Even the unemotional Franklin found it hard at times to resist the spell of Whitefield’s oratory.

     Gradually, however, the inevitable reaction came; for the movement was unwelcome not only to those who were tinged with the new secular spirit, but also to many who stood for the old ecclesiastical order. Thus Whitefield found among his antagonists the Anglican commissary Garden, of South Carolina,

many of the leading Puritan ministers of New England, and the faculties of Yale and Harvard.¹ By 1745 the “Great Awakening” had largely spent its force, and to-day men question whether it really helped or harmed the cause of morals and true religion. Many of its leaders were men of no great significance in American life; and even Whitefield was not a man of commanding intellect or character.

     One of these men cannot be so easily dismissed. Jonathan Edwards was not only a preacher of extraordinary power, trying to bring back his people to the hard but virile Calvinism from which they were gradually drifting, but perhaps the keenest and most original thinker America has ever produced. A graduate of Yale College at a time when it seemed on the verge of disintegration, he spent nearly all his life as the pastor of a small country town. Yet the great Scotch metaphysician, Stewart, said of him that in “logical acuteness and subtilty” he was not inferior “to any disputant bred in the universities of Europe”; and the German scholar, Immanuel Fichte, nearly a century after Edwards’s death, expressed his admiration for the contributions to ethical theory made by this “solitary thinker of North America.”²

     This preacher and metaphysician was also a genuine

poet. Like Dante, he used his imaginative power in depicting the terrors of the world to come for those who died unsaved, but he was also finely sensitive to beauty in nature and in the world of spirit. His record of his early spiritual experience contains many passages of exquisite beauty. In one of them he describes “the soul of a true Christian” as resembling “such a little white flower as we see in the spring of the year; low and humble on the ground, opening its bosom to receive the pleasant beams of the sun’s glory, rejoicing, as it were, in a calm rapture; diffusing around a sweet fragrancy; standing peacefully and lovingly, in the midst of other flowers round about; all in like manner opening their bosoms to drink in the light of the sun.”¹

     Edwards was born in 1703 and Franklin in 1706, both before the close of the first century of English colonization. The two men were alike in the keenness and range of their intellectual interests, and alike also in a reputation transcending the limits of the provincial communities in which they lived. In other respects they were as opposite as the poles. In sharp contrast to Franklin, with his worldly wisdom, his unemotional temper, and his matter-of-fact philanthropy, stands the great idealist Edwards, who in his writings and his life probably approached more nearly than any American before or since his time the highest levels of the human spirit.

     In 1743, while Edwards was absorbed in the

problems of the Great Awakening, Franklin wrote his Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowledge among the British Plantations in America,¹ in which he urged that, “the first drudgery of settling new colonies” being “pretty well over,” Americans might do their part in scientific and philosophical inquiry. Certainly his own achievements and those of Edwards might well have encouraged such a hope.

     From these studies, however, Franklin himself was soon diverted by new and perplexing political problems. Already the final struggle was coming on for the mastery of the continent. Already, too, there lay beneath the obscure questions of provincial politics deeper issues which were to estrange the colonies from the mother-country and force upon them the great problems of government for a new nation. Thus politics rather than speculation became the absorbing interest of the next generation, which saw the end of the provincial era.