A SOURCE BOOK
IN
AMERICAN HISTORY
TO 1787
COLLECTED AND EDITED
BY
WILLIS MASON WEST
SOMETIME PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND HEAD OF THEDEPARTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
ALLYN AND BACON
Boston New York Chicago
COPYRIGHT, 1913,
BY WILLIS MASON WEST.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
FOREWORD
Early American history is especially suited for "sourcework" in secondary schools and undergraduate college classes.After the year 1800, there are too many documents and manyof them are too long. The student can get no systematic surveynor any sense of continuity; and source work is thereforemerely illustrative of particular incidents. But, for the earlyperiod, it is possible, by careful selection and exclusion, to laya basis for a fairly connected study.
To do this, it is necessary to combine in one volume selectionswhich are usually grouped separately, as "Documents"and as "Readings,"—such, for instance, as the Massachusettscharter, on the one hand, and Winthrop's letters to his wife,on the other. Rigid scholarship may object to the inclusionof such different sorts of sources between the same covers.But students cannot be expected to own or use more than onevolume of sources in American history; and the practical educationaladvantages of the combination seem to me to outweighall possible objections—besides which, something might besaid for the arrangement in itself, for young students, on theside of interest and convenience.
A number of admirable collections of sources for schools arealready in use. And yet, in preparing my American Historyand Government,[1] I found no single volume which containedthe different kinds of source material desirable for illustration,while much of the most valuable material was still inaccessiblein any collection. Some two-thirds of the selections in thepresent volume, I believe, have not previously appeared in[Pg iv]Source Books; and, for many of the customary documents, Ihave found it desirable to print parts not usually given. Thus,for Gorges' Patent for Maine, instead of reproducing the territorialgrant (which is all that is given in the only SourceBook which touches on that document), I have chosen ratherto give the portion authorizing a degree of popular self-government(the reference to the "parliament in New England").
In a few cases, documents which might have been expectedare not given, because extracts from them are used freely inthe American History and Government, to which this is a companionvolume. The most important cases of this characterare noted at appropriate points. In general, in the selectionand arrangement of documents, special emphasis has beengiven to the following topics: (1) the idealistic motives backof American colonization in Virginia as well as in PuritanNew England; (2) the evolution of political institutions inVirginia and in typical Northern colonies,—especially of representativegovernment an