BEGINNINGS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
BY
CARL LOTUS BECKER
PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN HISTORY
UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
BOSTON NEW YORK CHICAGO
The Riverside Press Cambridge
COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY CARL LOTUS BECKER
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
The Riverside PressCAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
U.S.A.
THE RIVERSIDE HISTORY
OF THE UNITED STATES
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
In the following volumes the authors seek to present a brief account ofthe beginnings, development, and final unity of the people of the UnitedStates. There are many histories of the country, many biographies whichare in large measure histories; but these are exhaustive workstraversing minutely certain periods, like Rhodes's History of theUnited States from 1850 to 1877, or Nicolay and Hay's Abraham Lincoln:A History; or they are shorter "patriotic" accounts which seek to provesomething, or which fail to tell the whole story. Important as theseclasses of historical literature are, they hardly suffice for theteachers of advanced college classes, or for business and professionalmen who would like to know how the isolated European plantations orcorporations in North America became in so short a time the great andwealthy nation of to-day.
To meet these needs, that is, to describe in proper proportion and withdue emphasis, but in the brief space of four short volumes, the forces,influences, and masterful personalities which have made the country whatit is, has not been an easy task. For, contrary to the view of Europeanstudents, American history is not simple. The hostile camps of Puritansand Church of England men, the Dutch of New Amsterdam and the Catholicsof Maryland, could hardly be expected to merge into a single statewithout violent struggle. Nor could the hundreds of thousands of ScotchCalvinists, militant enemies of England and all her ways, who seized andheld the fertile highlands of the Middle and Southern colonies, submitquietly to any program not of their own making. And again, in thethirties and fifties of the nineteenth century, millions of peoplespeaking a strange tongue sought asylum in the Mississippi Valley—anisolated region whose early inhabitants, of whatsoever national strain,were strongly inclined to secession or revolt against the older Easterncommunities. Never was a nation composed of more diverse ethnic groupsand elements.
And the geographical environments of these groups and segments of oldercivilizations were quite as dissimilar as those among which the nationsof Europe developed. The cold and bleak hills of New England no moreresemble the rich river bottoms of the South than the sand dunes ofPrussia resemble the fertile plains of Andalusia. Geographicaldifferences tend to produce economic differences. If to these be addedinherited antagonisms like those of Puritan and Cavalier, one wondershow the East and the South of the United States ever became integralparts of one great social unit. Adding to this apparent impossibilitythe new antagonism of the West toward the East as a whole, the historianwonders at the statecraft that could hold the diverse elements togethertill certain economic and social factors became powerful enough toconquer in a long and bloody war. Or was it the influence of newinventions, railways, and the tightening bonds of commerce that did thework?
Leaving the reader to answer this question for himself, it remains forthe Editor to set for