INTRODUCTION
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By ALBERT SHAW
The designation “Middle States” has a negative, rather than a positive, significance. In our later history, as well as in that of our colonizing and federalizing periods, the term “New England” has had a definite value for many purposes besides those of geographical convenience: and it is equally true that “the South” has meant very much in our American life besides a mere territorial expression. But the “Middle States” lack the sharply distinguishing characteristics of the other groups. In more senses than the strictly literal one, the two immense States of New York and Pennsylvania, with one or two smaller neighbors, have occupied middle ground.
If New York, on the one hand, has been somewhat closely related to New England, Pennsylvania has had many neighborly associations with Maryland and Virginia. New Jersey, meanwhile, has been a close link between Pennsylvania and New York. The development of New England was dominated in a marvellous way by a set of ideas, religious, political and philosophical, that belonged to a certain phase of the English Reformation. Virginia and other settlements to the southward had their origins in a colonizing movement that was more typically representative of contemporary English manners, views and ways of living. The aristocratic system would have disappeared rapidly enough in the South but for the gradual extension of an exotic institution,—that of African slavery.
The Middle States had a more varied origin,—one that does not lend itself so readily to the purposes of contrast and generalization. The Hudson, called by the Dutch the North River, and the Delaware, which they called the South River, were both entered by Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the employ of the Dutch East India Company, in 1609; and apart from an extremely limited settlement of Swedes on the west bank of the Delaware, it was the Dutch who controlled the beginnings of European settlement along the seaboard of what afterward came to be known as the Middle States section. The Dutch colonization was not large, but it had a strong and persistent influence upon the subsequent development of New York and the region round about.
The gradual predominance in New York of men of English speech and origin came about partly by infiltration from the New England colonies and partly by direct migration from England. There resulted a natural and harmonious fusion between the Dutch pioneers on the Hudson and the English-speaking colonists. Various Dutch institutions survived long after the English language had come into general use.
Before the grant of Pennsylvania to William Penn, the settlers on the Delaware had been mainly Swedish, Dutch or otherwise from continental Europe. William Penn’s colonists at the outset were largely English Quakers, and some years later there arrived great numbers of Germans, some French Huguenots, and a good many Scotch-Irish Protestants.
Thus, as compared with New England on the one hand and the Southern colonies on the other, the Middle States had cosmopolitan, rather than purely English, origins. This cosmopolitanism has remained, as a leading factor in all their subsequent history. The spirit of compromise and tolerance that had been developed in the middle section by the contact of different nationalities was of incalculable value when the time came for the co-operation of the thirteen colonies in the struggle for independence, and in the subsequent formation of their federal union.
If the colony which developed into the Empire State, and that which came to be known as the Keystone State, had occupied some other geographical position than the one they held as a buffer between New England and the South, the history of America might well have taken a wholly different course. For there was almost as much difference in institutions, life and points of view between the New Englanders and the Virginians of Colonial days as between the New Englanders and the Canadian Frenchmen across the St. Lawrence. But the transition from New England to New York was easy, and involved no violent contrasts. There had been a steady movement of population from the New England States westward across the eastern boundary line of the State of New York. On the other hand, it was comparatively easy for Maryland and Virginia to co-operate with Pennsylvania. In so far, indeed, as population had extended back from the tide-water districts into the hill country and the Appalachian valleys, the settlement both of Maryland and Virginia had proceeded very largely from Pennsylvania.
Thus the Middle States had a great mission to perform in uniting and holding together the more extreme sections. In the development, after the Revolutionary War, of the country west of the Alleghanies, this harmonizing influence of the Middle States was very conspicuously shown in the creation of the great commonwealth of Ohio, and only to a less degree in the making of a number of other States in what has now come to be called the Middle West—the region that produced men of the type of Lincoln and Grant, and that joined with the old Middle States in later crises to preserve the Union and fuse its elements into a homogeneous nation.
No communities in the world lend themselves more profitably to the study of history than these which are described in the present volume. Concrete illustration aids no less in the study of history than in that of the physical sciences; and these towns of the Middle States illustrate not only the more recent tendencies that have marked the course of human history, but also lead us back by easy stages to an insight into conditions of an earlier time. For example, the survivals of the Dutch régime in New York quicken a sympathetic interest that greatly aids the comprehension of the international career of the Netherlands. On the very day when these remarks are written, the larger news of the world—that which is history in the making—concerns itself with two widely severed scenes of early Dutch colonization. From Paris comes the decision of the Venezuela arbitration tribunal, involving principally the material and legal facts as to the extent of Dutch exploration and settlement in the same general period as the Dutch colonization of New York. The relations of the Dutch and English in successions and exchanges of jurisdiction on the northern coast of South America can only be understood in the light of the history of the settlements at the mouth of the Hudson River.
In like manner the conditions of Dutch settlement in South Africa in the middle of the seventeenth century are best comprehended in connection with the story of contemporary Dutch colonization in America. The Knickerbockers of New York and the Boers of the Transvaal are of common origin,—a fact frankly recognized by the Holland Society of New York in its expressions of sympathy with the Dutch element in South Africa in its struggle against fate.
The history of the communities of Pennsylvania affords a convenient initiation into much of the complex religious and ecclesiastical history of Europe. Penn brought the Quakers and other fine English stock from the middle and north of England for reasons that go to the very heart of the English life of the seventeenth century. A little later the Protestant Germans of the Palatinate came in great numbers, impelled by motives to understand which is to find oneself essentially comprehending the conditions of Church and State that so disturbed and harassed Western Europe for a long period. Thus, to study the great city of Philadelphia in its origins, its later accretions and its existing conditions, is to find inviting avenues leading into many fields of historical inquiry both of the new world and the old.
What single spot could one find anywhere that would more naturally stimulate the study of political and economic history in the nineteenth century than old Castle Garden at the lower end of New York City, through which millions upon millions of immigrants have entered the Western world to find contentment and prosperity? Many of these came from Ireland; and the municipal life of New York City has been profoundly affected by that fact. To answer the question why these people left Ireland and, in leaving, why their destination was New York rather than some port in the British colonies, is to review the history of the Irish land system, the Irish Church and the political administration of Ireland for several generations.
An enormous element of the present population of New York, as well as of the country at large, is made up of a comparatively recent German immigration, to understand which one must learn something of the German revolutionary movement of 1848, the growth of German militarism and the conditions under which educational progress in Germany has outstripped the average material prosperity. Still more recently there has been a huge immigration of Russian Jews, with local effects of a most marked character in the city of New York. To know why these Jews have come is to look into racial, political, and economic conditions throughout the great empire of the Czar.
To study the main routes of communication in a region like our Middle States is to gain an insight into the relations of physical conditions to historical development that will be of no little use in the study of other origins and remoter periods. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance, for instance, of the part that the Hudson River has played in the history of the Western Hemisphere since its discovery and settlement by the Europeans. The route by way of the Hudson, Lake George and Lake Champlain afforded in the early times the one interior passage to the St. Lawrence from the settlements on our seaboard.
Much of the land adjacent to the river was granted in large tracts under the Dutch system to patroons, so called, who were virtually feudal lords. Upon some of these tracts there still survive various peculiarities of the feudal system of land tenure. To know something of what feudalism meant as respects the control of the land, the student might find a worse method than to trace back the history of one of these Hudson River estates to the period of the Dutch grant, in order to get so much nearer to the survivals of the mediæval system in Europe.
At the spot where I live on the Hudson, and where I am now writing, the environment is suggestive of almost three centuries of American history. I look out upon the great stream which Hudson navigated in the Half Moon in 1609, and upon which sailing craft have been plying almost continually ever since. I see great steamers passing where Fulton first experimented with steam navigation. The highway near by is the old Albany post-road, this immediate part of which was known as Edgar’s Lane and was opened in 1644. This morning I heard the pleasant notes of a coaching-horn, and looked out to see a stately four-in-hand on its way to the city, a forcible reminder of at least a century and a half of regular mail coaching on that same road. My home is a part of what was the old Philipse manor; and at Yonkers, a few miles below, one finds the manor-house, now in constant use as a municipal building. It was partly built in 1682, and assumed its present dimensions in about 1745.
On this very ground, and on the hills lying to the eastward, Washington’s army was encamped for a number of weeks in 1777, and near by is the well-preserved colonial house where Washington and Rochambeau sojourned for some time, and where the Yorktown campaign was planned. In the river at this point, on several occasions, the British frigates made appearance, the last of these being the final meeting between General Washington and General Sir Guy Carleton, in May, 1783, on the suspension of hostilities. A few miles farther up the road one comes to the lane that leads to Washington Irving’s “Sunnyside,” with its tablet stating that the house was first built in the year 1650.
With these older historical souvenirs in mind, I turn to the southward, and there, as a reminder that the current of American history flows on, and that our past is in no manner detached from the present and the future, I see, standing out in bold relief on the horizon, the tomb of General Grant, while anchored in the river lies the Olympia, the flag-ship of Admiral Dewey, just now returned from adventures as fraught with history-making results as was the presence of Hudson’s Half Moon in this same river two hundred and ninety years ago.
The historical significance of the Hudson might be illustrated in some such way at many another point upon its banks. The location of Albany is particularly to be noted as one evidently intended by nature for an important rendezvous. In the earlier period Albany and the Saratoga district, and certain points of advantage in the Mohawk Valley, were of great strategic importance. They were natural gateways, which had to be held first against the Indians and Frenchmen, and afterward against the British. Their later importance has had to do with canals, railroads and the development of commerce.
But of Albany it must be said that it has also the distinction of being one of the three or four chief law-making centres of the English-speaking world. In no other way has the State of New York exerted so wide an influence upon the country at large as in the working out of laws and institutions which have been re-enacted almost without change by a great number of the other States of the Union. Thus Albany has been a great training school in politics and legislation.
Before the days of railroad building, the Erie Canal was the greatest undertaking that this country had witnessed in the improvement of its transportation facilities. This waterway connected the Great Lakes with the Atlantic by way of the Mohawk and Hudson valleys; and among other results of a far-reaching nature there followed the development of the city of Buffalo, a commercial and manufacturing community founded in the opening years of the nineteenth century, and destined in the twentieth to achieve such growth and splendor as few men are yet bold enough to anticipate.
We have seen in our generation fierce rivalry for the occupation of Khartoum, at the head of Nile navigation, with one expedition succeeding another until the final success of the English under General Kitchener. The possession of Khartoum was known to carry with it the control of the fertile Soudan beyond, as well as to affect the permanent mastery of the valley of the lower Nile to the Delta. In some such manner the French and English in the middle of the eighteenth century appreciated the strategic importance of the point at the junction of the Alleghany and the Monongahela rivers, where the Ohio took its start, and from which navigation was unobstructed all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. It was in large part the struggle for the site of Pittsburgh that gave Washington the military training and the large perception of the future of America that fitted him for his great tasks of leadership. The development of Pittsburgh and the opening of the Ohio furnish most instructive and interesting chapters in the history of our country.
The quaint or curious or heroic beginnings must always have their fascination; and it is likely enough that for a long time to come they will take a little more than their normal or proportionate share of the page of history. But real history is learning also to concern itself with other things. The story of Princeton, now so largely that of Revolutionary annals, will henceforth increasingly be the story of the life and work of a great university. That of Pittsburgh will become in expanding proportions the story of the development of the arts and crafts and of manufacturing in this country, and of the struggle of skilled labor for an ever-larger share in the advantages made possible by the enormous increase in the volume of production. The story of Philadelphia will, to an increasing extent, be that of the best housed and most contented of all the great communities in the world, full of evidences of private thrift and the domestic virtues, while exhibiting the paradox of a relatively low degree of efficiency in matters of common concern like municipal administration.
The historic towns of the Middle States are now engaged in the making of history in ways very different from those of the Colonial and Revolutionary periods, but in ways certainly not less important. But their future will be the wiser and happier for a studious devotion to the records of their honorable past, and they cannot be too zealous in the perpetuation of the old landmarks.
