The name Iroquois was applied to them by the French. Their own national appellation was Konoskioni or "cabin-builders." The Catawbas dwelt upon the Yadkin and Catawba rivers, along the line that now separates North and South Carolina. The land of the Cherokees extended from the Carolina Broad river on the east to the Alabama on the west, including the whole upper part of Georgia. Below them, on the Savannah, the Oconee, and the head waters of the Great Ogeechee and the Chattahoochee, were seated the Uchees, who spoke a harsh and peculiar language, and were apparently the decayed remnant of a once powerful nation. The rest of the state of Georgia, part of South Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and the whole of Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi, were occupied by a great number of kindred tribes who are known in our history as the Mobilian nation. Their territory, which was only inferor in extent to that of the Algonquins, stretched along the gulf of Mexico from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. They were divided into three great confederacies of tribes, the Muscogees or Creeks, the Choctaws, and the Chickasaws. Among their sub-tribes of most note were the Seminoles and Yemassees, who belonged to the Creek confederacy. A small territory on the eastern side of the Mississippi, on the banks of the Pearl river, was occupied by the Natchez, who, though surrounded by Mobilian tribes, were a distinct people, speaking a language of their own, and worshipping the sun. Beyond the Mississippi were the numerous tribes of the Dacotahs or Sioux, who occupied the country between the Arkansas on the south and Lake Winnipeg on the north, and westward to the Rocky mountains. Their principal divisions were the Winnebagoes, who dwelt between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi; the Assiniboins, the most northerly in position; the Minatarees, Mandans, and Crows, who lived west of the Assiniboins; and the southern Sioux, who held the country between the Arkansas and Platte rivers. Beyond the Dacotah nation, on the great plains, in the Rocky mountains, and on the Pacific slope, were the powerful tribes of the Pawnees, Comanches, Apaches, Utahs, Blackfeet, Snakes, Nezperces, Flatheads, and California Indians. While in possession of its savage aborigines, the country from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, and from the lakes to the gulf of Mexico, with comparatively slight exceptions, was one vast forest, inhabited by wild beasts, whose pursuit formed the principal occupation of the Indians, and gave them their chief means of subsistence and clothing. According to the Scandinavian sagas, Leif, a Norwegian, sailed in 1002 from Iceland for Greenland, but was driven south ward by storms till he reached a country called Vinland, from the wild grapes he found growing there. Other Scandinavian adventurers followed him, and made settlements, none of which were permanent. By many writers Vinland is supposed to have been Rhode

Island or some other part of the coast of New England, but of its real position nothing is certainly known; and if these northern legends be rejected as too vague to afford a basis for sober history, we must conclude that the territory now comprised within the United States was first visited by Europeans about 5 years after Columbus discovered the West Indies. In 1497 John Cabot, a Venetian, commanding an English ship under a commission from Henry VII., sailed from Bristol westward, and on June 24 discovered land, along which he coasted to the southward for the distance of nearly 1,000 miles, landing at various points, and planting on the soil the banners of England and of Venice. In the following year his son Sebastian Cabot sailed with two ships from Bristol in search of a north-west passage to China; but finding the ice impenetrable, he turned to the south and coasted along as far as the entrance of Chesapeake bay. A few years later, in 1513, the Spaniard Ponce de Leon discovered Florida, and took formal possession of the country near where St. Augustine now stands: but on attempting shortly afterward to plant a colony, he was repulsed and mortally wounded by the natives. Toward the close of 1523 Francis I. of France sent John Verrazzani, a Florentine, to explore the North American coast. After a terribly tempestuous passage of 50 days, he made land near Wilmington, N. C., but found no convenient harbor, though he searched for one for 150 miles southward. Returning north, he sailed as far as Nova Scotia, stopping for a while in the harbors of New York and Newport, both of which are described in his narrative. Next followed the famous expedition of the Spaniard De Soto, who in 1539 landed with several hundred followers in Tampa bay on the west coast of Florida, and fought his way in the course of two years through the region which now forms the states of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, to the river Mississippi, beyond which he penetrated for about 200 miles, and to which he returned to die in the third year of his expedition. After his death his discouraged followers descended the river in boats, and crossed the gulf to the Spanish settlements in Mexico. For a long period no further attempt was made by the Spaniards to colonize Florida. But in 1569 the French Calvinists, under the direction of Admiral Coligni, endeavored to found there a colony which might become a place of refuge for the persecuted Huguenots. Charles IX. conceded an ample charter, and an expedition under Jean Ribault made a settlement at Port Royal in South Carolina, the name of Carolins being then first given to the country in honor of King Charles. This colony was soon abandoned, and another, composed also of Protes tants, was planted on the banks of the St. John's in Florida, which in 1565 was surprised and massacred by the Spaniards, who in the same year founded St. Augustine, now the oldest of American cities, and the first permanent settle

ment in the United States.-The discoveries of the Cabots had given the English crown a claim to North America, which, though not prosecuted for nearly a century, was never relinquished, and which led in the reign of Elizabeth to efforts at colonization on a large scale. In 1585 an expedition sent by Sir Walter Raleigh made a settlement on Roanoke island in North Carolina, which however failed so utterly that in a few years not a trace of it remained, the last of the colonists having been carried off captives by the Indians. James I. in 1606 divided the American territory claimed by England into two parts: South Virginia, extending from Cape Fear to the Potomac, and North Virginia, from the mouth of the Hudson to Newfoundland. Two companies were formed in England for the colonization of America: the London company, to which was granted South Virginia, and the Plymouth company, to which was granted North Virginia; and it was agreed that the region between the Potomac and the Hudson should be neutral ground on which either company might make settlements. The London company was earnest in the undertaking, and in 1607 sent out 3 ships and 105 emigrants, who entered Chesapeake bay, and founded on May 13 the commonwealth of Virginia by building Jamestown on James river, both names being given in honor of the English king. Capt. Newport commanded the expedition, but the master spirit of the enterprise was the celebrated Capt. John Smith, whose prudence, energy, and courage carried the settlement successfully through the perils which beset it, on the one hand, from the bad character of many of the colonists (who were, as Smith says, "unruly sparks packed off by their friends to escape worse destinies at home," and "poor gentlemen, broken tradesmen, footmen, and such as were much fitter to spoil and ruin a commonwealth than to help to raise or maintain one"), and on the other hand from the hostility of the natives, who however in 1614 were conciliated and made friendly for some years by the marriage of Pocahontas, the daughter of their king or principal chief Powhatan, to an Englishman. The government of Virginia was at first retained by the king in the hands of councils subject to his appointment or control; but after repeated changes the constitution was at length so framed that a house of burgesses chosen by the people was instituted, which met for the first time June 19, 1619. This was the beginning of representative government in America. It was closely followed by two events, both seemingly of slight importance at the time, but both destined to have a powerful and long continued influence on American affairs. In Aug. 1619, a Dutch man-of-war entered James river, and sold 20 Africans to the planters, thus introducing slavery into the colony; and two years afterward, in 1621, the cultivation of cotton was commenced. Capt. John Smith had returned to England in 1609, and in 1614 sailed

as

again for America; and having examined the coast from the Penobscot to Cape Cod, he named the country New England. Previous to this, in 1607, two ships, commanded by Raleigh and Gilbert, had carried out a company of 45 emigrants, led by George Popham, by whom a settlement named St. George was formed near the mouth of the Kennebec, and abandoned in the following year. Smith on his return home published a map and description of New England, which, together with his personal representations of the advantages of emigration, excited much enthusiasm in England for colonizing America; and a patent was obtained from the king for a new company incorporated "the council established at Plymouth in the county of Devon for the planting, ruling, ordering, and governing New England in America," which gave the planters absolute property, with unlimited jurisdiction, the sole powers of legislation, the appointment of all officers and all forms of government, over the territory, extending in breadth from the 40th to the 48th degree of north latitude, and in length from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This area comprised more than a million of square miles, and covered the present provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Canadas, New England, New York, Pennsylvania, nearly half of New Jersey, and all the continent lying directly west of those states. The first English settlement within its limits, however, was established without the knowledge of the corporation and without the aid of King James, by the "pilgrim fathers of New England," a body of Puritans who, led by John Carver, William Brewster, William Bradford, Edward Winslow, and Miles Standish, sailed from England, Sept. 6, 1620, in the Mayflower, a vessel of 180 tons burden, and landed Dec. 21 (Dec. 11, O.S.), to the number of about 100 men, women, and children, at a harbor in Massachusetts bay where they began to build a town, which they called Plymouth in memory of the hospitalities received at the last English port from which they had sailed. “A grateful posterity," says Bancroft, "has marked the rock which first received their footsteps. The consequences of that day are constantly unfolding themselves as time advances. It was the origin of New England; it was the planting of the New England institutions. Inquisitive historians have loved to mark every vestige of the pilgrims; poets of the purest minds have commemorated their virtues; the noblest genius has been called into exercise to display their merits worthily, and to trace the consequences of their daring enterprise. . . . . As the pilgrims landed, their institutions were already perfected. Democratic liberty and independent Christian worship at once existed in America." The government of the colony was strictly republican. The governor was elected by the people, and restricted by a council of 5 and afterward of 7 assistants. The legislature at first comprised the whole body of the peo

ple, but as population advanced the representative system was adopted. The foundation of the Plymouth colony was followed by that of Massachusetts Bay, where Salem was settled by John Endicott in 1628. In 1630 a fleet arrived with 840 additional emigrants, with John Winthrop, a man approved for piety, liberality, and conduct, at their head as governor, and Thomas Dudley as deputy governor. In September of the same year they settled Boston, which they named in honor of the town in England from which came their minister, the Rev. John Cotton. In 1692 Plymouth colony was united to Massachusetts. While these settlements on Massachusetts bay were in progress, Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason obtained a patent for a territory called Laconia, extending from the Atlantic to the St. Lawrence and from the Merrimack to the Kennebec, and settled Portsmouth and Dover in New Hampshire in 1623. In Maine a French colony had been planted in the island of Mount Desert as early as 1613, which was soon broken up by an expedition from Virginia; and the first permanent English settlements in Maine were made at Saco and on the island of Monhegan in 1622 or 1623. These settlements, however, ultimately fell under the jurisdiction of Massachusetts, and Maine continued to form a part of that commonwealth till 1820. Connecticut was colonized in 1635 by emigrants from Massachusetts, who settled at Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield, though a few huts had been erected at the latter place a year or two before, and the Dutch, who claimed the territory, had in 1633 built a fort and trading house at Hartford. Rhode Island was first settled at Providence in 1636 by Roger Williams, who had been exiled from Massachusetts for maintaining religious and political opinions at variance with those of the rulers of that colony. The first white man that ever set foot upon the soil of New York was Samuel Champlain, the French navigator, who in July, 1609, entered the lake which bears his name, and fought a battle on its shores with a band of Mohawks, whom he defeated, and thus brought upon the French the lasting hatred of the powerful confederacy of the Six Nations. Later in the same year, Sept. 6, Henry Hudson, an Englishman in the service of the Dutch East India company, entered New York bay and discovered the river to which his name has been given, and which he ascended nearly as far as the site of Albany. The region thus discovered was claimed by Holland and named New Netherlands; and in a few years trading posts were erected at Fort Orange, now Albany, and on Manhattan island. In 1623, 18 families settled at Fort Orange, and 30 families at New Amsterdam on Manhattan island, on the present site of the city of New York. The Dutch settlements gradually spread up the river, and eastward to the Connecticut, and westward and southward to the Delaware. On the latter river they came in collision with the Swedes, who had settled there in 1638 and

occupied both banks in Delaware and Pennsyl vania nearly to the site of Philadelphia, and named their settlements New Sweden. They were finally expelled in 1655 by a Dutch army; but the English, who claimed the whole country under the right given by Cabot's discovery, after much diplomatic controversy protracted through nearly half a century, at length ended the contest by seizing New Amsterdam by force in 1664, and with it the whole of New Netherlands. The province in the same year had been granted by Charles II. to his brother the duke of York and Albany, in whose honor New Amsterdam was named New York, which also became the name of the province, while Fort Orange became Albany. New Jersey at this time acquired its distinctive name from Sir George Carteret, who had been governor of the island of Jersey, and in conjunction with Lord Berkeley had purchased the territory from the duke of York and made it a separate colony. In 1681 the territory west of the Delaware was granted to William Penn, who col onized it chiefly with Friends or Quakers, and founded Philadelphia in 1682. Pennsylvania soon became one of the most flourishing of the colonies, and was honorably distinguished among them for the kindness and justice of its treatment of the Indians, and its consequent exemption for nearly a century from the horrors of savage warfare. About 1710 a large immigration of Germans began, which peopled several counties and gave a peculiar character to the population of the province. The country between the southern line of Pennsylvania and the Potomac was early called Maryland, in honor of Henrietta Maria, the queen of Charles I. The first settlement within its limits was made in 1631 by Capt. William Clayborne, with a party of men from Virginia, on Kent island in Chesapeake bay. In 1632 Charles I. granted the province by a charter to Cecilius Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who sent out in 1633 a colony of 201 persons, nearly all of them Roman Catholic gentlemen and their servants, led by the brother of the lord proprietor, Leonard Calvert, who became the first governor of the province. They crossed the Atlantic in two vessels named the Ark and the Dove, and landed on St. Clement's island, March 25, 1634. Two days af terward they began a settlement at St. Mary's on the mainland. The first legislature met in 1639, and in 1649 the assembly passed the memorable act by which Christians of all sects were secured in the public profession of their faith, and allowed to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences. The country south of Virginia was first permanently settled in 1670 by English colonists, who landed at Port Royal, but soon removed to the present site of Charleston. Under the name of Carolina the colony was nominally governed in accordance with the provisions of an aristocratic constitution framed by the philosopher John Locke, till 1727, when the king bought out the proprietors and divided the colony into

two, called respectively North and South Carolina. The present state of Georgia originally formed part of Carolina, but in 1732 George II., in honor of whom it was named, granted the territory to a corporation entitled "the trustees for settling the colony of Georgia;" and in the same year a colony of 120 persons sailed for the new province, under the direction of the celebrated Gen. James Oglethorpe.-In the course of little more than a century from the settlement of Jamestown, 13 colonies were thus founded by the English within the present limits of the United States. Within the same limits the Spaniards had also settled in Florida and New Mexico, and the French had established posts in Illinois, in Indiana, and in Louisiana near the mouth of the Mississippi. Though the emigration to the English colonies was mostly from England itself, and the language, laws, and manners of England everywhere prevailed, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Holland, France, and Scandinavia each contributed more or less extensively to their population. Nearly all the sects of Christendom were also represented; and while Calvinism predominated in New England, Quakerism in Pennsylvania, and Roman Catholicism in Maryland, the church of England preponderated in New York and in the South. In the genial climate and fertile soil of the southern colonies, where labor was chiefly performed by African slaves, a more easy and lavish style of living prevailed than in the bleak and barren land of the Puritans, though as population advanced the thrift and industry of the Yankees (an Indian corruption of the word English); as the New Englanders were termed by their southern neighbors, produced the usual effects in developing among them a high degree of wealth, comfort, and refinement. Though agriculture was the chief pursuit of the colonists, manufactures and commerce were not wholly neglected. But as early as 1660 the mother country, jealous of the increasing prosperity of her children beyond the Atlantic, began to hamper their trade with navigation acts selfishly designed to compel the commerce of the Americans to pass exclusively through English hands. The house of commons in 1719 declared "that erecting any manufactories in the colonies tended to lessen their dependence upon Great Britain," and laws were accordingly enacted prohibiting the working of iron and steel in the colonies, and restricting other branches of manufacture. It was declared that no sugar, tobacco, ginger, indigo, cotton, fustic, or dyeing woods should be transported to any other country than those belonging to the crown of England, under penalty of forfeiture. The importation of European commodities into the colonies was prohibited except in English ships from England, and thus the colonies were compelled to buy in England not only all English manufactures, but every thing else that they might need from any soil but their own. The colonists were allowed to sell to foreigners

only what England would not take, that so they might gain means to pay for the articles forced upon them by England. As they could buy few European and no Asiatic commodities except in the mother country, the English merchant was able to sell his goods for more than they were worth, and at the same time, being the sole legal purchaser of colonial products, could obtain these products at less than their fair value. In spite of these obstacles, the enterprise and industry of the colonists soon created a vigorous commerce, and even manufactures were not unknown, especially in Massachusetts, where the people manufactured paper, woollen goods, hemp, and iron, and nearly every family made coarse cloth for its own use. Notwithstanding their general poverty, and the hardships incident to the condition of a scanty population busily engaged in subduing the wilderness and its tribes of savages, the colonists, especially in New England, paid prompt and special attention to education. Schools were formed in Virginia as early as 1621, and in 1692 William and Mary college was established at Williamsburg. A school was founded in New, Amsterdam in 1633. Harvard college in Massachusetts was founded in 1637, and Yale college in Connecticut in 1701; the college of New Jersey was incorporated in 1738, and King's (now Columbia) college in New York in 1754. In the New England colonies, as soon almost as they were founded, laws were enacted providing for a liberal system of common schools, under which the people soon became remarkable for intelligence; a system continued with unbroken perseverance and with ever increasing improvement to the present day.-The 13 colonies, thus settled in the course of little more than a century from the foundation of Jamestown were New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The details of colonial history being given in this work under the names of the individual states, we shall only notice here the most prominent events of general interest, which may be classed under the three heads of Indian wars, French wars, and political struggles against the English government. The Indians at first received the whites as friends; but the steady encroachments of the settlers on their hunting grounds, and the manifold causes of quarrel incident to the contact of races so different, speedily led to acts of violence on both sides, and at length to open war, though to the last a few tribes continued faithful friends to the Europeans. In the infancy of the settlements these conflicts with the warlike savages were often bloody and perilous; but as the colonies grew in strength, their numbers, discipline, and superiority in arms gave them an assured victory whenever roused to put forth their power. The first serious encounter took place in 1622, after the death of the friendly Powhatan, when

a general conspiracy of the Indians of Virginia broke out in a bloody massacre, in which in one hour 350 of the English fell beneath the tomahawk. The colonists were victorious in this contest, and again in 1644-'6, when the Virginian tribes made their last struggle for independence, led by Opechancanough, who was captured and kept in prison till he died. From that period the red men gave little further trouble in Virginia, but peacefully submitted to the colonial authorities. In 1636 the powerful Pequot tribe commenced hostilities in Connecticut, which soon spread into Massachusetts and provoked an alliance of those colonies, by whose forces in 1637 the hostile nation was 'utterly destroyed, and such a terror struck into the remaining tribes that they did not venture again to molest the whites till 1675, when the famous Metacomet, sachem of the Wampanoags, or King Philip as he was called by the English, effected a general combination of the aborigines against the colonists. A terribly destructive war ensued, which for some months threatened the extermination of the European population of New England, but was finally ended by the defeat and death of Philip in 1676. Forty years later the Carolinas became involved in a fierce and sanguinary struggle with the Corees and Tuscaroras (1712), and with the Yemassees (1715), in both of which the whites were victorious. Notwithstanding these and other signal successes for more than a century and a half after the first settlement, there were few parts of the country which had not cause from time to time to tremble at the apprehension or the actual outbreak of Indian warfare, with its horrid accompaniments of outrage, massacre, and devastation, in which neither sex nor age was spared by the ruthless enemy. Toward the close of the 17th century the hostile Indians on the northern and western frontiers began to receive powerful aid and encouragement from the French in Canada, who, whenever their mother country was at war with England, carried on hostilities with the English colonies, and frequently, accompanied by their savage allies, made destructive inroads into New England and New York. In one of these incursions in 1689, Dover in New Hampshire was burned by the Abenakis or eastern Indians, and all the inhabitants were killed or carried away captive; and in the following year a similar fate was inflicted on Schenectady in New York, by a party from Montreal. A few years later (1704-'8) Deerfield and Haverhill in Massachusetts were destroyed, with hundreds of men, women, and children, by bands led by Hertel de Rouville, a French officer. Father Marquette, Louis Joliet, Robert Cavalier de la Salle, and other able and enterprising missionaries and adventurers, had carried the cross and the standards of France through the wilderness, from the St. Lawrence and the great lakes to the Mississippi and the gulf, and even into Texas; and gradually the English settlements on the Atlantic were flanked on their

western side by a chain of French posts, amounting finally to more than 60 in number, between Montreal and New Orleans. Many of these positions, selected with judgment at an early period, became afterward important towns, as Detroit (1683), Kaskaskia (1684), Vincennes (1690), New Orleans (1717), and Pittsburg (Fort Duquesne, 1754). This threatening lodgment of the French in the rear of their American colonies greatly excited the jealousy of the English, who, under the charters granted by James I., claimed dominion westward from the Atlantic to the Pacific, south of the latitude of the north shore of Lake Erie, while the French claimed all the territory watered by the Mississippi and its tributaries under the more plausible title of having made the first explorations and settlements. The earliest conflict between the two nations in America arose, however, not from any colonial quarrel, but from the revolution of 1688, and is known as King William's war. It lasted 7 years, and during its continuance the colonies suffered exceedingly from the incursions of the French and their Indian allies. In retaliation for these attacks efforts were made by the colonists to conquer Canada, against which in 1690 two expeditions were sent, one from Massachusetts under Sir William Phipps, and another from Connecticut and New York under Gen. Winthrop, neither of which accomplished any thing of importance. The war was terminated by the treaty of Ryswick, Sept. 20, 1697, but peace was not of long continuance. The war of the Spanish succession, which began in 1702, involved in its hostilities the French and Eng lish in America, where the contest is known in tradition and history as Queen Anne's war. Its effects were chiefly felt in New England, whose whole western frontier was ravaged by the Indians to such an extent that most of the remote settlements were destroyed or aban doned. In 1707 Massachusetts, New Hamp shire, and Rhode Island combined their forces and made an attack on the French in Acadia, but effected nothing. Three years later, in Sept. 1710, an expedition from Boston suc ceeded in conquering Acadia, and annexing it to the English empire under the title of the province of Nova Scotia. A powerful arma ment of English and New England troops, under Sir Hovenden Walker, attempted in the following year the conquest of Canada by sea but failed, as did another expedition which at the same time marched from Albany to attack Montreal. The peace of Utrecht (April 11, 1713) terminated hostilities, which were not resumed for more than 30 years. At the ex piration of that period the war of the Austrian succession broke out in Europe (March, 1744), and spread to America, where it is known as King George's war. Its principal event was the capture of Louisburg, the chief stronghold of the French in America, which was taken June 28, 1745, by a force from New England led by William Pepperell, a wealthy merchant