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Untitled Article
honour of receiving from that illustrious friend of America and of human nature , the late General La Fayelte . "—Preface , p . 11 . The history of America , from the plantation of the colonies to their result and declaration of independence , is so little known , that many of its readers will be unprepared to find how free the institutions of the different states were . The
ground work of their present constitution was laid in the charters and privileges they had obtained , either originally or in the course of their progress in wealth and population . Theiv municipal and political arrangements , and the social state of the people in general , have undergone but little change . They have been reformed—not revolutionised . The grand change , and a most beneficent one it was , consisted in the
separation from Great Britain . Before that event , America was subject to whatever caprices and fluctuations took place in the government of the parent state , to the imposition of governors , who were always appointed by the king , —and not always because they were worthy of their office—and to the calamities of war , when its causes existed solely in Europe .
Such evils are borne for a time by a country which is in need of protection ; but it is evident that America would have achieved her independence at no very distant period from that at which it actually took place , even though England had never oppressed , or the Stamp Act had never been passed .
The states were founded at periods and under circumstances widely different . The colonization of Virginia , the . earliest of them all , was originally projected by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1585 ; but all his ardour in the cause , and all the struggles of the parties which he sent out one after another , failed to establish any permanent settlement there .
Shipwrecks , cold , famine , the hostility of the natives , or the mismanagement of their own leaders , rendered all his attempts abortive . He succeeded only in naming the country in honour of the Queen ; but indirectly he accomplished his purpose . He created a spirit of enterprise , that led in the following rei < z ; n to the foundation of James Town , on the
shores of the Bay of Chesapeake , the first existing habitation of the English in America . This small beginning of a train of events which have swelled into such mighty results , was made by a party sent out by one of the two companies to whom James I . had granted by patent , in the year 1606 , all
those territories in America lying between the 34 th and 45 th degrees of N . latitude . Virginia was appropriated by the patentees of the London Company ; and the country further north by a party of the Plymouth and Bristol merchants who composed the other , called the Plymouth Company , from whom in 1620 the persecuted Puritans obtained a grant of fond , and colonized it under the name of New England * The
Untitled Article
North America . 901
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1836, page 301, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2657/page/37/
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