Massachusetts churches, led his whole congregation through the wilderness to the banks of the Connecticut, where they founded the towns of Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield. In the meantime, a little settlement named Saybrook had been begun at the mouth of the Connecticut River by John Winthrop, a son of the Massachusetts governor. Two years later a company of Puritans from London settled at New Haven. In the course of time all these little settlements were united to form the colony of Connecticut. England The life of the people was very much the same in all the early Puritan colonies in New England. Everywhere the settlers lived on small farms and each family raised most of Life in early its own food supply. The earliest settlers boasted of their great New crops of corn. One of them in writing to his friends in the mother country said, "Our turnips, parsnips, and carrots are here both bigger and sweeter than is ordinarily to be found in England. Here are stores of pumpkins, cucumbers, and other things of that nature which I know not." The same writer The complained of the mosquitoes and of the bitter cold of the winters. The Dutch and the Swedes in America.-In 1609, two years after the founding of Jamestown, Henry Hudson, an English sailor in the service of the Dutch, while searching for discovery of a northwest passage to India, found the mouth of the great the Hudson river which now bears his name. In his little ship, the Half Moon, he explored the Hudson River as far as the present site of Albany and reported "that the land was of finest kind for tillage, and as beautiful as the foot of man ever trod upon." River New founded New Amsterdam in 1656 The Dutch claimed all the region which Hudson visited and named it New Netherland. Within five years of the day the Half Moon entered the Hudson River, the Dutch had a permanent trading station on Manhattan Island where New York City now stands, and Netherland another at Fort Nassau near the present Albany. For some years these places were trading posts rather than real settlements. In 1621 the Dutch West India Company was given the exclusive right to colonize New Netherland. Two years later this company sent the first party of permanent settlers to the banks of the Hudson. Some of them stopped on Manhattan Island while others went up the river to Fort Nassau. The Dutch colony of New Netherland grew very slowly. It had a rich fur trade, but very few farmers came from Holland to settle in it. Unlike its neighbors, the New England colonies, Its slow New Netherland did not have self-government. The people growth were ruled by a governor and other officers sent out by the Dutch West India Company. The most famous of the Dutch governors of New Netherland was the last one, Peter Stuyvesant. On his arrival at New Amsterdam, as the town on Manhattan Island was called, he said to the people, "I shall govern you as a father his children." He was as good as his word and ruled with an The Dutch claimed that New Netherland included the valleys of the Delaware and the Connecticut, as well as that of the Hudson and established trading posts on both these rivers. In 1638 the Swedes made a settlement upon the banks of the Delaware and named their colony New Sweden. The Dutch protested against this invasion of territory which they claimed, but as they wanted the friendship of the Swedes in Europe at this time, they did nothing more. By 1655 affairs had so changed in Europe that the Dutch thought it time to act. Governor Stuyvesant marched against New Sweden with a large force and the Swedish settlers surrendered to him. They were not molested but became subject to the government of New Netherland. Tearing up the Call to Surrender Stuyvesant wanted to fight the English but the people would not support him and he was compelled to surrender. New Sweden New Revolution in England checks settlement in America On the Connecticut the Dutch were less fortunate. They built a trading post on that river, but the English came so thick and fast that they were forced to abandon it. Soon English colonists began to encroach upon the Dutch settlements on Long Island and west of New Haven, The English had always claimed that New Netherland belonged to them, and at last King Charles II made up his mind to seize it. In 1664, Colonel Nicolls, with four ships and five hundred veteran English troops, appeared before New Amsterdam. Stuyvesant, the brave old Dutch governor, wanted to fight to the last ditch, but the people, who were weary of his arbitrary ways and thought that they would have more liberty under an English government, would not support him. He was obliged to yield, and New Netherland passed peacefully into the hands of the English. A Group of Proprietary Colonies.-All the colonies whose beginnings we have thus far traced were founded before 1640. By that year the tyranny and persecution of Charles I had grown so bad that the English people would no longer endure them. The efforts of Parliament to bring about reforms led to a civil war in which the king was defeated. In 1649, Charles I was put to death by the victorious Puritans, and England was proclaimed a republic, although it was really ruled by Oliver Cromwell, the great Puritan general at the head of the army. When Cromwell died, there was no one strong enough to succeed him and, after two years of confusion, the English people decided to restore the monarchy. Accordingly, Charles II, the son of Charles I, became king in 1660. During the period of revolution in England, between 1640 and 1660, no new English colonies were begun in America, although some of the Cavaliers, as the friends of Charles I were called, came to live in Virginia. Charles II was a selfish and pleasure-loving king, and quickly gathered about him friends like himself. For twentyThe second five years, from 1660 to 1685, he lived in the midst of a gay, period of frivolous, and wicked court. This reign was the second period English colonization of English colonization in America. The king rewarded the friends who had helped him recover the throne, and paid some of the men to whom he owed money by giving them great tracts of land in America. Every English colony planted in America during this second period of settlement was proprietary, which means that the men to whom these colonies were granted owned the land in them and possessed certain rights of governn.ent over the actual settlers. Carolina was the first colony established in this period. In 1663, Charles II gave the land lying between Virginia and Florida to eight of his friends who asked him for it in the hope Carolina of increasing their wealth and importance. Some years before founded this the first real settlement in the Carolina region had been begun by some Virginians who had moved southward into the wilderness along the Chowan River near Albemarle Sound. The new proprietors sent a governor and more settlers from England to this Albemarle settlement and in time the colony of North Carolina grew up about it. The first settlement in South Carolina was made in the neighborhood of Charleston in 1670. At first the proprietors of Carolina did not intend to have two colonies, but the Albemarle and Charleston settlements were so far apart that it was more convenient to give each of Carolina them a separate government, and quite naturally the names divided North and South Carolina came into common use. In 1729 the proprietors sold their rights to the king. The two Carolinas were then completely separated and each of them became a royal province. There was a striking contrast between North Carolina and South Carolina. The former has a sandy or swampy coast with few good harbors, and most of its early settlers lived on North and small farms in the interior of the colony. In South Carolina, South Carolina on the other hand, the colonists lived near the coast, and Charles- contrasted ton soon grew to be an important seaport. The growing of rice on large plantations worked by gangs of negro slaves came to be the leading industry in South Carolina. For a part of each year the rich rice planters lived in the fine mansions which they built in the city of Charleston. More than sixty years after the beginning of South Carolina another colony was founded still farther to the south. The first settlement in Georgia was made at Savannah in 1732 by Georgia James Oglethorpe, an English soldier who wanted to set up a military outpost near the Spanish frontier of Florida and at the same time to give a new chance in life to those poor people in England who were put in prison in those days because they |