338 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL AND METHODIST CHURCHES. compel them to receive Episcopal clergymen as preachers. These denominations naturally protested, and finally in 1776 all the dissenters were released from parish rates and all forms of worship were legalized.* legalized.* In 1785 the Religious Freedom Act was passed, disestablishing the Church of England, abolishing parish rates, and doing away with all religious tests. But, in turn, the persecuted became the persecutors and proceeded to confiscate the property of the Church of England under the contention that the property of the Church had been largely created by unjustifiable taxation. Its parsonages and glebe lands were sold in 1802; its parishes wiped out; and its clergy left without a calling.t Until after the Revolution there were no bishops of the English Church in America, and between 1783 and 1785 it was difficult to see how one could be ordained, for the law compelled all who should be admitted into the ranks of the English clergy to take an oath of allegiance and acknowledge the king as the head of the Church. Numerous attempts were made to have bishops consecrated, but * See Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, in Ford's ed. of Jefferson's Writings, vol. iii., p. 262. Fiske, Critical Period, pp. 79-82. On the dispute in Virginia see Hunt, Life of Madison, chap. ix. For Jefferson's draft of the bill for establishing religious freedom in Virginia, see Ford's ed. of Jefferson's Writings, vol. ii., pp. 237–239. The bill as passed is in Hening's Statutes, vol. xii., p. 84. See also Conway, Edmund Randolph, pp. 158-166; Gay, Life of Madison, pp. 65-70; Madison's Works (Congress ed.), vol. i., pp. 129-130. without avail, and finally a constitution for the "Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America" was passed at a convention of the churches of the various States. At the same time a friendly letter was sent to the bishops of England urging them to secure legislation by Parliament, giving American clergymen the right to be ordained without taking the oaths of supremacy and allegiance. This was done, and accordingly three American bishops were ordained in due form. Thus the Episcopal Church in America was fairly started on its independent career. Meanwhile the first Methodist church in America had been founded in New York in 1766. When, in 1772, Wesley sent over Francis Asbury to act as his representative in this country, there were less than 1,000 Methodists and six preachers in the country, chiefly in the Middle and Southern colonies, but because of Asbury's eloquence, this number had increased seven fold within five years. After the Revolution, the American Methodists cut loose from the English establishment, and Wesley then sent Thomas Coke out as bishop for America and in 1784 he began his work in Maryland. In December of that year, at a conference of 60 ministers at Baltimore, Asbury was chosen the first American bishop and was ordained by Coke. Thus the Methodist Church in America was organized. Four years later, the OTHER RELIGIOUS BODIES; EDUCATION. Presbyterians organized their government in a general assembly which was also largely attended by Congregationalist delegates from New England. In New England the lay members were beginning to revolt against the doctrine of eternal punishment and the seeds of Unitarianism were germinating. In 1789 the first Roman Catholic Church in New England was dedicated at Boston, for so great had been the prejudice against the sect in that region that in 1784 there were only 600 Catholics in all New England. The chief stronghold of the Catholics was Maryland, where there were 20,000; in New York and New Jersey there were 1,700; in Delaware and Pennsylvania, 7,700; in the four southernmost States, 2,500; and in the French settlements along the eastern bank of the Mississippi it was calculated that there were about 12,000. In 1786 John Carroll, a cousin of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, was appointed apostolic vicar by the Pope, and subsequently became bishop of Baltimore and archbishop of the United States. By 1789 all the States had rescinded their statutes against Catholic worship. Education had not made great advancement. Schools for boys were held two months in the winter, the teacher being a man; the girls attended for two months in the summer and were generally taught by a woman. If the boys were fortunate, *Fiske, Critical Period, pp. 85-87. 339 they were sent to a seminary or an academy and thence to Harvard or Yale; but if not, the district school constituted their source of learning. Arithmetic, geography, spelling and commercial usages and customs were the principal things to be learned; political economy, geology, paleontology, etc., were almost unknown; but Latin and Greek, logic, metaphysics, rhetoric, etc., were considered necessary acquirements. In New York and Pennsylvania a schoolhouse was seldom seen outside a village or town; and in the Southern States education was sadly neglected, especially in North Carolina,* where in 1776 there were only four grammar schools and during the Revolution none.+ In 1775 there were 37 newspapers in circulation throughout the colonies: 14 in New England; 4 in New York; 9 in Pennsylvania; 2 each in Virginia and North Carolina; 3 in South Carolina and 1 in Georgia. At the end of the war there were 43, and scarcely one contained any news of the times, devoting its columns chiefly to exhortations to righteousness, etc. They did, however, contain some valuable letters from different parts of the country, such scraps of information usually being extracted from private communications passing between the city inhabitants and friends in remote districts. *On the scarcity of schools in Virginia see Life of Archibald Alexander, pp. 11-12. McMaster, United States, vol. i., p. 27, quoting Ramsay's History of South Carolina. 340 LABOR CONDITIONS; SLAVERY. The principal industry in the vicinity of Boston was truck-farming, upon which the Boston people depended for their daily food. Apples and pears were abundant; raspberries and strawberries grew wild; oranges and bananas were luxuries; and the tomato, cauliflower, or egg plant had not yet been cultivated. The farms were poor and ill-kept, fences were broken down and the barns mean and small; the wooden bull-plough was the chief agricultural instrument; grain was sowed broadcast and when ripe was cut with a scythe, and thrashed on the barn floor with a flail. The condition of manufactures was not encouraging. There were a few paper mills, an iron foundry or two, and a hat factory;* the whale fisheries had dropped somewhat in their importance. The so-called "laboring" classes were in better shape than they had been for some time, even though their wages were small and in fact not half as large, considering the depreciation in the value of money. The unskilled laborer of that day received two shillings per day for his work unless laborers were scarce, in which case the price was raised; and the man who received 15 shillings per week was considered fortunate. It seems to have been the consensus of opinion that the wages of labor were at least *For Jefferson's description of conditions in Virginia, see his Notes on Virginia, reprinted in Ford's ed. of Jefferson's Writings, vol. iii., p. 111 et seq. 50 per cent. higher in 1784 than in 1774. But his existence was pitiable. His dingy home was devoid of comfort; no carpet covered the floor; there was no glass on his table, china in his closet or pictures on his walls. His rude and poor meals were served on pewter dishes and his scanty means could hardly afford even the staples, corn being three shillings per bushel, wheat at eight and six pence, pork at ten pence per pound and an assize of bread four pence, while fruits were too expensive for him to think of. His clothes were even coarser than his food. Slavery and the slave trade still continued a source of much anxiety to many of the colonies. In 1776 negro slaves were held in all the thirteen colonies, but the fact that slaves were not so numerous in New England as in the South was due chiefly to the rigorous climate of the North, not to any sense of its immorality. The press and even the pulpit of early times regarded the transportation of savages to a civilized community as humane and Christian. But soon the sentiment in favor of abolishing this traffic began to grow, and several of the colonies, notably Virginia, in 1769, had enacted laws prohibiting the further importation of negroes to be sold into slavery. The English government, however, overruled these enactments, as "the trade was highly beneficial and advantageous to the Kingdom." When Jefferson made his first draft of the ENACTMENTS RESPECTING SLAVERY. Declaration of Independence, he iinserted a clause charging that the king, in order to maintain a market for the sale of human beings, had "prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce." But this clause was omitted from the Declaration because, as Jefferson said: "Our Northern brethren also, I believe, felt a little tender under those censures; for, tho' their people have very few slaves themselves, yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others."* The sentiment for emancipation was gaining strength in all the colonies except South Carolina and Georgia, while in North Carolina the pro-slavery feeling was probably never so strong as in the southernmost States, though that State still continued its importations, in the absence of any emancipation sentiment. All the foremost statesmen of Virginia opposed a continuance of slavery, and the same was the case in Maryland; but it was easier to accomplish emancipation in the North than in the South, because the number of slaves was small.+ All restraints 28. *Ford's ed. of Jefferson's Writings, vol. i., p. † Jefferson said: "I conjecture there are 650,000 negroes in the five Southernmost states, and not 50,000 in the rest. In most of these latter effectual measures have been taken for their future emancipation. In the former, nothing is done towards that. The disposition to emancipate them is strongest in Virginia. Those who desire it, form, as yet, the minority of the whole state, 341 upon emancipation had already been removed in Delaware, and when its new constitution was adopted in 1776, that State prohibited the further introduction of slaves. In 1778 Virginia, in 1783 Maryland, and still later New Jersey prohibited the further introduction of slaves and removed all restraints upon emancipation. North Carolina sought to discourage the trade in 1786 by placing a duty of £5 on every negro imported. In 1780 Pennsylvania, in 1783 New Hampshire, and in 1784 Connecticut and Rhode Island provided that no more slaves should be brought in, and that all children of slaves born after those dates should be free, while New York went still further, in 1785 enacting that they should not only be free but should be given the franchise on the same conditions as freemen. In 1786 Virginia passed an act inflicting the death penalty on all persons convicted of kidnapping or selling into slavery any free person. In the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 was a declaration of rights asserting that all men are born free and have an equal and inalienable right to de but it bears a respectable proportion to the whole * a very few are disposed to emancipate. In S. Carolina & Georgia not the smallest symptoms of it, but, on the contrary these two states & N. Carolina continue importations of negroes. These have been long prohibited in all the other states." - Ford's ed. of Jefferson's Writings, vol. iv., pp. 145-146. 342 COINAGE SYSTEM; PENAL AFFAIRS. fend their lives and liberties, to acquire property and to seek and obtain safety and happiness, which clause the supreme court decided was a complete abolition of slavery.* There was no money standard for all the States; no national currency based upon a universally recognized unit. The State pound and the Spanish milled dollar were the two units of value in the various States, but the standards of coinage were different in each. In Georgia the pound contained 1,547 grains of silver; in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Virginia it contained 1,289; in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland 1,03114; and in New York and North Carolina 9664.† When subdivided into shillings and pence, the value of a penny was therefore very unequal in the different States. The Spanish milled dollar was the chief silver coin in general circulation and was divided into a half, quarter, eighth or sixteenth, each represented by a silver coin, containing whatever number of shillings or pence the custom or standard of the country into which it was taken demanded. In New England and Virginia the dollar was supposed to equal 6s, or 72d; 7s and 6d in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland; 8s or 96d in New Fiske, Critical Period, pp. 71-75. See Jefferson's Notes on the Establishment of a Money Unit, and of a Coinage for the United States, in Ford's ed. of Jefferson's Writings, vol. iii., p. 449. York and North Carolina; and 4s and 8d in Georgia and South Carolina.* Penal affairs were in a deplorable condition, the laws being especially harsh. Perhaps the worst prison in the country was the underground Newgate prison, an old worked-out copper mine near Granby, Connecticut, which was absolutely dark and reeking with filth. At Northampton, Worcester, and other places in Massachusetts the jails were scarcely better, the cells being low and narrow, without light and almost without air. Though the cells in Philadelphia jails were themselves much larger, they were so crowded as to make the conditions no better; criminals of both sexes were huddled together in the same cells, without beds, oftentimes without clothing, unwashed, unshaved and generally half dead with disease. The modes of punishment consisted of the pillory, stocks, chains, whipping-post, branding, hanging by the thumbs, etc., while in Massachusetts ten crimes were punishable by death.‡ The problems before the people. were many and vexatious, for the end of the war did not end the trials of the federated colonies. In addition to clearing away the wreckage resulting from several years of war, the people had to find a suitable political organization and begin seri * McMaster, United States, vol. i., pp. 22–23. †R. H. Phelps, A History of the Newgate Prison (1844). McMaster, United States, vol. i., pp. 98-102. |