INTRODUCTION BY ALBERT SHAW HE designation "Middle States THE designation 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 cooperation 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 |
