History. —(1) United Secession Church.— The general causes which led to the first great secession from the Church of Scotland as by law established in 1688 have already been briefly indicated under Presbyterianism (see vol. xix. p. 685; compare also Scotland, Church of, vol. xxi. p. 536 sqf). Its immediate occasion rose out of an Act of Assembly of 1732 which abolished the last remnant of popular election by enacting that, in cases where patrons might neglect or decline to exercise their right of presentation, the minister was to be chosen, not by the congregation, but only by the elders and Protestant heritors. The Act itself had been passed by the Assembly, although the presbyteries to which it had been previously submitted as an overture had disapproved of it by a large majority; and in accordance with a previous Act (1730), which had taken away even the right of complaint, the protests of the dissentient majority were refused. In the following October Ebenezer Erskine (g ’.u), minister of Stirling, who happened to be moderator of the synod of Perth and Stirling, preached a synod sermon, in the course of which he took occasion to refer to the Act in question as in his opinion unscriptural and unconstitutional. Some of his expressions were objected to by members of synod because “tending to disquiet the peace of the church and impugning several Acts of Assembly and proceedings of church judicatories,” and after long and keen debate it was resolved that he should be censured for them. This judgment, on appeal, was affirmed by the Assembly in May 1733, whereupon Erskine protested to the effect that he held himself still at liberty to teach the same truths and to testify against the same or similar evils on every proper occasion. This protest, in which he was joined by William Wilson, Alexander Moncrieff, and James Fisher, ministers at Perth, Abernethy, and Kinclaven respectively, was regarded by the Assembly as contumacious, and the commission of Assembly was ordered to procure its retractation or to proceed to higher censures. In November accordingly the protesting ministers were severed from their charges, their churches declared vacant, and all ministers of the church prohibited from employing them in any ministerial function. They replied by protesting that they still adhered to the principles of the church, though now obliged to “make a secession from the prevailing party in ecclesiastical courts,” maintaining their continued right to discharge all the duties of the ministerial and pastoral office “according to the word of God, the Confession of Faith, and the constitution of the church,” and appealing to the “first free, faithful, and reforming General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.” In December 1733 they formally constituted themselves into a presbytery, but for some time their meetings were devoted almost entirely to prayer and religious conference. In 1734 they published their first “testimony,” with a statement of the grounds of their secession, which made prominent reference to the doctrinal laxity of previous General Assemblies. In 1736 they proceeded to exercise “judicial powers” as a church court, published a “judicial testimony,” and began to organize churches in various parts of the country. Having been joined by four other ministers, including the well-known Ralph Erskine, they appointed Mr Wilson professor of divinity. For these acts proceedings were again instituted against them in the Assembly, with the result that, having disowned the authority of that body in an “act of declinature,” they were in 1740 all deposed and ordered to be ejected from their churches. Meanwhile the members of the “Associate Presbytery” and its adherents steadily increased, until in 1745 there were forty-five congregations under its jurisdiction, and it was reconstituted into an “Associate Synod.” A violent controversy arose the same year respecting the religious clause of the oath taken by burgesses in Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Perth (“I profess and allow with my heart the true religion presently professed within this realm and authorized by the laws thereof ”), and resulted in April 1747 in a “breach,” when two bodies were formed, each claiming to be the “Associate Synod”; those who condemned the swearing of the burgess oath as sinful came to be popularly known as “Antiburghers,” while the other party, who contended that abstinence from it should not be made a term of communion, were designated “Burghers.” The Antiburghers not only refused to hold further friendly conference with the others, but ultimately went so far as to pass sentences of deposition and the greater excommunication on the Erskines and other ministers who held the opposing view.

The Associate (Antiburgher) Synod held its first meeting in Edinburgh in the house of Adam Gib (g.v.) on April 10, 1747. It grew with considerable rapidity, and in 1788 had ninety-four settled charges in Great Britain and nineteen in Ireland, besides a presbytery in America. For purposes of organization it was formed in that year into four provincial synods, and took the name of “The General Associate Synod.” The “new light” controversies as to the province of the civil magistrate in matters of religion led to the publication of a revised testimony in the “voluntary” sense in 1804, and in consequence M c Crie, the historian of Knox, with three other brethren, withdrew to form the Constitutional Associate Presbytery.

The Associate (Burgher) Synod held its first meeting at Stirling on June 16, 1747. The number of congregations under its charge rapidly increased, and within thirty years there were presbyteries in connexion with it in Ireland and North America, as well as throughout Scotland. In 1782 the American presbyteries took the designation of the Associate Reformed Church in America. About the year 1795 the “voluntary” controversy respecting the power of the civil magistrate in matters of religion arose within this synod also, and a large majority was found to have adopted “new light’’ views. This led in 1799 to the secession of the “Associate Presbytery,” which in 1805 took the designation of the Associate Synod or Original Burgher Synod.

In 1820 the General Associate or Antiburgher Synod (to the number of 129 congregations) united with the 154 congregations of the Associate or Burgher Synod. The body thus constituted, “The United Secession Church,” had increased by 1847 to 400 congregations, the whole of which united in that year with the Relief Synod to form the United Presbyterian Church.

(2) Relief Church.— The Presbytery of Relief was constituted in 1761 by three ministers of the Church of Scotland, one of whom was Thomas Gillespie (ÿ.v.), who had been deposed by the Assembly in 1752 for refusing to take part in the intrusion of unacceptable ministers. The number of congregations under its charge increased with considerable rapidity, and a Relief Synod was formed in 1773, which in 1847 had under its jurisdiction 136 congregations; of these 118 united with the United Secession Church in that year. The Relief Church issued no distinctive “testimonies,” and a certain breadth of view was shown in the formal declaration of their terms of communion, first made in 1773, which allowed occasional communion with those of the Episcopal and Independent persuasion who are “visible saints.” A Relief theological hall was instituted in 1824.

See M i Kerrow, History of the United Secession Church, 1841; Struthers, History of the Relief Church, 1843; Mackelvie, Annals and Statistics of the United Presbyterian Church, 1873.

2. In 1606 James I. formed two companies by a single charter. To one, the London Company, he granted the North-American coast between 34° and 38° N. lat.; to the other, the Plymouth Company, whose membership was more in the west of England, he granted the coast between 41° and 45° N. lat. The intervening coast, between lat. 38° and 41°, or between the Rappahannock and Hudson rivers, was to be common to both, but neither was to plant a settlement within 100 miles of a previous settlement of the other. Each was to be governed by a council appointed by the king, and these councils were to appoint colonial councils of thirteen, with really absolute powers. Neither company did much in colonization: the London Company gave up its charter in 1624, and the Plymouth Company, after a complete change of constitution in 1620, surrendered its charter in 1635. But the London Company at least began the work of colonization, and the Plymouth Company parcelled out its grant to actual colonists. Above all, the charter of the two companies had granted the principle to which the colonists always appealed as the foundation of English colonization in North America, as the condition on which immigrants had entered it, irrevocable unless by mutual consent of crown and subjects: “Also we do, for us, our heirs and successors, declare by these presents that all and every the persons, being our subjects, which shall go and inhabit within the said colony and plantation, and every their children and posterity, which shall happen to be born within any of the limits thereof, shall have and enjoy all liberties, franchises, and immunities of free denizens and natural subjects within any of our other dominions, to all intents and purposes as if they had been abiding and born within this our realm of England, or in any other of our dominions.”

3. The London Company was first in the field. A shipload of the adventurers then swarming in London was sent out under Christopher Newport. He found a fine river, which he named after the king, and on its banks, within the present State of Virginia, he planted the settlement of Jamestown (13th May 1607). Misgovernment, dissension, mismanagement, and starvation were almost too much for the infant colony, and several times the colonists were on the point of giving it up and going home. Twelve years were required to put Virginia on a sound footing. By that time the liberal element in the London Company had got control of it, and granted the colonists a representative government. The year in which this house of burgesses met (1619) was the year in which African slaves were introduced into the colony from a Dutch vessel.

4. Separatists from the Church of England began the more northerly settlements. Driven from England, they found refuge in Holland. Thence returning for the moment to England, a company of 102 of them set sail for America in the “Mayflower,” landing (December 21, 1620) at Plymouth, in the south-eastern part of the present State of Massachusetts. The rigours of a new and cold country, combined with poverty and the payment of interest at 45 per cent., made the early years of the Plymouth colony a desperate struggle for existence, but it survived. It had no special charter, but a licence from the Plymouth Company. Other little towns were founded to the north of this settlement, and in 1629 these were all embraced in a charter given by Charles I. to the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay. This was a Puritan venture, composed of men of higher social grade than the Plymouth Separatists, and was meant to furnish a refuge for those who dreaded the ecclesiastical policy of the crown. The next year the company took the bold step of transferring its organization to America, so as to be out of the immediate notice of the crown and its agents. Eleven vessels took more than a thousand colonists over, and the real colony of Massachusetts was begun.

5. The charter of the London Company was surrendered to the crown, as has been said, in 1624; and the king thereafter disposed of the territory which had been granted to it as he pleased. In 1632 the new colony of Maryland was carved out of it for Lord Baltimore. In 1663 the territory to the south of the present State of Virginia was cut off from it and called Carolina, covering the present States of North and South Carolina and Georgia. In 1729 Carolina was divided into North and South Carolina; and in 1732 the last of the colonies, Georgia, was organized. Five distinct colonies were thus formed out of the original ' London Company’s grant.

6. When the Plymouth Company finally surrendered its charter in 1635, it had made one ineffectual attempt at colonization (1607) near the mouth of the Kennebec river, in Maine, and one complete colony, Massachusetts Bay, had arisen within its territory. Another colony, that of Plymouth, existed by licence. Massachusetts settlers, without even a licence, were pouring into the vacant territory to the south of Massachusetts, there to form the colonies of Connecticut and Rhode Island, afterwards chartered by the crown, 1662 and 1663. A few fishing villages to the north of Massachusetts, established under the grant of John Mason, were the nucleus of the colony of New Hampshire. The present States of Vermont and Maine were not yet organized. Out of the original Plymouth Company’s grant were thus formed the colonies of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire. The name New England was commonly applied to the whole territory from the beginning, having been first used by Captain John Smith in 1614.

7. Nine of the “old thirteen” colonies are thus accounted for. The remaining four fell in the territory between the two main grants, which was to be common to both companies, but was in fact never appropriated by either. The Spaniard had settled contentedly far to the south; and the Frenchman, still bound by too many of the ancient ecclesiastical influences to contest supremacy with the Spaniard, had settled as far to the north as possible, in Canada. England had been so far released from ecclesiastical influences by the spread of the Reformation as to be prepared to contest supremacy with Spaniard, Frenchman, or any one else; but her lingering desires to avoid open conflict at any cheap rate had tended to fix her settlements on the very choicest part of the coast, in the middle latitudes,—a fact which was to colour the whole future history of the continent. The concurrent claims of the two English companies in the central zone seem to have deterred both of them from any attempt to interfere with the development of a colony there by the only other people of western Europe which was prepared to grasp at such an opportunity. The Dutch (1609) sent out Henry Hudson, an Englishman in their service, and he made the first close exploration of this central region. Dutch merchants thereupon set up a trading post at Manhadoes (the present city of New York), where a government under the Dutch West India Company was organized in 1621, when the Dutch states-general had granted the territory to it. The territory was named New Netherland, and the town at the mouth of the Hudson river New Amsterdam. Sweden sent a colony to Delaware Bay in 1638; but the attempt was never thoroughly backed, and in 1655 it was surrendered to the Dutch.

8. By the time of the Restoration in England, the northern and southern English colonies had developed so far that the existence of this alien element between them had come to be a recognized annoyance and danger. From the Hudson river to Maine, from the Savannah river to Delaware Bay, all was English. Roads had been roughly marked out; ships were sailing along the respective coasts as if at home; colonial governments were beginning to lean upon one another for support; but between the two was a territory which might at any moment turn to hostility. There was an evidently growing disposition in New England to attempt the conquest of it unaided. When England and Holland found themselves at war (1664), the opportunity arrived for a blow at Holland’s colonial possessions. An English army and fleet under Colonel Nichols touched at Boston, and, proceeding thence to New Amsterdam, took possession of the whole central territory. It had been granted by the king to his brother, the duke of York, and the province and city were now named New York in honour of the new proprietor. The duke, the same year, granted a part of his territory to Berkeley and Carteret, and the new colony of New Jersey was the result. In 1681 the great parallelogram west of New Jersey was granted to Penn and called Pennsylvania. In the following year Penn bought from the duke of York the little piece of territory which remained united to Pennsylvania until the revolution, then becoming the State of Delaware. The central territory thus furnished four of the “old thirteen” colonies, New England four, and the southern portion five.

9. If there was any governing idea in the organization of the colonial governments, it was of the rudest kind; and in fact each was allowed to be so largely modified by circumstances that, with a general similarity, there was the widest possible divergence. A general division of the colonial governments is into charter, proprietary, and royal governments. The charter governments were Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. In these the colonial governments had charters from the crown, giving the people, or freemen, the right to choose their own governors and other magistrates, to make their own laws, and to interpret and enforce them. Only Connecticut and Rhode Island kept their charters intact. The Massachusetts charter was cancelled by the crown judges (1684) under a quo warranto; and in 1691 a new charter was granted. As it reserved to the crown the appointment of the governor, with an absolute veto on laws and after 1726 on the election of the speaker of the lower house, Massachusetts was thus taken out of the class of purely charter colonies and put into that of a semi-royal colony. The proprietary colonies were New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania (including Delaware), Maryland, Carolina, and Georgia. These were granted to proprietors, who, as inducements to settlers, granted governmental privileges almost as liberal as those of the charter colonies. Only Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland remained proprietary colonies down to the revolution, and in these the governor had a charter right of veto on legislation. Virginia became a royal colony in 1620, and New York as soon as its proprietor became king; and other proprietors, becoming tired of continual quarrels with the colonists, gradually surrendered their grants to the crown. New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, and Georgia had thus become royal colonies before the revolution. In the royal colonies, commonly called provinces, the governors were appointed by the crown, and had an absolute veto on legislation. There were thus at last three proprietary, seven royal, one semiroyal, and two charter colonies.

10. The two charter colonies were simple representative democracies, having the power to legislate without even a practical appeal to the crown, and having no royal governor or agent within their borders. Their systems were the high-water mark to which the desires and claims of the other colonies gradually approached. Massachusetts and the proprietary colonies were very nearly on a level with them; and the royal or proprietary governor’s veto power was rather an annoyance than a fundamental difference. But in all the colonies representative governments had forced their way, and had very early taken a bicameral shape. In the charter colonies and Massachusetts the lower house was chosen by the towns and the upper house from the people at large, and the two houses made up the “assembly.” In Pennsylvania and Delaware there was but one house. In the royal colonies and in Maryland the lower house alone was elected by the people; the upper house, or council, was chosen by the crown through the governor; and the assent of all three elements was essential to legislation. In the final revolution the charter colonies did not change their governments at all; they already had what they wanted. The revolution was consummated in the other colonies by the assumption of power by the lower or popular house, usually known as the “assembly,” the governor or council, or both, being ousted.

ii. All these governmental organizations take a prominent place in American history, and had a strong influence on the ultimate development of the United States; and yet they touched the life of the people at comparatively few points. A more marked and important distinction is in the local organizations of the northern and southern colonies. All the southern colonies began as proprietary governments. Settlers went there as individuals connected only with the colony. To the individual the colony was the great political factor; his only other connexion was with his parish, to which the colony allowed few political functions; and, where political power touched him at all, it was through the colony. In time it became necessary to allow political powers to the parish or county, but they were really more judicial than political. “The southern county was a modified English shire, with the towns left out.” The whole tendency shows the character of the immigration in this part of the country, from English districts outside of the influence of the towns.

12. In New England local organization was quite different. A good example is the town of Dorchester. Organized (March 20, 1630) in Plymouth, England, when its people were on the point of embarkation for America, it took the shape of a distinct town and church before they went on shipboard. Its civil and ecclesiastical organization were complete before they landed in Massachusetts Bay and came under the jurisdiction of a chartered company. Its people governed themselves, in their town government, in all but a few points, in which the colony asserted superiority. As the colony’s claims increased, the town’s dissatisfaction increased. In 1635 the town migrated in a body, with its civil and ecclesiastical organization still intact, into the vacant territory of Connecticut, and there became the town of Windsor. Here, uniting with other towns, which had migrated in a similar fashion, it formed the new Commonwealth of Connecticut, in which the local liberty of the towns was fully secured in the frame of government. Rhode Island was formed in the same way, by separate towns; Vermont afterwards in the same way; and the towns of the parent colony of Massachusetts learned to claim a larger liberty than had been possible at first. Thus, all through New England, the local town organizations came to monopolize almost all ordinary governmental powers; and the counties to which the towns belonged were judicial, not political, units, marking merely the jurisdiction of the sheriff. In the annual town meetings, and in special meetings from time to time, the freemen exercised without any formal grant the powers of self-taxation, of expenditure of taxation, of trial by jury, and of a complete local government. Further, the lower houses of their colonial legislatures were made up of generally equal representations from the towns, while the upper houses were chosen from the colony at large. In this was the germ of the subsequent development of the United States senate, in which the States are equally represented, and of the house of representatives, representing the people numerically (§§ 104, 105, 109, 110).

13. The two opposite systems of the north and south found a field for conflict in the organization of the central territory after its acquisition (§ 8). The crown agents were strongly disposed to follow the more centralized system of the southern colonies, though Penn, having organized counties and restricted his legislature to a single house, based it on the counties. In New York and New Jersey the Dutch system of “patroonships” had left a simulacrum of local independence, and a stronger tendency in the same direction came in through immigration from New England. To encourage this immigration, the New Jersey proprietors gave town powers to many of them; and some of the New Jersey towns were merely transplanted New England towns. But the middle colonies never arrived at any distinct system; at the best, their system was a conglomerate. Much the same result has been reached in the new Western States, organized under the care of the Federal Government, where the New England immigration has brought with it a demand for local self-government which has resulted in a compromise between the two systems of town units and county units.

14. Ecclesiastical divisions w ere at first as strong as civil diversities. The New England colonies were Congregational, and these churches were established and supported by law, except in Rhode Island, where the Baptists were numerically superior. In the royal colonies generally there was a steady disposition to establish the Church of England, and it was more or less successful. In language there were striking dissimilarities, due to a most heterogeneous immigration. It was said that every language of Europe could be found in the colony of Pennsylvania. But, after all, this diversity had no indications of persistence; the immigration in each case had been too small to support itself. Very little of the wonderful increase of American population between 1607 and 1750 was due to immigration; most of it had come from natural increase. After the first outflow from Old to New England, in 1630-31, emigration was checked at first by the changing circumstances of the struggle between the people and the king, and, when the struggle was over, by the better-known difficulties of life in the colonies. Franklin, in 1751, when he estimated that there were “near a million English souls” in the colonies, thought that scarce eighty thousand had been brought over by sea. No matter how diverse the small immigration might have been on its arrival, there was a steady pressure on its descendants to turn them into Englishmen; and it was very successful. When Whitefield, the revivalist, visited America about 1740, he found the population sufficiently homogeneous for his preaching to take effect, all the way from Georgia to New England. The same tendency shows itself in the complete freedom of intercolonial migration. Men went from one colony to another, or held estates, or took inheritances in different colonies, without the slightest notion that they were under any essentially diverse political conditions. The whole coast, from Nova Scotia to the Spanish possessions in Florida, was one in all essential circumstances; and there was only the need of some sudden shock to crystallize it into a real political unity. Hardly anything in history is more impressive than this mustering of Englishmen on the Atlantic coast of North America, their organization of natural and simple governments, and their preparations for the final march of 3000 miles westward, unless it be the utter ignorance of the home Government and people that any such process was going on.

15. This ignorance had one singular effect in completing: the difference between the new and the old country. An ' odd belief that European plants and animals degenerated in size and quality on transplantation...