[Footnote 1:  From an old loom in the National Museum, Washington.]

[Illustration:  Colonial mansion in Charleston]

Travel between the large towns was almost entirely by sailing vessel, or on horseback.  The first stagecoach-and-four in New England began its trips in 1744.  The first stage between New York and Philadelphia was not set up till 1756, and spent three days on the road.

%97.  The Three Groups of Colonies.%—­It has always been usual to arrange the colonies in three groups:  1.  The Eastern or New England Colonies (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut). 2.  The Middle Colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware). 3.  The Southern Colonies (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia).  Now, this arrangement is good not only from a geographical point of view, but also because the people, the customs, the manners, the occupations, in each of these groups were very unlike the people and the ways of living in the others.

[Illustration:  New England mansion]

%98.  Occupations in New England.%—­In New England the colonists were almost entirely English, though there were some Scotch, some Scotch-Irish, a few Huguenot refugees from France, and, in Rhode Island, a few Portuguese Jews.  As the climate and soil did not admit of raising any great staple, such as rice or tobacco, the people “took to the sea.”  They cut down trees, with which the land was covered, built ships, and sailed away to the Grand Banks off Newfoundland for cod, and to the whale fisheries for oil.  They went to the English, Dutch, and Spanish West Indian Islands, with flour, salt meat, horses, oxen; with salted salmon, cod, and mackerel; with staves for barrels; with onions and salted oysters.  In return, they came back with sugar, molasses, cotton, wool, logwood, and Spanish dollars with which the New England Colonies paid for the goods they took from England.  They went to Spain, where their ships were often sold, the captains chartering English vessels and coming home with cargoes of goods made in England.  Six hundred ships are said to have been employed in the foreign trade of Boston, and more than a thousand in the fisheries and the trade along the coast.

[Illustration:  Dutch House at Albany[1]]

[Footnote 1:  From an old print.]

Farming, outside of Connecticut, yielded little more than a bare subsistence.  Manufactures in general were forbidden by English law.  Paper and hats were made in small quantities, leather was tanned, lumber was sawed, and rum was distilled from molasses; but it was on homemade manufactures that the people depended.

%99.  Occupations in the Middle Colonies.%—­In the Middle Colonies the population was a mixture of people from many European countries.  The line of little villages which began at the west end of Long Island and stretched up the Hudson to Albany, and out the Mohawk to Schenectady—–­the settled part of New York—­contained Englishmen, Irishmen, Dutchmen, French Huguenots, Germans from the Rhine countries, and negroes from Africa.  The chief occupations of those people were farming, making flour, and carrying on an extensive commerce with England, Spain, and the West Indian Islands.