CHAPTER IV.

THE NEW ENGLAND CONFEDERACY.

The Puritan exodus to New England, which came to an end about 1640, was purely and exclusively English.  There was nothing in it that came from the continent of Europe, nothing that was either Irish or Scotch, very little that was Welsh.  As Palfrey says, the population of 26,000 that had been planted in New England by 1640 “thenceforward continued to multiply on its own soil for a century and a half, in remarkable seclusion from other communities.”  During the whole of this period New England received but few immigrants; and it was not until after the Revolutionary War that its people had fairly started on their westward march into the state of New York and beyond, until now, after yet another century, we find some of their descendants dwelling in a homelike Salem and a Portland of charming beauty on the Pacific coast.  Three times between the meeting of the Long Parliament and the meeting of the Continental Congress did the New England colonies receive a slight infusion of non-English blood.  In 1652, after his victories at Dunbar and Worcester, Cromwell sent 270 of his Scottish prisoners to Boston, where the descendants of some of them still dwell.  After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, 150 families of Huguenots came to Massachusetts.  And finally in 1719, 120 Presbyterian families came over from the north of Ireland, and settled at Londonderry in New Hampshire, and elsewhere.  In view of these facts it may be said that there is not a county in England of which the population is more purely English than the population of New England at the end of the eighteenth century.  From long and careful research, Mr. Savage, the highest authority on this subject, concludes that more than 98 in 100 of the New England people at that time could trace their origin to England in the narrowest sense, excluding even Wales.  As already observed, every English shire contributed something to the emigration, but there was a marked preponderance of people from the East Anglian counties. [Sidenote:  The exodus was purely English]

The population of New England was nearly as homogeneous in social condition as it was in blood.  The emigration was preeminent for its respectability.  Like the best part of the emigration to Virginia, it consisted largely of country squires and yeomen.  The men who followed Winthrop were thrifty and prosperous in their old homes from which their devotion to an idea made them voluntary exiles.  They attached so much importance to regular industry and decorous behaviour that for a long time the needy and shiftless people who usually make trouble in new colonies were not tolerated among them.  Hence the early history of New England is remarkably free from those scenes of violence and disorder which have so often made hideous the first years of new communities.  Of negro slaves there were very few, and these were employed