While the English were thus engaged in establishing themselves on the coast, the French girt them in by a strategic circle of forts and trading posts reaching from Acadia, up the St. Lawrence, around the Great Lakes, and down the valley of the Mississippi, with outposts on the Ohio and other important confluents.  When, after the final struggle between France and Britain for world empire, France retired from the North American continent, she left to England all her possessions east of the Mississippi, with the exception of a few insignificant islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the West Indies; and to Spain she ceded New Orleans and her vast claims beyond the great river.

Thus from the first, the lure of the New World beckoned to many races, and to every condition of men.  By the time that England’s dominion spread over half the northern continent, her colonies were no longer merely English.  They were the most cosmopolitan areas in the world.  A few European cities had at times been cities of refuge, but New York and Philadelphia were more than mere temporary shelters to every creed.  Nowhere else could so many tongues be heard as in a stroll down Broadway to the Battery.  No European commonwealths embraced in their citizenry one-half the ethnic diversity of the Carolinas or of Pennsylvania.  And within the wide range of his American domains, the English King could point to one spot or another and say:  “Here the Spaniards have built a chaste and beautiful mission; here the French have founded a noble city; here my stubborn Roundheads have planted a whole nest of commonwealths; here my Dutch neighbors thought they stole a march on me, but I forestalled them; this valley is filled with Germans, and that plateau is covered with Scotch-Irish, while the Swedes have taken possession of all this region.”  And with a proud gesture he could add, “But everywhere they read their laws in the King’s English and acknowledge my sovereignty.”

Against the shifting background of history these many races of diverse origin played their individual parts, each contributing its essential characteristics to the growing complex of a new order of society in America.  So on this stage, broad as the western world, we see these men of different strains subduing a wilderness and welding its diverse parts into a great nation, stretching out the eager hand of exploration for yet more land, bringing with arduous toil the ample gifts of sea and forest to the townsfolk, hewing out homesteads in the savage wilderness, laboring faithfully at forge and shipyard and loom, bartering in the market place, putting the fear of God into their children and the fear of their own strong right arm into him whosoever sought to oppress them, be he Red Man with his tomahawk or English King with his Stamp Act.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  In 1773 and 1774 over thirty thousand came.  In the latter year Benjamin Franklin estimated the population of Pennsylvania at 350,000, of which number one-third was thought to be Scotch-Irish.  John Fiske states that half a million, all told, arrived in the colonies before 1776, “making not less than one-sixth part of our population at the time of the Revolution.”]