CHAPTER III

FORCES WHICH MADE PEORIA AND THE MATERIAL OF WHICH IT WAS MADE

"I beg pardon, once and for all, of those readers who take up 'history' merely for amusement, for plaguing them so long with old fashioned politics, and Whig and Tory, and Hanoverians and Jacobites. The truth is, I cannot promise them that this story shall be intelligible, not to say probable, without it." -Sir Walter Scott.

There prevailed in Europe in the days of Le Grand Monarque and the great protector, about the middle of the seventeenth century, many fundamental principles and ideas influencing society, ecclesiastical and civil, which were strenuously contending with each other for supremacy. These warring elements prompted and controlled the discovery and settlement of North America and influenced our development, determining the character and progress of our people and being still effective in the shaping of our institutions, our laws, and our civilization. The predominance of some of them in North America and their former suppression in South America have made the difference that exists to-day between the people, the laws, the civilization and progress, the happiness and glory of these two continents. Our southern sister republics are now making great advances and for several decades have been but this has come about largely through their efforts to follow our example and because they have been under the shadow of our flag. In all probability there would not be a republic there to-day if the United States had not demonstrated the proposition that a government of the people, by the people and for the people can live, at least for a hundred years and more.

The colonies in South America were a hundred years old at the inception of those in North America. This was perhaps a disadvantage to them for they were begun at a time when civil and religious liberty were little understood anywhere in the whole world, and they were controlled by Spain and other nations which in these respects were the least progressive of all church and state were allied and autocratic; and the greatest ambition of the people was the acquisition of gold. Only one party was allowed in Spain, the leaders being selfish, corrupt and tyrannical while the working people were little better than serfs or beasts of the plow.

On the other hand when our continent was colonized personal liberty, especially the liberty of the mind, had begun to be developed; men were beginning to pursue their own way of thinking and to express their opinions freely and publicly and the plain working people were more respected through all Europe. In England at this time four great classes of fundamental principles of government were at work each represented by a political party and each favoring and favored by some special religious faith and form of church government. The churches differed from each other as much in their form of government as in their creeds and each endeavored to have the civil government brought as nearly as possible to the rules and forms under which it controlled its ecclesiastical matters. The Independents carried their radical democratic principles not only into matters of church but into matters of state as well. The Presbyte

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rians were in both respects more conservative and stood for the principles of representative republican government. Then there was the established Episcopal Church with its prelates and bishops, its hierarchy in church and its specially favored nobility and gentry, its primogeniture and entailed estates. The fourth party was that of the Roman Catholics, a powerful element in the state. Charles II was a professional member of the Episcopal Church but in his heart he was a sympathizer and lover of the Roman Catholic Church and died in its confession. His brother and heir apparent to the succession was an open and pronounced Roman Catholic and when he came to the throne, lived on a pension from Louis XIV the grand master of absolutism. The kings of France and England both believe in the right of kings to rule absolutely by divine appointment and without the consent of the people. Fortunately no one of these four principal political parties had the uncontrolled power for any great length of time.

In France, under Louis XIV, the last of these four principles of absolutism held full sway. The church and state were absolutely allied and thoroughly autocratic, and the king allowed no opposition to his own views or wishes. He surrounded himself with able men who merely executed his will and whose highest aim was to increase and spread abroad the glory of the king. Colbert, his great promoter of French industry, manufactures and trade, and his generals Turenne, Conde and Vaban surpassed the statesmen and soldiers of all other countries while Louis himself was pre-eminently able, efficient, and accomplished among the kings and princes of his time which he rendered the most illustrious in the French annals. He caused the court of Versailles to be everywhere admired as the model of taste, refinement and distinction but he sought nothing but the gratification of his own selfishness and love of pleasure, his pride and desire of renown and splendor. His reign became the grave of freedom, of morals, of firmness of character, and of manly sentiment. Court favor was the end of every effort of his subjects and flattery the surest means of reaching it. Virtue and merit met with little acknowledgment. He built up the glory and magnificence of his own age and nation while he destroyed the only sure and permanent foundations of government. Without the free power in the people to conscientiously criticize superiors with impunity, no country can be progressive and enduring. Louis permitted nothing of the kind in either · church or state. Without power in the citizen to act according to his own individual judgment and on his own initiative, controlled only by necessary and equitable laws and his own conscience undominated by the dictation of autocratic superiors, no people can be intelligent, progressive, courageous, strong or safe. This power in either church or state, Louis completely crushed out in his kingdom. The magnificent centralization of wealth and splendor in his time ended after a few generations in a terrible downfall and the horrors of the French revolution and Louis and his wrong principles were responsible for it. There was only one clause in the constitution of France and that was made by the king himself. It reads thus, "The State, I am the State."

Spain too was a monarchy under the absolute control of the Catholic Church. There were other feebler nations that made settlements in what is now the territory of the United States. But the three great kingdoms of EuropeSpain, England and France-were almost equal in strength, and for hundreds of years it was the policy of European nations to preserve, if possible, the balance of power.

At the time the history of Peoria begins, from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Pole, there were very few European settlements situated more than ten miles distant from a port accessible to ocean vessels and these were small and insignificant.

Florida was held by the Spaniards. St. Augustine is the oldest settlement in the United States. It was and is a walled town, founded in 1565 by Spaniards. Possibly Santa Fe, New Mexico, also Spanish, was the next. French Calvinists, under the patronage of Admiral Coligny, had made a settlement a short time

before at St. John in Florida, but the Spanish navy ruthlessly destroyed the place, murdering the women and children and making slaves of the men whom they did not murder. These people were destroyed because they were Protes

tants.

Meanwhile the English were planting enduring colonies. The Dutch had settled in New York and the Swedes in Delaware but their control was of short duration. Except for these little colonies, which were soon absorbed by the English, the Atlantic coast was settled from Florida to Canada under the auspices and protection of the English government. However, the colonies differed greatly in character. Each one of the four parties of England was specially interested in its own particular colony and the people of each colony partook of the characteristic of the party, church or sect which colonized it.

New England was colonized by the Independents. They were divided into different sects and were not always tolerant of each other, but they did not differ greatly in the character of their people or even in important matters of creed or of ecclesiastical and civil government.

The Dutch colony of New York (New Amsterdam) soon passed into the control of the Duke of York, a Roman Catholic, but all religions were tolerated and most were to be found there.

Pennsylvania belonged to a Quaker and Quakers predominated there; but it also contained many Presbyterians and men of other sects, all of whom enjoyed religious liberty.

New Jersey and Delaware were settled partly by Swedes and Quakers and largely by Presbyterians.

Maryland belonged to a Roman Catholic proprietor but although thus owned and governed the majority of the people were Protestants from a very early day. Religious liberty prevailed there until 1692 when it passed for a short time under the control of the Episcopalians.

The leading Virginians were from the beginning lovers and imitators of the English gentry. They loved the English Episcopal Church, which was the established church until after the beginning of the Revolutionary War, and it was rather intolerant in the lower counties, nevertheless the Virginians were always strong and valiant defenders of liberty. For business reasons, the Lutherans were tolerated by special statute at an early date; and the valleys of the Shenandoah and Holston rivers were first settled by the Scotch and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, whom Gov. Gooch sought to introduce, on account of their heroic fighting qualities, as a defense against the Shawnees, Cherokees, and other warlike Indians promising that they should be allowed to enjoy their own religion in their own way. There were also some Dutch immigrants who were Protestant dissenters. It will be seen in another chapter that Virginia was really Illinois' mother country.

Neither of the Carolinas nor Georgia was sufficiently settled before the middle of the seventeenth century to make it an appreciable element in early colonial life or politics.

At the time of the discovery of Illinois, there were probably 150,000 white people settled on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean within the present territory of the United States; to the west of them in a territory bounded by the great lakes, the Mississippi river, and the Gulf of Mexico, there were approximately an equal number of Indians (150,000). Probably Plymouth had 6,500 whites; Connecticut, 13,000; Massachusetts, 19,000; Maine, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island had about 3,500 each; New York, 18,000; Virginia about 42,000; Maryland probably 16,000; Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware possibly 6,000; the Carolinas and Georgia together, 7,000.

We have given this review of the condition of the eastern colonies because they were at that time establishing and developing those great principles of civil and religious liberty upon which they united and formed of themselves a great nation which from the days of George Rogers Clark and his Virginians