File:Our first century (1905) (14597027638).jpg

Identifier: ourfirstcentury00eggl (find matches)
Title: Our first century
Year: 1905 (1900s)
Authors: Eggleston, George Cary, 1839-1911
Subjects: United States -- Social life and customs To 1775
Publisher: New York, A.S. Barnes & Company
Contributing Library: New York Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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when these had to cross streams theywere taken apart and packed in small boats, in which thepassengers were ferried, leading their swimming horsesalong the side of the boat. But so far as the recordsshow there were no wheeled vehicles of any kind in NewEngland until near the end of the first century and nostately carriages of the kind then called coaches, untilthe eighteenth century was well advanced. When mentravelled, at an earlier time, they walked, rode on horse-back, or went about in boats. The people who settled Massachusetts were mainlyplain men and women belonging to what was known asthe lower middle class in England. But in the Massa-chusetts Bay colony there were many men of the bettersort—men of brains and character who were destined tofound there some of the most distinguished families ofAmerica. There were among them none of those off-scourings of English society who constituted so large aproportion of the very earliest Virginia colonists. FIRST NEW ENGLAND COLONIES 79
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80 OUR FIRST CENTURY These people upon establishing themselves in the NewWorld set to work to meet conditions as they found them,and little by little to better themselves. The church waseverywhere dominant and the Puritan church had a habitof enforcing its edicts in every house and upon everyfamily. The young people were held rigidly in leashand were brought up in the nurture and admonition ofthe Lord. All conduct on the part of the old andyoung, men and women alike, was subject to clericalcriticism and, upon occasion, to churchly discipline. These people had come out to the New World insearch of liberty of conscience. But they had not learnedfrom their own sufferings under persecution to deal gen-erously with those who differed with them in religiousopinion. They made severe laws for the repressionof all who might undertake to teach other doctrinesthan those of the accepted faith. When at last a number of Friends, or Quakers, settledin Massachusetts and undertook to teach their doctr

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