Page:Augustine Herrman, beginner of the Virginia tobacco trade, merchant of New Amsterdam and first lord of Bohemia manor in Maryland (1941).djvu/139



Over three hundred years have passed since Augustine Herrman came to this country. His name is identified with a half dozen or more of the original American states. He was among the foremost men in at least two of them. His influence was felt over the rest. Ten years after his death his name passed into oblivion, to remain buried for well nigh one hundred seventy years. But during all those years we in America have been gaining sufficient leisure so that we have ample time to look over the past and remove the dust from the old colonial archives and take a look at the early makers of the nation. For the past fifty years we have been printing and arranging the colonial records and the official documents and out of these grim and dusty manuscripts are emerging the old heroes of three centuries ago.

Probably we Americans are more or less ignorant of the history of our nation. Most of us have a fairly good idea of what happened after the American Revolution, but enough of us do not appreciate the fact that American history began as many years before 1776 as have passed since the adoption of the federal constitution.

The seventeenth century is the period of the dark ages of the history of the United States. But to the world, as society was organized then, that century was something far different. As the sixteenth century was an era of discovery and exploration, the seventeenth was a century of colonization and settlement. This colonization can be well divided into two phases.