Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/264

252 form of institution, and sentiments not then translated into conscious thought. These represented man's natural instinct of progress and the momentum he had gained in history; they were to become institutions and facts in future time.

When the Puritan founded his colonies in New England, there were other Anglo-Saxon settlements on the Atlantic coast. Jamestown was founded in 1607. Other settlements followed. The same Anglo-Saxon blood flowed South as well as North; the same traditions and institutions were with both. But the Anglo-Saxons North brought institutions, ideas, and feelings quite unlike those of their Southern fellows. The motive for immigrating was altogether unlike. New England was a religious colony,—mainly composed of persecuted men who fled Westward because they had ideas which could not be set up in the Eastern world. Thrice the May-flower crossed the sea, coming to Plymouth, to Salem, to Boston; each time bringing veritable pilgrims who came from a religious motive, and sought religious ends. This was likewise the case with the primitive settlers of Pennsylvania. The South was not settled by religious colonies. The primitive difference in the seed has continually appeared in the growth thence accruing; in the policy and the character of the South and North. The same year which brought the Puritan Pilgrims to New England bore a quite different freight to Virginia. In 1620, a Dutch captain carried thither some twenty Africans who were sold as slaves into perpetual bondage—themselves and their children. Thus the old sin of Egypt, half omitted and half forgotten in classic and mediæval times, rediscovered by the Spaniards, and fixed by despots—a loathly plague-spot—on the tropic regions of America, was brought North, adopted by the Anglo-Saxons of the South, and set a going at Jamestown. It excited no astonishment. All the "Christian" world then sold prisoners of war for slaves. Thus early did Negro Slavery become an "institution" of the South.

But all things are double: in the Anglo-Saxon North there were two contending elements. One represented old institutions, and wished to stop therewith. It loved despotocracy in the family, aristocracy in the community, monarchy in the State, and theocracy in the Church: it