ORIGINAL TERRITORY OF THE UNITED STATES 75 



his hardy Swedes to the Delaware peninsula. The French went 

 fishing off the foggy coasts of Newfoundland, claimed the gulf 

 and river of St Lawrence for their King, and built their rude 

 huts amid the snows of Acadia. The English settlements were 

 small and feeble communities, trembling between the sea and 

 the wilderness. There is something sublime in the spectacle of 

 this great unexplored continent, guarding the rich treasures of 

 its vast interior by grim sentinels of gloomy forest, confronting 

 with a frown that narrow, halting strip of civilization, whose 

 frail forces, in spite of early poverty and weakness, were destined 

 to become its imperious master. For a hundred years it seemed 

 a most unequal contest. A handful of log-houses clustered about 

 the fortified church, a few acres of cultivated land not far away, 

 little groups of coarsely clad human figures laboring in the fields 

 with rifles near at hand, the infrequent arrival of a storm-beaten 

 ship — these were the only signs of the coming transformation 

 which for generations met the sharp glance of the stealthy savage 

 as he crept to the edge of the forest to observe the course of the 

 white man's life. 



The map of the Atlantic slope in 1640 4 reveals the cramped 

 and perilous condition of the English colonies. Considered as 

 a group, they were wholly inclosed between French territory on 

 the one side and the sea on the other. Beginning with Acadia 

 on the north, the French pressed upon the western limits of New 

 England until their frontiers met those of the Dutch ; then 

 sweeping around the home of the powerful Iroquois Indians, 

 who occupied the greater part of what is now the State of New 

 York, New France, following the line of the Alleghanies, hemmed 

 in all the seaboard settlements, cutting them off from the West, 

 and stretching along the whole western boundary of Virginia 

 until it ended in French Florida, covering the present states of 

 South Carolina and Georgia, beyond which lay Spanish Florida 

 and the Gulf of Mexico. While France thus stood as a barrier 

 to the further penetration of the continent by the English, leav- 

 ing them onlya slender strip of coast, the Dutch andtheSwedes 

 effectually separated the northern and southern colonies from 

 each other. To crown all, the Indians, affiliated with the French, 

 who fraternized and mingled freely with them, were a constant 

 menace to the safety of the English settlements, and furnished 

 a savage band of mercenaries for advancing the ambitious 

 schemes of France. 



1 See map "i National Claims t<> the Atlantic Slope in 1640. 



