Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Volume 17, No. 098, February, 1876 by Various
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page 9 of 273 (03%)
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Bloody Ground must wait. For its tillage other guess implements than
the plough were preparing--the same that beckoned him to Cambridge and the new century. The slender driblet of population which at this juncture flowed toward the Lower Mississippi was due to the anxiety of Spain to get a home-supply of wheat, hemp and such-like indispensables of temperate extraction for her broad tropical empire. A newspaper of August 20, 1773 gives news from New York of the arrival at that port of "the sloop Mississippi, Capt. Goodrich, with the Connecticut Military Adventurers from the Mississippi, but last from Pensacola, the 16th inst." They had "laid out twenty-three townships at the Natchez," where lands were in process of rapid occupation, the arrivals numbering "above four hundred families within six weeks, down the Ohio from Virginia and the Carolinas." The Connecticut men doubtless came back prepared, a little later, to vindicate their martial cognomen; and to aid them in that they were met by Transatlantic recruits in unusual force. The same journal mentions the arrival at Philadelphia of 1050 passengers in two ships from Londonderry; this valuable infusion of Scotch-Irish brawn, moral, mental and muscular, being farther supplemented by three hundred passengers and servants in the ship Walworth from the same port for South Carolina. The cash value to the country of immigrants was ascertainable by a much less circuitous computation then than now; many of them being indentured for a term of years at an annual rate that left a very fair sum for interest and sinking fund on the one thousand dollars it is the practice of our political economist of to-day to clap on each head that files into Castle Garden. The German came with the Celt in almost equal force--enough to more than balance their countrymen under Donop, Riedesel and Knyphausen. The attention drawn to the colonies by the |
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