of the great conflict about slavery. In the War of Secession the South, true to its English instinctat least the lower South and its Eastern Virginia ancestry — defended its conception of local rights, fought for the old order and against the new. The splendid heroism of the Southern actors in that mighty drama, of whom Lee, a man of English race, was chief, is the principal legacy of that time to this. During the years of national prominence the pioneer impulse had not been wanting in the lower South; it was but a repetition of that restless Saxon longing for new lands which drove Washington on his early journeys westward, and which in the closing years of the Eighteenth century sent long trains of emigrants across the Alleghanies and down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Before the adventurous men of the lower South stretched the vast, virtually unexplored regions to the west and southwest, while to the south were the Latin-American states with their reputed wealth, and to the southeast the Florida peninsula, and not far beyond the Island of Cuba. All the inherited race-tendencies of the Southern people urged them to explore and to possess these inviting lands. It was entirely natural, therefore, that they should try to annex Texas and Cuba. They did annex Texas and they fought Mexico, for both the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War were mainly the doing of Southern leaders. They did not annex Cuba; but when in 1898 President McKinley called for men to free Cuba from the Spaniard, these same Englishdescended Southerners, distant kinsmen of Raleigh and Nathaniel Bacon, such as Fitzhugh Lee and Joseph Wheeler, promptly responded and chivalrously succored an oppressed people.

The opening of the Golden Gate on the California coast about the middle of the century invited still

further westward the land- and gold-hungry men of the South. On across Arkansas and Texas, following in the tracks of Bowie and Travis and Crockett and Houston made years before, went wagonload after wagonload of emigrants. They opened the way for a steady march of pioneers across the plains bent on possessing a new promised land. Here they met streams from the northeast and from the adjacent west, and here the wandering New Englander met his Southern kinsman and both made themselves at home. Thus, steadily the British peoples of the South have made their way over all the southwestern country. They have developed that vast region into the territories of Arizona, New Mexico, and the state of Oklahoma, once the lands of a Spanish people. At last the imperial dreams of the makers of Elizabethan land-granting charters have been realized: the English colonies have indeed stretched themselves "up into the land from sea to sea."

BIBLIOGRAPHY.-Brown, A.: Genesis of the United States; Brown, W. G.: The Lower South in Am. History; Bruce: Economic History of Virginia; Channing: Town and County Government; Cooke: Virginia (and other state histories in American Commonwealths Series); Doyle: English Colonies in America; Eggleston: Beginners of a Nation; Fisher: Men, Women and Manners in Colonial Times; Fiske: Old Virginia and Her Neighbors and Critical Period of American History; Hart: Formation of the Union and American History Told by Contemporaries; Lodge: Short History of the English Colonies in America; Neill: English Colonization of America; Osgood: American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century; Roosevelt: The Winning of the West; Thwaites: The Colonies (1492-1750); Tyler: English in America; Wilson: Division and Reunion; Winsor: Narrative and Critical History; Publications of the Historical Societies of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and South Carolina.

JOHN CALVIN METCALF,

Professor of English, Richmond College.

CHAPTER II.

THE FRENCH IN THE SOUTH.

History.

HE first Frenchmen that we see in what is now the southern part of the United States are the men whom the great Admiral Coligny sent to Florida to found a colony where the French Protestants might practice their religion without being molested. The leader of the expedition was Jean Ribaut, and on May 1, 1562, his men landed from two ships at the mouth of a river which they called May, and which is now the St. John's in Florida. After taking possession of the country in the name of the king of France Ribaut continued his exploration, and on the coast of South Carolina built Charlesfort. He then sailed for France, leaving in the fort a small garrison which soon quarreled among themselves, murdered their commander and returned to Europe in a small boat which they had built.

Meanwhile Coligny had fitted three ships to bring relief to Ribaut's colonists, and the expedition, commanded by René de Laudonnière, sailed from Havre in April, 1564. They reached the mouth of the River of May or St. John's, and built a fort six miles from the sea, which they named La Caroline. The settlers, however, disagreed and neglected to cultivate the soil, and were reduced to such misery that Laudonnière was preparing to return to Europe, when in 1565 the famous buccaneer, John Hawkins, arrived at La Caroline. He offered to take back to France all the colonists, but Laudonnière did not accept his offer, and buying one of the

ships of Hawkins, decided to remain at his post. Relief soon came from France with seven ships under the command of Jean Ribaut, and the colony might have prospered had it not been attacked by the Spaniards. The latter considered that Florida belonged to them by right of discovery and resolved to destroy the French settlement. This was done in September, 1565, by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who arrived off the coast of Florida five days after Ribaut had reached La Caroline. The French fleet was dispersed by a storm, the fort was captured, its defenders were put to the sword, and Ribaut and his shipwrecked followers were ruthlessly put to death by Menéndez. The Spanish commander had spared the women and children in the fort, and some of the French had succeeded in escaping. The fact that the French colonists were Protestants doubtless made Menéndez more severe in his treatment of them. In that age of religious intolerance many crimes were committed in the name of the religion of the gentle Christ. It is said that in 1568 Dominique de Gourges, a French Catholic nobleman, fitted an expedition to avenge his countrymen, captured La Caroline and put to death the Spanish garrison, "not as Spaniards, but as traitors, robbers and murderers." Coligny had not succeeded any better in Florida than he had done in Brazil in 1555.

French Huguenots.

The terrible religious wars of the Sixteenth century came to an end when Henry of Navarre established securely his power as king of France, and granted, in 1598, the Edict of Nantes which gave religious freedom to the Protestants. The latter were attacked by Richelieu, during the reign of Louis XIII., as a political party, but were not persecuted for their religion. Louis XIV., however, de

stroyed the great work of his grandfather, Henry IV., when he revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685. A great many Protestants filed from France at that time, and a considerable number had left their country before 1685, in order to escape from the vexations and even persecutions to which they were subjected. From England many Huguenots came to America, settling in the South, principally at Charleston in South Carolina, although 700 established, in 1700, a settlement in Virginia, at a place which they called Manakinton, a short distance from Richmond. They were given 10,000 acres on the lands of the extinct Manakin tribe of Indians. Their leader was the Marquis de la Muce. There were also a few Huguenots who settled in Florida at that time, and others in Maryland.

The descendants of the French Protestants in the North and in the South of the present United States were, many of them, distinguished men, such as Francis Marion, Colonel Huger, and Legaré, of South Carolina; Marion, the gallant soldier of the Revolution; Huger, the devoted friend of Lafayette, and Legaré (French L'Egaré), an eminent man of letters and statesman. Many other distinguished families in the South might be mentioned, in whose veins flows the blood of the French Huguenots of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. Indeed, in regard to ability, the descendants of the French in America rank very high, and Senator Lodge, quoted by Mr. Rosengarten in his French Colonists and Exiles in America, says: "If we add the French and the French Huguenots together, we find that the people of French blood exceed absolutely, in the ability produced, all the other races represented in Appleton's Encyclopedia of American Biography, except the English and Scotch-Irish, and show a