"To be unacquainted with the events which have taken place before you were born, is to continue to live in childish ignorance; for where is the value of human life, unless memory enables us to compare the events of our own times with those of ages long gone by."-Cicero. [ENTERED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1843, by WILLIAM GOODMAN, in the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New York.] To The People of the UNITED STATES These Pages are respectfully DEDICATED, Exhibiting to them the Social Condition of their Patriotic Forefathers at the Time of their first Emigration, P R E F A СЕ. "IT is characteristic of the noblest natures and the finest imagination to love to explore the vestiges of antiquity."-EUSTACE. THE desire of possessing some knowledge of the events that have preceded us, of the places of our nativity, or which contain the sepulchres of our forefathers, seems to be one of the most universal feelings of our nature. The author of "The Last Days of Pompeii" beautifully writes: "We love to feel within us the bond which unites the most distant eras. Men, nations, customs perish; the affections are immortal! they are the sympathies which unite the ceaseless generations: the past lives; when we look upon its emotions, it lives in our own. It is the magician's gift, that revives the dead, that animates the dust of forgotten graves. This is not the author's skill; it is in the heart of the reader." The only people whose origin is known are the Jews, their history being handed down to us by Holy Writ. No country in Europe can prove a strict succession for many ages. The design of this work is to exhibit to the American reader, in a concise form, the manners, the customs, and the social condition of the people by whom this country was, for the most part, colonized: for, as Dr. Johnson observes, "Books that you may carry to the fire and hold steadily in hand, are the most useful after all. A reader will often look at them and be tempted to go on, when he would have been frightened at books of a larger size and of a more erudite appearance." As the Of the twenty-seven states which now form this confederacy, thirteen were originally peopled from Great Britain.* English language is spoken all over it, it must be highly useful for the public to know the social condition of that people at the period of its first settlement. Those who did not emigrate from those islands will find information which they cannot otherwise obtain, and thereby an insight into the habits and manners of the English nation, which at present may appear to them unaccountable. It appears to be the most important period of any to the * A table of the settlement of the States of the U. S. will be found in the Appendix, p. 311. |