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.The great estates along the Hudson, ownedby men like Van Rensselaer, a descendant of the old Dutch patroon, or Phillipse and Courtland andLivingston, who had profited by the lavish grants of early English governors, rivaled in extent the plantationsof Virginia; and like the planters of South Carolina their owners were often engaged in commerce, and wereconnected, through business or marriage, with the wealthy merchant families of New York City--the VanDams, Crugers, Waltons, and Ludlows.Elsewhere in America there were not, as in these provinces, great estates ranging from two hundred thousandto more than a million acres.But the thrifty Quakers of eastern Pennsylvania, engaging in less extensiveenterprises, were less often in debt than the planters of the South, and no less shrewd at a bargain than theDutch merchants of New York.Possessed of the best land in the province, or engaged at Philadelphia in theexport of provisions to the West Indies, they built up many respectable estates among them, and by effectiveorganization the leaders of the sect controlled the colony for many decades in the interest of aQuaker-merchant aristocracy inhabiting the three eastern counties of the province.And even in New Englandmaterial interests were transforming the structure of society.Slave-owning planters of Newport nowdominated the little colony which Roger Williams had established as an experiment in democracy and soulliberty.Boston shared with New York and Philadelphia the export of provisions with which the farms of theMiddle and Northern colonies supplied the West Indies.It was the chief center of the New England fisheries.Shipbuilding was there, as at Newport, a great industry; and there, as at Newport, rum was extensivelydistilled from molasses procured in the sugar islands.The vessels of Boston and Newport merchants, loadedwith rum and fish and tropical products, traded in many European ports, in the Azores, or on the Africancoast, returning with wine and slaves and every kind of English manufacture.In this material atmosphere theold Puritan spirit was being strangely subdued to the stuff it worked in.Wealth and shrewdness were moreeffective than orthodoxy in achieving social and political eminence.A few names familiar to the seventeenthcentury are still to be met with in high places--Sewall, Dudley, Quincy, Hutchinson; but in the middle of theeighteenth century the names of repute in the Old Bay colony are mostly new--Oliver, Bowdoin, Boylston,Cooper, Phillips, Cushing, Thatcher; names rescued from obscurity by men who had won distinction in thepulpit or at the bar, or by men who had made money in trade, and whose descendants, marrying with the oldclerical or official families, had pushed their way, in the second or third generation, into the social andpolitical aristocracy of the province.Such were the "men of considerable estates" in whose hands the English Government was generally wellcontent to leave the control of colonial politics; and as they were the men who profited most by the connectionwith England, they were the men whose outlook upon the world was least provincial and most European.Planters and merchants of the South, exporting their staples directly to England, were in constantcommunication with their London agents.Business or politics had taken many of them more than once acrossthe ocean.Not a few had been sent in their youth to be educated in England; and had resided there for someyears, forming acquaintance with prominent English families, listening to debates in the Commons or toarguments in the courts of law, diverting themselves in theaters and coffee-houses, acquiring the latest modesand mannerisms, moulding themselves upon some favorite model of a city magnate or country gentleman.Inthe Northern colonies, trade relations with England were less direct.Business rarely called the merchant toEurope; and Yale or Harvard was regarded as a satisfactory substitute for Oxford or Cambridge
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