The Crimson Bookshelf

COUNTLESS tomes have been published and are still being written eulogizing the courage, character, and pioneer spirit of our colonial ancestors, books which to many are dull accounts of uninteresting trials on the barren Atlantic coast of those who felt they must found a new country. Most of these tales deal entirely with the New World aspects of these colonies. Here is a book which takes up not primarily the American side, but the English antecedents of the foundings of America.

Mr. Andrews, a most painstaking and diligent student of American colonial history has here combined a series of lectures given in the Anson G. Phelps Lectureship on Early American History at New York University. In taking this view of the settlements and those who made them, the author defends his plan in the Preface by saying that "The men who founded the colonies were Englishmen, the incentives that impelled them to migrate were English in their origin and the forms of colonial life and government they set up were reproductions or modifications of institutions already established and conditions already prevailing in one way or another at home." Therefore the "first duty of him who would write of our colonial beginnings" is to determine the characters and ideas of the founders in relation to those which were influencing England at that same time. Realizing that little that took place in America at that time "can be construed as American" he writes to give "an unbiased approach to the colonies from the standpoint of their origin."

From this it can be seen that large portions of each lecture, of which there are six, on Roanoke, Virginia, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Maryland, are devoted to the English ancestry at each settlement. Accurate accounts of all the red tape through which the various colonizers had to go to achieve their goal, while not overpoweringly interesting are a most interesting change from the usual tales of colonial, hardship in the new world. The various charters and companies which Raleigh, Sandys and others had to wade through before they finally could settle here give the layman a new view of colonial life, one which apparently has failed to catch enough interest in scholars who might have devoted a book to it.

Perhaps it would be difficult to call Mr. Andrews, in this case, a scholar without compromise for there is the element, as there must be in any series of lectures of popularization of the subject in an effort to be interesting to a laity. Accuracy is not sacrificed to this end, but one has the feeling that the book cannot be "the paradise of the true scholar."