"About one-third of the
colonists in 1760," says Professor Channing, "were born outside
of America." Crevecoeur's "Letters from an American Farmer" thus
defined the Americans: "They are a mixture of English, Scotch,
Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous
breed that race now called Americans has arisen." The Atlantic
seaboard, with a narrow strip inland, was fairly well covered by
local communities, differing in blood, in religion, in political
organization--a congeries of separate experiments or young
utopias, waiting for that most utopian experiment of all, a
federal union. But the dominant language of the "promiscuous
breed" was English, and in the few real centers of intellectual
life the English tradition was almost absolute.
The merest glance at colonial journalism will confirm this
estimate. The "Boston News-Letter," begun in 1704, was the first
of the journals, if we omit the single issue of "Publick
Occurrences" in the same town in 1690. By 1765 there were nearly
fifty colonial newspapers and several magazines.
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