Augustine Herrman, Beginner of the Virginia Tobacco Trade, Merchant of New Amsterdam and First Lord of Bohemia Manor in Maryland/Chapter 10
Chapter X
HERRMAN’S PLACE IN AMERICAN HISTORY
Over three hundred years have passed since Augustine Herrman came to this country. His name is identified with a half dozen or more of the original American states. He was among the foremost men in at least two of them. His influence was felt over the rest. Ten years after his death his name passed into oblivion, to remain buried for well nigh one hundred seventy years. But during all those years we in America have been gaining sufficient leisure so that we have ample time to look over the past and remove the dust from the old colonial archives and take a look at the early makers of the nation. For the past fifty years we have been printing and arranging the colonial records and the official documents and out of these grim and dusty manuscripts are emerging the old heroes of three centuries ago.
Probably we Americans are more or less ignorant of the history of our nation. Most of us have a fairly good idea of what happened after the American Revolution, but enough of us do not appreciate the fact that American history began as many years before 1776 as have passed since the adoption of the federal constitution.
The seventeenth century is the period of the dark ages of the history of the United States. But to the world, as society was organized then, that century was something far different. As the sixteenth century was an era of discovery and exploration, the seventeenth was a century of colonization and settlement. This colonization can be well divided into two phases. The first was an epoch of gigantic commercial enterprises which ultimately resulted in the formation of large trading companies. Antwerp ushered in the seventeenth century, for it was that city that symbolized the commercial greatness of Europe. Gradually Antwerp’s two most important rivals, Amsterdam and London, were steadily pushing ahead, finally to replace the Flemish city as the commercial marts of Europe.
The second half of the seventeenth century was characterized by a settling down, a closer organization of society and politics and the establishment and the building up of great landed estates, particularly in the southern colonies of America, which subsequently gave rise to the landed gentry of the eighteenth century and a concomitant culture and refinement of life and manners the like of which the world had seen but once or twice since the age of Pericles.[1] It is interesting to find that Augustine Herrman rather symbolized these two divisions of the seventeenth century; and he was successful in both phases. During the first part of the century he was essentially a merchant and a trader and probably not over-scrupulous in the way he made his money. During the second half of his life we find him devoting his energies in the preparation of the drawing of a beautiful and useful map and the founding of a great estate. Living until 1686, Herrman’s life was roughly concomitant with the seventeenth century. He grew up with that century and he changed as the spirit of the times changed.
Seventeenth century America, nonetheless, produced few great figures whom we can regard as strictly Americans. Roger Williams may have come close to the point; and Charles Calvert, the third baron of Baltimore was in many respects a product of the New World. The second Richard Lee of Virginia was largely a product of his native colony; and in New England there were John Eliot, Increase Mather and Cotton Mather. Yet all of these men were largely products of a local civilization and rarely did they take much interest in the affairs of the other colonies.
But in the case of Augustine Herrman it was different. First a merchant of the only Dutch colony in what is now the United States, he learned to know these folk and lived as one of them, haggling, quarrelling and suing each other. As a diplomat he came in contact with the New Englanders on the one hand, and on the other with the southern planters. Later, as a great landed proprietor he learned to know more about the English colonists, living as successfully among them as he did formerly with the Dutch burgers. His estate was situated close to the center of Atlantic America; doubtless through his domains passed many of the celebrated visitors who came over from the Old World to take a look at the New. Herrman was neither New Netherlander nor Marylander; he was, in the best sense of the word, an American.
- ↑ During the Italian Renaissance or Elizabethan England.