[1653-1655 A.D.] the late treaty, and on letters from the governors of New Haven and Massachusetts, freely avowed their purpose. Stuyvesant, however, seized the ship, detained the emigrants, and, to strengthen the Dutch interest on the river, on the very spot which the New Haven adventurers had intended to occupy, and within five miles of the Swedish fort of Christiana, he built Fort Casimir, on the present site of New Castle. This was denounced at New Haven as a violation of the treaty; and the war which broke out in 1653 between Cromwell and the Dutch suggested the idea of the conquest of New Netherlands, still torn by internal dissensions. The disarming of Fort Bearen, and the imprisonment at New Amsterdam of Van Slechtenhorst, Cuyler's successor as commissary, had produced at Rensselaerswick great ill feeling, which Stuyvesant aggravated by assuming jurisdiction over Beverwick as within the precinct of the company's fort. Van der Donck's complaints, being staved off by the company, resulted only in the establishment, in February, 1653, of a very narrow municipal government for New Amsterdam, composed of two burgomasters and five schepens, of whom, however, the director claimed the nomination, while the provincial schout continued to act as city schout also. Yet even with the board it was not easy to agree either as to the revenue it should enjoy or the expenses it should pay-a matter of no little interest in the embarrassed state of the finances, burdened by a loan for repairing the city palisade, and adding a trench and rampart as defences against New England invasion. The obstinacy of Massachusetts became the safety of the Dutch, as related in the preceding chapter.

THE DUTCH CONQUEST OF NEW SWEDEN

With the Swedes, powerful competitors for the tobacco of Virginia and the beaver of the Schuylkill, the Dutch were to contend for the banks of the Delaware. In the vicinity of the river, the Swedish company was more powerful than its rival; but the whole province of New Netherlands was tenfold more populous than New Sweden. From motives of commercial security, the Dutch built Fort Casimir, in 1651, as we saw, on the site of New Castle, within five miles of Christiana, near the mouth of the Brandywine. To the Swedes this seemed an encroachment; jealousies ensued; and at last (1654), aided by stratagem and immediate superiority in numbers, Rising [or Rysingh], the Swedish governor, overpowered the garrison.

The aggression was fatal to the only colony which Sweden had planted. The metropolis was exhausted by a long succession of wars; the statesmen and soldiers whom Gustavus had educated had passed from the public service; Oxenstierna was no more. Sweden had ceased to awaken fear or inspire respect; and the Dutch company fearlessly commanded Stuyvesant [who had been absent in the Barbadoes] to "revenge their wrong, to drive the Swedes from the river, or compel their submission." The order was renewed; and in September, 1655, the Dutch governor, collecting a force of more than six hundred men, sailed into the Delaware with the purpose of conquest. Resistance had been unavailing. One fort after another surrendered: to Rising honourable terms were conceded (September 25th, 1655); the colonists were promised the quiet possession of their estates; and, in defiance of protests and the turbulence of the Scandinavians, the jurisdiction of the Dutch was established. Such was the end of New Sweden,1 the colony that connects

Such of the Swedes as consented to take an oath of allegiance were guaranteed the posension of their lands. Those who refused were shipped to Holland. All civil connection with

H. W.-VOL. XXIII. C.

[1655 A.D.] America with Gustavus Adolphus and the nations that dwell on the gulf of Bothnia. It maintained its distinct existence for a little more than seventeen years, and succeeded in establishing permanent plantations on the Delaware. The descendants of the colonists, in the course of generations, widely scattered and blended with emigrants of other lineage, constitute probably more than one part in two hundred of the present population of the United States. At the surrender, they did not much exceed seven hundred souls. Free from ambition, ignorant of the ideas which were convulsing the English mind, it was only as Protestants that they shared the impulse of the age.

THE GROWTH OF NEW AMSTERDAM; ITS COSMOPOLITAN TOLERATION

The conquest of the Swedish settlements was followed by relations bearing a near analogy to the provincial system of Rome. The West India Company desired an ally on its southern frontier; the country above Christiana was governed by Stuyvesant's deputy; whilst the city of Amsterdam became, by purchase, in December, 1656, the proprietary of Delaware, from the Brandywine to Bombay Hook; and afterwards, under cessions from the natives, extended its jurisdiction to Cape Henlopen. But did a city ever govern a province with forbearance? The noble and right honourable lords, the burgomasters of Amsterdam, instituted a paralysing commercial monopoly, and required of the colonists an oath of absolute obedience to all their past or future commands. But Maryland was free; Virginia governed itself. The restless colonists, almost as they landed, and even the soldiers of the garrison, fled in troops from the dominion of Amsterdam to the liberties of English colonies. The province of the city was almost deserted; the attempt to elope was punishable by death, and scarce thirty families remained.

During the absence of Stuyvesant from Manhattan (September, 1655), the warriors of the neighbouring Algonquin tribes, never reposing confidence in the Dutch, made a desperate assault on the colony. In sixty-four canoes, they appeared before the town, and ravaged the adjacent country. The return of the expedition restored confidence. The captives were ransomed, and industry repaired its losses. The Dutch seemed to have firmly established their power, and promised themselves happier years. New Netherlands consoled them for the loss of Brazil. They exulted in the possession of an admirable territory, that needed no embankments against the ocean. They were proud of its vast extent, from New England to Maryland, from the sea to the great river of Canada, and the remote northwestern wilderness. They sounded with exultation the channel of the deep stream, which was no longer shared with the Swedes. Its banks were more inviting than the lands on the Amazon.

Meantime the country near the Hudson gained by increasing emigration. Manhattan was already the chosen abode of merchants; and the policy of the government invited them by its good will. If Stuyvesant sometimes displayed the rash despotism of a soldier, he was sure to be reproved by his employers. Did he change the rate of duties arbitrarily? The directors, sensitive to commercial honour, charged him "to keep every contract inviolate." Did he tamper with the currency by raising the nominal value of foreign coin? The measure was rebuked as dishonest. Did he attempt to fix the price of labour by arbitrary rules? This also was condemned as the mother country was henceforth terminated; but the Swedish Lutheran church, the rights and freedom of which were secured by the capitulation, continued to recognize an ecclesiastical dependence on Sweden down to the time of the American Revolution.-HILDRETH.]

[1656 A.D.]

unwise and impracticable. Did he interfere with the merchants by inspecting their accounts? The deed was censured as without precedent "in Christendom"; and he was ordered to "treat the merchants with kindness, lest they return, and the country be depopulated." Did his zeal for Calvinism lead him to persecute Lutherans? He was chid for his bigotry. Did his hatred of "the abominable sect of Quakers" imprison and afterwards exile the blameless Bowne? "Let every peaceful citizen," wrote the directors, "enjoy freedom of conscience; this maxim has made our city the asylum for fugitives from every land; tread in its steps, and you shall be blessed."

Private worship was, therefore, allowed to every religion. Opinion, if not yet enfranchised, was already tolerated. The people of Palestine, from the destruction of their temple, an outcast and a wandering race, were allured by the traffic and the candour of the New World; and not the Saxon and Celtic races only, the children of the bondmen that broke from slavery in Egypt, the posterity of those who had wandered in Arabia, and worshipped near Calvary, found a home, liberty, and a burial-place on the island of Manhattan.1

The emigrants from Holland were themselves of the most various lineage; for Holland had long been the gathering-place of the unfortunate. Could we trace the descent of the emigrants from the Low Countries to New Netherlands, we should be carried not only to the bank of the Rhine and the borders of the German Sea, but to the Protestants who escaped from France after the massacre of Bartholomew's eve; and to those earlier inquirers who were swayed by the voice of Huss in the heart of Bohemia. New York was always a city of the world. Its settlers were relics of the first fruits of the Reformation, chosen from the Belgic provinces and England, from France and Bohemia, from Germany and Switzerland, from Piedmont and the Italian Alps.

The religious sects, which, in the middle ages, had been fostered by the municipal liberties of the south of France, were the harbingers of modern freedom, and had therefore been sacrificed to the inexorable feudalism of the north. After a bloody conflict, the plebeian reformers, crushed by the merciless leaders of the military aristocracy, escaped to the highlands that divide France and Italy. It was found, on the progress of the Reformation, that they had by three centuries anticipated Luther and Calvin. The hurricane of persecution, which was to sweep Protestantism from the earth, did not spare their seclusion; mothers with infants were rolled down the rocks, and the bones of martyrs scattered on the Alpine mountains. Was there no asylum for the pious Waldensians? The city of Amsterdam (December 19th, 1656) offered the fugitives a free passage to America, and a welcome reception was prepared in New Netherlands for the few who were willing to emigrate.

The persecuted of every creed and every clime were invited to the colony. When the Protestant churches in Rochelle were razed, the Calvinists of that city were gladly admitted; and the French Protestants came in such numbers that the public documents were sometimes issued in French as well as in Dutch and English. Troops of orphans were sometimes shipped for the milder

New York was already, indeed from the beginning it had been, a cosmopolitan city. As Holland was a refuge for all persecuted sects, so representatives of most of them had found their way to New Amsterdam. Even twenty years before, according to Jogues, the Jesuit missionary, not less than eighteen different dialects were spoken in it. Refugee Protestants from Spanish Flanders, Bohemia, France, and the valleys of the Alps, fugitive sectaries from New England, Jews, and even some Catholics, were to be found there. Yet public worship was only permitted to the Dutch Reformed churches (progenitors of a now numerous communion, which, down to the American Revolution, remained ecclesiastically dependent on the classis of Amsterdam), to the Swedish Lutherans at the South river, and to such of the English on Long Island as substantially conformed in doctrine and practice to the Established Church.-HILDRETH."]

[1626-1644 A.D.]

destinies of the New World; a free passage was offered to mechanics; for "population was known to be the bulwark of every state." The government of New Netherlands desired "farmers and labourers, foreigners and exiles, men inured to toil and penury." The colony increased; children swarmed in every village; the new year and the month of May were welcomed with noisy frolics; new modes of activity were devised; lumber was shipped to France; the whale pursued off the coast; the vine, the mulberry planted; flocks of sheep as well as cattle were multiplied; and tile, so long imported from Holland, began to be manufactured near Fort Orange. New Amsterdam could, in 1664, boast of stately buildings, and almost vied with Boston. "This happily situated province," said its inhabitants, "may become the granary of our fatherland; should our Netherlands be wasted by grievous wars, it will offer our countrymen a safe retreat; by God's blessing, we shall in a few years become a mighty people."

AFRICAN SLAVES IN NEW NETHERLANDS

Thus did various nations of the Caucasian race assist in colonising the central states. The African also had his portion on the Hudson. The West India Company, which sometimes transported Indian captives to the West Indies, having large establishments on the coast of Guinea, at an early day, in 1626, introduced negroes into Manhattan, and continued the negro slavetrade without remorse. We have seen Elizabeth of England a partner in the commerce, of which the Stuarts, to the days of Queen Anne, were distinguished patrons; the city of Amsterdam did not blush to own shares in a slave-ship, to advance money for the outfits, and to participate in the returns. In proportion to population, New York had imported as many Africans as Virginia. That New York is not a slave-state like Carolina is due to climate, and not to the superior humanity of its founders. Stuyvesant was instructed to use every exertion to promote the sale of negroes. They were imported sometimes by way of the West Indies, often directly from Guinea, and were sold at public auction to the highest bidder. The average price was less than one hundred and forty dollars. The monopoly of the traffic was not strictly enforced; and a change of policy sometimes favoured the export of negroes to the English colonies. The enfranchised negro might become a freeholder.

THE FIRST STRUGGLES FOR POPULAR LIBERTY

With the Africans came the African institution of abject slavery; the large emigrations from Connecticut engrafted on New Netherlands the Puritan idea of popular freedom. There were so many English at Manhattan as to require an English secretary, preachers who could speak in English as well as in Dutch, and a publication of civil ordinances in English. Whole towns had been settled by New England men, who planted New England liberties in a Congregational way, with the consent and under the jurisdiction of the Dutch. Their presence and their activity foretold a revolution.

In the fatherland, the power of the people was unknown; in New Netherlands, the necessities of the colony had given it a twilight existence, and delegates from the Dutch towns, at first twelve, then perhaps eight in number, had, as we have seen, mitigated the arbitrary authority of Kieft. There was no distinct concession of legislative power to the people; but the people had,

[1644-1653 A.D.] without a teacher, become convinced of the right of resistance. The brewers (August 18th, 1644) refused to pay an arbitrary excise: "Were we to yield," said they, "we should offend the Eight Men, and the whole commonalty." The large proprietaries did not favour popular freedom; the commander of Rensselaer Stein had even raised a battery, that "the canker of freemen" might not enter the manor; but the patroons cheerfully joined the free boors in resisting arbitrary taxation. As a compromise, it was proposed that, from a double nomination by the villages, the governor should appoint tribunes, to act as magistrates in trivial cases, and as agents for the towns, to give their opinion whenever they should be consulted. Town-meetings were absolutely prohibited.

Discontents increased. Van der Donck and others were charged with leaving nothing untried to abjure what they called the galling yoke of an arbitrary government. A commission repaired to Holland for redress; as farmers, they claimed the liberties essential to the prosperity of agriculture; as merchants, they protested against the intolerable burden of the customs; and when redress was refused, tyranny was followed by its usual consequence clandestine associations against oppression. The excess of complaint obtained for New Amsterdam a court of justice like that of the metropolis (April 4th, 1652); but the municipal liberties included no political franchise; the sheriff was appointed by the governor; the two burgomasters and five schepens made a double nomination of their own successors, from which "the valiant director himself elected the board." The city had privileges, not the citizens. The province gained only the municipal liberties, on which rested the commercial aristocracy of Holland. Citizenship was a commercial privilege, and not a political enfranchisement. It was not much more than a license to trade.

The system was at war with Puritan usages; the Dutch in the colony readily caught the idea of relying on themselves; and the persevering restlessness of the people had led to a general assembly (or Landtag) of two deputies from each village in New Netherlands (November to December, 1653), an assembly which Stuyvesant was unwilling to sanction, and could not prevent. As in Massachusetts, this first convention sprung from the will of the people; and it claimed the right of deliberating on the civil condition of the country:

The states-general of the United Provinces [such was the remonstrance and petition, drafted by George Baxter, and unanimously adopted by the convention] are our liege lords; we submit to the laws of the United Provinces; and our rights and privileges ought to be in harmony with those of the fatherland, for we are a member of the state, and not a subjugated people. We, who have come together from various parts of the world, and are a blended community of various lineage; we, who have, at our own expense, exchanged our native lands for the protection of the United Provinces; we, who have transformed the wilderness into fruitful farms, demand that no new laws shall be enacted but with the consent of the people, that none shall be appointed to office but with the approbation of the people, that obscure and obsolete laws shall never be revived.

Stuyvesant was taken by surprise. He had never had faith in "the wavering multitude"; and doubts of man's capacity for self-government dictated his reply:

Will you set your names to the visionary notions of the New England man? Is no one of the Netherlands' nation able to draft your petition? And your prayer is so extravagant you might as well claim to send delegates to the assembly of their high mightinesses themselves. (1) Laws will be made by the director and council. Evil manners produce good laws for their restraint; and therefore the laws of New Netherlands are good. (2) Shall the people elect their own officers? If this rule become our cynosure, and the election of magis