[1581-1609 A.D.] do in all human intercourse, and there were quarrels, struggles, and bloodshed in the forests, as in all European cities and towns.

Besides, the colonists quarrelled together and with their neighbours of other nations. The Dutch crushed the Swedish, and were in turn taken and retaken by the English. And there were the usual wrangles with the home government, little preliminaries to the long, fierce struggle that was to rage from 1776 to 1783. And yet the general story of this chapter is one of benevolence and wisdom unusual in history.

The Declaration of Independence, which was the thesis of the most important of colonial wars, had something of a prototype in the Union of Utrecht of 1581, by which twelve Holland provinces declared their independence of Spain and stated the grievances that absolved them from allegiance. This document has been fully discussed in our history of the Netherlands. The Dutch, who had done so many brave and stubborn things, made a settlement in America partly for gain, partly as an act of war against their inveterate Spanish foe. Land was bought from the Indians and their friendship cultivated. The Dutch settlers were quite as religious as the Puritans, and had fought far longer and far more bitterly for their creed, but they usually showed an easy-going tolerance of other opinions that lifted them to a higher mental plane. The final overthrow of their authority was, as we shall see, due less to the superiority of the English than to peculiar conditions of unpreparedness, at the moment of English descent. As it was, Dutch civilisation has persisted in many ways in America, and even their language remains to this day in isolated communities of New Jersey.

It was fortunate for the unity of the colonies that the English should obtain the ascendency and force their language upon the settlements. It was also fortunate that many ideals of the stout, independent, tolerant Dutch mind should have persisted.

An eloquent brief from the Dutch has been prepared by Douglas Campbell. He justly complains that American history has been written too much from the English viewpoint. He finds Puritanism a powerful factor in the life of Holland, whose war with Spain was in many ways a Puritan war; he insists that Puritanism was, in fact, not a creation of an obscure English sect, as people commonly assume, but rather a great Continental reaction against ritual religion and social corruption. He points out how the conception of the Dutch as a boorish and besotted people is the survival of an English insularism, whereas, in fact, they were, according to Motley,d "the most energetic and quick-witted people of the world," indeed the Yankees of Europe, alert in invention of tools and machinery, with an excellent internal government, with an advanced state of personal liberty. Their education was of a high grade, and Leyden, to commemorate its relief from the famous siege, instead of celebrating with fireworks or statues, built a splendid university. In 1609 Holland had about the same population as England, and far greater wealth. In the sixteenth century the Dutch emigrated to England by the thousand, settling thickly in the regions where the Separatist church had its beginning.

During the sojourn of the Pilgrims in Holland, there was ample opportunity for them to learn the conditions of Dutch liberty, so different from the conditions then existent in intolerant aristocracy - ridden England. Campbell claims that the Puritans brought from Holland the public school idea, and that its first establishment in America was by the Dutch settlers; that the Articles of Confederation, the written constitution, the organisation of the senate, the township system, the secret written ballot, the public

[1581-1600 A.D.]

prosecutor, public examination of witnesses, the relief of an acquitted prisoner from costs, the independence of the judiciary, the recording of deeds and mortgages, the freedom of religion and press, the education of girls as well as boys, the absence of primogeniture, prison reforms, and, indeed, the whole spirit of American society, so radically different from the English of that day, had their origin in Holland. John Fiskeb wisely calls attention to the many exaggerations of such a view and points out the larger element of personal liberty in the English colonies, and yet, though Campbell's book is rather a brief than a judgment, it is in effect a salutary protest against making England too much the mother-country of America.

Even in the foundation of Pennsylvania, which was an English colony, Campbell emphasises the fact that Penn's mother was a Dutch woman and that Penn knew the Dutch language

well and spent years of travel and residence under Dutch influence. When the short-lived Swedish colony came to America it was in boats hired from the Dutch, and the whole idea came from the Dutch brain of the discontented Usselinx.

This colony had been the dream of Gustavus Adolphus, but he did not live to see it made reality. "New Sweden," like New Amsterdam, was purchased from the Indians and the relationship was generally pleasant. But gradually friction with Dutch neighbours brought down wrath and final capture. The Swedes were absorbed later into the states of New Jersey and Delaware. The brief life of the settlement reminds one of the vanished legendary colonies the Scandinavians planted centuries before. By 1600 the race of bold Norse sea-rovers had died out, and left the colony to come over in boats hired from Holland. Later, after the United States had been well established, Swedes and Norwegians both again bers, settling in the middle west and giving foreign nature.

flocked over in large numcertain localities a distinct

The Quakers were in some ways Puritans. They were an offshoot of the same reaction, though their policy of peace at any price was distinctly different from that of the Puritans, at whose hands the Quakers suffered bitter treatment for a time, notably in Massachusetts, as already described. In spite of their policy of non-resistance, however, they had sturdiness enough of character and high enough sense of equality to establish a firm foundation in a wilderness. If they would not resist, neither would they yield. And of one of them, William Penn, John Fiske b is moved to say, "Take him for all in all, he was by far the greatest among the founders of American

[1610-1615 A.D.]

commonwealths." This chapter is to be devoted to the Dutch, the Swedes, the Quakers, and others. We shall begin with the first to arrive.a

THE FIRST DUTCH COLONIES

As the country on the Hudson had been discovered by an agent of the Dutch East India Company, the right of possession was claimed for the United Provinces; and in the very year in which Hudson perished (1610), merchants of Amsterdam fitted out a ship with various merchandise to traffic with the natives. The voyage was prosperous, and was renewed. When Argall, in 1613, returning from his piratical excursion against the French settlement at Port Royal, entered the waters of New York, he found three or four rude hovels, already erected on the island of Manhattan, as a summer shelter for the few Dutch mariners and fur traders, whom private enterprise had stationed there. His larger force made him for the time the lord of the harbour, and in Virginia he boasted of having subjected the establishments of Holland to the authority of England; but the Dutch, as he retired, continued their profitable traffic, and even remained on Manhattan during the winter.

1

Had these early navigators in the bays around New York anticipated the future, they might have left careful memorials of their voyages. The states general had assured to the enterprising a four years' monopoly of trade with newly discovered lands (March 27th, 1614); and a company of merchants, forming a partnership, but not a corporation, availed themselves of the privilege. Several ships, in consequence, sailed for America; and from the imperfect and conflicting statements we may infer, that perhaps in 1614, the first rude fort was erected, probably on the southern point of Manhattan Island; and the name of an island east of the sound still keeps the record that Adrian Blok sailed through the East river, discovered Long Island to be an island, and examined the coast as far as Cape Cod. The discovery of Connecticut river is undoubtedly due to the Dutch; the name of its first European navigator is uncertain. [It was probably Block.] That in 1615 the settlement at Albany began, on an island just below the present city, is placed beyond a doubt by existing records. It was the remote port of the Indian trader, and was never again abandoned. Yet at this early period there was no colony; not a single family had emigrated; the only Europeans on the Hudson were commercial agents and their subordinates. The Pilgrims, in planning their settlements, evidently esteemed the country unappropriated; and to the English mariner, the Hollanders were known only as having a trade in Hudson's river. As yet the United Provinces made no claim to the territory.

The cause of the tardy progress of colonisation is to be sought in the parties which divided the states. The independence of Holland had brought with

['As we have stated in our chapter on Virginia, the long-accepted statement that Argall went to New Netherlands is branded as false by some recent authorities. In 1648 the socalled Plantagenet e stated that Argall and Dale returning from Canada "landed at Manhatas Isle in Hudson's river, where they found four houses built, and a pretended Dutch governor under the West India Company's of Amsterdam share or part, who kept trading boats and trucking with the Indians."" The discovery of official correspondence between the Virginian and English governments proves, according to Fernow,f that Argall never touched at New Netherlands, though in 1621 he so planned; indeed, by the very knowledge that the Dutch were there "a demurre in their proceding was caused." Fiske, however, accepts the original story without comment.]

[1615-1621 A.D.]

it no elective franchise for the people; the municipal officers were either named by the stadtholder, or were self-elected, on the principle of close corporations. The municipal officers elected delegates to the provincial states; and these again, a representative to the states general. The states, the true representative of a fixed commercial aristocracy, resisted the tendencies to popular innovations with a unanimity and decision never equalled, even in the struggle of the English parliament against reform; and the same instinct which led the Romans to elevate Julius Cæsar, the commons of England to sustain Henry VII, the Danes to confer hereditary power on the descendants of Frederic III, the French to substitute absolute for feudal monarchy, induced the people of Holland to favour the ambition of the stadtholder. This division of parties extended to every question of domestic politics, theology, and international intercourse. The friends of the stadtholder asserted sovereignty for the states general; while the party of Olden Barneveld and Grotius, with greater reason in point of historic facts, claimed sovereignty exclusively for the provincial assemblies. Prince Maurice desired continued warfare with Spain, and favoured colonisation in America; the aristocratic party, fearing the increase of executive power, opposed colonisation because it might lead to new collisions. Thus the Calvinists, popular enthusiasm, and the stadtholder were arrayed against the provincial states and municipal authorities. The colonisation of New York by the Dutch depended on the issue of the struggle; and the issue was not long doubtful. The excesses of political ambition, disguised under the forms of religious controversy, led to violent counsels. Olden Barneveld and Grotius were taken into custody, and the selfishness of tyranny not only condemned the first political writer of the age to imprisonment for life, but conducted an old man of threescore years and twelve, the most venerable of the patriots of Holland, to the scaffold.

These events hastened the colonisation of Manhattan. That the river Hudson for a season bore the name of Prince Maurice, implies his favour to those who harboured there. A few weeks after the first acts of violence, in November, 1618, the states general gave a limited act of incorporation to a company of merchants; yet the conditions of the charter were not inviting, and no organisation took place. But after the triumph over intestine commotions, while the Netherlands were displaying unparalleled energy in their_foreign_relations, the scheme of a West India company was revived. The Dutch planted colonies only under the auspices of chartered companies; the states would never undertake the defence of foreign possessions.

The Dutch West India Company, which became the sovereign of the central portion of the United States, incorporated (June 3rd, 1621), for twentyfour years, with a pledge of a renewal of its charter, was invested, on the part of the Netherlands, with the exclusive privilege to traffic and plant colonies on the coast of Africa from the tropic of Cancer to the cape of Good Hope; on the coast of America, from the straits of Magellan to the remotest north. England, in its patents, made the conversion of the natives a prominent purpose; the Dutch were chiefly intent "on promoting trade." The English charters gave protection to the political rights of the colonists against the proprietaries; the Dutch, who had no popular liberty at home, bestowed no thought on colonial representation; the company, subject to the approval of the states general, had absolute power over its possessions. The charge of New Netherlands belonged to the branch at Amsterdam. The government of the whole was intrusted to a board of nineteen.

Thus did the little nation of merchants give away continents; and the corporate company, invested with a claim to more than a hemisphere, gradu

[1621-1627 A.D.] ally culled from its boundless grant the rich territories of Guinea, Brazil, and New Netherlands. Colonisation on the Hudson was neither the motive nor the main object of the establishment of the Dutch West India Company; the territory of the New Netherlands was not described either in the charter, or at that time in any public act of the states general, which neither made a formal specific grant, nor offered to guarantee the tranquil possession of a single foot of land. The company was to lay its own plans, and provide for its own protection.1

Yet the period of the due organisation of the company was the epoch of zealous efforts at colonisation. The name of the southern county and cape of New Jersey still attests the presence of Cornelius Mey, who not only visited Manhattan (1623), but entering the bay, and ascending the river of Delaware, known as the South River of the Dutch, took possession of the territory. On Timber creek, a stream that enters the Delaware a few miles below Camden, he built Fort Nassau. The country from the southern shore of Delaware bay to New Holland or Cape Cod became known as New Netherlands.9

Mey was succeeded by Verhulst, who arrived with three ships, bringing out horses, cattle, sheep, and swine, with a number of new settlers. Next year Peter Minuit was appointed director. The island of Manhattan, "rocky and full of trees," was purchased of the Indians in 1626 for sixty gilders, about twenty-four dollars; and a block-house, surrounded by a palisade of cedars, was erected at its southern extremity, and called Fort Amsterdam. About this fort, the headquarters of the colony, a little village slowly grew uprudiment of the present metropolis of New York. Six farms were laid out on Manhattan Island; and specimens of the harvest were sent to Holland in proof of the fertility of the soil.h

Reprisals on Spanish commerce were the great object of the West India Company; the North American colony was, for some years, little more than an inconsiderable establishment for trade, where Indians, even from the St. Lawrence, exchanged beaver-skins for European manufactures. The Spanish prizes, taken by the chartered privateers, on a single occasion in 1628, were almost eightyfold more valuable than the whole amount of exports from New Netherlands for the four preceding years.

In 1627 there was a first interchange of courtesies with the Pilgrims. De Razier [or De Rasieres], the second in command among the Dutch, went as envoy to Plymouth (October 4th). On the south of Cape Cod he was met by a boat from the Old Colony, and "honourably attended with the noise of trumpets." A treaty of friendship and commerce was proposed. The Pilgrims, who had English hearts, questioned the title of the Dutch to the banks of the Hudson, and recommended a treaty with England; the Dutch, with greater kindness, advised their old friends to remove to the rich meadow on the Connecticut. Harmony prevailed. "Our children after us," said the Pilgrims, "shall never forget the good and courteous entreaty which we found in your country, and shall desire your prosperity forever.' Such was the benediction of Plymouth on New Amsterdam; at the same time, the Pilgrims, rivals for the beaver trade, begged the Dutch not to send their skiffs into the Narragansett.

These were the rude beginnings of New York. Its first age was the age of hunters and Indian traders; of traffic in the skins of otters and beavers; when the native tribes were employed in the pursuit of game, and the yachts

[Fiskeb says epigrammatically, "It was not government of the people, by the people, and for the people; but it was government of the people, by the director and council, for the West India Company."]