But then, with a sigh, he reflected that all the earth was man"s, and the fullness thereof; and that here too, perhaps, would one day appear clearings in the primeval forest, and other vessels would ride at anchor, and huts would peep out from beneath the overshadowing foliage on the sh.o.r.es. But it was hard to conjure up such a picture; it was difficult to imagine so untamed a wilderness subdued, in ever so small a degree, by the hand of industry and commerce.
Northwestward, across the green miles of whispering leaves, the land appeared to rise in long, level bluffs, still thronged with serried trees; a great arm of the sea, a mile or two in breadth, extended east of north, and thither, the mariner dreamed, might lie the long-sought pathway to the Indies. A tongue of land, broadening as it receded, and swelling in low undulations, divided this wide strait from a narrower one more to the east. All was forest; and eastward still was more forest, stretching seaward. Southward, the land was low--almost as low and flat as the Netherlands themselves; an unexplored immensity, whose fertile soil had for countless ages been hidden from the sun by the impervious shelter of interlacing boughs. No--never had Hudson seen a land of such enduring charm and measureless promise as this: and here, in this citadel of loneliness, which no white man"s foot had ever trod, which, till then, only the eyes of the corsair Verrazano had seen, near a century before--here was to arise, like Aladdin"s Palace, the metropolis of the western world; enormous, roaring, hurrying, trafficking, grasping, swarming with its millions upon millions of striving, sleepless, dauntless, exulting, despairing, aspiring human souls; the home of unbridled luxury, of abysmal poverty, of gigantic industries, of insolent idleness, of genius, of learning, of happiness and of misery; of far-reaching enterprise, of political glory and shame, of science and art; here human life was to reach its intensest, most breathless, relentless and insatiable expression; here was to stand a city whose arms should reach westward over a continent, and eastward round the world; here were to thunder the streets and tower the buildings and reek the chimneys and arch the bridges and rumble the railways and throb the electric wires of American New York, the supreme product of Nineteenth Century civilization, radiant with the virtues and grimy with the failings that mankind has up to this time developed.
On the 23d of June, two years later, Henry Hudson was the central figure in another scene. He sat in a small, open boat, h.o.a.ry with frozen spray; he was m.u.f.fled in the s.h.a.ggy hide of a white bear, roughly fashioned into a coat; a sailor"s oilskin hat was drawn down over his brow, and beneath its rim his eyes gazed sternly out over a wide turbulence of gray waters, tossing with ma.s.ses of broken ice. His dark beard was grizzled with frost; his cheeks were gaunt with the privations of a long, arctic winter spent amid endless snows, in darkness unrelieved, smitten by storms, struggling with savage beasts and harried by more inhuman men. He sat with his hand at the helm; against his other shoulder leaned his son, his inseparable companion, now sinking into unconsciousness; the six rowers--the stanch comrades who, with him, had been thrust forth to perish by the mutineers--plied their work heavily and hopelessly; their rigid jaws were set; no words nor complaints broke from them, though was slowly settling round their valiant hearts. Overhead brooded a somber vault of clouds; the circle of the horizon, which seemed to creep in upon them, was one unbroken sweep of icy dreariness, save where, to the southeast, the dark hull of the "Discovery," and her pallid sails, rocked and leaned across the sullen heave of the waters. She was bound for Europe; but whither is Hudson bound?
His end befitted his life; he vanished into the unknown, as he had come from it. There is no record of the time or place of his birth, or of his early career, nor can any tell where lie his bones; we only know that his limbs were made in England, and that the great inland sea, called after him, ebbs and flows above his grave. He first comes into the ken of history, sailing on the seas, resolute to discover virgin straits and sh.o.r.es; and when we see him last, he is still toiling onward over the waves, peering into the great mystery. Possibly, as has been suggested, he may have been the descendant of the Hudson who was one of the founders of the Muscovy Company, in whose service the famous navigator afterward voyaged on various errands. It matters not; he lived, and did his work, and is no more; his strong heart burned within him; he saw what none had seen; he triumphed, and he was overcome. But the doubt that shrouds his end has given him to legend, and the thunder that rolls brokenly among the dark crags and ravines of the Catskills brings his name to the hearer"s lips.
The Dutch had had many opportunities offered to them to discover New York, before they accepted the services of Henry Hudson, who was willing to go out of his own country to find backers, so only that he might be afloat. Almost every year, from 1581 onward, the mariners of the Netherlands strove, by east and by west, to pa.s.s the barrier that America interposed between them and the Eastern trade they coveted. The Dutch East India Company was the first trading corporation of Europe; and after the war with Spain, during the twelve years" truce, the little country was overflowing with men eager to undertake any enterprise, and with money to fit them out. The Netherlands suddenly bloomed out the most prosperous country in the world.
They would not be hurried; they took their time to think it over, as Dutchmen will; but at length they conceived an immense project for acquiring all the trade, or the best part of it, of both the West and the East. They studied the subject with the patient particularity of their race; they outcla.s.sed Spain on the seas, and they believed they could starve out her commerce. Some there were, however, who feared that in finding new countries they would lose their own; Europe was again in a turmoil, and they were again fighting Spain before New Amsterdam was founded. But meanwhile, in 1609, quite inadvertently, Henry Hudson discovered it for them at a moment when they supposed him to be battling with freezing billows somewhere north of Siberia. When he was stopped by Nova Zembla ice, he put about and crossed the Atlantic to Nova Scotia, and so down the coast, as we have seen, to the Chesapeake, the Delaware, and finally the Hudson. He told his tale in glowing words when he got back; but the Dutch merchants perhaps fancied he was spinning sailors" yarns, and heeded not his report till long after.
Hudson, after pa.s.sing the Narrows, anch.o.r.ed near the Jersey sh.o.r.e, and received a visit from some Indians with native commodities to exchange for knives and beads. They presented the usual Indian aspect as regarded dress and arms; but they wore ornaments of red copper under their feather mantles, and carried pipes of copper and clay. They were affable, but untrustworthy, stealing what they could lay their hands on, and a few days later shooting arrows at a boatload of seamen from the ship, and killing one John Colman. Hudson went ash.o.r.e, and was honored with dances and chants; upon the whole, the impression mutually created seems to have been favorable. An abundance of beans and oysters was supplied to the crew; and no doubt trade was carried on to the latter"s advantage; we know that years afterward the whole of Manhattan Island was purchased of its owners for four-and-twenty dollars. The present inhabitants of New York City could not be so easily overreached.
Hudson now began the first trip ever made by white men up the great river. How many millions have made it since! But he, at this gentlest time of year, won with the magic not only of what he saw, but of the unknown that lay before him--what must have been his sensations! As reach after reach of the incomparable panorama spread itself out quietly before him, with its beauty of color, its majesty of form, its broad gleam of placid current, the sheer lift of its brown cliffs, its mighty headlands setting their t.i.tanic shoulders across his path, its toppling pinnacles a.s.suming the likeness of giant visages, its swampy meadows and inlets, lovely with flowers and waving with rushes, its royal eagles stemming the pure air aloft, its fish leaping in the ripples--and then, as he sailed on, mute with enchantment, the blue magnificence of the mountains soaring heavenward and melting into the clouds that hung about their summits--as all this multifarious beauty unfolded itself, Hudson may well have thought that the lost Eden of the earth was found at last. And ere long, he dreamed, the vast walls through which the river moved would diverge and cease, like another Pillars of Hercules, and his ship would emerge into another ocean. It was verily a voyage to be remembered; and perhaps it returned in a vision to his dimming eyes, that day he steered his open boat through the arctic surges of Hudson"s Bay.
For ten days or more he pressed onward before a southerly breeze, until, in the neighborhood of what now is Albany, it became evident that the Pacific was not to be found in northern New York. He turned, therefore, and drifted slowly downward with the steady current, while the matchless lines of the American autumn glowed every day more sumptuously from the far-billowing woods. What sunrises and what sunsets dyed the waters with liquid splendor: what moons, let us hope, turned the glories of day into the spiritual mysteries of fairyland!
Hudson was not born for repose; his fate was to sail unrestingly till he died; but as he pa.s.sed down through this serene carnival of opulent nature, he may well have wished that here, after all voyages were done, his lot might finally be cast; he may well have wondered whether any race would be born so great and n.o.ble as to merit the gift of such a river and such a land.
He landed at various places on the way, and was always civilly and hospitably welcomed by the red men, who brought him their wild abundance, and took in return what he chose to give. The marvelous richness of the vegetation, and the vegetable decay of ages, had rendered the margins of the stream as deadly as they were lovely; fever lurked in every glade and bower, and serpents whose bite was death basked in the sun or crept among the rocks. All was as it had always been; the red men, living in the midst of nature, were a part of nature themselves; nothing was changed by their presence; they altered not the flutter of a leaf or the posture of a stone, but stole in and out noiseless and lithe, and left behind them no trace of their pa.s.sage. It is not so with the white man: before him, nature flies and perishes; he clothes the earth in the thoughts of his own mind, cast in forms of matter, and contemplates them with pride; but when he dies, another comes, and refashions the materials to suit himself. So one follows another, and nothing endures that man has made; for this is his destiny. And at length, when the last man has dressed out his dolls and built his little edifice of stones and sticks, and is gone: nature, who was not dead, but sleeping, awakes, and resumes her ancient throne, and her eternal works declare themselves once more; and she dissolves the bones in the grave, and the grave itself vanishes, with its record of what man had been. What says our poet?--
"How am I theirs, When they hold not me, But I hold them?"
In 1613, or thereabout, Christianson and Block visited the harbor and got furs, and also a couple of Indian boys to show the burghers of Amsterdam, since they could not fetch the great river to Holland. In 1614 they went again with five ships--the "Fortune of Amsterdam," the "Fortune of Hoorn," and the "Tiger of Amsterdam" (which was burned), and two others. Block built himself a boat of sixteen tons, and explored the Sound, and the New England coast as far as Ma.s.sachusetts Bay; touched at the island known by his name, and forgathered with the Indian tribes all along his route. The explorers were granted a charter in the same year, giving them a three years" monopoly of the trade, and in this charter the t.i.tle New Netherland is bestowed upon the region.
The Dutch were at last bestirring themselves. Two years after, Schouten of Hoorn saw the southernmost point of Tierra del Fuego, and gave it the name of his home port as he swept by; and three other Netherlanders penetrated to the wilds of Philadelphia that was to be. A fortified trading post was built at Albany, where now legislation instead of peltries is the subject of barter. At this juncture internal quarrels in the Dutch government led to tragic events, which stimulated plans of western colonization, and the desire to start a commonwealth on Hudson River to forestall the English--for the latter as well as the Dutch and Spanish claimed everything in sight. The Dutch East India Company began business in 1621 with a twenty-four year charter, renewable. It was given power to create an independent nation; the world was invited to buy its stock, and the States-General invested a million guilders in it. Its field was the entire west coast of Africa, and the east coast of North and South America. Such schemes are of planetary magnificence; but of all this realm, the Dutch now hold the little garden patch of Dutch Guiana only, and the pleasant records of their sojourn on Manhattan Island between the years 1623 and 1664.
Indeed, the Dutch episode in our history is in all respects refreshing and agreeable; the burghers set us an example of thrift and steadiness too good for us to follow it; and they deeded to us some of our best citizens, and most engaging architectural traditions. But it is not after all for these and other material benefits that we are indebted to them; we thank them still more for being what they were (and could not help being): for their character, their temperament, their costume, their habits, their breadth of beam, their length of pipes, the deliberation of their courtships, the hardness of their bargains, the portentousness of their tea-parties, the industrious decorum of their women, the dignity of their patroons, the strictness of their social conduct, the soundness of their education, the stoutness of their independence, the excellence of their good sense, the simplicity of their prudence, and above all, for the wooden leg of Peter Stuyvesant.
In a word, the humorous perception of the American people has made a pet of the Dutch tradition in New York and Pennsylvania; as, likewise, of the childlike comicalities of the plantation negro; the arch waggishness of the Irish emigrants, and the cherubic shrewdness of the newly-acquired German. The Dutch gained much, on the sentimental score, by transplantation; their old-world flavor and rich coloring are admirably relieved against the background of unbaked wilderness. We could not like them so much or laugh at them at all, did we not so thoroughly respect them; the men of New Amsterdam were worthy of their national history, which recounts as stirring a struggle as was ever made by the love of liberty against the foul l.u.s.t of oppression. The Dutch are not funny anywhere but in Seventeenth Century Manhattan; nor can this singularity be explained by saying that Washington Irving made them so. It inheres in the situation; and the delightful chronicles of Diedrich Knickerbocker owe half their enduring fascination to their sterling veracity--the veracity which is faithful to the spirit and gambols only with the letter. The humor of that work lies in its sympathetic and creative insight quite as much as in the broad good-humor and imaginative whimsicality with which the author handles his theme. The caricature of a true artist gives a better likeness than any photograph.
The first ship containing families of colonists went out early in 1623, under the command of Cornelis May; he broke ground on Manhattan, while Joris built Fort Orange at Albany, and a little group of settlers squatted round it. May acted as director for the first year or two; the trade in furs was prosecuted, and the first Dutch-American baby was born at Fort Orange.
Fortune was kind. King Charles, instead of discussing prior rights, offered an alliance; at home, the bickerings of sects were healed.
Peter Minuit came out as director-general and paid his twenty-four dollars for the Island--a little less than a thousand acres for a dollar. At all events, the Indians seemed satisfied from Albany to the Narrows. The Battery was designed, and there was quite a cl.u.s.ter of houses on the clearing back of it. An atmosphere of Dutch homeliness began to temper the thin American air. The honest citizens were pious, and had texts read to them on Sundays; but they did not torture their consciences with spiritual self-questionings like the English Puritans, nor dream of disciplining or banishing any of their number for the better heavenly security of the rest. The souls of these Netherlander fitted their bodies far better than was the case with the colonists of Boston and Salem. Instead of starving and rending them, their religion made them happy and comfortable. Instead of settling the ultimate principles of theology and government, they enjoyed the consciousness of mutual good-will, and took things as they came. The new world needed men of both kinds. It must, however, be admitted that the people of New Amsterdam were not wholly harmonious with those of Plymouth. Minuit and Bradford had some correspondence, in which, while professions of mutual esteem and love were exchanged, uneasy things were let fall about clear t.i.tles and prior rights. Minuit was resolute for his side, and the att.i.tude of Bradford prompted him to send for a company of soldiers from home. But there was probably no serious antic.i.p.ation of coming to blows on either part. There was s.p.a.ce enough in the continent for the two hundred and seventy inhabitants of New Amsterdam and for the Pilgrim Fathers, for the present.
Spain was an unwilling contributor to the prosperity of the Dutch colonists, by the large profits which the latter gained from the capture of Spanish galleons; but in 1629 the charter creating the order of Patroons laid the foundation for abuses and discontent which afflicted the settlers for full thirty years. Upon the face of it, the charter was liberal, and promised good results; but it made the mistake of not securing popular liberties. The Netherlands were no doubt a free country, as freedom was at that day understood in Europe; but this freedom did not involve independence for the individual. The only recognized individuality was that of the munic.i.p.alities, the rulers of which were not chosen by popular franchise. This system answered well enough in the old home, but proved unsuited to the conditions of settlers in the wilderness. The American spirit seemed to lurk like some subtle contagion in the remotest recesses of the forest, and those who went to live there became affected with it. It was longer in successfully vindicating itself than in New England, because it was not stimulated on the banks of the Hudson by the New England religious fervor; it was supported on grounds of practical expediency merely. Men could not prosper unless they received the rewards of industry, and were permitted to order their private affairs in a manner to make their labor pay. They were not content to have the Patroon devour their profits, leaving them enough only for a bare subsistence. The Dutch families scattered throughout the domain could not get ahead, while yet they could not help feeling that the bounty of nature ought to benefit those whose toil made it available, at least as much as it did those who toiled not, but simply owned the land in virtue of some doc.u.mentary transaction with the powers above, and therefore claimed ownership also over the poor emigrant who settled on it--having nowhere else to go.
The emigrants were probably helped to comprehend and formulate their own misfortunes by communications with stragglers from New England, who regaled them with tales of such liberties as they had never before imagined. But the seed thus sown by the Englishmen fell on fruitful soil, and the crop was reaped in due season.
The charter intended, primarily, the encouragement of emigration, and did not realize that it needed very little encouragement. The advantages offered were more alluring than they need have been. Any person who, within four years, could establish a colony of fifty persons, was given privileges only comparable to those of independent princes. They were allowed to take up tracts of land many square miles in area, to govern them absolutely (according to the laws of the realm), to found and administer cities, and in a word to drink from Baucis"s pitcher to their hearts" content. In return, the home administration expected the benefit of their trade. Two stipulations only restrained them: they were to buy t.i.tles to their land from the Indians, and they were to permit, on penalty of removal, no cotton or woolen manufactures in the country. That was a monopoly which was reserved to the weavers in the old country.
This was excellent for such as could afford to become patroons; but what about the others? The charter provided that any emigrant who could pay for his exportation might take up what land he required for his needs, and cultivate it independently. Other emigrants, unable to pay their fare out, might have it paid for them, but in that case, of course, incurred a mortgage to their benefactors. In effect, they could not own the product of the work of their hands, until it had paid their sponsors for their outlay, together with such additions in the way of interest on capital as might seem to the sponsors equitable.
The Company further undertook to supply slaves to the colony, should they prove to be a paying investment; and it was chiefly because the climate of New York was less favorable to the Guinea Coast negro than was that further south, that African slavery did not take early and firm root in the former region. Philosophers have long recognized the influence of degrees of lat.i.tude upon human morality. The patroon planters could dispense with black slaves, since they had white men enough who cost them no more than their keep, and would, presumably, not involve the expense of overseers. Everything, therefore, seemed harmonious and sunshiny, and the Company congratulated itself.
But the patroons, through their agents, began buying up all the land that was worth having, and found it easy to evade the stipulation restricting them to sixteen miles apiece. One of them had an estate running twenty-four miles on either bank of the Hudson, below Albany (or Fort Orange as it was then), and forty-eight miles inland. It was superb; but it was as far as possible from being democracy; and the portly Van Rensselaer of Rennselaerwyck would have shuddered to his marrow, could he have cast a prophetic eye into the Nineteenth Century.
The Company at home presently discovered that its incautious liberality had injured its own interests, as well as those of poor settlers; for the estates of the patroons covered the trading posts where the Indians came to traffic, and all the profits from the latter swelled the pockets of the patroons. But the charter could not be withdrawn; the directors must be content with whatever sympathetic benefits might be conferred by the increasing wealth of the colony. The patroons were becoming more powerful than their creators, and took things more and more into their own lordly hands. Neither patroons nor Company concerned themselves about the people. The charter had, indeed, mentioned the subjects of schools and religious instructors for the emigrants, but had made no provision for the maintenance of such; and the patroons conceived that such luxuries were deserving of but the slightest encouragement. The more a poor man knows, the less contented is he. Such was the argument then, and it is occasionally heard to-day, when our trusts and corporations are annoyed by the complaints and disaffections of their only half ignorant employes.
Governor Minuit was not held to be the best man in the world for his position, and he was recalled in 1632, and Wouter Van Twiller, who possessed all of his predecessor"s faults and none of his virtues, took his place. A governor with the American idea in him would have saved Manhattan a great deal of trouble, and perhaps have enabled the Dutch to keep their hold upon it; but no such governor was available, and worse than Van Twiller was yet to come. A colony had already been planted in Delaware, but unjust dealings with the Indians led to a ma.s.sacre which left nothing of the Cape Henlopen settlement but bones and charred timbers. The English to the south were led to renew the a.s.sertion of their never-abandoned claim to the region; there were encroachments by the English settlers on the Connecticut boundary, and the Dutch, deprived by the wars in Europe of the support of their countrymen at home, were too feeble to do more than protest. But protests from those unable to enforce them have never been listened to with favor--not even by the English. Besides, the Dutch, though amenable to religious observances, were far from making them the soul and end of all thought and action; and this lack of aggressive religious fiber put them at a decided political disadvantage with their rivals. Man for man, they were the equals of the English, or of any other people; as they magnificently demonstrated, forty years afterward, by defeating allied and evil-minded Europe in its attempt to expunge them as a nation. But the indomitable spirit of Van Tromp and De Ruyter was never awakened in the New Netherlands; commercial considerations were paramount; and though the Dutch settlers remained, and were always welcome, the colony finally pa.s.sed from the jurisdiction of their own government, with their own expressed consent.
Van Twiller vanished after eight years" mismanagement, and the sanguinary Kieft took the reins. But before his inc.u.mbency, Sweden, at the instance of Gustavus Adolphus, and by the agency of his chancellor Oxenstiern, both men of the first cla.s.s, lodged a colony on Delaware Bay, which subsisted for seventeen years, and was absorbed, at last, without one stain upon its fair record. Minuit, being out of a job, offered his experienced services in bringing the emigrating Swedes and Finns to their new abode, and they began their sojourn in 1638. They were industrious, peaceable, religious and moral, and they declared against any form of slavery. They threw out a branch toward Philadelphia. But Gustavus Adolphus had died at Luetzen before the Swedes came over, and Queen Christina had not the ability to carry out his ideas, even had she possessed the power. The Dutch began to dispute the rights of the Scandinavians; Rysingh took their fort Casimir in 1654, and Peter Stuyvesant with six hundred men received their submission in the same year. But this success was of no benefit to the Dutch; the tyrannous monopolies which the Company tried to establish in Delaware, instead of creating revenues, caused the country to be deserted by the settlers, who betook themselves to the less oppressive English administrations to the southward; and it was not until the English took possession of both Delaware and the rest of the New Netherlands that it began to yield a fair return on the investment.
But we must return to the ill-omened Kieft. It was upon the Indian question that he made shipwreck, not only incurring their deadly enmity, but alienating from himself the sympathies and support of his own countrymen. The Algonquin tribe, which inhabited the surrounding country, had been constantly overreached in their trade with the Dutchmen; the principle upon which barter was carried on with the untutored savage being, "I"ll take the turkey, and you keep the buzzard: or you take the buzzard, and I"ll keep the turkey." This sounded fair; but when the Indian came to examine his a.s.sets, it always appeared that a buzzard was all he could make of it. Partly, perhaps, by way of softening the asperities of such a discovery, the Dutch merchant had been wont to furnish his victim with brandy (not eleemosynary, of course); but the results were disastrous. The Indians, transported by the alcohol beyond the anything-but-restricted bounds which nature had imposed upon them, felt the insult of the buzzard more keenly than ever, and signified their resentment in ways consistent with their instincts and traditions. In 1640 an army of them fell upon the colony in Staten Island, and slaughtered them, man, woman and child, with the familiar Indian accessories of tomahawk, scalping-knife and torch. The Staten Islanders, it should be stated, had done nothing to merit this treatment; but Indian logic interprets the legal maxim "Qui facit per alium, facit per se," as meaning that if one white man cheats him, he can get his satisfaction out of the next one who happens in sight. Staten Island was a definite and convenient area, and when its population had been exterminated, the Indians could feel relieved from their obligation. Not long afterward an incident such as romancers love to feign actually took place; an Indian brave who, as a child years before, had seen his uncle robbed and slain, and had vowed revenge, now having become of age, or otherwise qualified himself for the enterprise, went upon the warpath, and returned with the long-coveted scalp at his girdle. Evidently the time had come for Governor Kieft to a.s.sert himself.
It was of small avail to invade the wilds of New Jersey, or to offer rewards for Raritans, dead or alive. The sachems were willing to express their regret, but they would not surrender the culprits, and declared that the Dutchmen"s own brandy was the really guilty party.
Kieft would not concede the point, and the situation was strained. At this juncture, the unexpected happened. The Mohawks, a kingly tribe of red men, who claimed all Northeast America from the St. Lawrence to the Delaware, and who had already driven the Algonquins before them like chaff, sent down a war party from northern New York, and demanded tribute from them. There were more Algonquins than there were Mohawks; but one eagle counts for more than many kites. The kites came fluttering to Fort Orange for protection: not so much that they feared death or torture, but they were overawed by the spirit of the Mohawk, and could not endure to face him. Kieft fancied that he saw his opportunity. He would teach the red scoundrels a lesson they would remember. There was a company of soldiers in the Fort, and in the river were moored some vessels with crews of Dutch privateers on board. Kieft made up his party, and when night had fallen he sent them on their b.l.o.o.d.y errand, guided by one who knew all the camps and hiding-places of the doomed tribe. It was a revolting episode; a hundred Indians were unresistingly murdered. They would have made a stronger defense had they not been under the impression that it was the Mohawks who were upon them; and to be killed by a Mohawk was no more than an Algonquin should expect. But when it transpired that the Dutch were the perpetrators, the whole nation gave way to a double exasperation: first, that their friends had been killed, and secondly that they had suffered under a misapprehension. The settlers, in disregard of advice, were living in scattered situations over a large territory, and they were all in danger, and defenseless, even if New Amsterdam itself could escape. Kieft was heartily cursed by all impartially; he was compelled to make overtures for peace, and a pow-wow was held in Rockaway woods, in the spring of 1643. Terms were agreed upon, and, according to Indian usage, gifts were exchanged. But those of the chiefs so far exceeded in value the offerings of Kieft that these were regarded as a fresh insult; war was declared, and dragged along for two years more. It was not until 1645 that the grand meeting of the settlers and the Five Nations took place at Fort Amsterdam, and the treaty of lasting peace was ratified. Kieft sailed from New Amsterdam with the consciousness of having injured his countrymen more than had any enemy; but he was drowned off the Welsh coast, without having brought forth fruits meet for repentance.
Peter Stuyvesant is a favorite character in our history because he was a manly and straightforward man, faithful to his employers, fearless in doing and saying what he thought was right, and endowed with a full share of obstinate, homely, kindly human nature. He was not in advance of his age, or superior to his training; he was the plain product of both, but free from selfishness, malice, and unworthy ambitions. He was born in 1602, and came to America a warrior from honorable wars, seamed and knotty, with a famous wooden leg which all New Yorkers, at any rate love to hear stumping down the corridors of time. His administration, the last of the Dutch regime, wiped out the stains inflicted by his predecessors, and resisted with equal energy encroachments from abroad and innovations at home. He was a true Dutchman, with most of the limitations and all the virtues of his race; fond of peace and of dwelling in his own "Bowery," yet not afraid to fight when he deemed that his duty. His tenure of office lasted from 1647 till 1664, a period of seventeen active years; after the English took possession of the town and called it New York, Peter went back to Holland, unwilling to live in the presence of new things; but he found that, at the age of sixty-three, he could not be happy away from the home that he had made for himself in the new world; so he returned to Manhattan Island, and completed the tale of his eighty years on the farm which is now the most populous and democratic of New York"s thoroughfares. There he smoked his long-stemmed pipe and drank his schnapps, and thought over old times, and criticised the new. After two and a half centuries, the memory of him is undimmed; and it is to be wished that some fitting memorial of him may be erected in the city which his presence honored.
The very next year after his arrival, free trade was established in New Amsterdam. There had been a strict monopoly till then; but in one way or another it was continually evaded, and the New Amsterdam merchants found themselves so much handicapped by the restrictions, that their inability reacted upon the managers at home. There were not at that time any infant industries in need of protection, and the colony was large and capacious enough to take what the mother country sent it, and more also. But in order to prevent loss, an export duty was enforced, which pressed lightly on those who paid it, and comforted those to whom it was paid. Commerce was greatly stimulated, and the merchants of old Amsterdam sent compliments and prophesies of future greatness to their brethren across the sea. Every new-hatched settlement that springs up on the borders of the wilderness is liable to be "hailed" by its promoters as destined to become the Queen City of its region; the wish fathers the word, and the word is an advertis.e.m.e.nt. But the merchant princes of Amsterdam spoke by the card; they perceived the almost unique advantages of geographical position and local facilities of their American namesake; with such a bay and water front, with such a river, with such a soil and such openings for trade, what might it not become! Yes: but--"Sic vos noa vobis aedificatis!" The English reaped what the Dutch had sown, and New York inherits the glory and power predicted for New Amsterdam.
The soil of Manhattan Island being comparatively poor, the place was destined to be used as a residence merely, and the houses of prosperous traders and burghers began to a.s.semble and bear likeness to a town. The primeval forest still clothed the upper part of the island; but the visible presence of a munic.i.p.ality in the southern extremity prompted the inhabitants to suggest a remodeling of the government somewhat after the New England pattern, where patroons were unknown and impossible. It is not surprising that suggestions to this effect from the humbler members of the community were not cordially embraced by either the patroons or their creators at home; in fact, it was still-born. That the people should rule themselves was as good as to say that the horse should loll in the carriage while his master toiled between the shafts. The thing was impossible, and should be unmentionable. The people, however, continued to mention it, and even to neglect paying the taxes which had been imposed with no regard to their reasonable welfare. A deputation went to Holland to tell the directors that they could neither farm nor trade with profit unless the burdens were lightened; the directors thought otherwise, and the consequence was that devices were practiced to lighten them illicitly.
This added to the interest of life, but subverted the welfare of the state. Where political rights are not secured to all men by const.i.tutional right, those who are unable to get them by privilege, intrigue to steal what such rights would guarantee. At this rate, there would presently be a Council of Ten and an Inquisition in New Amsterdam. In 1653, the Governor was constrained to admit the deputies from the various settlements to an interview, in which they said their say, and he his. "We have come here at our own expense," they observed, "from various countries of Europe, expecting to be given protection while earning our living; we have turned your wilderness into a fruitful garden for you, and you, in return, impose on us laws which disable us from profiting by our labor. We ask you to repeal these laws, allow us to make laws to meet our needs, and appoint none to office who has not our approbation." Thus, in substance, spoke the people; and we, at the end of the Nineteenth Century, may think they were uttering the veriest axioms of political common sense. What st.u.r.dy Peter Stuyvesant thought is perfectly expressed in what he replied.
"The old laws will stand. Directors and council only shall be law-makers: never will they make themselves responsible to the people.
As to officers of government, were their election left to the rabble, we should have thieves on horseback and honest men on foot." And with that, we may imagine, the Governor stamped his wooden toe.
The people shrugged their shoulders. "We aim but at the general good,"
said they. "All men have a natural right to const.i.tute society, and to a.s.semble to protect their liberties and property."
"I declare this a.s.sembly dissolved," Peter retorted. "a.s.semble again at your peril! The authority which rules you is derived not from the whim of a few ignorant malcontents." Alas! the seed of the American Idea had never germinated in Peter"s soldierly bosom; and when the West India Company learned of the dialogue, they spluttered with indignation. "The people be d----d." was the sense of their message. "Let them no longer delude themselves with the fantasy that taxes require their a.s.sent."
With that, they dismissed the matter from their minds. Yet even then, the Writing was on the wall. The flouted people were ripe to welcome England; and England, in the shape of Charles II., who had come at last to his own, meditated wiping the Dutch off the Atlantic seaboard. It availed not to plead rights: Lord Baltimore snapped his fingers.
Lieutenant-governor Beekman, indeed, delayed the appropriation of Delaware; but Long Island was being swallowed up, and n.o.body except the government cared. The people may be incompetent to frame laws: but what if they decline to fight for you when called upon? If they cannot make taxes to please themselves, at all events they will not make war to please anybody else. If they are poor and ignorant, that is not their fault. The English fleet was impending; what was to be done? Could Stuyvesant but have multiplied himself into a thousand Stuyvesants, he knew what he would do; but he was impotent. In August, 1664, here was the fleet actually anch.o.r.ed in Gravesend Bay, with Nicolls in command.
"What did they want?" the Governor inquired. "Immediate recognition of English sovereignty," replied Nicolls curtly; and the gentler voice of Winthrop of Boston was heard, advising surrender. "Surrender would be reproved at home," said poor Stuyvesant, refusing to know when he was beaten. He was doing his best to defeat the army and navy of England single-handed. But the burgomasters went behind him, and capitulated, and--Peter to the contrary for four days more notwithstanding--New Amsterdam became New York.
The English courted favor by liberal treatment of their new dependants on the western sh.o.r.e of the Hudson; whatever the Dutch had refused to do, they did. The Governor and Council were to be balanced by the people"s representatives; no more arbitrary taxation; citizens might think and pray as best pleased them; land tenure was made easy, and seventy-five acres was the bounty for each emigrant imported, negroes included. By such inducements the wilderness of New Jersey, a.s.signed to Berkeley and Carteret, was peopled by Scots, New Englanders and Quakers. Settlement proceeded rapidly, and in 1668 a colonial legislature met in the town named after Elizabeth Carteret. There were so many Puritans in the a.s.sembly, and their arguments were so convincing, that New Jersey law bore a strong family resemblance to that of New England. This had its effect, when, in 1670, the rent question came up for settlement. The Puritans contended that the Indians held from Noah, and as they were lawful heirs of the Indians, they declined to pay rents to the English proprietors. There was no means of compelling them to do so, and they had their way. The Yankees were already going ahead.
Manhattan did not get treated quite so well. The Governor had everything his own way, the council being his creatures, and the justices his appointees. The people were permitted no voice in affairs, and might as well have had Stuyvesant back again. After Nicolls had strutted his term, Lord Lovelace came, and outdid him. His idea of how to govern was formulated in his instructions to an agent: "Lay such taxes," said he, "as may give them liberty for no thought but how to discharge them." Lord Lovelace was an epigrammatist; but in the end he had to pay for his wit. He attempted to levy a tax for defense, and was met with refusal; the towns of Long Island had not one cent either for tribute or defense; his lordship swore at them heartily, but they heeded him not; and he found himself in the shoes of the ousted Dutch Governor in an another sense than he desired. And then was poetical justice made complete; for who should appear before the helpless forts but Evertsen with a Dutch fleet! New York, New Jersey and Delaware surrendered to him almost with enthusiasm, and the work of England seemed to be all undone.
But larger events were to control the lesser. France and England combined in an iniquitous conspiracy to destroy the Dutch Republic, and swooped down upon the coast with two hundred thousand men. The story has often been told how the Dutch, tenfold outnumbered, desperately and gloriously defended themselves. They finally swept the English from the seas, and patroled the Channel with a broom at the masthead. By the terms of the treaty of peace which Charles was obliged by his own parliament to make, all conquests were mutually restored, and New York consequently reverted to England. West Jersey was bought by the Quakers; the eastern half of the province was restored to the rule of Carteret. The Atlantic coast, from Canada down to Florida, continuously, was English ground, and so remained until, a century later, the transplanted spirit of liberty, born in England, threw down the gauntlet to the spirit of English tyranny, and won independence for the United States.
When we remember that the Dutch maintained their government in the new world for little more than fifty years, it is surprising how deep a mark they made there. It is partly because their story lends itself to picturesque and graphic treatment; it is so rich in character and color, and telling in incident. Then, too, it has a beginning, middle and end, which is what historians as well as romancers love. But most of all, perhaps, their brief chronicles as a distinct political phenomenon ill.u.s.trate the profound problem of self-government in mankind. The Netherlander had proved, before any of them came hither, with what inflexible courage they could resent foreign tyranny; and the munic.i.p.alities, as well as the nation, had grasped the principles of independence. But it was not until they erected their little commonwealth amid the forests of the Hudson that they awakened to the conception that every man should bear his part in the government of all. To attain this, it was necessary to break through a crust of conservatism almost as stubborn as that of Spain. The authority of their upper cla.s.ses had never been questioned; the idea had never been entertained that a citizen in humble life could claim any right to influence the conditions under which his life should be carried on.
That innate and inalienable right of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, which Jefferson a.s.serted, and which has become an axiom to every American school-boy, does not appear, upon investigation, to be either inalienable or innate. The history of mankind shows that it has been constantly alienated from them; and if we pa.s.s in review the population of the world, from the oldest to contemporary times, and from savages tribes to the most highly civilized nations, we find the plebeian bowing before the patrician, the poor man serving the wealthy. The conception of human equality before the law is not a congenital endowment, but an accomplishment, arduously acquired and easily forfeited. The first impulse of weakness in the presence of strength is to bow down before it; it is the impulse of the animal, and of the unspiritual, the unregenerate nature in man.
The ability to recognize the solidarity of man, and therefore the equality of spiritual manhood, involves an uplifting of the mind, an illumination of the soul, which can be regarded as the result of nothing less than a revelation. It is not developed from below--it is received from above; it is a divine whisper in the ear of fallen man, transfiguring him, and opening before him the way of life. It postulates no loss of humility; it does not disturb the truth that some must serve and some must direct; that some shall have charge over many things, and some over but few. It does not supersede the outward order of society. But it affirms that to no man or body of men, no matter how highly endowed by nature or circ.u.mstance with intellect, position or riches, shall be accorded the right to dispose arbitrarily of the lives and welfare of the ma.s.ses. Not elsewhere than in the hands of the entire community shall be lodged the reins of government. The administration shall be with the chosen ones whose training and qualifications fit them for that function; but the principles on which their administration is conducted shall be determined by the will and vote of all.
This is not lightly to be believed or understood; Peter Stuyvesant voiced the unenlightened thought when he said that, should the rabble rule, order and honesty must be overthrown. This is the inevitable conclusion of materialistic logic. Like produces like; evil, evil; ignorance, ignorance. Only by inspired faith will the experiment be tried of trusting the Creator to manifest His purposes, not by the conscious wisdom of any man or men, but through the unconscious, organic tendency, mental and moral, of universal man. We may call it "the tendency, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness"; or we may a.n.a.lyze it into the resultant of innumerable forces, taking a direction independent of them all; or we may say simply that it is the Divine method of leading us upward; it is all one. Universal suffrage is an act of faith; and, faithfully carried out, it brings political and religious emanc.i.p.ation to the people. How far it has been carried out in this country is a question we shall have to answer hereafter; we may say here that our forefathers realized its value, and gave to us in our Const.i.tution the mechanism whereby to practice it. To it they added the memory of their courage and their sacrifices in its behalf; and more than this was not theirs to give.
The English Puritans received their revelation in one way; the Dutch traders and farmers in another; but it was the same revelation. To neither could it be imparted in Europe, but only in the virgin solitudes of an untrodden continent. There man, already civilized, was enabled to perceive the inefficiency and distortion of his civilization, and to grasp the cure. Hudson, an Englishman, but at the moment in Dutch service, opened the gates to the Netherlanders, and thus enabled their emigrants to perfect the work of emanc.i.p.ation which had been brought to the highest stage it could reach at home. They were opposed by the directors in Amsterdam, by their own governors and patroons, and by the errors which immemorial usage had ingrained in them as individuals. They overcame these forces, not by their own strength, nor by any violent act of revolution, but by the slow, irresistible energy of natural law, with which, as with a gravitative force, they had placed themselves in harmony. Thus they exemplified one of the several ways in which freedom comes to man, and took their place as a component element in the limitless cosmopolitanism of our population.
Their subsequent history shows that nothing truly valuable is lost in democracy. The high behavior and dignified manners which belonged to their patroons may be observed among their descendants in contemporary New York; the men whose ancestors controlled a thousand tenants have not lost the powers of handling large matters in a large spirit; but they exercise it now for worthier ends than of old. Similarly, the Dutch stolidity which amuses us in the chronicles, reappears to-day in the form of steadiness and judgment; the obstinacy of headstrong Peter, as self-confidence and perseverance; the physical grossness of the old burghers, as const.i.tutional vigor. Many of their customs too have come down to us; their heavy afternoon teas are recalled in our informal receptions; their New Year"s Day sociability in our calls, their Christmas celebrations in our festival of Santa Claus. Much of our domestic architecture reflects their influence: the gabled fronts, the tiled fireplaces, the high "stoops," and the custom of sitting on them in summer evenings. In general it is seen that the effect of democratic inst.i.tutions is to save the grain and reject the chaff, because criticism becomes more close and punctual, abuses and license are not chartered, and the individual is bereft of artificial supports and disguises, and must appear more nearly as G.o.d made him.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Trepanning Men to be Sent to the Colonies]
CHAPTER FIFTH
LIBERTY, SLAVERY, AND TYRANNY
We left the colony at Jamestown emerging from thick darkness and much tribulation toward the light. Some distance was still to be traversed before full light and eas.e.m.e.nt were attained; but fortune, upon the whole, was kinder to Virginia than to most of the other settlements; and though clouds gathered darkly now and then, and storms threatened, and here and there a bolt fell, yet deliverance came beyond expectation. Something Virginia suffered from Royal governors, something from the Indians, something too from the imprudence and wrong-headedness of her own people. But her story is full of stirring and instructive pa.s.sages. It tells how a community chiefly of aristocratic const.i.tution and sympathies, whose loyalty to the English throne was deep and ardent, and whose type of life was patrician, nevertheless were won insensibly and inevitably to espouse the principles of democracy. It shows how, with honest men, a king may be loved, and the system which he stands for reverenced and defended, while yet the lovers and apologists choose and maintain a wholly different system for themselves. The House of Stuart had none but friends in Virginia; when the son of Charles the First was a fugitive, Virginia offered him a home; and the follies and frailties of his father, and the grotesque chicaneries of his grandfather, could not alienate the colonists" affection. Yet, from the moment their Great Charter was given them, they never ceased to defend the liberties which it bestowed against every kingly effort to curtail or destroy them; and on at least one occasion they fairly usurped the royal prerogative.