With prosperity came, as usual, care and trouble. Complaints were made of Minuit. The Yankees on the east, and the Swedes on the Delaware, were jealous of Dutch rule, and stickled for their own institutions, political and social. The fort, established by Minuit at Hartford, was like a piano-forte in an inconvenient place, strongly objected to, and its airs raised a brisk breeze around it.
Finally, in 1633, Peter was requested to give up his stewardship; and Wouter van Twiller, or the Doubter, took the seals of office and all the other seals he could lay hands on. Minuit could not, however, remain quiet. Office, as usual, had produced a restlessness which office medicine only could cure. He went to Europe, and brought out a company of Swedes, and settled with them at Christiana, near Wilmington, naming the place after the girlish Queen of Sweden. The prolific Swedes spread northwards, and gratefully named their territory New Sweden,—a territory stretching, defiant of New Netherlands, and planting its northern line as near as Trenton. The Doubter was too undecided to face their decided advances; and was replaced, in 1638, by William Kieft, the third overseer of the Dutch plantations.
One of Kieft’s first acts was to protest against the Minuit, or Swedish jig, which Peter was dancing with his lively company on the Delaware. The protest was, like so many others since issued from New York, only made a note of, but left unheeded. Sharper protests, backed by bayonets and knapsacks provisioned with good long sausages, were, two years later, made against the Indians of Long Island, who, egged on by the Swedes of the south, and the sleek Pilgrims on the Connecticut, kindled their fires on Staten Island, and threatened to eat their omelets in New Amsterdam itself. For five long years were those Indian eggs and the colony over the fire. At last the Iroquois called away the coppery cooks, and the boiling waters simmered down again. The colony enlarged itself. Broom-corn waved along the Mohawk River; Dutch pigs were made into head-cheese in Schenectady; and Dutch cabbages, sweltered in large hogs-heads, came out sour-kraut for purple-colored families all up the valley, still so plentifully sprinkled with Dutch hamlets, baptized with genuine Holland names. The warm hearts of the colonists blunted Indian hostilities, as their thick heads, almost impenetrable to anything but three meals a day, defied their tomahawks.
In 1647 Kieft was recalled, and Peter Stuyvesant reigned in his stead. His combustible temper was kept constantly crackling, like a bunch of fire-crackers, during the sixteen years he headed the Dutch settlements in America. His wooden leg, like Santa Anna’s in our own day, seemed ever stirring up the fires to renewed blazes. On all sides he was scorched. The wood, long seasoning, piled up by the colonists in Connecticut, and in the territory since divided up into Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, was kindled into a hot flame. Permission to the former, in 1650, to extend their settlements up to Oyster Bay on Long Island, and to Greenwich on the main-land, only whet their appetites for other kinds of oysters and new beds. Five years later, and the fiery Stuyvesant led a regiment of six hundred men against Christiana, and, reducing it to silence, brought his victorious troops back again; the colony now having a liberal supply of candidates for all its offices for that generation. Whether the burgomaster of New Amsterdam and the five scheppens took occasion of the return of these troops to vote themselves suppers, medals, and free rides around the island, is very doubtful, as contemporary accounts are mute on the subject.
At last even Dutch patience became weary of wars with the Indians and disputes with all the neighboring colonies. The growing political privileges, won by the vigilant perseverance of those colonies,—the right of representation in assemblies,—the larger immunities from home taxation, attracted their attention, so that in 1664, when Charles II. granted, however unjustly, to his brother, the Duke of York, the whole country, from the Connecticut River to the Delaware,—including, of course, the Dutch settlements,—and Nichols, the duke’s lieutenant, in September of that year, anchoring before New Amsterdam, asked the peppery Stuyvesant to hand over, the wishes of the inhabitants for change was so great, that the governor, although disposed to resist, found no backers; and so, after stumping around for several hours among his councillors, was obliged to cut his stick into a pen, and sign a document, transferring the American Empire of their High Mightinesses, the States General, to the royal English Duke. So ended the political dominion of Holland in America. The iron feet of the statue were, however, firmly planted on the soil of New York, although the upper parts of the figure have been cast in other metals, and moulded by Saxon, Celtic, Teutonic, and Gallic hands.
The last Dutch governor, let us add, gracefully submitted to the English sway, living in his ample house in the Bowery until his death, happy in his farm, which then grew chestnuts instead of men, and was tracked by cows and calves, sheep and lambs, instead of the iron tracks which now spike New York to its rocky bed, whose sheets are balance sheets, and whose covering is the dirty blankets which its unconscientious Mrs. Gamps throw over her.
CHAPTER VI.
THE SETTLEMENT OF NEW JERSEY.
A spirited Sketch of the Way in which it was done, and the Results.
New Jersey Settled.