Augustine Herman.
Bohemia Manor.
With the arrival of Quakers there appeared on the northeastern horizon a menace from the Dutch, and incidents occurred that curiously affected the future growth of Lord Baltimore’s princely domain. Since 1638 parties of Swedes had been establishing themselves on the western bank of the Delaware River, on and about the present sites of Newcastle and Wilmington. This region they called New Sweden, but in 1655 Peter Stuyvesant despatched from Manhattan a force of Dutchmen which speedily overcame the little colony. Stuyvesant then divided his conquest into two provinces, which he called New Amstel and Altona, and appointed a governor over each. It was now Maryland’s turn to be aroused. The governor of New Netherland had no business to be setting up jurisdictions west of Delaware River. That whole region was expressly included in Lord Baltimore’s charter. Accordingly the Dutch governors of New Amstel and Altona were politely informed that they must either acknowledge Baltimore’s jurisdiction or leave the country. This led to Stuyvesant’s sending an envoy to St. Mary’s, to discuss the proprietorship of the territory in question. The person selected for this business was a man of no ordinary mould, a native of Prague, with the German name of Augustine Herman. He came to New Amsterdam at some time before 1647, in which year he was appointed one of the Nine Men whose business it was to advise the governor. This Herman was a man of broad intelligence, rare executive ability, and perfect courage. He was by profession a land surveyor and draughtsman, but in the course of his life he accumulated a great fortune by trade. His portrait, painted from life, shows us a masterful face, clean shaven, with powerful jaw, firm-set lips, imperious eyes, and long hair flowing upon his shoulders over a red coat richly ruffled.[103] Such was the man whom Stuyvesant chose to dispute Lord Baltimore’s title to the smiling fields of New Amstel and Altona. He well understood the wisdom of claiming everything, and when the discovery of North America by John Cabot was cited against him, he boldly set up the priority of Christopher Columbus as giving the Spaniards a claim upon the whole hemisphere. To the Dutch, he said, as victors over their wicked stepmother Spain, her claims had naturally passed! One is inclined to wonder if such an argument was announced without something like a twinkle in those piercing eyes. At all events, it was not long before the astute ambassador abandoned his logic and changed his allegiance. Romantic tradition has assigned various grounds for Herman’s leaving New Amsterdam. Whether it was because of a quarrel with Stuyvesant, and whether the quarrel had its source in love of woman or love of pelf, we know not; but in 1660 Herman wrote to Lord Baltimore, asking for the grant of a manor, and offering to pay for it by making a map of Maryland. The proposal was accepted. The map, which was completed after careful surveys extending over ten years and was engraved in London in 1673, with a portrait of Herman attached, is still preserved in the British Museum. For this important service the enterprising surveyor received an estate on the Elk River, which by successive accretions came to include more than 20,000 acres.[104] It is still called by the name which Herman gave it, Bohemia Manor. There he grew immensely rich by trade with the Indians along the very routes which Claiborne had hoped to monopolize, and there in his great manor house, in spite of matrimonial infelicities like those of Socrates and the elder Mr. Weller, he lived to a good old age and dispensed a regal hospitality, in which the items of rum and brandy, strong beer, sound wines, and “best cider out of the orchard” were not forgotten. Herman’s tomb is still to be seen hard by the vestiges of his house and his deer park. Six of his descendants succeeded him as lords of Bohemia Manor, until its legal existence came to an end in 1789. The fact is not without interest that Margaret Shippen, wife of Benedict Arnold, counted among her ancestors the sturdy Augustine Herman.
The Labadists.
A noteworthy episode in the history of Bohemia Manor is the settlement of a small sect of Mystics, known as Labadists, from the name of their French founder, Jean de Labadie. Their professed aim was to restore the simplicity of life and doctrine attributed to the primitive Christians. Their views of spiritual things were brightened by an inward light, their drift of thought was toward antinomianism, they held all goods in common, and their notions about marriage were such as to render them liable to be molested on civil grounds. The persistent recurrence of such little communities, age after age, each one ignorant of the existence of its predecessors and supremely innocent of all knowledge of the world, is one of the interesting freaks in religious history. Even in the tolerant atmosphere of Holland these Labadists led an uneasy life, and in 1679 two of their brethren, Sluyter and Dankers, came over to New York, to make fresh converts and find a new home. One of their first converts was Ephraim, the weak-minded son of Augustine Herman, and it may have been through the son’s persuasion that the father was induced to grant nearly 4,000 acres of his manor to the community. A company settled there in 1683 and were joined by persons from New York. As often happens in such communities the affair ended in a despotism, in which the people were ruled with a rod of iron by Brother Sluyter and his wife, who set themselves up as a kind of abbot and abbess. On Sluyter’s death in 1722 the sect seems to have come to an end, but to this day the land is known as “the Labadie tract.”
The Duke of York takes possession of the Delaware settlements.
Long before Augustine Herman’s death, Lord Baltimore had granted him a second estate, called the manor of St. Augustine, extending eastward from Bohemia Manor to the shore of Delaware Bay; but to the greater part of it the Herman family never succeeded in making good their title, for the territory passed out of Lord Baltimore’s domain. Once more the heedlessness and bad faith of the Stuart kings, in their grants of American lands, was exhibited, and as Baltimore’s patent had once encroached upon the Virginians, so now he was encroached upon by the Duke of York and presently by William Penn. The province of New Netherland, which Charles II. took from the Dutch in 1664 and bestowed upon his brother as lord proprietor, extended from the upper waters of the Hudson down to Cape May at the entrance to Delaware Bay, but did not include a square foot of land on the west shore of the bay, since all that was expressly included in the Maryland charter. It was not to be expected that Swedes or Dutchmen would pay any heed to that English charter; but it might have been supposed that Charles II. and his brother James would have shown some respect for a contract made by their father. Not so, however. The little Swedish and Dutch settlements on the west shore were at once taken in charge by officers of the Duke of York, as if they had belonged to his domain of New Netherland, while the southern part of that domain was granted by him, under the name of New Jersey, to his friends, Lord Berkeley and Sir George Carteret.
Charter of Pennsylvania.
Nothing more of consequence occurred for several years, in the course of which interval, in 1675, Cecilius Calvert died and was succeeded by his son Charles, third Lord Baltimore. Not long afterward William Penn appeared on the scene, at first as trustee of certain Quaker estates in New Jersey, but presently as ruler over a princely domain of his own. The Quakers had been ill treated in many of the colonies; why not found a colony in which they should be the leaders? The suggestion offered to Charles II. an easy way of paying an old debt of £16,000 owed by the crown to the estate of the late Admiral Penn, and accordingly William was made lord proprietor of a spacious country lying west of the Delaware River and between Maryland to the south and the Five Nations to the north. His charter created a government very similar to Lord Baltimore’s but far less independent, for laws passed in Pennsylvania must be sent to England for the royal assent, and the British government, which fifty years before had expressly renounced the right to lay taxes upon Marylanders, now expressly asserted the right to lay taxes upon Pennsylvanians. This change marks the growth of the imperial and anti-feudal sentiment in England, the feeling that privileges like those accorded to the Calverts were too extensive to be enjoyed by subjects.
Boundaries between Penn and Baltimore.