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 But the charter could not be withdrawn; the directors must be content with whatever sympathetic benefits might be conferred by the increasing wealth of the colony.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 employés.
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 massacre which left nothing of the Cape Henlopen settlement but bones and charred timbers. The English to the south were led to renew the assertion 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 passed 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 incumbency, Sweden, at the instance of Gustavus Adolphus, and by the agency of his chancellor Oxenstiern, both men of the first class, 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 assets, 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 assert 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 bloody 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 advertisement. 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 assemble and bear likeness to a town. The primeval forest still clothed the upper part of the island; but the visible presence of a municipality 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 constitutional 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 sturdy 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.