The Conquest of a Continent; or, The Expansion of Races in America

by Madison Grant

There was no further general and organized emigration from Holland to America until the close of the Revolution. At that time some of the Amsterdam bankers, who had loaned millions of dollars to the Revolutionary government, decided to try to capitalize their investments and bought nearly 4,000,000 acres of land in New York and Pennsylvania. Most of the settlers on this tract were not Dutch; and while Dutch names may still play an important part in the Social Registers of New York and Albany, Dutch blood is insignificant in the present make-up of the population of the United States.

The southerly tide of New Englanders, which washed over the Dutch colony and others to the South, was in the first instance made up largely of those who did not find the religious convictions of their associates in Massachusetts and Connecticut to their liking.

The little "Forts" of the Dutch in the Connecticut valley were swamped shortly after 1630, and by 1639 the Connecticut people of English ancestry had established themselves at Greenwich within thirty miles of New Amsterdam and in other towns even nearer. Long Island was settled from the same source, and Thomas Belcher took up a tract upon the present site of the City of Brooklyn in the same year in which the English began to build at Greenwich. Brooklyn, until the twentieth century, has been a typically New England community, entirely distinct from the other boroughs of Greater New York. The eastern end of Long Island was long separated from the western end and was settled directly from Connecticut. The Hamptons are virtually still a part of New England.

The development of the southern part of New York State, and particularly of the Hudson River valley, was delayed indefinitely by the great land holdings of the so-called "patroons" or great landlords. New York City continued to be a cosmopolitan and nondescript town, built up on commerce and trade and without any particular racial complexion. Even at the time of the Revolution, it was inferior alike in size and in influence to Philadelphia and Boston, and New York State was but seventh in population among the thirteen colonies.

The real foundation of the greatness of the Empire State was the New England colonization of northern and western New York, which created a territory that was, and has ever since remained, quite distinct in political complexion and economic and social interests from the Hudson River valley and the metropolis at its mouth.

The commercial greatness of the City of New York dates from the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, which made New York the outlet of the lake States. Meanwhile, however, several other foreign invasions had taken place.

The French Huguenots, racially Nordic and almost identical with the British, began to arrive in Colonial New York after 1685, founding the town of New Rochelle to commemorate the French city from which so many of them had come. Here, as elsewhere, their influence was far in excess of their proportionately small number.

In 1711, Governor Hunter of New York became imbued with grandiose ideas about developing the resources of his Province and began to look for a source of cheap labor for its exploitation. He found this in the German districts on the Rhine, broadly known as the Palatinate, where various national elements, not merely German and Alsatian, but French, Swiss, Moravian, and miscellaneous, were gathered, and where the religious persecution to which they were subjected as Protestants, and the excessive hardships which they were compelled to endure from invasions of the armies of Louis XIV, had reduced them to great misery.

The population was ripe for emigration and furnished the only substantial element of non-Nordic origin in the Colonial history of America. It is not necessary to trace in detail the innumerable petty sects and national elements, often two or three times removed from their original home, of which this "Palatine" emigration was composed. For the present purpose it was pre-dominantly German-speaking, and largely of the round-headed Alpine stock in racial make-up.

About 1709, these Palatines began frantic efforts to escape from their misfortunes, and within a few years some 30,000 had gone over into Holland and even into England, where they were not welcome. The British Government was only too glad to subsidize their further emigration, and several thousand of them were transported to the Hudson River valley. They soon became discontented there and were finally colonized on the Schoharie River in New York. Here, in turn, they were ousted by what they considered political jobbery and many of them moved on to the Mohawk River, a tributary of the Hudson, while others continued down the Susquehanna River to Pennsylvania. On the whole, therefore, the Palatines are to be considered merely temporary inhabitants of New York State. Although a good many of them remained, the reports they sent out as to their treatment were so unsatisfactory that thenceforth the Palatine immigration mostly avoided New York and landed in Pennsylvania, where it will be encountered later.