After he went back to Providence George Fox, the famous Quaker leader, came to New England and preached to the people there. Roger Williams did not agree with Fox in many of his teachings, and took the opposite side at many public meetings. Whenever there was debate or argument over religious matters Roger Williams wanted to have his share in it. He held the same views as leader of the Providence Plantations that he had voiced when he first came as minister to the First Church at Boston.
In many ways Roger Williams was something like William Penn. He founded a colony that was in time to become one of the original Thirteen States of the American Union. He was a religious leader, and he was always fair in his dealings with the Indians. Probably he was greatest as a friend of the Indians, for his little colony was spared the frequent attacks and massacres that made life so hard for many of the small English settlements along the Atlantic coast. He came to the New World seeking liberty and justice between all men, and these he taught to the settlers who followed and built their homes around his log house on the shores of the great bay named for the Narragansetts.
II PETER STUYVESANT'S FLAG
(New York, 1661)
I
The island of Manhattan, which is now tightly packed with the office-buildings and houses of New York, was in 1661 the home of a small number of families who had come across the Atlantic Ocean from the Netherlands to settle this part of the new world for the Dutch West India Company. There was a fort at the southern end of the island, sometimes known as the Battery, and two roads led from it toward the north. One of these roads followed the line of the street now called Broadway, running north to a great open field, or common, and, skirting that, leading on to the settlement of Harlaem. In time this road came to be known as the Old Post Road to Boston. Another road ran to the east, and in its neighborhood were the farms of many of the richer Dutch settlers. Near where Third Avenue and Thirteenth Street now meet was the bouwery, as the Dutchmen called a farm, of Peter Stuyvesant, the governor of the colony of New Netherland. It was a large, prosperous bouwery, with a good-sized house for the governor and his family.
This Dutch governor, sturdy, impetuous, obstinate, had lost a leg while leading an attack on the Portuguese island of Saint Martin, in 1644, and now used a wooden stump, which caused him to be nicknamed "Wooden-Legged Peter." He was a much better governor than the others who had been sent out by the West India Company to rule New Netherland. He had plenty of courage, but he had also a very determined will of his own, which often made him seem a tyrant to the other settlers.