The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1 by Julian Hawthorne

J >> Julian Hawthorne >> The History of the United States from 1492 to 1910, Volume 1

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Hudson, after passing the Narrows, anchored near the Jersey shore, and
received a visit from some Indians with native commodities to exchange for
knives and beads. They presented the usual Indian aspect as regarded dress
and arms; but they wore ornaments of red copper under their feather
mantles, and carried pipes of copper and clay. They were affable, but
untrustworthy, stealing what they could lay their hands on, and a few days
later shooting arrows at a boatload of seamen from the ship, and killing
one John Colman. Hudson went ashore, and was honored with dances and
chants; upon the whole, the impression mutually created seems to have been
favorable. An abundance of beans and oysters was supplied to the crew; and
no doubt trade was carried on to the latter's advantage; we know that
years afterward the whole of Manhattan Island was purchased of its owners
for four-and-twenty dollars. The present inhabitants of New York City
could not be so easily overreached.

Hudson now began the first trip ever made by white men up the great
river. How many millions have made it since! But he, at this gentlest time
of year, won with the magic not only of what he saw, but of the unknown
that lay before him--what must have been his sensations! As reach after
reach of the incomparable panorama spread itself out quietly before him,
with its beauty of color, its majesty of form, its broad gleam of placid
current, the sheer lift of its brown cliffs, its mighty headlands setting
their titanic shoulders across his path, its toppling pinnacles assuming
the likeness of giant visages, its swampy meadows and inlets, lovely with
flowers and waving with rushes, its royal eagles stemming the pure air
aloft, its fish leaping in the ripples--and then, as he sailed on, mute
with enchantment, the blue magnificence of the mountains soaring
heavenward and melting into the clouds that hung about their summits--as
all this multifarious beauty unfolded itself, Hudson may well have thought
that the lost Eden of the earth was found at last. And ere long, he
dreamed, the vast walls through which the river moved would diverge and
cease, like another Pillars of Hercules, and his ship would emerge into
another ocean. It was verily a voyage to be remembered; and perhaps it
returned in a vision to his dimming eyes, that day he steered his open
boat through the arctic surges of Hudson's Bay.

For ten days or more he pressed onward before a southerly breeze, until,
in the neighborhood of what now is Albany, it became evident that the
Pacific was not to be found in northern New York. He turned, therefore,
and drifted slowly downward with the steady current, while the matchless
lines of the American autumn glowed every day more sumptuously from the
far-billowing woods. What sunrises and what sunsets dyed the waters with
liquid splendor: what moons, let us hope, turned the glories of day into
the spiritual mysteries of fairyland! Hudson was not born for repose; his
fate was to sail unrestingly till he died; but as he passed down through
this serene carnival of opulent nature, he may well have wished that here,
after all voyages were done, his lot might finally be cast; he may well
have wondered whether any race would be born so great and noble as to
merit the gift of such a river and such a land.

He landed at various places on the way, and was always civilly and
hospitably welcomed by the red men, who brought him their wild abundance,
and took in return what he chose to give. The marvelous richness of the
vegetation, and the vegetable decay of ages, had rendered the margins of
the stream as deadly as they were lovely; fever lurked in every glade and
bower, and serpents whose bite was death basked in the sun or crept among
the rocks. All was as it had always been; the red men, living in the midst
of nature, were a part of nature themselves; nothing was changed by their
presence; they altered not the flutter of a leaf or the posture of a
stone, but stole in and out noiseless and lithe, and left behind them no
trace of their passage. It is not so with the white man: before him,
nature flies and perishes; he clothes the earth in the thoughts of his own
mind, cast in forms of matter, and contemplates them with pride; but when
he dies, another comes, and refashions the materials to suit himself. So
one follows another, and nothing endures that man has made; for this is
his destiny. And at length, when the last man has dressed out his dolls
and built his little edifice of stones and sticks, and is gone: nature,
who was not dead, but sleeping, awakes, and resumes her ancient throne,
and her eternal works declare themselves once more; and she dissolves the
bones in the grave, and the grave itself vanishes, with its record of what
man had been. What says our poet?--

"How am I theirs,
When they hold not me,
But I hold them?"

In 1613, or thereabout, Christianson and Block visited the harbor and got
furs, and also a couple of Indian boys to show the burghers of Amsterdam,
since they could not fetch the great river to Holland. In 1614 they went
again with five ships--the "Fortune of Amsterdam," the "Fortune of Hoorn,"
and the "Tiger of Amsterdam" (which was burned), and two others. Block
built himself a boat of sixteen tons, and explored the Sound, and the New
England coast as far as Massachusetts Bay; touched at the island known by
his name, and forgathered with the Indian tribes all along his route. The
explorers were granted a charter in the same year, giving them a three
years' monopoly of the trade, and in this charter the title New Netherland
is bestowed upon the region. The Dutch were at last bestirring themselves.
Two years after, Schouten of Hoorn saw the southernmost point of Tierra
del Fuego, and gave it the name of his home port as he swept by; and three
other Netherlanders penetrated to the wilds of Philadelphia that was to
be. A fortified trading post was built at Albany, where now legislation
instead of peltries is the subject of barter. At this juncture internal
quarrels in the Dutch government led to tragic events, which stimulated
plans of western colonization, and the desire to start a commonwealth on
Hudson River to forestall the English--for the latter as well as the Dutch
and Spanish claimed everything in sight. The Dutch East India Company
began business in 1621 with a twenty-four year charter, renewable. It was
given power to create an independent nation; the world was invited to buy
its stock, and the States-General invested a million guilders in it. Its
field was the entire west coast of Africa, and the east coast of North and
South America. Such schemes are of planetary magnificence; but of all this
realm, the Dutch now hold the little garden patch of Dutch Guiana only,
and the pleasant records of their sojourn on Manhattan Island between the
years 1623 and 1664.

Indeed, the Dutch episode in our history is in all respects refreshing
and agreeable; the burghers set us an example of thrift and steadiness too
good for us to follow it; and they deeded to us some of our best citizens,
and most engaging architectural traditions. But it is not after all for
these and other material benefits that we are indebted to them; we thank
them still more for being what they were (and could not help being): for
their character, their temperament, their costume, their habits, their
breadth of beam, their length of pipes, the deliberation of their
courtships, the hardness of their bargains, the portentousness of their
tea-parties, the industrious decorum of their women, the dignity of their
patroons, the strictness of their social conduct, the soundness of their
education, the stoutness of their independence, the excellence of their
good sense, the simplicity of their prudence, and above all, for the
wooden leg of Peter Stuyvesant. In a word, the humorous perception of the
American people has made a pet of the Dutch tradition in New York and
Pennsylvania; as, likewise, of the childlike comicalities of the
plantation negro; the arch waggishness of the Irish emigrants, and the
cherubic shrewdness of the newly-acquired German. The Dutch gained much,
on the sentimental score, by transplantation; their old-world flavor and
rich coloring are admirably relieved against the background of unbaked
wilderness. We could not like them so much or laugh at them at all, did we
not so thoroughly respect them; the men of New Amsterdam were worthy of
their national history, which recounts as stirring a struggle as was ever
made by the love of liberty against the foul lust of oppression. The Dutch
are not funny anywhere but in Seventeenth Century Manhattan; nor can this
singularity be explained by saying that Washington Irving made them so. It
inheres in the situation; and the delightful chronicles of Diedrich
Knickerbocker owe half their enduring fascination to their sterling
veracity--the veracity which is faithful to the spirit and gambols only
with the letter. The humor of that work lies in its sympathetic and
creative insight quite as much as in the broad good-humor and imaginative
whimsicality with which the author handles his theme. The caricature of a
true artist gives a better likeness than any photograph.

The first ship containing families of colonists went out early in 1623,
under the command of Cornelis May; he broke ground on Manhattan, while
Joris built Fort Orange at Albany, and a little group of settlers squatted
round it. May acted as director for the first year or two; the trade in
furs was prosecuted, and the first Dutch-American baby was born at Fort
Orange.

Fortune was kind. King Charles, instead of discussing prior rights,
offered an alliance; at home, the bickerings of sects were healed. Peter
Minuit came out as director-general and paid his twenty-four dollars for
the Island--a little less than a thousand acres for a dollar. At all
events, the Indians seemed satisfied from Albany to the Narrows. The
Battery was designed, and there was quite a cluster of houses on the
clearing back of it. An atmosphere of Dutch homeliness began to temper the
thin American air. The honest citizens were pious, and had texts read to
them on Sundays; but they did not torture their consciences with spiritual
self-questionings like the English Puritans, nor dream of disciplining or
banishing any of their number for the better heavenly security of the
rest. The souls of these Netherlander fitted their bodies far better than
was the case with the colonists of Boston and Salem. Instead of starving
and rending them, their religion made them happy and comfortable. Instead
of settling the ultimate principles of theology and government, they
enjoyed the consciousness of mutual good-will, and took things as they
came. The new world needed men of both kinds. It must, however, be
admitted that the people of New Amsterdam were not wholly harmonious with
those of Plymouth. Minuit and Bradford had some correspondence, in which,
while professions of mutual esteem and love were exchanged, uneasy things
were let fall about clear titles and prior rights. Minuit was resolute for
his side, and the attitude of Bradford prompted him to send for a company
of soldiers from home. But there was probably no serious anticipation of
coming to blows on either part. There was space enough in the continent
for the two hundred and seventy inhabitants of New Amsterdam and for the
Pilgrim Fathers, for the present.

Spain was an unwilling contributor to the prosperity of the Dutch
colonists, by the large profits which the latter gained from the capture
of Spanish galleons; but in 1629 the charter creating the order of
Patroons laid the foundation for abuses and discontent which afflicted the
settlers for full thirty years. Upon the face of it, the charter was
liberal, and promised good results; but it made the mistake of not
securing popular liberties. The Netherlands were no doubt a free country,
as freedom was at that day understood in Europe; but this freedom did not
involve independence for the individual. The only recognized individuality
was that of the municipalities, the rulers of which were not chosen by
popular franchise. This system answered well enough in the old home, but
proved unsuited to the conditions of settlers in the wilderness. The
American spirit seemed to lurk like some subtle contagion in the remotest
recesses of the forest, and those who went to live there became affected
with it. It was longer in successfully vindicating itself than in New
England, because it was not stimulated on the banks of the Hudson by the
New England religious fervor; it was supported on grounds of practical
expediency merely. Men could not prosper unless they received the rewards
of industry, and were permitted to order their private affairs in a manner
to make their labor pay. They were not content to have the Patroon devour
their profits, leaving them enough only for a bare subsistence. The Dutch
families scattered throughout the domain could not get ahead, while yet
they could not help feeling that the bounty of nature ought to benefit
those whose toil made it available, at least as much as it did those who
toiled not, but simply owned the land in virtue of some documentary
transaction with the powers above, and therefore claimed ownership also
over the poor emigrant who settled on it--having nowhere else to go. The
emigrants were probably helped to comprehend and formulate their own
misfortunes by communications with stragglers from New England, who
regaled them with tales of such liberties as they had never before
imagined. But the seed thus sown by the Englishmen fell on fruitful soil,
and the crop was reaped in due season.

The charter intended, primarily, the encouragement of emigration, and did
not realize that it needed very little encouragement. The advantages
offered were more alluring than they need have been. Any person who,
within four years, could establish a colony of fifty persons, was given
privileges only comparable to those of independent princes. They were
allowed to take up tracts of land many square miles in area, to govern
them absolutely (according to the laws of the realm), to found and
administer cities, and in a word to drink from Baucis's pitcher to their
hearts' content. In return, the home administration expected the benefit
of their trade. Two stipulations only restrained them: they were to buy
titles to their land from the Indians, and they were to permit, on penalty
of removal, no cotton or woolen manufactures in the country. That was a
monopoly which was reserved to the weavers in the old country.

This was excellent for such as could afford to become patroons; but what
about the others? The charter provided that any emigrant who could pay for
his exportation might take up what land he required for his needs, and
cultivate it independently. Other emigrants, unable to pay their fare out,
might have it paid for them, but in that case, of course, incurred a
mortgage to their benefactors. In effect, they could not own the product
of the work of their hands, until it had paid their sponsors for their
outlay, together with such additions in the way of interest on capital as
might seem to the sponsors equitable.

The Company further undertook to supply slaves to the colony, should they
prove to be a paying investment; and it was chiefly because the climate of
New York was less favorable to the Guinea Coast negro than was that
further south, that African slavery did not take early and firm root in
the former region. Philosophers have long recognized the influence of
degrees of latitude upon human morality. The patroon planters could
dispense with black slaves, since they had white men enough who cost them
no more than their keep, and would, presumably, not involve the expense of
overseers. Everything, therefore, seemed harmonious and sunshiny, and the
Company congratulated itself.

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 employes.

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.

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