frontier of New Belgium, on Delaware bay, the favor of Strafford had, in June, 1634, obtained for Sir Edward Ployden a patent for New Albion. The county never existed, except on parchment. The lord palatine attempted a settlement; but, for want of a pilot, he entered the Chesapeake; and his people were absorbed in the happy province of Virginia.

The Swedes and Dutch were left to contend for the Delaware. In the vicinity of the river the Swedish company was more powerful than its rival; but the province of New Netherland was tenfold more populous than New Sweden. From motives of commercial security, the Dutch, in 1651, built Fort Casimir, on the site of Newcastle, within five miles of Christiana, near the mouth of the Brandywine. In 1654, aided by stratagem and superiority in numbers, Rysingh, the Swedish governor, overpowered the garrison. The aggression was fatal to the only colony which Sweden had planted. That kingdom was exhausted by a long succession of wars; the statesmen and soldiers whom Gustavus had educated had passed from the public service; Oxenstiern, after adorning retirement by the pursuits of philosophy, was no more; a youthful queen, eager for literary distinction and without capacity for government, had impaired the strength of the kingdom by nursing contending factions and then capriciously abdicating the throne. The Dutch company repeatedly commanded Stuyvesant to "revenge their wrong, to drive the Swedes from the river, or compel their submission;" and, in September, 1655, after they had maintained their separate existence for a little more than seventeen years, the Dutch governor, collecting a force of more than six hundred men, sailed into the Delaware. One fort after another surrendered; to Rysingh honorable terms were conceded; the colonists were promised the quiet possession of their estates; and the jurisdiction of the Dutch was established. Such was the end of New Sweden, the colony that connects our country with Gustavus Adolphus and the nations that dwell on the gulf of Bothnia. The descendants of the colonists, in the course of generations, widely scattered and blended with emigrants of other lineage, constituted, perhaps, more than one part in two

hundred of the population of our country in the early part of the nineteenth century. At the surrender, they did not much exceed seven hundred souls. As Protestants, they shared the religious impulse of the age. They reverenced the bonds of family and the purity of morals; their children, under every disadvantage of want of teachers and of Swedish books, were well instructed. With the natives they preserved peace. The love for their mother country, and an abiding sentiment of loyalty toward its sovereign, continued to distinguish them; at Stockholm, they remained for a century the objects of a disinterested and generous regard; in the New World, a part of their descendants still preserve their altar and their dwellings round the graves of their fathers.

The West India company desiring an ally on its southern frontier, the city of Amsterdam became, by purchase, in 1656, the proprietary of Delaware, from the Brandywine to Bombay Hook; and afterward, under cessions from the natives, extended its jurisdiction to Cape Henlopen. But the noble and right honorable lords, the burgomasters of Amsterdam, instituted a paralyzing commercial monopoly, and required of the colonists absolute obedience. Emigrants, almost as they landed, and even soldiers of the garrison, fled from the dominion of a city to the liberties of Maryland and Virginia. The attempt to elope was punishable by death, yet scarce thirty families remained. In 1663, the West India company ceded to Amsterdam all that remained of its claims on Delaware river.

In September, 1655, during the attack of Stuyvesant on New Sweden, the Algonkins near Manhattan, in sixty-four canoes, appeared before New Amsterdam, and ravaged the adjacent country. His return restored confidence; the captives were ransomed; industry repaired its losses; New Netherland consoled the Dutch for the loss of Brazil. They were proud of its extent, from New England to Maryland, from the sea to the great river of Canada, and the north-western wilderness. They sounded the channel of the Delaware, which was no longer shared with the Swedes; they counted with delight its many runs of water on which the beavers built their villages; and great travellers, as they ascended the deep stream, declared it one of the noblest rivers in the

world, with banks more inviting than the lands on the Amazon.

Manhattan was already the chosen abode of merchants; and the policy of the government invited them by its goodwill. If Stuyvesant sometimes displayed the rash despotism of a soldier, he was sure to be reproved by his employers. Did he change the rate of duties arbitrarily, the directors, sensitive to commercial honor, charged him "to keep every contract inviolate." Did he tamper with the currency by raising the normal value of foreign coin, the measure was rebuked as dishonest. Did he attempt to fix the price of labor by arbitrary rules, this also was condemned as unwise and impracticable. Did he interfere with the merchants by inspecting their accounts, the deed was censured as without precedent "in Christendom;" and he was ordered to "treat the merchants with kindness, lest they return, and the country be depopulated." Did his zeal for Calvinism lead him to persecute Lutherans, he was chid for his bigotry. Did he, from hatred of "the abominable sect of Quakers," imprison and afterward exile the blameless Bowne, "let every peaceful citizen," wrote the directors, "enjoy freedom of conscience; this maxim has made our city the asylum for fugitives from every land; tread in its steps, and you shall be blessed."

CHAPTER XIV.

NEW NETHERLAND, NEW JERSEY, AND NEW YORK.

PRIVATE Worship was, therefore, allowed to every religion. The Jews found a home, liberty, and a burial-place on the island of Manhattan. The comers from Low Countries were themselves of the most various lineage; for Holland had long been the gathering-place of the persecuted and the wronged of many nations. New York was always a city of the world. Its settlers were relics of the first-fruits of the Reformation, chosen chiefly from the Belgic provinces and England, from France, Germany, and Switzerland. A few of them were the offspring of those early inquirers who listened to Huss in the heart of Bohemia. The hurricane of persecution, which was to have swept Protestantism from the earth, did not spare the descendants of the medieval Puritans who escaped from bloody conflicts in the south of France to Piedmont and the Italian Alps. The city of Amsterdam, in 1656, offered the fugitive Waldenses a free passage to America, and New Netherland welcomed those who came. When the Protestant

churches in Rochelle were razed, their members were gladly received; and French Protestants so abounded that public documents were sometimes issued in French as well as in Dutch and English.

In Holland "population was known to be the bulwark of every state;" the government of New Netherland asked for "farmers and laborers, foreigners and exiles, men inured to toil and penury." A free passage was offered to mechanics, and troops of orphans were sent over. From the colony a trade in lumber grew up. The whale was pursued off the coast; the vine, the mulberry, planted; flocks of sheep as

well as cattle were multiplied; and tile, long imported from Holland, was manufactured near Fort Orange. "This happily situated province," said its inhabitants, "may become the granary of our fatherland; should our Netherlands be wasted by grievous wars, it will offer our countrymen a safe retreat; by God's blessing, we shall in a few years become a mighty people."

The African had his portion on the Hudson. The West India company, which sometimes transported captive red men to the West Indies, having large establishments on the coast of Guinea, in 1626 introduced negroes into Manhattan, and continued the trade in them. The city of Amsterdam owned shares in a slave-ship. That New York was not a slave state like Carolina is due to climate, and not to the superior humanity of its founders. Stuyvesant was instructed to use every exertion to promote the sale of negroes. They were imported sometimes by way of the West Indies, often directly from Guinea, and were sold at public auction to the highest bidder. The average price was less than one hundred and forty dollars. The enfranchised negro might become a freeholder.

The large emigrations from Connecticut engrafted on New Netherland the Puritan idea of popular freedom. There were so many English at Manhattan as to require an English. secretary, preachers who could speak in English as well as in Dutch, and a publication of civil ordinances in English. New England men planted on Long Island towns and New England liberties in a congregational way, with the consent and under the jurisdiction of the Dutch.

In the fatherland, the power of the people was unknown; in New Netherland, the necessities of the colony had given it a twilight existence; and, in 1642, twelve, then perhaps eight delegates from the Dutch towns, had mitigated the arbitrary authority of Kieft. There was no distinct concession of legislative power to the people; but, without a teacher, they became convinced of the right of resistance. The brewers refused to pay an arbitrary excise: "Were we to yield," said they, in 1644, "we should offend the eight men, and the whole commonalty." The commander of Rensselaer Stein, in 1644,